The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

His life thereafter was a comfortable one. He was as popular as Byron had been, and the earnings from his poetry (sometimes exceeding .10,000 a year) enabled him to purchase a house in the country and to enjoy the kind of seclusion he liked. His notoriety was enhanced, like that of Bernard Shaw and Walt Whitman, by his colorful appearance. Huge and shaggy in cloak and broad-brimmed hat, gruff in manner, he impressed everyone as what is called a "character." The pioneering photographer Julia Cameron, who took magnificent portraits of him, called him "the most beautiful old man on earth." Like Dylan Thomas in the twentieth century, Tennyson had a booming voice that electrified listeners when he read his poetry, "mouthing out his hollow o's and a's, / Deep-chested music," as he would covertly describe himself in an early version of his Arthurian epic. Moreover, for many Victorian readers, he seemed not only a great poetical phrase maker and a striking individual but also a wise man whose occasional pronouncements on politics or world affairs represented the national voice itself. In 1884 he accepted a peerage. In 1892 he died and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

It is often said that success was bad for Tennyson and that after In Memoriam his poetic power seriously declined. That in his last forty-two years certain of his mannerisms became accentuated is true. One of the difficulties of his dignified blank verse was, as he said himself, that it is hard to describe commonplace objects and "at the same time to retain poetical elevation." This difficulty is evident, for example, in Enoch Arden (1864), a long blank verse narrative of everyday life in a fishing village, in which a basketful of fish is ornately described as "Enoch's ocean spoil / In ocean-smelling osier." In his later poems dealing with national affairs, there is also an increased shrillness of tone�a mannerism accentuated by Tennyson's realizing that he, like Charles Dickens, had a vast public behind him to back up his pronouncements.

It would be unwise, however, to ignore all of Tennyson's later productions. In 1855 he published his experimental monologue Maud, in which he presents an alienated hero who feels great bitterness toward society. In 1859 appeared four books of his Idylls of the King, a large-scale epic that occupied most of his energies in the second half of his career. The Idylls uses the body of Arthurian legend to construct a vision of civilization's rise and fall. In this civilization women both inspire men's highest efforts and sow the seeds of those efforts' destruction. The Idylls provides Tennyson's most extensive social vision, one that typifies much social thought of the age in its concern with medieval ideals of social community, heroism, and courtly love and in its despairing sense of the cycles of historical change.

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ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON / 1111

W. H. Auden stated that Tennyson had "the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet." The interesting point is that Tennyson did not "have" such an ear: he developed it. Studies of the original versions of his poems in the 1830 and 1832 volumes demonstrate how hard he worked at his craftsmanship. Like Geoffrey Chaucer or Alexander Pope or John Keats, Tennyson studied his predecessors assiduously to perfect his technique. Anyone wanting to learn the traditional craft of English verse can study profitably the various stages of revision that poems such as "The Lotos-Eaters" were subjected to by this painstaking and artful poet. Some lines written in 1988 by the American poet Karl Shapiro effectively characterize Tennyson's accomplishments in these areas: Long-lived, the very image of English Poet, Whose songs still break out tears in the generations, Whose poetry for practitioners still astounds, Who crafted his life and letters like a watch.

Tennyson's early poetry shows other skills as well. One of these was a capacity for linking scenery to states of mind. As early as 1835 J. S. Mill identified the special kind of scene painting to be found in poems such as "Mariana" (1830): "not the power of producing that rather vapid species of composition usually termed descriptive poetry . . . but the power of creating scenery, in keeping with some state of human feeling so fitted to it as to be the embodied symbol of it, and to summon up the state of feeling itself, with a force not to be surpassed by anything but reality."

The state of feeling to which Tennyson was most intensely drawn was a melancholy isolation, often portrayed through the consciousness of an abandoned woman, as in "Mariana." Tennyson's absorption with such emotions in his early poetry evoked considerable criticism. His friend R. C. Trench warned him, "Tennyson, we cannot live in Art," and Mill urged him to "cultivate, and with no half devotion, philosophy as well as poetry." Advice of this kind Tennyson was already predisposed to heed. The death of Hallam and the religious uncertainties that he had himself experienced, together with his own extensive study of writings by geologists, astronomers, and biologists, led him to confront many of the religious issues that bewildered his and later generations. The result was In Memoriam, a long elegy written over a period of seventeen years, embodying the poet's reflections on the relation of human beings to God and to nature.

Tennyson's exploration of these vast subjects prompted some readers, such as T. H. Huxley, to consider him an intellectual giant, a thinker who had mastered the scientific thought of his century and fully confronted the issues it raised. Others dismissed Tennyson, in this phase, as a lightweight. Auden went so far as to call him the "stupidest" of English poets. He added, "There was little about melancholia that he didn't know; there was little else that he did." Perhaps T. S. Eliot's evaluation of In Memoriam is the more thought-provoking: the poem, he wrote, is remarkable not "because of the quality of its faith but because of the quality of its doubt." Tennyson's mind was slow, ponderous, brooding; for the composition of In Memoriam such qualities of mind were assets, not liabilities. Very different are the poems Tennyson writes of events of the moment over which his thoughts and feelings have had no time to brood. Several of these are what he himself called "newspaper verse." They are letters to the editor in effect, with the heat we expect of such productions. "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1854), inspired by a report in the London Times of a cavalry charge at Balaclava during the Crimean War, is one of the most fascinating of his productions in this category.

Tennyson's poems of contemporary events were inevitably popular in his own day. So too were those poems in which, as in "Locksley Hall" (1842), he dipped into the future. The technological changes wrought by Victorian inventors and engineers fascinated him, sometimes giving him an exultant assurance of human progress. At other times the horrors of industrialism's by-products in the slums, the persistence of barbarity and bloodshed, and the greed of the newly rich destroyed his hopes that human

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1112 1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

ity was evolving upward. In the final book of Idylls of the King (1869), Arthur laments that his "realm / Reels back into the beast": Tennyson was similarly haunted by the possibility of retrogression.

For despite Tennyson's fascination with technological developments, he was essentially a poet of the countryside, a man whose whole being was conditioned by the recurring rhythms of rural rather than urban life. He had the country dweller's awareness of traditional roots and sense of the past. It is appropriate that so many of his poems are about the past, not about the present or future. Tennyson said that "the words 'far, far away' had always a strange charm" for him, even in his childhood; he was haunted by what he called "the passion of the past." The past became his great theme, whether it be his own past (such as the times he shared with Hallam), his country's past (as in Idylls of the King), or the past of the world itself, as expressed in these lines from In Memoriam:

There rolls the deep where grew the tree. O earth, what changes hast thou seen!

There where the long street roars hath been The stillness of the central sea.

Though Tennyson more often is inspired by the recorded past of humankind, he is the first major writer to express this awareness of the vast extent of geological time that has haunted human consciousness since Victorian scientists exposed the history of the earth's crust.

Mariana1 "Mariana in the moated grange." Measure for Measure With blackest moss the flower-plots Were thickly crusted, one and all; The rusted nails fell from the knots 5That held the pear to the gable wall. The broken sheds looked sad and strange: Unlifted was the clinking latch; Weeded0 and worn the ancient thatch full of weeds 10Upon the lonely moated grange. She only said, "My life is dreary, He cometh not," she said; She said, "I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!" 15Her tears fell with the dews at even; Her tears fell ere the dews were dried; She could not look on the sweet heaven, Either at morn or eventide. 20After the flitting of the bats, When thickest dark did trance0 the sky, She drew her casement curtain by, And glanced athwart0 the glooming flats. She only said, "The night is dreary, cross across

He cometh not," she said;

1. Mariana, in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure 3.1.255, waits in a grange (an outlying farmhouse) for her lover, who has deserted her.

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MARIANA / 1113

She said, "I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!" Upon the middle of the night,

Waking she heard the nightfowl crow;

The cock sung out an hour ere light;

From the dark fen� the oxen's low marshland

Came to her; without hope of change,

In sleep she seemed to walk forlorn,

Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn

About the lonely moated grange.

She only said, "The day is dreary,

He cometh not," she said;

She said, "I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!" About a stonecast� from the wall stone's throw

A sluice with blackened waters slept,

And o'er it many, round and small,

40 The clustered marish-mosses2 crept.

Hard0 by a poplar shook alway, close

All silver-green with gnarled bark:

For leagues no other tree did mark

The level waste, the rounding gray.

45 She only said, "My life is dreary,

He cometh not," she said;

She said, "I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!" And ever when the moon was low,

And the shrill winds were up and away,

In the white curtain, to and fro,

She saw the gusty shadow sway.

But when the moon was very low,

And wild winds bound within their cell,3

The shadow of the poplar fell

Upon her bed, across her brow.

She only said, "The night is dreary,

He cometh not," she said;

She said, "I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!" All day within the dreamy house,

The doors upon their hinges creaked;

The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse

Behind the moldering wainscot0 shrieked, wooden paneling

65 Or from the crevice peered about.

Old faces glimmered through the doors,

Old footsteps trod the upper floors,

Old voices called her from without.

She only said, "My life is dreary,

2. The little marsh-moss lumps that lloat on the 3. According to Virgil, Aeolus, god of winds, kept surface of water [Tennyson's note). the winds imprisoned in a cave (Aeneid 1.50�59).

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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

70 He cometh not," she said;

She said, "I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!"

The sparrow's chirrup on the roof,

The slow clock ticking, and the sound

75 Which to the wooing wind aloof

The poplar made, did all confound

Her sense; but most she loathed the hour

When the thick-moted sunbeam lay

Athwart the chambers, and the day

so Was sloping toward his western bower.

Then, said she, "I am very dreary,

He will not come," she said;

She wept, "I am aweary, aweary,

Oh God, that I were dead!"

1830

The Lady of Shalott'

Part 1

On either side the river lie

Long fields of barley and of rye,

That clothe the wold� and meet the sky; rolling plain

And through the field the road runs by

5 To many-towered Camelot;

And up and down the people go,

Gazing where the lilies blow0 bloom

Round an island there below,

The island of Shalott.

io Willows whiten, aspens quiver,

Little breezes dusk and shiver

Through the wave that runs forever

By the island in the river

Flowing down to Camelot.

15 Four gray walls, and four gray towers,

Overlook a space of flowers,

And the silent isle imbowers

The Lady of Shalott.

By the margin, willow-veiled,

20 Slide the heavy barges trailed

By slow horses; and unhailed

The shallop0 flitteth silken-sailed light open boat

1. The story of the Lady of Shalott is a version of the story first in some Italian novelle: but the web, the tale of "Elaine the fair maid of Astolat," which mirror, island, etc., were my own. Indeed, I doubt appears in book 18 of Sir Thomas Malory's Morte whether I should ever have put it in that shape if Darthur (1470). Tennyson, however, claimed he I had been aware of the Maid of Astolat in Morte did not know Malory's version when he wrote his Arthur." Tennyson subjected this poem to numerdraft in 1832, identifying his source as a 14th-ous revisions over the years. century tale about "la Damigella di Scalot": "I met

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THE LADY OF SHALOTT / 1115

Skimming down to Camelot:

But who hath seen her wave her hand?

25 Or at the casement seen her stand?

Or is she known in all the land,

The Lady of Shalott?

Only reapers, reaping early

In among the bearded barley,

30 Hear a song that echoes cheerly

From the river winding clearly, Down to towered Camelot;

And by the moon the reaper weary,

Piling sheaves in uplands airy,

35 Listening, whispers " 'Tis the fairy

Lady of Shalott."

Part 2

There she weaves by night and day

A magic web with colors gay.

She has heard a whisper say, 40 A curse is on her if she stay0 pauseTo look down to Camelot.

She knows not what the curse may be,

And so she weaveth steadily,

And little other care hath she,

45 The Lady of Shalott.

And moving through a mirror clear2

That hangs before her all the year,

Shadows of the world appear.

There she sees the highway near

50 Winding down to Camelot; There the river eddy whirls,

And there the surly village churls,0 peasantsAnd the red cloaks of market girls,

Pass onward from Shalott.

55 Sometimes a troop of damsels glad, An abbot on an ambling pad,� eas)-paced horse Sometimes a curly shepherd lad,

Or long-haired page in crimson clad,

Goes by to towered Camelot;

60 And sometimes through the mirror blue

The knights come riding two and two:

She hath no loyal knight and true,

The Lady of Shalott.

But in her web she still delights

65 To weave the mirror's magic sights,

For often through the silent nights

2. Weavers used mirrors, placed facing their looms, to see the progress of their work.

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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

A funeral, with plumes and lights And music, went to Camelot; Or when the moon was overhead,

Came two young lovers lately wed: "I am half sick of shadows," said The Lady of Shalott.

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Part 3

A bowshot from her bower eaves,

He rode between the barley sheaves, 75 The sun came dazzling through the leaves, And flamed upon the brazen greaves3

Of bold Sir Lancelot. A red-cross knight forever kneeled To a lady in his shield,

That sparkled on the yellow field, Beside remote Shalott.

80

The gemmy bridle glittered free, Like to some branch of stars we see Hung in the golden Galaxy.

85 The bridle bells rang merrily

As he rode down to Camelot; And from his blazoned baldric4 slung A mighty silver bugle hung, And as he rode his armor rung,

90 Beside remote Shalott.

All in the blue unclouded weather Thick-jeweled shone the saddle leather, The helmet and the helmet-feather Burned like one burning flame together,

95 As he rode down to Camelot; As often through the purple night, Below the starry clusters bright, Some bearded meteor, trailing light,

Moves over still Shalott.

100 His broad clear brow in sunlight glowed; On burnished hooves his war horse trode; From underneath his helmet flowed His coal-black curls as on he rode, As he rode down to Camelot.

105 From the bank and from the river He flashed into the crystal mirror, "Tirra lirra,"5 by the river Sang Sir Lancelot.

She left the web, she left the loom, 110 She made three paces through the room,

3. Armor protecting the leg below the knee. zoned": painted with a heraldic device. 4. A belt worn diagonally from one shoulder to the 5. Cf. Autolycus's song in Shakespeare's The Win- opposite hip, supporting a sword or bugle. "Bla-ter's Tale 4.3.9.

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THE LADY OF SHALOTT / 1117

She saw the water lily bloom,

She saw the helmet and the plume,

She looked down to Camelot.

Out flew the web and floated wide;

115 The mirror cracked from side to side;

"The curse is come upon me," cried

The Lady of Shalott.

Part 4

In the stormy east wind straining,

The pale yellow woods were waning,

The broad stream in his banks complaining,

Heavily the low sky raining

Over towered Camelot;

Down she came and found a boat

Beneath a willow left afloat,

And round about the prow she wrote

The Lady of Shalott.

And down the river's dim expanse

Like some bold seer in a trance,

Seeing all his own mischance�

With a glassy countenance

Did she look to Camelot.

And at the closing of the day

She loosed the chain, and down she lay;

The broad stream bore her far away,

The Lady of Shalott. Lying, robed in snowy white

That loosely flew to left and right�

The leaves upon her falling light�

Through the noises of the night

She floated down to Camelot;

And as the boat-head wound along

The willowy hills and fields among,

They heard her singing her last song,

The Lady of Shalott. Heard a carol, mournful, holy,

Chanted loudly, chanted lowly,

Till her blood was frozen slowly,

And her eyes were darkened wholly,6

Turned to towered Camelot.

For ere she reached upon the tide

The first house by the waterside,

Singing in her song she died,

The Lady of Shalott.

6. In the 1832 version this line read: "And her smooth face sharpened slowly." George Eliot informed Tennyson that she preferred the earlier version.

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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

This 1857 engraving, created by Dante Gabriel Rossetti for publisher Edward Moxon's illustrated collection of Tennyson's poetry, shows Lancelot musing "a little space" on the Lady of Shalott in her boat.

Under tower and balcony,

155 By garden wall and gallery,

A gleaming shape she floated by,

Dead-pale between the houses high,

Silent into Camelot.

Out upon the wharfs they came,

160 Knight and burgher, lord and dame,

And round the prow they read her name,

The Lady of Shalott.

Who is this? and what is here?

And in the lighted palace near

165 Died the sound of royal cheer;

And they crossed themselves for fear,

All the knights at Camelot:

But Lancelot mused a little space;

He said, "She has a lovely face;

170 God in his mercy lend her grace,

The Lady of Shalott."

1831-32 1832, 1842

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THE LOTOS-EATERS / 1119

The Lotos-Eaters1

"Courage!" he2 said, and pointed toward the land, "This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon." In the afternoon they came unto a land3 In which it seemed always afternoon. All round the coast the languid air did swoon, Breathing like one that hath a weary dream. Full-faced above the valley stood the moon; And, like a downward smoke, the slender stream Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem.

A land of streams! some, like a downward smoke, Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn,0 did go; fine thin linen And some through wavering lights and shadows broke, Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below. They saw the gleaming river seaward flow From the inner land; far off, three mountaintops Three silent pinnacles of aged snow, Stood sunset-flushed; and, dewed with showery drops, Up-clomb� the shadowy pine above the woven copse. climbed up

The charmed sunset lingered low adown In the red West; through mountain clefts the dale Was seen far inland, and the yellow down4 Bordered with palm, and many a winding vale And meadow, set with slender galingale;5 A land where all things always seemed the same! And round about the keel with faces pale, Dark faces pale against that rosy flame, The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came.

