The whirl of the red, green, and blue: Christopher Anstey and the particoloured poem

A hundred years before Robert Browning’s “red, green, and blue that whirl into a white” made The Ring and the Book the most consciously kaleidoscopic of Victorian poems, the centre of the whirling world was a hundred miles away from Browning’s Paddington, in the city of Bath. The principles of polyphony and chromatic co-ordination were writ large not only in the massive segmented circle of John Wood’s Circus but also, at the very time the Circus was approaching completion, in Christopher Anstey’s poem The New Bath Guide (1766). Anstey’s poem is shaped by sharply marked differences between the voices, idioms and metres that it interlaces. The component parts are equally valuable and weighty, and so dovetailed one into another that although each is independently apprehensible all can be harmoniously combined. This chapter attends to the dynamics of The New Bath Guide, and considers some of the pointers which it offered to the subsequent development of “polyphonic narrative,” as C. S. Lewis would term it, in poems and novels alike.