Ulysses<\/b> by Alfred, Lord Tennyson<\/i><\/p>\n
It little profits that an idle king,
\nBy this still hearth, among these barren crags,
\nMatch’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
\nUnequal laws unto a savage race,
\nThat hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.<\/p>\n
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
\nLife to the lees: all times I have enjoyed
\nGreatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
\nThat loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
\nThrough scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
\nVexed the dim sea: I am become a name;
\nFor always roaming with a hungry heart
\nMuch have I seen and known; cities of men
\nAnd manners, climates, councils, governments,
\nMyself not least, but honoured of them all;
\nAnd drunk delight of battle with my peers;
\nFar on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
\nI am part of all that I have met;
\nYet all experience is an arch wherethrough
\nGleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
\nFor ever and for ever when I move.
\nHow dull it is to pause, to make an end,
\nTo rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
\nAs though to breath were life. Life piled on life
\nWere all too little, and of one to me
\nLittle remains: but every hour is saved
\nFrom that eternal silence, something more,
\nA bringer of new things; and vile it were
\nFor some three suns to store and hoard myself,
\nAnd this grey spirit yearning in desire
\nTo follow knowledge like a sinking star,
\nBeyond the utmost bound of human thought.<\/p>\n
This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
\nTo whom I leave the sceptre and the isle \u0097
\nWell-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
\nThis labour, by slow prudence to make mild
\nA rugged people, and through soft degrees
\nSubdue them to the useful and the good.
\nMost blameless is he, centred in the sphere
\nOf common duties, decent not to fail
\nIn offices of tenderness, and pay
\nMeet adoration to my household gods,
\nWhen I am gone. He works his work, I mine.<\/p>\n
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
\nThere gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
\nSouls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me \u0097
\nThat ever with a frolic welcome took
\nThe thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
\nFree hearts, free foreheads \u0097 you and I are old;
\nOld age hath yet his honour and his toil;
\nDeath closes all: but something ere the end,
\nSome work of noble note, may yet be done,
\nNot unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
\nThe lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
\nThe long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
\nMoans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
\n‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
\nPush off, and sitting well in order smite
\nThe sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
\nTo sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
\nOf all the western stars, until I die.
\nIt may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
\nIt may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
\nAnd see the great Achilles, whom we knew<\/p>\n
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and though
\nWe are not now that strength which in old days
\nMoved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
\nOne equal temper of heroic hearts,
\nMade weak by time and fate, but strong in will
\nTo strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.<\/p>\n
\n
\nThe bower we shrined to Tennyson
\nGentlemen,
\nIs roof-wrecked; damps there drip upon
\nSagged seats, the creeper-nails are rust,
\nThe spider is sole denizen;
\nEven she who voiced those rhymes is dust,
\nGentlemen!
\n— Thomas Hardy, “An Ancient to Ancients”<\/i><\/p>\n
“”I cannot think he is a supremely great poet. There is something lacking in him. He is very beautiful — very graceful. In short, the Perfect Artist. But he seldom lets us forget<\/u> the artist — we are never swept away — Not he — he flows on serenely. And that is good. But an occasional bit of wild nature would make it better still.” — LM Montgomery<\/i><\/p>\n
“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:<\/p>\n
Do we indeed desire the dead
\nShould still be near us at our side?
\nIs there no baseness we would hide,
\nNo inner vileness that we dread?”
\n— LM Montgomery<\/i><\/p>\n
“On the bald street breaks the blank day.” — Tennyson<\/p>\n
“Do you know, a horrible thing has happened to me. I have begun to doubt Tennyson.” — Gerard Manley Hopkins<\/i><\/p>\n
“Even excluding the plays, it is a vast body of work: poems of feeling and of sentiment, poems of thought and of received opinion. When Browning acquired an audience, he turned garrulous. Tennyson turned sententious. But the Representative Voice does not merely entertain doubts, he actually feels them; his politics, like his religion, are rooted in memory of the past and fear of the future. A liberal, he distrusts progressivism even as he acknowledges the injustices and evils that make it necessary. Tennyson is an intellectual enigma, which is why many take him to be a philosopher speaking for their own indecision and doubt.” — Michael Schmidt<\/i><\/p>\n
“I wrote as much as seventy lines at one time, and used to go shouting them about the fields after dark.” — Tennyson<\/i><\/p>\n
“The real truth is that Tennyson, with all his temperament and artistic skill, is deficient in intellectual power; and no modern poet can make very much of his business unless he is pre-eminently strong in this.” — Matthew Arnold in a letter to his mother, 1860<\/i><\/p>\n
“It is not religious because of the quality of its faith, but because of the quality of its doubt.” — TS Eliot on Tennyson’s religion<\/i><\/p>\n
“In 1850 Tennyson received public laurels and fulfilled a private desire. He was married after a courship whose length reflected not reluctance but lack of money. He published In Memoriam<\/i>. And he became poet laureate, succeeding Wordsworth. The “Ode on Wellington” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade” are masterpieces of laureate art. Few laureates are so transparently sincere, prompt and prosodically competent in the execution of their duties. ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ entered the common memory.” — Michael Schmidt, “Lives of the Poets”<\/i><\/p>\n
“Tennyson spoke to and for his age in In Memoriam<\/i>. Its success as a long poem depends on its fragmentariness. The sections are elegiac idylls, assembled into a sequence. Like Maud<\/i>, the sequence hangs together thanks to what Eliot called ‘the greatest lyrical resourcefulness that a poet has ever shown.’ Elegies and poems of aftermath were Tennyson’s forte. He was a gray beard from the beginning.” – Michael Schmidt<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and … Continue reading