I take myself to task;
Lest of the fullness of my life
I leave an empty flask:
For I had hope, by something rare,
To prove myself a poet;
But, while I plan and plan, my hair
Is gray before I know it.
So fares it since the years began,
Till they be gather’d up;
The truth, that flies the flowing can,
Will haunt the vacant cup:
And others’ follies teach us not,
Nor much their wisdom teaches;
And most, of sterling worth, is what
Our own experience preaches.
Ah, let the rusty theme alone!
We know not what we know.
But for my pleasant hour, ’tis gone,
’Tis gone, and let it go.
’Tis gone: a thousand such have slipt
Away from my embraces,
And fall’n into the dusty crypt
Of darken’d forms and faces.
Go, therefore, thou! thy betters went
Long since, and came no more;
With peals of genial clamour sent
From many a tavern-door,
With twisted quirks and happy hits,
From misty men of letters;
The tavern-hours of mighty wits—
Thine elders and thy betters.
Hours, when the Poet’s words and looks
Had yet their native glow:
Not yet the fear of little books
Had made him talk for show:
But, all his vast heart sherris-warm’d,
He flash’d his random speeches;
Ere days, that deal in ana, swarm’d
His literary leeches.
So mix for ever with the past,
Like all good things on earth!
For should I prize thee, couldst thou last,
At half thy real worth?
I hold it good, good things should pass:
With time I will not quarrel:
It is but yonder empty glass
That makes me maudlin-moral.
Head-waiter of the chop-house here,
To which I most resort,
I too must part: I hold thee dear
For this good pint of port.
For this, thou shalt from all things suck
Marrow of mirth and laughter;
And, wheresoe’er thou move, good luck
Shall fling her old shoe after.
But thou wilt never move from hence,
The sphere thy fate allots:
Thy latter days increased with pence
Go down among the pots:
Thou battenest by the greasy gleam
In haunts of hungry sinners,
Old boxes, larded with the steam
Of thirty thousand dinners.
_We_ fret, _we_ fume, would shift our skins,
Would quarrel with our lot;
_Thy_ care is, under polish’d tins,
To serve the hot-and-hot;
To come and go, and come again,
Returning like the pewit,
And watch’d by silent gentlemen,
That trifle with the cruet.
Live long, ere from thy topmost head
The thick-set hazel dies;
Long, ere the hateful crow shall tread
The corners of thine eyes:
Live long, nor feel in head or chest
Our changeful equinoxes,
Till mellow Death, like some late guest,
Shall call thee from the boxes.
But when he calls, and thou shalt cease
To pace the gritted floor,
And, laying down an unctuous lease
Of life, shalt earn no more;
No carved cross-bones, the types of Death,
Shall show thee past to Heaven:
But carved cross-pipes, and, underneath,
A pint-pot neatly graven.
[1] 1842 and all previous to 1853. To full and kindly.
[2] All previous to 1853:—
Like Hezekiah’s, backward runs
The shadow of my days.
[3]
All previous to 1853. Though.
[4] The expression is Shakespeare’s, _Twelfth Night_, v., i.,
“and thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges”.
[5]
All previous to 1853. Though.
[6] 1842 to 1843. With motion less or greater.
To——
after reading a Life and Letters
Originally published in the _Examiner_ for 24th March, 1849; then in
the sixth edition of the poems, 1850, with the second part of the title
and the alterations noted. When reprinted in 1851 one more slight
alteration was made. It has not been altered since. The work referred
to was Moncton Milne’s (afterwards Lord Houghton) _Letters and Literary
Remains of Keats_ published in 1848, and the person to whom the poem
may have been addressed was Tennyson’s brother Charles, afterwards
Charles Tennyson Turner, to the facts of whose life and to whose
character it would exactly apply. See Napier,_Homes and Haunts of
Tennyson_, 48-50. But Sir Franklin Lushington tells me that it was most
probably addressed to some imaginary person, as neither he nor such of
Tennyson’s surviving friends as he kindly consulted for me are able to
identify the person.
You might have won the Poet’s name
If such be worth the winning now,
And gain’d a laurel for your brow
Of sounder leaf than I can claim;
But you have made the wiser choice,
A life that moves to gracious ends
Thro’ troops of unrecording friends,
A deedful life, a silent voice:
And you have miss’d the irreverent doom
Of those that wear the Poet’s crown:
Hereafter, neither knave nor clown
Shall hold their orgies at your tomb.
For now the Poet cannot die
Nor leave his music as of old,
But round him ere he scarce be cold
Begins the scandal and the cry:
“Proclaim the faults he would not show:
Break lock and seal: betray the trust:
Keep nothing sacred: ’tis but just
The many-headed beast should know”.
Ah, shameless! for he did but sing.
A song that pleased us from its worth;
No public life was his on earth,
No blazon’d statesman he, nor king.
He gave the people of his best:
His worst he kept, his best he gave.
My Shakespeare’s curse on[1] clown and knave
Who will not let his ashes rest!
Who make it seem more sweet[2] to be
The little life of bank and brier,
The bird that pipes his lone desire
And dies unheard within his tree,
Than he that warbles long and loud
And drops at Glory’s temple-gates,
For whom the carrion vulture waits
To tear his heart before the crowd!
[1] In Examiner and in 1850. My curse upon the.
[2] In Examiner. Sweeter seem. For the sentiment _cf._ Goethe:—
Ich singe, wie der Vogel singt
Der in den Zweigen wohnet;
Das Lied das aus dem Seele dringt
Ist Lohn, der reichlich lohnet.
(_Der Sänger._)
To E. L. on his travels in Greece.
This was first printed in 1853. It has not been altered since. The poem
was addressed to Edward Lear, the landscape painter, and refers to his
travels.
Illyrian woodlands, echoing falls
Of water, sheets of summer glass,
The long divine Peneian pass,[1]
The vast Akrokeraunian walls,[2]
Tomohrit,[3] Athos, all things fair,
With such a pencil, such a pen,
You shadow forth to distant men,
I read and felt that I was there:
And trust me, while I turn’d the page,
And track’d you still on classic ground,
I grew in gladness till I found
My spirits in the golden age.
For me the torrent ever pour’d
And glisten’d—here and there alone
The broad-limb’d Gods at random thrown
By fountain-urns;-and Naiads oar’d
A glimmering shoulder under gloom
Of cavern pillars; on the swell
The silver lily heaved and fell;
And many a slope was rich in bloom
From him that on the mountain lea
By dancing rivulets fed his flocks,
To him who sat upon the rocks,
And fluted to the morning sea.
[1] _Cf_. Lear’s description of Tempe:
“It is not a vale, it is a narrow pass, and although extremely
beautiful on account of the precipitous rocks on each side, the Peneus
flowing deep in the midst between the richest overhanging plane woods,
still its character is distinctly that of a ravine.”
(_Journal_, 409.)
[2] The Akrokeraunian walls: the promontory now called Glossa.
[3] Tomóhr, Tomorit, or Tomohritt is a lofty mountain in Albania not
far from Elbassan. Lear’s account of it is very graphic: “That calm
blue plain with Tomóhr in the midst like an azure island in a
boundless sea haunts my mind’s eye and varies the present with the
past”.
Lady Clare
First published 1842. After 1851 no alterations were made.
This poem was suggested by Miss Ferrier’s powerful novel _The
Inheritance_. A comparison with the plot of Miss Ferrier’s novel will
show with what tact and skill Tennyson has adapted the tale to his
ballad. Thomas St. Clair, youngest son of the Earl of Rossville,
marries a Miss Sarah Black, a girl of humble and obscure birth. He
dies, leaving a widow and as is supposed a daughter, Gertrude, who
claim the protection of Lord Rossville, as the child is heiress
presumptive to the earldom. On Lord Rossville’s death she accordingly
becomes Countess of Rossville. She has two lovers, both distant
connections, Colonel Delmour and Edward Lyndsay. At last it is
discovered that she was not the daughter of Thomas St. Clair and her
supposed mother, but of one Marion La Motte and Jacob Leviston, and
that Mrs. St. Clair had adopted her when a baby and passed her off as
her own child, that she might succeed to the title. Meanwhile Delmour
by the death of his elder brother succeeds to the title and estates
forfeited by the detected foundling, but instead of acting as
Tennyson’s Lord Ronald does, he repudiates her and marries a duchess.
But her other lover Lyndsay is true to her and marries her. Delmour not
long afterwards dies without issue, and Lyndsay succeeds to the title,
Gertrude then becoming after all Countess of Rossville. In details
Tennyson follows the novel sometimes very closely. Thus the “single
rose,” the poor dress, the bitter exclamation about her being a beggar
born, are from the novel.
The 1842 and all editions up to and including 1850 begin with the
following stanza and omit stanza 2:—
Lord Ronald courted Lady Clare,
I trow they did not part in scorn;
Lord Ronald, her cousin, courted her
And they will wed the morrow morn.
It was the time when lilies blow,
And clouds are highest up in air,
Lord Ronald brought a lily-white doe
To give his cousin Lady Clare.
I trow they did not part in scorn:
Lovers long-betroth’d were they:
They two will wed the morrow morn!
God’s blessing on the day!
“He does not love me for my birth,
Nor for my lands so broad and fair;
He loves me for my own true worth,
And that is well,” said Lady Clare.
In there came old Alice the nurse,
Said, “Who was this that went from thee?”
“It was my cousin,” said Lady Clare,
“To-morrow he weds with me.”
“O God be thank’d!” said Alice the nurse,
“That all comes round so just and fair:
Lord Ronald is heir of all your lands,
And you are not the Lady Clare.”
“Are ye out of your mind, my nurse, my nurse?”
Said Lady Clare, “that ye speak so wild”;
“As God’s above,” said Alice the nurse,
“I speak the truth: you are my child.
“The old Earl’s daughter died at my breast;
I speak the truth, as I live by bread!
I buried her like my own sweet child,
And put my child in her stead.”
“Falsely, falsely have ye done,
O mother,” she said, “if this be true,
To keep the best man under the sun
So many years from his due.”
“Nay now, my child,” said Alice the nurse,
“But keep the secret for your life,
And all you have will be Lord Ronald’s,
When you are man and wife.”
“If I’m a beggar born,” she said,
“I will speak out, for I dare not lie.
Pull off, pull off, the broach[1] of gold,
And fling the diamond necklace by.”
“Nay now, my child,” said Alice the nurse,
“But keep the secret all ye can.”
She said, “Not so: but I will know
If there be any faith in man”.
“Nay now, what faith?” said Alice the nurse,
“The man will cleave unto his right.”
“And he shall have it,” the lady replied,
“Tho’[2] I should die to-night.”
“Yet give one kiss to your mother dear!
Alas, my child, I sinn’d for thee.”
“O mother, mother, mother,” she said,
“So strange it seems to me.
“Yet here’s a kiss for my mother dear,
My mother dear, if this be so,
And lay your hand upon my head,
And bless me, mother, ere I go.”
She clad herself in a russet gown,
She was no longer Lady Clare:
She went by dale, and she went by down,
With a single rose in her hair.
The lily-white doe Lord Ronald had brought
Leapt up from where she lay,
Dropt her head in the maiden’s hand,
And follow’d her all the way.[3]
Down stept Lord Ronald from his tower:
“O Lady Clare, you shame your worth!
Why come you drest like a village maid,
That are the flower of the earth?”
“If I come drest like a village maid,
I am but as my fortunes are:
I am a beggar born,” she said,[4]
“And not the Lady Clare.”
“Play me no tricks,” said Lord Ronald,
“For I am yours in word and in deed.
Play me no tricks,” said Lord Ronald,
“Your riddle is hard to read.”
O and proudly stood she up!
Her heart within her did not fail:
She look’d into Lord Ronald’s eyes,
And told him all her nurse’s tale.
He laugh’d a laugh of merry scorn:
He turn’d, and kiss’d her where she stood:
“If you are not the heiress born,
And I,” said he, “the next in blood—
“If you are not the heiress born,
And I,” said he, “the lawful heir,
We two will wed to-morrow morn,
And you shall still be Lady Clare.”
