Link to PDF of Poem: Pompeii- Dix, William Giles
Purpose
In this blog post, I will be analyzing William Giles Dix’s “Pompeii” (1848) poem through its two major themes:
- Contrasting Pompeii’s glory with its fall
- The impartiality of natural forces
“The Last Day of Pompeii”: Painting by Karl Bryullov, 1830-33 (Romantic Era, Contemporary with Poet William Giles Dix); Image Source
Introduction
The tragedy of Pompeii has informed numerous literary authors throughout the centuries. One of these is William Giles Dix, a poet from the Romantic Era. His poem “Pompeii,” from “Pompeii and Other Poems” (1848), induces a glorification of the disaster. This poem very much reflects the Romantic era’s style of authorship, that is, a genre in which human emotions and the idealization of nature and history’s events are emphasized. Dix is particularly fond of the poetic device of juxtaposition; he uses this throughout the poem to discuss the pre- and post-life of Pompeii relative to 79 AD.
Overall, Dix’s “Pompeii” is a dark reflection on the doom of the Vesuvius eruption, lamenting how the imperial majesty of the city and its treasures of Roman imperialism could fall so simply to natural forces. His conception of the tragedy continues to have its parallels in contemporary retellings of the event, encouraging the continuing association of “Pompeii” with sadness, the fatality of death, and the fragility of human civilization.
Theme 1: Contrasting Pompeii’s glory with its fall
The major standout from Dix’s “Pompeii” is his use of the literary device of juxtaposition. Dix devotes the first half of the poem to outlining the majesty of Pompeii in its pre-Vesuvius days. He achieves this through purposeful use of diction and imagery, writing about how Pompeii was a place where “luxurious Naples [threw] its shadow” and the spirit of the city could be compared to a “delightful blue.” By associating Pompeii’s way of life with luxury and blueness, Dix attempts to demonstrate to the reader how the legacy of its Roman civilization (pre-Vesuvius) was one of wealth, mirth, and liveliness. In other words, this was a region with charm; the kind of place where people would want to settle down and enjoy their lifetime. This vision of an ideal Pompeii is contrasted with the destruction that arrives with the eruption of Vesuvius. Again, employing diction and imagery, Dix describes the despair, anguish, and woe that befell Pompeii.
Theme 2: The impartiality of natural forces
Dix describes the disaster as the consequence of “nature’s fiery zest.” There is a certain sense of indifferent cruelness invoked by this description. In other words, the natural forces of disaster are not interested in the type of person one is nor one’s circumstances past temporal and geographic location; socioeconomic circumstance, age, appearance, relationships, and other social identifiers that have consumed individuals’ entire understanding of reality are of little to no significance to nature. The “volcanic fires fret and rage,” and will impart their catastrophic destruction on any and all. This harsh impartiality only adds to the sentiment of sorrow and doom from the loss of ‘innocent’ lives. There is no appeal process or second chances for those members of society who have led more ‘virtuous’ lives. In this manner, Dix reminds his readers that natural disasters, with their capacity to cause death of large populations, act as the equalizer of the many differences that humans construct amongst themselves.
Personal Reflections
Poetry is one of the most evocative mediums for the dissemination of our ideas. Personally, I have always been a fan of learning about history through more creative sources such as poetry and literature; I feel that these mediums capture the truth that tellings of history, though they might try to reveal to us the true nature of the events that have occurred, always continue to be socially-constructed narratives of our shared world. This poem by William Giles Dix brings the reader into the scene of Pompeii during the time of panic and hysteria resulting from the eruption, however also flashes forward to a present time where the narrator is walking through the ruins of the site and trying to make sense of the disaster. Without sounding too grandiose, isn’t attempting to create coherent narratives of our lives the challenge with which we are all presented?
I don’t believe that any human being has lived a completely trouble-free life. It’s simply in our biological natures, as well as in our cultural motivations, to strive for more, to desire for higher ideals or a reality outside of our own. However, when we do face personal and collective setbacks, how it is that we make sense of these events? One way is to ignore them and to detach ourselves from the reality of the physical and mental occurrences of our lives; the other way, which is often embodied in the contents of this examined poem and other works of historical literature, is to use memories and the physical remains of our surroundings to construct a narrative. Some narratives are understood only individually; others have been made public for cultural consumption.
In the research of Pompeii over the course of the semester, I have encountered numerous renditions of the disaster, from the romantic and tragic narrative as embodied by Dix’s poem, to the more humorous jokes and observations of the event in a source such as Dr. Who’s “The Fires of Pompeii” (2008) episode. By the end of my research, I hope to construct for myself a personal understanding of Pompeii that integrates all of the sources I have examined—literary, scientific, humorous—into an understanding of what Pompeii should mean for us today. As we walk through the cobbled grounds of its ruins as tourists, what narrative do we construct for ourselves?
Pompeii 