Branches they bore of that enchanted stem, Laden with flower and fruit, whereof they gave To each, but whoso did receive of them And taste, to him the gushing of the wave Far far away did seem to mourn and rave On alien shores; and if his fellow spake, His voice was thin, as voices from the grave;

1. Based on a short episode from the Odyssey rest and death. The descriptions in the first stanzas (9.82�97) in which the weary Greek veterans of are similar to Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1 590) the Trojan War are tempted by a desire to abandon 2.6 and employ the same stanza form. The final their long voyage homeward. As Odysseus later section derives, in part, from Lucretius's concepreported: "On the tenth day we set foot on the land tion of the gods in De Rerum Natura (ca. 55 B.C.E.). of the lotos-eaters who eat a flowering food. .. . I 2. Odysseus (or Ulysses). sent forth certain of my company [who] . . . mixed 3. The repetition of "land" from line 1 was delibwith the men of the lotos-eaters who gave . . . them erate; Tennyson said that this "no rhyme" was of the lotos to taste. Now whosoever of them did "lazier" in its effect. This technique of repeating eat the honey-sweet fruit of the lotos had no more words, phrases, and sounds continues; cf. "afterwish to bring tidings nor to come back, but there noon" (lines 3�4) and the rhyming of "adown" and he chose to abide . . . forgetful of his homeward "down" (lines 19 and 21). way." 4. An open plain on high ground. Tennyson expands Homer's brief account into 5. A plant resembling tall coarse grass. an elaborate picture of weariness and the desire for

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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

And deep-asleep he seemed, yet all awake,

And music in his ears his beating heart did make.

They sat them down upon the yellow sand,

Between the sun and moon upon the shore;

And sweet it was to dream of Fatherland,

Of child, and wife, and slave; but evermore

Most weary seemed the sea, weary the oar,

Weary the wandering fields of barren foam,

Then some one said, "We will return no more"; And all at once they sang, "Our island home0 Ithaca

Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam."

Choric Song1.6

There is sweet music here that softer falls

Than petals from blown roses on the grass,

Or night-dews on still waters between walls

Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass;

Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,

Than tired7 eyelids upon tired eyes; Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies.

Here are cool mosses deep,

And through the moss the ivies creep,

And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep,

And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep.

2

Why are we weighed upon with heaviness,

And utterly consumed with sharp distress,

While all things else have rest from weariness?

All things have rest: why should we toil alone,

We only toil, who are the first of things,

And make perpetual moan,

Still from one sorrow to another thrown;

Nor ever fold our wings,

And cease from wanderings, Nor steep our brows in slumber's holy balm;

Nor harken what the inner spirit sings,

"There is no joy but calm!"� Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things?8

3

Lo! in the middle of the wood,

The folded leaf is wooed from out the bud

With winds upon the branch, and there

Grows green and broad, and takes no care,

6. Sung by the mariners. 8. Cf. The Faerie Qiteene 2.6.17: "Why then dost 7. Tennyson wanted the word to be pronounced thou, O man, that of them all / Art Lord, and eke as tie-yerd rather than tier'd or tire-ed, thus "mak-of nature Sovereaine,/Wilfully . . . wast thyjoyous ing the word neither monosyllable or disyllabic, but houres in needlesse paine?" a dreamy child of the two."

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THE LOTOS-EATERS / 1121

Sun-steeped at noon, and in the moon

75 Nightly dew-fed; and turning yellow

Falls, and floats adown the air.

Lo! sweetened with summer light,

The full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow,

Drops in a silent autumn night,

so All its allotted length of days

The flower ripens in its place,

Ripens and fades, and falls, and hath no toil,

Fast-rooted in the fruitful soil.

4

Hateful is the dark blue sky,

85 Vaulted o'er the dark blue sea.

Death is the end of life; ah, why

Should life all labor be?

Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,

And in a little while our lips are dumb.

90 Let us alone. What is it that will last?

All things are taken from us, and become

Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.

Let us alone. What pleasure can we have

To war with evil? Is there any peace

95 In ever climbing up the climbing wave? All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave

In silence�ripen, fall, and cease: Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.9

5

How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream,

IOO With half-shut eyes ever to seem

Falling asleep in a half-dream!

To dream and dream, like yonder amber light,

Which will not leave the myrrh-bush1 on the height;

To hear each other's whispered speech;

105 Eating the Lotos day by day, To watch the crisping0 ripples on the beach, curlingAnd tender curving lines of creamy spray;

To lend our hearts and spirits wholly

To the influence of mild-minded melancholy;

no To muse and brood and live again in memory,

With those old faces of our infancy

Heaped over with a mound of grass,

Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass!

6

Dear is the memory of our wedded lives,

115 And dear the last embraces of our wives

And their warm tears; but all hath suffered change;

For surely now our household hearths are cold,

9. Cf. The Faerie Queen 1.9.40: "Sleepe after 1. Myrrh, a resin used in perfume and incense, is toyle, port after stormie seas, / Ease after warre, associated with sweetness and comfort, death after life does greatly please."

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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Our sons inherit us,� our looks are strange, succeed us as our heirs And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy.

Or else the island princes2 overbold Have eat our substance, and the minstrel sings

Before them of the ten years' war in Troy,

And our great deeds, as half-forgotten things.

Is there confusion in the little isle?

Let what is broken so remain.

The Gods are hard to reconcile;

'Tis hard to settle order once again.

There is confusion worse than death,

Trouble on trouble, pain on pain,

Long labor unto aged breath, Sore tasks to hearts worn out by many wars

And eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars.

7

But, propped on beds of amaranth and moly,3

How sweet�while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly�

With half-dropped eyelid still,

Beneath a heaven dark and holy,

To watch the long bright river drawing slowly

His waters from the purple hill�

To hear the dewy echoes calling

From cave to cave through the thick-twined vine�

To watch the emerald-colored water falling

Through many a woven acanthus4 wreath divine!

Only to hear and see the far-off sparkling brine,

Only to hear were sweet, stretched out beneath the pine.

8

The Lotos blooms below the barren peak,

The Lotos blows by every winding creek;

All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone;

Through every hollow cave and alley lone

Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos dust is blown.

We have had enough of action, and of motion we,

Rolled to starboard, rolled to larboard, when the surge was seething free,

Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea.

Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,

In the hollow Lotos land to live and be reclined

On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind. For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts0 are hurled thunderbolts

Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curled

Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world;

Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,

Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands,

Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands.

But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song

Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong,

2. The suitors of Penelope, Odysseus's wife; dur- Homer. "Amaranth": a legendary unfading flower, ing his long absence they have settled themselves 4. A plant resembling a thistle. Its leaves were the as guests in his hall as they pressure her to remarry. model for ornaments on Corinthian columns. 3. A flower with magical properties mentioned by

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ULYSSES / 1123

Like a tale of little meaning though the words are strong;

165 Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil,

Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil,

Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and oil;

Till they perish and they suffer�some, 'tis whispered�down in hell

Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell,

170 Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel.5 Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore Than labor in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar; O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.

1832, 1842

Ulysses1

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws2 unto a savage race,

5 That hoard, and sleep, and feed,3 and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel; I will drink

Life to the lees. All times I have enjoyed

Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those

That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when

io Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades4

Vexed the dim sea. I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known�cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

15 Myself not least, but honored of them all�

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy,

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough

20 Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades

Forever and forever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!5

5. A yellow lilylike flower supposed to grow in Ely-involved in governing his kingdom. sium�in classical mythology a paradise for heroes Tennyson stated that this poem expressed his favored by the gods. own "need of going forward and braving the strug- I. According to Dante, after the fall of Troy, Ulys-gle of life" after the death of Arthur Haliam. ses never returned to his island home of Ithaca. 2. Measure out rewards and punishments. Instead he persuaded some of his followers to seek 3. Cf. Shakespeare's Hamlet 4.4.9.23-25: "What new experiences by a voyage of exploration west-is a man / If his chief good .. . Be but to sleep and ward out beyond the Strait of Gibraltar. In his feed?�a beast, no more." inspiring speech to his aging crew he said: "Con-4. A group of stars (literally, "rainy ones") in the sider your origin: you were not made to live as constellation Taurus; their heliacal rising and set- brutes, but to pursue virtue and knowledge" ting generally coincided with the season of heavy (Inferno 26). Tennyson modified Dante's 14th-rains. "Scudding drifts": driving showers of spray century version by combining it with Homer's and rain. account (Odyssey 19�24). Thus Tennyson has 5. Cf. Ulysses' speech in Shakespeare's Troilus Ulysses make his speech in Ithaca some time after and Cressida 3.3.144-^47: "Perseverance, dear my he has returned home; reunited with his wife, lord, / Keeps honour bright. To have done is to Penelope, and his son, Telemachus; and, presum-hang / Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail / In ably, resumed his administrative responsibilities monumental mock'ry."

.

1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life

25 Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains; but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

30 And this gray spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,

To whom I leave the scepter and the isle�

35 Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill

This labor, by slow prudence to make mild

A rugged people, and through soft degrees

Subdue them to the useful and the good.

Most blameless is he, centered in the sphere

40 Of common duties, decent not to fail

In offices of tenderness, and pay Meet0 adoration to my household gods, suitable, fitting When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail;

45 There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me�

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine,6 and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads7�you and I are old;

50 Old age hath yet his honor and his toil. Death closes all; but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;

55 The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

60 To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths8

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,9

And see the great Achilles,1 whom we knew.

65 Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are�

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

6. I.e., varying fortunes. adise of perpetual summer, located in the far7. Confidence. western ocean, where the virtuous and heroes 8. The outer ocean or river that the Greeks dwell forever after death (often identified with Elybelieved surrounded the flat circle of the earth; the sium). stars descended into it. 1. The greatest of the Greek warriors at Troy, 9. In Greek myth the Islands of the Blessed, a par-where he was killed.

.

TITHONUS / 1125

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will 70 To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

1833 1842

Tithonus1

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, The vapors weep their burthen to the ground, Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, And after many a summer dies the swan.2

5 Me only cruel immortality Consumes; I wither slowly in thine arms,3 Here at the quiet limit of the world, A white-haired shadow roaming like a dream The ever-silent spaces of the East,

io Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of mom.

Alas! for this gray shadow, once a man� So glorious in his beauty and thy choice, Who madest him thy chosen, that he seemed To his great heart none other than a God!

15 I asked thee, "Give me immortality." Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile, Like wealthy men who care not how they give. But thy strong Hours indignant worked their wills, And beat me down and marred and wasted me,

20 And though they could not end me, left me maimed To dwell in presence of immortal youth, Immortal age beside immortal youth, And all I was in ashes. Can thy love, Thy beauty, make amends, though even now,

25 Close over us, the silver star,4 thy guide, Shines in those tremulous eyes that fill with tears To hear me? Let me go; take back thy gift. Why should a man desire in any way To vary from the kindly race of men,

30 Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance' Where all should pause, as is most meet for all?

A soft air fans the cloud apart; there comes A glimpse of that dark world where I was born. Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals

35 From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure, And bosom beating with a heart renewed. Thy cheek begins to redden through the gloom, Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine, Ere yet they blind the stars, and the wild team6

1. A Trojan prince loved by the goddess of the 3. Aurora's arms. dawn, Eos or Aurora, who obtained for him the gift 4. The morning star that precedes the dawn. of living forever but neglected to ask for the gift of 5. What is decreed or ordained as human destiny. everlasting youth. 6. The horses that draw Aurora's chariot into the 2. Some species of swans live for at least fifty sky at daybreak. years.

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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

40 Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise,

And shake the darkness from their loosened manes,

And beat the twilight into flakes of fire.

Lo! ever thus thou growest beautiful

In silence, then before thine answer given

45 Departest, and thy tears are on my cheek.

Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears,

And make me tremble lest a saying learnt,

In days far-off, on that dark earth, be true?

"The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts."

50 Ay me! ay me! with what another heart

In days far-off, and with what other eyes

I used to watch�if I be he that watched�

The lucid outline forming round thee; saw

The dim curls kindle into sunny rings;

55 Changed with thy mystic change, and felt my blood

Glow with the glow that slowly crimsoned all

Thy presence and thy portals, while I lay,

Mouth, forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm

With kisses balmier than half-opening buds

60 Of April, and could hear the lips that kissed

Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet,

Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing,

While Ilion like a mist rose into towers.7

Yet hold me not forever in thine East;

65 How can my nature longer mix with thine?

Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold

Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet

Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam

Floats up from those dim fields about the homes

70 Of happy men that have the power to die, And grassy barrows0 of the happier dead. burial mounds

Release me, and restore me to the ground.

Thou seest all things, thou wilt see my grave;

Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn,

75 I earth in earth forget these empty courts,

And thee returning on thy silver wheels.

1833,1859 I860

Break, Break, Break

Break, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter

The thoughts that arise in me. 5 O, well for the fisherman's boy,

That he shouts with his sister at play!

7. The walls of Troy ("Ilion") were supposed to have been built to the strains of the god Apollo's music.

.

TH E EPI C [MORT E D'ARTHUR ] / 112 7 O, well for the sailor lad, That he sings in his boat on the bay! 10And the stately ships go on To their haven under the hill; But O for the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still! 15Break, 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. 1834 1842

The Epic [Morte d'Arthur]1

At Francis Allen's on the Christmas eve�

The game of forfeits done�the girls all kissed

Beneath the sacred bush� and passed0 away� mistletoe /gone

The parson Holmes, the poet Everard Hall,

5 The host, and I sat round the wassail-bowl,

Then halfway ebbed; and there we held a talk,

How all the old honor had from Christmas gone,

Or gone or dwindled down to some odd games

In some odd nooks like this; till I, tired out io With cutting eights0 that day upon the pond, figure eights

Where, three times slipping from the outer edge,

I bumped the ice into three several stars,

Fell in a doze; and half-awake I heard

The parson taking wide and wider sweeps,

15 Now harping on the church-commissioners,2

Now hawking at geology and schism;

Until I woke, and found him settled down

Upon the general decay of faith

Right through the world: "at home was little left,

20 And none abroad; there was no anchor, none,

To hold by." Francis, laughing, clapped his hand

On Everard's shoulder, with "I hold by him."

"And I," quoth Everard, "by the wassail-bowl."

"Why yes," I said, "we knew your gift that way

25 At college; but another which you had�

1. At age twenty-four Tennyson proposed to write d'Arthur" into his long narrative poem Idylls of the a long epic on King Arthur. Five years later he had King; it appears there as the twelfth book, The completed one book of the twelve, the story of Passing of Arthur. At that time the "Epic" frameArthur's death, which he published in 1842 under work was discarded and some lines added. The the title "Morte d'Arthur." In this early version the 1842 version can be reconstructed from The Pass- story is given a framework, "The Epic," which con-ing of Arthur, which incorporates "Morte d'Arthur sists of a short introductory section (fifty-one lines) (lines 170�440; only two lines are modified). and an epilogue (thirty lines), describing a party on 2. Commissioners appointed by the government Christmas Eve in modern times, at which the poet in 1835 to regulate the finances of the Anglican ("Everard Hall") reads "Morte d'Arthur" to his Church. friends. In 1869 Tennyson incorporated "Morte

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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

I mean of verse (for so we held it then),

What came of that?" "You know," said Frank, "he burnt

His epic, his King Arthur, some twelve books"�

And then to me demanding why: "O, sir,

30 He thought that nothing new was said, or else

Something so said 'twas nothing�that a truth

Looks freshest in the fashion of the day;

God knows; he has a mint of reasons; ask.

It pleased me well enough." "Nay, nay," said Hall,

35 "Why take the style of those heroic times?

For nature brings not back the mastodon,

Nor we those times; and why should any man

Remodel models? these twelve books of mine

Were faint Homeric echoes,3 nothing-worth, 40 Mere chaff and draff,0 much better burnt." "Rut I," bits of

Said Francis, "picked the eleventh from this hearth,

And have it; keep a thing, its use will come.

I hoard it as a sugarplum for Holmes."

He laughed, and I, though sleepy, like a horse

45 That hears the corn-bin open, pricked my ears;

For I remembered Everard's college fame

When we were Freshmen. Then at my request

He brought it; and the poet, little urged,

But with some prelude of disparagement,

50 Read, mouthing out his hollow o's and a's,

Deep-chested music, and to this result.'1 fc * a Here ended Hall, and our last light, that long

325 Had winked and threatened darkness, flared and fell;

At which the parson, sent to sleep with sound,

And waked with silence, grunted "Good!" but we

Sat rapt: it was the tone with which he read�

Perhaps some modern touches here and there

330 Redeemed it from the charge of nothingness�

Or else we loved the man, and prized his work;

I know not; but we sitting, as I said,

The cock crew loud, as at that time of year

The lusty bird takes every hour for dawn.5

335 Then Francis, muttering like a man ill-used, "There now�that's nothing!" drew a little back,

And drove his heel into the smoldered log,

That sent a blast of sparkles up the flue.