[1] All up to and including 1850. Brooch.
[2] All up to and including 1850. Though.
[3] The stanza beginning “The lily-white doe” is omitted in 1842 and
1843, and in the subsequent editions up to and including 1850 begins
“A lily-white doe”.
[4] In a letter addressed to Tennyson the late Mr. Peter Bayne
ventured to object to the dramatic propriety of Lady Clare speaking of
herself as “a beggar born”. Tennyson defended it by saying: “You make
no allowance for the shock of the fall from being Lady Clare to
finding herself the child of a nurse”. But the expression is Miss
Ferrier’s: “Oh that she had suffered me to remain the beggar I was
born”; and again to her lover: “You have loved an impostor and a
beggar”.
The Lord of Burleigh
Written, as we learn from _Life_, i., 182, by 1835. First published in
1842. No alteration since with the exception of “tho’” for “though”.
This poem tells the well-known story of Sarah Hoggins who married under
the circumstances related in the poem. She died in January, 1797,
sinking, so it was said, but without any authority for such a
statement, under the burden of an honour “unto which she was not born”.
The story is that Henry Cecil, heir presumptive to his uncle, the ninth
Earl of Exeter, was staying at Bolas, a rural village in Shropshire,
where he met Sarah Hoggins and married her. They lived together at
Bolas, where the two eldest of his children were born, for two years
before he came into the title. She bore him two other children after
she was Countess of Exeter, dying at Burleigh House near Stamford at
the early age of twenty-four. The obituary notice runs thus: “January,
1797. At Burleigh House near Stamford, aged twenty-four, to the
inexpressible surprise and concern of all acquainted with her, the
Right Honbl. Countess of Exeter.” For full information about this
romantic incident see Walford’s _Tales of Great Families_, first
series, vol. i., 65-82, and two interesting papers signed W. O. Woodall
in _Notes and Queries_, seventh series, vol. xii., 221-23; _ibid_.,
281-84, and Napier’s _Homes and Haunts of Tennyson_, 104-111.
In her ear he whispers gaily,
“If my heart by signs can tell,
Maiden, I have watch’d thee daily,
And I think thou lov’st me well”.
She replies, in accents fainter,
“There is none I love like thee”.
He is but a landscape-painter,
And a village maiden she.
He to lips, that fondly falter,
Presses his without reproof:
Leads her to the village altar,
And they leave her father’s roof.
“I can make no marriage present;
Little can I give my wife.
Love will make our cottage pleasant,
And I love thee more than life.”
They by parks and lodges going
See the lordly castles stand:
Summer woods, about them blowing,
Made a murmur in the land.
From deep thought himself he rouses,
Says to her that loves him well,
“Let us see these handsome houses
Where the wealthy nobles dwell”.
So she goes by him attended,
Hears him lovingly converse,
Sees whatever fair and splendid
Lay betwixt his home and hers;
Parks with oak and chestnut shady,
Parks and order’d gardens great,
Ancient homes of lord and lady,
Built for pleasure and for state.
All he shows her makes him dearer:
Evermore she seems to gaze
On that cottage growing nearer,
Where they twain will spend their days.
O but she will love him truly!
He shall have a cheerful home;
She will order all things duly,
When beneath his roof they come.
Thus her heart rejoices greatly,
Till a gateway she discerns
With armorial bearings stately,
And beneath the gate she turns;
Sees a mansion more majestic
Than all those she saw before:
Many a gallant gay domestic
Bows before him at the door.
And they speak in gentle murmur,
When they answer to his call,
While he treads with footstep firmer,
Leading on from hall to hall.
And, while now she wonders blindly,
Nor the meaning can divine,
Proudly turns he round and kindly,
“All of this is mine and thine”.
Here he lives in state and bounty,
Lord of Burleigh, fair and free,
Not a lord in all the county
Is so great a lord as he.
All at once the colour flushes
Her sweet face from brow to chin:
As it were with shame she blushes,
And her spirit changed within.
Then her countenance all over
Pale again as death did prove:
But he clasp’d her like a lover,
And he cheer’d her soul with love.
So she strove against her weakness,
Tho’ at times her spirits sank:
Shaped her heart with woman’s meekness
To all duties of her rank:
And a gentle consort made he,
And her gentle mind was such
That she grew a noble lady,
And the people loved her much.
But a trouble weigh’d upon her,
And perplex’d her, night and morn,
With the burthen of an honour
Unto which she was not born.
Faint she grew, and ever fainter,
As she murmur’d “Oh, that he
Were once more that landscape-painter
Which did win my heart from me!”
So she droop’d and droop’d before him,
Fading slowly from his side:
Three fair children first she bore him,
Then before her time she died.
Weeping, weeping late and early,
Walking up and pacing down,
Deeply mourn’d the Lord of Burleigh,
Burleigh-house by Stamford-town.
And he came to look upon her,
And he look’d at her and said,
“Bring the dress and put it on her,
That she wore when she was wed”.
Then her people, softly treading,
Bore to earth her body, drest
In the dress that she was wed in,
That her spirit might have rest.
Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere
a fragment
First published in 1842. Not altered since 1853.
See for what may have given the hint for this fragment _Morte
D’Arthur_, bk. xix., ch. i., and bk. xx., ch. i., and _cf. Coming of
Arthur_:—
And Launcelot pass’d away among the flowers,
For then was latter April, and return’d
Among the flowers in May with Guinevere.
Like souls that balance joy and pain,
With tears and smiles from heaven again
The maiden Spring upon the plain
Came in a sun-lit fall of rain.
In crystal vapour everywhere
Blue isles of heaven laugh’d between,
And, far in forest-deeps unseen,
The topmost elm-tree[1] gather’d green
From draughts of balmy air.
Sometimes the linnet piped his song:
Sometimes the throstle whistled strong:
Sometimes the sparhawk, wheel’d along,
Hush’d all the groves from fear of wrong:
By grassy capes with fuller sound
In curves the yellowing river ran,
And drooping chestnut-buds began
To spread into the perfect fan,
Above the teeming ground.
Then, in the boyhood of the year,
Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere
Rode thro’ the coverts of the deer,
With blissful treble ringing clear.
She seem’d a part of joyous Spring:
A gown of grass-green silk she wore,
Buckled with golden clasps before;
A light-green tuft of plumes she bore
Closed in a golden ring.
Now on some twisted ivy-net,
Now by some tinkling rivulet,
In mosses mixt[2] with violet
Her cream-white mule his pastern set:
And fleeter now[3] she skimm’d the plains
Than she whose elfin prancer springs
By night to eery warblings,
When all the glimmering moorland rings
With jingling bridle-reins.
As she fled fast thro’ sun and shade,
The happy winds upon her play’d,
Blowing the ringlet from the braid:
She look’d so lovely, as she sway’d
The rein with dainty finger-tips,
A man had given all other bliss,
And all his worldly worth for this,
To waste his whole heart in one kiss
Upon her perfect lips.
[1] Up to 1848. Linden.
[2] All editions up to and including 1850. On mosses thick.
[3] 1842 to 1851. And now more fleet,
A Farewell
First published in 1842. Not altered since 1843.
This poem was dedicated to the brook at Somersby described in the _Ode
to Memory_ and referred to so often in _In Memoriam_. Possibly it may
have been written in 1837 when the Tennysons left Somersby. _Cf. In
Memoriam_, sect. ci.
Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea,
Thy tribute wave deliver:
No more by thee my steps shall be,
For ever and for ever.
Flow, softly flow, by lawn and lea,
A rivulet then a river:
No where by thee my steps shall be,
For ever and for ever.
But here will sigh thine alder tree,
And here thine aspen shiver;
And here by thee will hum the bee,
For ever and for ever.
A thousand suns[1] will stream on thee,
A thousand moons will quiver;
But not by thee my steps shall be,
For ever and for ever.
[1] 1842. A hundred suns
The Beggar Maid
First published in 1842, not altered since.
Suggested probably by the fine ballad in Percy’s _Reliques_, first
series, book ii., ballad vi.
Her arms across her breast she laid;
She was more fair than words can say:
Bare-footed came the beggar maid
Before the king Cophetua.
In robe and crown the king stept down,
To meet and greet her on her way;
“It is no wonder,” said the lords,
“She is more beautiful than day”.
As shines the moon in clouded skies,
She in her poor attire was seen:
One praised her ancles, one her eyes,
One her dark hair and lovesome mien:
So sweet a face, such angel grace,
In all that land had never been:
Cophetua sware a royal oath:
“This beggar maid shall be my queen!”
The Vision of Sin
First published in 1842. No alteration made in it after 1851, except in
the insertion of a couplet afterwards omitted.
This remarkable poem may be regarded as a sort of companion poem to
_The Palace of Art_; the one traces the effect of callous indulgence in
mere intellectual and æsthetic pleasures, the other of profligate
indulgence in the grosser forms of sensual enjoyment. At first all is
ecstasy and intoxication, then comes satiety, and all that satiety
brings in its train, cynicism, pessimism, the drying up of the very
springs of life. “The body chilled, jaded and ruined, the cup of
pleasure drained to the dregs, the senses exhausted of their power to
enjoy, the spirit of its wish to aspire, nothing left but loathing,
craving and rottenness.” See Spedding in _Edinburgh Review_ for April,
1843. The poem concludes by leaving as an answer to the awful question,
“can there be final salvation for the poor wretch?” a reply
undecipherable by man, and dawn breaking in angry splendour. The best
commentary on the poem would be Byron’s lyric: “There’s not a joy the
world can give like that it takes away,” and _Don Juan_, biography and
daily life are indeed full of comments on the truth of this fine
allegory.
1
I had a vision when the night was late:
A youth came riding toward a palace-gate.
He rode a horse with wings, that would have flown,[1]
But that his heavy rider kept him down.
And from the palace came a child of sin,
And took him by the curls, and led him in,
Where sat a company with heated eyes,
Expecting when a fountain should arise:
A sleepy light upon their brows and lips—
As when the sun, a crescent of eclipse,
Dreams over lake and lawn, and isles and capes—
Suffused them, sitting, lying, languid shapes,
By heaps of gourds, and skins of wine, and piles of grapes.
2
Then methought I heard a mellow sound,
Gathering up from all the lower ground;[2]
Narrowing in to where they sat assembled
Low voluptuous music winding trembled,
Wov’n in circles: they that heard it sigh’d,
Panted hand in hand with faces pale,
Swung themselves, and in low tones replied;
Till the fountain spouted, showering wide
Sleet of diamond-drift and pearly hail;
Then the music touch’d the gates and died;
Rose again from where it seem’d to fail,
Storm’d in orbs of song, a growing gale;
Till thronging in and in, to where they waited,
As ’twere a hundred-throated nightingale,
The strong tempestuous treble throbb’d and palpitated;
Ran into its giddiest whirl of sound,
Caught the sparkles, and in circles,
Purple gauzes, golden hazes, liquid mazes,
Flung the torrent rainbow round:
Then they started from their places,
Moved with violence, changed in hue,
Caught each other with wild grimaces,
Half-invisible to the view,
Wheeling with precipitate paces
To the melody, till they flew,
Hair, and eyes, and limbs, and faces,
Twisted hard in fierce embraces,
Like to Furies, like to Graces,
Dash’d together in blinding dew:
Till, kill’d with some luxurious agony,
The nerve-dissolving melody
Flutter’d headlong from the sky.
3
And then I look’d up toward a mountain-tract,
That girt the region with high cliff and lawn:
I saw that every morning, far withdrawn
Beyond the darkness and the cataract,
God made himself an awful rose of dawn,[3]
Unheeded: and detaching, fold by fold,
From those still heights, and, slowly drawing near,
A vapour heavy, hueless, formless, cold,
Came floating on for many a month and year,
Unheeded: and I thought I would have spoken,
And warn’d that madman ere it grew too late:
But, as in dreams, I could not. Mine was broken,
When that cold vapour touch’d the palace-gate,
And link’d again. I saw within my head
A gray and gap-tooth’d man as lean as death,
Who slowly rode across a wither’d heath,
And lighted at a ruin’d inn, and said:
4
“Wrinkled ostler, grim and thin!
