Philip Bourke Marston was an English poet.

He was born in London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

. His father, John Westland Marston

John Westland Marston

John Westland Marston was an English dramatist.Born in Boston, Lincolnshire, Marston wrote several plays, including Strathmore and Marie de Méranie...

 (1819-1890), wrote verse dramas, and was a friend of Dickens, Macready

Macready

Macready is a surname, and may refer to:* George Macready , American screen actor* Nevil Macready , British Army officer* John Macready , American gymnast and motivational speaker...

 and Charles Kean

Charles Kean

Charles John Kean , was born at Waterford, Ireland, the son of the actor Edmund Kean.After preparatory education at Worplesdon and at Greenford, near Harrow, he was sent to Eton College, where he remained three years...

. Philip's godparent

Godparent

A godparent, in many denominations of Christianity, is someone who sponsors a child's baptism. A male godparent is a godfather, and a female godparent is a godmother...

s were Philip James Bailey

Philip James Bailey

Philip James Bailey , English poet, author of Festus, was born at Nottingham.- Life :His father, who himself published both prose and verse, owned and edited from 1845 to 1852 the Nottingham Mercury, one of the chief journals in his native town...

 and Dinah Mulock

Dinah Craik

Dinah Maria Craik was an English novelist and poet. She was born at Stoke-on-Trent and brought up in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire.After the death of her mother in 1845, Dinah Maria Mulock settled in London about 1846...

. At his father's house near Chalk Farm

Chalk Farm

Chalk Farm is an area of north London, England. It lies directly to the north of Camden Town and its underground station is the closest tube station to the nearby, upmarket neighbourhood of Primrose Hill....

 he met authors and actors of his father's generation, and subsequently the Rossetti

Rossetti

Rossetti may refer to:* Biagio Rossetti , an architect and urbanist from Ferrara, the first to use modern methods* Carlo Rossetti , an Italian Catholic cardinal* Cezaro Rossetti , a Scottish Esperanto writer...

s, Swinburne

Swinburne

Swinburne may refer to:* A place:**Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia**Swinburne University of Technology Sarawak Campus in Kuching, Malaysia**Swinburne Senior Secondary College in Melbourne, Australia...

, Arthur O'Shaughnessy

Arthur O'Shaughnessy

Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy was a British poet of Irish descent, born in London.-Biography:At the age of seventeen, in June 1861, Arthur O'Shaughnessy received the post of transcriber in the library of the British Museum, reportedly through the influence of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton...

 and Henry Irving

Henry Irving

Sir Henry Irving , born John Henry Brodribb, was an English stage actor in the Victorian era, known as an actor-manager because he took complete responsibility for season after season at the Lyceum Theatre, establishing himself and his company as...

. In his fourth year, his sight began to decay, and he gradually became almost totally blind.

His mother died in 1870. His fiance, Mary Nesbit, died in 1871; his closest friend, Oliver Madox Brown, in 1874; his sister Cicely, his amanuensis

Amanuensis

Amanuensis is a Latin word adopted in various languages, including English, for certain persons performing a function by hand, either writing down the words of another or performing manual labour...

, in 1878; in 1879 his remaining sister, Eleanor, who was followed to the grave after a brief interval by her husband, the poet O'Shaughnessy, and her two children.

In 1882, the death of his chief poetic ally and inspirer, Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...

, was followed closely by that of another kindred spirit, James Thomson (B.V.)

James Thomson (B.V.)

James Thomson , who wrote under the pseudonym Bysshe Vanolis, was a Scottish Victorian-era poet famous primarily for the long poem The City of Dreadful Night , an expression of bleak pessimism in a dehumanized, uncaring urban environment.-Life:Thomson was born in Port Glasgow, Scotland, and, after...

, who was carried dying from his blind friend's rooms, where he had sought refuge from his latest miseries early in June of the same year.

It is not surprising that Marston's verse became sorrowful and melancholy. The idylls of flower-life, such as the early and very beautiful The Rose and the Wind, were succeeded by dreams of sleep and the repose of death. These qualities and gradations of feeling are traceable through his three published collections, Songtide (1871), All in All (1873) and Wind Voices (1883). Marston's verse was collected in 1892 by Louise Chandler Moulton

Louise Chandler Moulton

Louise Chandler Moulton was an American poet, story-writer and critic.-Biography:She was born in 1835, the daughter of Lucius L. Chandler, in Pomfret, Connecticut....

, a loyal friend, and herself a poet.

In his later years he wrote short stories in Home Chimes and other American magazines, through the agency of Mrs. Chandler Moulton. His popularity in America far exceeded that in his own country.

His health showed signs of collapse from 1883; in January 1887 he lost his voice, and suffered intensely from the failure to make himself understood.

He was commemorated in Gordon Hake

Thomas Gordon Hake

Thomas Gordon Hake , English poet, was born at Leeds, of an old Devon family. His mother was a Gordon of the Huntly branch. He studied medicine at St George's hospital and at Edinburgh and Glasgow, but had given up practice for many years before his death and had devoted himself to a literary life...

's Blind Boy, and in a sonnet

Sonnet

A sonnet is one of several forms of poetry that originate in Europe, mainly Provence and Italy. A sonnet commonly has 14 lines. The term "sonnet" derives from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian word sonetto, both meaning "little song" or "little sound"...

 by Swinburne, beginning The days of a man are threescore years and ten. There is an intimate sketch of the blind poet by a friend, Coulson Kernahan

Coulson Kernahan

Coulson Kernahan was an English novelist, born at Ilfracombe, Devon, and educated privately by his father and at St Albans School. He was associated with Frederick Locker-Lampson on a new edition of Lyra Elegantiarum, contributed to many periodicals, wrote humorous verse, and gained wide...

, in Sorrow and Song (1894).

Literature

• Coulson Kernahan
  Coulson Kernahan
  Coulson Kernahan was an English novelist, born at Ilfracombe, Devon, and educated privately by his father and at St Albans School. He was associated with Frederick Locker-Lampson on a new edition of Lyra Elegantiarum, contributed to many periodicals, wrote humorous verse, and gained wide...
  
  , in Sorrow and Song (Philadelphia, 1894)
• William Sharp
  William Sharp (writer)
  William Sharp was a Scottish writer, of poetry and literary biography in particular, who from 1893 wrote also as Fiona MacLeod, a pseudonym kept almost secret during his lifetime...
  
  , in Papers Critical and Reminiscent (New York, 1912)