and
Counting the dewy pebbles, fix’d in thought.
There is an alteration in Œnone which is very interesting. Till 1884 this was allowed to stand:—
The lizard, with his shadow on the stone,
Rests like a shadow, and the cicala sleeps.
No one could have known better than Tennyson that the cicala is loudest in the torrid calm of the noonday, as Theocritus, Virgil, Byron and innumerable other poets have noticed; at last he altered it, but at the heavy price of a cumbrous pleonasm, into “and the winds are dead”.
He allowed many years to elapse before he corrected another error in natural history—but at last the alteration came. In The Poet’s Song in the line—
The swallow stopt as he hunted the bee,
the “fly” which the swallow does hunt was substituted for what it does not hunt, and that for very obvious reasons.
But whoever would see what Tennyson’s poetry has owed to elaborate revision and scrupulous care would do well to compare the first edition of Mariana in the South, The Sea-Fairies, Œnone, The Lady of Shalott, The Palace of Art and A Dream of Fair Women with the poems as they are presented in 1853. Poets do not always improve their verses by revision, as all students of Wordsworth’s text could abundantly illustrate; but it may be doubted whether, in these poems at least, Tennyson ever made a single alteration which was not for the better. Fitzgerald, indeed, contended that in some cases, particularly in The Miller’s Daughter, Tennyson would have done well to let the first reading stand, but few critics would agree with him in the instances he gives. We may perhaps regret the sacrifice of such a stanza as this—
Each coltsfoot down the grassy bent,
Whose round leaves hold the gathered shower,
Each quaintly folded cuckoo pint,
And silver-paly cuckoo flower.