Here is custom come your way;
Take my brute, and lead him in,
Stuff his ribs with mouldy hay.
“Bitter barmaid, waning fast!
See that sheets are on my bed;
What! the flower of life is past:
It is long before you wed.
“Slip-shod waiter, lank and sour,
At the Dragon on the heath!
Let us have a quiet hour,
Let us hob-and-nob with Death.
“I am old, but let me drink;
Bring me spices, bring me wine;
I remember, when I think,
That my youth was half divine.
“Wine is good for shrivell’d lips,
When a blanket wraps the day,
When the rotten woodland drips,
And the leaf is stamp’d in clay.
“Sit thee down, and have no shame,
Cheek by jowl, and knee by knee:
What care I for any name?
What for order or degree?
“Let me screw thee up a peg:
Let me loose thy tongue with wine:
Callest thou that thing a leg?
Which is thinnest? thine or mine?
“Thou shalt not be saved by works:
Thou hast been a sinner too:
Ruin’d trunks on wither’d forks,
Empty scarecrows, I and you!
“Fill the cup, and fill the can:
Have a rouse before the morn:
Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one is born.[4]
“We are men of ruin’d blood;
Therefore comes it we are wise.
Fish are we that love the mud.
Rising to no fancy-flies.
“Name and fame! to fly sublime
Thro’ the courts, the camps, the schools,
Is to be the ball of Time,
Bandied by the hands of fools.
“Friendship!—to be two in one—
Let the canting liar pack!
Well I know, when I am gone,
How she mouths behind my back.
“Virtue!—to be good and just—
Every heart, when sifted well,
Is a clot of warmer dust,
Mix’d with cunning sparks of hell.
“O! we two as well can look
Whited thought and cleanly life
As the priest, above his book
Leering at his neighbour’s wife.
“Fill the cup, and fill the can:
Have a rouse before the morn:
Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one is born.[4]
“Drink, and let the parties rave:
They are fill’d with idle spleen;
Rising, falling, like a wave,
For they know not what they mean.
“He that roars for liberty
Faster binds a tyrant’s[5] power;
And the tyrant’s cruel glee
Forces on the freer hour.
“Fill the can, and fill the cup:
All the windy ways of men
Are but dust that rises up,
And is lightly laid again.
“Greet her with applausive breath,
Freedom, gaily doth she tread;
In her right a civic wreath,
In her left a human head.
“No, I love not what is new;
She is of an ancient house:
And I think we know the hue
Of that cap upon her brows.
“Let her go! her thirst she slakes
Where the bloody conduit runs:
Then her sweetest meal she makes
On the first-born of her sons.
“Drink to lofty hopes that cool—
Visions of a perfect State:
Drink we, last, the public fool,
Frantic love and frantic hate.
“Chant me now some wicked stave,
Till thy drooping courage rise,
And the glow-worm of the grave
Glimmer in thy rheumy eyes.
“Fear not thou to loose thy tongue;
Set thy hoary fancies free;
What is loathsome to the young
Savours well to thee and me.
“Change, reverting to the years,
When thy nerves could understand
What there is in loving tears,
And the warmth of hand in hand.
“Tell me tales of thy first love—
April hopes, the fools of chance;
Till the graves begin to move,
And the dead begin to dance.
“Fill the can, and fill the cup:
All the windy ways of men
Are but dust that rises up,
And is lightly laid again.
“Trooping from their mouldy dens
The chap-fallen circle spreads:
Welcome, fellow-citizens,
Hollow hearts and empty heads!
“You are bones, and what of that?
Every face, however full,
Padded round with flesh and fat,
Is but modell’d on a skull.
“Death is king, and Vivat Rex!
Tread a measure on the stones,
Madam—if I know your sex,
From the fashion of your bones.
“No, I cannot praise the fire
In your eye—nor yet your lip:
All the more do I admire
Joints of cunning workmanship.
“Lo! God’s likeness—the ground-plan—
Neither modell’d, glazed, or framed:
Buss me thou rough sketch of man,
Far too naked to be shamed!
“Drink to Fortune, drink to Chance,
While we keep a little breath!
Drink to heavy Ignorance!
Hob-and-nob with brother Death!
“Thou art mazed, the night is long,
And the longer night is near:
What! I am not all as wrong
As a bitter jest is dear.
“Youthful hopes, by scores, to all,
When the locks are crisp and curl’d;
Unto me my maudlin gall
And my mockeries of the world.
“Fill the cup, and fill the can!
Mingle madness, mingle scorn!
Dregs of life, and lees of man:
Yet we will not die forlorn.”
5
The voice grew faint: there came a further change:
Once more uprose the mystic mountain-range:
Below were men and horses pierced with worms,
And slowly quickening into lower forms;
By shards and scurf of salt, and scum of dross,
Old plash of rains, and refuse patch’d with moss,
Then some one spake[6]: “Behold! it was a crime
Of sense avenged by sense that wore with time”.
[7]Another said: “The crime of sense became
The crime of malice, and is equal blame”.
And one: “He had not wholly quench’d his power;
A little grain of conscience made him sour”.
At last I heard a voice upon the slope
Cry to the summit, “Is there any hope?”
To which an answer peal’d from that high land.
But in a tongue no man could understand;
And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn
God made Himself an awful rose of dawn.[8]
[1] A reference to the famous passage in the _Phoedrus_ where Plato
compares the soul to a chariot drawn by the two-winged steeds.
[2] Imitated apparently from the dance in Shelley’s _Triumph of
Life_:—
The wild dance maddens in the van; and those
...
Mix with each other in tempestuous measure
To savage music, wilder as it grows.
They, tortur’d by their agonising pleasure,
Convuls’d, and on the rapid whirlwinds spun
...
Maidens and youths fling their wild arms in air.
As their feet twinkle, etc.
[3] See footnote to last line.
[4]
All up to and including 1850 read:—
Every _minute_ dies a man,
Every _minute_ one is born.
Mr. Babbage, the famous mathematician, is said to have addressed the
following letter to Tennyson in reference to this couplet:—
“I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to
keep the sum total of the world’s population in a state of perpetual
equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is
constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of
suggesting that, in the next edition of your excellent poem, the
erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows:—
Every moment dies a man,
And one and a sixteenth is born.
I may add that the exact figures are 1.167, but something must, of
course, be conceded to the laws of metre.”
[5] 1842 and 1843. The tyrant’s.
[6] 1842. Said.
[7] In the Selection published in 1865 Tennyson here inserted a
couplet which he afterwards omitted:—
Another answer’d: “But a crime of sense!”
“Give him new nerves with old experience.”
[8] In Professor Tyndall’s reminiscences of Tennyson, inserted in
Tennyson’s _Life_, he says he once asked him for some explanation of
this line, and the poet’s reply was:
“The power of explaining such concentrated expressions of the
imagination was very different from that of writing them”.
And on another occasion he said very happily:
“Poetry is like shot silk with many glancing colours. Every reader must
find his own interpretation, according to his ability, and according to
his sympathy with the poet”.
Poetry in its essential forms always suggests infinitely more than it
expresses, and at once inspires and kindles the intelligence which is
to comprehend it; if that intelligence, which is perhaps only another
name for sympathy, does not exist, then, in Byron’s happy sarcasm:—
“The gentle readers wax unkind,
And, not so studious for the poet’s ease,
Insist on knowing what he _means_, a hard
And hapless situation for a bard”.
Possibly Tennyson may have had in his mind Keats’s line:—
“There was an awful rainbow once in heaven”
Come not, when I am dead...
First published in _The Keepsake_ for 1851.
Come not, when I am dead,
To drop thy foolish tears upon my grave,
To trample round my fallen head,
And vex the unhappy dust thou wouldst not save.
There let the wind sweep and the plover cry;
But thou, go by.[1]
Child, if it were thine error or thy crime
I care no longer, being all unblest:
Wed whom thou wilt, but I am sick of Time,[2]
And I desire to rest.
Pass on, weak heart, and leave me where I lie:
Go by, go by.
[1] _The Keepsake_:—But go thou by.
[2] _The Keepsake_ has a small _t_ for Time.
The Eagle
(fragment)
First published in 1851. It has not been altered.
He clasps the crag with hooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;[1]
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
[1] One of Tennyson’s most magically descriptive lines; nothing could
exceed the vividness of the words “wrinkled” and “crawls” here.
Move eastward, happy earth...
First published in 1842.
Move eastward, happy earth, and leave
Yon orange sunset waning slow:
From fringes of the faded eve,
O, happy planet, eastward go;
Till over thy dark shoulder glow
Thy silver sister-world, and rise
To glass herself in dewy eyes
That watch me from the glen below.
Ah, bear me with thee, smoothly[1] borne,
Dip forward under starry light,
And move me to my marriage-morn,
And round again to happy night.
[1] 1842 to 1853. Lightly.
Break, break, break...
First published in 1842. No alteration.
This exquisite poem was composed in a very different scene from that to
which it refers, namely in “a Lincolnshire lane at five o’clock in the
morning between blossoming hedges”. See _Life of Tennyson_, vol. i., p.
223.
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
O well for the fisherman’s boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!
Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.
The Poet’s Song
First published in 1842.
The rain had fallen, the Poet arose,
He pass’d by the town and out of the street,
A light wind blew from the gates of the sun,
And waves of shadow went over the wheat,
And he sat him down in a lonely place,
And chanted a melody loud and sweet,
That made the wild-swan pause in her cloud,
And the lark drop down at his feet.
The swallow stopt as he hunted the bee,[1]
The snake slipt under a spray,
The wild hawk stood with the down on his beak,
And stared, with his foot on the prey,
And the nightingale thought, “I have sung many songs,
But never a one so gay,
For he sings of what the world will be
When the years have died away”.
[1] 1889, Fly.
Appendix
The Poems published in MDCCCXXX and in MDCCCXXXIII which were
temporarily or finally suppressed.
Poems published in MDCCCXXX
Elegiacs
Reprinted in _Collected Works_ among _Juvenilia_, with title altered to
_Leonine Elegiacs_. The only alterations made in the text were
“wood-dove” for “turtle,” and the substitution of “or” for “and” in the
last line but one.
Lowflowing breezes are roaming the broad valley dimm’d in the gloaming:
Thoro’ the black-stemm’d pines only the far river shines.
Creeping thro’ blossomy rushes and bowers of rose-blowing bushes,
Down by the poplar tall rivulets babble and fall.
Barketh the shepherd-dog cheerily; the grasshopper carolleth clearly;
Deeply the turtle coos; shrilly the owlet halloos;
Winds creep; dews fell chilly: in her first sleep earth breathes
stilly:
Over the pools in the burn watergnats murmur and mourn.
Sadly the far kine loweth: the glimmering water outfloweth:
Twin peaks shadow’d with pine slope to the dark hyaline.
Lowthroned Hesper is stayed between the two peaks; but the Naiad
Throbbing in mild unrest holds him beneath in her breast.
The ancient poetess singeth, that Hesperus all things bringeth,
Smoothing the wearied mind: bring me my love, Rosalind.
Thou comest morning and even; she cometh not morning or even.
False-eyed Hesper, unkind, where is my sweet Rosalind?
The “How” and the “Why”
I am any man’s suitor,
If any will be my tutor:
Some say this life is pleasant,
Some think it speedeth fast:
In time there is no present,
In eternity no future,
In eternity no past.
We laugh, we cry, we are born, we die,
Who will riddle me the _how_ and the _why_?
The bulrush nods unto its brother,
The wheatears whisper to each other:
What is it they say? What do they there?
Why two and two make four? Why round is not square?
Why the rocks stand still, and the light clouds fly?
Why the heavy oak groans, and the white willows sigh?
Why deep is not high, and high is not deep?
Whether we wake, or whether we sleep?
Whether we sleep, or whether we die?
How you are you? Why I am I?
Who will riddle me the _how_ and the _why_?
The world is somewhat; it goes on somehow;
But what is the meaning of _then_ and _now_?
I feel there is something; but how and what?