And so to bed, where yet in sleep I seemed

340 To sail with Arthur under looming shores, Point after point; till on to dawn, when dreams

Begin to feel the truth and stir of day,

To me, methought, who waited with the crowd,

3. After reading "Morte d'Arthur" in manuscript, pp. 1205-11). "The Epic" then continued as Walter Savage Landor commented: "It is more lows. Homeric than any poem of our time, and rivals 5. See Shakespeare's Hamlet 1.1.138^11, on some of the nohlest parts of the Odyssey." legend of the cock's crowing "all night long" in 4. Here followed the 271 lines of "Morte d'Arthur" season of Jesus' birth. in 1842 (see The Passing of Arthur, lines 1 70-440,

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LOCKSLEY HALL / 112 9 There came a bark� that, blowing forward, bore345 King Arthur, like a modern gentleman Of stateliest port;0 and all the people cried, "Arthur is come again: he cannot die." Then those that stood upon the hills behind Repeated�"Come again, and thrice as fair"; 350 And, further inland, voices echoed�"Come With all good things, and war shall be no more." At this a hundred bells began to peal, That with the sound I woke, and heard indeed The clear church bells ring in the Christmas morn. small ship deportment 1833-38 1842

Locksley Hall1

Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet 'tis early morn; Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle horn.

'Tis the place, and all around it, as of old, the curlews call, Dreary gleams2 about the moorland flying over Locksley Hall;

Locksley Hall, that in the distance overlooks the sandy tracts, And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts.

Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest, Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the west.

Many a night I saw the Pleiads,3 rising through the mellow shade, Glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid.

Here about the beach I wandered, nourishing a youth sublime With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of time;

When the centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed; When I clung to all the present for the promise that it closed0 enclosed

When I dipped into the future far as human eye could see, Saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that would be.�

In the spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin's breast; In the spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest;

In the spring a livelier iris changes on the burnished dove;4 In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

1. The situation in this poem�of a young man's speaker (a tone accentuated by the heavily marked being jilted by a woman who chose to marry a trochaic meter), Tennyson said: "The whole poem wealthy landowner�may have been suggested to represents young life, its good side, its deficiencies, Tennyson by the experience of his brother Fred-and its yearnings." erick, a hot-tempered man who had fallen in love 2. Tennyson stated that the noun "gleams" refers with his cousin Julia Tennyson and who was sim-not to "curlews" flying but to streaks of light. ilarly unsuccessful, [t may also have been inspired 3. Or the Pleiades, seven stars in the constellation by Tennyson's own frustrated courtship of Rosa Taurus. Baring, who rejected the young poet in favor of a 4. The rainbowlike colors of a dove's throat plum- wealthy suitor. Concerning the ranting tone of the age are intensified in the mating season.

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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Then her cheek was pale and thinner than should be for one so young,

And her eyes on all my motions with a mute observance hung. And I said, "My cousin Amy, speak, and speak the truth to me,

Trust me, cousin, all the current of my being sets to thee." 25 On her pallid cheek and forehead came a color and a light,

As I have seen the rosy red flushing in the northern night. And she turned�her bosom shaken with a sudden storm of sighs�

All the spirit deeply dawning in the dark of hazel eyes� Saying, "I have hid my feelings, fearing they should do me wrong";

30 Saying, "Dost thou love me, cousin?" weeping, "I have loved thee long." Love took up the glass of Time, and turned it in his glowing hands;

Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands. Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;

Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, passed in music out of sight. 35 Many a morning on the moorland did we hear the copses ring,

And her whisper thronged my pulses with the fullness of the spring. Many an evening by the waters did we watch the stately ships,

And our spirits rushed together at the touching of the lips. O my cousin, shallow-hearted! O my Amy, mine no more!

40 O the dreary, dreary moorland! O the barren, barren shore! Falser than all fancy fathoms, falser than all songs have sung,

Puppet to a father's threat, and servile to a shrewish tongue! Is it well to wish thee happy?�having known me�to decline

On a range of lower feelings and a narrower heart than mine! 45 Yet it shall be; thou shalt lower to his level day by day,

What is fine within thee growing coarse to sympathize with clay.

As the husband is, the wife is; thou art mated with a clown,0 boor And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down. He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force,

50 Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse. What is this? his eyes are heavy; think not they are glazed with wine.

Go to him, it is thy duty; kiss him, take his hand in thine. It may be my lord is weary, that his brain is overwrought;

Soothe him with thy finer fancies, touch him with thy lighter thought. 55 He will answer to the purpose, easy things to understand�

Better thou wert dead before me, though I slew thee with my hand!

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LOCKSLEY HAL L / 113 1 Better thou and I were lying, hidden from the heart's disgrace, Rolled in one another's arms, and silent in a last embrace. Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth! Cursed be the social lies that warp us from the living truth! Cursed be the sickly forms that err from honest Nature's rule! Cursed be the gold that gilds the straitened0 forehead of the fool! narrowed

Well�'tis well that I should bluster!�Hadst thou less unworthy proved� Would to God�for I had loved thee more than ever wife was loved.

Am I mad, that I should cherish that which bears but bitter fruit? I will pluck it from my bosom, though my heart be at the root.

Never, though my mortal summers to such length of years should come As the many-wintered crow5 that leads the clanging rookery home.

Where is comfort? in division of the records of the mind? Can I part her from herself, and love her, as I knew her, kind?

I remember one that perished; sweetly did she speak and move; Such a one do I remember, whom to look at was to love.

Can I think of her as dead, and love her for the love she bore? No�she never loved me truly; love is love for evermore.

Comfort? comfort scorned of devils! this is truth the poet6 sings, That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.

Drug thy memories, lest thou learn it, lest thy heart be put to proof, In the dead unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof.

Like a dog, he hunts in dreams, and thou art staring at the wall, Where the dying night-lamp flickers, and the shadows rise and fall.

Then a hand shall pass before thee, pointing to his drunken sleep, To thy widowed7 marriage-pillows, to the tears that thou wilt weep.

Thou shalt hear the "Never, never," whispered by the phantom years. And a song from out the distance in the ringing of thine ears;

And an eye shall vex thee, looking ancient kindness on thy pain.

Turn thee, turn thee on thy pillow; get thee to thy rest again.

Nay, but Nature brings thee solace; for a tender voice will cry.

'Tis a purer life than thine, a lip to drain thy trouble dry.

Baby lips will laugh me down; my latest rival brings thee rest.

Baby fingers, waxen touches, press me from the mother's breast.

5. A rook, a long-lived bird. 7. Presumably figurative. Her marriage having 6. Dante; see Inferno 5.121-23. become a mockery, she is widowed.

.

1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

O, the child too clothes the father with a dearness not his due.

Half is thine and half is his; it will be worthy of the two. O, I see thee old and formal, fitted to thy petty part,

With a little hoard of maxims preaching down a daughter's heart. 95 "They were dangerous guides the feelings�she herself was not exempt�

Truly, she herself had suffered"�Perish in thy self-contempt! Overlive it�lower yet�be happy! wherefore should I care?

I myself must mix with action, lest I wither by despair. What is that which I should turn to, lighting upon days like these?

100 Every door is barred with gold, and opens but to golden keys. Every gate is thronged with suitors, all the markets overflow.

I have but an angry fancy; what is that which I should do? I had been content to perish, falling on the foeman's ground,

When the ranks are rolled in vapor, and the winds are laid with sound.8 105 But the jingling of the guinea helps the hurt that Honor feels,

And the nations do but murmur, snarling at each other's heels. Can I but relive in sadness? I will turn that earlier page.

Hide me from my deep emotion, O thou wondrous Mother-Age!9 Make me feel the wild pulsation that I felt before the strife,

no When I heard my days before me, and the tumult of my life; Yearning for the large excitement that the coming years would yield,

Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father's field, And at night along the dusky highway near and nearer drawn,

Sees in heaven the light of London flaring like a dreary dawn; 115 And his spirit leaps within him to be gone before him then,

Underneath the light he looks at, in among the throngs of men; Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new;

That which they have done but earnest0 of the things that they pledge

shall do. For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see,

120 Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be; Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,'

Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

8. It was once believed that the firing of artillery (see also line 185). stilled the winds. 1. Probably airships, such as balloons. "Argosies": 9. A happier past at life's beginning, which gen- merchant vessels, erated a more confident anticipation of the future

.

LOCKSLEY HALL / 1133

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew

From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue; 125 Far along the world-wide whisper of the south wind rushing warm,

With the standards of the peoples plunging through the thunderstorm; Till the war drum throbbed no longer, and the battle flags were furled

In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world. There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,

130 And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapped in� universal law. encompassed by So I triumphed ere my passion sweeping through me left me dry,

Left me with the palsied heart, and left me with the jaundiced eye; Eye, to which all order festers, all things here are out of joint.

Science moves, but slowly, slowly, creeping on from point to point; 135 Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion, creeping nigher,

Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly-dying fire. Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs,

And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns. What is that to him that reaps not harvest of his youthful joys,

140 Though the deep heart of existence beat forever like a boy's? Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and I linger on the shore,

And the individual withers, and the world is more and more. Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast,

Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest. 145 Hark, my merry comrades call me, sounding on the bugle horn,

They to whom my foolish passion were a target for their scorn. Shall it not be scorn to me to harp on such a moldered string?

I am shamed through all my nature to have loved so slight a thing. Weakness to be wroth with weakness! woman's pleasure, woman's pain�

150 Nature made them blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain. Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions, matched with mine,

Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine� Here at least, where nature sickens, nothing. Ah, for some retreat

Deep in yonder shining Orient, where my life began to beat.

155 Where in wild Mahratta-battle2 fell my father evil-starred� I was left a trampled orphan, and a selfish uncle's ward.

2. Reference to wars waged by a Hindu people against the British forces in India (1803 and 1817).

.

1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Or to burst all links of habit�there to wander far away,

On from island unto island at the gateways of the day. Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies,

160 Breadths of tropic shade and palms in cluster, knots of Paradise.

Never comes the trader, never floats an European flag, Slides the bird o'er lustrous woodland, swings the trailer0 from the vine crag;

Droops the heavy-blossomed bower, hangs the heavy-fruited tree�

Summer isles of Eden lying in dark purple spheres of sea. 165 There methinks would be enjoyment more than in this march of mind,

In the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake mankind. There the passions cramped no longer shall have scope and breathing space;

I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race. Iron-jointed, supple-sinewed, they shall dive, and they shall run,

170 Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun; Whistle back the parrot's call, and leap the rainbows of the brooks,

Not with blinded eyesight poring over miserable books� Fool, again the dream, the fancy! but I know my words are wild,

But I count the gray barbarian lower than the Christian child. 175 I, to herd with narrow foreheads, vacant of our glorious gains,

Like a beast with lower pleasures, like a beast with lower pains! Mated with a squalid savage�what to me were sun or clime?

I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time� I that rather held it better men should perish one by one,

180 Than that earth should stand at gaze like Joshua's moon in Ajalon!1 Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range,

Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves4 of change. Through the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day;

Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.5 185 Mother-Age�for mine I knew not�help me as when life begun;

Rift the hills, and roll the waters, flash the lightnings, weigh the sun.

3. At Joshua's command the sun and moon stood impression that train wheels ran in grooved rails. still while the Israelites completed the slaughter of 5. China, regarded in the 19th century as a static, their enemies in the valley of Ajalon (Joshua unprogressive country. Cf. Mill, On Liberty 10.12-13). (1859), p. 1051. 4. Railroad tracks. Tennyson at one time had the

.

TEARS , IDLE TEAR S / 1 13 5 O, I see the crescent promise of my spirit hath not set. Ancient founts of inspiration well through all my fancy yet. Howsoever these things be, a long farewell to Locksley Hall! Now for me the woods may wither, now for me the roof-tree fall. Comes a vapor from the margin,0 blackening over heath andholt,� Cramming all the blast before it, in its breast a thunderbolt. riverbank wood Let it fall on Locksley Hall, with rain or hail, or fire or snow; For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go. 1837-38 1842

FROM THE PRINCESS1

Tears, Idle Tears2

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

Tears from the depth of some divine despair

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy autumn-fields,

5 And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,

That brings our friends up from the underworld,

Sad as the last which reddens over one

That sinks with all we love below the verge;

io So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns

The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds

To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;

15 So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,

And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned

On lips that are for others; deep as love,

1. The Princess (1847), a long narrative poem, worth's "Tintern Abbey" (1798) and with memories contains interludes in which occasional songs are of Arthur Hallam, who was buried across the Brissung. Several of these songs, two of which are tol Channel in this area. "It is what I have always printed here, have been set to music by various felt even from a boy, and what as a boy I called the 19th- and 20th-century composers. passion of the past.' And it is so always with me 2. Tennyson commented: "This song came to me now; it is the distance that charms me in the land- on the yellowing autumn-tide at Tintern Abbey, scape, the picture and the past, and not the full for me of its bygone memories." This locale immediate today in which I move." would be for him associated both with Words

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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;

20 O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

1847

Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;

Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;

Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font.

The firefly wakens; waken thou with me.

s Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,

And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

Now lies the Earth all Danae1 to the stars,

And all thy heart lies open unto me.

Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves

io A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,

And slips into the bosom of the lake.

So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip

Into my bosom and be lost in me.

1847

["The woman's cause is man's"]'

"Blame not thyself too much," I said, "nor blame

240 Too much the sons of men and barbarous laws;

These were the rough ways of the world till now.

Henceforth thou hast a helper, me, that know

The woman's cause is man's: they rise or sink

Together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free:

245 For she that out of Lethe2 scales with man

The shining steps of Nature, shares with man

1. A Greek princess, whose father confined her in Gama, the prince's father, invades the university a brazen chamber after hearing the oracle that her to rescue his son and force Ida to marry him�the son would kill him. But Zeus came to her in the university is turned into a hospital and the princess form of a shower of gold, and she bore the hero is persuaded of the error of her ways. The prince's Perseus. final vision, from book 7 (reprinted here), in which 1. The Princess was Tennyson's attempt to address he imagines a future of gradual change, by which the contemporary debate over woman's proper men and women adopt the strengths of the other role. It tells the story of a prince who courts the while maintaining their distinct natures, has been young and beautiful Princess Ida. She has vowed a key text in discussing Victorian constructions of she will never marry and has established a women's masculinity and femininity. In the operetta Prinuniversity from which men are excluded. The cess Ida (1884), w. S Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan prince and his two companions dress themselves parody Tennyson's poem and satirize feminism. up in women's clothes to gain entrance to the uni-2. In the classical underworld, the river of forgetversity. When a battle ensues�in which King fulness.

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["THE WOMAN'S CAUSE is MAN'S"] / 1137

His nights, his days, moves with him to one goal,

Stays all the fair young planet in her hands�

If she be small, slight-natured, miserable,

250 How shall men grow? but work no more alone!

Our place is much: as far as in us lies

We two will serve them both in aiding her�

Will clear away the parasitic forms

That seem to keep her up but drag her down�

255 Will leave her space to burgeon out of all

Within her�let her make herself her own

To give or keep, to live and learn and be

All that not harms distinctive womanhood.

For woman is not undevelopt man,

260 But diverse: could we make her as the man, Sweet Love were slain: his dearest bond is this,

Not like to like, but like in difference.

Yet in the long years liker must they grow;

The man be more of woman, she of man;

265 He gain in sweetness and in moral height, Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;

She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care,

Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind;

Till at the last she set herself to man,

270 Like perfect music unto noble words; And so these twain, upon the skirts of Time,

Sit side by side, full-summed in all their powers,

Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be,

Self-reverent each and reverencing each,

275 Distinct in individualities, But like each other even as those who love.

Then comes the statelier Eden back to men:

Then reign the world's great bridals, chaste and calm:

Then springs the crowning race of humankind.

May these things be!"

280 Sighing she spoke "I fear They will not."

"Dear, but let us type0 them now model

In our own lives, and this proud watchword rest

Of equal; seeing either sex alone

Is half itself, and in true marriage lies

285 Nor equal, nor unequal: each fulfils

Defect in each, and always thought in thought,

Purpose in purpose, will in will, they grow,

The single pure and perfect animal,

The two-celled heart beating, with one full stroke,

Life." And again sighing she spoke: "A dream

That once was mine! what woman taught you this?"

1839-47 1847

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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

In Memoria m A. H. H. When Arthur Hallam died suddenly at the age of twenty-two, probably of a stroke, Tennyson felt that his life had been shattered. Hal- lam was not only Tennyson's closest friend, and his sister's fiance, but a critic and champion of his poetry. Widely regarded as the most promising young man of his generation, Hallam had written a review of Tennyson's first book of poetry that is still one of the best assessments of it. When Tennyson lost Hallam's love and support, he was overwhelmed with doubts about his own life and vocation and about the meaning of the universe and humankind's place in it, doubts reinforced by his study of geology and other sciences. To express the variety of his feelings and reflections, he began to compose a series of lyrics. Tennyson later arranged these "short swallow-flights of song," as he called them, written at intervals over a period of seventeen years, into one long elegy. Although the resulting poem has many affinities with traditional elegies like Milton's "Lycidas" (1638) and Shelley's Adonais (1821), its structure is strikingly different. It is made up of individual lyric units that are seemingly self-contained but take their full meaning from their place in the whole. As T. S. Eliot has written, "It is unique: it is a long poem made by putting together lyrics, which have only the unity and continuity of a diary, the concentrated diary of a man confessing himself." Though intensely personal, the elegy expressed the religious doubts of his age. It is also a love poem. Like Shakespeare's sonnets, to which the poem alludes, In Memoriam vests its most intense emotion in male relationships.

