Chapter I: Front Matter (1)

Early Poems To the Queen Claribel—a Melody Lilian Isabel Mariana To —— (“Clear-headed friend, whose joyful scorn”) Madeline Song—The Owl Second Song to the Same Recollections of the Arabian Nights Ode to Memory Song (“A spirit haunts the year’s last hours”) Adeline A Character The Poet The Poet’s Mind The Sea-Fairies The Deserted House The Dying Swan A Dirge Love and Death The Ballad of Oriana Circumstance The Merman The Mermaid Sonnet to J. M. K. The Lady of Shalott Mariana in the South Eleänore The Miller’s Daughter Fatima Œnone The Sisters To—— (“I send you here a sort of allegory”) The Palace of Art Lady Clara Vere de Vere The May Queen New Year’s Eve Conclusion The Lotos-Eaters Dream of Fair Women Margaret The Blackbird The Death of the Old Year To J. S. “You ask me, why, tho’ ill at ease” “Of old sat Freedom on the heights” “Love thou thy land, with love far-brought” The Goose The Epic Morte d’Arthur The Gardener’s Daughter; or, The Pictures Dora Audley Court Walking to the Mail Edwin Morris; or, The Lake St. Simeon Stylites The Talking Oak Love and Duty The Golden Year Ulysses Locksley Hall Godiva The Two Voices The Day-Dream:—Prologue The Sleeping Palace The Sleeping Beauty The Arrival The Revival The Departure L’Envoi Epilogue Amphion St. Agnes Sir Galahad Edward Gray Will Waterproof’s Lyrical Monologue To ——, after reading a Life and Letters To E.L., on his Travels in Greece Lady Clare The Lord of Burleigh Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere: a Fragment A Farewell The Beggar Maid The Vision of Sin “Come not, when I am dead” The Eagle “Move eastward, happy earth, and leave” “Break, break, break” The Poet’s Song Appendix—Suppressed Poems Elegiacs The “How” and the “Why” Supposed Confessions The Burial of Love To —— (“Sainted Juliet! dearest name !”) Song (“I’ the glooming light”) Song (“The lintwhite and the throstlecock”) Song (“Every day hath its night”) Nothing will Die All Things will Die Hero to Leander The Mystic The Grasshopper Love, Pride and Forgetfulness Chorus (“The varied earth, the moving heaven”) Lost Hope The Tears of Heaven Love and Sorrow To a Lady Sleeping Sonnet (“Could I outwear my present state of woe”) Sonnet (“Though Night hath climbed her peak of highest noon”) Sonnet (“Shall the hag Evil die with child of Good”) Sonnet (“The pallid thunderstricken sigh for gain”) Love The Kraken English War Song National Song Dualisms We are Free οἱ ῥέοντες. “Mine be the strength of spirit, full and free” To — (“All good things have not kept aloof”) Buonaparte Sonnet (“Oh, Beauty, passing beauty! sweetest Sweet!”) The Hesperides Song (“The golden apple, the golden apple, the hallowed fruit”) Rosalind Song (“Who can say”) Kate Sonnet (“Blow ye the trumpet, gather from afar”) Poland To — (“As when with downcast eyes we muse and brood”) O Darling Room To Christopher North The Skipping Rope Timbuctoo Bibliography of the _Poems_ of 1842

Preface

A Critical edition of Tennyson’s poems has long been an acknowledged want. He has taken his place among the English Classics, and as a Classic he is, and will be, studied, seriously and minutely, by many thousands of his countrymen, both in the present generation as well as in future ages. As in the works of his more illustrious brethren, so in his trifles will become subjects of curious interest, and assume an importance of which we have no conception now. Here he will engage the attention of the antiquary, there of the social historian. Long after his politics, his ethics, his theology have ceased to be immediately influential, they will be of immense historical significance. A consummate artist and a consummate master of our language, the process by which he achieved results so memorable can never fail to be of interest, and of absorbing interest, to critical students.

I must, I fear, claim the indulgence due to one who attempts, for the first time, a critical edition of a text so perplexingly voluminous in variants as Tennyson’s. I can only say that I have spared neither time nor labour to be accurate and exhaustive. I have myself collated, or have had collated for me, every edition recorded in the British Museum Catalogue, and where that has been deficient I have had recourse to other public libraries, and to the libraries of private friends. I am not conscious that I have left any variant unrecorded, but I should not like to assert that this is the case. Tennyson was so restlessly indefatigable in his corrections that there may lurk, in editions of the poems which I have not seen, other variants; and it is also possible that, in spite of my vigilance, some may have escaped me even in the editions which have been collated, and some may have been made at a date earlier than the date recorded. But I trust this has not been the case.

Of the Bibliography I can say no more than that I have done my utmost to make it complete, and that it is very much fuller than any which has hitherto appeared. That it is exhaustive I dare not promise.

With regard to the Notes and Commentaries, I have spared no pains to explain everything which seemed to need explanation. There are, I think, only two points which I have not been able to clear up, namely, the name of the friend to whom the _The Palace of Art_ was addressed, and the name of the friend to whom the _Verses after reading a Life and Letters_ were addressed. I have consulted every one who would be likely to throw light on the subject, including the poet’s surviving sister, many of his friends, and the present Lord Tennyson, but without success; so the names, if they were not those of some imaginary person, appear to be irrecoverable. The Prize Poem, _Timbuctoo_, as well as the poems which were temporarily or finally suppressed in the volumes published in 1830 and 1832 have been printed in the Appendix: those which were subsequently incorporated in his Works, in large type; those which he never reprinted, in small.

The text here adopted is that of 1857, but Messrs. Macmillan, to whom I beg to express my hearty thanks, have most generously allowed me to record all the variants which are still protected by copyright. I have to thank them, too, for assistance in the Bibliography. I have also to thank Mr. J. T. Wise for his kindness in lending me the privately printed volume containing the _Morte d’Arthur, Dora,_ etc.

Introduction

I

The development of Tennyson’s genius, methods, aims and capacity of achievement in poetry can be studied with singular precision and fulness in the history of the poems included in the present volume. In 1842 he published the two volumes which gave him, by almost general consent, the first place among the poets of his time, for, though Wordsworth was alive, Wordsworth’s best work had long been done. These two volumes contained poems which had appeared before, some in 1830 and some in 1832, and some which were then given to the world for the first time, so that they represent work belonging to three eras in the poet’s life, poems written before he had completed his twenty-second year and belonging for the most part to his boyhood, poems written in his early manhood, and poems written between his thirty-first and thirty-fourth year.