I know there is somewhat; but what and why?
I cannot tell if that somewhat be I.
The little bird pipeth, “why? why?”
In the summerwoods when the sun falls low
And the great bird sits on the opposite bough,
And stares in his face and shouts, “how? how?”
And the black owl scuds down the mellow twilight,
And chaunts, “how? how?” the whole of the night.
Why the life goes when the blood is spilt?
What the life is? where the soul may lie?
Why a church is with a steeple built;
And a house with a chimneypot?
Who will riddle me the how and the what?
Who will riddle me the what and the why?
Supposed Confessions...
of a second-rate sensitive mind not in unity with itself.
There has been only one important alteration made in this poem, when it
was reprinted among the _Juvenilia_ in 1871, and that was the
suppression of the verses beginning “A grief not uninformed and dull”
to “Indued with immortality” inclusive, and the substitution of “rosy”
for “waxen”. Capitals are in all cases inserted in the reprint where
the Deity is referred to, “through” is altered into “thro’” all through
the poem, and hyphens are inserted in the double epithets. No further
alterations were made in the edition of 1830.
Oh God! my God! have mercy now.
I faint, I fall. Men say that thou
Didst die for me, for such as _me_,
Patient of ill, and death, and scorn,
And that my sin was as a thorn
Among the thorns that girt thy brow,
Wounding thy soul.—That even now,
In this extremest misery
Of ignorance, I should require
A sign! and if a bolt of fire
Would rive the slumbrous summernoon
While I do pray to thee alone,
Think my belief would stronger grow!
Is not my human pride brought low?
The boastings of my spirit still?
The joy I had in my freewill
All cold, and dead, and corpse-like grown?
And what is left to me, but thou,
And faith in thee? Men pass me by;
Christians with happy countenances—
And children all seem full of thee!
And women smile with saint-like glances
Like thine own mother’s when she bow’d
Above thee, on that happy morn
When angels spake to men aloud,
And thou and peace to earth were born.
Goodwill to me as well as all—
I one of them: my brothers they:
Brothers in Christ—a world of peace
And confidence, day after day;
And trust and hope till things should cease,
And then one Heaven receive us all.
How sweet to have a common faith!
To hold a common scorn of death!
And at a burial to hear
The creaking cords which wound and eat
Into my human heart, whene’er
Earth goes to earth, with grief, not fear,
With hopeful grief, were passing sweet!
A grief not uninformed, and dull
Hearted with hope, of hope as full
As is the blood with life, or night
And a dark cloud with rich moonlight.
To stand beside a grave, and see
The red small atoms wherewith we
Are built, and smile in calm, and say—
“These little moles and graves shall be
Clothed on with immortality
More glorious than the noon of day—
All that is pass’d into the flowers
And into beasts and other men,
And all the Norland whirlwind showers
From open vaults, and all the sea
O’er washes with sharp salts, again
Shall fleet together all, and be
Indued with immortality.”
Thrice happy state again to be
The trustful infant on the knee!
Who lets his waxen fingers play
About his mother’s neck, and knows
Nothing beyond his mother’s eyes.
They comfort him by night and day;
They light his little life alway;
He hath no thought of coming woes;
He hath no care of life or death,
Scarce outward signs of joy arise,
Because the Spirit of happiness
And perfect rest so inward is;
And loveth so his innocent heart,
Her temple and her place of birth,
Where she would ever wish to dwell,
Life of the fountain there, beneath
Its salient springs, and far apart,
Hating to wander out on earth,
Or breathe into the hollow air,
Whose dullness would make visible
Her subtil, warm, and golden breath,
Which mixing with the infant’s blood,
Fullfills him with beatitude.
Oh! sure it is a special care
Of God, to fortify from doubt,
To arm in proof, and guard about
With triple-mailed trust, and clear
Delight, the infant’s dawning year.
Would that my gloomed fancy were
As thine, my mother, when with brows
Propped on thy knees, my hands upheld
In thine, I listen’d to thy vows,
For me outpour’d in holiest prayer—
For me unworthy!—and beheld
Thy mild deep eyes upraised, that knew
The beauty and repose of faith,
And the clear spirit shining through.
Oh! wherefore do we grow awry
From roots which strike so deep? why dare
Paths in the desert? Could not I
Bow myself down, where thou hast knelt,
To th’ earth—until the ice would melt
Here, and I feel as thou hast felt?
What Devil had the heart to scathe
Flowers thou hadst rear’d—to brush the dew
From thine own lily, when thy grave
Was deep, my mother, in the clay?
Myself? Is it thus? Myself? Had I
So little love for thee? But why
Prevail’d not thy pure prayers? Why pray
To one who heeds not, who can save
But will not? Great in faith, and strong
Against the grief of circumstance
Wert thou, and yet unheard. What if
Thou pleadest still, and seest me drive
Thro’ utter dark a fullsailed skiff,
Unpiloted i’ the echoing dance
Of reboant whirlwinds, stooping low
Unto the death, not sunk! I know
At matins and at evensong,
That thou, if thou were yet alive,
In deep and daily prayers wouldst strive
To reconcile me with thy God.
Albeit, my hope is gray, and cold
At heart, thou wouldest murmur still—
“Bring this lamb back into thy fold,
My Lord, if so it be thy will”.
Wouldst tell me I must brook the rod,
And chastisement of human pride;
That pride, the sin of devils, stood
Betwixt me and the light of God!
That hitherto I had defied
And had rejected God—that grace
Would drop from his o’erbrimming love,
As manna on my wilderness,
If I would pray—that God would move
And strike the hard hard rock, and thence,
Sweet in their utmost bitterness,
Would issue tears of penitence
Which would keep green hope’s life. Alas!
I think that pride hath now no place
Nor sojourn in me. I am void,
Dark, formless, utterly destroyed.
Why not believe then? Why not yet
Anchor thy frailty there, where man
Hath moor’d and rested? Ask the sea
At midnight, when the crisp slope waves
After a tempest, rib and fret
The broadimbasèd beach, why he
Slumbers not like a mountain tarn?
Wherefore his ridges are not curls
And ripples of an inland mere?
Wherefore he moaneth thus, nor can
Draw down into his vexed pools
All that blue heaven which hues and paves
The other? I am too forlorn,
Too shaken: my own weakness fools
My judgment, and my spirit whirls,
Moved from beneath with doubt and fear.
“Yet” said I, in my morn of youth,
The unsunned freshness of my strength,
When I went forth in quest of truth,
“It is man’s privilege to doubt,
If so be that from doubt at length,
Truth may stand forth unmoved of change,
An image with profulgent brows,
And perfect limbs, as from the storm
Of running fires and fluid range
Of lawless airs, at last stood out
This excellence and solid form
Of constant beauty. For the Ox
Feeds in the herb, and sleeps, or fills
The horned valleys all about,
And hollows of the fringed hills
In summerheats, with placid lows
Unfearing, till his own blood flows
About his hoof. And in the flocks
The lamb rejoiceth in the year,
And raceth freely with his fere,
And answers to his mother’s calls
From the flower’d furrow. In a time,
Of which he wots not, run short pains
Through his warm heart; and then, from whence
He knows not, on his light there falls
A shadow; and his native slope,
Where he was wont to leap and climb,
Floats from his sick and filmed eyes,
And something in the darkness draws
His forehead earthward, and he dies.
Shall man live thus, in joy and hope
As a young lamb, who cannot dream,
Living, but that he shall live on?
Shall we not look into the laws
Of life and death, and things that seem,
And things that be, and analyse
Our double nature, and compare
All creeds till we have found the one,
If one there be?” Ay me! I fear
All may not doubt, but everywhere
Some must clasp Idols. Yet, my God,
Whom call I Idol? Let thy dove
Shadow me over, and my sins
Be unremembered, and thy love
Enlighten me. Oh teach me yet
Somewhat before the heavy clod
Weighs on me, and the busy fret
Of that sharpheaded worm begins
In the gross blackness underneath.
O weary life! O weary death!
O spirit and heart made desolate!
O damnèd vacillating state!
The Burial of Love
His eyes in eclipse,
Pale cold his lips,
The light of his hopes unfed,
Mute his tongue,
His bow unstrung
With the tears he hath shed,
Backward drooping his graceful head,
Love is dead;
His last arrow is sped;
He hath not another dart;
Go—carry him to his dark deathbed;
Bury him in the cold, cold heart—
Love is dead.
Oh, truest love! art thou forlorn,
And unrevenged? thy pleasant wiles
Forgotten, and thine innocent joy?
Shall hollowhearted apathy,
The cruellest form of perfect scorn,
With languor of most hateful smiles,
For ever write
In the withered light
Of the tearless eye,
An epitaph that all may spy?
No! sooner she herself shall die.
For her the showers shall not fall,
Nor the round sun that shineth to all;
Her light shall into darkness change;
For her the green grass shall not spring,
Nor the rivers flow, nor the sweet birds sing,
Till Love have his full revenge.
To——
Sainted Juliet! dearest name!
If to love be life alone,
Divinest Juliet,
I love thee, and live; and yet
Love unreturned is like the fragrant flame
Folding the slaughter of the sacrifice
Offered to gods upon an altarthrone;
My heart is lighted at thine eyes,
Changed into fire, and blown about with sighs.
Song—“I’ the glooming light...”
I
I’ the glooming light
Of middle night
So cold and white,
Worn Sorrow sits by the moaning wave;
Beside her are laid
Her mattock and spade,
For she hath half delved her own deep grave.
Alone she is there:
The white clouds drizzle: her hair falls loose;
Her shoulders are bare;
Her tears are mixed with the bearded dews.
II
Death standeth by;
She will not die;
With glazed eye
She looks at her grave: she cannot sleep;
Ever alone
She maketh her moan:
She cannot speak; she can only weep;
For she will not hope.
The thick snow falls on her flake by flake,
The dull wave mourns down the slope,
The world will not change, and her heart will not break.
Song—“The lintwhite and the throstlecock...”
I
The lintwhite and the throstlecock
Have voices sweet and clear;
All in the bloomed May.
They from the blosmy brere
Call to the fleeting year,
If that he would them hear
And stay. Alas! that one so beautiful
Should have so dull an ear.
II
Fair year, fair year, thy children call,
But thou art deaf as death;
All in the bloomèd May.
When thy light perisheth
That from thee issueth,
Our life evanisheth: Oh! stay.
Alas! that lips so cruel-dumb
Should have so sweet a breath!
III
Fair year, with brows of royal love
Thou comest, as a king,
All in the bloomèd May.
Thy golden largess fling,
And longer hear us sing;
Though thou art fleet of wing,
Yet stay. Alas! that eyes so full of light
Should be so wandering!
IV
Thy locks are all of sunny sheen
In rings of gold yronne,[1]
All in the bloomèd May,
We pri’thee pass not on;
If thou dost leave the sun,
Delight is with thee gone, Oh! stay.
Thou art the fairest of thy feres,
We pri’thee pass not on.
[1] His crispè hair in ringis was yronne.— Chaucer, _Knight’s Tale_.
(Tennyson’s note.)
Song—“Every day hath its night...”
I
Every day hath its night:
Every night its morn:
Thorough dark and bright
Wingèd hours are borne;
Ah! welaway!
Seasons flower and fade;
Golden calm and storm
Mingle day by day.
There is no bright form
Doth not cast a shade—
Ah! welaway!
II
When we laugh, and our mirth
Apes the happy vein,
We’re so kin to earth,
Pleasaunce fathers pain—
Ah! welaway!
Madness laugheth loud:
Laughter bringeth tears:
Eyes are worn away
Till the end of fears
Cometh in the shroud,
Ah! welaway!
III
All is change, woe or weal;
Joy is Sorrow’s brother;
Grief and gladness steal
Symbols of each other;
Ah! welaway!
Larks in heaven’s cope
Sing: the culvers mourn
All the livelong day.
Be not all forlorn;
Let us weep, in hope—
Ah! welaway!
Nothing Will Die
Reprinted without any important alteration among the _Juvenilia_ in
1871 and onward. No change made except that “through” is spelt “thro’,”
and in the last line “and” is substituted for “all”.
