Part II—comparison of the editions
Part III—grouping the poems
Part IV—“Art for art, art for truth.”
Early Poems
To the Queen
Claribel—a Melody
Lilian
Isabel
Mariana
To —— (“Clear-headed friend, whose joyful scorn”)
Madeline
Song—The Owl
Second Song to the Same
Recollections of the Arabian Nights
Ode to Memory
Song (“A spirit haunts the year’s last hours”)
Adeline
A Character
The Poet
The Poet’s Mind
The Sea-Fairies
The Deserted House
The Dying Swan
A Dirge
Love and Death
The Ballad of Oriana
Circumstance
The Merman
The Mermaid
Sonnet to J. M. K.
The Lady of Shalott
Mariana in the South
Eleänore
The Miller’s Daughter
Fatima
Œnone
The Sisters
To—— (“I send you here a sort of allegory”)
The Palace of Art
Lady Clara Vere de Vere
The May Queen
New Year’s Eve
Conclusion
The Lotos-Eaters
Dream of Fair Women
Margaret
The Blackbird
The Death of the Old Year
To J. S.
“You ask me, why, tho’ ill at ease”
“Of old sat Freedom on the heights”
“Love thou thy land, with love far-brought”
The Goose
The Epic
Morte d’Arthur
The Gardener’s Daughter; or, The Pictures
Dora
Audley Court
Walking to the Mail
Edwin Morris; or, The Lake
St. Simeon Stylites
The Talking Oak
Love and Duty
The Golden Year
Ulysses
Locksley Hall
Godiva
The Two Voices
The Day-Dream:—Prologue
The Sleeping Palace
The Sleeping Beauty
The Arrival
The Revival
The Departure
L’Envoi
Epilogue
Amphion
St. Agnes
Sir Galahad
Edward Gray
Will Waterproof’s Lyrical Monologue
To ——, after reading a Life and Letters
To E.L., on his Travels in Greece
Lady Clare
The Lord of Burleigh
Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere: a Fragment
A Farewell
The Beggar Maid
The Vision of Sin
“Come not, when I am dead”
The Eagle
“Move eastward, happy earth, and leave”
“Break, break, break”
The Poet’s Song
Appendix—Suppressed Poems
Elegiacs
The “How” and the “Why”
Supposed Confessions
The Burial of Love
To —— (“Sainted Juliet! dearest name !”)
Song (“I’ the glooming light”)
Song (“The lintwhite and the throstlecock”)
Song (“Every day hath its night”)
Nothing will Die
All Things will Die
Hero to Leander
The Mystic
The Grasshopper
Love, Pride and Forgetfulness
Chorus (“The varied earth, the moving heaven”)
Lost Hope
The Tears of Heaven
Love and Sorrow
To a Lady Sleeping
Sonnet (“Could I outwear my present state of woe”)
Sonnet (“Though Night hath climbed her peak of highest noon”)
Sonnet (“Shall the hag Evil die with child of Good”)
Sonnet (“The pallid thunderstricken sigh for gain”)
Love
The Kraken
English War Song
National Song
Dualisms
We are Free
οἱ ῥέοντες.
“Mine be the strength of spirit, full and free”
To — (“All good things have not kept aloof”)
Buonaparte
Sonnet (“Oh, Beauty, passing beauty! sweetest Sweet!”)
The Hesperides
Song (“The golden apple, the golden apple, the hallowed fruit”)
Rosalind
Song (“Who can say”)
Kate
Sonnet (“Blow ye the trumpet, gather from afar”)
Poland
To — (“As when with downcast eyes we muse and brood”)
O Darling Room
To Christopher North
The Skipping Rope
Timbuctoo
Bibliography of the _Poems_ of 1842
Preface
A Critical edition of Tennyson’s poems has long been an acknowledged
want. He has taken his place among the English Classics, and as a
Classic he is, and will be, studied, seriously and minutely, by many
thousands of his countrymen, both in the present generation as well as
in future ages. As in the works of his more illustrious brethren, so in
his trifles will become subjects of curious interest, and assume an
importance of which we have no conception now. Here he will engage the
attention of the antiquary, there of the social historian. Long after
his politics, his ethics, his theology have ceased to be immediately
influential, they will be of immense historical significance. A
consummate artist and a consummate master of our language, the process
by which he achieved results so memorable can never fail to be of
interest, and of absorbing interest, to critical students.
I must, I fear, claim the indulgence due to one who attempts, for the
first time, a critical edition of a text so perplexingly voluminous in
variants as Tennyson’s. I can only say that I have spared neither time
nor labour to be accurate and exhaustive. I have myself collated, or
have had collated for me, every edition recorded in the British Museum
Catalogue, and where that has been deficient I have had recourse to
other public libraries, and to the libraries of private friends. I am
not conscious that I have left any variant unrecorded, but I should not
like to assert that this is the case. Tennyson was so restlessly
indefatigable in his corrections that there may lurk, in editions of
the poems which I have not seen, other variants; and it is also
possible that, in spite of my vigilance, some may have escaped me even
in the editions which have been collated, and some may have been made
at a date earlier than the date recorded. But I trust this has not been
the case.
Of the Bibliography I can say no more than that I have done my utmost
to make it complete, and that it is very much fuller than any which has
hitherto appeared. That it is exhaustive I dare not promise.
With regard to the Notes and Commentaries, I have spared no pains to
explain everything which seemed to need explanation. There are, I
think, only two points which I have not been able to clear up, namely,
the name of the friend to whom the _The Palace of Art_ was addressed,
and the name of the friend to whom the _Verses after reading a Life and
Letters_ were addressed. I have consulted every one who would be likely
to throw light on the subject, including the poet’s surviving sister,
many of his friends, and the present Lord Tennyson, but without
success; so the names, if they were not those of some imaginary person,
appear to be irrecoverable. The Prize Poem, _Timbuctoo_, as well as the
poems which were temporarily or finally suppressed in the volumes
published in 1830 and 1832 have been printed in the Appendix: those
which were subsequently incorporated in his Works, in large type; those
which he never reprinted, in small.
The text here adopted is that of 1857, but Messrs. Macmillan, to whom I
beg to express my hearty thanks, have most generously allowed me to
record all the variants which are still protected by copyright. I have
to thank them, too, for assistance in the Bibliography. I have also to
thank Mr. J. T. Wise for his kindness in lending me the privately
printed volume containing the _Morte d’Arthur, Dora,_ etc.
Introduction
I
The development of Tennyson’s genius, methods, aims and capacity of
achievement in poetry can be studied with singular precision and
fulness in the history of the poems included in the present volume. In
1842 he published the two volumes which gave him, by almost general
consent, the first place among the poets of his time, for, though
Wordsworth was alive, Wordsworth’s best work had long been done. These
two volumes contained poems which had appeared before, some in 1830 and
some in 1832, and some which were then given to the world for the first
time, so that they represent work belonging to three eras in the poet’s
life, poems written before he had completed his twenty-second year and
belonging for the most part to his boyhood, poems written in his early
manhood, and poems written between his thirty-first and thirty-fourth
year.
The poems published in 1830 had the following title-page: “_Poems,
Chiefly Lyrical, by Alfred Tennyson._ London: Effingham Wilson, Royal
Exchange, 1830”. They are fifty-six in number and the titles are:—
_Claribel_.
_Lilian_.
_Isabel_.
Elegiacs.*
The “How” and the “Why”.
_Mariana_.
To —— .
Madeline.
The Merman.
The _Mermaid_.
Supposed Confessions of a second-rate sensitive mind not in unity with
itself.*
The Burial of Love.
To — (Sainted Juliet dearest name.)
_Song. The Owl._
_Second Song. To the same._
_Recollections of the Arabian Nights._
_Ode to Memory_.
Song. (I’ the glooming light.)
_Song. (A spirit haunts.)_
_Adeline_.
_A Character._
Song. (The lint-white and the throstle cock.)
Song. (Every day hath its night.)
_The Poet._
_The Poet’s Mind._
Nothing will die.*
All things will die.*
Hero to Leander.
The Mystic.
_The Dying Swan._
_A Dirge._
The Grasshopper.
Love, Pride and Forgetfulness.
Chorus (in an unpublished drama written very early).
Lost Hope.
The Deserted House.*†
The Tears of Heaven.
Love and Sorrow.
To a Lady Sleeping.
Sonnet. (Could I outwear my present state of woe.)
Sonnet. (Though Night hath climbed her peak of highest noon.)
Sonnet. (Shall the hag Evil die with child of Good.)
Sonnet. (The pallid thunderstricken sigh for gain.)
Love.
_Love and Death._
The Kraken.*
_The Ballad of Oriana._
_Circumstance._
English War Song.
National Song.
_The Sleeping Beauty._
Dualisms.
We are Free.
The Sea-Fairies.*†
_Sonnet to J.M.K._
οἱ ῥέοντες
Of these the poems in _italics_ appeared in the edition of 1842, and
were not much altered. Those with an asterisk were, in addition to the
italicised poems, afterwards included among the _Juvenilia_ in the
collected works (1871-1872), though excluded from all preceding
editions of the poems. Those with both a dagger and an asterisk were
restored in editions previous to the first collected editions of the
works.
In December, 1832, appeared a second volume (it is dated on the
title-page, 1833): “Poems by Alfred Tennyson. London: Moxon,
MDCCCXXXIII.” This contains thirty poems:—
Sonnet.†† (Mine be the strength of spirit fierce and free.)
To— .†† (All good things have not kept aloof.)
Buonaparte.††
Sonnet I. (O Beauty passing beauty, sweetest Sweet.)
Sonnet II.†† (But were I loved, as I desire to be.)
_The Lady of Shalott_.*
_Mariana in the South._*
_Eleanore._
_The Miller’s Daughter._*
φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θεοῖσιν Ἔμμεν ἀνήρ.
_Œnone_.
_The Sisters._
To— . (With the Palace of Art.)*
_The Palace of Art_*
_The May Queen._
_New Year’s Eve._
The Hesperides.
_The Lotos Eaters._
Rosalind.††
_A Dream of Fair Women_*
Song. (Who can say.)
_Margaret_.
Kate.
Sonnet. Written on hearing of the outbreak of the Polish Insurrection.
Sonnet.†† On the result of the late Russian invasion of Poland.
Sonnet.†† (As when with downcast eyes we muse and brood.)
O Darling Room.
To Christopher North.
_The Death of the Old Year._
_To J. S._
Of these the poems italicised were included in the edition of 1842;
those marked with an asterisk being greatly altered and in some cases
almost rewritten, those marked with a dagger being practically
unaltered. To those reprinted in the collected works a double dagger is
prefixed.
In 1842 appeared the two volumes which contained, in addition to the
selections made from the two former volumes, several new poems:—
“Poems by Alfred Tennyson. In two volumes. London: Edward Moxon,
MDCCCXLII.”
The first volume is divided into two parts: Selections from the poems
published in 1830, _Claribel_ to the _Sonnet to J. M. K._ inclusive.
Selections from the poems of 1832, _The Lady of Shalott_ to _The Goose_
inclusive. The second volume contains poems then, with two exceptions,
first published.
The Epic.
Morte d’Arthur.
The Gardener’s Daughter.
Dora.
Audley Court.
Walking to the Mail.
St. Simeon Stylites.
Conclusion to the May Queen.
The Talking Oak.
Lady Clara Vere de Vere.
Love and Duty.
Ulysses.
Locksley Hall.
Godiva.
The Two Voices.
The Day Dream.
Prologue.
The Sleeping Palace.
The Sleeping Beauty.
The Arrival.
The Revival.
The Departure.
Moral.
L’Envoi.
Epilogue.
Amphion.
St. Agnes.
Sir Galahad.
Edward Gray.
Will Waterproofs Lyrical Monologue, made at the Cock.
Lady Clare.
The Lord of Burleigh.
Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere.
A Farewell.
The Beggar Maid.
The Vision of Sin.
The Skipping Rope.
“Move Eastward, happy Earth.”
“Break, break, break.”
The Poet’s Song.
Only two of these poems had been published before, namely, _St. Agnes_,
which was printed in _The Keepsake_ for 1837, and _The Sleeping Beauty_
in _The Day Dream_, which was adopted with some alterations from the
1830 poem, and only one of these poems was afterwards suppressed, _The
Skipping Rope_, which was, however, allowed to stand till 1851. In 1843
appeared the second edition of these poems, which is merely a reprint
with a few unimportant alterations, and which was followed in 1845 and
in 1846 by a third and fourth edition equally unimportant in their
variants, but in the fourth _The Golden Year_ was added. In the next
edition, the fifth, 1848, _The Deserted House_ was included from the
poems of 1830. In the sixth edition, 1850, was included another poem,
_To— , after reading a Life and Letters_, reprinted, with some
alterations, from the _Examiner_ of 24th March, 1849.
The seventh edition, 1851, contained important additions. First the
Dedication to the Queen, then _Edwin Morris_, the fragment of _The
Eagle_, and the stanzas, “Come not when I am dead,” first printed in
_The Keepsake_ for 1851, under the title of _Stanzas_. In this edition
the absurd trifle _The Skipping Rope_ was excised and finally
cancelled. In the eighth edition, 1853, _The Sea-Fairies,_ though
greatly altered, was included from the poems of 1830, and the poem _To
E. L. on his Travels in Greece_ was added. This edition, the eighth,
may be regarded as the final one. Nothing afterwards of much importance
was added or subtracted, and comparatively few alterations were made in
the text from that date to the last collected edition in 1898.
All the editions up to, and including, that of 1898 have been carefully
collated, so that the student of Tennyson can follow step by step the
process by which he arrived at that perfection of expression which is
perhaps his most striking characteristic as a poet. And it was indeed a
trophy of labour, of the application “of patient touches of unwearied
art”. Whoever will turn, say to _The Palace of Art_, to _Œnone_, to the
_Dream of Fair Women_, or even to _The Sea-Fairies_ and to _The Lady of
Shalott_, will see what labour was expended on their composition.
Nothing indeed can be more interesting than to note the touches, the
substitution of which measured the whole distance between mediocrity
and excellence. Take, for example, the magical alteration in the
couplet in the _Dream of Fair Women_:—
One drew a sharp knife thro’ my tender throat
Slowly,—and nothing more,
into
The bright death quiver’d at the victim’s throat;
Touch’d; and I knew no more.
Or, in the same poem:—
What nights we had in Egypt! I could hit
His humours while I cross’d him. O the life
I led him, and the dalliance and the wit,
into
We drank the Libyan Sun to sleep, and lit
Lamps which outburn’d Canopus. O my life
In Egypt! O the dalliance and the wit,
The flattery and the strife.
Or, in _Mariana in the South_:—
She mov’d her lips, she pray’d alone,
She praying, disarray’d and warm
From slumber, deep her wavy form
In the dark lustrous mirror shone,
into
Complaining, “Mother, give me grace
To help me of my weary load”.
And on the liquid mirror glow’d
The clear perfection of her face.
How happy is this slight alteration in the verses _To J. S._ which
corrects one of the falsest notes ever struck by a poet:—
A tear
Dropt on _my tablets_ as I wrote.
A tear
Dropt on _the letters_ as I wrote.
or where in _Locksley Hall_ a splendidly graphic touch of description
is gained by the alteration of “_droops_ the trailer from the crag”
into “_swings_ the trailer”.
