“I detest Tennyson’s ‘Arthur’! If I’d been Guinevere, I’d have been unfaithful to him too. But not for Lancelot — he is just as unbearable in another way. As for Geraint, if I’d been Enid, I’d have bitten him. These ‘patient Griseldes’ of women deserve all they get!
I like Tennyson because he gives me nothing but pleasure. I cannot love him because he gives me nothing but pleasure … I love best the poets who hurt me.
But I think I shall have some love for Tennyson after this — for today I read a verse in ‘In Memoriam’ which I do not think I can ever have read carefully before — which scorched me with a sudden flame of self-revelation and brought to me one of those awful moments when we look into the abysses of our own natures and recoil in horror. The verse was:
Do we indeed desire the dead
Should still be near us at our side?
Is there no baseness we would hide,
No inner vileness that we dread?”
Did she ever comment on Tennyson’s “Ulysses”?
Michael –
Let me check the geek database and I will get back to you.
I ask because it’s my favorite Tennyson poem, by far. In fact, it’s my favorite nineteenth-century poem, and maybe my favorite pre-twentieth-century poem. Though it loses momentum during the stanza about Telemachus.