When will the stream be aweary of flowing
Under my eye?
When will the wind be aweary of blowing
Over the sky?
When will the clouds be aweary of fleeting?
When will the heart be aweary of beating?
And nature die?
Never, oh! never, nothing will die?
The stream flows,
The wind blows,
The cloud fleets,
The heart beats,
Nothing will die.
Nothing will die;
All things will change
Through eternity.
’Tis the world’s winter;
Autumn and summer
Are gone long ago;
Earth is dry to the centre,
But spring, a new comer,
A spring rich and strange,
Shall make the winds blow
Round and round,
Through and through,
Here and there,
Till the air
And the ground
Shall be filled with life anew.
The world was never made;
It will change, but it will not fade.
So let the wind range;
For even and morn
Ever will be
Through eternity.
Nothing was born;
Nothing will die;
All things will change.
All Things Will Die
Reprinted among _Juvenilia_ in 1872 and onward, without alteration.
Clearly the blue river chimes in its flowing
Under my eye;
Warmly and broadly the south winds are blowing
Over the sky.
One after another the white clouds are fleeting;
Every heart this May morning in joyance is beating
Full merrily;
Yet all things must die.
The stream will cease to flow;
The wind will cease to blow;
The clouds will cease to fleet;
The heart will cease to beat;
For all things must die.
All things must die.
Spring will come never more.
Oh! vanity!
Death waits at the door.
See! our friends are all forsaking
The wine and the merrymaking.
We are called—we must go.
Laid low, very low,
In the dark we must lie.
The merry glees are still;
The voice of the bird
Shall no more be heard,
Nor the wind on the hill.
Oh! misery!
Hark! death is calling
While I speak to ye,
The jaw is falling,
The red cheek paling,
The strong limbs failing;
Ice with the warm blood mixing;
The eyeballs fixing.
Nine times goes the passing bell:
Ye merry souls, farewell.
The old earth
Had a birth,
As all men know,
Long ago.
And the old earth must die.
So let the warm winds range,
And the blue wave beat the shore;
For even and morn
Ye will never see
Through eternity.
All things were born.
Ye will come never more,
For all things must die.
Hero to Leander
Oh go not yet, my love,
The night is dark and vast;
The white moon is hid in her heaven above,
And the waves climb high and fast.
Oh! kiss me, kiss me, once again,
Lest thy kiss should be the last.
Oh kiss me ere we part;
Grow closer to my heart.
My heart is warmer surely than the bosom of the main.
Oh joy! O bliss of blisses!
My heart of hearts art thou.
Come bathe me with thy kisses,
My eyelids and my brow.
Hark how the wild rain hisses,
And the loud sea roars below.
Thy heart beats through thy rosy limbs
So gladly doth it stir;
Thine eye in drops of gladness swims.
I have bathed thee with the pleasant myrrh;
Thy locks are dripping balm;
Thou shalt not wander hence to-night,
I’ll stay thee with my kisses.
To-night the roaring brine
Will rend thy golden tresses;
The ocean with the morrow light
Will be both blue and calm;
And the billow will embrace thee with a kiss as soft as mine.
No western odours wander
On the black and moaning sea,
And when thou art dead, Leander,
My soul must follow thee!
Oh go not yet, my love
Thy voice is sweet and low;
The deep salt wave breaks in above
Those marble steps below.
The turretstairs are wet
That lead into the sea.
Leander! go not yet.
The pleasant stars have set:
Oh! go not, go not yet,
Or I will follow thee.
The Mystic
Angels have talked with him, and showed him thrones:
Ye knew him not: he was not one of ye,
Ye scorned him with an undiscerning scorn;
Ye could not read the marvel in his eye,
The still serene abstraction; he hath felt
The vanities of after and before;
Albeit, his spirit and his secret heart
The stern experiences of converse lives,
The linked woes of many a fiery change
Had purified, and chastened, and made free.
Always there stood before him, night and day,
Of wayward vary colored circumstance,
The imperishable presences serene
Colossal, without form, or sense, or sound,
Dim shadows but unwaning presences
Fourfaced to four corners of the sky;
And yet again, three shadows, fronting one,
One forward, one respectant, three but one;
And yet again, again and evermore,
For the two first were not, but only seemed,
One shadow in the midst of a great light,
One reflex from eternity on time,
One mighty countenance of perfect calm,
Awful with most invariable eyes.
For him the silent congregated hours,
Daughters of time, divinely tall, beneath
Severe and youthful brows, with shining eyes
Smiling a godlike smile (the innocent light
Of earliest youth pierced through and through with all
Keen knowledges of low-embowed eld)
Upheld, and ever hold aloft the cloud
Which droops low hung on either gate of life,
Both birth and death; he in the centre fixt,
Saw far on each side through the grated gates
Most pale and clear and lovely distances.
He often lying broad awake, and yet
Remaining from the body, and apart
In intellect and power and will, hath heard
Time flowing in the middle of the night,
And all things creeping to a day of doom.
How could ye know him? Ye were yet within
The narrower circle; he had wellnigh reached
The last, with which a region of white flame,
Pure without heat, into a larger air
Upburning, and an ether of black blue,
Investeth and ingirds all other lives.
The Grasshopper
I
Voice of the summerwind,
Joy of the summerplain,
Life of the summerhours,
Carol clearly, bound along.
No Tithon thou as poets feign
(Shame fall ’em they are deaf and blind)
But an insect lithe and strong,
Bowing the seeded summerflowers.
Prove their falsehood and thy quarrel,
Vaulting on thine airy feet.
Clap thy shielded sides and carol,
Carol clearly, chirrup sweet.
Thou art a mailéd warrior in youth and strength complete;
Armed cap-a-pie,
Full fair to see;
Unknowing fear,
Undreading loss,
A gallant cavalier
_Sans peur et sans reproche,_
In sunlight and in shadow,
The Bayard of the meadow.
II
I would dwell with thee,
Merry grasshopper,
Thou art so glad and free,
And as light as air;
Thou hast no sorrow or tears,
Thou hast no compt of years,
No withered immortality,
But a short youth sunny and free.
Carol clearly, bound along,
Soon thy joy is over,
A summer of loud song,
And slumbers in the clover.
What hast thou to do with evil
In thine hour of love and revel,
In thy heat of summerpride,
Pushing the thick roots aside
Of the singing flowered grasses,
That brush thee with their silken tresses?
What hast thou to do with evil,
Shooting, singing, ever springing
In and out the emerald glooms,
Ever leaping, ever singing,
Lighting on the golden blooms?
Love, Pride and Forgetfulness
Ere yet my heart was sweet Love’s tomb,
Love laboured honey busily.
I was the hive and Love the bee,
My heart the honey-comb.
One very dark and chilly night
Pride came beneath and held a light.
The cruel vapours went through all,
Sweet Love was withered in his cell;
Pride took Love’s sweets, and by a spell,
Did change them into gall;
And Memory tho’ fed by Pride
Did wax so thin on gall,
Awhile she scarcely lived at all,
What marvel that she died?
Chorus: “The varied earth...”
In an unpublished drama written very early.
The varied earth, the moving heaven,
The rapid waste of roving sea,
The fountainpregnant mountains riven
To shapes of wildest anarchy,
By secret fire and midnight storms
That wander round their windy cones,
The subtle life, the countless forms
Of living things, the wondrous tones
Of man and beast are full of strange
Astonishment and boundless change.
The day, the diamonded light,
The echo, feeble child of sound,
The heavy thunder’s griding might,
The herald lightning’s starry bound,
The vocal spring of bursting bloom,
The naked summer’s glowing birth,
The troublous autumn’s sallow gloom,
The hoarhead winter paving earth
With sheeny white, are full of strange
Astonishment and boundless change.
Each sun which from the centre flings
Grand music and redundant fire,
The burning belts, the mighty rings,
The murmurous planets’ rolling choir,
The globefilled arch that, cleaving air,
Lost in its effulgence sleeps,
The lawless comets as they glare,
And thunder thro’ the sapphire deeps
In wayward strength, are full of strange
Astonishment and boundless change.
Lost Hope
You cast to ground the hope which once was mine,
But did the while your harsh decree deplore,
Embalming with sweet tears the vacant shrine,
My heart, where Hope had been and was no more.
So on an oaken sprout
A goodly acorn grew;
But winds from heaven shook the acorn out,
And filled the cup with dew.
The Tears of Heaven
Heaven weeps above the earth all night till morn,
In darkness weeps, as all ashamed to weep,
Because the earth hath made her state forlorn
With selfwrought evils of unnumbered years,
And doth the fruit of her dishonour reap.
And all the day heaven gathers back her tears
Into her own blue eyes so clear and deep,
And showering down the glory of lightsome day,
Smiles on the earth’s worn brow to win her if she may.
Love and Sorrow
O Maiden, fresher than the first green leaf
With which the fearful springtide flecks the lea,
Weep not, Almeida, that I said to thee
That thou hast half my heart, for bitter grief
Doth hold the other half in sovranty.
Thou art my heart’s sun in love’s crystalline:
Yet on both sides at once thou canst not shine:
Thine is the bright side of my heart, and thine
My heart’s day, but the shadow of my heart,
Issue of its own substance, my heart’s night
Thou canst not lighten even with _thy_ light,
All powerful in beauty as thou art.
Almeida, if my heart were substanceless,
Then might thy rays pass thro’ to the other side,
So swiftly, that they nowhere would abide,
But lose themselves in utter emptiness.
Half-light, half-shadow, let my spirit sleep;
They never learnt to love who never knew to weep.
To a Lady Sleeping
O Thou whose fringed lids I gaze upon,
Through whose dim brain the winged dreams are borne,
Unroof the shrines of clearest vision,
In honour of the silverflecked morn:
Long hath the white wave of the virgin light
Driven back the billow of the dreamful dark.
Thou all unwittingly prolongest night,
Though long ago listening the poised lark,
With eyes dropt downward through the blue serene,
Over heaven’s parapets the angels lean.
Sonnet—“Could I outwear my present state of woe...”
Could I outwear my present state of woe
With one brief winter, and indue i’ the spring
Hues of fresh youth, and mightily outgrow
The wan dark coil of faded suffering—
Forth in the pride of beauty issuing
A sheeny snake, the light of vernal bowers,
Moving his crest to all sweet plots of flowers
And watered vallies where the young birds sing;
Could I thus hope my lost delights renewing,
I straightly would commend the tears to creep
From my charged lids; but inwardly I weep:
Some vital heat as yet my heart is wooing:
This to itself hath drawn the frozen rain
From my cold eyes and melted it again.
Sonnet—“Though Night hath climbed her peak of highest noon...”
Though Night hath climbed her peak of highest noon,
And bitter blasts the screaming autumn whirl,
All night through archways of the bridged pearl
And portals of pure silver walks the moon.
Wake on, my soul, nor crouch to agony,
Turn cloud to light, and bitterness to joy,
And dross to gold with glorious alchemy,
Basing thy throne above the world’s annoy.
Reign thou above the storms of sorrow and ruth
That roar beneath; unshaken peace hath won thee:
So shalt thou pierce the woven glooms of truth;
So shall the blessing of the meek be on thee;
So in thine hour of dawn, the body’s youth,
An honourable old shall come upon thee.
Sonnet—“Shall the hag Evil die with child of Good...”
Shall the hag Evil die with child of Good,
Or propagate again her loathed kind,
Thronging the cells of the diseased mind,
Hateful with hanging cheeks, a withered brood,
Though hourly pastured on the salient blood?
Oh! that the wind which bloweth cold or heat
Would shatter and o’erbear the brazen beat
Of their broad vans, and in the solitude
Of middle space confound them, and blow back
Their wild cries down their cavernthroats, and slake
With points of blastborne hail their heated eyne!
So their wan limbs no more might come between
The moon and the moon’s reflex in the night;
Nor blot with floating shades the solar light.
Sonnet—“The pallid thunderstricken sigh for gain...”