So again in _Love and Duty_:—
Should my shadow cross thy thoughts
Too sadly for their peace, _so put it back_.
For calmer hours in memory’s darkest hold,
where by altering “so put it back” into “remand it thou,” a somewhat
ludicrous image is at all events softened.
What great care Tennyson took with his phraseology is curiously
illustrated in _The May Queen_. In the 1842 edition “Robin” was the
name of the May Queen’s lover. In 1843 it was altered to “Robert,” and
in 1845 and subsequent editions back to “Robin”.
Compare, again, the old stanza in _The Miller’s Daughter_:—
How dear to me in youth, my love,
Was everything about the mill;
The black and silent pool above,
The pool beneath it never still,
with what was afterwards substituted:—
I loved the brimming wave that swam
Through quiet meadows round the mill,
The sleepy pool above the dam,
The pool beneath it never still.
Another most felicitous emendation is to be found in _The Poet_, where
the edition of 1830 reads:—
And in the bordure of her robe was writ
Wisdom, a name to shake
Hoar anarchies, as with a thunderfit.
This in 1842 appears as:—
And in her raiment’s hem was trac’d in flame
Wisdom, a name to shake
All evil dreams of power—a sacred name.
Again, in the _Lotos Eaters_
_Three thunder-cloven thrones of oldest snow_
Stood sunset-flushed
is changed into
_Three silent pinnacles of aged snow_.
So in _Will Waterproof_ the cumbrous
Like Hezekiah’s backward runs
The shadow of my days,
was afterwards simplified into
Against its fountain upward runs
The current of my days.
Not less felicitous have been the additions made from time to time.
Thus in _Audley Court_ the concluding lines ran:—
The harbour buoy,
With one green sparkle ever and anon
Dipt by itself.
But what vividness is there in the subsequent insertion of
“Sole star of phosphorescence in the calm.”
between the first line and the second.
So again in the _Morte d’Arthur_ how greatly are imagery and rhythm
improved by the insertion of
Across the ridge, and paced beside the mere,
between
Then went Sir Bedivere the second time,
and
Counting the dewy pebbles, fix’d in thought.
There is an alteration in Œnone which is very interesting. Till 1884
this was allowed to stand:—
The lizard, with his shadow on the stone,
Rests like a shadow, _and the cicala sleeps_.
No one could have known better than Tennyson that the cicala is loudest
in the torrid calm of the noonday, as Theocritus, Virgil, Byron and
innumerable other poets have noticed; at last he altered it, but at the
heavy price of a cumbrous pleonasm, into “and the winds are dead”.
He allowed many years to elapse before he corrected another error in
natural history—but at last the alteration came. In _The Poet’s Song_
in the line—
The swallow stopt as he hunted the _bee_,
the “fly” which the swallow does hunt was substituted for what it does
not hunt, and that for very obvious reasons.
But whoever would see what Tennyson’s poetry has owed to elaborate
revision and scrupulous care would do well to compare the first edition
of _Mariana in the South_, _The Sea-Fairies_, _Œnone_, _The Lady of
Shalott_, _The Palace of Art_ and _A Dream of Fair Women_ with the
poems as they are presented in 1853. Poets do not always improve their
verses by revision, as all students of Wordsworth’s text could
abundantly illustrate; but it may be doubted whether, in these poems at
least, Tennyson ever made a single alteration which was not for the
better. Fitzgerald, indeed, contended that in some cases, particularly
in _The Miller’s Daughter_, Tennyson would have done well to let the
first reading stand, but few critics would agree with him in the
instances he gives. We may perhaps regret the sacrifice of such a
stanza as this—
Each coltsfoot down the grassy bent,
Whose round leaves hold the gathered shower,
Each quaintly folded cuckoo pint,
And silver-paly cuckoo flower.
II
Tennyson’s genius was slow in maturing. The poems contributed by him to
the volume of 1827, _Poems by Two Brothers_, are not without some
slight promise, but are very far from indicating extraordinary powers.
A great advance is discernible in _Timbuctoo_, but that Matthew Arnold
should have discovered in it the germ of Tennyson’s future powers is
probably to be attributed to the youth of the critic. Tennyson was in
his twenty-second year when the _Poems Chiefly Lyrical_ appeared, and
what strikes us in these poems is certainly not what Arthur Hallam saw
in them: much rather what Coleridge and Wilson discerned in them. They
are the poems of a fragile and somewhat morbid young man in whose
temper we seem to see a touch of Hamlet, a touch of Romeo and, more
healthily, a touch of Mercutio. Their most promising characteristic is
the versatility displayed. Thus we find _Mariana_ side by side with the
_Supposed Confessions_, the _Ode to Memory_ with οἱ ῥέοντες, _The
Ballad of Oriana_ with _The Dying Swan_, _Recollections of The Arabian
Nights_ with _The Poet_. Their worst fault is affectation. Perhaps the
utmost that can be said for them is that they display a fine but
somewhat thin vein of original genius, after deducing what they owe to
Coleridge, to Keats and to other poets. This is seen in the magical
touches of description, in the exquisite felicity of expression and
rhythm which frequently mark them, in the pathos and power of such a
poem as _Oriana_, in the pathos and charm of such poems as _Mariana_
and _A Dirge_, in the rich and almost gorgeous fancy displayed in _The
Recollections_.
The poems of 1833 are much more ambitious and strike deeper notes. Here
comes in for the first time that σπουδαιότης, that high seriousness
which is one of Tennyson’s chief characteristics—we see it in _The
Palace of Art_, in _Œnone_ and in the verses _To J. S._ But in
intrinsic merit the poems were no advance on their predecessors, for
the execution was not equal to the design. The best, such as _Œnone_,
_A Dream of Fair Women_, _The Palace of Art_, _The Lady of Shalott_—I
am speaking of course of these poems in their first form—were full of
extraordinary blemishes. The volume was degraded by pieces which were
very unworthy of him, such as _O Darling Room_ and the verses _To
Christopher North_, and affectations of the worst kind deformed many,
nay, perhaps the majority of the poems. But the capital defect lay in
the workmanship. The diction is often languid and slipshod, sometimes
quaintly affected, and we can never go far without encountering lines,
stanzas, whole poems which cry aloud for the file. The power and charm
of Tennyson’s poetry, even at its ripest, depend very largely, often
mainly, on expression, and the couplet which he envied Browning,
The little more, and how much it is,
The little less, and what worlds away,
is strangely applicable to his own art. On a single word, on a subtle
collocation, on a slight touch depend often his finest effects: “the
little less” reduces him to mediocrity, “the little more” and he is
with the masters. To no poetry would the application of Goethe’s test
be, as a rule, more fatal—that the real poetic quality in poetry is
that which remains when it has been translated literally into prose.
Whoever will compare the poems of 1832 with the same poems as they
appeared in 1842 will see that the difference is not so much a
difference in degree, but almost a difference in kind. In the
collection of 1832 there were three gems, _The Sisters_, the lines _To
J. S._ and _The May Queen_. Almost all the others which are of any
value were, in the edition of 1842, carefully revised, and in some
cases practically rewritten. If Tennyson’s career had closed in 1833 he
would hardly have won a prominent place among the minor poets of the
present century. The nine years which intervened between the
publication of his second volume and the volumes of 1842 were the
making of him, and transformed a mere dilettante into a master. Much
has been said about the brutality of Lockhart’s review in the
_Quarterly_. In some respects it was stupid, in some respects it was
unjust, but of one thing there can be no doubt—it had a most salutary
effect. It held up the mirror to weaknesses and deficiencies which, if
Tennyson did not care to acknowledge to others, he must certainly have
acknowledged to himself. It roused him and put him on his mettle. It
was a wholesome antidote to the enervating flattery of coteries and
“apostles” who were certainly talking a great deal of nonsense about
him, as Arthur Hallam’s essay in the _Englishman_ shows. During the
next nine years he published nothing, with the exception of two
unimportant contributions to certain minor periodicals.[1] But he was
educating himself, saturating himself with all that is best in the
poetry of Ancient Greece and Rome, of modern Italy, of Germany and of
his own country, studying theology, metaphysics, natural history,
geology, astronomy and travels, observing nature with the eye of a
poet, a painter and a naturalist. Nor was he a recluse. He threw
himself heartily into the life of his time, following with the keenest
interest all the great political and social movements, the progress and
effects of the Reform Bill, the troubles in Ireland, the troubles with
the Colonies, the struggles between the Protectionists and the Free
Traders, Municipal Reform, the advance of the democracy, Chartism, the
popular education question. He travelled on the Continent, he travelled
in Wales and Scotland, he visited most parts of England, not as an idle
tourist, but as a student with note-book in hand. And he had been
submitted also to the discipline which is of all disciplines the most
necessary to the poet, and without which, as Goethe says, “he knows not
the heavenly powers”: he had “ate his bread in sorrow”. The death of
his father in 1831 had already brought him face to face, as he has
himself expressed it, with the most solemn of all mysteries. In 1833 he
had an awful shock in the sudden death of his friend Arthur Hallam, “an
overwhelming sorrow which blotted out all joy from his life and made
him long for death”. He had other minor troubles which contributed
greatly to depress him,—the breaking up of the old home at Somersby,
his own poverty and uncertain prospects, his being compelled in
consequence to break off all intercourse with Miss Emily Selwood. It is
possible that _Love and Duty_ may have reference to this sorrow; it is
certain that _The Two Voices_ is autobiographical.
Such was his education between 1832 and 1842, and such the influences
which were moulding him, while he was slowly evolving _In Memoriam_ and
the poems first published in the latter year. To the revision of the
old poems he brought tastes and instincts cultivated by the critical
study of all that was best in the poetry of the world, and more
particularly by a familiarity singularly intimate and affectionate with
the masterpieces of the ancient classics; he brought also the skill of
a practised workman, for his diligence in production was literally that
of Sir Joshua Reynolds in the sister art—_nulla dies sine line’_. Into
the composition of the new poems all this entered. He was no longer a
trifler and a Hedonist. As Spedding has said, his former poems betrayed
“an over-indulgence in the luxuries of the senses, a profusion of
splendours, harmonies, perfumes, gorgeous apparel, luscious meals and
drinks, and creature comforts which rather pall upon the sense, and
make the glories of the outward world to obscure a little the world
within”. Like his own _Lady of Shalott_, he had communed too much with
shadows. But the serious poet now speaks. He appeals less to the ear
and the eye, and more to the heart. The sensuous is subordinated to the
spiritual and the moral. He deals immediately with the dearest concerns
of man and of society. He has ceased to trifle. The σπουδαιότης, the
high seriousness of the true poet, occasional before, now pervades and
enters essentially into his work. It is interesting to note how many of
these poems have direct didactic purpose. How solemn is the message
delivered in such poems as _The Palace of Art_ and _The Vision of Sin_,
how noble the teaching in _Love and Duty_, in _Œnone_, in _Godiva_, in
_Ulysses_; to how many must such a poem as _The Two Voices_ have
brought solace and light; how full of salutary lessons are the
political poems _You ask me, why, though ill at ease_ and _Love thou
thy Land_, and how noble is their expression! And, even where the poems
are less directly didactic, it is such refreshment as busy life needs
to converse with them, so pure, so wholesome, so graciously human is
their tone, so tranquilly beautiful is their world. Who could lay down
_The Miller’s Daughter, Dora, The Golden Year, The Gardener’s Daughter,
The Talking Oak, Audley Court, The Day Dream_ without something of the
feeling which Goethe felt when he first laid down _The Vicar of
Wakefield?_ In the best lyrics in these volumes, such as _Break,
Break_, and _Move Eastward_, _Happy Earth_, the most fastidious of
critics must recognise flawless gems. In the two volumes of 1842
Tennyson carried to perfection all that was best in his earlier poems,
and displayed powers of which he may have given some indication in his
cruder efforts, but which must certainly have exceeded the expectation
of the most sanguine of his rational admirers. These volumes justly
gave him the first place among the poets of his time, and that
supremacy he maintained—in the opinion of most—till the day of his
death. It would be absurd to contend that Tennyson’s subsequent
publications added nothing to the fame which will be secured to him by
these poems. But this at least is certain, that, taken with _In
Memorium_, they represent the crown and flower of his achievement. What
is best in them he never excelled and perhaps never equalled. We should
be the poorer, and much the poorer, for the loss of anything which he
produced subsequently, it is true; but would we exchange half a dozen
of the best of these poems or a score of the best sections of _In
Memoriam_ for all that he produced between 1850 and his death?
[1] In _The Keepsake_, “St. Agnes’ Eve”; in _The Tribute_, “Stanzas”:
“Oh! that ’twere possible”. Between 1831 and 1832 he had contributed
to _The Gem_ three, “No more,” “Anacreontics,” and “A Fragment”; in
_The Englishman!s Magazine_, a Sonnet; in _The Yorkshire Literary
Annual_, lines, “There are three things that fill my heart with
sighs”; in _Friendship’s Offering_, lines, “Me my own fate”.
III
The poems of 1842 naturally divide themselves into seven groups:—
(i.) _Studies in Fancy._
_Claribel_.
_Lilian_.
_Isabel_.
_Madeline_.
_A Spirit Haunts_.
_Recollections of the Arabian Nights_.
_Adeline_.
_The Dying Swan_.
_A Dream of Fair Women_.
_The Sea-Fairies_.
_The Deserted House_.
_Love and Death_.
_The Merman_.
_The Mermaid_.
_The Lady of Shalott_.
_Eleanore_.
_Margaret_.
_The Death of the Old Year_.
_St. Agnes._
_Sir Galahad_.
_The Day Dream_.
_Will Waterproof’s Monologue_.
_Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere_.
_The Talking Oak_.
_The Poet’s Song_.
(ii.) _Studies of Passion._
_Mariana_.
_Mariana in the South._
_Oriana_.
_Fatima_.
_The Sisters_.
_Locksley Hall_.
_Edward Gray_.
(iii.) _Psychological Studies._
_A Character_.
_The Poet_.
_The Poet’s Mind_.
_The Two Voices_.
_The Palace of Art_.
_The Vision of Sin_.
_St. Simeon Stylites_.
(iv.) _Idylls._
(_a_.) Classical.
_Œnone_.
_The Lotos Eaters_.
_Ulysses_.
(_b_.) English.
_The Miller’s Daughter_.
_The May Queen_.
_Morte d’Arthur_.
_The Gardener’s Daughter_.
_Dora_.
_Audley Court_.
_Walking to the Mail_.
_Edwin Morris_.
_The Golden Year_.
(v.) _Ballads._
_Oriana_.
_Lady Clara Vere de Vere_.
_Edward Gray_.
_Lady Clare_.
_The Lord of Burleigh_.
_The Beggar Maid_.
(vi.) _Autobiographical._
_Ode to Memory_.
_Sonnet to J. M. K_.
_To—— with the Palace of Art_.
_To J.S._
_Amphion_.
_To E. L. on his Travels in Greece_.
_To—— after reading a Life and Letters_.
_“Come not when I am Dead_.”
_A Farewell_.
“_Move Eastward, Happy Earth_.”
“_Break, Break, Break_.”