The poems published in 1830 had the following title-page: “_Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, by Alfred Tennyson._ London: Effingham Wilson, Royal Exchange, 1830”. They are fifty-six in number and the titles are:—

_Claribel_. _Lilian_. _Isabel_. Elegiacs.* The “How” and the “Why”. _Mariana_. To —— . Madeline. The Merman. The _Mermaid_. Supposed Confessions of a second-rate sensitive mind not in unity with itself.* The Burial of Love. To — (Sainted Juliet dearest name.) _Song. The Owl._ _Second Song. To the same._ _Recollections of the Arabian Nights._ _Ode to Memory_. Song. (I’ the glooming light.) _Song. (A spirit haunts.)_ _Adeline_. _A Character._ Song. (The lint-white and the throstle cock.) Song. (Every day hath its night.) _The Poet._ _The Poet’s Mind._ Nothing will die.* All things will die.* Hero to Leander. The Mystic. _The Dying Swan._ _A Dirge._ The Grasshopper. Love, Pride and Forgetfulness. Chorus (in an unpublished drama written very early). Lost Hope. The Deserted House.*† The Tears of Heaven. Love and Sorrow. To a Lady Sleeping. Sonnet. (Could I outwear my present state of woe.) Sonnet. (Though Night hath climbed her peak of highest noon.) Sonnet. (Shall the hag Evil die with child of Good.) Sonnet. (The pallid thunderstricken sigh for gain.) Love. _Love and Death._ The Kraken.* _The Ballad of Oriana._ _Circumstance._ English War Song. National Song. _The Sleeping Beauty._ Dualisms. We are Free. The Sea-Fairies.*† _Sonnet to J.M.K._ οἱ ῥέοντες

Of these the poems in _italics_ appeared in the edition of 1842, and were not much altered. Those with an asterisk were, in addition to the italicised poems, afterwards included among the _Juvenilia_ in the collected works (1871-1872), though excluded from all preceding editions of the poems. Those with both a dagger and an asterisk were restored in editions previous to the first collected editions of the works.

In December, 1832, appeared a second volume (it is dated on the title-page, 1833): “Poems by Alfred Tennyson. London: Moxon, MDCCCXXXIII.” This contains thirty poems:—

Sonnet.†† (Mine be the strength of spirit fierce and free.) To— .†† (All good things have not kept aloof.) Buonaparte.†† Sonnet I. (O Beauty passing beauty, sweetest Sweet.) Sonnet II.†† (But were I loved, as I desire to be.) _The Lady of Shalott_.* _Mariana in the South._* _Eleanore._ _The Miller’s Daughter._* φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θεοῖσιν Ἔμμεν ἀνήρ. _Œnone_. _The Sisters._ To— . (With the Palace of Art.)* _The Palace of Art_* _The May Queen._ _New Year’s Eve._ The Hesperides. _The Lotos Eaters._ Rosalind.†† _A Dream of Fair Women_* Song. (Who can say.) _Margaret_. Kate. Sonnet. Written on hearing of the outbreak of the Polish Insurrection. Sonnet.†† On the result of the late Russian invasion of Poland. Sonnet.†† (As when with downcast eyes we muse and brood.) O Darling Room. To Christopher North. _The Death of the Old Year._ _To J. S._

Of these the poems italicised were included in the edition of 1842; those marked with an asterisk being greatly altered and in some cases almost rewritten, those marked with a dagger being practically unaltered. To those reprinted in the collected works a double dagger is prefixed.

In 1842 appeared the two volumes which contained, in addition to the selections made from the two former volumes, several new poems:—

“Poems by Alfred Tennyson. In two volumes. London: Edward Moxon, MDCCCXLII.”

The first volume is divided into two parts: Selections from the poems published in 1830, _Claribel_ to the _Sonnet to J. M. K._ inclusive. Selections from the poems of 1832, _The Lady of Shalott_ to _The Goose_ inclusive. The second volume contains poems then, with two exceptions, first published.

The Epic. Morte d’Arthur. The Gardener’s Daughter. Dora. Audley Court. Walking to the Mail. St. Simeon Stylites. Conclusion to the May Queen. The Talking Oak. Lady Clara Vere de Vere. Love and Duty. Ulysses. Locksley Hall. Godiva. The Two Voices. The Day Dream. Prologue. The Sleeping Palace. The Sleeping Beauty. The Arrival. The Revival. The Departure. Moral. L’Envoi. Epilogue. Amphion. St. Agnes. Sir Galahad. Edward Gray. Will Waterproofs Lyrical Monologue, made at the Cock. Lady Clare. The Lord of Burleigh. Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere. A Farewell. The Beggar Maid. The Vision of Sin. The Skipping Rope. “Move Eastward, happy Earth.” “Break, break, break.” The Poet’s Song.

Only two of these poems had been published before, namely, _St. Agnes_, which was printed in _The Keepsake_ for 1837, and _The Sleeping Beauty_ in _The Day Dream_, which was adopted with some alterations from the 1830 poem, and only one of these poems was afterwards suppressed, _The Skipping Rope_, which was, however, allowed to stand till 1851. In 1843 appeared the second edition of these poems, which is merely a reprint with a few unimportant alterations, and which was followed in 1845 and in 1846 by a third and fourth edition equally unimportant in their variants, but in the fourth _The Golden Year_ was added. In the next edition, the fifth, 1848, _The Deserted House_ was included from the poems of 1830. In the sixth edition, 1850, was included another poem, _To— , after reading a Life and Letters_, reprinted, with some alterations, from the _Examiner_ of 24th March, 1849.

The seventh edition, 1851, contained important additions. First the Dedication to the Queen, then _Edwin Morris_, the fragment of _The Eagle_, and the stanzas, “Come not when I am dead,” first printed in _The Keepsake_ for 1851, under the title of _Stanzas_. In this edition the absurd trifle _The Skipping Rope_ was excised and finally cancelled. In the eighth edition, 1853, _The Sea-Fairies,_ though greatly altered, was included from the poems of 1830, and the poem _To E. L. on his Travels in Greece_ was added. This edition, the eighth, may be regarded as the final one. Nothing afterwards of much importance was added or subtracted, and comparatively few alterations were made in the text from that date to the last collected edition in 1898.