The pallid thunderstricken sigh for gain,
Down an ideal stream they ever float,
And sailing on Pactolus in a boat,
Drown soul and sense, while wistfully they strain
Weak eyes upon the glistering sands that robe
The understream. The wise could he behold
Cathedralled caverns of thick-ribbed gold
And branching silvers of the central globe,
Would marvel from so beautiful a sight
How scorn and ruin, pain and hate could flow:
But Hatred in a gold cave sits below,
Pleached with her hair, in mail of argent light
Shot into gold, a snake her forehead clips
And skins the colour from her trembling lips.
Love
I
Thou, from the first, unborn, undying love,
Albeit we gaze not on thy glories near,
Before the face of God didst breathe and move,
Though night and pain and ruin and death reign here.
Thou foldest, like a golden atmosphere,
The very throne of the eternal God:
Passing through thee the edicts of his fear
Are mellowed into music, borne abroad
By the loud winds, though they uprend the sea,
Even from his central deeps: thine empery
Is over all: thou wilt not brook eclipse;
Thou goest and returnest to His Lips
Like lightning: thou dost ever brood above
The silence of all hearts, unutterable Love.
II
To know thee is all wisdom, and old age
Is but to know thee: dimly we behold thee
Athwart the veils of evil which enfold thee.
We beat upon our aching hearts with rage;
We cry for thee: we deem the world thy tomb.
As dwellers in lone planets look upon
The mighty disk of their majestic sun,
Hollowed in awful chasms of wheeling gloom,
Making their day dim, so we gaze on thee.
Come, thou of many crowns, white-robed love,
Oh! rend the veil in twain: all men adore thee;
Heaven crieth after thee; earth waileth for thee:
Breathe on thy winged throne, and it shall move
In music and in light o’er land and sea.
III
And now—methinks I gaze upon thee now,
As on a serpent in his agonies
Awestricken Indians; what time laid low
And crushing the thick fragrant reeds he lies,
When the new year warm breathed on the earth,
Waiting to light him with his purple skies,
Calls to him by the fountain to uprise.
Already with the pangs of a new birth
Strain the hot spheres of his convulsed eyes,
And in his writhings awful hues begin
To wander down his sable sheeny sides,
Like light on troubled waters: from within
Anon he rusheth forth with merry din,
And in him light and joy and strength abides;
And from his brows a crown of living light
Looks through the thickstemmed woods by day and night.
The Kraken
Reprinted without alteration, except in the spelling of “antient,”
among _Juvenilia_ in 1871 and onward.
Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His antient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber’d and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
English War Song
Who fears to die? Who fears to die?
Is there any here who fears to die
He shall find what he fears, and none shall grieve
For the man who fears to die;
But the withering scorn of the many shall cleave
To the man who fears to die.
_Chorus_.—
Shout for England!
Ho! for England!
George for England!
Merry England!
England for aye!
The hollow at heart shall crouch forlorn,
He shall eat the bread of common scorn;
It shall be steeped in the salt, salt tear,
Shall be steeped in his own salt tear:
Far better, far better he never were born
Than to shame merry England here.
_Chorus_.—Shout for England! etc.
There standeth our ancient enemy;
Hark! he shouteth—the ancient enemy!
On the ridge of the hill his banners rise;
They stream like fire in the skies;
Hold up the Lion of England on high
Till it dazzle and blind his eyes.
_Chorus_.—Shout for England! etc.
Come along! we alone of the earth are free;
The child in our cradles is bolder than he;
For where is the heart and strength of slaves?
Oh! where is the strength of slaves?
He is weak! we are strong; he a slave, we are free;
Come along! we will dig their graves.
_Chorus_.—Shout for England! etc.
There standeth our ancient enemy;
Will he dare to battle with the free?
Spur along! spur amain! charge to the fight:
Charge! charge to the fight!
Hold up the Lion of England on high!
Shout for God and our right!
_Chorus_.-Shout for England! etc.
National Song
There is no land like England
Where’er the light of day be;
There are no hearts like English hearts,
Such hearts of oak as they be.
There is no land like England
Where’er the light of day be;
There are no men like Englishmen,
So tall and bold as they be.
_Chorus_.
For the French the Pope may shrive ’em,
For the devil a whit we heed ’em,
As for the French, God speed ’em
Unto their hearts’ desire,
And the merry devil drive ’em
Through the water and the fire.
_Chorus_.
Our glory is our freedom,
We lord it o’er the sea;
We are the sons of freedom,
We are free.
There is no land like England,
Where’er the light of day be;
There are no wives like English wives,
So fair and chaste as they be.
There is no land like England,
Where’er the light of day be;
There are no maids like English maids,
So beautiful as they be.
_Chorus_.—For the French, etc.
Dualisms
Two bees within a chrystal flowerbell rocked
Hum a lovelay to the westwind at noontide.
Both alike, they buzz together,
Both alike, they hum together
Through and through the flowered heather.
Where in a creeping cove the wave unshocked
Lays itself calm and wide,
Over a stream two birds of glancing feather
Do woo each other, carolling together.
Both alike, they glide together
Side by side;
Both alike, they sing together,
Arching blue-glossed necks beneath the purple weather.
Two children lovelier than Love, adown the lea are singing,
As they gambol, lilygarlands ever stringing:
Both in blosmwhite silk are frockèd:
Like, unlike, they roam together
Under a summervault of golden weather;
Like, unlike, they sing together
Side by side,
Mid May’s darling goldenlockèd,
Summer’s tanling diamondeyed.
We are Free
The winds, as at their hour of birth,
Leaning upon the ridged sea,
Breathed low around the rolling earth
With mellow preludes, “We are Free”;
The streams through many a lilied row,
Down-carolling to the crispèd sea,
Low-tinkled with a bell-like flow
Atween the blossoms, “We are free”.
οἱ ῥέοντες
I
All thoughts, all creeds, all dreams are true,
All visions wild and strange;
Man is the measure of all truth
Unto himself. All truth is change:
All men do walk in sleep, and all
Have faith in that they dream:
For all things are as they seem to all,
And all things flow like a stream.
II
There is no rest, no calm, no pause,
Nor good nor ill, nor light nor shade,
Nor essence nor eternal laws:
For nothing is, but all is made.
But if I dream that all these are,
They are to me for that I dream;
For all things are as they seem to all,
And all things flow like a stream.
Argal—This very opinion is only true relatively to the flowing
philosophers. (Tennyson’s note.)
Poems of MDCCCXXXIII
“Mine be the strength of spirit...”
Reprinted without any alteration, except that Power is spelt with a
small p, among the _Juvenilia_ in 1871 and onward.
Mine be the strength of spirit, full and free,
Like some broad river rushing down alone,
With the selfsame impulse wherewith he was thrown
From his loud fount upon the echoing lea:—
Which with increasing might doth forward flee
By town, and tower, and hill, and cape, and isle,
And in the middle of the green salt sea
Keeps his blue waters fresh for many a mile.
Mine be the Power which ever to its sway
Will win the wise at once, and by degrees
May into uncongenial spirits flow;
Even as the great gulfstream of Florida
Floats far away into the Northern Seas
The lavish growths of Southern Mexico.
To—— (“My life is full...”)
When this poem was republished among the _Juvenilia_ in 1871 several
alterations were made in it. For the first stanza was substituted the
following:—
My life is full of weary days,
But good things have not kept aloof,
Nor wander’d into other ways:
I have not lack’d thy mild reproof,
Nor golden largess of thy praise.
The second began “And now shake hands”. In the fourth stanza for
“sudden laughters” of the jay was substituted the felicitous “sudden
scritches,” and the sixth and seventh stanzas were suppressed.
I
All good things have not kept aloof
Nor wandered into other ways:
I have not lacked thy mild reproof,
Nor golden largess of thy praise.
But life is full of weary days.
II
Shake hands, my friend, across the brink
Of that deep grave to which I go:
Shake hands once more: I cannot sink
So far—far down, but I shall know
Thy voice, and answer from below.
III
When in the darkness over me
The fourhanded mole shall scrape,
Plant thou no dusky cypresstree,
Nor wreathe thy cap with doleful crape,
But pledge me in the flowing grape.
IV
And when the sappy field and wood
Grow green beneath the showery gray,
And rugged barks begin to bud,
And through damp holts newflushed with May,
Ring sudden laughters of the Jay,
V
Then let wise Nature work her will,
And on my clay her darnels grow;
Come only, when the days are still,
And at my headstone whisper low,
And tell me if the woodbines blow.
VI
If thou art blest, my mother’s smile
Undimmed, if bees are on the wing:
Then cease, my friend, a little while,
That I may hear the throstle sing
His bridal song, the boast of spring.
VII
Sweet as the noise in parchèd plains
Of bubbling wells that fret the stones,
(If any sense in me remains)
Thy words will be: thy cheerful tones
As welcome to my crumbling bones.
Buonoparte
Reprinted without any alteration among _Early Sonnets_ in 1872, and
unaltered since.
He thought to quell the stubborn hearts of oak,
Madman!—to chain with chains, and bind with bands
That island queen who sways the floods and lands
From Ind to Ind, but in fair daylight woke,
When from her wooden walls, lit by sure hands,
With thunders and with lightnings and with smoke,
Peal after peal, the British battle broke,
Lulling the brine against the Coptic sands.
We taught him lowlier moods, when Elsinore
Heard the war moan along the distant sea,
Rocking with shatter’d spars, with sudden fires
Flamed over: at Trafalgar yet once more
We taught him: late he learned humility
Perforce, like those whom Gideon school’d with briers.
Sonnet—“Oh, beauty, passing beauty!...”
I.
Oh, Beauty, passing beauty! sweetest Sweet!
How canst thou let me waste my youth in sighs?
I only ask to sit beside thy feet.
Thou knowest I dare not look into thine eyes,
Might I but kiss thy hand! I dare not fold
My arms about thee—scarcely dare to speak.
And nothing seems to me so wild and bold,
As with one kiss to touch thy blessed cheek.
Methinks if I should kiss thee, no control
Within the thrilling brain could keep afloat
The subtle spirit. Even while I spoke,
The bare word KISS hath made my inner soul
To tremble like a lutestring, ere the note
Hath melted in the silence that it broke.
II.
Reprinted in 1872 among _Early Sonnets_ with two alterations, “If I
were loved” for “But were I loved,” and “tho’” for “though”.
But were I loved, as I desire to be,
What is there in the great sphere of the earth,
And range of evil between death and birth,
That I should fear—if I were loved by thee?
All the inner, all the outer world of pain
Clear Love would pierce and cleave, if thou wert mine,
As I have heard that, somewhere in the main,
Fresh water-springs come up through bitter brine.
’Twere joy, not fear, clasped hand in hand with thee,
To wait for death—mute—careless of all ills,
Apart upon a mountain, though the surge
Of some new deluge from a thousand hills
Flung leagues of roaring foam into the gorge
Below us, as far on as eye could see.
The Hesperides
Hesperus and his daughters three
That sing about the golden tree.
—(Comus).
The Northwind fall’n, in the newstarred night
Zidonian Hanno, voyaging beyond
The hoary promontory of Soloë
Past Thymiaterion, in calmèd bays,
Between the Southern and the Western Horn,
Heard neither warbling of the nightingale,
Nor melody o’ the Lybian lotusflute
Blown seaward from the shore; but from a slope
That ran bloombright into the Atlantic blue,
Beneath a highland leaning down a weight
Of cliffs, and zoned below with cedarshade,
Came voices, like the voices in a dream,
Continuous, till he reached the other sea.
Song—“The golden apple...”
I
The golden apple, the golden apple, the hallowed fruit,
Guard it well, guard it warily,
Singing airily,
Standing about the charmèd root.
Round about all is mute,
As the snowfield on the mountain-peaks,
As the sandfield at the mountain-foot.
Crocodiles in briny creeks
Sleep and stir not: all is mute.
If ye sing not, if ye make false measure,
We shall lose eternal pleasure,
Worth eternal want of rest.
Laugh not loudly: watch the treasure
Of the wisdom of the West.
In a corner wisdom whispers.
Five and three
(Let it not be preached abroad) make an awful mystery.