(vii.) _Political Group._
_“You ask me.”_
_“Of old sat Freedom.”_
_“Love thou thy Land.”_
_The Goose._
In surveying these poems two things must strike every one— their very
wide range and their very fragmentary character. There is scarcely any
side of life on which they do not touch, scarcely any phase of passion
and emotion to which they do not give exquisite expression. Take the
love poems: compare _Fatima_ with _Isabel_, _The Miller’s Daughter_
with _Locksley Hall_, _The Gardener’s Daughter_ with _Madeline_, or
_Mariana_ with Cleopatra in the _Dream of Fair Women_. When did love
find purer and nobler expression than in _Love and Duty?_ When has
sorrow found utterance more perfect than in the verses _To J.S_., or
the passion for the past than in _Break, Break, Break_, or revenge and
jealousy than in _The Sisters?_ In _The Two Voices_, _The Palace of
Art_ and _The Vision of Sin_ we are in another sphere. They are appeals
to the soul of man on subjects of momentous concern to him. And each is
a masterpiece. What is proper to philosophy and what is proper to
poetry have never perhaps been so happily blended. They have all the
sensuous charm of Keats, but the prose of Hume could not have presented
the truths which they are designed to convey with more lucidity and
precision. In that superb fragment the _Morte d’Arthur_ we have many of
the noblest attributes of Epic poetry. _ënone_ is the perfection of the
classical idyll, _The Gardener’s Daughter_ and the idylls that follow
it of the romantic. _Sir Galahad_ and _St. Agnes_ are in the vein of
Keats and Coleridge, but Keats and Coleridge have produced nothing more
exquisite and nothing so ethereal. _The Lotos Eaters_ is perhaps the
most purely delicious poem ever written, the _ne plus ultra_ of
sensuous loveliness, and yet the poet who gave us that has given us
also the political poems, poems as trenchant and austerely dignified in
style as they are pregnant with practical wisdom. There is the same
versatility displayed in the trifles.
But all is fragmentary. No thread strings these jewels. They form a
collection of gems unset and unarranged. Without any system or any
definite scope they have nothing of that unity in diversity which is so
perceptible in the lyrics and minor poems of Goethe and Wordsworth.
Capricious as the gyrations of a sea-gull seem the poet’s moods and
movements. We have now the reveries of a love-sick maiden, now the
picture of a soul wrestling with despair and death; here a study from
rural life, or a study in character, there a sermon on politics, or a
descent into the depths of psychological truth, or a sketch from
nature. But nothing could be more concentrated than the power employed
to shape each fragment into form. What Pope says of the _Æneid_ may be
applied with very literal truth to these poems:—
Finish’d the whole, and laboured every part
With patient touches of unwearied art.
In the poems of 1842 we have the secret of Tennyson’s eminence as a
poet as well as the secret of his limitations. He appears to have been
constitutionally deficient in what the Greeks called _architektoniké_,
combination and disposition on a large scale. The measure of his power
as a constructive artist is given us in the poem in which the English
idylls may be said to culminate, namely, _Enoch Arden_. _In Memoriam_
and the _Idylls of the King_ have a sort of spiritual unity, but they
are a series of fragments tacked rather than fused together. It is the
same with _Maud_, and it is the same with _The Princess_. His poems
have always a tendency to resolve themselves into a series of cameos:
it is only the short poems which have organic unity. A gift of
felicitous and musical expression which is absolutely marvellous; an
instinctive sympathy with what is best and most elevated in the sphere
of ordinary life, of ordinary thought and sentiment, of ordinary
activity with consummate representative power; a most rare faculty of
seizing and fixing in very perfect form what is commonly so
inexpressible because so impalpable and evanescent in emotion and
expression; a power of catching and rendering the charm of nature with
a fidelity and vividness which resemble magic; and lastly, unrivalled
skill in choosing, repolishing and remounting the gems which are our
common inheritance from the past: these are the gifts which will secure
permanence for his work as long as the English language lasts.
In his power of crystallising commonplaces he stands next to Pope, in
subtle felicity of expression beside Virgil. And, when he says of
Virgil that we find in his diction “all the grace of all the muses
often flowering in one lonely word,” he says what is literally true of
his own work. As a master of style his place is in the first rank among
English classical poets. But his style is the perfection of art. His
diction, like the diction of Milton and Gray, resembles mosaic work.
With a touch here and a touch there, now from memory, now from
unconscious assimilation, inlaying here an epithet and there a phrase,
adding, subtracting, heightening, modifying, substituting one metaphor
for another, developing what is latent in the suggestive imagery of a
predecessor, laying under contribution the most intimate familiarity
with what is best in the literature of the ancient and modern world,
the unwearied artist toils patiently on till his precious mosaic work
is without a flaw. All the resources of rhetoric are employed to give
distinction to his style and every figure in rhetoric finds expression
in his diction: Hypallage as in
_The pillard dusk_
Of sounding sycamores.
—_Audley Court_.
Paronomasia as in
The seawind sang
_Shrill, chill_ with flakes of foam.
—_Morte d’Arthur_.
Oxymoron as
_Behold_ them _unbeheld, unheard
Hear_ all.
—_Œnone._
Hyperbaton as in
The _dew-impearled_ winds of dawn.
—_Ode to Memory._
Metonymy as in
The _bright death_ quiver’d at the victim’s throat.
—_Dream of Fair Women_.
or in
For some three _careless moans_
The summer pilot of an empty heart.
—_Gardener’s Daughter_.
No poet since Milton has employed what is known as Onomatopoeia with so
much effect. Not to go farther than the poems of 1842, we have in the
_Morte d’Arthur_:—
So all day long the noise of battle _rolled
Among the mountains by the winter sea;_
or
_Dry clashed_ his harness in the icy caves
And _barren chasms_, and all to left and right
The _bare black cliff clang’d round_ him, as he bas’d
His feet _on juts of slippery crag that rang
Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels—_
or the exquisite
I heard the _water lapping on the crag,_
And the _long ripple washing in the reeds._
So in _The Dying Swan,_
And _the wavy swell of the soughing reeds._
See too the whole of _Oriana_ and the description of the dance at the
beginning of _The Vision of Sin._
Assonance, alliteration, the revival or adoption of obsolete and
provincial words, the transplantation of phrases and idioms from the
Greek and Latin languages, the employment of common words in uncommon
senses, all are pressed into the service of adding distinction to his
diction. His diction blends the two extremes of simplicity and
artificiality, but with such fine tact that this strange combination
has seldom the effect of incongruity. Longinus has remarked that “as
the fainter lustre of the stars is put out of sight by the
all-encompassing rays of the sun, so when sublimity sheds its light
round the sophistries of rhetoric they become invisible”.[2] What
Longinus says of “sublimity” is equally true of sincerity and
truthfulness in combination with exquisitely harmonious expression. We
have an illustration in Gray’s _Elegy_. Nothing could be more
artificial than the style, but what poem in the world appeals more
directly to the heart and to the eye? It is one thing to call art to
the assistance of art, it is quite another thing to call art to the
assistance of nature. And this is what both Gray and Tennyson do, and
this is why their artificiality, so far from shocking us, “passes in
music out of sight”. But this cannot be said of Tennyson without
reserve. At times his strained endeavours to give distinction to his
style by putting common things in an uncommon way led him into
intolerable affectation. Thus we have “the knightly growth that fringed
his lips” for a moustache, “azure pillars of the hearth” for ascending
smoke, “ambrosial orbs” for apples, “frayed magnificence” for a shabby
dress, “the secular abyss to come” for future ages, “the sinless years
that breathed beneath the Syrian blue” for the life of Christ, “up went
the hush’d amaze of hand and eye” for a gesture of surprise, and the
like. One of the worst instances is in _In Memoriam_, where what is
appropriate to the simple sentiment finds, as it should do,
corresponding simplicity of expression in the first couplet, to
collapse into the falsetto of strained artificiality in the second:—
To rest beneath the clover sod
That takes the sunshine and the rains,
_Or where the kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of God._
An illustration of the same thing, almost as offensive, is in _Enoch
Arden_, where, in an otherwise studiously simple diction, Enoch’s wares
as a fisherman become
Enoch’s _ocean spoil_
In ocean-smelling osier.
But these peculiarities are less common in the earlier poems than in
the later: it was a vicious habit which grew on him.
But, if exception may sometimes be taken to his diction, no exception
can be taken to his rhythm. No English poet since Milton, Tennyson’s
only superior in this respect, had a finer ear or a more consummate
mastery over all the resources of rhythmical expression. What colours
are to a painter rhythm is, in description, to the poet, and few have
rivalled, none have excelled Tennyson in this. Take the following:—
And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
_On the bald street strikes the blank day._
—_In Memoriam._
See particularly _In Memoriam_, cvii., the lines beginning “Fiercely
flies,” to “darken on the rolling brine”: the description of the island
in _Enoch Arden_; but specification is needless, it applies to all his
descriptive poetry. It is marvellous that he can produce such effects
by such simple means: a mere enumeration of particulars will often do
it, as here:—
No gray old grange or lonely fold,
Or low morass and whispering reed,
Or simple style from mead to mead,
Or sheep walk up the windy wold.
—_In Memoriam,_ c.
Or here:—
The meal sacks on the whitened floor,
The dark round of the dripping wheel,
The very air about the door
Made misty with the floating meal.
—_The Miller’s Daughter._
His blank verse is best described by negatives. It has not the endless
variety, the elasticity and freedom of Shakespeare’s, it has not the
massiveness and majesty of Milton’s, it has not the austere grandeur of
Wordsworth’s at its best, it has not the wavy swell, “the linked
sweetness long drawn out” of Shelley’s, but its distinguishing feature
is, if we may use the expression, its importunate beauty. What
Coleridge said of Claudian’s style may be applied to it: “Every line,
nay every word stops, looks full in your face and asks and begs for
praise”. is earlier blank verse is less elaborate and seemingly more
spontaneous and easy than his later.[3] But it is in his lyric verse
that his rhythm is seen in its greatest perfection. No English lyrics
have more magic or more haunting beauty, more of that which charms at
once and charms for ever.
In his description of nature he is incomparable. Take the following
from _The Dying Swan_:—
Some blue peaks in the distance rose,
And white against the cold-white sky,
Shone out their crowning snows.
One willow over the river wept,
And shook the wave as the wind did sigh;
Above in the wind was the swallow,
Chasing itself at its own wild will,
or the opening scene in _Œnone_ and in _The Lotos Eaters_, or the
meadow scene in _The Gardener’s Daughter_, or the conclusion of _Audley
Court_, or the forest scene in the _Dream of Fair Women_, or this
stanza in _Mariana in the South_:—
There all in spaces rosy-bright
Large Hesper glitter’d on her tears,
And deepening through the silent spheres,
Heaven over Heaven rose the night.
A single line, nay, a single word, and a scene is by magic before us,
as here where the sea is looked down upon from an immense height:—
The _wrinkled_ sea beneath him _crawls_.
—_The Eagle_.
Or here of a ship at sea, in the distance:—
And on through zones of light and shadow
_Glimmer away to the lonely deep._
—_To the Rev. F. D. Maurice._
Or here of waters falling high up on mountains:—
Their thousand _wreaths of dangling water-smoke._
—_The Princess._
Or of a water-fall seen at a distance:—
And _like a downward smoke_ the slender stream
Along the cliff _to fall and pause and fall_ did seem.
Or here again:—
We left the dying ebb that _faintly lipp’d
The flat red granite._
Or here of a wave:—
Like a wave in the wild North Sea
_Green glimmering toward the summit_ bears with all
_Its stormy crests that smoke_ against the skies
Down on a bark.
—_Elaine._
That beech will _gather brown_,
This _maple burn itself away_.
—_In Memoriam._
The _wide-wing’d sunset_ of the misty marsh.
—_Last Tournament._
But illustrations would be endless. Nothing seems to escape him in
Nature. Take the following:—
Like _a purple beech among the greens
Looks out of place_.
—_Edwin Morris_.
Or
Delays _as the tender ash delays To clothe herself, when all the woods
are green_.
—_The Princess_.
As _black as ash-buds in the front of March_.
—_The Gardener’s Daughter_.
A gusty April morn
That _puff’d_ the swaying _branches into smoke_.
—_Holy Grail_.
So with flowers, trees, birds and insects:—
The fox-glove _clusters dappled bells_.
—_The Two Voices_.
The sunflower:—
_Rays round with flame its disk of seed_.
—_In Memoriam_.
The dog-rose:—
_Tufts of rosy-tinted snow_.
—_Two Voices_.
A _million emeralds_ break from the _ruby-budded lime_.
—_Maud_.
In gloss and hue the chestnut, _when the shell
Divides threefold to show the fruit within_.
—_The Brook_.
Or of a chrysalis:—
And flash’d as those
_Dull-coated_ things, _that making slide apart
Their dusk wing cases, all beneath there burns
A Jewell’d harness_, ere they pass and fly.
—_Gareth and Lynette_.
So again:—
Wan-sallow, as _the plant that feeds itself,
Root-bitten by white lichen_.
—_Id_.
And again:—
All the _silvery gossamers_
That _twinkle into green and gold_.
—_In Memoriam_.
His epithets are in themselves a study: “the _dewy-tassell’d_ wood,”
“the _tender-pencill’d_ shadow,” “_crimson-circl’d_ star,” the “_hoary_
clematis,” “_creamy_ spray,” “_dry-tongued_ laurels”. But whatever he
describes is described with the same felicitous vividness. How magical
is this in the verses to Edward Lear:—
Naiads oar’d
A _glimmering shoulder_ under _gloom_
Of _cavern pillars_.
Or this:—
She lock’d her lips: she left me where I stood:
“Glory to God,” she sang, and past afar,
Thridding the sombre boskage of the wood,
Toward the morning-star.
—_A Dream of Fair Women_.
But if in the world of Nature nothing escaped his sensitive and
sympathetic observation,—and indeed it might be said of him as truly as
of Shelley’s _Alastor_
Every sight
And sound from the vast earth and ambient air
Sent to his heart its choicest impulses,
—he had studied the world of books with not less sympathy and
attention. In the sense of a profound and extensive acquaintance with
all that is best in ancient and modern poetry, and in an
extraordinarily wide knowledge of general literature, of philosophy and
theology, of geography and travel, and of various branches of natural
science, he is one of the most erudite of English poets. With the
poetry of the Greek and Latin classics he was, like Milton and Gray,
thoroughly saturated. Its influence penetrates his work, now in
indirect reminiscence, now in direct imitation, now inspiring, now
modifying, now moulding. He tells us in _The Daisy_ how when at Como
“the rich Virgilian rustic measure of _Lari Maxume_” haunted him all
day, and in a later fragment how, as he rowed from Desenzano to Sirmio,
Catullus was with him. And they and their brethren, from Homer to
Theocritus, from Lucretius to Claudian, always were with him. I have
illustrated so fully in the notes and elsewhere[4] the influence of the
Greek and Roman classics on the poems of 1842 that it is not necessary
to go into detail here. But a few examples of the various ways in which
they affected Tennyson’s work generally may be given. Sometimes he
transfers a happy epithet or expression in literal translation, as in:—
On either _shining_ shoulder laid a hand,
which is Homer’s epithet for the shoulder—
ἀνὰ φαιδίμῳ ὤμῳ
—_Od_., xi., 128.