All the editions up to, and including, that of 1898 have been carefully collated, so that the student of Tennyson can follow step by step the process by which he arrived at that perfection of expression which is perhaps his most striking characteristic as a poet. And it was indeed a trophy of labour, of the application “of patient touches of unwearied art”. Whoever will turn, say to _The Palace of Art_, to _Œnone_, to the _Dream of Fair Women_, or even to _The Sea-Fairies_ and to _The Lady of Shalott_, will see what labour was expended on their composition. Nothing indeed can be more interesting than to note the touches, the substitution of which measured the whole distance between mediocrity and excellence. Take, for example, the magical alteration in the couplet in the _Dream of Fair Women_:—

One drew a sharp knife thro’ my tender throat
Slowly,—and nothing more,

into

The bright death quiver’d at the victim’s throat;
Touch’d; and I knew no more.

Or, in the same poem:—

What nights we had in Egypt! I could hit His humours while I cross’d him. O the life I led him, and the dalliance and the wit,

into

We drank the Libyan Sun to sleep, and lit
Lamps which outburn’d Canopus. O my life
In Egypt! O the dalliance and the wit,
The flattery and the strife.

Or, in _Mariana in the South_:—

She mov’d her lips, she pray’d alone,
She praying, disarray’d and warm
From slumber, deep her wavy form
In the dark lustrous mirror shone,

into

Complaining, “Mother, give me grace
To help me of my weary load”.
And on the liquid mirror glow’d
The clear perfection of her face.

How happy is this slight alteration in the verses _To J. S._ which corrects one of the falsest notes ever struck by a poet:—

A tear Dropt on _my tablets_ as I wrote.

A tear Dropt on _the letters_ as I wrote.

or where in _Locksley Hall_ a splendidly graphic touch of description is gained by the alteration of “_droops_ the trailer from the crag” into “_swings_ the trailer”.

So again in _Love and Duty_:—

Should my shadow cross thy thoughts Too sadly for their peace, _so put it back_. For calmer hours in memory’s darkest hold,

where by altering “so put it back” into “remand it thou,” a somewhat ludicrous image is at all events softened.

What great care Tennyson took with his phraseology is curiously illustrated in _The May Queen_. In the 1842 edition “Robin” was the name of the May Queen’s lover. In 1843 it was altered to “Robert,” and in 1845 and subsequent editions back to “Robin”.

Compare, again, the old stanza in _The Miller’s Daughter_:—

How dear to me in youth, my love,
Was everything about the mill;
The black and silent pool above,
The pool beneath it never still,

with what was afterwards substituted:—

I loved the brimming wave that swam
Through quiet meadows round the mill,
The sleepy pool above the dam,
The pool beneath it never still.

Another most felicitous emendation is to be found in _The Poet_, where the edition of 1830 reads:—

And in the bordure of her robe was writ Wisdom, a name to shake Hoar anarchies, as with a thunderfit.

This in 1842 appears as:—

And in her raiment’s hem was trac’d in flame Wisdom, a name to shake All evil dreams of power—a sacred name.

Again, in the _Lotos Eaters_

_Three thunder-cloven thrones of oldest snow_ Stood sunset-flushed

is changed into

_Three silent pinnacles of aged snow_.

So in _Will Waterproof_ the cumbrous

Like Hezekiah’s backward runs
The shadow of my days,

was afterwards simplified into

Against its fountain upward runs
The current of my days.

Not less felicitous have been the additions made from time to time. Thus in _Audley Court_ the concluding lines ran:—

The harbour buoy, With one green sparkle ever and anon Dipt by itself.

But what vividness is there in the subsequent insertion of

“Sole star of phosphorescence in the calm.”

between the first line and the second.

So again in the _Morte d’Arthur_ how greatly are imagery and rhythm improved by the insertion of

Across the ridge, and paced beside the mere,

between

Then went Sir Bedivere the second time,

and

Counting the dewy pebbles, fix’d in thought.

There is an alteration in Œnone which is very interesting. Till 1884 this was allowed to stand:—

The lizard, with his shadow on the stone, Rests like a shadow, _and the cicala sleeps_.

No one could have known better than Tennyson that the cicala is loudest in the torrid calm of the noonday, as Theocritus, Virgil, Byron and innumerable other poets have noticed; at last he altered it, but at the heavy price of a cumbrous pleonasm, into “and the winds are dead”.

He allowed many years to elapse before he corrected another error in natural history—but at last the alteration came. In _The Poet’s Song_ in the line—

The swallow stopt as he hunted the _bee_,

the “fly” which the swallow does hunt was substituted for what it does not hunt, and that for very obvious reasons.

But whoever would see what Tennyson’s poetry has owed to elaborate revision and scrupulous care would do well to compare the first edition of _Mariana in the South_, _The Sea-Fairies_, _Œnone_, _The Lady of Shalott_, _The Palace of Art_ and _A Dream of Fair Women_ with the poems as they are presented in 1853. Poets do not always improve their verses by revision, as all students of Wordsworth’s text could abundantly illustrate; but it may be doubted whether, in these poems at least, Tennyson ever made a single alteration which was not for the better. Fitzgerald, indeed, contended that in some cases, particularly in _The Miller’s Daughter_, Tennyson would have done well to let the first reading stand, but few critics would agree with him in the instances he gives. We may perhaps regret the sacrifice of such a stanza as this—

Each coltsfoot down the grassy bent,
Whose round leaves hold the gathered shower,
Each quaintly folded cuckoo pint,
And silver-paly cuckoo flower.

