I've never been a teacher, but I've been the beneficiary of many fine teachers, and a few great ones. Dave Mason, who joins us next week as Guest Lariat, may well be the greatest teacher I have ever observed. When he taught in a neighboring town, I often spoke to his classes and saw him in action. My favorite essay from his humane book, The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry, (Story Line Press), is his account of how "Break, Break, Break" is interwoven through two centuries of his family's history. Long before it was an essay, I saw him give it as a lecture, and it brought tears to my eyes to see the flash of recognition, the dawning of comprehension, in all those young people.
A TOUCHSTONE FROM TENNYSON
Words can assume a personal significance beyond their lexical identities; they are saturated with private associations. My grandfather’s name was Abraham- a fact I do not take lightly. He was a candy-maker in Trinidad, Colorado, and as a result most of my early memories of him are sweet. When I grew older and learned more about my family’s wanderlust, what became significant about Abe was not only his symbolic position at the head of a peripatetic tribe, but also the fact that the brown river flowing through his town was called- no doubt by French trappers- the Purgatoire. Suddenly Old and New Testament associations ran together in the history of my clan. And before the French, a party of Spanish conquistadors had first called the river El Rio de las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio, so I have been free to imagine my family as a tribe of lost souls.
I learned much of this years ago at a family reunion held near a rock formation called Stonewall Gap. Like many Americans, I have my genealogical obsessions, and I saved all the family documents I was given at this gathering. Leafing through old Xeroxes of apparently unrelated data, I discovered yet another complicated connection: this time between my family and the poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
My grandfather’s grandfather was also named Abraham; he was born in Kentucky in 1824, and died in Paris, Missouri, in 1887, “aged 62 years, 5 months and 5 days,” according to his obituary. This document is quite detailed, perhaps because my ancestor had edited the paper in which it appeared, the Paris Mercury. There is a lengthy biography and description of the obsequies, concluding as follows: To his deeply afflicted and sorrowing wife and children we tender
our deepest sympathy, trusting that a kind and loving providence
will ever watch and tend them as they journey on in life.
The stately ships go on,
To their haven under the hill,
But oh for the touch of a vanished hand
And the sound of a voice that is still.
There is a bit more- what a gentleman he was, “so true to the high moral principles that should prevail throughout the country,” and so forth. But notice the Tennyson. Notice, among other things, the little misquotations, suggesting that the writer worked from memory. “Lawn Tennyson,” as James Joyce would later call him, was still very much alive and writing when his poem “Break, break, break,” was misquoted in Abraham Mason’s obituary. In short, Tennyson was exceedingly famous, known by heart wherever English was spoken. In 1883 he had been elevated to a peerage, and each of his publications was an event noted on several continents, but apparently he was not yet resented as a voice of Empire.
This fame and popularity, as well as the sentimentality of his worst poems, resulted in Tennyson’s dismissal by a great many twentieth century critics- even those, like T.S. Eliot, who were influenced by him. Though Eliot would later write an admiring introduction to In Memoriam, his often-quoted remarks in “The Metaphysical Poets” seem to have stuck firmly in the minds of many critics:
Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not
Feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought
To Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.
When he adds, slightly later, that “Keats and Shelley died” while “Tennyson and Browning ruminated,” he seems to view Victorian poetry as a diminished thing. The power of such dismissals was so strong that I avoided reading Tennyson for years, until I heard a reading of “Break, Break, Break” that moved me to go back to his poems. There I discovered a master of verse technique and a poet of great feeling, a figure I was unwilling to dismiss, in whose poems I still take unguilty pleasure.
When I teach poetry, I often use this little poem as an example of the power inherent in meter. Here is the whole of the well-known text:
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.
Students first learning the technique of scansion are driven mad by this poem. They are used to the predominance of iambic and other two-syllable feet in English poetry, and their scansions of Victorians, for whom three-syllable feet were perfectly natural, are often hilarious. Some are tempted to find exotic fauna like the molossus (a three-syllable foot with every syllable long or stressed) in the poem’s first line. Students who have studied music usually hear right away what the pattern is- a simple three feet per line, usually with three firmly stressed syllables. I could scan the first stanza as follows:
3 monosyllabic feet
anapest, spondee, iamb
2 anapests and an amphybrach
iamb, anapest, iamb
The second foot of the line two could also be an iamb, depending on which side of the bed you got up on this morning.
Now, several fascinating technical matters occur to me when I read this poem. First, it is an example of verse in which a great many three-syllable feet, usually anapests, do not create the galloping rhythm so famously illustrated in Byron’s “The Destruction of Sennacherib.” Where Byron’s poem is regularly anapestic, Tennyson’s contains a variety of two and three-syllable feet. Second, the repetition of the opening line at the start of the final stanza has a braking- as well as breaking- effect, slowing the poem down. Finally, Tennyson’s significant variations have emotional effects. The fact that the third lines in stanzas three and four are the poem’s only tetrameters becomes crucial; read the poem aloud, and you will hear that the first of these occurs at the poem’s emotional crux: “But O for the touch of a vanished hand…” When Tennyson alters his meter and extends the line, he breaks your heart.
This sort of controlled variety almost disappears in the twentieth century, and ought to be brought back by our most capable poets. Many of the New Formalists in America have been too easily satisfied with the thumping iamb; they might do well to study Tennyson’ meter-making moods. No doubt some readers find this poem sentimental. I find it a simple expression of memorable emotion, achieved with what appears to have been near-spontaneous mastery, the inner condition of the poet presented in images of the external world and in telling cadences. As the Victorian critic R.H. Hutton wrote, “No poet ever made the dumb speak so effectually.”
I said earlier that I had avoided reading Tennyson for years, under the influence of modernist critics, or especially the influence of teachers swayed by such critics. The event that lured me back to him was a memorial service for my older brother, Douglas Cameron Mason, who died in a mountaineering accident just short of his twenty-ninth birthday in 1979. The service was held in Seattle, where my brother had lived and engaged in politics. An old family friend, Marshall Forrest, a judge in both state and local courts, built his fine eulogy around Tennyson’s poem. Years later, I would notice the obituary for our great-great grandfather, quoting- or misquoting- the same verses. It felt as if a circle had closed. I had been given another example for the deep connections between life and art. Or perhaps these connections are coincidence, but when they instruct us as this one did me, coincidences resonate throughout our experience.
As readers of poetry, we all have our touchstones, poems we come back to without always knowing why. Sometimes life appears to choose these poems for us and we have to learn how to love them, even when they might embarrass us among our intellectual friends.
We learn where our loyalties lie by listening for the truth.
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