It was the red cock _shouting_ to the light,
exactly the
ἕος ἐβόησεν ἀλέκτωρ
(Until the cock _shouted_).
—_Batrachomyomachia_, 192.
And all in passion utter’d a _dry_ shriek,
which is the _sicca vox_ of the Roman poets. So in _The Lotos Eaters_:—
His voice was _thin_ as voices from the grave,
which is Theocritus’ voice of Hylas from his watery grave:—
ἀραιὰ δ’ Ἱκετο φωνά
So in _The Princess_, sect. i.:—
And _cook’d his spleen_,
which is a phrase from the Greek, as in Homer, _Il_., iv., 513:—
ἐπι νηυσὶ χόλον θυμαλγέα πέσσει
(At the ships he cooks his heart-grieving spleen).
Again in _The Princess_, sect. iv.:—
_Laugh’d with alien lips,_
which is Homer’s (_Od_., 69-70)—
διδ’ ἤδη γναθμοῖσι γελῴων ἀλλοτρίοισι
So in _Edwin Morris_—
All perfect, finished _to the finger nail_,
which is a phrase transferred from Latin through the Greek; _cf._,
Horace, _Sat_., i., v., 32:—
_Ad unguem_
Factus homo
(A man fashioned to the finger nail).
“The _brute_ earth,” _In Memoriam_, cxxvii., which is Horace’s
_Bruta_ tellus.
—_Odes_, i., xxxiv., 9.
So again:—
A bevy of roses _apple-cheek’d_
in _The Island_, which is Theocritus’ μαλοπάρῃος. The line in the
_Morte d’Arthur_,
This way and that, dividing the swift mind,
is an almost literal translation of Virgil’s _Æn._, iv., 285:—
Atque animum nunc huc celerem nunc dividit illuc
(And this way and that he divides his swift mind).
Another way in which they affect him is where, without direct
imitation, they colour passages and poems as in _Œnone_, _The Lotos
Eaters_, _Tithonus_, _Tiresias_, _The Death of Œnone_, _Demeter and
Persephone_, the passage beginning “From the woods” in _The Gardener’s
Daughter_, which is a parody of Theocritus, _Id._, vii., 139 _seq._,
while the Cyclops’ invocation to Galatea in Theocritus, _Id._, xi.,
29-79, was plainly the model for the idyll, “Come down, O Maid,” in the
seventh section of _The Princess_, just as the tournament in the same
poem recalls closely the epic of Homer and Virgil. Tennyson had a
wonderful way of transfusing, as it were, the essence of some beautiful
passage in a Greek or Roman poet into English. A striking illustration
of this would be the influence of reminiscences of Virgil’s fourth
_Æneid_ on the idyll of _Elaine and Guinevere_. Compare, for instance,
the following: he is describing the love-wasted Elaine, as she sits
brooding in the lonely evening, with the shadow of the wished-for death
falling on her:—
But when they left her to herself again,
Death, like a friend’s voice from a distant field,
Approaching through the darkness, call’d; the owls
Wailing had power upon her, and she mix’d
Her fancies with the sallow-rifted glooms
Of evening and the moanings of the wind.
How exactly does this recall, in a manner to be felt rather than
exactly defined, a passage equally exquisite and equally pathetic in
Virgil’s picture of Dido, where, with the shadow of her death also
falling upon her, she seems to hear the phantom voice of her dead
husband, and “mixes her fancies” with the glooms of night and the owl’s
funereal wail:—
Hinc exaudiri voces et verba vocantis
Visa viri, nox quum terras obscura teneret;
Solaque culminibus ferali carmine bubo
Sæpe queri, et longas in fletum ducere voces.
—_Æn._, iv., 460.)
(From it she thought she clearly heard a voice, even the accents of
her husband calling her when night was wrapping the earth with
darkness; and on the roof the lonely owl in funereal strains kept
oft complaining, drawing out into a wail its protracted notes.)
Similar passages, though not so striking, would be the picture of
Pindar’s Elysium in _Tiresias_, the sentiment pervading _The Lotos
Eaters_ transferred so faithfully from the Greek poets, the scenery in
_Œnone_ so crowded with details from Homer, Theocritus and Callimachus.
Sometimes we find similes suggested by the classical poets, but
enriched by touches from original observation, as here in _The
Princess_:—
As one that climbs a peak to gaze
O’er land and main, and sees a great black cloud
Drag inward from the deeps, a wall of night
Blot out the slope of sea from verge to shore.
...
And quenching lake by lake and tarn by tarn
Expunge the world,
which was plainly suggested by Homer, iv., 275:—
ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἀπὸ σκοπιῆς εἴδε νέφος αἰπολος ἀνήρ
ἐρχόμενον κατὰ πόντον ὑπὸ Ζεφύροιο ἰωῆς
τῷ δε τ’ ἄνευθεν ἐόντι, μελάντερον ἠΰτε πίσσα,
φαίνετ’ ἰὸν κατὰ πόντον, ἄγει δέ τε λαῖλαπα πολλὴν.
(As when a goat-herd from some hill-peak sees a cloud coming across the
deep with the blast of the west wind behind it; and to him, being as he
is afar, it seems blacker, even as pitch, as it goes along the deep,
bringing with it a great whirlwind.)
So again the fine simile in _Elaine_, beginning
Bare as a wild wave in the wide North Sea,
is at least modelled on the simile in _Iliad_, xv., 381-4, with
reminiscences of the same similes in _Iliad_, xv., 624, and _Iliad_,
iv., 42-56. The simile in the first section of the _Princess_,
As when a field of corn
Bows all its ears before the roaring East,
reminds us of Homer’s
ὡς δ’ ὅτε κινήση Ζέφυρος βαθυλήϊον, ἐλθὼν
λάβρος, ἐπαιγίζων, ἐπὶ τ’ ἠμύει ἀσταχύεσσιν.
(As when the west wind tosses a deep cornfield rushing down with
furious blast, and it bows with all its ears.)
Nothing could be more happy than such an adaptation as the following—
Ever fail’d to draw
The quiet night into her blood,
from Virgil, _Æn_., iv., 530:—
Neque unquam Solvitur in somnos _oculisve aut pectore noctem
Accipit._
(And she never relaxes into sleep, or receives the night in eyes or
bosom),
or than the following (in _Enid_) from Theocritus:—
Arms on which the standing muscle sloped,
As slopes a wild brook o’er a little stone,
Running too vehemently to break upon it.
ἐν δὲ μύες στερεοῖσι βραχίοσιν ἄκρον ὑπ’ ὦμον
ἔστασαν, ἠύτε πέτροι ὀλοίτροχοι οὕς τε κυλίνδον
χειμάῤῥους ποταμὸς μεγάλαις περιέξεσε δίναις.
—_Idyll_, xxii., 48 _seq._
(And the muscles on his brawny arms close under the shoulder stood out
like boulders which the wintry torrent has rolled and worn smooth with
the mighty eddies.)
But there was another use to which Tennyson applied his accurate and
intimate acquaintance with the classics. It lay in developing what was
suggested by them, in unfolding, so to speak, what was furled in their
imagery. Nothing is more striking in ancient classical poetry than its
pregnant condensation. It often expresses in an epithet what might be
expanded into a detailed picture, or calls up in a single phrase a
whole scene or a whole position. Where in _Merlin and Vivian_ Tennyson
described
The _blind wave feeling round his long sea hall
In silence_,
he was merely unfolding to its full Homer’s κῦμα κωφόν—“dumb wave”;
just as the best of all comments on Horace’s expression, “Vultus nimium
lubricus aspici,” _Odes_, _I._, xix., 8, is given us in Tennyson’s
picture of the Oread in Lucretius:—
How the sun delights
To _glance and shift about her slippery sides_.
Or take again this passage in the _Agamemnon_, 404-5, describing
Menelaus pining in his desolate palace for the lost Helen:—
πόθῳ δ’ ὑπερποντίας
φάσμα δόξει δόμων ἀνάσσειν
(And in his yearning love for her who is over the sea a phantom will
seem to reign over his palace.)
What are the lines in _Guinevere_ but an expansion of what is latent
but unfolded in the pregnant suggestiveness of the Greek poet:—
And in thy bowers of Camelot or of Usk
Thy shadow still would glide from room to room,
And I should evermore be vex’d with thee
In hanging robe or vacant ornament,
Or ghostly foot-fall echoing on the stair—
with a reminiscence also perhaps of Constance’s speech in _King John_,
III., iv.
It need hardly be said that these particular passages, and possibly
some of the others, may be mere coincidences, but they illustrate what
numberless other passages which could be cited prove that Tennyson’s
careful and meditative study of the Greek and Roman poets enabled him
to enrich his work by these felicitous adaptations.
He used those poets as his master Virgil used his Greek predecessors,
and what the elder Seneca said of Ovid, who had appropriated a line
from Virgil, might exactly be applied to Tennyson: “Fecisse quod in
multis aliis versibus Virgilius fecerat, non surripiendi caus, sed
palam imitandi, hoc animo ut vellet agnosci”.[5]
He had plainly studied with equal attention the chief Italian poets,
especially Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto and Tasso. On a passage in Dante he
founded his _Ulysses_, and imitations of that master are frequent
throughout his poems. _In Memoriam_, both in its general scheme as well
as in numberless particular passages, closely recalls Petrarch; and
Ariosto and Tasso have each influenced his work. In the poetry of his
own country nothing seems to have escaped him, either in the masters or
the minor poets.[6] To apply the term plagiarism to Tennyson’s use of
his predecessors would be as absurd as to resolve some noble fabric
into its stones and bricks, and confounding the one with the other to
taunt the architect with appropriating an honour which belongs to the
quarry and the potter. Tennyson’s method was exactly the method of two
of the greatest poets in the world, Virgil and Milton, of the poet who
stands second to Virgil in Roman poetry, Horace, of one of the most
illustrious of our own minor poets, Gray.
An artist more fastidious than Tennyson never existed. As scrupulous a
purist in language as Cicero, Chesterfield and Macaulay in prose, as
Virgil, Milton, and Leopardi in verse, his care extended to the nicest
minutiæ of word-forms. Thus “ancle” is always spelt with a “c” when it
stands alone, with a “k” when used in compounds; thus he spelt “Idylls”
with one “l” in the short poems, with two “l’s” in the epic poems; thus
the employment of “through” or “thro’,” of “bad” or “bade,” and the
retention or suppression of “e” in past participles are always
carefully studied. He took immense pains to avoid the clash of “s” with
“s,” and to secure the predominance of open vowels when rhythm rendered
them appropriate. Like the Greek painter with his partridge, he thought
nothing of sacrificing good things if, in any way, they interfered with
unity and symmetry, and thus, his son tells us, many stanzas, in
themselves of exquisite beauty, have been lost to us.
[2] _De Sublimitate,_ xvii.
[3] Tennyson’s blank verse in the _Idylls of the King_ (excepting in
the _Morte d’Arthur_ and in the grander passages), is obviously
modelled in rhythm on that of Shakespeare’s earlier style seen to
perfection in _King John_. Compare the following lines with the rhythm
say of _Elaine_ or _Guinevere_;—
But now will canker sorrow eat my bud,
And chase the native beauty from his cheek,
And he will look as hollow as a ghost;
As dim and meagre as an ague’s fit:
And so he’ll die; and, rising so again,
When I shall meet him in the court of heaven
I shall not know him: therefore never, never
Must I behold my pretty Arthur more.
—_King John_, III., iv.
[4] _Illustrations of Tennyson_.
[5] Seneca, third _Suasoria_.
[6] For fuller illustrations of all this, and for the influence of the
ancient classics on Tennyson, I may perhaps venture to refer the
reader to my _Illustrations of Tennyson_. And may I here take the
opportunity of pointing out that nothing could have been farther from
my intention in that book than what has so often been most unfairly
attributed to it, namely, an attempt to show that a charge of
plagiarism might be justly urged against Tennyson. No honest critic,
who had even cursorily inspected the book, could so utterly
misrepresent its purpose.
IV
Tennyson’s place is not among the “lords of the visionary eye,” among
seers, among prophets, but not the least part of the debt which his
countrymen owe to him is his dedication of his art to the noblest
purposes. At a time when poetry was beginning to degenerate into what
it has now almost universally become—a mere sense-pampering siren, and
when critics were telling us, as they are still telling us, that we are
to understand by it “all literary production which attains the power of
giving pleasure by its form as distinct from its matter,” he remained
true to the creed of his great predecessors. “L’art pour art,” he would
say, quoting Georges Sand, “est un vain mot: l’art pour le vrai, l’art
pour le beau et le bon, voila la religion que je cherche.” When he
succeeded to the laureateship he was proud to remember that the wreath
which had descended to him was
greener from the brows
Of him that utter’d nothing base,
and he was a loyal disciple of that poet whose aim had been, in his own
words, “to console the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight by making
the happy happier, to teach the young and the gracious of every age to
see, to think, to feel, and therefore to become more actively and
securely virtuous”.[7] Wordsworth had said that he wished to be
regarded as a teacher or as nothing, but unhappily he did not always
distinguish between the way in which a poet and a philosopher should
teach. He forgot that the didactic element in a poem should be, to
employ a homely illustration, what garlic should be in a salad, “scarce
suspected, animate the whole,” that the poet teaches not as the
moralist and the preacher teach, but as nature and life teach us. He
taught us when he wrote _The Fountain_ and _The Highland Reaper, The
Leach-gatherer_ and _Michael_, he merely wearied us when he sermonised
in _The Excursion_ and in _The Prelude_. Tennyson never makes this
mistake. He is seldom directly didactic. Would he inculcate subjugation
to the law of duty—he gives us the funeral ode on Wellington, _The
Charge of the Light Brigade_, and _Love and Duty_. Would he inculcate
resignationto the will of God, and the moral efficacy of conventional
Christianity—he gives us _Enoch Arden_. Would he picture the endless
struggle between the sensual and the spiritual, and the relation of
ideals to life—he gives us the _Idylls of the King_. Would he point to
what atheism may lead—he gives us _Lucretius_. Poems which are
masterpieces of sensuous art, such as mere æsthetes, like Rosetti and
his school, must contemplate with admiring despair, he makes vehicles
of the most serious moral and spiritual teaching. _The Vision of Sin_
is worth a hundred sermons on the disastrous effects of unbridled
profligacy. In _The Palace of Art_ we have the quintessence of _The
Book of Ecclesiastes_ and much more besides. Even in _The Lotos Eaters_
we have the mirror held up to Hedonism. On the education of the
affections and on the purity of domestic life must depend very largely,
not merely the happiness of individuals, but the well-being of society,
and how wide a space is filled by poems in Tennyson’s works bearing
influentially on these subjects is obvious. And they admit us into a
pleasaunce with which it is good to be familiar, so pure and wholesome
is their atmosphere, so tranquilly beautiful the world in which the
characters move and the little dramas unfold themselves. They preach
nothing, but deep into every heart must sink their silent lessons.
“Upon the sacredness of home life,” writes his son, “he would maintain
that the stability and greatness of a nation largely depend; and one of
the secrets of his power over mankind was his true joy in the family
duties and affections.” What sermons have we in _The Miller’s
Daughter_, in _Dora_, in _The Gardener’s Daughter_ and in _Love and
Duty_. _The Princess_ was a direct contribution to a social question of
momentous importance to our time. _Maud_ had an immediate political
purpose, while in _In Memoriam_ he became the interpreter and teacher
of his generation in a still higher sense.
