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 1811 > Devonshire Coast, No.1 Sketchbook > Artwork

Joseph Mallord William Turner Inscription by Turner: Draft of Poetry 1811

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Inscription by Turner: Draft of Poetry’ 1811
Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 23 Verso:
Inscription by Turner: Draft of Poetry 1811
D08405
Turner Bequest CXXIII 23a
Inscribed by Turner in ink (see main catalogue entry) on white wove printing paper, 75 x 117 mm
Part watermark ‘ie’
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
At the top (outer) edge of the page are the following lines of verse:
To call what heroic into force and show
But [?inimitable] alas the gloworms fire1
Interspersed with drawings and the printed pages of Coltman’s British Itinerary, sixty-nine pages of this sketchbook are given over wholly or partly to these verses which Turner intended as a commentary for publication with the Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England which he sketched on the 1811 West Country tour (see the introduction to the sketchbook). The first lines are on folio 18 verso (D08396), and the last on folio 207 verso (D08736; CXXIII 204a).
The previous passage, on folio 21 recto (D08401), concerns the Thames west of London and its associated poets, developing a theme of the transitory nature of life and inspiration, expressed here in another fragmentary metaphor. Wilton and Turner give the second word of the last line as ‘immitate’; Lindsay’s reading is tentatively followed above. In the next passage, on folio 25 verso (D08409), Turner journeys south-west via Hounslow.

Matthew Imms
June 2011

1
See transcriptions (followed here with slight variations) in Lindsay 1966, pp.108–9, as part of ‘To James Thomson’, section (b) of poem no.50, ‘On the Western Itinerary 1811’, and Wilton and Turner 1990, p.170; previously transcribed with variations in Thornbury 1862, II, p.17 and 1897, p.206.

How to cite

Matthew Imms, ‘Inscription by Turner: Draft of Poetry 1811 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, June 2011, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-inscription-by-turner-draft-of-poetry-r1136882, accessed 05 April 2026.