Atque animum nunc huc celerem nunc dividit illuc
(And this way and that he divides his swift mind).
Another way in which they affect him is where, without direct imitation, they colour passages and poems as in Œnone, The Lotos Eaters, Tithonus, Tiresias, The Death of Œnone, Demeter and Persephone, the passage beginning “From the woods” in The Gardener’s Daughter, which is a parody of Theocritus, Id., vii., 139 seq., while the Cyclops’ invocation to Galatea in Theocritus, Id., xi., 29-79, was plainly the model for the idyll, “Come down, O Maid,” in the seventh section of The Princess, just as the tournament in the same poem recalls closely the epic of Homer and Virgil. Tennyson had a wonderful way of transfusing, as it were, the essence of some beautiful passage in a Greek or Roman poet into English. A striking illustration of this would be the influence of reminiscences of Virgil’s fourth Æneid on the idyll of Elaine and Guinevere. Compare, for instance, the following: he is describing the love-wasted Elaine, as she sits brooding in the lonely evening, with the shadow of the wished-for death falling on her:—
But when they left her to herself again,
Death, like a friend’s voice from a distant field,
Approaching through the darkness, call’d; the owls
Wailing had power upon her, and she mix’d
Her fancies with the sallow-rifted glooms
Of evening and the moanings of the wind.
How exactly does this recall, in a manner to be felt rather than exactly defined, a passage equally exquisite and equally pathetic in Virgil’s picture of Dido, where, with the shadow of her death also falling upon her, she seems to hear the phantom voice of her dead husband, and “mixes her fancies” with the glooms of night and the owl’s funereal wail:—
Hinc exaudiri voces et verba vocantis
Visa viri, nox quum terras obscura teneret;
Solaque culminibus ferali carmine bubo
Sæpe queri, et longas in fletum ducere voces.
—Æn., iv., 460.)
(From it she thought she clearly heard a voice, even the accents of her husband calling her when night was wrapping the earth with darkness; and on the roof the lonely owl in funereal strains kept oft complaining, drawing out into a wail its protracted notes.)
Similar passages, though not so striking, would be the picture of Pindar’s Elysium in Tiresias, the sentiment pervading The Lotos Eaters transferred so faithfully from the Greek poets, the scenery in Œnone so crowded with details from Homer, Theocritus and Callimachus. Sometimes we find similes suggested by the classical poets, but enriched by touches from original observation, as here in The Princess:—
As one that climbs a peak to gaze
O’er land and main, and sees a great black cloud
Drag inward from the deeps, a wall of night
Blot out the slope of sea from verge to shore.
...
And quenching lake by lake and tarn by tarn
Expunge the world,
which was plainly suggested by Homer, iv., 275:—
ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἀπὸ σκοπιῆς εἴδε νέφος αἰπολος ἀνήρ
ἐρχόμενον κατὰ πόντον ὑπὸ Ζεφύροιο ἰωῆς
τῷ δε τ’ ἄνευθεν ἐόντι, μελάντερον ἠΰτε πίσσα,
φαίνετ’ ἰὸν κατὰ πόντον, ἄγει δέ τε λαῖλαπα πολλὴν.
(As when a goat-herd from some hill-peak sees a cloud coming across the deep with the blast of the west wind behind it; and to him, being as he is afar, it seems blacker, even as pitch, as it goes along the deep, bringing with it a great whirlwind.)
So again the fine simile in Elaine, beginning