The sections of the poem record a progressive development from despair to some sort of hope. Some of the early sections of the poem resemble traditional pastoral elegies, including those portraying the voyage during which Hallam's body was brought to England for burial (sections 9 to 15 and 19). Other early sections portraying the speaker's loneliness, in which even Christmas festivities seem joyless (sections 28 to 30), are more distinctive. The poem's internal chronology covers a span of around three years, and with the passage of time, indicated by anniversaries and by recurring changes of the seasons, the speaker comes to accept the loss and to assert his belief in life and in an afterlife. In particular the recurring Christmases (sections 28, 78, 104) indicate the stages of his development, yet the pattern of progress in the poem is not a simple unimpeded movement upward. Dramatic conflicts recur throughout. Thus the most intense expression of doubt occurs not at the beginning of In Memoriam but as late as sections 54, 55, and 56.

The quatrain form in which the whole poem is written is usually called the "In Memoriam stanza," although it had been occasionally used by earlier poets. So rigid a form taxed Tennyson's ingenuity in achieving variety, but it is one of several means by which the diverse parts of the poem are knitted together.

The introductory section, consisting of eleven stanzas, is commonly referred to as the "Prologue," although Tennyson did not assign a title to it. It was written in 1849 after the rest of the poem was complete.

FROM IN MEMORIAM A. H. H.

OBIIT MDCCCXXXII11

Strong Son of God, immortal Love, Whom we, that have not seen thy face, By faith, and faith alone, embrace,

Believing where we cannot prove;2

1. He died 1833 (Latin). tion: "Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet 2. Cf. John 20.24�29, in which Jesus rebukes have believed." Thomas for his doubts concerning the Resurrec

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IN MEMORIAM, EPILOGUE/ 1139

5 Thine are these orbs3 of light and shade; Thou madest Life in man and brute; Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot Is on the skull which thou hast made. Thou wilt not leave us in the dust: 10 Thou madest man, he knows not why, He thinks he was not made to die; And thou hast made him: thou art just. Thou seemest human and divine, The highest, holiest manhood, thou. 15 Our wills are ours, we know not how; Our wills are ours, to make them thine. Our little systems4 have their day; They have their day and cease to be; They are but broken lights of thee, 20 And thou, O Lord, art more than they. We have but faith: we cannot know, For knowledge is of things we see; And yet we trust it comes from thee, A beam in darkness: let it grow. 25 Let knowledge grow from more to more, But more of reverence in us dwell; That mind and soul, according well, May make one music as before,5 But vaster. We are fools and slight; JO We mock thee when we do not fear: But help thy foolish ones to bear; Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light. Forgive what seemed my sin in me, What seemed my worth since I began; 35 For merit lives from man to man, And not from man, O Lord, to thee. Forgive my grief for one removed, Thy creature, whom I found so fair. I trust he lives in thee, and there 40 I find him worthier to be loved. Forgive these wild and wandering cries, Confusions of a wasted0 youth; desolated Forgive them where they fail in truth, And in thy wisdom make me wise. 1849

3. The sun and moon (according to Tennyson's 4. Of religion and philosophy, note). 5. As in the days of fixed religious faith.

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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

1

I held it truth, with him who sings To one clear harp in divers tones,6 That men may rise on stepping stones

Of their dead selves to higher things.

5 But who shall so forecast the years And find in loss a gain to match? Or reach a hand through time to catch

The far-off interest of tears?

Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drowned, io Let darkness keep her raven gloss. Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss, To dance with Death, to beat the ground,

Than that the victor Hours should scorn The long result of love, and boast, is "Behold the man that loved and lost, But all he was is overworn."

2

Old yew, which graspest at the stones That name the underlying dead, Thy fibres net the dreamless head,

Thy roots are wrapped about the bones.

5 The seasons bring the flower again, And bring the firstling to the flock; And in the dusk of thee the clock

Beats out the little lives of men.

O, not for thee the glow, the bloom, io Who changest not in any gale, Nor branding summer suns avail To touch thy thousand years of gloom7

And gazing on thee, sullen tree, Sick for� thy stubborn hardihood, envying 15 I seem to fail from out my blood And grow incorporate into thee.

6. Identified by Tennyson as the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). 7. The ancient yew tree, growing in the grounds near the clock tower and church where Haliam was to be buried, seems neither to blossom in spring nor to change from its dark mournful color in summer. "Thousand years": cf. Book of Common Prayer, Psalm 90: "For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night."

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IN MEMORIAM, 118 / 1141

115

O Sorrow, cruel fellowship, O Priestess in the vaults of Death, O sweet and bitter in a breath,

What whispers from thy lying lip?

5 "The stars," she whispers, "blindly run; A web is woven across the sky; From out waste places comes a cry,

And murmurs from the dying sun;

"And all the phantom, Nature, stands� 10 With all the music in her tone, A hollow echo of my own� A hollow form with empty hands."

And shall I take a thing so blind, Embrace her� as my natural good; Sorrow 15 Or crush her, like a vice of blood, Upon the threshold of the mind?

4

To Sleep I give my powers away; My will is bondsman to the dark; I sit within a helmless bark,

And with my heart I muse and say:

5 O heart, how fares it with thee now, That thou should fail from thy desire, Who scarcely darest to inquire,

"What is it makes me beat so low?"

Something it is which thou hast lost, 10 Some pleasure from thine early years. Break thou deep vase of chilling tears, That grief hath shaken into frost!8

Such clouds of nameless trouble cross All night below the darkened eyes; is With morning wakes the will, and cries,

"Thou shalt not be the fool of loss."

8. Water can be brought below freezing-point and not turn into ice�if it be kept still; but if it be moved suddenly it turns into ice and may break a vase [Tennyson's note].

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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

5

I sometimes hold it half a sin To put in words the grief I feel; For words, like Nature, half reveal

And half conceal the Soul within.

5 But, for the unquiet heart and brain, A use in measured language lies; The sad mechanic exercise,

Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

In words, like weeds," I'll wrap me o'er, mourning garments 10 Like coarsest clothes against the cold; But that large grief which these enfold Is given in outline and no more.

6

One writes, that "Other friends remain," That "Loss is common to the race"� And common is the commonplace, And vacant chaff3 well meant for grain. husks 5 That loss is common would not make My own less bitter, rather more: Too common! Never morning wore To evening, but some heart did break. IOO father, wheresoe'er thou be, Who pledgest" now thy gallant son; A shot, ere half thy draft be done, Hath stilled the life that beat from thee. toasts

O mother, praying God will save Thy sailor�while thy head is bowed, is His heavy-shotted hammock-shroud Drops in his vast and wandering grave.9

Ye know no more than I who wrought At that last hour to please him well;1 Who mused on all I had to tell,

20 And something written, something thought;

Expecting still his advent home; And ever met him on his way With wishes, thinking, "here today,"

Or "here tomorrow will he come."

9. Sailors buried at sea were often wrapped in 1. According to his son, Tennyson discovered that their own hammocks. "Heavy-shotted": heavily he had been writing a letter to Hallam during the weighted. very hour in which his friend died.

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IN MEMORIAM, EPILOGUE/ 1143

25 O somewhere, meek, the unconscious dove, That sittest ranging0 golden hair; And glad to find thyself so fair, Poor child, that waitest for thy love! arranging 30For now her father's chimney glows In expectation of a guest; And thinking "this will please him best," She takes a riband or a rose; 35For he will see them on tonight; And with the thought her color burns; And, having left the glass, she turns Once more to set a ringlet right; 40And, even when she turned, the curse Had fallen, and her future Lord Was drowned in passing through the ford, Or killed in falling from his horse. O what to her shall be the end? And what to me remains of good? To her, perpetual maidenhood, And unto me no second friend. 7 Dark house,2 by which once more I stand Here in the long unlovely street, Doors, where my heart was used to beat So quickly, waiting for a hand, 5 A hand that can be clasped no more� Behold me, for I cannot sleep, And like a guilty thing I creep At earliest morning to the door. ioHe is not here; but far away The noise of life begins again, And ghastly through the drizzling rain On the bald street breaks the blank day. 8 A happy lover who has come To look on her that loves him well, Who 'lights0 and rings the gateway bell, And learns her gone and far from home; alights 2. The house on Wimpole Street, in London, where Haliam had lived.

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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

5 He saddens, all the magic light Dies off at once from bower and hall, And all the place is dark, and all The chambers emptied of delight: 10So find I every pleasant spot In which we two were wont to meet, The field, the chamber, and the street, For all is dark where thou art not. isYet as that other, wandering there In those deserted walks, may find A flower beat with rain and wind, Which once she fostered up with care; 20So seems it in my deep regret, 0 my forsaken heart, with thee And this poor flower of poesy Which little cared for fades not yet. But since it pleased a vanished eye,3 1 go to plant it on his tomb, That if it can it there may bloom, Or dying, there at least may die.

9

Fair ship, that from the Italian shore4 Sailest the placid ocean-plains With my lost Arthur's loved remains,

Spread thy full wings, and waft him o'er.

5 So draw him home to those that mourn In vain; a favorable speed Ruffle thy mirrored mast, and lead

Through prosperous floods his holy urn.

All night no ruder air perplex 10 Thy sliding keel, till Phosphor,0 bright morning star As our pure love, through early light Shall glimmer on the dewy decks.

Sphere all your lights around, above; Sleep, gentle heavens, before the prow; 15 Sleep, gentle winds, as he sleeps now, My friend, the brother of my love;

My Arthur, whom I shall not see Till all my widowed race be run;

3. Hallam expressed enthusiasm for Tennyson's 4. Hallam's body was conveyed back to England early poetry in a review written in 1831. by ship from Trieste, Italy.

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IN MEMORIAM, EPILOGUE / 1145

Dear as the mother to the son, 20 More than my brothers are to me.

10

I hear the noise about thy keel; I hear the bell struck in the night; I see the cabin window bright;

I see the sailor at the wheel.

5 Thou bring'st the sailor to his wife, And traveled men from foreign lands; And letters unto trembling hands;

And, thy dark freight, a vanished life.

So bring him; we have idle dreams; io This look of quiet flatters thus Our home-bred fancies. O, to us, The fools of habit, sweeter seems

To rest beneath the clover sod, That takes the sunshine and the rains, 15 Or where the kneeling hamlet drains The chalice of the grapes of God;5

Than if with thee the roaring wells Should gulf him fathom-deep in brine, And hands so often clasped in mine,

20 Should toss with tangle0 and with shells. seaweed

11

Calm is the morn without a sound, Calm as to suit a calmer grief, And only through the faded leaf

The chestnut pattering to the ground;

5 Calm and deep peace on this high wold,� open countryside And on these dews that drench the furze, And all the silvery gossamers

That twinkle into green and gold;

Calm and still light on yon great plain io That sweeps with all its autumn bowers, And crowded farms and lessening towers, To mingle with the bounding main;

5. Reference to a burial inside a church building rather than in the churchyard.

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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

15Calm and deep peace in this wide air, These leaves that redden to the fall, And in my heart, if calm at all, If any calm, a calm despair; 20Calm on the seas, and silver sleep, And waves that sway themselves in rest, And dead calm in that noble breast Which heaves but with the heaving deep. 12 Lo, as a dove when up she springs To bear through Heaven a tale of woe, Some dolorous message knit below The wild pulsation of her wings; 5 Like her I go; I cannot stay; I leave this mortal ark behind, A weight of nerves without a mind, And leave the cliffs, and haste away ioO'er ocean-mirrors rounded large, And reach the glow of southern skies, And see the sails at distance rise, And linger weeping on the marge,0 shore 15And saying; "Comes he thus, my friend? Is this the end of all my care?" And circle moaning in the air: "Is this the end? Is this the end?" 20And forward dart again, and play About the prow, and back return To where the body sits, and learn That I have been an hour away. 13 Tears of the widower, when he sees A late-lost form that sleep reveals, And moves his doubtful arms, and feels Her place is empty, fall like these; 5 Which weep a loss forever new, A void where heart on heart reposed; And, where warm hands have pressed and closed, Silence, till I be silent too; ioWhich weep the comrade of my choice, An awful thought, a life removed,

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IN MEMORIAM, EPILOGUE/ 1147

The human-hearted man I loved, A Spirit, not a breathing voice.

Come, Time, and teach me, many years, I do not suffer in a dream; is For now so strange do these things seem, Mine eyes have leisure for their tears,

My fancies time to rise on wing, And glance about the approaching sails, As though they brought but merchants' bales,

20 And not the burthen that they bring.

14

If one should bring me this report, That thou� hadst touched the land today, the ship And I went down unto the quay;6

And found thee lying in the port;

5 And standing, muffled round with woe, Should see thy passengers in rank Come stepping lightly down the plank

And beckoning unto those they know;

And if along with these should come 10 The man I held as half divine, Should strike a sudden hand in mine, And ask a thousand things of home;

And I should tell him all my pain, And how my life had drooped of late, 15 And he should sorrow o'er my state And marvel what possessed my brain;

And I perceived no touch of change, No hint of death in all his frame, But found him all in all the same,

20 I should not feel it to be strange.

15

Tonight the winds begin to rise And roar from yonder dropping day; The last red leaf is whirled away,

The rooks are blown about the skies;

6. By 1850 the accepted pronunciation of "quay" would rhyme with he}', but Tennyson reverts to an earlier pronunciation, kay.

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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

5 The forest cracked, the waters curled, The cattle huddled on the lea; And wildly dashed on tower and tree The sunbeam strikes along the world: 10And but for fancies, which aver That all thy motions gently pass Athwart a plane of molten glass,7 I scarce could brook the strain and stir isThat makes the barren branches loud; And but for fear it is not so, The wild unrest that lives in woe Would dote and pore on yonder cloud 20That rises upward always higher, And onward drags a laboring breast, And topples round the dreary west, A looming bastion fringed with fire. 19 The Danube to the Severn" gave The darkened heart that beat no more; They laid him by the pleasant shore, And in the hearing of the wave. 5 There twice a day the Severn fills; The salt sea water passes by, And hushes half the babbling Wye,9 And makes a silence in the hills. ioThe Wye is hushed nor moved along, And hushed my deepest grief of all, When filled with tears that cannot fall, I brim with sorrow drowning song. 15The tide flows down, the wave again Is vocal in its wooded walls;1 My deeper anguish also falls, And I can speak a little then.

7. I.e., a calm sea. 1. The water of the Wye River is dammed up as 8. Haliam died at Vienna on the river Danube. His the tide flows in, and its sound is silenced until, burial place is on the banks of the Severn, a tidal with the turn of the tide, its "wave" once more river in the southwest of England. becomes "vocal"; these stanzas were written at Tin9. A tributary of the Severn. tern Abbey in the Wye valley.

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IN MEMORIAM, 118 / 1149

115

I sing to him that rests below And, since the grasses round me wave, I take the grasses of the grave,2

And make them pipes whereon to blow.

5 The traveler hears me now and then, And sometimes harshly will he speak: "This fellow would make weakness weak,

And melt the waxen hearts of men."

Another answers: "Let him be, IO He loves to make parade of pain, That with his piping he may gain The praise that comes to constancy."

A third is wroth: "Is this an hour

For private sorrow's barren song, 15 When more and more the people throng The chairs and thrones of civil power?

"A time to sicken and to swoon, When Science reaches forth her arms3 To feel from world to world, and charms

20 Her secret from the latest moon?"4

Behold, ye speak an idle thing; Ye never knew the sacred dust. I do but sing because I must,

And pipe but as the linnets sing:

25 And one is glad; her note is gay, For now her little ones have ranged; And one is sad; her note is changed,

Because her brood is stolen away.

22

The path by which we twain did go, Which led by tracts that pleased us well, Through four sweet years arose and fell,

From flower to flower, from snow to snow;

5

And we with singing cheered the way, And, crowned with all the season lent,

2. The poet assumes that the burial was in the 3. Astronomical instruments, such as telescopes. churchyard; in fact, on January 3, 1834, at St. 4. Probably alluding to the discovery in 1846 of Andrews in Clevedon, Somersetshire, Hallam's the planet Neptune and one of its moons. body was interred in a vault inside the church.

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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

From April on to April went, And glad at heart from May to May.

But where the path we walked began io To slant the fifth autumnal slope,5 As we descended following Hope, There sat the Shadow feared of man;

Who broke our fair companionship, And spread his mantle dark and cold, 15 And wrapped thee formless in the fold, And dulled the murmur on thy lip,

And bore thee where I could not see Nor follow, though I walk in haste, And think that somewhere in the waste

20 The Shadow sits and waits for me.

23

Now, sometimes in my sorrow shut, Or breaking into song by fits, Alone, alone, to where he sits,

The Shadow cloaked from head to foot,

5 Who keeps the keys of all the creeds, I wander, often falling lame, And looking back to whence I came,

Or on to where the pathway leads;

And crying, How changed from where it ran io Through lands where not a leaf was dumb, But all the lavish hills would hum The murmur of a happy Pan;6

When each by turns was guide to each, And Fancy light from Fancy caught, 15 And Thought leapt out to wed with Thought Ere Thought could wed itself with Speech;

And all we met was fair and good, And all was good that Time could bring, And all the secret of the Spring

20 Moved in the chambers of the blood;

And many an old philosophy On Argive7 heights divinely sang,

5. Hallam died just before the beginning of tures. autumn (September 15, 1833) in the fifth year of 7. Of Argos, an ancient city-state in the north- the friendship. eastern Peloponnesus; more generally, Greek. 6. In Greek mythology the god of woods and pas

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INMEMORIAM,EPILOGUE/1151

And round us all the thicket rang To many a flute of Arcady.8 88

24

And was the day of my delight

As pure and perfect as I say?

