The lines of verse are Turner’s own composition but are also inspired by ‘Q.Z’, who gives as examples of the ridiculous and the Sublime respectively two famous poems, Samuel Butler’s
Hudibras (1661) and Thomas Gray’s
The Bard (1757). Citing Gray’s ‘image of his Bard, “Loose his beard and hoary hair, streamed like a meteor to the troubled air”’, the 1804 article goes on to say that ‘it is, however, remarkable, and somewhat ludicrous, that the
beard of Hudibras is compared to a meteor, and the accompanying observation almost induces me to think Gray derived from it the plan of that sublime ode; since his bard
precisely performs what the
beard of
Hudibras denounced’. Aside from her reflections on poetic ‘imitations and similarities’, the author’s point, and Turner’s, is that either the ridiculous or the Sublime can be exaggerated to the point that it risks turning into the other: ‘let us recollect, that the
burlesque and the
sublime are extremes, and that extremes meet. How often does it merely depend on our own state of mind, and on our own taste, to consider the sublime as burlesque!’ For Turner the same considerations apply to pictorial expression, and on folios 43 verso–45 verso of the sketchbook he writes at length on the relationship between painting and poetry (
D07587–D07591).
