Every Reader’s Tennyson

  

     This is the sixteenth of a series of Every Reader’s Poets, essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) non-scholarly readers to the work of important English poets. In this series I limit my focus to the discussion, often including a close paraphrase, of only three or four of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography, eschewing most byways and all footnotes.  The general introduction to the series titled “Why Read Poetry?” is also available on this site.

     Tennyson’s poetry is readily available on line, but for the reader’s convenience I have here appended the poems I discuss.

 

 

     Every poem, indeed, every utterance, is a combination of familiar and novel elements.  We relish some poets for their idiosyncratic sensibilities, thrillingly contrasting with the reader’s more normative reactions.  Among the writers prized for seeing the world in a way dramatically different from others are Blake in the English tradition and Rimbaud in the French.  At the same time other writers, some equally gifted, excel at representing received opinions so precisely that they become culture bearers for a generation.  Though the description does not hold in every particular, Vergil in antiquity, Trollope in fiction, and Longfellow in the United States may be found toward the conventional side of the spectrum.

     Alfred, Lord Tennyson is an author of this latter sort.  Though unsuccessful in his first ventures as an author, at the age of thirty-three his new volume of Poems was well-received and a mere eight years later he was named Poet Laureate, a position he held longer than any of his predecessors, from 1850 until 1892, long enough to be considered an institution.  Gerard Manley Hopkins was bothered by a “vulgarity” in his work which allowed him to achieve a “vogue” but not “ascendancy.”  Tennyson was more popular with Queen Victoria and other rear-guard aristocrats as well as among the middle-class book-buying public.  Enough of a genuine celebrity to find himself pestered by poetry-loving tourists, his funeral in Westminster Abbey (where one may yet visit his grave) attracted over ten thousand applicants for the thousand seats assigned to the general public, while a great many more citizens clustered outside.  The invited mourners included scholars like Benjamin Jowett and numerous dukes, marquis, and bishops.  It is difficult to imagine such a fuss over any poet’s death today.  In The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, that museum of words, Tennyson is given more pages than any other writer with the single exception of William Shakespeare.

     With time his sentiments came to seem overdrawn, his attitudes conformist, and the fantasy of medievalism with which he had captivated the public in his Idylls of the King and other works became passé.  With the arrival of free verse in the twentieth century, fewer readers appreciated Tennyson’s mastery of meters, though he was perhaps the most skillful prosodist since Pope.  Even his successor to the dignity of the laureateship, Alfred Austin, himself an indifferent poet, while obliged to concede that “the present age, taken in the lump, likes Mr. Tennyson’s poetry,” found him third-rate.  His reputation never has recovered. 

     Perhaps the best illustration of his successful use of conventional opinion is the non-partisan if unthinking patriotism of his best-known poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (the text is appended), which celebrates the valor of the British soldiers in the Crimean War who, as the result of an erroneous order, attempted an impossible objective and were cut to pieces.  This simple sentiment so appealed to British nationalism (and to American as well) that the poem soon found a place in school curricula and memorial assemblies.  Its brevity, repetitions, and jangling rhymes make it as digestible as a nursery rhyme.

     The reader needs know no history.  The soldiers are exemplary citizens specifically because they obey without reflection. 

 

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

 

Because such dedication is an ideal of all ruling classes in every time and place, the poem sheds little light on the author’s attitudes or the specific historical circumstances of the war, yet this generic quality is what makes it so instantly understandable to all and so comforting to the fellow-countrymen of the fallen.    

     Tennyson was often far more subtle.  He reflected the changes in taste as British culture shifted from feudalism to capitalism and the Victorian world-view was shaken not only by Marx, but also by Darwin and the scientific study of the Bible and of non-Christian scriptures.  Thus Tennyson, while in a sense as laureate the official propagandist for the regime (and found himself writing works such as “A Welcome to Alexandra” for the Queen Dowager upon her return from overseas) was in fact in politics a mild liberal a bit in advance of his more backward compatriots and in religion somewhat slippery, tending in the end toward the broadest opinions, even beyond the borders of Christianity.  The tensions generated by his uncertainty are often evident and modern readers are likely to identify with his Angst and his ambiguity more than with the pose of confident and conservative opinion that won him renown during his life. 