Since Shakespeare no English poet has been so essentially patriotic, or
appealed so directly to the political conscience of the nation. In his
noble eulogies of the English constitution and of the virtue and wisdom
of its architects, in his spirit-stirring pictures of the heroic
actions of our forefathers and contemporaries both by land and sea, in
his passionate denunciations of all that he believed would detract from
England’s greatness and be prejudicial to her real interests, in his
hearty sympathy with every movement and with every measure which he
believed would contribute to her honour and her power, in all this he
stands alone among modern poets. But if he loved England as Shakespeare
loved her, he had other lessons than Shakespeare’s to teach her. The
responsibilities imposed on the England of our time—and no poet knew
this better—are very different from those imposed on the England of
Elizabeth. An empire vaster and more populous than that of the Cæsars
has since then been added to our dominion. Millions, indeed, who are of
the same blood as ourselves and who speak our language have, by the
folly of common ancestors, become aliens. But how immense are the
realms peopled by the colonies which are still loyal to us, and by the
three hundred millions who in India own us as their rulers: of this
vast empire England is now the capital and centre. That she should
fulfil completely and honourably the duties to which destiny has called
her will be the prayer of every patriot, that he should by his own
efforts contribute all in his power to further such fulfilment must be
his earnest desire. It would be no exaggeration to say that Tennyson
contributed more than any man who has ever lived to what may be called
the higher political education of the English-speaking races. Of
imperial federation he was at once the apostle and the pioneer. In
poetry which appealed as probably no other poetry has appealed to every
class, wherever our language is spoken, he dwelt fondly on all that
constitutes the greatness and glory of England, on her grandeur in the
past, on the magnificent promise of the part she will play in the
future, if her sons are true to her. There should be no distinction,
for she recognises no distinction between her children at home and her
children in her colonies. She is the common mother of a common race:
one flag, one sceptre, the same proud ancestry, the same splendid
inheritance. “How strange England cannot see,” he once wrote, “that her
true policy lies in a close union with her colonies.”
Sharers of our glorious past,
Shall we not thro’ good and ill
Cleave to one another still?
Britain’s myriad voices call,
Sons be welded all and all
Into one imperial whole,
One with Britain, heart and soul!
One life, one flag, one fleet, one Throne!
Thus did the poetry of Tennyson draw closer, and thus will it continue
to draw closer those sentimental ties—ties, in Burke’s phrase, “light
as air, but strong as links of iron,” which bind the colonies to the
mother country; and in so doing, if he did not actually initiate, he
furthered, as no other single man has furthered, the most important
movement of our time. Nor has any man of genius in the present
century—not Dickens, not Ruskin—been moved by a purer spirit of
philanthropy, or done more to show how little the qualities and actions
which dignify humanity depend, or need depend, on the accidents of
fortune. He brought poetry into touch with the discoveries of science,
and with the speculations of theology and metaphysics, and though, in
treating such subjects, his power is not, perhaps, equal to his charm,
the debt which his countrymen owe him, even intellectually, is
incalculable.
[7] See Wordsworth’s letter to Lady Beaumont, _Prose Works_, vol. ii.,
p. 176.
Early Poems
To the Queen
This dedication was first prefixed to the seventh edition of these
poems in 1851, Tennyson having succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate,
19th Nov., 1850.
Revered, beloved[1]—O you that hold
A nobler office upon earth
Than arms, or power of brain, or birth
Could give the warrior kings of old,
Victoria,[2]—since your Royal grace
To one of less desert allows
This laurel greener from the brows
Of him that utter’d nothing base;
And should your greatness, and the care
That yokes with empire, yield you time
To make demand of modern rhyme
If aught of ancient worth be there;
Then—while[3] a sweeter music wakes,
And thro’ wild March the throstle calls,
Where all about your palace-walls
The sun-lit almond-blossom shakes—
Take, Madam, this poor book of song;
For tho’ the faults were thick as dust
In vacant chambers, I could trust
Your kindness.[4] May you rule us long.
And leave us rulers of your blood
As noble till the latest day!
May children of our children say,
“She wrought her people lasting good;[5]
“Her court was pure; her life serene;
God gave her peace; her land reposed;
A thousand claims to reverence closed
In her as Mother, Wife and Queen;
“And statesmen at her council met
Who knew the seasons, when to take
Occasion by the hand, and make
The bounds of freedom wider yet[6]
“By shaping some august decree,
Which kept her throne unshaken still,
Broad-based upon her people’s will,[7]
And compass’d by the inviolate sea.”
MARCH, 1851.
[1] 1851. Revered Victoria, you that hold.
[2] 1851. I thank you that your Royal grace.
[3] This stanza added in 1853.
[4] 1851. Your sweetness.
[5] In 1851 the following stanza referring to the first Crystal
Palace, opened 1st May, 1851, was inserted here:—
She brought a vast design to pass,
When Europe and the scatter’d ends
Of our fierce world were mixt as friends
And brethren, in her halls of glass.
[6] 1851. Broader yet.
[7] With this cf. Shelley, _Ode to Liberty_:—
Athens diviner yet
Gleam’d with its crest of columns _on the will_
Of man.
Claribel
a melody
First published in 1830.
In 1830 and in 1842 edd. the poem is in one long stanza, with a full
stop in 1830 ed. after line 8; 1842 ed. omits the full stop. The name
“Claribel” may have been suggested by Spenser (_F. Q._, ii., iv., or
Shakespeare, _Tempest_).
1
Where Claribel low-lieth
The breezes pause and die,
Letting the rose-leaves fall:
But the solemn oak-tree sigheth,
Thick-leaved, ambrosial,
With an ancient melody
Of an inward agony,
Where Claribel low-lieth.
2
At eve the beetle boometh
Athwart the thicket lone:
At noon the wild bee[1] hummeth
About the moss’d headstone:
At midnight the moon cometh,
And looketh down alone.
Her song the lintwhite swelleth,
The clear-voiced mavis dwelleth,
The callow throstle[2] lispeth,
The slumbrous wave outwelleth,
The babbling runnel crispeth,
The hollow grot replieth
Where Claribel low-lieth.
[1] 1830. “Wild” omitted, and “low” inserted with a hyphen before
“hummeth”.
[2] 1851 and all previous editions, “fledgling” for “callow”.
Lilian
First printed in 1830.
1
Airy, fairy Lilian,
Flitting, fairy Lilian,
When I ask her if she love me,
Claps her tiny hands above me,
Laughing all she can;
She’ll not tell me if she love me,
Cruel little Lilian.
2
When my passion seeks
Pleasance in love-sighs
She, looking thro’ and thro’[1] me
Thoroughly to undo me,
Smiling, never speaks:
So innocent-arch, so cunning-simple,
From beneath her gather’d wimple[2]
Glancing with black-beaded eyes,
Till the lightning laughters dimple
The baby-roses in her cheeks;
Then away she flies.
3
Prythee weep, May Lilian!
Gaiety without eclipse
Wearieth me, May Lilian:
Thro’[3] my very heart it thrilleth
When from crimson-threaded[4] lips
Silver-treble laughter[5] trilleth:
Prythee weep, May Lilian.
4
Praying all I can,
If prayers will not hush thee,
Airy Lilian,
Like a rose-leaf I will crush thee,
Fairy Lilian.
[1] 1830. Through and through me.
[2] 1830. Purfled.
[3] 1830. Through.
[4] With “crimson-threaded” _cf._ Cleveland’s _Sing-song on Clarinda’s
Wedding_, “Her _lips those threads of scarlet dye_”; but the original
is _Solomons Song_ iv. 3, “Thy lips are _like a thread of scarlet_”.
[5] 1830. Silver treble-laughter.
Isabel
First printed in 1830. Lord Tennyson tells us (_Life of Tennyson_, i.,
43) that in this poem his father more or less described his own mother,
who was a “remarkable and saintly woman”. In this as in the other poems
elaborately painting women we may perhaps suspect the influence of
Wordsworth’s _Triad_, which should be compared with them.
1
Eyes not down-dropt nor over-bright, but fed
With the clear-pointed flame of chastity,
Clear, without heat, undying, tended by
Pure vestal thoughts in the translucent fane
Of her still spirit[1]; locks not wide-dispread,
Madonna-wise on either side her head;
Sweet lips whereon perpetually did reign
The summer calm of golden charity,
Were fixed shadows of thy fixed mood,
Revered Isabel, the crown and head,
The stately flower of female fortitude,
Of perfect wifehood and pure lowlihead.[2]
2
The intuitive decision of a bright
And thorough-edged intellect to part
Error from crime; a prudence to withhold;
The laws of marriage[3] character’d in gold
Upon the blanched[4] tablets of her heart;
A love still burning upward, giving light
To read those laws; an accent very low
In blandishment, but a most silver flow
Of subtle-paced counsel in distress,
Right to the heart and brain, tho’ undescried,
Winning its way with extreme gentleness
Thro’[5] all the outworks of suspicious pride;
A courage to endure and to obey;
A hate of gossip parlance, and of sway,
Crown’d Isabel, thro’[6] all her placid life,
The queen of marriage, a most perfect wife.
3
The mellow’d reflex of a winter moon;
A clear stream flowing with a muddy one,
Till in its onward current it absorbs
With swifter movement and in purer light
The vexed eddies of its wayward brother:
A leaning and upbearing parasite,
Clothing the stem, which else had fallen quite,
With cluster’d flower-bells and ambrosial orbs
Of rich fruit-bunches leaning on each other—
Shadow forth thee:—the world hath not another
(Though all her fairest forms are types of thee,
And thou of God in thy great charity)
Of such a finish’d chasten’d purity,
[1] With these lines may be compared Shelley, _Dedication to the
Revolt of Islam_:—
And through thine eyes, e’en in thy soul, I see
A lamp of vestal fire burning eternally.
[2] Lowlihead a favourite word with Chaucer and Spenser.
[3] 1830. Wifehood.
[4] 1830. Blenched.
[5] 1830 and all before 1853. Through.
[6] 1830. Through.
Mariana
“Mariana in the moated grange.”—_Measure for Measure_.
First printed in 1830.
This poem as we know from the motto prefixed to it was suggested by
Shakespeare (_Measure for Measure_, iii., 1, “at the moated grange
resides this dejected Mariana,”) but the poet may have had in his mind
the exquisite fragment of Sappho:—
δέδυκε μὲν ἁ σελάννα
καὶ Πληϊαδες, μέδαι δὲ
νύκτες, παρὰ δ’ ἔρχετ’ ὥρα,
ἔγω δὲ μόνα κατεύδω.
“The moon has set and the Pleiades, and it is midnight: the hour too is
going by, but I sleep alone.” It was long popularly supposed that the
scene of the poem was a farm near Somersby known as Baumber’s farm, but
Tennyson denied this and said it was a purely “imaginary house in the
fen,” and that he “never so much as dreamed of Baumbers farm”. See
_Life_, i., 28.
With blackest moss the flower-plots
Were thickly crusted, one and all:
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the peach[1] to the garden-wall.[2]
The broken sheds look’d sad and strange:
Unlifted was the clinking latch;
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.
She only said, “My life is dreary,
He cometh not,” she said;
She said, “I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!”
Her tears fell with the dews at even;
Her tears fell ere the dews were dried;[3]
She could not look on the sweet heaven,
Either at morn or eventide.
After the flitting of the bats,
When thickest dark did trance the sky,
She drew her casement-curtain by,
And glanced athwart the glooming flats.
She only said, “The night is dreary,
He cometh not,” she said;
She said, “I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!”
Upon the middle of the night,
Waking she heard the night-fowl crow:
The cock sung out an hour ere light:
From the dark fen the oxen’s low
Came to her: without hope of change,
In sleep she seem’d to walk forlorn,
Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed[4] morn
About the lonely moated grange.
She only said, “The day is dreary,
He cometh not,” she said;
She said, “I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!”
About a stone-cast from the wall
A sluice with blacken’d waters slept,
And o’er it many, round and small,
The cluster’d marish-mosses crept.
Hard by a poplar shook alway,
All silver-green with gnarled bark:
For leagues no other tree did mark[5]
The level waste, the rounding gray.[6]
She only said, “My life is dreary,
He cometh not,” she said;
She said, “I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!”
And ever when the moon was low,
And the shrill winds were up and away,[7]
In the white curtain, to and fro,
She saw the gusty shadow sway.
But when the moon was very low,
And wild winds bound within their cell,
The shadow of the poplar fell
Upon her bed, across her brow.
She only said, “The night is dreary,
He cometh not,” she said;
She said, “I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!”
All day within the dreamy house,
The doors upon their hinges creak’d;
The blue fly sung in the pane;[8] the mouse
Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek’d,
Or from the crevice peer’d about.
Old faces glimmer’d thro’ the doors,
Old footsteps trod the upper floors,
Old voices called her from without.
She only said, “My life is dreary,
He cometh not,” she said;
She said, “I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!”
The sparrow’s chirrup on the roof,
The slow clock ticking, and the sound,
Which to the wooing wind aloof
The poplar made, did all confound
Her sense; but most she loathed the hour
When the thick-moted sunbeam lay
Athwart the chambers, and the day
Was sloping[9] toward his western bower.
Then, said she, “I am very dreary,
He will not come,” she said;
She wept, “I am aweary, aweary,
O God, that I were dead!”
[1] 1863. Pear.
[2] 1872. Gable-wall.
[3] With this beautiful couplet may be compared a couplet of Helvius
Cinna:—
Te matutinus flentem conspexit Eous,
Te flentem paullo vidit post Hesperus idem.
(_Cinnae Reliq._ Ed. Mueller, p. 83.)
[4] 1830. _Grey_-eyed. _Cf. Romeo and Juliet_, ii., 3,
“The _grey morn_ smiles on the frowning night”.
[5] 1830, 1842, 1843. Dark.
[6] 1830. Grey.
[7] 1830. An’ away.
[8] All editions before 1851. I’ the pane. With this line _cf. Maud_,
I., vi., 8, “and the shrieking rush of the wainscot mouse”.
[9] 1830. Downsloped was westering in his bower.
To——
First printed in 1830.
The friend to whom these verses were addressed was Joseph William
Blakesley, third Classic and Senior Chancellor’s Medallist in 1831, and
afterwards Dean of Lincoln. Tennyson said of him: “He ought to be Lord
Chancellor, for he is a subtle and powerful reasoner, and an honest
man”.—_Life_, i., 65. He was a contributor to the _Edinburgh_ and
_Quarterly Reviews_, and died in April, 1885. See memoir of him in the
_Dictionary of National Biography_.
1
Clear-headed friend, whose joyful scorn,
Edged with sharp laughter, cuts atwain
The knots that tangle human creeds,[1]
The wounding cords that[2] bind and strain
The heart until it bleeds,
Ray-fringed eyelids of the morn
Roof not a glance so keen as thine:
If aught of prophecy be mine,
Thou wilt not live in vain.
2
Low-cowering shall the Sophist sit;
Falsehood shall bear her plaited brow:
Fair-fronted Truth shall droop not now
With shrilling shafts of subtle wit.