II

Tennyson’s genius was slow in maturing. The poems contributed by him to the volume of 1827, _Poems by Two Brothers_, are not without some slight promise, but are very far from indicating extraordinary powers. A great advance is discernible in _Timbuctoo_, but that Matthew Arnold should have discovered in it the germ of Tennyson’s future powers is probably to be attributed to the youth of the critic. Tennyson was in his twenty-second year when the _Poems Chiefly Lyrical_ appeared, and what strikes us in these poems is certainly not what Arthur Hallam saw in them: much rather what Coleridge and Wilson discerned in them. They are the poems of a fragile and somewhat morbid young man in whose temper we seem to see a touch of Hamlet, a touch of Romeo and, more healthily, a touch of Mercutio. Their most promising characteristic is the versatility displayed. Thus we find _Mariana_ side by side with the _Supposed Confessions_, the _Ode to Memory_ with οἱ ῥέοντες, _The Ballad of Oriana_ with _The Dying Swan_, _Recollections of The Arabian Nights_ with _The Poet_. Their worst fault is affectation. Perhaps the utmost that can be said for them is that they display a fine but somewhat thin vein of original genius, after deducing what they owe to Coleridge, to Keats and to other poets. This is seen in the magical touches of description, in the exquisite felicity of expression and rhythm which frequently mark them, in the pathos and power of such a poem as _Oriana_, in the pathos and charm of such poems as _Mariana_ and _A Dirge_, in the rich and almost gorgeous fancy displayed in _The Recollections_.

The poems of 1833 are much more ambitious and strike deeper notes. Here comes in for the first time that σπουδαιότης, that high seriousness which is one of Tennyson’s chief characteristics—we see it in _The Palace of Art_, in _Œnone_ and in the verses _To J. S._ But in intrinsic merit the poems were no advance on their predecessors, for the execution was not equal to the design. The best, such as _Œnone_, _A Dream of Fair Women_, _The Palace of Art_, _The Lady of Shalott_—I am speaking of course of these poems in their first form—were full of extraordinary blemishes. The volume was degraded by pieces which were very unworthy of him, such as _O Darling Room_ and the verses _To Christopher North_, and affectations of the worst kind deformed many, nay, perhaps the majority of the poems. But the capital defect lay in the workmanship. The diction is often languid and slipshod, sometimes quaintly affected, and we can never go far without encountering lines, stanzas, whole poems which cry aloud for the file. The power and charm of Tennyson’s poetry, even at its ripest, depend very largely, often mainly, on expression, and the couplet which he envied Browning,

The little more, and how much it is, The little less, and what worlds away,

is strangely applicable to his own art. On a single word, on a subtle collocation, on a slight touch depend often his finest effects: “the little less” reduces him to mediocrity, “the little more” and he is with the masters. To no poetry would the application of Goethe’s test be, as a rule, more fatal—that the real poetic quality in poetry is that which remains when it has been translated literally into prose.

Whoever will compare the poems of 1832 with the same poems as they appeared in 1842 will see that the difference is not so much a difference in degree, but almost a difference in kind. In the collection of 1832 there were three gems, _The Sisters_, the lines _To J. S._ and _The May Queen_. Almost all the others which are of any value were, in the edition of 1842, carefully revised, and in some cases practically rewritten. If Tennyson’s career had closed in 1833 he would hardly have won a prominent place among the minor poets of the present century. The nine years which intervened between the publication of his second volume and the volumes of 1842 were the making of him, and transformed a mere dilettante into a master. Much has been said about the brutality of Lockhart’s review in the _Quarterly_. In some respects it was stupid, in some respects it was unjust, but of one thing there can be no doubt—it had a most salutary effect. It held up the mirror to weaknesses and deficiencies which, if Tennyson did not care to acknowledge to others, he must certainly have acknowledged to himself. It roused him and put him on his mettle. It was a wholesome antidote to the enervating flattery of coteries and “apostles” who were certainly talking a great deal of nonsense about him, as Arthur Hallam’s essay in the _Englishman_ shows. During the next nine years he published nothing, with the exception of two unimportant contributions to certain minor periodicals.[1] But he was educating himself, saturating himself with all that is best in the poetry of Ancient Greece and Rome, of modern Italy, of Germany and of his own country, studying theology, metaphysics, natural history, geology, astronomy and travels, observing nature with the eye of a poet, a painter and a naturalist. Nor was he a recluse. He threw himself heartily into the life of his time, following with the keenest interest all the great political and social movements, the progress and effects of the Reform Bill, the troubles in Ireland, the troubles with the Colonies, the struggles between the Protectionists and the Free Traders, Municipal Reform, the advance of the democracy, Chartism, the popular education question. He travelled on the Continent, he travelled in Wales and Scotland, he visited most parts of England, not as an idle tourist, but as a student with note-book in hand. And he had been submitted also to the discipline which is of all disciplines the most necessary to the poet, and without which, as Goethe says, “he knows not the heavenly powers”: he had “ate his bread in sorrow”. The death of his father in 1831 had already brought him face to face, as he has himself expressed it, with the most solemn of all mysteries. In 1833 he had an awful shock in the sudden death of his friend Arthur Hallam, “an overwhelming sorrow which blotted out all joy from his life and made him long for death”. He had other minor troubles which contributed greatly to depress him,—the breaking up of the old home at Somersby, his own poverty and uncertain prospects, his being compelled in consequence to break off all intercourse with Miss Emily Selwood. It is possible that _Love and Duty_ may have reference to this sorrow; it is certain that _The Two Voices_ is autobiographical.

