Thomas Miller (poet)

Early life
Miller was born in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, the son of George Miller, an
unsuccessful wharfinger and ship-owner who deserted his wife and two sons in 1810.
Thomas grew up in Sailors Alley, and one of his childhood friends was the future poet
and journalist Thomas Cooper. He attended the White Hart Charity School. Although he
left school at nine, he became a voracious reader. His love of the countryside was
reinforced by summers spent on his grandfather's farm.
Miller found work as a ploughboy, then as a shoemakers apprentice, but was released
from his indentures when he threw "an iron instrument" at his vicious and tyrannical
master. He was then apprenticed as a basket-maker to his stepfather, and when he had
done his time, moved to Nottingham in 1831 to set up his own basket-making business.
There he published his own first writings Songs of the Sea Nymphs (1832), which he
dedicated to Lady Blessington.
London poverty
After moving to London he was befriended by Lady Blessington and by Samuel Rogers,
and for a time engaged in business as a bookseller, but was unsuccessful and then
devoted himself exclusively to literature, producing over 45 volumes, including novels, in
which he successfully delineated rural characters and scenes. Among them were Royston
Gower (1838), Gideon Giles the Roper, Rural Sketches and Pictures of Country Life,
illustrated by Samuel Williams. He contributed a series to the run of penny dreadfuls
entitled Mysteries of London, which depicted urban crime.
Although Miller attracted some patronage and some sums from the Royal Literary Fund,
but he was often in financial need, and appealed directly to Charles Dickens for
assistance in 1851. Dickens declined and wrote to his friend Bulwer Lytton of Miller; I
fear he has mistaken his vocation.
Miller had a wife and four children: Henry, George, Emma and Ellen. He died of a stroke
at his home at 24 New Street, Kensington, on 24 October 1874 and was buried in West
Norwood Cemetery. He was survived by a son and two spinster daughters.

Poems
Mosquitoes

The Palace of Mirages

Though I live

There is a room in Paris

on the eighteenth floor

mosquitoes still find me

that can be transformed

by the use of mirrors and machinery
into three different locations.

Though we sleep
side by side
the mosquito loves only me

Lights dim on an Indian Temple

that turns into a Tropical Jungle.
When the room slowly darkens

Run very hot water

on your mosquito bites
and dont scratch them
Welcome mosquitoes!
We serve only one cocktail herethick nourishing blood
The faintest huma mosquito hovering
in the dark around my ear
The mosquito welt
on my ear
glows red hot
In the morning- thuggish
mosquitoes cling to the bathroom tile
full of blood, out of breath

again,
the Jungle transforms into a
Moorish Palace.