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 110 Verso:
Inscription by Turner: Draft of Poetry 1811
D08572
Turner Bequest CXXIII 107a
Inscribed by Turner in ink (see main catalogue entry) on white wove printing paper, 75 x 117 mm
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The whole page is taken up with the following lines of verse:
Our atmosphere to [i.e. ‘too’] temprate or denys
The Northern [?Eria] to <...>harden or mature
The vegetable produce or can it not indure
The parching heat of Summers solstice oer
Weak arguments Look round our shore
Sterile and bleak our upmost appear
And barren left thro all the varied year
With wins [i.e. ‘whins’] and gors [i.e. ‘gorse’] alone possesst
Would <not> here the seedling hemp then be distresst
Look farther north of [?wanted] Scotias heights
With firs and snows and <...>Winters full delights
No- north enough, [‘then’ inserted above] transatlantic lay
Some vast extended land of Hudson Bay1
Wilton and Turner inadvertently omit ‘our upmost appear | And barren’, eliding the beginning of line six and the end of line seven. Their reading of the beginning of the second line as ‘The Northern Eria’ is problematic, as the latter word is unclear in Turner’s manuscript beyond its initial ‘E’; Eria can indicate a silkwork and a genus of orchid, neither of which appears germane here. Thornbury’s tentative reading of ‘vaunted (?) Scotia’s’ in the tenth line may be correct.
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 passages, on folios 105 verso and 108 verso (D08563, D08569; CXXIII 102a, 105a), consider the rope-making industry at Bridport in Dorset, leading to a patriotic meditation on British industry and agriculture during the Napoleonic Wars, continued here and concluded on folio 113 verso (D08578; CXXIII 110a).

Matthew Imms
June 2011

1
See Wilton and Turner 1990, p.173 (transcription, followed here with slight variations); previously transcribed with variations in Thornbury 1862, II, pp.26–7 and 1897, p.215.

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-r1137049, accessed 04 April 2026.