Such was his education between 1832 and 1842, and such the influences which were moulding him, while he was slowly evolving _In Memoriam_ and the poems first published in the latter year. To the revision of the old poems he brought tastes and instincts cultivated by the critical study of all that was best in the poetry of the world, and more particularly by a familiarity singularly intimate and affectionate with the masterpieces of the ancient classics; he brought also the skill of a practised workman, for his diligence in production was literally that of Sir Joshua Reynolds in the sister art—_nulla dies sine line’_. Into the composition of the new poems all this entered. He was no longer a trifler and a Hedonist. As Spedding has said, his former poems betrayed “an over-indulgence in the luxuries of the senses, a profusion of splendours, harmonies, perfumes, gorgeous apparel, luscious meals and drinks, and creature comforts which rather pall upon the sense, and make the glories of the outward world to obscure a little the world within”. Like his own _Lady of Shalott_, he had communed too much with shadows. But the serious poet now speaks. He appeals less to the ear and the eye, and more to the heart. The sensuous is subordinated to the spiritual and the moral. He deals immediately with the dearest concerns of man and of society. He has ceased to trifle. The σπουδαιότης, the high seriousness of the true poet, occasional before, now pervades and enters essentially into his work. It is interesting to note how many of these poems have direct didactic purpose. How solemn is the message delivered in such poems as _The Palace of Art_ and _The Vision of Sin_, how noble the teaching in _Love and Duty_, in _Œnone_, in _Godiva_, in _Ulysses_; to how many must such a poem as _The Two Voices_ have brought solace and light; how full of salutary lessons are the political poems _You ask me, why, though ill at ease_ and _Love thou thy Land_, and how noble is their expression! And, even where the poems are less directly didactic, it is such refreshment as busy life needs to converse with them, so pure, so wholesome, so graciously human is their tone, so tranquilly beautiful is their world. Who could lay down _The Miller’s Daughter, Dora, The Golden Year, The Gardener’s Daughter, The Talking Oak, Audley Court, The Day Dream_ without something of the feeling which Goethe felt when he first laid down _The Vicar of Wakefield?_ In the best lyrics in these volumes, such as _Break, Break_, and _Move Eastward_, _Happy Earth_, the most fastidious of critics must recognise flawless gems. In the two volumes of 1842 Tennyson carried to perfection all that was best in his earlier poems, and displayed powers of which he may have given some indication in his cruder efforts, but which must certainly have exceeded the expectation of the most sanguine of his rational admirers. These volumes justly gave him the first place among the poets of his time, and that supremacy he maintained—in the opinion of most—till the day of his death. It would be absurd to contend that Tennyson’s subsequent publications added nothing to the fame which will be secured to him by these poems. But this at least is certain, that, taken with _In Memorium_, they represent the crown and flower of his achievement. What is best in them he never excelled and perhaps never equalled. We should be the poorer, and much the poorer, for the loss of anything which he produced subsequently, it is true; but would we exchange half a dozen of the best of these poems or a score of the best sections of _In Memoriam_ for all that he produced between 1850 and his death?

[1] In _The Keepsake_, “St. Agnes’ Eve”; in _The Tribute_, “Stanzas”: “Oh! that ’twere possible”. Between 1831 and 1832 he had contributed to _The Gem_ three, “No more,” “Anacreontics,” and “A Fragment”; in _The Englishman!s Magazine_, a Sonnet; in _The Yorkshire Literary Annual_, lines, “There are three things that fill my heart with sighs”; in _Friendship’s Offering_, lines, “Me my own fate”.

III

The poems of 1842 naturally divide themselves into seven groups:—

(i.) _Studies in Fancy._

_Claribel_. _Lilian_. _Isabel_. _Madeline_. _A Spirit Haunts_. _Recollections of the Arabian Nights_. _Adeline_. _The Dying Swan_. _A Dream of Fair Women_. _The Sea-Fairies_. _The Deserted House_. _Love and Death_. _The Merman_. _The Mermaid_. _The Lady of Shalott_. _Eleanore_. _Margaret_. _The Death of the Old Year_. _St. Agnes._ _Sir Galahad_. _The Day Dream_. _Will Waterproof’s Monologue_. _Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere_. _The Talking Oak_. _The Poet’s Song_.

(ii.) _Studies of Passion._

_Mariana_. _Mariana in the South._ _Oriana_. _Fatima_. _The Sisters_. _Locksley Hall_. _Edward Gray_.

(iii.) _Psychological Studies._

_A Character_. _The Poet_. _The Poet’s Mind_. _The Two Voices_. _The Palace of Art_. _The Vision of Sin_. _St. Simeon Stylites_.

(iv.) _Idylls._ (_a_.) Classical.

_Œnone_. _The Lotos Eaters_. _Ulysses_.

(_b_.) English.

_The Miller’s Daughter_. _The May Queen_. _Morte d’Arthur_. _The Gardener’s Daughter_. _Dora_. _Audley Court_. _Walking to the Mail_. _Edwin Morris_. _The Golden Year_.

(v.) _Ballads._

_Oriana_. _Lady Clara Vere de Vere_. _Edward Gray_. _Lady Clare_. _The Lord of Burleigh_. _The Beggar Maid_.

(vi.) _Autobiographical._

_Ode to Memory_. _Sonnet to J. M. K_. _To—— with the Palace of Art_. _To J.S._ _Amphion_. _To E. L. on his Travels in Greece_. _To—— after reading a Life and Letters_. _“Come not when I am Dead_.” _A Farewell_. “_Move Eastward, Happy Earth_.” “_Break, Break, Break_.”

(vii.) _Political Group._

_“You ask me.”_ _“Of old sat Freedom.”_ _“Love thou thy Land.”_ _The Goose._

In surveying these poems two things must strike every one— their very wide range and their very fragmentary character. There is scarcely any side of life on which they do not touch, scarcely any phase of passion and emotion to which they do not give exquisite expression. Take the love poems: compare _Fatima_ with _Isabel_, _The Miller’s Daughter_ with _Locksley Hall_, _The Gardener’s Daughter_ with _Madeline_, or _Mariana_ with Cleopatra in the _Dream of Fair Women_. When did love find purer and nobler expression than in _Love and Duty?_ When has sorrow found utterance more perfect than in the verses _To J.S_., or the passion for the past than in _Break, Break, Break_, or revenge and jealousy than in _The Sisters?_ In _The Two Voices_, _The Palace of Art_ and _The Vision of Sin_ we are in another sphere. They are appeals to the soul of man on subjects of momentous concern to him. And each is a masterpiece. What is proper to philosophy and what is proper to poetry have never perhaps been so happily blended. They have all the sensuous charm of Keats, but the prose of Hume could not have presented the truths which they are designed to convey with more lucidity and precision. In that superb fragment the _Morte d’Arthur_ we have many of the noblest attributes of Epic poetry. _ënone_ is the perfection of the classical idyll, _The Gardener’s Daughter_ and the idylls that follow it of the romantic. _Sir Galahad_ and _St. Agnes_ are in the vein of Keats and Coleridge, but Keats and Coleridge have produced nothing more exquisite and nothing so ethereal. _The Lotos Eaters_ is perhaps the most purely delicious poem ever written, the _ne plus ultra_ of sensuous loveliness, and yet the poet who gave us that has given us also the political poems, poems as trenchant and austerely dignified in style as they are pregnant with practical wisdom. There is the same versatility displayed in the trifles.

