Joseph Noel Paton | Biography

Sir Joseph Noel Paton, the elder son of Joseph Neil and Catherine MacDiarmid Paton, was born in Dunfermline, Fifeshire, on 13 December 1821. He became a student at the Royal Academy, London, in 1843 and was awarded a prize for his painting by the Royal Commission at the Westminster Hall competition in 1845. His first volume of verse. Poems by a Painter, was published anonymously in 1861; his second, Spindrift, appeared in 1867, the year he became a teacher at the Royal Scottish Academy.

Paton's efforts as a poet must be regarded as an avocation as measured against his true vocation as a painter, sculptor, and illustrator. He was trained, honored with prizes and fellowships, and knighted for his work as a painter, and some of the characteristics of his painting carried over into his poetry. Paton's best-known paintings include The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania, Dante, The Dead Lady, The Pursuit of Pleasure, Home, In Memoriam, and Dawn: Luther at Erfurt, all of which deal with favorite Victorian subjects.

His favorite themes as a poet are death, loss, and the hope of recovery. He found his subjects in classical mythology, medieval romance, and even (for the subject of his most famous poem, "The Last of the Eurydicé") the daily press. The deaths treated in his poetry became objects of nostalgia, historical curiosity, fear and indignation, and, occasionally, sentimentality and self-pity.

Two notable features of Paton's verse are traceable to his love of ancient and exotic subjects. These are alliteration, which can be obsessive and inadvertently comic ("The knightly baldric brast, the brave sword gone" from "The Tomb in the Chancel" and "No more the fairy frost-flowers fret the panes" from "With the Sunshine and the Swallows"), and deliberate archaisms ("If I clipt him as of yore" from "Requiem" and "As tight a craft, I ween" from "The Last of the Eurydicé").

Paton's fondness for archaism is often the mark of ineptitude as a poet. The opening lines of "The Last of the Eurydicé," which was a spontaneous effusion written the day after the sinking of the British ship Eurydicé on 24 March 1878, lurch from an unjustifiable use of archaism to chest-thumping jingoism:

The training-ship Eurydice--
       As tight a craft, I ween,
As ever bore brave men who loved
       Their Country and their Queen--
Built when a ship, sir, was a ship
        And not a steam machine.

The proximity of the sunken ship to its port at the time of its sinking occasions the poem's (and Paton's) most famous line, "Only an hour from home," but the poem fails to invest its subject with tragic grandeur. Given Paton's pronounced mythological tastes, it is curious that he failed to find resonance in the ship's classical name: one might expect a pun, for example, on Christoph Willibald Gluck's famous aria "Che faro senza Euridice"" ("Where are you now, Euridice""). The curmudgeonly outburst on the "steam machine" is indicative of the poem's failure to find a proper tone or focus.

Archaisms are more appropriate to the medieval setting of "The Tomb in the Chancel," in which the alliteration and the heaviness of the verse ("his clangorous life-moil long since done, / Sir Everard Raby in his hauberk slept") help to distance the material from the reader. But it is a sign of ineptitude that Paton speaks of the knight's "craven mail," since the poem does not question Raby's courage elsewhere or treat him ironically. "With the Sunshine and the Swallows" shows Paton's love of Miltonic exotic words: "Tyrrhenian" redeems the bland words preceding it. But otherwise it seems a trite exercise in nostalgia: "She is coming, my beloved, o'er the sea!"

Paton was also the author of A Christmas Carol, included in The New Amphion, "the book of the Edinburgh University fancy fair," in 1886 and published posthumously in pamphlet form in 1907. He provided illustrations for Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (1844), Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1863), and William Edmondstoune Aytoun's Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers (1863). Paton died in Edinburgh in December 1901. Margaret Bloomhill Paton, his wife of more than forty years and mother of their eleven children, had died the preceding year.