     One of Tennyson’s most lovely lyrics, “Tears, Idle Tears” (text appended) articulates such a dialectic while at the same time appealing to nineteenth century sentimentality.  Ambivalence is foregrounded even in the title.  The “tears” expressing a pathetic emotion are checked by the qualifier “idle,” posing the poem’s question – “I know not what they mean” – at the outset.  They are the age-old tears inspired by mortality and the passing of time, familiar poetic themes since Gilgamesh.  Such tears “rise in the heart” when contemplating “the happy Autumn-fields” and “thinking of the days that are no more.”  The naming of the season means belatedness and the approach of death, yet the scene is nonetheless “happy.”

     Rather than eliding this tension, Tennyson develops the contradiction in extraordinary images.  The thoughts of the past, though dwelling on the departed are still “fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,” while at the same time “sad as the last” beam of daylight.  The days gone by are “sad” since they are not recoverable, and the distress they inspire is heightened because they remain “fresh,” as powerful in the memory as they had been at first. 
     Tennyson then constructs the most precise and telling image of this contradiction.  The “freshness” of memory is now figured as morning birdsong light, but heard by “dying ears.”  With cinematic power the poet depicts the sickroom during sunrise as the light slowly increases.  In the face of the collision of life and death, he can only muse in wonder “so sad, so strange.”  

     Tennyson seeks to resolve his anxiety by embracing the unity of the opposite ends of the bipolar opposition.  In the penultimate stanza all the images have this compound character.  The summer is “dark,” the moment teeters between night and day, the ears and eyes are “dying” yet alert, the casement displays both light and shade.  The poet can only sigh and repeat in wonder “so sad, so strange.”

     After two stanzas detailing the deathbed scene, the poem concludes with the romantic application of regret, the shock of reaching out in embrace only to find one’s lover a phantom due to death or faithlessness or simply the inexorable passage of time.  Even love, it seems, is inescapably “Death in Life” due to the transient character of all experience.  Just as life is bound always death, joy cannot be without pain, and all love necessarily entails loss.  Tennyson here offers a more nuanced if less popular attitude than simply portraying love as the saving grace of life.  Christianity plays no role.

     Tennyson walks the same fine line between the popular appeal which tends toward saying all is well and the darker intuitions of his soul in "In Memoriam A.H.H.," an elegy for his dear friend Arthur Hallam  (Canto LIII is appended).  Though the book-length poem enjoyed immense popularity (an appeal that eludes any book of poetry today) including the approval of Queen Victoria who said she was “soothed & pleased” by the poem during her mourning for Albert, it contains much distressed agnosticism.  The beginning and ending, though, adopt a pose of orthodoxy.  The first lines address the “Strong Son of God, immortal Love,” and conclusion confidently imagines that his deceased friend lives now 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.

 

     Yet between these expressions of conventional religiosity, Tennyson concedes the impact of the science of his day which seemed to contradict a literal reading of the Bible: evolution, geological history, Higher Criticism as well as his own internal crises of belief.  Similarly on the smaller scale, canto LIII walks the ridgepole between belief and disbelief. 

     All the rhetoric is deeply ambiguous.  Beginning with a cry of the lyric pathos “Oh,” the poet says “yet,” that is, in spite of evidence to the contrary, we “trust,” since we cannot know, that “somehow” “good will the final goal of ill.”  The statement could hardly be more conflicted.  The poet is so confounded that he must in the end throw up his hands and give up, declaring “we know not anything” and comparing himself to an infant who can only cry. 

       Philosophically, of course, Tennyson was striving to attain an unlikely position, to imagine that in some way hidden from human view, every pain serves a beneficent end.  He represented a good many other middlebrow British citizens who were comforted by his platitudes, cleaving always to the accepted standards of the day.  Tennyson in fact embodied his Zeitgeist so well specifically because remained superficially loyal to accepted opinion despite being troubled by religious doubts that would not have occurred in an age of hegemonic faith and by sympathy for political reform tendencies that were aimed at ending feudalism and softening capitalism. 

