Poems (1828) — Story, Setting & Ideas

Grief and the Domestic Muse

The most striking piece in the excerpts is the untitled elegy for Gent's wife. Its language is direct and unguarded: 'Thy dying look of love can I forget; / The last fond pressure of thy hand, for ever! / Thrills in my veins, I see thy struggles yet.' The poem does not reach for metaphysical consolation; it stays with the physical memory of suffering. In the advertisement, Gent had praised his wife's 'Lectures on the Physiology of the External Senses' as 'a splendid proof of her acquirements.' That scientific interest may echo in the poem's focus on sensory detail—the sound of her struggle, the pressure of her hand. The companion piece 'To Mary,' written at midnight to his daughter, is calmer but equally personal: 'And may no care disturb that breast, / Nor sorrow dim that brow serene.' Together, these poems suggest that Gent's most urgent subject was domestic loss, not the public themes one might expect from a poet of the 1820s.

Convivial Verse and Comic Excess

In sharp contrast, the Hornsey passage is a rollicking catalogue of bodily pleasures. Gent invokes Horace, then lists 'substantial beef, pies, puddings, ducks, and peas' and 'wine! generous wine! that drowns corroding care.' The tone is deliberately coarse: 'For my coarse palate coarser food must please.' He even includes a mock-heroic address to the 'Fair' who preside over tea, complete with 'nods, and winks, and whispers, and all that.' This is not the language of a poet who takes himself too seriously. The epigram 'Auri Sacra Fames' goes further into satire, describing a miser with 'one shilling, and one fourteen-penny leg' and a back shaped 'from the dromedary.' When fortune gives him twenty thousand pounds a year, the same women who once shrieked now find his face 'not the finest' but forgive his faults. The humor is broad, even cruel, and it sits uneasily beside the elegies—a reminder that Gent's volume contains multiple, sometimes contradictory, poetic selves.

Translation and Light Occasions

Gent also includes translations, such as 'Black Eyes and Blue. From the Italian,' a dialogue between blue eyes and jet eyes that Cupid resolves by declaring 'Give me eyes that can speak / From the depths of the heart.' The poem is slight, a social trifle, but it shows Gent engaging with European verse forms. The advertisement notes that some pieces 'have been separately published, at different times,' and the collection feels assembled rather than designed. The catalog subject 'Poetry' does not capture the volume's internal variety: it is part elegy, part tavern song, part Juvenalian satire. Readers should expect shifts in register that can be jarring—the same poet who writes 'Oh! my lost love, thou patient Being' also writes of 'quickening cyder, and with fattening ale.' The excerpts give no evidence of a unifying theme or a consistent persona. Gent presents himself as a man of feeling, a convivial companion, and a sharp-tongued moralist, sometimes on adjacent pages.

Because the excerpts represent only a fraction of the 26,013-word volume, readers should be cautious about generalizing. The poems sampled here are vivid but may not be typical of the whole. Gent's own advertisement warns that he has added 'many others, which are now first printed,' and the range of subjects could be wider still. Approach the collection as a period miscellany, not a unified work, and pay attention to the dates and occasions of individual pieces. The grief-stricken advertisement is a powerful frame, but it may not govern every poem that follows.

The rain pressed against the window as I turned from Thomas Gent’s sharp grief to his quieter, slyer verses. That same strange taste—centuries of voices catching light—sent me later, almost by accident, to Quaint Gleanings from Ancient Poetry A Collection of Curious Poetical Compositions of the XVIth, XVIIth, and XVIIIth Centuries — Background and Themes. Odd corners, both; the rain never seemed heavy.