[A. E. Stallings]

I had promised a Tennyson thread to Nyctom elsewhere, and thought I might initiate it before I set off for the States. Tom feels Tennyson is too lavender-sachet High Victorian for him to really enjoy, though he is willing to be persuaded otherwise. So was hoping some of us might show him there is plenty of Tennyson that goes beyond that. Hector posted the fine thumbnail sketch, "The Eagle." Ulysses is about as strong a piece of dramatic blank verse as one is likely to find outside of a great verse play.

Going back and reading through Tennyson reminds us, I think, of how metrically bold and innovative the Victorians were. Witness this accentual trimeter, whose lines range from three to eleven syllables:

Break, break, break
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.

O, well for the fisherman's boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.


OK, admittedly that, with it's "lad" and "thy" and "O" probably isn't going to remove the olfactory hallucination of lavender. But this certainly must. (The last line is famous for its rhythm.) This is part of a series "In Memoriam", for Arthur Henry Hallam:

Dark House, By Which Once More I stand

Dark house, 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,

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.

He 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.

[A. E. Stallings]

And, oh pooh, I don't care if this has "Elfland" and "yon" and "hark", it is one of my favorite poems, and I think one of the first poems I ever memorized. It's just darn gorgeous. (And MUST be read aloud to be appreciated.) Also makes most contemporary formal poems look metrically old-fashioned by comparison. (Pardon lack of proper indentation):

The splendor falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story;
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O hark, O hear! How thing and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going!
O sweet and far from cliff and scar
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying:
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river,
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow for oever and for ever.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.


I fear that has not helped my case much. But then, I also love "Tears, Idle Tears." Actually, I guess I must confess to being a FAN of much Victorian poetry. How hopelessly unhip is THAT?

[Jerry Wielenga]

Two of my favorite poems of all time are Tennyson's "Ulysses" and "Tithonus". Both have an epic quality that is on the one hand slightly purple and melodramatic, but on the other hand has a universal timelessness about it.

A very early piece "Supposed Confessions of a Second-Rate Sensitive Mind" ( http://tennysonpoetry.home.att.net/sc.htm ) shows the young Tennyson in spiritual turmoil. His vacillations are sometimes slightly overdone (in my humble opinion), but still, there are some poignant moments.

Also, "Why should we weep for those who die" ( http://www.sc.edu/library/spcoll/bri...nn/2poems.html ), has a predictably religious - and cliched - ending (each stanza has the same ending, each stanza repeats the previous stanza, he might as well have made the whole piece an epigram). But, nonetheless, stanzas such as the following are pretty:

The fairest flower on earth must fade,
The brightest hopes on earth must die:
Why should we mourn that man was made
To droop on earth, but dwell on high?

Of all his work, nothing really beat "Ullyses" and "Tithonus", however.

- Fugwozzle



[This message has been edited by Fugwozzle (edited April 08, 2002).]

[nyctom]

Alicia:

You are a good egg.

Tom

PS To aid in the discussion, here are some links with Tennyson's poetry and biographical information:
http://tennysonpoetry.home.att.net/
http://65.107.211.206/victorian/tennyson/tennyov.html
(this is part of the Victorian Web--something I thought you might find interesting, Alicia)
http://charon.sfsu.edu/TENNYSON/tennyson.html
http://www.literaryhistory.com/19thC/TENNYSON.htm
(literaryhistory.com looks like a good site to explore)



[This message has been edited by nyctom (edited April 08, 2002).]

[Deborah Warren]

I had to memorize 'Break, Break, Break' in high school for something they called 'choral speaking.' Instead of sopranos and altos, they had 'lights' and 'darks.' It must have been pretty grisly.

And I've often consoled myself with "better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."

Which reminds me of the infatuations thread--things we loved and got disenchanted with: I wonder if there's anyone else who never gets sick of 'Ulysses.'

[Roger Slater]

I'm sure it's just me, and there's much to admire in Tennyson, but I've tried and tried over the years to warm to him and always end up being extremely bored, though I sort of like Ulysses. In Memoriam is mind-numbing, I'm afraid. Again, I'm sure it's just me, and perhaps I'll change my opinion some day, but every great poet has a voice and Tennyson's voice is one I find dreary, mannered, and uninteresting. He may be the only card-carrying member of the Canon that I don't care for at all.

[graywyvern]

i reread "Idylls of the King" last year.
Tennyson's best writing is perhaps in his
occasional lyrics & "In Memoriam", but there
is a lot of accumulated power in this sequence,
not least because (like Vergil) we witness an
empire's supreme apologist despairing of its
fate. content aside, his skillfulness with meter
is nearly always repaying of close study.

[Len Krisak]

In Memoriam is powerfully affecting,
especially when you read it at 4 in the AM
as an undergraduate, after a great sadness.

Break, break, break,
yes, definitely. But lines
11 and 15 are tetrameter, so
perhaps Tennyson was a tad more
metrically experimental than any
of us noticed.

[David Mason]

Not to beat my own drum too often, but, underlining Len's last point, I could point you folks to a wee piece called "A Touchstone from Tennyson" in Poetry of Life and Life of Poetry.

I also think one problem with longer poems and sequences is that one reads them at a gulp for a class assignment, when in fact small doses will do over time. In Memoriam has transcendent passages for me when I read it that way, and I think the best of the Idylls is terrific. Same with Maud and a heap of shorter poems like Ulysses, Tithonus, Locksley Hall, etc.

I had a good teacher in grad school named Jim Longenbach, who really knew modernism very well. One thing he knew well was that Eliot's work is unthinkable without Tennyson--look at the Gawain sequences in Idylls for just one example. Jim also very wisely pointed out that whenever we read any author we submit ON PURPOSE to certain traits because we know they will allow us certain pleasures. (We don't submit when we find that there aren't any pleasures at the end of all this effort). I'd say that if you allow for the unfashionable diction Alicia points out, and keep your sense of humor intact through moments of Victorian bathos, Tennyson will engage you deeply. There is also the point that one can read with the imagination of another time to some degree, just as we can empathize with characters in novels who are nothing like ourselves. It broadens us to try.

The man wrote some bad poems, and I understand why Joyce called him Lawn Tennyson, but he had an extraordinary ear for the cadences of English verse, and in his best poems there is emotional truth and intellectual rigor.

[Tom Jardine]

,

[This message has been edited by Tom Jardine (edited January 26, 2005).]