阁楼诗人的请愿

Turner sent this to the Royal Academy's summer exhibition at Somerset House in 1809 and had four lines of verse printed beside it in the catalogue: Aid me, ye Powers! O bid my thoughts to roll in quick succession, animate my soul. The lines are the prayer of the poet in the picture, and Turner wrote them himself.

He was 34 and a Royal Academician already, but the shows of those years belonged to David Wilkie, a young Scot whose crowded comic interiors pulled the biggest crowds in London. Turner answered with small dark rooms of his own. This one holds a hack poet in a freezing attic, with an image of Parnassus, the hill where the Muses were said to live, pinned on the wall above his head.

Turner's own verse never came right. He kept at it, and from 1812 he was attaching lines from an unfinished poem of his, The Fallacies of Hope, to picture after picture.