For the blossom unto three-fold music bloweth;
Evermore it is born anew;
And the sap to three-fold music floweth,
From the root
Drawn in the dark,
Up to the fruit,
Creeping under the fragrant bark,
Liquid gold, honeysweet thro’ and thro’.
Keen-eyed Sisters, singing airily,
Looking warily
Every way,
Guard the apple night and day,
Lest one from the East come and take it away.
II
Father Hesper, Father Hesper, watch, watch, ever and aye,
Looking under silver hair with a silver eye.
Father, twinkle not thy stedfast sight;
Kingdoms lapse, and climates change, and races die;
Honour comes with mystery;
Hoarded wisdom brings delight.
Number, tell them over and number
How many the mystic fruittree holds,
Lest the redcombed dragon slumber
Rolled together in purple folds.
Look to him, father, lest he wink, and the golden apple be stol’n away,
For his ancient heart is drunk with over-watchings night and day,
Round about the hallowed fruit tree curled—
Sing away, sing aloud evermore in the wind, without stop,
Lest his scalèd eyelid drop,
For he is older than the world.
If he waken, we waken,
Rapidly levelling eager eyes.
If he sleep, we sleep,
Dropping the eyelid over the eyes.
If the golden apple be taken
The world will be overwise.
Five links, a golden chain, are we,
Hesper, the dragon, and sisters three,
Bound about the golden tree.
III
Father Hesper, Father Hesper, watch, watch, night and day,
Lest the old wound of the world be healed,
The glory unsealed,
The golden apple stol’n away,
And the ancient secret revealed.
Look from west to east along:
Father, old Himala weakens,
Caucasus is bold and strong.
Wandering waters unto wandering waters call;
Let them clash together, foam and fall.
Out of watchings, out of wiles,
Comes the bliss of secret smiles.
All things are not told to all,
Half-round the mantling night is drawn,
Purplefringed with even and dawn.
Hesper hateth Phosphor, evening hateth morn.
IV
Every flower and every fruit the redolent breath
Of this warm seawind ripeneth,
Arching the billow in his sleep;
But the landwind wandereth,
Broken by the highland-steep,
Two streams upon the violet deep:
For the western sun and the western star,
And the low west wind, breathing afar,
The end of day and beginning of night
Make the apple holy and bright,
Holy and bright, round and full, bright and blest,
Mellowed in a land of rest;
Watch it warily day and night;
All good things are in the west,
Till midnoon the cool east light
Is shut out by the round of the tall hillbrow;
But when the fullfaced sunset yellowly
Stays on the flowering arch of the bough,
The luscious fruitage clustereth mellowly,
Goldenkernelled, goldencored,
Sunset-ripened, above on the tree,
The world is wasted with fire and sword,
But the apple of gold hangs over the sea,
Five links, a golden chain, are we,
Hesper, the dragon, and sisters three,
Daughters three,
Bound about
All round about
The gnarled bole of the charmèd tree,
The golden apple, the golden apple, the hallowed fruit,
Guard it well, guard it warily,
Watch it warily,
Singing airily,
Standing about the charmed root.
Rosalind
Not reprinted till 1884 when it was unaltered, as it has remained
since: but the poem appended and printed by Tennyson in _italics_ has
not been reprinted.
I
My Rosalind, my Rosalind,
My frolic falcon, with bright eyes,
Whose free delight, from any height of rapid flight,
Stoops at all game that wing the skies,
My Rosalind, my Rosalind,
My bright-eyed, wild-eyed falcon, whither,
Careless both of wind and weather,
Whither fly ye, what game spy ye,
Up or down the streaming wind?
II
The quick lark’s closest-carolled strains,
The shadow rushing up the sea,
The lightningflash atween the rain,
The sunlight driving down the lea,
The leaping stream, the very wind,
That will not stay, upon his way,
To stoop the cowslip to the plains,
Is not so clear and bold and free
As you, my falcon Rosalind.
You care not for another’s pains,
Because you are the soul of joy,
Bright metal all without alloy.
Life shoots and glances thro’ your veins,
And flashes off a thousand ways,
Through lips and eyes in subtle rays.
Your hawkeyes are keen and bright,
Keen with triumph, watching still
To pierce me through with pointed light;
And oftentimes they flash and glitter
Like sunshine on a dancing rill,
And your words are seeming-bitter,
Sharp and few, but seeming-bitter
From excess of swift delight.
III
Come down, come home, my Rosalind,
My gay young hawk, my Rosalind:
Too long you keep the upper skies;
Too long you roam, and wheel at will;
But we must hood your random eyes,
That care not whom they kill,
And your cheek, whose brilliant hue
Is so sparkling fresh to view,
Some red heath-flower in the dew,
Touched with sunrise. We must bind
And keep you fast, my Rosalind,
Fast, fast, my wild-eyed Rosalind,
And clip your wings, and make you love:
When we have lured you from above,
And that delight of frolic flight, by day or night,
From North to South;
We’ll bind you fast in silken cords,
And kiss away the bitter words
From off your rosy mouth.[1]
[1] Perhaps the following lines may be allowed to stand as a separate
poem; originally they made part of the text, where they were
manifestly superfluous:—
My Rosalind, my Rosalind,
Bold, subtle, careless Rosalind,
Is one of those who know no strife
Of inward woe or outward fear;
To whom the slope and stream of life,
The life before, the life behind,
In the ear, from far and near,
Chimeth musically clear.
My falconhearted Rosalind,
Fullsailed before a vigorous wind,
Is one of those who cannot weep
For others’ woes, but overleap
All the petty shocks and fears
That trouble life in early years,
With a flash of frolic scorn
And keen delight, that never falls
Away from freshness, self-upborne
With such gladness, as, whenever
The freshflushing springtime calls
To the flooding waters cool,
Young fishes, on an April morn,
Up and down a rapid river,
Leap the little waterfalls
That sing into the pebbled pool.
My happy falcon, Rosalind;
Hath daring fancies of her own,
Fresh as the dawn before the day,
Fresh as the early seasmell blown
Through vineyards from an inland bay.
My Rosalind, my Rosalind,
Because no shadow on you falls
Think you hearts are tennis balls
To play with, wanton Rosalind?
Song—“Who can say...?”
Who can say
Why To-day
To-morrow will be yesterday?
Who can tell
Why to smell
The violet, recalls the dewy prime
Of youth and buried time?
The cause is nowhere found in rhyme.
Kate
Reprinted without alteration among the _Juvenilia_ in 1895.
I know her by her angry air,
Her brightblack eyes, her brightblack hair,
Her rapid laughters wild and shrill,
As laughter of the woodpecker
From the bosom of a hill.
’Tis Kate—she sayeth what she will;
For Kate hath an unbridled tongue,
Clear as the twanging of a harp.
Her heart is like a throbbing star.
Kate hath a spirit ever strung
Like a new bow, and bright and sharp
As edges of the scymetar.
Whence shall she take a fitting mate?
For Kate no common love will feel;
My woman-soldier, gallant Kate,
As pure and true as blades of steel.
Kate saith “the world is void of might”.
Kate saith “the men are gilded flies”.
Kate snaps her fingers at my vows;
Kate will not hear of lover’s sighs.
I would I were an armèd knight,
Far famed for wellwon enterprise,
And wearing on my swarthy brows
The garland of new-wreathed emprise:
For in a moment I would pierce
The blackest files of clanging fight,
And strongly strike to left and right,
In dreaming of my lady’s eyes.
Oh! Kate loves well the bold and fierce;
But none are bold enough for Kate,
She cannot find a fitting mate.
Sonnet—“Blow ye the trumpet, gather from afar...”
_Written, on hearing of the outbreak of the Polish Insurrection._
Blow ye the trumpet, gather from afar
The hosts to battle: be not bought and sold.
Arise, brave Poles, the boldest of the bold;
Break through your iron shackles—fling them far.
O for those days of Piast, ere the Czar
Grew to this strength among his deserts cold;
When even to Moscow’s cupolas were rolled
The growing murmurs of the Polish war!
Now must your noble anger blaze out more
Than when from Sobieski, clan by clan,
The Moslem myriads fell, and fled before—
Than when Zamoysky smote the Tartar Khan,
Than earlier, when on the Baltic shore
Boleslas drove the Pomeranian.
Poland
Reprinted without alteration in 1872, except the removal of italics in
“now” among the _Early Sonnets_.
How long, O God, shall men be ridden down,
And trampled under by the last and least
Of men? The heart of Poland hath not ceased
To quiver, tho’ her sacred blood doth drown
The fields; and out of every smouldering town
Cries to Thee, lest brute Power be increased,
Till that o’ergrown Barbarian in the East
Transgress his ample bound to some new crown:—
Cries to thee, “Lord, how long shall these things be?
How long this icyhearted Muscovite
Oppress the region?” Us, O Just and Good,
Forgive, who smiled when she was torn in three;
Us, who stand now, when we should aid the right—
A matter to be wept with tears of blood!
To—— (“As when, with downcast eyes...”)
Reprinted without alteration as first of the _Early Sonnets_ in 1872;
subsequently in the twelfth line “That tho’” was substituted for
“Altho’,” and the last line was altered to—
“And either lived in either’s heart and speech,”
and “hath” was not italicised.
As when with downcast eyes we muse and brood,
And ebb into a former life, or seem
To lapse far back in some confused dream
To states of mystical similitude;
If one but speaks or hems or stirs his chair,
Ever the wonder waxeth more and more,
So that we say, “All this hath been before,
All this _hath_ been, I know not when or where”.
So, friend, when first I look’d upon your face,
Our thought gave answer each to each, so true—
Opposed mirrors each reflecting each—
Altho’ I knew not in what time or place,
Methought that I had often met with you,
And each had lived in the other’s mind and speech.
O Darling Room
I
O darling room, my heart’s delight,
Dear room, the apple of my sight,
With thy two couches soft and white,
There is no room so exquisite,
No little room so warm and bright,
Wherein to read, wherein to write.
II
For I the Nonnenwerth have seen,
And Oberwinter’s vineyards green,
Musical Lurlei; and between
The hills to Bingen have I been,
Bingen in Darmstadt, where the Rhene
Curves towards Mentz, a woody scene.
III
Yet never did there meet my sight,
In any town, to left or right,
A little room so exquisite,
With two such couches soft and white;
Not any room so warm and bright,
Wherein to read, wherein to write.
To Christopher North
You did late review my lays,
Crusty Christopher;
You did mingle blame and praise,
Rusty Christopher.
When I learnt from whom it came,
I forgave you all the blame,
Musty Christopher;
I could _not_ forgive the praise,
Fusty Christopher.
The Skipping Rope
This silly poem was first published in the edition of 1842, and was
retained unaltered till 1851, when it was finally suppressed.
Sure never yet was Antelope
Could skip so lightly by,
Stand off, or else my skipping-rope
Will hit you in the eye.
How lightly whirls the skipping-rope!
How fairy-like you fly!
Go, get you gone, you muse and mope—
I hate that silly sigh.
Nay, dearest, teach me how to hope,
Or tell me how to die.
There, take it, take my skipping-rope,
And hang yourself thereby.
Timbuctoo
A poem which obtained
the Chancellor’s Medal
at the _Cambridge Commencement_
M.DCCCXXIX
by A. TENNYSON
Of Trinity College.
Printed in the Cambridge _Chronicle and Journal_ for Friday, 10th July,
1839, and at the University Press by James Smith, among the
_Profusiones Academicæ Praemiis annuis dignatæ, et in Curiâ
Cantabrigiensi Recitatæ Comitiis Maximis_ A.D. M.DCCCXXIX. Reprinted in
an edition of the _Cambridge Prize Poems_ from 1813 to 1858 inclusive,
by Messrs. Macmillan in 1859, but without any alteration, except in
punctuation and the substitution of small letters for capitals where
the change was appropriate; and again in 1893 in the appendix to the
reprint of the _Poems by Two Brothers_.
Deep in that lion-haunted island lies
A mystic city, goal of enterprise.—(Chapman.)
