In his poem, John Gambril Nicholson writes of the many boys he sees and admires as he stares out of his window, rides the train, or walks the streets of London. The obvious theme in this poem is simply being queer, but there is also a hint at a theme of unrequited love towards the end. Aside from the hinted theme, Nicholson is surprisingly blatant for the time period. The lines, “And gazing from my window high / I like to watch them passing by” (Nicholson), and the fact that he is referring solely to the “boys” in the street make it quite clear that he is interested in men, not women.
After the first stanza, which just introduces the topic of the poem, Nicholson lists the boys he watches. While he does interact with several of them, he never calls anyone by his real name. He refers to all of them by various characteristics such as “The boy that tidies up the bar” (7), and “The lad that’s lettered G.P.O.” (12). This could be a way to lead up to the last stanza, which suddenly shifts from a personal narrative with no target audience, to a sort of message to a specific person.
And though I never see you there
All boys your name and nature share,
And almost every day I make
Some new acquaintance for your sake.
Nicholson could be directing this stanza towards the object of his affection, whom he is unable to have a relationship with. There is not much information other than the fact that this nameless person is never where the narrator goes, yet the narrator always sees a reflection of the person in all of the other boys.
This poem surprises me because of its straightforwardness, but the themes do not surprise me at all. It seems like nearly every poem in the archive deals with unrequited love, and this is most likely due to the fact that queerness was obviously not acceptable during the Victorian era, so most people were forced to mask their feelings.
I think that you make a really good point that a lot of these poems aren’t just about love, but about unrequited love. I think the fact that he appears to be watching these other boys through a window really adds to that message: he is stuck in one place while everyone else is out in another. I think that being alone and staring out a window also has a very depressing connotation to it, highlighting how painful it can be to have this unrequited love. The window also serves as his mask in a way. it’s usually way easier to see out of a window than into one, so it kind of protects him in a way from the world seeing the thing they would not approve of: his queerness.
I like how you pointed out how the “nameless person” isn’t actually there but is reflected in the boys the speaker meets. I wonder if the nameless person isn’t there because he doesn’t love the speaker back, or if the nameless person died. In the last two lines the speaker says “And almost every day I make/ Some new acquaintance for your sake.” It’s like he’s doing this because it’s what the nameless person would have wanted for him; to move on.