5
The voice grew faint: there came a further change:
Once more uprose the mystic mountain-range:
Below were men and horses pierced with worms,
And slowly quickening into lower forms;
By shards and scurf of salt, and scum of dross,
Old plash of rains, and refuse patch’d with moss,
Then some one spake[[6]]: “Behold! it was a crime
Of sense avenged by sense that wore with time”.
[[7]]Another said: “The crime of sense became
The crime of malice, and is equal blame”.
And one: “He had not wholly quench’d his power;
A little grain of conscience made him sour”.
At last I heard a voice upon the slope
Cry to the summit, “Is there any hope?”
To which an answer peal’d from that high land.
But in a tongue no man could understand;
And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn
God made Himself an awful rose of dawn.[[8]]
[1] A reference to the famous passage in the Phoedrus where Plato compares the soul to a chariot drawn by the two-winged steeds.
[2] Imitated apparently from the dance in Shelley’s Triumph of Life:—
The wild dance maddens in the van; and those
...
Mix with each other in tempestuous measure
To savage music, wilder as it grows.
They, tortur’d by their agonising pleasure,
Convuls’d, and on the rapid whirlwinds spun
...
Maidens and youths fling their wild arms in air.
As their feet twinkle, etc.
[3] See footnote to last line.
[4] All up to and including 1850 read:—
Every minute dies a man,
Every minute one is born.
Mr. Babbage, the famous mathematician, is said to have addressed the following letter to Tennyson in reference to this couplet:—
“I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world’s population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that, in the next edition of your excellent poem, the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows:—
Every moment dies a man,
And one and a sixteenth is born.
I may add that the exact figures are 1.167, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre.”
[5] 1842 and 1843. The tyrant’s.
[6] 1842. Said.
[7] In the Selection published in 1865 Tennyson here inserted a couplet which he afterwards omitted:—
Another answer’d: “But a crime of sense!”
“Give him new nerves with old experience.”
[8] In Professor Tyndall’s reminiscences of Tennyson, inserted in Tennyson’s Life, he says he once asked him for some explanation of this line, and the poet’s reply was:
“The power of explaining such concentrated expressions of the imagination was very different from that of writing them”.
And on another occasion he said very happily:
“Poetry is like shot silk with many glancing colours. Every reader must find his own interpretation, according to his ability, and according to his sympathy with the poet”.
Poetry in its essential forms always suggests infinitely more than it expresses, and at once inspires and kindles the intelligence which is to comprehend it; if that intelligence, which is perhaps only another name for sympathy, does not exist, then, in Byron’s happy sarcasm:—
“The gentle readers wax unkind,
And, not so studious for the poet’s ease,
Insist on knowing what he means, a hard
And hapless situation for a bard”.
Possibly Tennyson may have had in his mind Keats’s line:—
“There was an awful rainbow once in heaven”