{"id":8304,"date":"2008-08-06T08:51:45","date_gmt":"2008-08-06T12:51:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=8304"},"modified":"2022-10-16T10:11:51","modified_gmt":"2022-10-16T14:11:51","slug":"happy-birthday-alfred-lord-tennyson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=8304","title":{"rendered":"Happy Birthday, Alfred Lord Tennyson"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, Tennyson came up last night, as we sat talking over wine and cheese, in a conversation we were having about poets we loved. We also discussed politics, morons, reading, acting, the new production of Hair<\/i> in Central Park, resumes, weddings, our pets, and Angelina Jolie. But Tennyson came up, too. So this morning, when I saw it was his birthday, I just thought it was too much of a coincidence (how often do I have an in-depth conversation about Tennyson? Not enough, I’m thinking) NOT to post a birthday message to the man. There is some of Tennyson I can take, some I can leave – but then, there are lines which reverberate through my whole life – and not just the most famous “red in tooth and claw” lines, but other ones … taking on deeply personal meanings, phrases I cannot imagine doing without. Guiding posts. Or – not just “guiding posts”, but glimpses of a world so beautiful, so vaulted and important, that it is almost blinding to the eye. For example (and this is my favorite of all of Tennyson’s words he ever wrote):<\/p>\n

THE splendour falls on castle walls
\nAnd snowy summits old in story:
\nThe long light shakes across the lakes,
\nAnd the wild cataract leaps in glory.
\nBlow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
\nBlow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.<\/p>\n

O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,
\nAnd thinner, clearer, farther going!
\nO sweet and far from cliff and scar
\nThe horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
\nBlow, let us hear the purple glens replying:
\nBlow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.<\/p>\n

O love, they die in yon rich sky,
\nThey faint on hill or field or river:
\nOur echoes roll from soul to soul,
\nAnd grow for ever and for ever.
\nBlow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
\nAnd answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.<\/p>\n

That is just NEVER not satisfying to me to read. And I mean “satisfying” in almost a spiritual sense, a sense of rightness and perfection, vibrating through that verse.<\/p>\n

So if a poet has one or two of those lines in his long lifetime, well – then I should say he is a success. (Like the last verse of “Ulysses” below.)<\/p>\n

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 –
\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 –
\nThat ever with a frolic welcome took
\nThe thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
\nFree hearts, free foreheads – 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

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And so, in honor of the man’s birthday, and in honor of how weird it was that he was just discussed at length<\/i> last night in a little wine bar in Manhattan … here is a compilation of quotes about the man, and from the man.<\/p>\n

The 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 in her journal<\/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

“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?”<\/p>\n

— LM Montgomery, in her journal<\/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

“The churches have killed their Christ.” — Tennyson, “Maud”, 1855<\/i><\/p>\n

“In 1850 Tennyson received public laurels and fulfilled a private desire. He was married after a courtship 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

The Charge Of The Light Brigade<\/em>
\nby Alfred, Lord Tennyson
\nMemorializing Events in the Battle of Balaclava, October 25, 1854
\nWritten 1854<\/em><\/p>\n

Half a league half a league,
\nHalf a league onward,
\nAll in the valley of Death
\nRode the six hundred:
\n‘Forward, the Light Brigade!
\nCharge for the guns’ he said:
\nInto the valley of Death
\nRode the six hundred.<\/p>\n

‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’
\nWas there a man dismay’d ?
\nNot tho’ the soldier knew
\nSome one had blunder’d:
\nTheirs not to make reply,
\nTheirs not to reason why,
\nTheirs but to do & die,
\nInto the valley of Death
\nRode the six hundred.<\/p>\n

Cannon to right of them,
\nCannon to left of them,
\nCannon in front of them
\nVolley’d & thunder’d;
\nStorm’d at with shot and shell,
\nBoldly they rode and well,
\nInto the jaws of Death,
\nInto the mouth of Hell
\nRode the six hundred.<\/p>\n

Flash’d all their sabres bare,
\nFlash’d as they turn’d in air
\nSabring the gunners there,
\nCharging an army while
\nAll the world wonder’d:
\nPlunged in the battery-smoke
\nRight thro’ the line they broke;
\nCossack & Russian
\nReel’d from the sabre-stroke,
\nShatter’d & sunder’d.
\nThen they rode back, but not
\nNot the six hundred.<\/p>\n

Cannon to right of them,
\nCannon to left of them,
\nCannon behind them
\nVolley’d and thunder’d;
\nStorm’d at with shot and shell,
\nWhile horse & hero fell,
\nThey that had fought so well
\nCame thro’ the jaws of Death,
\nBack from the mouth of Hell,
\nAll that was left of them,
\nLeft of six hundred.<\/p>\n

When can their glory fade?
\nO the wild charge they made!
\nAll the world wonder’d.
\nHonour the charge they made!
\nHonour the Light Brigade,
\nNoble six hundred!<\/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, “Lives of the Poets<\/a>\"\"“<\/i><\/p>\n

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