The very source and fount of day

Is dashed with wandering isles of night.9

5 If all was good and fair we met,

This earth had been the Paradise

It never looked to human eyes

Since our first sun arose and set.

And is it that the haze of grief IO Makes former gladness loom so great? The lowness of the present state, That sets the past in this relief?

Or that the past will always win A glory from its being far, 15 And orb into the perfect star We saw not when we moved therein?1

25 I know that this was Life�the track Whereon with equal feet we fared; And then, as now, the day prepared The daily burden for the back. 5 But this it was that made me move As light as carrier birds in air; I loved the weight I had to bear, Because it needed help of Love; ioNor could I weary, heart or limb, When mighty Love would cleave in twain The lading0 of a single pain, And part it, giving half to him. burden

26

Still onward winds the dreary way; I with it, for I long to prove

8. A sheep-raising region in Greece associated 1. The poet wonders whether Earth would have with pastoral poetry. the deceptive appearance of being a perfect orb if 9. Moving spots on the sun. viewed from afar, on another planet.

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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

No lapse of moons can canker Love, Whatever fickle tongues may say.

5 And if that eye which watches guilt And goodness, and hath power to see Within the green the mouldered tree,

And towers fallen as soon as built�

O, if indeed that eye foresee 10 Or see�in Him is no before� In more of life true life no more And Love the indifference to be,

Then might I find, ere yet the morn Breaks hither over Indian seas, 15 That Shadow waiting with the keys, To shroud me from my proper scorn.2

27

I envy not in any moods The captive void of noble rage, The linnet born within the cage,

That never knew the summer woods;

5 I envy not the beast that takes His license in the field of time, Unfettered by the sense of crime,

To whom a conscience never wakes;

Nor, what may count itself as blest, io The heart that never plighted troth But stagnates in the weeds of sloth; Nor any want-begotten rest.3

I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; 15 Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.

28

The time draws near the birth of Christ.4 The moon is hid, the night is still; The Christmas bells from hill to hill

Answer each other in the mist.

2. The Deity, being outside time, sees (rather than 3. Complacency resulting from some deficiency foresees) whether or not the rest of life ("more of ("want"). life," line 11) will be pointless. If pointless, then 4. The first Christmas after Hallam's death the way for the speaker to deal with his self-scorn (1833); the setting is Tennyson's family home in ("proper scorn") might be to seek death. Lincolnshire.

.

IN MEMORIAM, EPILOGUE / 1153

5 Four voices of four hamlets round, From far and near, on mead and moor, Swell out and fail, as if a door Were shut between me and the sound; 10Each voice four changes5 on the wind, That now dilate, and now decrease, Peace and goodwill, goodwill and peace, Peace and goodwill, to all mankind. 15This year I slept and woke with pain, I almost wished no more to wake, And that my hold on life would break Before I heard those bells again; 20But they my troubled spirit rule, For they controlled me when a boy; They bring me sorrow touched with joy, The merry, merry bells of Yule.

29

With such compelling cause to grieve As daily vexes household peace, And chains regret to his decease, How dare we keep our Christmas eve;

5 Which brings no more a welcome guest To enrich the threshold of the night With showered largess of delight

In dance and song and game and jest?

Yet go, and while the holly boughs 10 Entwine the cold baptismal font, Make one wreath more for Use and Wont,6 That guard the portals of the house;

Old sisters of a day gone by, Gray nurses, loving nothing new; 15 Why should they miss their yearly due Before their time? They too will die.

30

With trembling fingers did we weave The holly round the Christmas hearth;

5. Different sequences in which church bells are observances of the Christmas season to be folpealed. lowed. 6. Personifying the spirits who expect customary

.

1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

A rainy cloud possessed the earth, And sadly fell our Christmas eve.

5

At our old pastimes in the hall We gamboled, making vain pretense Of gladness, with an awful sense

Of one mute Shadow watching all.

We paused: the winds were in the beech; 10 We heard them sweep the winter land; And in a circle hand-in-hand Sat silent, looking each at each.

Then echo-like our voices rang; We sung, though every eye was dim, 15 A merry song we sang with him Last year; impetuously we sang.

We ceased; a gentler feeling crept Upon us: surely rest is meet.0 proper, appropriate "They rest," we said, "their sleep is sweet,"

20 And silence followed, and we wept.

Our voices took a higher range; Once more we sang: "They do not die Nor lose their mortal sympathy,

Nor change to us, although they change;

25 "Rapt from7 the fickle and the frail With gathered power, yet the same, Pierces the keen seraphic flame

From orb to orb, from veil8 to veil."

Rise, happy morn, rise, holy morn, 30 Draw forth the cheerful day from night: O Father, touch the east, and light The light that shone when Hope was born.

34

My own dim life should teach me this, That life shall live forevermore, Else earth is darkness at the core,

And dust and ashes all that is;

5

This round of green, this orb of flame, Fantastic beauty; such as lurks

7. Carried away from. heaven (cf. section 56, line 28). "From orb to orb": 8. An image representing the boundary between the angelic spirit ("flame") of the dead moves from different worlds, especially that between Earth and star to star.

.

IN MEMORIAM, EPILOGUE / 1155

In some wild poet, when he works Without a conscience or an aim.

What then were God to such as I? 10

'Twere hardly worth my while to choose Of things all mortal, or to use A little patience ere I die;

Twere best at once to sink to peace, Like birds the charming serpent9 draws, 15 To drop head-foremost in the jaws Of vacant darkness and to cease.

35

Yet if some voice that man could trust Should murmur from the narrow house, "The cheeks drop in, the body bows; Man dies, nor is there hope in dust"; 5 Might I not say? "Yet even here, But for one hour, O Love, I strive To keep so sweet a thing alive." But I should turn mine ears and hear ioThe moanings of the homeless sea, The sound of streams that swift or slow Draw down Aeonian1 hills, and sow The dust of continents to be; 15And Love would answer with a sigh, "The sound of that forgetful shore2 Will change my sweetness more and more, Half-dead to know that I shall die." 20O me, what profits it to put An idle case? If Death were seen At first as Death, Love had not been, Or been in narrowest working shut, Mere fellowship of sluggish moods, Or in his coarsest Satyr-shape3 Had bruised the herb and crushed the grape, And basked and battened0 in the woods.4 grown fat $ $ *

9. Some snakes are reputed to capture their prey by hypnotizing it. 1. Eons old, seemingly everlasting. 2. I.e., of Lethe, the river in the classical underworld whose water caused forgetfulness. 3. In Greek mythology satyrs were half-man, half- beast (goat or horse) in appearance, desires, and behavior.

4. Lines 18-24 may be paraphrased: if we knew death to be final and that no afterlife were possible, love could not exist except on a primitive or bestial level.

.

1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

39

Old warder of these buried bones,

And answering now my random stroke

With fruitful cloud and living smoke,

Dark yew, that graspest at the stones 5 And dippest toward the dreamless head,

To thee too comes the golden hour

When flower is feeling after flower;5

But Sorrow�fixed upon the dead, And darkening the dark graves of men�

io What whispered from her lying lips?

Thy gloom is kindled at the tips,6

And passes into gloom again.

47

That each, who seems a separate whole,

Should move his rounds,7 and fusing all

The skirts8 of self again, should fall

Remerging in the general Soul, 5 Is faith as vague as all unsweet.

Eternal form shall still divide

The eternal soul from all beside;

And I shall know him when we meet;

And we shall sit at endless feast,

io Enjoying each the other's good.

What vaster dream can hit the mood

Of Love on earth? He seeks at least

Upon the last and sharpest height,

Before the spirits fade away,

15 Some landing place, to clasp and say,

"Farewell! We lose ourselves in light."9

48

If these brief lays, of Sorrow born,

Were taken to be such as closed

5. The ancient yew tree in the graveyard was 8. Outer edges or fringes. described in section 2 as never changing. Now the 9. These lines express the hope that, as Tennyson poet discovers that in the flowering season, if the wrote, "individuality lasts after death, and we are tree is struck ("my random stroke"), it gives off a not utterly absorbed into the Godhead. If we are cloud of golden pollen. to be finally merged into the Universal Soul, Love 6. Only the tips of the yew branches are in flower. asks to have at least one more parting before we 7. I.e., go through the customary circuit of life. lose ourselves."

.

IN MEMORIAM, EPILOGUE 1157

/

Grave doubts and answers here proposed,

Then these were such as men might scorn. 5 Her� care is not to part and prove; Sorrow's

She takes, when harsher moods remit,

What slender shade of doubt may flit,

And makes it vassal unto love; And hence, indeed, she sports with words,

10 But better serves a wholesome law,

And holds it sin and shame to draw

The deepest measure from the chords; Nor dare she trust a larger lay,� song

But rather loosens from the lip

15 Short swallow-flights of song, that dip

Their wings in tears, and skim away.

# $ $

50

Be near me when my light is low,

When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick

And tingle; and the heart is sick,

And all the wheels of being slow. 5 Be near me when the sensuous frame

Is racked with pangs that conquer trust;

And Time, a maniac scattering dust,

And Life, a Fury slinging flame. Be near me when my faith is dry,

IO And men the flies of latter spring,

That lay their eggs, and sting and sing

And weave their petty cells and die. Be near me when I fade away,

To point the term of human strife,

i 5 And on the low dark verge of life

The twilight of eternal day.

* $ *

54

O, yet we trust that somehow good

Will be the final goal of ill,

To pangs of nature, sins of will,

Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

.

1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

5 That nothing walks with aimless feet;

That not one life shall be destroyed,

Or cast as rubbish to the void,

When God hath made the pile complete; That not a worm is cloven in vain;

10 That not a moth with vain desire

Is shriveled in a fruitless fire,

Or but� subserves another's gain. only Behold, we know not anything;

I can but trust that good shall fall

is At last�far off�at last, to all,

And every winter change to spring.

So runs my dream; but what am I?

An infant crying in the night;

An infant crying for the light,

20 And with no language but a cry.

55

The wish, that of the living whole

No life may fail beyond the grave,

Derives it not from what we have

The likest God within the soul?1 5 Are God and Nature then at strife,

That Nature lends such evil dreams?

So careful of the type she seems,

So careless of the single life,

That I, considering everywhere

io Her secret meaning in her deeds,

And finding that of fifty seeds

She often brings but one to bear,

I falter where I firmly trod,

And falling with my weight of cares

15 Upon the great world's altar-stairs

That slope through darkness up to God,

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,

And gather dust and chaff, and call

To what I feel is Lord of all,

20 And faintly trust the larger hope.2

1. According to Tennyson, the "innerconscience� 2. As expressed in lines 1 and 2. the divine in man."

.

IN MEMORIAM, 118 / 1159

115

"So careful of the type?" but no. From scarped3 cliff and quarried stone She� cries, "A thousand types are gone; I care for nothing, all shall go. Nature s "Thou makest thine appeal to me: I bring to life, I bring to death; The spirit does but mean the breath: I know no more." And he, shall he, ioMan, her last work, who seemed so fair, Such splendid purpose in his eyes, Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies, Who built him fanes0 of fruitless prayer, temples 15Who trusted God was love indeed And love Creation's final law� Though Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine, shrieked against his creed� 20Who loved, who suffered countless ills, Who battled for the True, the Just, Be blown about the desert dust, Or sealed within the iron hills?4 No more? A monster then, a dream, A discord. Dragons of the prime,0That tare0 each other in their slime, Were mellow music matched with0 him. primeval age tore (archaic) compared to 25 O life as futile, then, as frail! O for thy voice to soothe and bless! What hope of answer, or redress? Behind the veil, behind the veil.

57

Peace; come away: the song of woe Is after all an earthly song. Peace; come away: we do him wrong

To sing so wildly: let us go.

5 Come; let us go: your cheeks are pale; Methinks my friend is richly shrined; But half my life I leave behind.

But I shall pass, my work will fail.

3. Cut away so that the strata are exposed. 4. Preserved like fossils in rock.

.

1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Yet in these ears, till hearing dies, 10 One set slow bell will seem to toll The passing of the sweetest soul That ever looked with human eyes.

I hear it now, and o'er and o'er, Eternal greetings to the dead; 15 And "Ave,� Ave, Ave," said, Hail (Latin) "Adieu, adieu," forevermore.

58

In those sad words I took farewell. Like echoes in sepulchral halls, As drop by drop the water falls

In vaults and catacombs, they fell;

5 And, falling, idly broke the peace Of hearts that beat from day to day, Half-conscious of their dying clay,

And those cold crypts where they shall cease.

The high Muse answered: "Wherefore grieve io Thy brethren with a fruitless tear? Abide a little longer here, And thou shalt take a nobler leave."

59

O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me No casual mistress, but a wife, My bosom friend and half of life;

As I confess it needs must be?

5 O Sorrow, wilt thou rule my blood, Be sometimes lovely like a bride, And put thy harsher moods aside,

If thou wilt have me wise and good?

My centered passion cannot move, io Nor will it lessen from today; But I'll have leave at times to play As with the creature of my love;

And set thee forth, for thou art mine, With so much hope for years to come, 15 That, howsoe'er I know thee, some Could hardly tell what name were thine.

�* � �

.

IN MEMORIAM, 118 / 1161

115

Dost thou look back on what hath been, As some divinely gifted man, Whose life in low estate began

And on a simple village green;

5 Who breaks his birth's invidious bar, And grasps the skirts of happy chance, And breasts the blows of circumstance,

And grapples with his evil star;

Who makes by force his merit known io And lives to clutch the golden keys,5 To mold a mighty state's decrees, And shape the whisper of the throne;

And moving up from high to higher, Becomes on Fortune's crowning slope 15 The pillar of a people's hope, The centre of a world's desire;

Yet feels, as in a pensive dream, When all his active powers are still, A distant dearness in the hill,

20 A secret sweetness in the stream,

The limit of his narrower fate, While yet beside its vocal springs He played at counselors and kings,

With one that was his earliest mate;

25 Who plows with pain his native lea And reaps the labour of his hands, Or in the furrow musing stands:

"Does my old friend remember me?"

# a #

67

When on my bed the moonlight falls, I know that in thy place of rest By that broad water6 of the west

There comes a glory on the walls:

5 Thy marble bright in dark appears, As slowly steals a silver flame

5. Badges of high public office. 6. The Severn River.

.

1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Along the letters of thy name, And o'er the number of thy years.

The mystic glory swims away, 10 From off my bed the moonlight dies; And closing eaves of wearied eyes I sleep till dusk is dipped in gray;

And then I know the mist is drawn A lucid veil from coast to coast, 15 And in the dark church like a ghost Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn.

$ * #

70

I cannot see the features right, When on the gloom I strive to paint The face I know; the hues are faint

And mix with hollow masks of night;

5 Cloud-towers by ghostly masons wrought, A gulf that ever shuts and gapes, A hand that points, and palled shapes

In shadowy thoroughfares of thought;

And crowds that stream from yawning doors, io And shoals of puckered faces drive; Dark bulks that tumble half alive, And lazy lengths on boundless shores;

Till all at once beyond the will I hear a wizard music roll, 15 And through a lattice on the soul

Looks thy fair face and makes it still.

71

Sleep, kinsman thou to death and trance And madness, thou has forged at last A night-long present of the past

In which we went through summer France.7

5

Hadst thou such credit with the soul? Then bring an opiate trebly strong, Drug down the blindfold sense of wrong,

That so my pleasure may be whole;

7. In the summer of 1830 Hallam and Tennyson went through southern France en route to Spain.

.

I N MEMORIAM , EPILOGU E / 116 3 While now we talk as once we talked 10 Of men and minds, the dust of change, The days that grow to something strange, In walking as of old we walked isBeside the river's wooded reach, The fortress, and the mountain ridge, The cataract flashing from the bridge, The breaker breaking on the beach.

72

Risest thou thus, dim dawn, again,8

And howlest, issuing out of night,

With blasts that blow the poplar white,

And lash with storm the streaming pane? 5 Day, when my crowned estate9 begun

To pine in that reverse of doom,1

Which sickened every living bloom,

And blurred the splendor of the sun;

Who usherest in the dolorous hour

io With thy quick tears that make the rose

Pull sideways, and the daisy close

Her crimson fringes to the shower; Who mightst have heaved a windless flame

Up the deep East, or, whispering, played

15 A checker-work of beam and shade

Along the hills, yet looked the same,

As wan, as chill, as wild as now;

Day, marked as with some hideous crime,

When the dark hand struck down through time,

20 And canceled nature's best: but thou, Lift as thou mayst thy burthened brows

Through clouds that drench the morning star,

And whirl the ungarnered sheaf afar,

And sow the sky with flying boughs, 25 And up thy vault with roaring sound

Climb thy thick noon, disastrous day;

Touch thy dull goal of joyless gray,

And hide thy shame beneath the ground.

$ * *

8. September 15, 1834, the first anniversary of 1. The reversal or disaster that doom brought Hallam's death. upon him when Hallam died. 9. State of happiness.