Nor martyr-flames, nor trenchant swords
Can do away that ancient lie;
A gentler death shall Falsehood die,
Shot thro’ and thro’[3] with cunning words.
3
Weak Truth a-leaning on her crutch,
Wan, wasted Truth in her utmost need,
Thy kingly intellect shall feed,
Until she be an athlete bold,
And weary with a finger’s touch
Those writhed limbs of lightning speed;
Like that strange angel[4] which of old,
Until the breaking of the light,
Wrestled with wandering Israel,
Past Yabbok brook the livelong night,
And heaven’s mazed signs stood still
In the dim tract of Penuel.
[1] 1830. The knotted lies of human creeds.
[2] 1830. “Which” for “that”.
[3] 1830. Through and through.
[4] The reference is to Genesis xxxii. 24-32.
Madeline
First published in 1830.
1
Thou art not steep’d in golden languors,
No tranced summer calm is thine,
Ever varying Madeline.
Thro’[1] light and shadow thou dost range,
Sudden glances, sweet and strange,
Delicious spites and darling angers,
And airy[2] forms of flitting change.
2
Smiling, frowning, evermore,
Thou art perfect in love-lore.
Revealings deep and clear are thine
Of wealthy smiles: but who may know
Whether smile or frown be fleeter?
Whether smile or frown be sweeter,
Who may know?
Frowns perfect-sweet along the brow
Light-glooming over eyes divine,
Like little clouds sun-fringed, are thine,
Ever varying Madeline.
Thy smile and frown are not aloof
From one another,
Each to each is dearest brother;
Hues of the silken sheeny woof
Momently shot into each other.
All the mystery is thine;
Smiling, frowning, evermore,
Thou art perfect in love-lore,
Ever varying Madeline.
3
A subtle, sudden flame,
By veering passion fann’d,
About thee breaks and dances
When I would kiss thy hand,
The flush of anger’d shame
O’erflows thy calmer glances,
And o’er black brows drops down
A sudden curved frown:
But when I turn away,
Thou, willing me to stay,
Wooest not, nor vainly wranglest;
But, looking fixedly the while,
All my bounding heart entanglest
In a golden-netted smile;
Then in madness and in bliss,
If my lips should dare to kiss
Thy taper fingers amorously,[3]
Again thou blushest angerly;
And o’er black brows drops down
A sudden-curved frown.
[1] 1830. Through.
[2] 1830. Aery.
[3] 1830. Three-times-three; though noted as an _erratum_ for
amorously.
Song—The Owl
First printed in 1830.
1
When cats run home and light is come,
And dew is cold upon the ground,
And the far-off stream is dumb,
And the whirring sail goes round,
And the whirring sail goes round;
Alone and warming his five wits,
The white owl in the belfry sits.
2
When merry milkmaids click the latch,
And rarely smells the new-mown hay,
And the cock hath sung beneath the thatch
Twice or thrice his roundelay,
Twice or thrice his roundelay;
Alone and warming his five wits,
The white owl in the belfry sits.
Second Song—To the Same
First printed in 1830.
1
Thy tuwhits are lull’d I wot,
Thy tuwhoos of yesternight,
Which upon the dark afloat,
So took echo with delight,
So took echo with delight,
That her voice untuneful grown,
Wears all day a fainter tone.
2
I would mock thy chaunt anew;
But I cannot mimick it;
Not a whit of thy tuwhoo,
Thee to woo to thy tuwhit,
Thee to woo to thy tuwhit,
With a lengthen’d loud halloo,
Tuwhoo, tuwhit, tuwhit, tuwhoo-o-o.
Recollections of the Arabian Nights
First printed in 1830.
With this poem should be compared the description of Harun al Rashid’s
Garden of Gladness in the story of Nur-al-din Ali and the damsel Anis
al Talis in the Thirty-Sixth Night. The style appears to have been
modelled on Coleridge’s _Kubla Khan_ and _Lewti_, and the influence of
Coleridge is very perceptible throughout the poem.
When the breeze of a joyful dawn blew free
In the silken sail of infancy,
The tide of time flow’d back with me,
The forward-flowing tide of time;
And many a sheeny summer-morn,
Adown the Tigris I was borne,
By Bagdat’s shrines of fretted gold,
High-walled gardens green and old;
True Mussulman was I and sworn,
For it was in the golden prime[1]
Of good Haroun Alraschid.
Anight my shallop, rustling thro’[2]
The low and bloomed foliage, drove
The fragrant, glistening deeps, and clove
The citron-shadows in the blue:
By garden porches on the brim,
The costly doors flung open wide,
Gold glittering thro’[3] lamplight dim,
And broider’d sofas[4] on each side:
In sooth it was a goodly time,
For it was in the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.
Often, where clear-stemm’d platans guard
The outlet, did I turn away
The boat-head down a broad canal
From the main river sluiced, where all
The sloping of the moon-lit sward
Was damask-work, and deep inlay
Of braided blooms[5] unmown, which crept
Adown to where the waters slept.
A goodly place, a goodly time,
For it was in the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.
A motion from the river won
Ridged the smooth level, bearing on
My shallop thro’ the star-strown calm,
Until another night in night
I enter’d, from the clearer light,
Imbower’d vaults of pillar’d palm,
Imprisoning sweets, which, as they clomb
Heavenward, were stay’d beneath the dome
Of hollow boughs.—A goodly time,
For it was in the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.
Still onward; and the clear canal
Is rounded to as clear a lake.
From the green rivage many a fall
Of diamond rillets musical,
Thro’ little crystal[6] arches low
Down from the central fountain’s flow
Fall’n silver-chiming, seem’d to shake
The sparkling flints beneath the prow.
A goodly place, a goodly time,
For it was in the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.
Above thro’[7] many a bowery turn
A walk with vary-colour’d shells
Wander’d engrain’d. On either side
All round about the fragrant marge
From fluted vase, and brazen urn
In order, eastern flowers large,
Some dropping low their crimson bells
Half-closed, and others studded wide
With disks and tiars, fed the time
With odour in the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.
Far off, and where the lemon-grove
In closest coverture upsprung,
The living airs of middle night
Died round the bulbul[8] as he sung;
Not he: but something which possess’d
The darkness of the world, delight,
Life, anguish, death, immortal love,
Ceasing not, mingled, unrepress’d.
Apart from place, withholding[9] time,
But flattering the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.
Black the[10] garden-bowers and grots
Slumber’d: the solemn palms were ranged
Above, unwoo’d of summer wind:
A sudden splendour from behind
Flush’d all the leaves with rich gold-green,
And, flowing rapidly between
Their interspaces, counterchanged
The level lake with diamond-plots
Of dark and bright.[11] A lovely time,
For it was in the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.
Dark-blue the deep sphere overhead,
Distinct with vivid stars inlaid,[12]
Grew darker from that under-flame:
So, leaping lightly from the boat,
With silver anchor left afloat,
In marvel whence that glory came
Upon me, as in sleep I sank
In cool soft turf upon the bank,
Entranced with that place and time,
So worthy of the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.
Thence thro’ the garden I was drawn—[13]
A realm of pleasance, many a mound,
And many a shadow-chequer’d lawn
Full of the city’s stilly sound,[14]
And deep myrrh-thickets blowing round
The stately cedar, tamarisks,
Thick rosaries[15] of scented thorn,
Tall orient shrubs, and obelisks
Graven with emblems of the time,
In honour of the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.
With dazed vision unawares
From the long alley’s latticed shade
Emerged, I came upon the great
Pavilion of the Caliphat.
Right to the carven cedarn doors,
Flung inward over spangled floors,
Broad-based flights of marble stairs
Ran up with golden balustrade,
After the fashion of the time,
And humour of the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.
The fourscore windows all alight
As with the quintessence of flame,
A million tapers flaring bright
From twisted silvers look’d[16] to shame
The hollow-vaulted dark, and stream’d
Upon the mooned domes aloof
In inmost Bagdat, till there seem’d
Hundreds of crescents on the roof
Of night new-risen, that marvellous time,
To celebrate the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.
Then stole I up, and trancedly
Gazed on the Persian girl alone,
Serene with argent-lidded eyes
Amorous, and lashes like to rays
Of darkness, and a brow of pearl
Tressed with redolent ebony,
In many a dark delicious curl,
Flowing beneath[17] her rose-hued zone;
The sweetest lady of the time,
Well worthy of the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.
Six columns, three on either side,
Pure silver, underpropt[18] a rich
Throne of the[19] massive ore, from which
Down-droop’d, in many a floating fold,
Engarlanded and diaper’d
With inwrought flowers, a cloth of gold.
Thereon, his deep eye laughter-stirr’d
With merriment of kingly pride,
Sole star of all that place and time,
I saw him—in his golden prime,
THE GOOD HAROUN ALRASCHID!
[1] “Golden prime” from Shakespeare. “That cropp’d the _golden prime_
of this sweet prince.” (_Rich. III._, i., sc. ii., 248.)
[2] 1830. Through.
[3] 1830. Through.
[4] 1830 and 1842. Sophas.
[5] 1830. Breaded blosms.
[6] 1830. Through crystal.
[7] 1830. Through.
[8] “Bulbul” is the Persian for nightingale. _Cf. Princes_, iv., 104:—
“O Bulbul, any rose of Gulistan
Shall brush her veil”.
[9] 1830. Witholding. So 1842, 1843, 1845.
[10] 1830. Blackgreen.
[11] 1830. Of saffron light.
[12] 1830. Unrayed.
[13] 1830. Through ... borne.
[14] Shakespeare has the same expression: “The hum of either army
_stilly sounds_”. (_Henry V._, act iv., prol.)
[15] 1842. Roseries.
[16] 1830. Wreathed.
[17] 1830. Below.
[18] 1830. Underpropped. 1842. Underpropp’d.
[19] 1830. O’ the.
Ode to Memory
First printed in 1830.
After the title in 1830 ed. is “Written very early in life”. The
influence most perceptible in this poem is plainly Coleridge, on whose
_Songs of the Pixies_ it seems to have been modelled. Tennyson
considered it, and no wonder, as one of the very best of “his early and
peculiarly concentrated Nature-poems”. See _Life_, i., 27. It is full
of vivid and accurate pictures of his Lincolnshire home and haunts. See
_Life_, i., 25-48, _passim_.
1
Thou who stealest fire,
From the fountains of the past,
To glorify the present; oh, haste,
Visit my low desire!
Strengthen me, enlighten me!
I faint in this obscurity,
Thou dewy dawn of memory.
2
Come not as thou camest[1] of late,
Flinging the gloom of yesternight
On the white day; but robed in soften’d light
Of orient state.
Whilome thou camest with the morning mist,
Even as a maid, whose stately brow
The dew-impearled winds of dawn have kiss’d,[2]
When she, as thou,
Stays on her floating locks the lovely freight
Of overflowing blooms, and earliest shoots
Of orient green, giving safe pledge of fruits,
Which in wintertide shall star
The black earth with brilliance rare.
3
Whilome thou camest with the morning mist.
And with the evening cloud,
Showering thy gleaned wealth into my open breast,
(Those peerless flowers which in the rudest wind
Never grow sere,
When rooted in the garden of the mind,
Because they are the earliest of the year).
Nor was the night thy shroud.
In sweet dreams softer than unbroken rest
Thou leddest by the hand thine infant Hope.
The eddying of her garments caught from thee
The light of thy great presence; and the cope
Of the half-attain’d futurity,
Though deep not fathomless,
Was cloven with the million stars which tremble
O’er the deep mind of dauntless infancy.
Small thought was there of life’s distress;
For sure she deem’d no mist of earth could dull
Those spirit-thrilling eyes so keen and beautiful:
Sure she was nigher to heaven’s spheres,
Listening the lordly music flowing from
The illimitable years.[3]
O strengthen me, enlighten me!
I faint in this obscurity,
Thou dewy dawn of memory.
4
Come forth I charge thee, arise,
Thou of the many tongues, the myriad eyes!
Thou comest not with shows of flaunting vines
Unto mine inner eye,
Divinest Memory!
Thou wert not nursed by the waterfall
Which ever sounds and shines
A pillar of white light upon the wall
Of purple cliffs, aloof descried:
Come from the woods that belt the grey hill-side,
The seven elms, the poplars[4] four
That stand beside my father’s door,
And chiefly from the brook[5] that loves
To purl o’er matted cress and ribbed sand,
Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves,
Drawing into his narrow earthen urn,
In every elbow and turn,
The filter’d tribute of the rough woodland.
O! hither lead thy feet!
Pour round mine ears the livelong bleat
Of the thick-fleeced sheep from wattled folds,
Upon the ridged wolds,
When the first matin-song hath waken’d[6] loud
Over the dark dewy earth forlorn,
What time the amber morn
Forth gushes from beneath a low-hung cloud.
5
Large dowries doth the raptured eye
To the young spirit present
When first she is wed;
And like a bride of old
In triumph led,
With music and sweet showers
Of festal flowers,
Unto the dwelling she must sway.
Well hast thou done, great artist Memory,
In setting round thy first experiment
With royal frame-work of wrought gold;
Needs must thou dearly love thy first essay,
And foremost in thy various gallery
Place it, where sweetest sunlight falls
Upon the storied walls;
For the discovery
And newness of thine art so pleased thee,
That all which thou hast drawn of fairest
Or boldest since, but lightly weighs
With thee unto the love thou bearest
The first-born of thy genius.
Artist-like,
Ever retiring thou dost gaze
On the prime labour of thine early days:
No matter what the sketch might be;
Whether the high field on the bushless Pike,
Or even a sand-built ridge
Of heaped hills that mound the sea,
Overblown with murmurs harsh,
Or even a lowly cottage[7] whence we see
Stretch’d wide and wild the waste enormous marsh,
Where from the frequent bridge,
Like emblems of infinity,[8]
The trenched waters run from sky to sky;
Or a garden bower’d close
With plaited[9] alleys of the trailing rose,
Long alleys falling down to twilight grots,
Or opening upon level plots
Of crowned lilies, standing near
Purple-spiked lavender:
Whither in after life retired
From brawling storms,
From weary wind,
With youthful fancy reinspired,
We may hold converse with all forms
Of the many-sided mind,
And those[10] whom passion hath not blinded,
Subtle-thoughted, myriad-minded.
My friend, with you[11] to live alone,
Were how much[12] better than to own
A crown, a sceptre, and a throne!
O strengthen, enlighten me!
I faint in this obscurity,
Thou dewy dawn of memory.
[1] 1830. Cam’st.
[2] 1830. Kist.
[3] Transferred from _Timbuctoo_.
And these with lavish’d sense
Listenist the lordly music flowing from
The illimitable years.
[4] The poplars have now disappeared but the seven elms are still to
be seen in the garden behind the house. See Napier, _The Laureate’s
County_, pp. 22, 40-41.
[5] This is the Somersby brook which so often reappears in Tennyson’s
poetry, cf. _Millers Daughter, A Farewell_, and _In Memoriam_, 1 xxix.
and c.
[6] 1830. Waked. For the epithet “dew-impearled” _cf._ Drayton,
_Ideas_, sonnet liii., “amongst the dainty _dew-impearled flowers_,”
where the epithet is more appropriate and intelligible.