But all is fragmentary. No thread strings these jewels. They form a collection of gems unset and unarranged. Without any system or any definite scope they have nothing of that unity in diversity which is so perceptible in the lyrics and minor poems of Goethe and Wordsworth. Capricious as the gyrations of a sea-gull seem the poet’s moods and movements. We have now the reveries of a love-sick maiden, now the picture of a soul wrestling with despair and death; here a study from rural life, or a study in character, there a sermon on politics, or a descent into the depths of psychological truth, or a sketch from nature. But nothing could be more concentrated than the power employed to shape each fragment into form. What Pope says of the _Æneid_ may be applied with very literal truth to these poems:—

Finish’d the whole, and laboured every part With patient touches of unwearied art.

In the poems of 1842 we have the secret of Tennyson’s eminence as a poet as well as the secret of his limitations. He appears to have been constitutionally deficient in what the Greeks called _architektoniké_, combination and disposition on a large scale. The measure of his power as a constructive artist is given us in the poem in which the English idylls may be said to culminate, namely, _Enoch Arden_. _In Memoriam_ and the _Idylls of the King_ have a sort of spiritual unity, but they are a series of fragments tacked rather than fused together. It is the same with _Maud_, and it is the same with _The Princess_. His poems have always a tendency to resolve themselves into a series of cameos: it is only the short poems which have organic unity. A gift of felicitous and musical expression which is absolutely marvellous; an instinctive sympathy with what is best and most elevated in the sphere of ordinary life, of ordinary thought and sentiment, of ordinary activity with consummate representative power; a most rare faculty of seizing and fixing in very perfect form what is commonly so inexpressible because so impalpable and evanescent in emotion and expression; a power of catching and rendering the charm of nature with a fidelity and vividness which resemble magic; and lastly, unrivalled skill in choosing, repolishing and remounting the gems which are our common inheritance from the past: these are the gifts which will secure permanence for his work as long as the English language lasts.

In his power of crystallising commonplaces he stands next to Pope, in subtle felicity of expression beside Virgil. And, when he says of Virgil that we find in his diction “all the grace of all the muses often flowering in one lonely word,” he says what is literally true of his own work. As a master of style his place is in the first rank among English classical poets. But his style is the perfection of art. His diction, like the diction of Milton and Gray, resembles mosaic work. With a touch here and a touch there, now from memory, now from unconscious assimilation, inlaying here an epithet and there a phrase, adding, subtracting, heightening, modifying, substituting one metaphor for another, developing what is latent in the suggestive imagery of a predecessor, laying under contribution the most intimate familiarity with what is best in the literature of the ancient and modern world, the unwearied artist toils patiently on till his precious mosaic work is without a flaw. All the resources of rhetoric are employed to give distinction to his style and every figure in rhetoric finds expression in his diction: Hypallage as in

_The pillard dusk_ Of sounding sycamores.

—_Audley Court_.

Paronomasia as in

The seawind sang _Shrill, chill_ with flakes of foam.

—_Morte d’Arthur_.

Oxymoron as

_Behold_ them _unbeheld, unheard Hear_ all.

—_Œnone._

Hyperbaton as in

The _dew-impearled_ winds of dawn.

—_Ode to Memory._

Metonymy as in

The _bright death_ quiver’d at the victim’s throat.

—_Dream of Fair Women_.

or in

For some three _careless moans_ The summer pilot of an empty heart.

—_Gardener’s Daughter_.

No poet since Milton has employed what is known as Onomatopoeia with so much effect. Not to go farther than the poems of 1842, we have in the _Morte d’Arthur_:—

So all day long the noise of battle _rolled Among the mountains by the winter sea;_

or

_Dry clashed_ his harness in the icy caves And _barren chasms_, and all to left and right The _bare black cliff clang’d round_ him, as he bas’d His feet _on juts of slippery crag that rang Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels—_

or the exquisite

I heard the _water lapping on the crag,_ And the _long ripple washing in the reeds._

So in _The Dying Swan,_

And _the wavy swell of the soughing reeds._

See too the whole of _Oriana_ and the description of the dance at the beginning of _The Vision of Sin._

Assonance, alliteration, the revival or adoption of obsolete and provincial words, the transplantation of phrases and idioms from the Greek and Latin languages, the employment of common words in uncommon senses, all are pressed into the service of adding distinction to his diction. His diction blends the two extremes of simplicity and artificiality, but with such fine tact that this strange combination has seldom the effect of incongruity. Longinus has remarked that “as the fainter lustre of the stars is put out of sight by the all-encompassing rays of the sun, so when sublimity sheds its light round the sophistries of rhetoric they become invisible”.[2] What Longinus says of “sublimity” is equally true of sincerity and truthfulness in combination with exquisitely harmonious expression. We have an illustration in Gray’s _Elegy_. Nothing could be more artificial than the style, but what poem in the world appeals more directly to the heart and to the eye? It is one thing to call art to the assistance of art, it is quite another thing to call art to the assistance of nature. And this is what both Gray and Tennyson do, and this is why their artificiality, so far from shocking us, “passes in music out of sight”. But this cannot be said of Tennyson without reserve. At times his strained endeavours to give distinction to his style by putting common things in an uncommon way led him into intolerable affectation. Thus we have “the knightly growth that fringed his lips” for a moustache, “azure pillars of the hearth” for ascending smoke, “ambrosial orbs” for apples, “frayed magnificence” for a shabby dress, “the secular abyss to come” for future ages, “the sinless years that breathed beneath the Syrian blue” for the life of Christ, “up went the hush’d amaze of hand and eye” for a gesture of surprise, and the like. One of the worst instances is in _In Memoriam_, where what is appropriate to the simple sentiment finds, as it should do, corresponding simplicity of expression in the first couplet, to collapse into the falsetto of strained artificiality in the second:—

To rest beneath the clover sod
That takes the sunshine and the rains,
_Or where the kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of God._

An illustration of the same thing, almost as offensive, is in _Enoch Arden_, where, in an otherwise studiously simple diction, Enoch’s wares as a fisherman become

Enoch’s _ocean spoil_ In ocean-smelling osier.

But these peculiarities are less common in the earlier poems than in the later: it was a vicious habit which grew on him.