.

1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

75

I leave thy praises unexpressed

In verse that brings myself relief,

And by the measure of my grief

I leave thy greatness to be guessed.

5 What practice howsoe'er expert In fitting aptest words to things,

Or voice the richest-toned that sings,

Hath power to give thee as thou wert? I care not in these fading days

io To raise a cry that lasts not long,

And round thee with the breeze of song

To stir a little dust of praise. Thy leaf has perished in the green,

And, while we breathe beneath the sun,

is The world which credits what is done

Is cold to all that might have been. So here shall silence guard thy fame;

But somewhere, out of human view,

Whate'er thy hands are set to do

20 Is wrought with tumult of acclaim.

* s *

78 Again at Christmas2 did we weave The holly round the Christmas hearth; The silent snow possessed the earth, And calmly fell our Christmas eve. 5 The yule clog� sparkled keen with frost, No wing of wind the region swept, But over all things brooding slept The quiet sense of something lost. log ioAs in the winters left behind, Again our ancient games had place, The mimic picture's3 breathing grace, And dance and song and hoodman-blind.4

2. The second Christmas (1834) after Hallam's spectators try to guess what work of art is being death. portrayed. 3. A game in which the participants pose in the 4. The player in the game of blindman's buff who manner of some famous statue or painting and the wears a blindfold or hood.

.

IN MEMORIAM, EPILOGUE / 1165

Who showed a token of distress? No single tear, no mark of pain� is O sorrow, then can sorrow wane? O grief, can grief be changed to less?

O last regret, regret can die! No�mixed with all this mystic frame, Her deep relations are the same,

20 But with long use her tears are dry.

^ * *

82

I wage not any feud with Death For changes wrought on form and face; No lower life that earth's embrace

May breed with him can fright my faith.

5 Eternal process moving on, From state to state the spirit walks; And these are but the shattered stalks,

Or ruined chrysalis of one.

Nor blame I Death, because he bare io The use of virtue out of earth; I know transplanted human worth Will bloom to profit, otherwhere.

For this alone on Death I wreak The wrath that garners in my heart: 15 He put our lives so far apart We cannot hear each other speak.

83

Dip down upon the northern shore, O sweet new-year� delaying long; spring J835 Thou doest expectant Nature wrong;

Delaying long, delay no more.

5 What stays thee from the clouded noons, Thy sweetness from its proper place? Can trouble live with April days,

Or sadness in the summer moons?

Bring orchis, bring the foxglove spire, 10 The little speedwell's0 darling blue, spring flower

.

1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Deep tulips dashed with fiery dew, Laburnums, dropping-wells of fire.

O thou, new-year, delaying long, Delayest the sorrow in my blood, 15

That longs to burst a frozen bud And flood a fresher throat with song.

84

When I contemplate all alone The life that had been thine below, And fix my thoughts on all the glow

To which thy crescent would have grown,

5 I see thee sitting crowned with good, A central warmth diffusing bliss In glance and smile, and clasp and kiss,

On all the branches of thy blood;

Thy blood, my friend, and partly mine; io For now the day was drawing on, When thou shouldst link thy life with one Of mine own house, and boys of thine

Had babbled "Uncle" on my knee; But that remorseless iron hour 15 Made cypress of her orange flower,5 Despair of hope, and earth of thee.

I seem to meet their least desire, To clap their cheeks, to call them mine. I see their unborn faces shine

20 Beside the never-lighted fire.

I see myself an honored guest, Thy partner in the flowery walk Of letters, genial table talk,

Or deep dispute, and graceful jest;

25 While now thy prosperous labor fills The lips of men with honest praise, And sun by sun the happy days

Descend below the golden hills

With promise of a morn as fair; 30

And all the train of bounteous hours Conduct, by paths of growing powers, To reverence and the silver hair;

5. Orange blossoms are associated with brides�here the poet's sister Emily Tennyson, to whom Hallam had been engaged. Cypress branches are associated with funerals.

.

IN MEMORIAM, EPILOGUE/ 1167

Till slowly worn her earthly robe, Her lavish mission richly wrought, 35

Leaving great legacies of thought, Thy spirit should fail from off the globe;

What time mine own might also flee, As linked with thine in love and fate, And, hovering o'er the dolorous strait

40 To the other shore, involved in thee,

Arrive at last the blessed goal, And He that died in Holy Land Would reach us out the shining hand,

And take us as a single soul.

45 What reed was that on which I leant? Ah, backward fancy, wherefore wake The old bitterness again, and break

The low beginnings of content?

* $ $ 86

Sweet after showers, ambrosial air, That rollest from the gorgeous gloom Of evening over brake" and bloomAnd meadow, slowly breathing bare thicket 5 The round of space,6 and rapt below Through all the dewy-tasseled wood, And shadowing down the horned flood7 In ripples, fan my brows and blow ioThe fever from my cheek, and sigh The full new life that feeds thy breath Throughout my frame, till Doubt and Death, 111 brethren, let the fancy fly From belt to belt of crimson seas 15On leagues of odor streaming far, To where in yonder orient star A hundred spirits whisper "Peace."

87

I passed beside the reverend walls8 In which of old I wore the gown;

6. The "ambrosial air" is slowly clearing the clouds 7. Between two promontories [Tennyson's note], from the sky. 8. Of Trinity College, Cambridge University.

.

1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

I roved at random through the town, And saw the tumult of the halls;

And heard once more in college fanes" chapels The storm their high-built organs make, And thunder-music, rolling, shake

The prophet blazoned on the panes;

And caught once more the distant shout, The measured pulse of racing oars Among the willows; paced the shores And many a bridge, and all about

The same gray flats again, and felt The same, but not the same; and last Up that long walk of limes I passed To see the rooms in which he dwelt.

Another name was on the door. I lingered; all within was noise Of songs, and clapping hands, and boys

That crashed the glass and beat the floor;

Where once we held debate, a band Of youthful friends,9 on mind and art, And labor, and the changing mart,

And all the framework of the land;

When one would aim an arrow fair, But send it slackly from the string; And one would pierce an outer ring,

And one an inner, here and there;

And last the master bowman, he, Would cleave the mark. A willing ear We lent him. Who but hung to hear

The rapt oration flowing free

From point to point, with power and grace And music in the bounds of law, To those conclusions when we saw The God within him light his face,

And seem to lift the form, and glow In azure orbits heavenly-wise; And over those ethereal eyes

The bar of Michael Angelo?1

9. The Apostles, an undergraduate club to which (1475�1564), had a prominent ridge of bone above Tennyson and Hallam had belonged. his eyes. I. Hallam, like the Italian artist Michelangelo

.

IN MEMORIAM, 118 / 1169

115

Wild bird,2 whose warble, liquid sweet, Rings Eden through the budded quicks,3 O tell me where the senses mix,

O tell me where the passions meet,

5 Whence radiate: fierce extremes employ Thy spirits in the darkening leaf, And in the midmost heart of grief

Thy passion clasps a secret joy;

And I�my harp would prelude woe� io I cannot all command the strings; The glory of the sum of things Will flash along the chords and go.

89 Witch elms that counterchange the floor Of this flat lawn with dusk and bright;4 And thou, with all thy breadth and height Of foliage, towering sycamore; 5 How often, hither wandering down, My Arthur found your shadows fair, And shook to all the liberal air The dust and din and steam of town! ioHe brought an eye for all he saw; He mixed in all our simple sports; They pleased him, fresh from brawling courts And dusty purlieus0 of the law.5 regions 15O joy to him in this retreat, Immantled in ambrosial dark, To drink the cooler air, and mark The landscape winking through the heat! 20O sound to rout the brood of cares, The sweep of scythe in morning dew, The gust that round the garden flew, And tumbled half the mellowing pears! O bliss, when all in circle drawn About him, heart and ear were fed

2. Probably a nightingale. Somersby, the Tennysons' country home. 3. Hawthorn hedges. 5. Haliam became a law student in London after 4. Shadows of the elm tree checker the lawn at leaving Cambridge.

.

1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

To hear him, as he lay and read The Tuscan poets6 on the lawn!

25 Or in the all-golden afternoon A guest, or happy sister, sung, Or here she brought the harp and flung

A ballad to the brightening moon.

Nor less it pleased in livelier moods, 30 Beyond the bounding hill to stray, And break the livelong summer day With banquet in the distant woods;

Whereat we glanced from theme to theme, Discussed the books to love or hate, 35 Or touched the changes of the state, Or threaded some Socratic dream;7

But if I praised the busy town, He loved to rail against it still, For "ground in yonder social mill

40 We rub each other's angles down,

"And merge," he said, "in form and gloss The picturesque of man and man." We talked: the stream beneath us ran,

The wine-flask lying couched in moss,

45 Or cooled within the glooming wave; And last, returning from afar, Before the crimson-circled star8

Had fallen into her father's9 grave,

And brushing ankle-deep in flowers, so We heard behind the woodbine veil The milk that bubbled in0 the pail, into And buzzings of the honeyed hours.

91

When rosy plumelets tuft the larch, And rarely0 pipes the mounted thrush, exquisitely Or underneath the barren bush

Flits by the sea-blue bird0 of March; kingfisher

6. A group of 13th-and 14th-century poets in cen-8. Venus, which will sink into the west as the Sun tral Italy (Tuscany); the best-known of them are has done. Dante and Petrarch. 9. According to the nebular hypothesis, planets 7. I.e., worked our way through some discourse of condensed out of the sun's atmosphere; in this Socrates (as recorded by Plato). sense the Sun is the "father" of planets.

.

IN MEMORIAM, EPILOGUE / 117 1

5

Come, wear the form by which I know

Thy spirit in time among thy peers;

The hope of unaccomplished years

Be large and lucid round thy brow. When summer's hourly-mellowing change

io May breathe, with many roses sweet,

Upon the thousand waves of wheat That ripple round the lowly grange,0 outlying farmhouse

Come; not in watches of the night,

But where the sunbeam broodeth warm,

is Come, beauteous in thine after form,

And like a finer light in light.

93

I shall not see thee. Dare I say

No spirit ever brake the band

That stays him from the native land

Where first he walked when clasped in clay?1 5 No visual shade of someone lost,

But he, the Spirit himself, may come

Where all the nerve of sense is numb,

Spirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost.

Oh, therefore from thy sightless0 range invisible io With gods in unconjectured bliss,

Oh, from the distance of the abyss

Of tenfold-complicated change, Descend, and touch, and enter; hear

The wish too strong for words to name,

15 That in this blindness of the frame0 human bodyMy Ghost may feel that thine is near.

94

How pure at heart and sound in head,

With what divine affections bold

Should be the man whose thought would hold

An hour's communion with the dead. 5 In vain shalt thou, or any, call

The spirits from their golden day,

1. I.e., when he was alive and in fleshly form.

.

1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Except, like them, thou too canst say, My spirit is at peace with all.

They haunt the silence of the breast, 10

Imaginations calm and fair, The memory like a cloudless air, The conscience as a sea at rest;

But when the heart is full of din, And doubt beside the portal waits, 15 They can but listen at the gates, And hear the household jar� within. noise

95

By night we lingered on the lawn, For underfoot the herb was dry; And genial warmth; and o'er the sky

The silvery haze of summer drawn;

5 And calm that let the tapers burn Unwavering: not a cricket chirred; The brook alone far off was heard,

And on the board the fluttering urn.2

And bats went round in fragrant skies, io And wheeled or lit the filmy shapes3 That haunt the dusk, with ermine capes And woolly breasts and beaded eyes;

While now we sang old songs that pealed From knoll to knoll, where, couched at ease, 15 The white kine� glimmered, and the trees cows Laid their dark arms4 about the field.

But when those others, one by one, Withdrew themselves from me and night, And in the house light after light

20 Went out, and I was all alone,

A hunger seized my heart; I read Of that glad year which once had been, In those fallen leaves which kept their green,

The noble letters of the dead.

25 And strangely on the silence broke The silent-speaking words, and strange

2. Vessel for boiling water for tea or coffee, heated moths. by a fluttering flame. 4. Cast the shadows of their branches. 3. The white-winged night moths called ermine

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IN MEMORIAM, EPILOGUE / 1173

Was love's dumb cry defying change To test his worth; and strangely spoke

The faith, the vigor, bold to dwell 30

On doubts that drive the coward back, And keen through wordy snares to track Suggestion to her inmost cell.

So word by word, and line by line, The dead man touched me from the past, 35 And all at once it seemed at last The5 living soul was flashed on mine.

And mine in this was wound, and whirled About empyreal0 heights of thought, heavenly And came on that which is, and caught

40 The deep pulsations of the world,

Aeonian music6 measuring out The steps of Time�the shocks of Chance� The blows of Death. At length my trance

Was canceled, stricken through with doubt.7

45 Vague words! but ah, how hard to frame In matter-molded forms of speech, Or even for intellect to reach

Through memory that which I became.

Till now the doubtful dusk revealed 50 The knolls once more where, couched at ease, The white kine glimmered, and the trees Laid their dark arms about the field;

And sucked from out the distant gloom A breeze began to tremble o'er 55 The large leaves of the sycamore, And fluctuate all the still perfume,

And gathering freshlier overhead, Rocked the full-foliaged elms, and swung The heavy-folded rose, and flung

60 The lilies to and fro, and said,

5. "His" in the 1st edition. Also in the 1st edition, state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of line 37 read: "And mine in his was wound." the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly 6. Music of the universe, which has pulsated for beyond words, where death was an almost laugh- eons. able impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it 7. In a letter of 1874, replying to an inquiry about were) seeming no extinction but the only true life. his experience of mystical trances, Tennyson . . . This might.. . be the state which St. Paul wrote: "A kind of waking trance I have frequently describes, 'Whether in the body I cannot tell, or had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all whether out of the body I cannot tell.'.. . I am alone. This has generally come upon me through ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said repeating my own name two or three times to the state is utterly beyond words? But in a moment, myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the when I come back to my normal state of 'sanity,' I intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the am ready to fight for mein liebes lch [my dear self], individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade and hold that it will last for aeons of aeons" (Alfred away into boundless being, and this not a confused Lord Tennyson, A Memoir, 1897, vol. 1, 320).

.

1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

"The dawn, the dawn," and died away;

And East and West, without a breath,

Mixed their dim lights, like life and death,

To broaden into boundless day.

96

You say, but with no touch of scorn,

Sweet-hearted, you,8 whose light blue eyes

Are tender over drowning flies,

You tell me, doubt is Devil-born. 5 1 know not: one indeed I knew

In many a subtle question versed,

Who touched a jarring lyre at first,

But ever strove to make it true; Perplexed in faith, but pure in deeds,

io At last he beat his music out.

There lives more faith in honest doubt,

Believe me, than in half the creeds. He fought his doubts and gathered strength,

He would not make his judgment blind,

is He faced the specters of the mind

And laid them; thus he came at length To find a stronger faith his own,

And Power was with him in the night,

Which makes the darkness and the light,

20 And dwells not in the light alone, But in the darkness and the cloud,

As over Sinai's peaks of old,

While Israel made their gods of gold,

Although the trumpet blew so loud.9

$ * 3

99

Risest thou thus, dim dawn, again,1

So loud with voices of the birds,

So thick with lowings of the herds,

Day, when I lost the flower of men;

8. A woman of simple faith. Aaron made, and the Israelites worshipped, a 9. After veiling Mount Sinai in a "thick cloud" and golden calf (32.1-6). signifying the divine presence by "the voice of the 1. September 15, 1835, the second anniversary of trumpet" (Exodus 19.16), God addresses Moses Hallam's death. from the "thick darkness" (20.21). Meanwhile

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IN MEMORIAM, EPILOGUE / 1175

5

Who tremblest through thy darkling red On yon swollen brook that bubbles fast2 By meadows breathing of the past,

And woodlands holy to the dead;

Who murmurest in the foliage eaves io A song that slights the coming care,3 And Autumn laying here and there A fiery finger on the leaves;

Who wakenest with thy balmy breath To myriads on the genial0 earth, generative 15 Memories of bridal, or of birth,4 And unto myriads more, of death.

Oh, wheresoever those5 may be, Betwixt the slumber of the poles, Today they count as kindred souls;

20 They know me not, but mourn with me.

* $ *

103

On that last night before we went From out the doors where I was bred,6 I dreamed a vision of the dead,

Which left my after-morn content.

5 Methought I dwelt within a hall, And maidens with me; distant hills From hidden summits fed with rills

A river sliding by the wall.

The hall with harp and carol rang, io They sang of what is wise and good And graceful. In the center stood A statue veiled, to which they sang;

And which, though veiled, was known to me, The shape of him I loved, and love 15 Forever. Then flew in a dove And brought a summons from the sea;

And when they learnt that I must go, They wept and wailed, but led the way

2. I.e., reflections of the clouded red light of dawn 6. In 1837 Tennyson and his family moved away quiver on the surface of the fast-moving water. from their home in Lincolnshire, which had been 3. I.e., that disregards future events such as death closely associated with his friendship with Hallam. or the coming of autumn. In section 104 the move seems to occur in 1835, 4. Cf. "Epilogue," lines I 17-28 (p. 1187). the year of the third Christmas after Hallam's 5. I.e., the many who remember death. deatb.

.