[7] 1830. The few.
[8] 1830 and 1842. Thee.
[9] 1830. Methinks were, so till 1850, when it was altered to the
present reading.
[10] The cottage at Maplethorpe where the Tennysons used to spend the
summer holidays. (See _Life_, i., 46.)
[11] 1830. Emblems or Glimpses of Eternity.
[12] 1830. Pleached. The whole of this passage is an exact description
of the Parsonage garden at Somersby. See _Life_, i., 27.
Song
First printed in 1830.
The poem was written in the garden at the Old Rectory, Somersby; an
autumn scene there which it faithfully describes. This poem seems to
have haunted Poe, a fervent admirer of Tennyson’s early poems.
1
A Spirit haunts the year’s last hours
Dwelling amid these yellowing bowers:
To himself he talks;
For at eventide, listening earnestly,
At his work you may hear him sob and sigh
In the walks;
Earthward he boweth the heavy stalks
Of the mouldering flowers:
Heavily hangs the broad sunflower
Over its grave i’ the earth so chilly;
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,
Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.
2
The air is damp, and hush’d, and close,
As a sick man’s room when he taketh repose
An hour before death;
My very heart faints and my whole soul grieves
At the moist rich smell of the rotting leaves,
And the breath
Of the fading edges of box beneath,
And the year’s last rose.
Heavily hangs the broad sunflower
Over its grave i’ the earth so chilly;
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,
Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.
Adeline
First printed in 1830.
1
Mystery of mysteries,
Faintly smiling Adeline,
Scarce of earth nor all divine,
Nor unhappy, nor at rest,
But beyond expression fair
With thy floating flaxen hair;
Thy rose-lips and full blue eyes
Take the heart from out my breast.
Wherefore those dim looks of thine,
Shadowy, dreaming Adeline?
2
Whence that aery bloom of thine,
Like a lily which the sun
Looks thro’ in his sad decline,
And a rose-bush leans upon,
Thou that faintly smilest still,
As a Naïad in a well,
Looking at the set of day,
Or a phantom two hours old
Of a maiden passed away,
Ere the placid lips be cold?
Wherefore those faint smiles of thine,
Spiritual Adeline?
3
What hope or fear or joy is thine?
Who talketh with thee, Adeline?
For sure thou art not all alone:
Do beating hearts of salient springs
Keep measure with thine own?
Hast thou heard the butterflies
What they say betwixt their wings?
Or in stillest evenings
With what voice the violet woos
To his heart the silver dews?
Or when little airs arise,
How the merry bluebell rings[1]
To the mosses underneath?
Hast thou look’d upon the breath
Of the lilies at sunrise?
Wherefore that faint smile of thine,
Shadowy, dreaming Adeline?
4
Some honey-converse feeds thy mind,
Some spirit of a crimson rose
In love with thee forgets to close
His curtains, wasting odorous sighs
All night long on darkness blind.
What aileth thee? whom waitest thou
With thy soften’d, shadow’d brow,
And those dew-lit eyes of thine,[2]
Thou faint smiler, Adeline?
5
Lovest thou the doleful wind
When thou gazest at the skies?
Doth the low-tongued Orient[3]
Wander from the side of[4] the morn,
Dripping with Sabæan spice
On thy pillow, lowly bent
With melodious airs lovelorn,
Breathing Light against thy face,
While his locks a-dropping[5] twined
Round thy neck in subtle ring
Make a _carcanet of rays_,[6]
And ye talk together still,
In the language wherewith Spring
Letters cowslips on the hill?
Hence that look and smile of thine,
Spiritual Adeline.
[1] This conceit seems to have been borrowed from Shelley, _Sensitive
Plant_, i.:—
And the hyacinth, purple and white and blue,
Which flung from its bells a sweet peal anew
Of music.
[2] _Cf._ Collins, _Ode to Pity_, “and _eyes of dewy light_”.
[3] What “the low-tongued Orient” may mean I cannot explain.
[4] 1830 and all editions till 1853. O’.
[5] 1863. A-drooping.
[6] A carcanet is a necklace, diminutive from old French “Carcan”. Cf.
_Comedy of Errors_, in., i, “To see the making of her Carcanet”.
A Character
First printed in 1830.
The only authoritative light thrown on the person here described is
what the present Lord Tennyson gives, who tells us that “the then
well-known Cambridge orator S—was partly described”. He was “a very
plausible, parliament-like, self-satisfied speaker at the Union
Debating Society”. The character reminds us of Wordsworth’s Moralist.
See _Poet’s Epitaph_;—
One to whose smooth-rubbed soul can cling,
Nor form nor feeling, great nor small;
A reasoning, self-sufficient thing,
An intellectual all in all.
Shakespeare’s fop, too (Hotspur’s speech, _Henry IV._, i., i., 2),
seems to have suggested a touch or two.
With a half-glance upon the sky
At night he said, “The wanderings
Of this most intricate Universe
Teach me the nothingness of things”.
Yet could not all creation pierce
Beyond the bottom of his eye.
He spake of beauty: that the dull
Saw no divinity in grass,
Life in dead stones, or spirit in air;
Then looking as ’twere in a glass,
He smooth’d his chin and sleek’d his hair,
And said the earth was beautiful.
He spake of virtue: not the gods
More purely, when they wish to charm
Pallas and Juno sitting by:
And with a sweeping of the arm,
And a lack-lustre dead-blue eye,
Devolved his rounded periods.
Most delicately hour by hour
He canvass’d human mysteries,
And trod on silk, as if the winds
Blew his own praises in his eyes,
And stood aloof from other minds
In impotence of fancied power.
With lips depress’d as he were meek,
Himself unto himself he sold:
Upon himself himself did feed:
Quiet, dispassionate, and cold,
And other than his form of creed,
With chisell’d features clear and sleek.
The Poet
First printed in 1830.
In this poem we have the first grand note struck by Tennyson, the first
poem exhibiting the σπουδαιότης of the true poet.
The poet in a golden clime was born,
With golden stars above;
Dower’d with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,[1]
The love of love.
He saw thro’[2] life and death, thro’[3] good and ill,
He saw thro’[4] his own soul.
The marvel of the everlasting will,
An open scroll,
Before him lay: with echoing feet he threaded
The secretest walks of fame:
The viewless arrows of his thoughts were headed
And wing’d with flame,—
Like Indian reeds blown from his silver tongue,
And of so fierce a flight,
From Calpe unto Caucasus they sung,
Filling with light
And vagrant melodies the winds which bore
Them earthward till they lit;
Then, like the arrow-seeds of the field flower,
The fruitful wit
Cleaving, took root, and springing forth anew
Where’er they fell, behold,
Like to the mother plant in semblance, grew
A flower all gold,
And bravely furnish’d all abroad to fling
The winged shafts of truth,
To throng with stately blooms the breathing spring
Of Hope and Youth.
So many minds did gird their orbs with beams,
Tho’[5] one did fling the fire.
Heaven flow’d upon the soul in many dreams
Of high desire.
Thus truth was multiplied on truth, the world
Like one[6] great garden show’d,
And thro’ the wreaths of floating dark upcurl’d,
Rare sunrise flow’d.
And Freedom rear’d in that august sunrise
Her beautiful bold brow,
When rites and forms before his burning eyes
Melted like snow.
There was no blood upon her maiden robes
Sunn’d by those orient skies;
But round about the circles of the globes
Of her keen eyes
And in her raiment’s hem was traced in flame
WISDOM, a name to shake
All evil dreams of power—a sacred name.[7]
And when she spake,
Her words did gather thunder as they ran,
And as the lightning to the thunder
Which follows it, riving the spirit of man,
Making earth wonder,
So was their meaning to her words.
No sword
Of wrath her right arm whirl’d,[8]
But one poor poet’s scroll, and with _his_ word
She shook the world.
[1] The expression, as is not uncommon with Tennyson, is extremely
ambiguous; it may mean that he hated hatred, scorned scorn, and loved
love, or that he had hatred, scorn and love as it were in
quintessence, like Dante, and that is no doubt the meaning
[2] 1830. Through.
[3] 1830. Through.
[4] 1830. Through.
[5] 1830 till 1851. Though.
[6] 1830. A.
[7] 1830.
And in the bordure of her robe was writ
Wisdom, a name to shake
Hoar anarchies, as with a thunderfit.
[8] 1830. Hurled.
The Poet’s Mind
First published in 1830.
A companion poem to the preceding.
After line 7 in 1830 appears this stanza, afterwards omitted:—
Clear as summer mountain streams,
Bright as the inwoven beams,
Which beneath their crisping sapphire
In the midday, floating o’er
The golden sands, make evermore
To a blossom-starrèd shore.
Hence away, unhallowed laughter!
1
Vex not thou the poet’s mind
With thy shallow wit:
Vex not thou the poet’s mind;
For thou canst not fathom it.
Clear and bright it should be ever,
Flowing like a crystal river;
Bright as light, and clear as wind.
2
Dark-brow’d sophist, come not anear;
All the place[1] is holy ground;
Hollow smile and frozen sneer
Come not here.
Holy water will I pour
Into every spicy flower
Of the laurel-shrubs that hedge it around.
The flowers would faint at your cruel cheer.
In your eye there is death,
There is frost in your breath
Which would blight the plants.
Where you stand you cannot hear
From the groves within
The wild-bird’s din.
In the heart of the garden the merry bird chants,
It would fall to the ground if you came in.
In the middle leaps a fountain
Like sheet lightning,
Ever brightening
With a low melodious thunder;
All day and all night it is ever drawn
From the brain of the purple mountain
Which stands in the distance yonder:
It springs on a level of bowery lawn,
And the mountain draws it from Heaven above,
And it sings a song of undying love;
And yet, tho’[2] its voice be so clear and full,
You never would hear it; your ears are so dull;
So keep where you are: you are foul with sin;
It would shrink to the earth if you came in.
[1] 1830. The poet’s mind. With this may be compared the opening
stanza of Gray’s _Installation Ode_: “Hence! avaunt! ’tis holy
ground,” and for the sentiments _cf_. Wordsworth’s _Poet’s Epitaph._
[2] 1830 to 1851. Though.
The Sea Fairies
First published in 1830 but excluded from all editions till its
restoration, when it was greatly altered, in 1853. I here give the text
as it appeared in 1830; where the present text is the same as that of
1830 asterisks indicate it.
This poem is a sort of prelude to the _Lotos-Eaters_, the burthen being
the same, a siren song: “Why work, why toil, when all must be over so
soon, and when at best there is so little to reward?”
Slow sailed the weary mariners, and saw
Between the green brink and the running foam
White limbs unrobed in a chrystal air,
Sweet faces, etc.
...
middle sea.
SONG
Whither away, whither away, whither away?
Fly no more!
Whither away wi’ the singing sail? whither away wi’ the oar?
Whither away from the high green field and the happy blossoming shore?
Weary mariners, hither away,
One and all, one and all,
Weary mariners, come and play;
We will sing to you all the day;
Furl the sail and the foam will fall
From the prow! one and all
Furl the sail! drop the oar!
Leap ashore!
Know danger and trouble and toil no more.
Whither away wi’ the sail and the oar?
Drop the oar,
Leap ashore,
Fly no more!
Whither away wi’ the sail? whither away wi’ the oar?
Day and night to the billow, etc.
...
over the lea;
They freshen the silvery-crimson shells,
And thick with white bells the cloverhill swells
High over the full-toned sea.
Merrily carol the revelling gales
Over the islands free:
From the green seabanks the rose downtrails
To the happy brimmèd sea.
Come hither, come hither, and be our lords,
For merry brides are we:
We will kiss sweet kisses, etc.
...
With pleasure and love and revelry;
...
ridgèd sea.
Ye will not find so happy a shore
Weary mariners! all the world o’er;
Oh! fly no more!
Harken ye, harken ye, sorrow shall darken ye,
Danger and trouble and toil no more;
Whither away?
Drop the oar;
Hither away,
Leap ashore;
Oh! fly no more—no more.
Whither away, whither away, whither away with the sail and the oar?
Slow sail’d the weary mariners and saw,
Betwixt the green brink and the running foam,
Sweet faces, rounded arms, and bosoms prest
To little harps of gold; and while they mused,
Whispering to each other half in fear,
Shrill music reach’d them on the middle sea.
Whither away, whither away, whither away? fly no more.
Whither away from the high green field, and the happy blossoming shore?
Day and night to the billow the fountain calls;
Down shower the gambolling waterfalls
From wandering over the lea:
Out of the live-green heart of the dells
They freshen the silvery-crimsoned shells,
And thick with white bells the clover-hill swells
High over the full-toned sea:
O hither, come hither and furl your sails,
Come hither to me and to me:
Hither, come hither and frolic and play;
Here it is only the mew that wails;
We will sing to you all the day:
Mariner, mariner, furl your sails,
For here are the blissful downs and dales,
And merrily merrily carol the gales,
And the spangle dances in bight[1] and bay,
And the rainbow forms and flies on the land
Over the islands free;
And the rainbow lives in the curve of the sand;
Hither, come hither and see;
And the rainbow hangs on the poising wave,
And sweet is the colour of cove and cave,
And sweet shall your welcome be:
O hither, come hither, and be our lords
For merry brides are we:
We will kiss sweet kisses, and speak sweet words:
O listen, listen, your eyes shall glisten
With pleasure and love and jubilee:
O listen, listen, your eyes shall glisten
When the sharp clear twang of the golden cords
Runs up the ridged sea.
Who can light on as happy a shore
All the world o’er, all the world o’er?
Whither away? listen and stay: mariner, mariner, fly no more.
[1] Bight is properly the coil of a rope; it then came to mean a bend,
and so a corner or bay. The same phrase occurs in the _Voyage of
Maledune_, v.: “and flung them in bight and bay”.
The Deserted House
First printed in 1830, omitted in all the editions till 1848 when it
was restored. The poem is of course allegorical, and is very much in
the vein of many poems in Anglo-Saxon poetry.
1
Life and Thought have gone away
Side by side,
Leaving door and windows wide:
2
All within is dark as night:
In the windows is no light;
And no murmur at the door,
So frequent on its hinge before.
3
Close the door, the shutters close,
Or thro’[1] the windows we shall see
The nakedness and vacancy
Of the dark deserted house.
4
Come away: no more of mirth
Is here or merry-making sound.
The house was builded of the earth,
And shall fall again to ground.
5
Come away: for Life and Thought
Here no longer dwell;
But in a city glorious—
A great and distant city—have bought
A mansion incorruptible.
Would they could have stayed with us!
[1] 1848 and 1851. Through.
The Dying Swan
First printed in 1830.
The superstition here assumed is so familiar from the Classics as well
as from modern tradition that it scarcely needs illustration or
commentary. But see Plato, _Phaedrus_, xxxi., and Shakespeare, _King
John_, v., 7.
1
The plain was grassy, wild and bare,
Wide, wild, and open to the air,
Which had built up everywhere
An under-roof of doleful gray.[1]
With an inner voice the river ran,
Adown it floated a dying swan,
And[2] loudly did lament.
It was the middle of the day.
Ever the weary wind went on,
And took the reed-tops as it went.
2
Some blue peaks in the distance rose,
And white against the cold-white sky,
Shone out their crowning snows.