But, if exception may sometimes be taken to his diction, no exception can be taken to his rhythm. No English poet since Milton, Tennyson’s only superior in this respect, had a finer ear or a more consummate mastery over all the resources of rhythmical expression. What colours are to a painter rhythm is, in description, to the poet, and few have rivalled, none have excelled Tennyson in this. Take the following:—

And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
_On the bald street strikes the blank day._

—_In Memoriam._

See particularly _In Memoriam_, cvii., the lines beginning “Fiercely flies,” to “darken on the rolling brine”: the description of the island in _Enoch Arden_; but specification is needless, it applies to all his descriptive poetry. It is marvellous that he can produce such effects by such simple means: a mere enumeration of particulars will often do it, as here:—

No gray old grange or lonely fold,
Or low morass and whispering reed,
Or simple style from mead to mead,
Or sheep walk up the windy wold.

—_In Memoriam,_ c.

Or here:—

The meal sacks on the whitened floor,
The dark round of the dripping wheel,
The very air about the door
Made misty with the floating meal.

—_The Miller’s Daughter._

His blank verse is best described by negatives. It has not the endless variety, the elasticity and freedom of Shakespeare’s, it has not the massiveness and majesty of Milton’s, it has not the austere grandeur of Wordsworth’s at its best, it has not the wavy swell, “the linked sweetness long drawn out” of Shelley’s, but its distinguishing feature is, if we may use the expression, its importunate beauty. What Coleridge said of Claudian’s style may be applied to it: “Every line, nay every word stops, looks full in your face and asks and begs for praise”. is earlier blank verse is less elaborate and seemingly more spontaneous and easy than his later.[3] But it is in his lyric verse that his rhythm is seen in its greatest perfection. No English lyrics have more magic or more haunting beauty, more of that which charms at once and charms for ever.

In his description of nature he is incomparable. Take the following from _The Dying Swan_:—

Some blue peaks in the distance rose, And white against the cold-white sky, Shone out their crowning snows. One willow over the river wept, And shook the wave as the wind did sigh; Above in the wind was the swallow, Chasing itself at its own wild will,

or the opening scene in _Œnone_ and in _The Lotos Eaters_, or the meadow scene in _The Gardener’s Daughter_, or the conclusion of _Audley Court_, or the forest scene in the _Dream of Fair Women_, or this stanza in _Mariana in the South_:—

There all in spaces rosy-bright
Large Hesper glitter’d on her tears,
And deepening through the silent spheres,
Heaven over Heaven rose the night.

A single line, nay, a single word, and a scene is by magic before us, as here where the sea is looked down upon from an immense height:—

The _wrinkled_ sea beneath him _crawls_.

—_The Eagle_.

Or here of a ship at sea, in the distance:—

And on through zones of light and shadow _Glimmer away to the lonely deep._

—_To the Rev. F. D. Maurice._

Or here of waters falling high up on mountains:—

Their thousand _wreaths of dangling water-smoke._

—_The Princess._

Or of a water-fall seen at a distance:—

And _like a downward smoke_ the slender stream Along the cliff _to fall and pause and fall_ did seem.

Or here again:—

We left the dying ebb that _faintly lipp’d The flat red granite._

Or here of a wave:—

Like a wave in the wild North Sea _Green glimmering toward the summit_ bears with all _Its stormy crests that smoke_ against the skies Down on a bark.

—_Elaine._

That beech will _gather brown_, This _maple burn itself away_.

—_In Memoriam._

The _wide-wing’d sunset_ of the misty marsh.

—_Last Tournament._

But illustrations would be endless. Nothing seems to escape him in Nature. Take the following:—

Like _a purple beech among the greens Looks out of place_.

—_Edwin Morris_.

Or

Delays _as the tender ash delays To clothe herself, when all the woods are green_.

—_The Princess_.

As _black as ash-buds in the front of March_.

—_The Gardener’s Daughter_.

A gusty April morn That _puff’d_ the swaying _branches into smoke_.

—_Holy Grail_.

So with flowers, trees, birds and insects:—

The fox-glove _clusters dappled bells_.

—_The Two Voices_.

The sunflower:—

_Rays round with flame its disk of seed_.

—_In Memoriam_.

The dog-rose:—

_Tufts of rosy-tinted snow_.

—_Two Voices_.

A _million emeralds_ break from the _ruby-budded lime_.

—_Maud_.

In gloss and hue the chestnut, _when the shell Divides threefold to show the fruit within_. —_The Brook_.

Or of a chrysalis:—

And flash’d as those _Dull-coated_ things, _that making slide apart Their dusk wing cases, all beneath there burns A Jewell’d harness_, ere they pass and fly.

—_Gareth and Lynette_.

So again:—

Wan-sallow, as _the plant that feeds itself, Root-bitten by white lichen_.

—_Id_.

And again:—

All the _silvery gossamers_ That _twinkle into green and gold_.

—_In Memoriam_.

His epithets are in themselves a study: “the _dewy-tassell’d_ wood,” “the _tender-pencill’d_ shadow,” “_crimson-circl’d_ star,” the “_hoary_ clematis,” “_creamy_ spray,” “_dry-tongued_ laurels”. But whatever he describes is described with the same felicitous vividness. How magical is this in the verses to Edward Lear:—

Naiads oar’d A _glimmering shoulder_ under _gloom_ Of _cavern pillars_.

Or this:—

She lock’d her lips: she left me where I stood:
“Glory to God,” she sang, and past afar,
Thridding the sombre boskage of the wood,
Toward the morning-star.

—_A Dream of Fair Women_.

But if in the world of Nature nothing escaped his sensitive and sympathetic observation,—and indeed it might be said of him as truly as of Shelley’s _Alastor_

Every sight And sound from the vast earth and ambient air Sent to his heart its choicest impulses,

—he had studied the world of books with not less sympathy and attention. In the sense of a profound and extensive acquaintance with all that is best in ancient and modern poetry, and in an extraordinarily wide knowledge of general literature, of philosophy and theology, of geography and travel, and of various branches of natural science, he is one of the most erudite of English poets. With the poetry of the Greek and Latin classics he was, like Milton and Gray, thoroughly saturated. Its influence penetrates his work, now in indirect reminiscence, now in direct imitation, now inspiring, now modifying, now moulding. He tells us in _The Daisy_ how when at Como “the rich Virgilian rustic measure of _Lari Maxume_” haunted him all day, and in a later fragment how, as he rowed from Desenzano to Sirmio, Catullus was with him. And they and their brethren, from Homer to Theocritus, from Lucretius to Claudian, always were with him. I have illustrated so fully in the notes and elsewhere[4] the influence of the Greek and Roman classics on the poems of 1842 that it is not necessary to go into detail here. But a few examples of the various ways in which they affected Tennyson’s work generally may be given. Sometimes he transfers a happy epithet or expression in literal translation, as in:—

On either _shining_ shoulder laid a hand,

which is Homer’s epithet for the shoulder—

ἀνὰ φαιδίμῳ ὤμῳ

—_Od_., xi., 128.