     Tennyson found an effective escape from the disquiet induced by modernity’s ambiguities other than seconding received opinion.  He ornamented his bourgeois practicality with gay ribands of aristocratic glamor by recalling a mythic past.  A good number of his most popular works developed the idealized picture of the Middle Ages now known as Medievalism that inspired pre-Raphaelite painting, Gothic Revival architecture, research into balladry, and, for Tennyson, poems like The Idylls of the King and such shorter pieces as “The Lady of Shalott.”  Bedivere’s lament over the dying Arthur in “Morte d’Arthur” expresses nostalgia for a lost world where everything made sense and fostered excellence.  The Round Table is here explicitly an image for the fallen world, tangled with sin since the expulsion from Eden, further degraded by the collapse of chivalric values, and, in the poet’s own time, sullied by the physical and spiritual pollution of industrial capitalism.  While propriety forbids direct protest, one may, perhaps sentimentally, but also with effective elegance, allude to more blessed earlier times.    

 

       Then loudly cried the bold Sir Bedivere:

"Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go?

Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes?

For now I see the true old times are dead,

When every morning brought a noble chance,

And every chance brought out a noble knight.

Such times have been not since the light that led

The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh.

But now the whole Round Table is dissolved

Which was an image of the mighty world,

And I, the last, go forth companionless,

And the days darken round me, and the years,

Among new men, strange faces, other minds."

 

The taste for this sort of thing has not quite vanished, it has merely reached an epigone in phenomena like Game of Thrones, so-called Renaissance Faires, The Society for Creative Anachronism, and over-priced restaurants where one may dine while people play at sword-fighting. 

     Tennyson was a major poet in a sense now extinct.  Mass audiences read lengthy works and cried and sighed and smiled.  Tennyson was the favorite of a demographic which in today’s time prefers television and films and reads no poetry at all. His mastery of meters was widely appreciated in viva voce readings and he both expressed the experience of millions and, in turn, influenced them, embodying the culture of his day.  If contemporary Americans find less beauty in his verse, perhaps that means that we have the more to learn from him.    

 

 

 

 

The Charge of the Light Brigade

 

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

"Forward, the Light Brigade!

Charge for the guns!" he said:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

 

"Forward, the Light Brigade!"

Was there a man dismay’d?

Not tho’ the soldier knew

Some one had blunder’d:

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

 

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

Volley’d and thunder’d;

Storm’d at with shot and shell,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of Hell

Rode the six hundred.

 

Flash’d all their sabres bare,

Flash’d as they turn’d in air

Sabring the gunners there,

Charging an army, while

All the world wonder’d:

Plunged in the battery-smoke

Right thro’ the line they broke;

Cossack and Russian

Reel’d from the sabre-stroke

Shatter’d and sunder’d.

Then they rode back, but not

Not the six hundred.

 

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon behind them

Volley’d and thunder’d;

Storm’d at with shot and shell,

While horse and hero fell,

They that had fought so well

Came thro’ the jaws of Death,

Back from the mouth of Hell,

All that was left of them,

Left of six hundred.

 

When can their glory fade?

O the wild charge they made!

All the world wonder’d.

Honor the charge they made!

Honor the Light Brigade,

Noble six hundred!

 

 

 

 

Tears, Idle Tears

 

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,

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;

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

 

         Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns

The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds

To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;

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

 

         Dear as remember'd kisses after death,

And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd

On lips that are for others; deep as love,

Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;

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

 

 

In Memoriam, A. H. H., Canto LIII

 

Oh 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;

 

That nothing walks with aimless feet;

⁠That not one life shall be destroy'd,

⁠Or cast as rubbish to the void,

When God hath made the pile complete;

 

That not a worm is cloven in vain;

⁠That not a moth with vain desire

⁠Is shrivel'd in a fruitless fire,

Or but subserves another's gain.

 

Behold!;

⁠I can but trust that good shall fall

⁠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:

And with no language but a cry.