1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON 20To where the little shallop" lay At anchor in the flood below; light open boat And on by many a level mead,0And shadowing bluff that made the banks, We glided winding under ranks Of iris and the golden reed; meadow 25 And still as vaster grew the shore And rolled the floods in grander space, The maidens gathered strength and grace And presence, lordlier than before; 30And I myself, who sat apart And watched them, waxed� in every limb; I felt the thews of Anakim,7 The pulses of a Titan's8 heart; grown 35As one would sing the death of war, And one would chant the history Of that great race which is to be,9 And one the shaping of a star; 40Until the forward-creeping tides Began to foam, and we to draw From deep to deep, to where we saw A great ship lift her shining sides.1 The man we loved was there on deck, But thrice as large as man he bent To greet us. Up the side I went, And fell in silence on his neck; 45 Whereat those maidens with one mind Bewailed their lot; I did them wrong: "We served thee here," they said, "so long, And wilt thou leave us now behind?" 50So rapt� I was, they could not win An answer from my lips, but he Replying, "Enter likewise ye And go with us:" they entered in. entranced And while the wind began to sweep A music out of sheet and shroud,

7. Plural of Anak; a reference to the giant sons of Anak (see Numbers 13.33). 8. Giant of Greek mythology. 9. See the account of the "crowning race" in "Epilogue," lines 128-44. 1. Cf. The Passing of Arthur, lines 361^169, in which Bedivere is left behind as Arthur's barge, the ship of death, sails away. In the present dream vision the speaker is taken aboard, as are his companions, who represent the creative arts of this world�"all the human powers and talents that do not pass with life but go along with it," as Tennyson said of this passage.

.

IN MEMORIAM, EPILOGUE / 1177

55

We steered her toward a crimson cloud That landlike slept along the deep.

104

The time draws near the birth of Christ;2 The moon is hid, the night is still; A single church below the hill

Is pealing, folded in the mist.

5 A single peal of bells below, That wakens at this hour of rest A single murmur in the breast,

That these are not the bells I know.

Like strangers' voices here they sound, io In lands where not a memory strays, Nor landmark breathes of other days, But all is new unhallowed ground.

105

Tonight ungathered let us leave This laurel, let this holly stand:3 We live within the stranger's land, And strangely falls our Christmas eve. 5 Our father's dust is left alone And silent under other snows: There in due time the woodbine blows,0The violet comes, but we are gone. blooms ioNo more shall wayward grief abuse The genial hour with mask and mime; For change of place, like growth of time, Has broke the bond of dying use. 15Let cares that petty shadows cast, By which our lives are chiefly proved, A little spare the night I loved, And hold it solemn to the past. But let no footstep beat the floor, Nor bowl of wassail mantle warm;4

2. The third Christmas (1835) after Hallam's new home the customary observances lapse. death. 4. I.e., let no bowl of hot punch warm the man3. Cf. section 29, in which the family in their for-telpiece. mer home still continued to gather holly. In the

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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

For who would keep an ancient form 20 Through which the spirit breathes no more?

Be neither song, nor game, nor feast; Nor harp be touched, nor flute be blown; No dance, no motion, save alone

What lightens in the lucid east

25 Of rising worlds5 by yonder wood. Long sleeps the summer in the seed; Run out your measured arcs, and lead

The closing cycle rich in good.

106

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light: The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

5 Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go;

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind, io For those that here we see no more; Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause, And ancient forms of party strife; 15 Ring in the nobler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times: Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,

20 But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite; Ring in the love of truth and right,

Ring in the common love of good.

25 Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old,

Ring in the thousand years of peace.

5. The scintillating motion of the stars that rise [Tennyson's note].

.

IN MEMORIAM, 108 / 1 179

Ring in the valiant man and free, 30

The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be.6

107

It is the day when he was born.� February 1 A bitter day that early sank Behind a purple-frosty bank

Of vapor, leaving night forlorn.

s The time admits not flowers or leaves To deck the banquet. Fiercely flies The blast of North and East, and ice

Makes daggers at the sharpened eaves,

And bristles all the brakes0 and thorns thickets io To yon hard crescent, as she hangs Above the wood which grides7 and clangs Its leafless ribs and iron horns

Together, in the drifts" that pass To darken on the rolling brine is That breaks the coast. But fetch the wine, Arrange the board and brim the glass;

Bring in great logs and let them lie, To make a solid core of heat; Be cheerful-minded, talk and treat

20 Of all things even as he were by;

We keep the day. With festal cheer, With books and music, surely we Will drink to him, whate'er he be,

And sing the songs he loved to hear.

108

I will not shut me from my kind, And, lest I stiffen into stone, I will not eat my heart alone,

Nor feed with sighs a passing wind:

6. These allusions to the second coming of Christ would alter; but that the spirit of Christ would still and to the millennium are derived from Revelation grow from more to more." 20, but Tennyson has interpreted the biblical 7. Clashes with a strident noise. account in his own way. He once told his son of 8. Either cloud drifts or clouds of snow. his conviction that "the forms of Christian religion

.

1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

5 What profit lies in barren faith,

And vacant yearning, though with might

To scale the heaven's highest height,

Or dive below the wells of Death? What find I in the highest place,

10 But mine own phantom chanting hymns?

And on the depths of death there swims The reflex of a human face.0 his own face

I'll rather take what fruit may be

Of sorrow under human skies:

is 'Tis held that sorrow makes us wise, Whatever wisdom sleep with thee.� Hallam

109

Heart-affluence in discursive talk

From household fountains never dry;

The critic clearness of an eye

That saw through all the Muses' walk;9 5 Seraphic intellect and force

To seize and throw the doubts of man;

Impassioned logic, which outran

The hearer in its fiery course; High nature amorous of the good,

io But touched with no ascetic gloom;

And passion pure in snowy bloom

Through all the years of April blood; A love of freedom rarely felt,

Of freedom in her regal seat

15 Of England; not the schoolboy heat,

The blind hysterics of the Celt;1 And manhood fused with female grace

In such a sort, the child would twine

A trustful hand, unasked, in thine,

20 And find his comfort in thy face; All these have been, and thee mine eyes

Have looked on: if they looked in vain,

My shame is greater who remain,

Nor let thy wisdom make me wise.

a # a

9. The realm of art and literature. description of the Irish temperament in On the 1. A member or descendant of one of the groups Study of Celtic Literature (p. 1619). of peoples populating ancient Britain; cf. Arnold's

.

IN MEMORIAM, 118 / 1181

11 5 Now fades the last long streak of snow, Now burgeons every maze of quick0About the flowering squares,0 andBy ashen roots the violets blow. hawthorn hedge thick fields 5 Now rings the woodland loud and long, The distance takes a lovelier hue, And drowned in yonder living blue The lark becomes a sightless song. ioNow dance the lights on lawn and lea, The flocks are whiter down the vale, And milkier every milky sail On winding stream or distant sea; 15Where now the seamew� pipes, or divesIn yonder greening gleam, and fly The happy birds, that change their sky To build and brood, that live their lives a seabird 20From land to land; and in my breast Spring wakens too, and my regret Becomes an April violet, And buds and blossoms like the rest.

118

Contemplate all this work of Time,

The giant laboring in his youth;

Nor dream of human love and truth, As dying Nature's earth and lime;2

5 But trust that those we call the dead

Are breathers of an ampler day

For ever nobler ends. They0 say, Scientists The solid earth whereon we tread

In tracts of fluent heat began, io And grew to seeming-random forms, The seeming prey of cyclic storms, Till at the last arose the man;

Who throve and branched from clime to clime, The herald of a higher race,

2. Two of the perishable organic ingredients of the human body.

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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

15 And of himself in higher place

If so he type3 this work of time Within himself, from more to more;

Or, crowned with attributes of woe

Like glories, move his course, and show

20 That life is not as idle ore, But iron dug from central gloom,

And heated hot with burning fears,

And dipped in baths of hissing tears,

And battered with the shocks of doom 25 To shape and use. Arise and fly

The reeling Faun,4 the sensual feast;

Move upward, working out the beast,

And let the ape and tiger die.

119

Doors,5 where my heart was used to beat

So quickly, not as one that weeps

I come once more; the city sleeps;

I smell the meadow in the street; 5 I hear a chirp of birds; I see

Betwixt the black fronts long-withdrawn

A light blue lane of early dawn,

And think of early days and thee,

And bless thee, for thy lips are bland,0 gentleio And bright the friendship of thine eye;

And in my thoughts with scarce a sigh

I take the pressure of thine hand.

120 I trust I have not wasted breath:

I think we are not wholly brain,

Magnetic mockeries;6 not in vain,

Like Paul7 with beasts, I fought with Death;

5 Not only cunning0 casts in clay: skillful Let Science prove we are, and then

3. Emulate, prefigure as a type. pole Street. Cf. section 7. 4. In Roman mythology a half-human, half-beast 6. Mechanisms operated by responses to electrical deity of the woods and mountains. forces. 5. The doors of Hallam's house on London's Wim-7. 1 Corinthians 15.32.

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IN MEMORIAM, EPILOGUE / 1183

What matters Science unto men, At least to me? I would not stay.

Let him, the wiser man who springs 10

Hereafter, up from childhood shape His action like the greater ape, But I was born to other things.

121

Sad Hesper0 o'er the buried sun evening star And ready, thou, to die with him, Thou watchest all things ever dim

And dimmer, and a glory done.

5 The team is loosened from the wain,0 hay wagon The boat is drawn upon the shore; Thou listenest to the closing door,

And life is darkened in the brain.

Bright Phosphor," fresher for the night, morning star

io By thee the world's great work is heard Beginning, and the wakeful bird; Behind thee comes the greater light.8

The market boat is on the stream, And voices hail it from the brink; i5 Thou hear'st the village hammer clink, And see'st the moving of the team.

Sweet Hesper-Phosphor, double name9 For what is one, the first, the last, Thou, like my present and my past,

20 Thy place is changed; thou art the same.

* s fc 123

There rolls the deep where grew the tree. O earth, what changes hast thou seen! There where the long street roars hath been

The stillness of the central sea.1

8. Cf. Genesis 1.16: "the greater light to rule the Charles Lyell discusses the "interchange of sea and day." land" that has occurred "on the surface of our 9. The planet Venus, named for the Roman god-globe": "In the Mediterranean alone, many flourdess of love, is both the evening star and the morn-ishing inland towns and a still greater number of ing star (visible at different times in different ports now stand where the sea rolled its waves seasons). since the era when civilized nations first grew in 1. In a passage from The Principles of Geology Europe." (1832), a book well known to Tennyson, Sir

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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

5 The hills are shadows, and they flow

From form to form, and nothing stands;

They melt like mist, the solid lands,

Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

But in my spirit will I dwell,

10 And dream my dream, and hold it true;

For though my lips may breathe adieu,

1 cannot think the thing farewell.

124

That which we dare invoke to bless;

Our dearest faith; our ghastliest doubt;

He, They, One, All; within, without;

The Power in darkness whom we guess� 5 I found Him not in world or sun,

Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye,2

Nor through the questions men may try,

The petty cobwebs we have spun.

If e'er when faith had fallen asleep,

io I heard a voice, "believe no more,"

And heard an ever-breaking shore

That tumbled in the Godless deep,

A warmth within the breast would melt

The freezing reason's colder part,

15 And like a man in wrath the heart

Stood up and answered, "I have felt."3

No, like a child in doubt and fear:

But that blind clamor made me wise;

Then was I as a child that cries,

20 But, crying, knows his father near; And what I am beheld again

What is, and no man understands;

And out of darkness came the hands

That reach through nature, molding men.

3 V *

126

Love is and was my lord and king,

And in his presence I attend

2. He does not discover satisfactory proof of God's exist a designer. existence in the 18th-century argument that 3. Cf. Carlyle's Sartor Resartns (1833�34), "The because objects in nature are designed there must Everlasting No" (p. 1006).

.

IN MEMORIAM, EPILOGUE / 1185

To hear the tidings of my friend,

Which every hour his couriers bring.

5

Love is and was my king and lord,

And will be, though as yet I keep

Within the court on earth, and sleep

Encompassed by his faithful guard,

And hear at times a sentinel

io Who moves about from place to place,

And whispers to the worlds of space,

In the deep night, that all is well.

127

And all is well, though faith and form4

Be sundered in the night of fear;

Well roars the storm to those that hear

A deeper voice across the storm,

5 Proclaiming social truth shall spread,

And justice, even though thrice again

The red fool-fury of the Seine

Should pile her barricades with dead.5

But ill for him that wears a crown,

io And him, the lazar,6 in his rags!

They tremble, the sustaining crags;

The spires of ice are toppled down,

And molten up, and roar in flood;

The fortress crashes from on high,

15 The brute earth lightens7 to the sky,

And the great Aeon8 sinks in blood,

And compassed by the fires of hell,

While thou, dear spirit, happy star,

O'erlook'st the tumult from afar,

20 And smilest, knowing all is well.

# s &

129

Dear friend, far off, my lost desire, So far, so near in woe and weal,� happiness

4. Traditional institutions through which faith date earlier than 1848, the reference to three rev- was formerly expressed, such as the Church. olutions (line 6) was prophetic. Seine: the river 5. Reference to revolutionary uprisings in France, that runs through Paris. in each of which a king lost his throne (line 9): in 6. Pauper suffering from disease. 1789 against Louis XVI, in 1830 against Charles 7. Is lit up by fire. X, and in 1848 against Louis-Philippe. If, as Ten-8. A vast tract of time, here perhaps modern Westnyson recollected, section 127 was finished at a ern civilization.

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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

O loved the most, when most I feel

There is a lower and a higher; Known and unknown, human, divine;

Sweet human hand and lips and eye;

Dear heavenly friend that canst not die,

Mine, mine, forever, ever mine; Strange friend, past, present, and to be;

10 Loved deeplier, darklier understood;

Behold, I dream a dream of good,

And mingle all the world with thee.

130

Thy voice is on the rolling air

I hear thee where the waters run;

Thou standest in the rising sun,

And in the setting thou art fair. ? What art thou then? I cannot guess;

But though I seem in star and flower

To feel thee some diffusive power,

I do not therefore love thee less. My love involves the love before;

io My love is vaster passion now;

Tho' mix'd with God and Nature thou,

I seem to love thee more and more. Far off thou art, but ever nigh;

I have thee still, and I rejoice;

15 I prosper, circled with thy voice;

I shall not lose thee tho' I die.

131

O living will9 that shalt endure

When all that seems shall suffer shock,

Rise in the spiritual rock,'

Flow through our deeds and make them pure, 5 That we may lift from out of dust

A voice as unto him that hears,

A cry above the conquered years

To one that with us works, and trust,

9. Tennyson later commented that he meant here drink the same spiritual drink; for they drank of the moral will of humankind. that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that 1. Christ. Cf. 1 Corinthians 10.4: "And did all Rock was Christ."

.

IN MEMORIAM, EPILOGUE / 1187

With faith that comes of self-control, 10

The truths that never can be proved Until we close with all we loved, And all we flow from, soul in soul.

From Epilogue2

* * *

And rise, O moon, from yonder down, 110 Till over down and over dale All night the shining vapor sail And pass the silent-lighted town,

The white-faced halls, the glancing rills, And catch at every mountain head, 115 And o'er the friths0 that branch and spread inlets of the sea Their sleeping silver through the hills;

And touch with shade the bridal doors, With tender gloom the roof, the wall; And breaking let the splendor fall

120 To spangle all the happy shores

By which they rest, and ocean sounds, And, star and system rolling past, A soul shall draw from out the vast

And strike his being into bounds,

125 And, moved through life of lower phase, Result in man,3 be born and think, And act and love, a closer link

Betwixt us and the crowning race

Of those that, eye to eye, shall look 130 On knowledge; under whose command Is Earth and Earth's, and in their hand Is Nature like an open book;

No longer half-akin to brute, For all we thought and loved and did, 135 And hoped, and suffered, is but seed Of what in them is flower and fruit;

Whereof the man that with me trod This planet was a noble type0 model, example

2. The "Epilogue" describes the wedding day of Tennyson's sister Cecilia to Edmund Lushington. At the conclusion (printed here) the speaker reflects on the moonlit wedding night and the kind of offspring that will result from their union. 3. A child will be conceived and will develop in embryo through various stages. This development is similar to human evolution from the animal to the human level and perhaps to a future higher stage of development.

.

1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Appearing ere the times were ripe, 140 That friend of mine who lives in God,

That God, which ever lives and loves, One God, one law, one element, And one far-off divine event,

To which the whole creation moves.

1833-50 1850

The Charge of the Light Brigade1

Half a league,2 half a league, Half a league onward, All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

5 "Forward the Light Brigade! Charge for the guns!" he said. Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.3

2

"Forward, the Light Brigade!" io Was there a man dismayed? Not though the soldier knew

Someone had blundered. Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why,

15 Theirs but to do and die. Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred.

3 Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them,

20 Cannon in front of them

Volleyed and thundered; Stormed at with shot and shell, Roldly they rode and well, Into the jaws of Death,

25 Into the mouth of hell Rode the six hundred.

1. During the Crimean War (1854�56), owing to confusion of orders, a brigade of British cavalry charged some entrenched batteries of Russian artillery. This blunder cost the lives of three- quarters of the six hundred horsemen engaged (see Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Reason Why, 1954). Tennyson rapidly composed his "ballad" (as he called the poem) after reading an account of the battle in a newspaper.