It was the red cock _shouting_ to the light,

exactly the

ἕος ἐβόησεν ἀλέκτωρ (Until the cock _shouted_).

—_Batrachomyomachia_, 192.

And all in passion utter’d a _dry_ shriek,

which is the _sicca vox_ of the Roman poets. So in _The Lotos Eaters_:—

His voice was _thin_ as voices from the grave,

which is Theocritus’ voice of Hylas from his watery grave:—

ἀραιὰ δ’ Ἱκετο φωνά

So in _The Princess_, sect. i.:—

And _cook’d his spleen_,

which is a phrase from the Greek, as in Homer, _Il_., iv., 513:—

ἐπι νηυσὶ χόλον θυμαλγέα πέσσει (At the ships he cooks his heart-grieving spleen).

Again in _The Princess_, sect. iv.:—

_Laugh’d with alien lips,_

which is Homer’s (_Od_., 69-70)—

διδ’ ἤδη γναθμοῖσι γελῴων ἀλλοτρίοισι

So in _Edwin Morris_—

All perfect, finished _to the finger nail_,

which is a phrase transferred from Latin through the Greek; _cf._, Horace, _Sat_., i., v., 32:—

_Ad unguem_ Factus homo

(A man fashioned to the finger nail).

“The _brute_ earth,” _In Memoriam_, cxxvii., which is Horace’s

_Bruta_ tellus.

—_Odes_, i., xxxiv., 9.

So again:—

A bevy of roses _apple-cheek’d_

in _The Island_, which is Theocritus’ μαλοπάρῃος. The line in the _Morte d’Arthur_,

This way and that, dividing the swift mind,

is an almost literal translation of Virgil’s _Æn._, iv., 285:—

Atque animum nunc huc celerem nunc dividit illuc (And this way and that he divides his swift mind).

Another way in which they affect him is where, without direct imitation, they colour passages and poems as in _Œnone_, _The Lotos Eaters_, _Tithonus_, _Tiresias_, _The Death of Œnone_, _Demeter and Persephone_, the passage beginning “From the woods” in _The Gardener’s Daughter_, which is a parody of Theocritus, _Id._, vii., 139 _seq._, while the Cyclops’ invocation to Galatea in Theocritus, _Id._, xi., 29-79, was plainly the model for the idyll, “Come down, O Maid,” in the seventh section of _The Princess_, just as the tournament in the same poem recalls closely the epic of Homer and Virgil. Tennyson had a wonderful way of transfusing, as it were, the essence of some beautiful passage in a Greek or Roman poet into English. A striking illustration of this would be the influence of reminiscences of Virgil’s fourth _Æneid_ on the idyll of _Elaine and Guinevere_. Compare, for instance, the following: he is describing the love-wasted Elaine, as she sits brooding in the lonely evening, with the shadow of the wished-for death falling on her:—

But when they left her to herself again, Death, like a friend’s voice from a distant field, Approaching through the darkness, call’d; the owls Wailing had power upon her, and she mix’d Her fancies with the sallow-rifted glooms Of evening and the moanings of the wind.

How exactly does this recall, in a manner to be felt rather than exactly defined, a passage equally exquisite and equally pathetic in Virgil’s picture of Dido, where, with the shadow of her death also falling upon her, she seems to hear the phantom voice of her dead husband, and “mixes her fancies” with the glooms of night and the owl’s funereal wail:—

Hinc exaudiri voces et verba vocantis Visa viri, nox quum terras obscura teneret; Solaque culminibus ferali carmine bubo Sæpe queri, et longas in fletum ducere voces.

—_Æn._, iv., 460.)

(From it she thought she clearly heard a voice, even the accents of
her husband calling her when night was wrapping the earth with
darkness; and on the roof the lonely owl in funereal strains kept
oft complaining, drawing out into a wail its protracted notes.)

Similar passages, though not so striking, would be the picture of Pindar’s Elysium in _Tiresias_, the sentiment pervading _The Lotos Eaters_ transferred so faithfully from the Greek poets, the scenery in _Œnone_ so crowded with details from Homer, Theocritus and Callimachus. Sometimes we find similes suggested by the classical poets, but enriched by touches from original observation, as here in _The Princess_:—

As one that climbs a peak to gaze O’er land and main, and sees a great black cloud Drag inward from the deeps, a wall of night Blot out the slope of sea from verge to shore. ... And quenching lake by lake and tarn by tarn Expunge the world,

which was plainly suggested by Homer, iv., 275:—

ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἀπὸ σκοπιῆς εἴδε νέφος αἰπολος ἀνήρ ἐρχόμενον κατὰ πόντον ὑπὸ Ζεφύροιο ἰωῆς τῷ δε τ’ ἄνευθεν ἐόντι, μελάντερον ἠΰτε πίσσα, φαίνετ’ ἰὸν κατὰ πόντον, ἄγει δέ τε λαῖλαπα πολλὴν.

(As when a goat-herd from some hill-peak sees a cloud coming across the deep with the blast of the west wind behind it; and to him, being as he is afar, it seems blacker, even as pitch, as it goes along the deep, bringing with it a great whirlwind.)

So again the fine simile in _Elaine_, beginning

Bare as a wild wave in the wide North Sea,

is at least modelled on the simile in _Iliad_, xv., 381-4, with reminiscences of the same similes in _Iliad_, xv., 624, and _Iliad_, iv., 42-56. The simile in the first section of the _Princess_,

As when a field of corn Bows all its ears before the roaring East,

reminds us of Homer’s

ὡς δ’ ὅτε κινήση Ζέφυρος βαθυλήϊον, ἐλθὼν λάβρος, ἐπαιγίζων, ἐπὶ τ’ ἠμύει ἀσταχύεσσιν.

(As when the west wind tosses a deep cornfield rushing down with furious blast, and it bows with all its ears.)