He read on: ‘Her hair that lay along her back / Was yellow like ripe corn’.73 Eventually he would ironise this material, not least by juxtaposing its phrasing with the repressed, polite milieu in which he came to move: ‘The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript / Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn’.74 Probably such ironising began early, and indeed elements of it may be sensed in at least one piece Tom published in the Smith Academy Record.

This was ‘A Fable for Feasters’, a poem for Christmas published unseasonably in February 1905. Tom’s tale about a ghost in a medieval monastery uses the stanza form favoured by Byron in Don Juan, another signal of the boy’s liking for nineteenth-century poetry with an erotic tinge. Cheeky rhymes such as ‘Mormon’ and ‘Norman’ suggest Tom liked Byron’s wit and acoustic nimbleness too.75 Yet the immediate model, as readers from his brother Henry to modern critics have recognised, was the Ingoldsby Legends, or Mirth and Marvels, a once popular series of Victorian English comic verses about medieval life. The poems of the Ingoldsby Legends mix modern, sometimes slangy lingo (‘You will have a kicking!’) with mock-medievalisms (‘Quoth his saintship, “How now!”’), and parody both actual medieval forms and nineteenth-century medievalising, such as that of Keats in ‘The Eve of St Agnes’.76 Where Tom’s admired Morte d’Arthur and Vision of Sir Lanfaul were solemnly medieval, Ingoldsby capered; so does ‘A Fable for Feasters’.

Tom’s first printed poem describes the many-wived King Henry VIII as ‘that royal Mormon’ and presents monks as ‘quacks’. Tom’s brother relished the way, conducting an exorcism, the poem’s Abbot douses a dining room with holy water, ‘And watered everything except the wine’.77 Into his poem Tom works expressions such as ‘“O jiminy!”’ rhyming with ‘the chimney’. As well as drawing on ‘The Ghost’ from The Ingoldsby Legends, he learned from the poem that follows it in the same collection, ‘The Brothers of Birchington, A Lay of St Thomas À Becket’. When Tom wrote in his last stanza of how ‘Each morn from four to five one took a knout / And flogged his mates ’till they grew good and friarly’, his use of the unusual word ‘knout’ in this context probably owes something to the way in ‘The Brothers of Birchington’ we hear of ‘such a knout! / For his self-flagellations! The Monks used to say / He would wear out two penn’orth of whipcord a day!’78

Reading and imitating this work, Tom began to put together allusions to older cultural forms with anachronistically modern colloquial language. He also found a way both to indulge and subvert the taste he shared with his mother for sometimes ascetic medieval religious life. Though later he would be fascinated by masochistic saints and as a mature poet would return more solemnly to Thomas à Becket, what he started to essay in this teenage poem was mixing modern and antique diction. In doing so he drew on some of his interests in older poetry and religion, yet developed an ironic edge. Tom did not succeed fully in 1905, but perhaps the untonsured man in ‘The Brothers of Birchington’ who worries about ‘a little bald patch on the top of his crown’ would return later as J. Alfred Prufrock with a ‘bald spot in the middle of my hair’.79

In his penultimate year at school, though absent from the sports field, he did win respect for his academic performance. Like his brother before him, he was awarded the school’s gold medal for Latin. Tom’s medal made his parents proud. Pa gave him a reward of $25, but secretly Tom took (‘stole’ as he later put it) $2 of this to purchase a copy of Shelley’s poems.80 Reading the work of a poet who had written a notorious justification of atheism was in its way a rebellious act. It followed Tom’s authoring of those ‘atheistical’ quatrains spurred by his reading of Fitzgerald. He perused Edward Dowden’s edition of Shelley’s poems excitedly. On the first page of his introduction Dowden presented Shelley’s genius as ‘primarily lyrical’. ‘No poet ever sang more directly out of his own feelings – his joys, his sorrows, his desires, his regrets.’ A little-known, fragmentary lyric poem towards the end of Dowden’s edition, where it was entitled ‘To the Moon’, stayed with Tom all his life. He came to think it ‘the most perfect short poem that Shelley wrote’:

Art thou pale for weariness

Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,

Wandering companionless

Among the stars that have a different birth,

And ever changing, like a joyless eye

That finds no object worth its constancy?81

Like ‘The Blessed Damozel’, this is a poem of longing and apartness that articulates a sense of the ‘companionless’ – just what Tom’s mother worried about when she feared Tom had been ‘deprived’ of ‘companionship’.82 If his taste in poetry was something he kept (in part at least) hidden from his parents, his attraction towards the ‘atheistical’ may have led this boy perceived by outsiders as shy to feel cut off from some aspects of his family life too. This helps explain why at least once he said his Unitarian upbringing had formed him as an ‘Atheist’.83 In some rather despondent moods, looking back twenty years later, he could intuit that his growing commitment to poetry had isolated him, feeling he had been ‘forced into poetry by my weakness in other directions … I took this direction very young, and learned very early to find my life and my realisation in this curious way, and to be obtuse and indifferent to my reality in other ways.’84

Tom played no part in the editing of his school magazine, but he was published in it. His three short prose contributions in 1905 are undistinguished, but hint how his reading continued to guide him. ‘The Birds of Prey’, about a vulture which comes to feast on a battlefield victim, has a title reminiscent of Kipling’s ‘“Birds of Prey” March’. ‘The Man Who Was King’ (the narrative about a man shipwrecked in Polynesia) echoes Kipling’s short story ‘The Man Who Would Be King’, but also inclines towards R. L. Stevenson. ‘The Man Who Was King’ is narrated by a retired captain, ‘at present engaged in lobster-trawling and skippering summer visitors’. He sounds a bit like the skipper who taught Tom to sail at Gloucester. Terms such as ‘mizzen top-gallant shrouds’, ‘flying jib-boom’, ‘fore staysail’ and ‘holystoning the deck’ (all used in Tom’s other story ‘A Tale of a Whale’) demonstrate that the young mariner had been well taught. Moments in these narratives, as when sailors on the back of a whale eat ‘sponge-cake, made out of the sponges which grew on the bottom of the great animal’, suggest Tom’s more mischievous, Edward Lear-loving side.85 So do occasional made-up words, including Tom’s Polynesian ‘bhghons’.