J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8
J.M.W. Turner > 1802-18 Academician and professor > West Country 1813 > Plymouth, Hamoaze Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Inscription by Turner: A Draft of Poetry 1813

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Inscription by Turner: A Draft of Poetry’ 1813
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 278 Verso:
Inscription by Turner: A Draft of Poetry 1813
D09481
Turner Bequest CXXXI 189a
Pen and ink and pencil on white wove paper, 157 x 95 mm
Inscribed by Turner in pen and ink and pencil (see main catalogue entry)
Stamped in black ‘J*M W Turner’ bottom right, upside down
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
A little over half the page, inverted relative to the sketchbook’s foliation, is taken up with the following lines of verse:
O Man that vanity alone
Should tempt us all thro life
To give to furnish pleasure all our <...> wings
That waft and kills with exquisite delight
Far – from what is real joy
We hurry onward, in [?madness recal]
In wooing trifles, our Employ
Will time and Death.
Neglecting time, tho time we steal
For as the shadow. passeth on
So man neglectfull soon declines
Looks anxiously for [... ?whom ...] gone
always the [... ?too late aspires]1
The inscription is in ink as far as ‘For as the shadow’, with the rest in faint pencil. Jack Lindsay reads the end of line 2 in the second stanza as ‘madning zeal’, the first word of line 4 as ‘Still’, and the last word of line 2 in the third stanza as ‘destroys’.2 He describes Turner ‘trying to sum up the discontents, the sense of failure and frustration, the cheat of time’.3 There is further poetry working back through the sketchbook on the recto of the present leaf and on folio 277 verso and recto (D09480, D09479, D09478; CXXXI 189, 188a, 188).
Turner’s name is stamped again inside the front cover (D40579), under which his rare use of such stamps is discussed.

Matthew Imms
April 2014

1
See Lindsay 1966, pp.128–9, and Wilton and Turner 1990, p.178 (transcriptions, followed here with slight variations).
2
Lindsay 1966, p.129.
3
Ibid., p.128.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Inscription by Turner: A Draft of Poetry 1813 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, April 2014, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, September 2014, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-inscription-by-turner-a-draft-of-poetry-r1148211, accessed 10 June 2025.