Robert F. Murray (author of the Scarlet Gown): His Poems; with a Memoir

Robert F. Murray wrote one poem that Oxford undergraduates never stopped singing. 'The Scarlet Gown' captured the reckless joy of university life so perfectly that it became an unofficial anthem, yet its author was dead by twenty-one. This collection gathers the poems that survived him, verses marked by wit, feeling, and an unsettling awareness of his own fragility. The memoir that accompanies them reveals what the revelry concealed: a young man plagued by self-doubt, nursing artistic ambitions he feared would go unrealized, writing letters full of both joy and melancholy. Murray died of tuberculosis in 1894, leaving behind a small body of work that has lingered in obscurity ever since. What remains is poignant and uneven, the voice of someone who never got to grow into himself, whose promise was cut short just as the world was beginning to notice.