I stood upon the Mountain which o’erlooks
The narrow seas, whose rapid interval
Parts Afric from green Europe, when the Sun
Had fall’n below th’ Atlantick, and above
The silent Heavens were blench’d with faery light,
Uncertain whether faery light or cloud,
Flowing Southward, and the chasms of deep, deep blue
Slumber’d unfathomable, and the stars
Were flooded over with clear glory and pale.
I gaz’d upon the sheeny coast beyond,
There where the Giant of old Time infixed
The limits of his prowess, pillars high
Long time eras’d from Earth: even as the sea
When weary of wild inroad buildeth up
Huge mounds whereby to stay his yeasty waves.
And much I mus’d on legends quaint and old
Which whilome won the hearts of all on Earth
Toward their brightness, ev’n as flame draws air;
But had their being in the heart of Man
As air is th’ life of flame: and thou wert then
A center’d glory—circled Memory,
Divinest Atalantis, whom the waves
Have buried deep, and thou of later name
Imperial Eldorado roof’d with gold:
Shadows to which, despite all shocks of Change,
All on-set of capricious Accident,
Men clung with yearning Hope which would not die.
As when in some great City where the walls
Shake, and the streets with ghastly faces throng’d
Do utter forth a subterranean voice,
Among the inner columns far retir’d
At midnight, in the lone Acropolis.
Before the awful Genius of the place
Kneels the pale Priestess in deep faith, the while
Above her head the weak lamp dips and winks
Unto the fearful summoning without:
Nathless she ever clasps the marble knees,
Bathes the cold hand with tears, and gazeth on
Those eyes which wear no light but that wherewith
Her phantasy informs them. Where are ye
Thrones of the Western wave, fair Islands green?
Where are your moonlight halls, your cedarn glooms,
The blossoming abysses of your hills?
Your flowering Capes and your gold-sanded bays
Blown round with happy airs of odorous winds?
Where are the infinite ways which, Seraph-trod,
Wound thro’ your great Elysian solitudes,
Whose lowest depths were, as with visible love,
Fill’d with Divine effulgence, circumfus’d,
Flowing between the clear and polish’d stems,
And ever circling round their emerald cones
In coronals and glories, such as gird
The unfading foreheads of the Saints in Heaven?
For nothing visible, they say, had birth
In that blest ground but it was play’d about
With its peculiar glory. Then I rais’d
My voice and cried “Wide Afric, doth thy Sun
Lighten, thy hills enfold a City as fair
As those which starr’d the night o’ the Elder World?
Or is the rumour of thy Timbuctoo
A dream as frail as those of ancient Time?”
A curve of whitening, flashing, ebbing light!
A rustling of white wings! The bright descent
Of a young Seraph! and he stood beside me
There on the ridge, and look’d into my face
With his unutterable, shining orbs,
So that with hasty motion I did veil
My vision with both hands, and saw before me
Such colour’d spots as dance athwart the eyes
Of those that gaze upon the noonday Sun.
Girt with a Zone of flashing gold beneath
His breast, and compass’d round about his brow
With triple arch of everchanging bows,
And circled with the glory of living light
And alternation of all hues, he stood.
“O child of man, why muse you here alone
Upon the Mountain, on the dreams of old
Which fill’d the Earth with passing loveliness,
Which flung strange music on the howling winds,
And odours rapt from remote Paradise?
Thy sense is clogg’d with dull mortality,
Thy spirit fetter’d with the bond of clay:
Open thine eye and see.” I look’d, but not
Upon his face, for it was wonderful
With its exceeding brightness, and the light
Of the great angel mind which look’d from out
The starry glowing of his restless eyes.
I felt my soul grow mighty, and my spirit
With supernatural excitation bound
Within me, and my mental eye grew large
With such a vast circumference of thought,
That in my vanity I seem’d to stand
Upon the outward verge and bound alone
Of full beautitude. Each failing sense
As with a momentary flash of light
Grew thrillingly distinct and keen. I saw
The smallest grain that dappled the dark Earth,
The indistinctest atom in deep air,
The Moon’s white cities, and the opal width
Of her small glowing lakes, her silver heights
Unvisited with dew of vagrant cloud,
And the unsounded, undescended depth
Of her black hollows. The clear Galaxy
Shorn of its hoary lustre, wonderful,
Distinct and vivid with sharp points of light
Blaze within blaze, an unimagin’d depth
And harmony of planet-girded Suns
And moon-encircled planets, wheel in wheel,
Arch’d the wan Sapphire. Nay, the hum of men,
Or other things talking in unknown tongues,
And notes of busy life in distant worlds
Beat like a far wave on my anxious ear.
A maze of piercing, trackless, thrilling thoughts
Involving and embracing each with each
Rapid as fire, inextricably link’d,
Expanding momently with every sight
And sound which struck the palpitating sense,
The issue of strong impulse, hurried through
The riv’n rapt brain: as when in some large lake
From pressure of descendant crags, which lapse
Disjointed, crumbling from their parent slope
At slender interval, the level calm
Is ridg’d with restless and increasing spheres
Which break upon each other, each th’ effect
Of separate impulse, but more fleet and strong
Than its precursor, till the eye in vain
Amid the wild unrest of swimming shade
Dappled with hollow and alternate rise
Of interpenetrated arc, would scan
Definite round.
I know not if I shape
These things with accurate similitude
From visible objects, for but dimly now,
Less vivid than a half-forgotten dream,
The memory of that mental excellence
Comes o’er me, and it may be I entwine
The indecision of my present mind
With its past clearness, yet it seems to me
As even then the torrent of quick thought
Absorbed me from the nature of itself
With its own fleetness. Where is he that borne
Adown the sloping of an arrowy stream,
Could link his shallop to the fleeting edge,
And muse midway with philosophic calm
Upon the wondrous laws which regulate
The fierceness of the bounding element?
My thoughts which long had grovell’d in the slime
Of this dull world, like dusky worms which house
Beneath unshaken waters, but at once
Upon some earth-awakening day of spring
Do pass from gloom to glory, and aloft
Winnow the purple, bearing on both sides
Double display of starlit wings which burn
Fanlike and fibred, with intensest bloom:
E’en so my thoughts, ere while so low, now felt
Unutterable buoyancy and strength
To bear them upward through the trackless fields
Of undefin’d existence far and free.
Then first within the South methought I saw
A wilderness of spires, and chrystal pile
Of rampart upon rampart, dome on dome,
Illimitable range of battlement
On battlement, and the Imperial height
Of Canopy o’ercanopied.
Behind,
In diamond light, upsprung the dazzling Cones
Of Pyramids, as far surpassing Earth’s
As Heaven than Earth is fairer. Each aloft
Upon his narrow’d Eminence bore globes
Of wheeling suns, or stars, or semblances
Of either, showering circular abyss
Of radiance. But the glory of the place
Stood out a pillar’d front of burnish’d gold
Interminably high, if gold it were
Or metal more ethereal, and beneath
Two doors of blinding brilliance, where no gaze
Might rest, stood open, and the eye could scan
Through length of porch and lake and boundless hall,
Part of a throne of fiery flame, where from
The snowy skirting of a garment hung,
And glimpse of multitudes of multitudes
That minister’d around it—if I saw
These things distinctly, for my human brain
Stagger’d beneath the vision, and thick night
Came down upon my eyelids, and I fell.
With ministering hand he rais’d me up;
Then with a mournful and ineffable smile,
Which but to look on for a moment fill’d
My eyes with irresistible sweet tears,
In accents of majestic melody,
Like a swol’n river’s gushings in still night
Mingled with floating music, thus he spake:
“There is no mightier Spirit than I to sway
The heart of man: and teach him to attain
By shadowing forth the Unattainable;
And step by step to scale that mighty stair
Whose landing-place is wrapt about with clouds
Of glory of Heaven.[1] With earliest Light of Spring,
And in the glow of sallow Summertide,
And in red Autumn when the winds are wild
With gambols, and when full-voiced Winter roofs
The headland with inviolate white snow,
I play about his heart a thousand ways,
Visit his eyes with visions, and his ears
With harmonies of wind and wave and wood—
Of winds which tell of waters, and of waters
Betraying the close kisses of the wind—
And win him unto me: and few there be
So gross of heart who have not felt and known
A higher than they see: They with dim eyes
Behold me darkling. Lo! I have given thee
To understand my presence, and to feel
My fullness; I have fill’d thy lips with power.
I have rais’d thee nigher to the Spheres of Heaven,
Man’s first, last home: and thou with ravish’d sense
Listenest the lordly music flowing from
Th’illimitable years. I am the Spirit,
The permeating life which courseth through
All th’ intricate and labyrinthine veins
Of the great vine of Fable, which, outspread
With growth of shadowing leaf and clusters rare,
Reacheth to every corner under Heaven,
Deep-rooted in the living soil of truth:
So that men’s hopes and fears take refuge in
The fragrance of its complicated glooms
And cool impleached twilights. Child of Man,
See’st thou yon river, whose translucent wave,
Forth issuing from darkness, windeth through
The argent streets o’ the City, imaging
The soft inversion of her tremulous Domes.
Her gardens frequent with the stately Palm,
Her Pagods hung with music of sweet bells.
Her obelisks of ranged Chrysolite,
Minarets and towers? Lo! how he passeth by,
And gulphs himself in sands, as not enduring
To carry through the world those waves, which bore
The reflex of my City in their depths.
Oh City! Oh latest Throne! where I was rais’d
To be a mystery of loveliness
Unto all eyes, the time is well nigh come
When I must render up this glorious home
To keen _Discovery_: soon yon brilliant towers
Shall darken with the waving of her wand;
Darken, and shrink and shiver into huts,
Black specks amid a waste of dreary sand,
Low-built, mud-wall’d, Barbarian settlement,
How chang’d from this fair City!”
Thus far the Spirit:
Then parted Heavenward on the wing: and I
Was left alone on Calpe, and the Moon
Had fallen from the night, and all was dark!
[1] Be ye perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect.
Bibliography of the _Poems_ of 1842
1830 _Poems, chiefly Lyrical_, by Alfred Tennyson. London: Effingham
Wilson, 1830.
1832 _Poems_ by Alfred Tennyson. London: Edward Moxon, 1833 (published
at the end of 1832).
1837 In the _Keepsake_, an Annual, appears the poem “St. Agnes’ Eve,”
afterwards republished in the Poems of 1842, as “St. Agnes”.
1842 _Morte d’Arthur, Dora, and other Idyls_. (Privately printed for
the Author.)
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Dover Street, 1842.
1843 _Id_. 2 vols. Second Edition, 1843.
1845 _Id_. Third Edition, 1845.
1846 _Id_. Fourth Edition, 1846.
1848 _Id._ Fifth Edition, 1848.
1849 In the _Examiner_ for 24th March, 1849, appeared the poem “To—— ,
after reading a Life and Letters,” republished in the Sixth Edition of
the Poems.
1850 _Poems_. 2 vols. Sixth Edition, 1850.
1851 In the _Keepsake_ appeared the verses: “Come not when I am Dead,”
reprinted in the Seventh Edition of the Poems.
1851 _Poems_. Seventh Edition. London: Edward Moxon, 1851. i vol.
1853 _Id_. Eighth Edition, 1853. i vol.
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William Holman Hunt, William Macready, John Calcott Horsley, Dante
Gabriel Rosetti, Clarkson Stanfield, and Daniel Maclise. Pp. xiii.,
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1889 The _Works_ of Alfred Tennyson. London: Macmillan & Co., 1889.
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1893 _Poems_. Illustrated. I vol. (This contains the poems and
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1895 The _Poetical Works_ of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (without the plays).
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1896 _Id._ Pocket Edition.
1898 The _Life and Works_ of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. (Edition de Luxe.)
12 vols. Macmillan & Co., 1898.
1899 The _Works_ of Alfred Tennyson. 8 vols.
1899 _Poetical Works_ of Alfred Lord Tennyson. Globe Edition.
Macmillan. This Edition was supplied to Messrs. Warne and published by
them as the Albion Edition.
1899 _Poems_ including _In Memoriam_. Popular Edition, 1 vol.