One willow over the water[3] wept,
And shook the wave as the wind did sigh;
Above in the wind was[4] the swallow,
Chasing itself at its own wild will,
And far thro’[5] the marish green and still
The tangled water-courses slept,
Shot over with purple, and green, and yellow.
3
The wild swan’s death-hymn took the soul
Of that waste place with joy
Hidden in sorrow: at first to the ear
The warble was low, and full and clear;
And floating about the under-sky,
Prevailing in weakness, the coronach[6] stole
Sometimes afar, and sometimes anear;
But anon her awful jubilant voice,
With a music strange and manifold,
Flow’d forth on a carol free and bold;
As when a mighty people rejoice
With shawms, and with cymbals, and harps of gold,
And the tumult of their acclaim is roll’d
Thro’[7] the open gates of the city afar,
To the shepherd who watcheth the evening star.
And the creeping mosses and clambering weeds,
And the willow-branches hoar and dank,
And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds,
And the wave-worn horns of the echoing bank,
And the silvery marish-flowers that throng
The desolate creeks and pools among,
Were flooded over with eddying song.
[1] 1830. Grey.
[2] 1830 till 1848. Which.
[3] 1863. River.
[4] 1830. Sung.
[5] 1830. Through.
[6] A coronach is a funeral song or lamentation, from the Gaelic
_Corranach_. _Cf_. Scott’s _Waverley_, ch. xv., “Their wives and
daughters came clapping their hands and _crying the coronach_ and
shrieking”.
[7] 1830 till 1851. Through.
A Dirge
First printed in 1830.
1
Now is done thy long day’s work;
Fold thy palms across thy breast,
Fold thine arms, turn to thy rest.
Let them rave.
Shadows of the silver birk[1]
Sweep the green that folds thy grave.
Let them rave.
2
Thee nor carketh[2] care nor slander;
Nothing but the small cold worm
Fretteth thine enshrouded form.
Let them rave.
Light and shadow ever wander
O’er the green that folds thy grave.
Let them rave.
3
Thou wilt not turn upon thy bed;
Chaunteth not the brooding bee
Sweeter tones than calumny?
Let them rave.
Thou wilt never raise thine head
From the green that folds thy grave.
Let them rave.
4
Crocodiles wept tears for thee;
The woodbine and eglatere
Drip sweeter dews than traitor’s tear.
Let them rave.
Rain makes music in the tree
O’er the green that folds thy grave.
Let them rave.
5
Round thee blow, self-pleached[3] deep,
Bramble-roses, faint and pale,
And long purples[4] of the dale.
Let them rave.
These in every shower creep.
Thro’[5] the green that folds thy grave.
Let them rave.
6
The gold-eyed kingcups fine:
The frail bluebell peereth over
Rare broidry of the purple clover.
Let them rave.
Kings have no such couch as thine,
As the green that folds thy grave.
Let them rave.
7
Wild words wander here and there;
God’s great gift of speech abused
Makes thy memory confused:
But let them rave.
The balm-cricket[6] carols clear
In the green that folds thy grave.
Let them rave.
[1] Still used in the north of England for “birch”.
[2] Carketh. Here used transitively, “troubles,” though in Old English
it is generally intransitive, meaning to be careful or thoughtful; it
is from the Anglo-Saxon _Carian_; it became obsolete in the
seventeenth century. The substantive cark, trouble or anxiety, is
generally in Old English coupled with “care”.
[3] Self-pleached, self-entangled or intertwined. _Cf_. Shakespeare,
“pleached bower,” _Much Ado_, iii., i., 7.
[4] 1830. “_Long purples_,” thus marking that the phrase is borrowed
from Shakespeare, _Hamlet_, iv., vii., 169:—
and _long purples_
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name.
It is the purple-flowered orchis, _orchis mascula_.
[5] 1830. Through.
[6] Balm cricket, the tree cricket; _balm_ is a corruption of _baum_.
Love and Death
First printed in 1830.
What time the mighty moon was gathering light[1]
Love paced the thymy plots of Paradise,
And all about him roll’d his lustrous eyes;
When, turning round a cassia, full in view
Death, walking all alone beneath a yew,
And talking to himself, first met his sight:
“You must begone,” said Death, “these walks are mine”.
Love wept and spread his sheeny vans[2] for flight;
Yet ere he parted said, “This hour is thine;
Thou art the shadow of life, and as the tree
Stands in the sun and shadows all beneath,
So in the light of great eternity
Life eminent creates the shade of death;
The shadow passeth when the tree shall fall,
But I shall reign for ever over all”.[3]
[1] The expression is Virgil’s, _Georg_., i., 427: “Luna revertentes
cum primum _colligit ignes_”.
[2] Vans used also for “wings” by Milton, _Paradise Lost_, ii.,
927-8:—
His sail-broad _vans_
He spreads for flight.
So also Tasso, _Ger. Lib_., ix., 60: “Indi spiega al gran volo i
_vanni_ aurati”.
[3] _Cf. Lockley Hall Sixty Years After_: “Love will conquer at the
last”.
The Ballad of Oriana
First published in 1830, not in 1833.
This fine ballad was evidently suggested by the old ballad of Helen of
Kirkconnel, both poems being based on a similar incident, and both
being the passionate soliloquy of the bereaved lover, though Tennyson’s
treatment of the subject is his own. Helen of Kirkconnel was one of the
poems which he was fond of reciting, and Fitzgerald says that he used
also to recite this poem, in a way not to be forgotten, at Cambridge
tables. _Life_, i., p. 77.
My heart is wasted with my woe, Oriana.
There is no rest for me below, Oriana.
When the long dun wolds are ribb’d with snow,
And loud the Norland whirlwinds blow, Oriana,
Alone I wander to and fro, Oriana.
Ere the light on dark was growing, Oriana,
At midnight the cock was crowing, Oriana:
Winds were blowing, waters flowing,
We heard the steeds to battle going, Oriana;
Aloud the hollow bugle blowing, Oriana.
In the yew-wood black as night, Oriana,
Ere I rode into the fight, Oriana,
While blissful tears blinded my sight
By star-shine and by moonlight, Oriana,
I to thee my troth did plight, Oriana.
She stood upon the castle wall, Oriana:
She watch’d my crest among them all, Oriana:
She saw me fight, she heard me call,
When forth there stept a foeman tall, Oriana,
Atween me and the castle wall, Oriana.
The bitter arrow went aside, Oriana:
The false, false arrow went aside, Oriana:
The damned arrow glanced aside,
And pierced thy heart, my love, my bride, Oriana!
Thy heart, my life, my love, my bride, Oriana!
Oh! narrow, narrow was the space, Oriana.
Loud, loud rung out the bugle’s brays, Oriana.
Oh! deathful stabs were dealt apace,
The battle deepen’d in its place, Oriana;
But I was down upon my face, Oriana.
They should have stabb’d me where I lay, Oriana!
How could I rise and come away, Oriana?
How could I look upon the day?
They should have stabb’d me where I lay, Oriana
They should have trod me into clay, Oriana.
O breaking heart that will not break, Oriana!
O pale, pale face so sweet and meek, Oriana!
Thou smilest, but thou dost not speak,
And then the tears run down my cheek, Oriana:
What wantest thou? whom dost thou seek, Oriana?
I cry aloud: none hear my cries, Oriana.
Thou comest atween me and the skies, Oriana.
I feel the tears of blood arise
Up from my heart unto my eyes, Oriana.
Within my heart my arrow lies, Oriana.
O cursed hand! O cursed blow! Oriana!
O happy thou that liest low, Oriana!
All night the silence seems to flow
Beside me in my utter woe, Oriana.
A weary, weary way I go, Oriana.
When Norland winds pipe down the sea, Oriana,
I walk, I dare not think of thee, Oriana.
Thou liest beneath the greenwood tree,
I dare not die and come to thee, Oriana.
I hear the roaring of the sea, Oriana.
Circumstance
First published in 1830.
Two children in two neighbour villages
Playing mad pranks along the healthy leas;
Two strangers meeting at a festival;
Two lovers whispering by an orchard wall;
Two lives bound fast in one with golden ease;
Two graves grass-green beside a gray church-tower,
Wash’d with still rains and daisy-blossomed;
Two children in one hamlet born and bred;
So runs[1] the round of life from hour to hour.
[1] 1830. Fill up.
The Merman
First printed in 1830.
1
Who would be
A merman bold,
Sitting alone,
Singing alone
Under the sea,
With a crown of gold,
On a throne?
2
I would be a merman bold;
I would sit and sing the whole of the day;
I would fill the sea-halls with a voice of power;
But at night I would roam abroad and play
With the mermaids in and out of the rocks,
Dressing their hair with the white sea-flower;
And holding them back by their flowing locks
I would kiss them often under the sea,
And kiss them again till they kiss’d me
Laughingly, laughingly;
And then we would wander away, away
To the pale-green sea-groves straight and high,
Chasing each other merrily.
3
There would be neither moon nor star;
But the wave would make music above us afar—
Low thunder and light in the magic night—
Neither moon nor star.
We would call aloud in the dreamy dells,
Call to each other and whoop and cry
All night, merrily, merrily;
They would pelt me with starry spangles and shells,
Laughing and clapping their hands between,
All night, merrily, merrily:
But I would throw to them back in mine
Turkis and agate and almondine:[1]
Then leaping out upon them unseen
I would kiss them often under the sea,
And kiss them again till they kiss’d me
Laughingly, laughingly.
Oh! what a happy life were mine
Under the hollow-hung ocean green!
Soft are the moss-beds under the sea;
We would live merrily, merrily.
[1] Almondine. This should be “almandine,” the word probably being a
corruption of alabandina, a gem so called because found at Alabanda in
Caria; it is a garnet of a violet or amethystine tint. _Cf._ Browning,
_Fefine at the Fair_, xv., “that string of mock-turquoise, these
_almandines_ of glass”.
The Mermaid
First printed in 1830.
1
Who would be
A mermaid fair,
Singing alone,
Combing her hair
Under the sea,
In a golden curl
With a comb of pearl,
On a throne?
2
I would be a mermaid fair;
I would sing to myself the whole of the day;
With a comb of pearl I would comb my hair;
And still as I comb’d I would sing and say,
“Who is it loves me? who loves not me?”
I would comb my hair till my ringlets would fall,
Low adown, low adown,
From under my starry sea-bud crown
Low adown and around,
And I should look like a fountain of gold
Springing alone
With a shrill inner sound,
Over the throne
In the midst of the hall;
Till that[1] great sea-snake under the sea
From his coiled sleeps in the central deeps
Would slowly trail himself sevenfold
Round the hall where I sate, and look in at the gate
With his large calm eyes for the love of me.
And all the mermen under the sea
Would feel their[2] immortality
Die in their hearts for the love of me.
3
But at night I would wander away, away,
I would fling on each side my low-flowing locks,
And lightly vault from the throne and play
With the mermen in and out of the rocks;
We would run to and fro, and hide and seek,
On the broad sea-wolds in the[3] crimson shells,
Whose silvery spikes are nighest the sea.
But if any came near I would call, and shriek,
And adown the steep like a wave I would leap
From the diamond-ledges that jut from the dells;
For I would not be kiss’d[4] by all who would list,
Of the bold merry mermen under the sea;
They would sue me, and woo me, and flatter me,
In the purple twilights under the sea;
But the king of them all would carry me,
Woo me, and win me, and marry me,
In the branching jaspers under the sea;
Then all the dry pied things that be
In the hueless mosses under the sea
Would curl round my silver feet silently,
All looking up for the love of me.
And if I should carol aloud, from aloft
All things that are forked, and horned, and soft
Would lean out from the hollow sphere of the sea,
All looking down for the love of me.
[1] Till 1857. The.
[2] Till 1857. The.
[3] 1830. ’I the. So till 1853.
[4] 1830 Kist.
Sonnet to J. M. K.
First printed in 1830, not in 1833.
This sonnet was addressed to John Mitchell Kemble, the well-known
Editor of the _Beowulf_ and other Anglo-Saxon poems. He intended to go
into the Church, but was never ordained, and devoted his life to early
English studies. See memoir of him in _Dict, of Nat. Biography_.
My hope and heart is with thee—thou wilt be
A latter Luther, and a soldier-priest
To scare church-harpies from the master’s feast;
Our dusted velvets have much need of thee:
Thou art no Sabbath-drawler of old saws,
Distill’d from some worm-canker’d homily;
But spurr’d at heart with fieriest energy
To embattail and to wall about thy cause
With iron-worded proof, hating to hark
The humming of the drowsy pulpit-drone
Half God’s good sabbath, while the worn-out clerk
Brow-beats his desk below. Thou from a throne
Mounted in heaven wilt shoot into the dark
Arrows of lightnings. I will stand and mark.
The Lady of Shalott
First published in 1833.
This poem was composed in its first form as early as May, 1832 or 1833,
as we learn from Fitzgerald’s note—of the exact year he was not certain
(_Life of Tennyson_, i., 147). The evolution of the poem is an
interesting study. How greatly it was altered in the second edition of
1842 will be evident from the collation which follows. The text of 1842
became the permanent text, and in this no subsequent material
alterations were made. The poem is more purely fanciful than Tennyson
perhaps was willing to own; certainly his explanation of the allegory,
as he gave it to Canon Ainger, is not very intelligible: “The new-born
love for something, for some one in the wide world from which she has
been so long excluded, takes her out of the region of shadows into that
of realities”. Poe’s commentary is most to the point: “Why do some
persons fatigue themselves in endeavours to unravel such phantasy
pieces as the _Lady of Shallot_? As well unweave the ventum
textilem”.—_Democratic Review_, Dec., 1844, quoted by Mr. Herne
Shepherd. Mr. Palgrave says (selection from the _Lyric Poems of
Tennyson_, p. 257) the poem was suggested by an Italian romance upon
the Donna di Scalotta. On what authority this is said I do not know,
nor can I identify the novel. In Novella, lxxxi., a collection of
novels printed at Milan in 1804, there is one which tells but very
briefly the story of Elaine’s love and death, “Qui conta come la
Damigella di scalot mori per amore di Lancealotto di Lac,” and as in
this novel Camelot is placed near the sea, this may be the novel
referred to. In any case the poem is a fanciful and possibly an
allegorical variant of the story of Elaine, Shalott being a form,
through the French, of Astolat.
Part I
On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro’ the field the road runs by
To many-tower’d Camelot;
And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below,
The island of Shalott.[1]
Willows whiten, aspens quiver,[2]
Little breezes dusk and shiver
Thro’ the wave that runs for ever
By the island in the river
Flowing down to Camelot.
Four gray walls, and four gray towers,
Overlook a space of flowers,
And the silent isle imbowers
The Lady of Shalott.
By the margin, willow-veil’d
Slide the heavy barges trail’d
By slow horses; and unhail’d
The shallop flitteth silken-sail’d
Skimming down to Camelot:
But who hath seen her wave her hand?
Or at the casement seen her stand?
Or is she known in all the land,
The Lady of Shalott?[3]
Only reapers, reaping early
In among the bearded barley,
Hear a song that echoes cheerly
From the river winding clearly,
Down to tower’d Camelot:
And by the moon the reaper weary,
Piling sheaves in uplands airy,
Listening, whispers “’Tis the fairy
Lady of Shalott”.[4]