2. About a mile and a half. 3. In the recording Tennyson made of this poem, "hundred" sounds like "hunderd"�a Lincolnshire pronunciation that reinforces the rhyme with "thundered," etc. "Valley of Death": see Psalms 23.4 ("Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death").

.

IDYLLS OF THE KING / 1189

4 Flashed all their sabers bare, Flashed as they turned in air Sab'ring the gunners there,

30 Charging an army, while

All the world wondered. Plunged in the battery smoke Right through the line they broke; Cossack and Russian

35 Reeled from the saber stroke Shattered and sundered. Then they rode back, but not, Not the six hundred.

5 Cannon to right of them, 40 Cannon to left of them, Cannon behind them

Volleyed and thundered; Stormed at with shot and shell, While horse and hero fell.

45 They that had fought so well Came through the jaws of Death, Back from the mouth of hell, All that was left of them,

Left of six hundred.

6 50 When can their glory fade? O the wild charge they made! All the world wondered. Honor the charge they made! Honor the Light Brigade, 55 Noble six hundred!

1854 1854

Idylls of the King When John Milton was considering subjects suitable for an epic poem, one of those he entertained was the story of the British king Arthur, a semilegendary leader of about 500 c.E. who fought off the Saxon invaders who had swarmed into Britain after the withdrawal of the Roman legions. Tennyson likewise saw that the Arthurian story had epic potential and selected it for his lifework as "the greatest of all poetical subjects." At intervals, during a period of fifty years, he labored over the twelve books that make up his Idylls of the King, completing the work in

1888.

The principal source of Tennyson's stories of Arthur and his knights was Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur, a version that Malory translated into English prose from French sources in 1470. As Talbot Donaldson suggested, one basis of the appeal of the Arthurian stories, like the legends of Robin Hood and stories of the American West, is that they represent the struggle of individuals to restore order when chaos

.

1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

and anarchy are ascendant, a task performed in the face of seemingly overwhelming

odds. The individual stories in Tennyson's Idylls have the same basic appeal, but the

overall design of the whole poem is more ambitious and impressive. The epic repre

sents the rise and fall of a civilization, and its underlying theme is that after two

thousand years of Christianity, Western civilization may be going through a cycle in

which it must confront the possibilities of a renewal in the future or an apocalyptic

extinction. The first book, The Coming of Arthur, introduces the basic myth of a

springtime hero transforming a wasteland and inspiring faith and hope in the highest

values of civilized life among his devoted followers, the knights of his Round Table.

Succeeding books move through summer and autumn and culminate in the bleak

wintry scene of Arthur's last battle in which his order perishes in a civil war; the leader of the enemy forces is his own nephew, Sir Modred.

Throughout the later books of the Idylls the forces of opposition grow in strength, and discontent and resentment infect leading figures of the Round Table itself. The most glaring example is the adulterous relationship between Guinevere, Arthur's "sumptuous" queen (as Tennyson once described her), and the king's chief lieutenant and friend, Sir Lancelot. Many other fallings away subsequently come to light, such as the deceitful betrayal by Sir Gawain in the ninth book, Pelleas and Ettarre, and the cynical conduct of Sir Tristram, whose story is told in the bitter tenth book, The Last Tournament. Even Merlin, Arthur's trusted magician and counselor, becomes corrupted and can perform no further offices for the king (Merlin and Vivien). The Passing of Arthur depicts the apocalyptic end of this long process of disintegration

and decay.

FROM IDYLLS OF THE KING

The Coming of Arthur Leodogran, the King of Cameliard, Had one fair daughter, and none other child; And she was fairest of all flesh on earth, Guinevere, and in her his one delight. 5 For many a petty king ere Arthur came Ruled in this isle, and ever waging war Each upon other, wasted all the land; And still from time to time the heathen host Swarm'd overseas, and harried0 what was left. ravaged 10 And so there grew great tracts of wilderness, Wherein the beast was ever more and more, But man was less and less, till Arthur came. For first Aurelius1 lived and fought and died, And after him King Uther fought and died, 15 But either fail'd to make the kingdom one. And after these King Arthur for a space, And thro' the puissance0 of his Table Round, power Drew all their petty princedoms under him, Their king and head, and made a realm, and reign'd.

1. Brother of King Ulhcr.

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20

And thus the land of Cameliard was waste, Thick with wet woods, and many a beast therein, And none or few to scare or chase the beast; So that wild dog, and wolf and boar and bear Came night and day, and rooted0 in the fields, dug for food

25 And wallow'd in the gardens of the King. And ever and anon the wolf would steal The children and devour, but now and then, Her own brood lost or dead, lent her fierce teat To human sucklings; and the children, housed

30 In her foul den, there at their meat would growl, And mock their foster-mother on four feet, Till, straighten'd, they grew up to wolf-like men, Worse than the wolves. And King Leodogran Groan'd� for the Roman legions here again, yearned

35 And Caesar's eagle:2 then his brother king, Urien, assail'd him: last a heathen horde, Reddening the sun with smoke and earth with blood, And on the spike that split the mother's heart Spitting0 the child, brake on him, till, amazed, impaling

40 He knew not whither he should turn for aid.

But�for he heard of Arthur newly crown'd, Tho' not without an uproar made by those Who cried, "He is not Uther's son"�the King Sent to him, saying, "Arise, and help us thou!

45 For here between the man and beast we die."

And Arthur yet had done no deed of arms, But heard the call, and came: and Guinevere Stood by the castle walls to watch him pass; But since he neither wore on helm or shield

so The golden symbol of his kinglihood,3 But rode a simple knight among his knights, And many of these in richer arms than he, She saw him not, or mark'd not, if she saw, One among many, tho' his face was bare.

55 But Arthur, looking downward as he past, Felt the light of her eyes into his life Smite on the sudden, yet rode on, and pitch'd His tents beside the forest. Then he drave� drove away The heathen; after, slew the beast, and fell'd

so The forest, letting in the sun, and made Broad pathways for the hunter and the knight And so return'd.

For while he linger'd there, A doubt that ever smoulder'd in the hearts Of those great Lords and Barons of his realm

65 Flash'd forth and into war: for most of these, Colleaguing with a score of petty kings,

2. I.e., imperial protection. 3. The golden dragon [Tennyson's note].

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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON Made head against him, crying, "Who is he That he should rule us? who hath proven him King Uther's son? for lo! we look at him, 70 And find nor face nor bearing, limbs nor voice, Are like to those of Uther whom we knew. This is the son of Gorloi's, not the King; This is the son of Anton, not the King." And Arthur, passing thence to battle, felt 75 Travail, and throes and agonies of the life, Desiring to be join'd with Guinevere; And thinking as he rode, "Her father said That there between the man and beast they die. Shall I not lift her from this land of beasts so Up to my throne, and side by side with me? What happiness to reign a lonely king, Vext�O ye stars that shudder over me, 0 earth that soundest hollow under me, Vext with waste dreams? for saving" I be join'd unless 85 To her that is the fairest under heaven, 1 seem as nothing in the mighty world, And cannot will my will, nor work my work Wholly, nor make myself in mine own realm Victor and lord. But were I join'd with her, 90 Then might we live together as one life, And reigning with one will in everything Have power on this dark land to lighten it, And power on this dead world to make it live." Thereafter�as he speaks who tells the tale� 95 When Arthur reach'd a field-of-battle bright With pitch'd pavilions of his foe, the world Was all so clear about him, that he saw The smallest rock far on the faintest hill, And even in high day the morning star. IOO So when the King had set his banner broad, At once from either side, with trumpet-blast, And shouts, and clarions shrilling unto blood, The long-lanced battle let their horses run. And now the Barons and the kings prevail'd, 105 And now the King, as here and there that war Went swaying; but the Powers who walk the world Made lightnings and great thunders over him, And dazed all eyes, till Arthur by main might, And mightier of his hands with every blow, I io And leading all his knighthood threw0 the kings defeated Carados, Urien, Cradlemont of Wales, Claudias, and Clariance of Northumberland, The King Brandagoras of Latangor, With Anguisant of Erin, Morganore, us And Lot of Orkney. Then, before a voice As dreadful as the shout of one who sees To one who sins, and deems himself alone And all the world asleep, they swerved and brake

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Flying, and Arthur call'd to stay the brands0 swords

120 That hack'd among the flyers, "Ho! they yield!" So like a painted battle the war stood Silenced, the living quiet as the dead, And in the heart of Arthur joy was lord. He laugh'd upon his warrior0 whom he loved Lancelot

125 And honour'd most. "Thou dost not doubt me King, So well thine arm hath wrought for me to-day." "Sir and my liege," he cried, "the fire of God Descends upon thee in the battle-field: I know thee for my King!" Whereat the two,

130 For each had warded0 either in the fight, guarded Sware on the field of death a deathless love. And Arthur said, "Man's word is God in man: Let chance what will, I trust thee to the death."

Then quickly from the foughten field he sent

135 Ulfius, and Brastias, and Bedivere, His new-made knights, to King Leodogran, Saying, "If I in aught have served thee well, Give me thy daughter Guinevere to wife."

Whom when he heard, Leodogran in heart

140 Debating�"How should I that am a king, However much he hoIp� me at my need, helped Give my one daughter saving to a king, And a king's son?"�lifted his voice, and call'd A hoary man, his chamberlain, to whom

145 He trusted all things, and of him required His counsel: "Knowest thou aught of Arthur's birth?"

Then spake the hoary chamberlain and said, "Sir King, there be but two old men that know: And each is twice as old as I; and one

150 Is Merlin, the wise man that ever served King Uther thro' his magic art; and one Is Merlin's master (so they call him) Bleys, Who taught him magic; but the scholar ran Before the master, and so far, that Bleys

155 Laid magic by, and sat him down, and wrote All things and whatsoever Merlin did In one great annal-book, where after-years Will learn the secret of our Arthur's birth."

To whom the King Leodogran replied,

160 "O friend, had I been holpen half as well By this King Arthur as by thee to-day, Then beast and man had had their share of me: But summon here before us yet once more Ulfius, and Brastias, and Bedivere."

165 Then, when they came before him, the King said, "I have seen the cuckoo chased by lesser fowl, And reason in the chase: but wherefore now

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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON Do these your lords stir up the heat of war, Some calling Arthur born of Gorlois, 170 Others of Anton? Tell me, ye yourselves, Hold ye this Arthur for King Uther's son?" And Ulfius and Brastias answer'd, "Ay." Then Bedivere, the first of all his knights Knighted by Arthur at his crowning, spake� 175 For bold in heart and act and word was he, Whenever slander breathed against the King� "Sir, there be many rumours on this head:� subject For there be those who hate him in their hearts, Call him baseborn, and since his ways are sweet, i8o And theirs are bestial, hold him less than man: And there be those who deem him more than man, And dream he dropt from heaven: but my belief In all this matter�so ye care to learn� Sir, for ye know that in King Uther's time 185 The prince and warrior Gorlois, he that held Tintagil castle by the Cornish sea, Was wedded with a winsome wife, Ygerne: And daughters had she borne him,�one whereof, Lot's wife, the Queen of Orkney, Bellicent, 190 Hath ever like a loyal sister cleaved To Arthur,�but a son she had not borne. And Uther cast upon her eyes of love: But she, a stainless wife to Gorlois, So loathed the bright dishonour of his love, 195 That Gorlois and King Uther went to war: And overthrown was Gorlois and slain. Then Uther in his wrath and heat besieged Ygerne within Tintagil, where her men, Seeing the mighty swarm about their walls, 200 Left her and fled, and Uther enter'd in, And there was none to call to but himself. So, compass'd by the power of the King, Enforced she was to wed him in her tears, And with a shameful swiftness: afterward, 205 Not many moons, King Uther died himself, Moaning and wailing for an heir to rule After him, lest the realm should go to wrack.� ruin And that same night, the night of the new year, By reason of the bitterness and grief 210 That vext his mother, all before his time Was Arthur born, and all as soon as born Deliver'd at a secret postern-gate To Merlin, to be holden far apart Until his hour should come; because the lords 215 Of that fierce day were as the lords of this, Wild beasts, and surely would have torn the child Piecemeal among them, had they known; for each But sought to rule for his own self and hand,

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And many hated Uther for the sake

220 Of Gorloi's. Wherefore Merlin took the child, And gave him to Sir Anton, an old knight And ancient friend of Uther; and his wife Nursed the young prince, and rear'd him with her own; And no man knew. And ever since the lords

225 Have foughten like wild beasts among themselves, So that the realm has gone to wrack: but now, This year, when Merlin (for his hour had come) Brought Arthur forth, and set him in the hall, Proclaiming, 'Here is Uther's heir, your king,'

230 A hundred voices cried, 'Away with him! No king of ours! a son of Gorloi's he, Or else the child of Anton, and no king, Or else baseborn.' Yet Merlin thro' his craft, And while the people clamour'd for a king,

235 Had Arthur crown'd; but after, the great lords Banded, and so brake out in open war."

Then while the King debated with himself If Arthur were the child of shamefulness, Or born the son of Gorloi's, after death,

240 Or Uther's son, and born before his time, Or whether there were truth in anything Said by these three, there came to Cameliard, With Gawain and young Modred, her two sons, Lot's wife, the Queen of Orkney, Bellicent;

245 Whom as he could, not as he would, the King Made feast for, saying, as they sat at meat,

"A doubtful throne is ice on summer seas. Ye come from Arthur's court. Victor his men Report him! Yea, but ye�think ye this king�

250 So many those that hate him, and so strong, So few his knights, however brave they be� Hath body enow" to hold his foemen down?" enough

"O King," she cried, "and I will tell thee: few, Few, but all brave, all of one mind with him;

255 For I was near him when the savage yells Of Uther's peerage died, and Arthur sat Crown'd on the dais, and his warriors cried, 'Be thou the king, and we will work thy will Who love thee.' Then the King in low deep tones,

260 And simple words of great authority, Bound them by so strait0 vows to his own self, strict That when they rose, knighted from kneeling, some Were pale as at the passing of a ghost, Some flush'd, and others dazed, as one who wakes

265 Half-blinded at the coming of a light.

"But when he spake and cheer'd his Table Round With large, divine, and comfortable words,

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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Beyond my tongue to tell thee�I beheld From eye to eye thro' all their Order flash

270 A momentary likeness of the King: And ere it left their faces, thro' the cross And those around it and the Crucified, Down from the casement over Arthur, smote Flame-colour, vert� and azure, in three rays, green

275 One falling upon each of three fair queens, Who stood in silence near his throne, the friends Of Arthur, gazing on him, tall, with bright Sweet faces, who will help him at his need.

"And there I saw mage� Merlin, whose vast wit magician 280 And hundred winters are but as the hands Of loyal vassals toiling for their liege.

"And near him stood the Lady of the Lake,4 Who knows a subtler magic than his own� Clothed in white samite,5 mystic, wonderful.

285 She gave the King his huge cross-hilted sword, Whereby to drive the heathen out: a mist Of incense curl'd about her, and her face Wellnigh was hidden in the minster0 gloom; church But there was heard among the holy hymns

290 A voice as of the waters,6 for she dwells Down in a deep; calm, whatsoever storms May shake the world, and when the surface rolls, Hath power to walk the waters like our Lord.

"There likewise I beheld Excalibur

295 Before him at his crowning borne, the sword That rose from out the bosom of the lake, And Arthur row'd across and took it�rich With jewels, elfin Urim,7 on the hilt, Bewildering heart and eye�the blade so bright

300 That men are blinded by it�on one side, Graven in the oldest tongue of all this world, 'Take me,' but turn the blade and ye shall see, And written in the speech ye speak yourself, 'Cast me away!' And sad was Arthur's face

305 Taking it, but old Merlin counsell'd him, 'Take thou and strike! the time to cast away Is yet far-off.' So this great brand the king Took, and by this will beat his foemen down."

Thereat Leodogran rejoiced, but thought

310 To sift his doubtings to the last, and ask'd, Fixing full eyes of question on her face, "The swallow and the swift are near akin,

4. The Lady of the Lake in the old legends is the heaven, as the voice of many waters." Church [Tennyson's note]. 7. Mentioned numerous times in the Old Testa5. A rich silk fabric. ment, this is a device of precious stones worn by 6. Cf. Revelation 14.2: "And I heard a voice from priests and used in prophesying. "Elfin": elflike.

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But thou art closer to this noble prince, Being his own dear sister;" and she said,

315 "Daughter of Gorloi's and Ygerne am I;" "And therefore Arthur's sister?" ask'd the King She answer'd, "These be secret things," and sign'd To those two sons to pass, and let them be. And Gawain went, and breaking into song

320 Sprang out, and follow'd by his flying hair Ran like a colt, and leapt at all he saw: But Modred laid his ear beside the doors, And there half-heard; the same that afterward Struck for the throne, and striking found his doom.

325 And then the Queen made answer, "What know I? For dark my mother was in eyes and hair, And dark in hair and eyes am I; and dark Was Gorloi's, yea and dark was Uther too, Wellnigh to blackness; but this King is fair

330 Beyond the race of Britons and of men. Moreover, always in my mind I hear A cry from out the dawning of my life, A mother weeping, and I hear her say, 'O that ye had some brother, pretty one,