4. His Poetical Characteristics. (a) His Craftsmanship. No one can deny the great care and skill shown in Tennyson’s work. His method of producing poetry was slowly to evolve the lines in his mind, commit them to paper, and to revise them till they were as near perfection as he could make them. Consequently we have a high level of poetical artistry. No one excels Tennyson in the deft application of sound to sense and in the subtle and pervading employment of alliteration and vowel-music. Such passages as this abound in his work:
Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro’ the lawn,
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees.
The Princess
This is perhaps not the highest poetry, but shows only a kind of manual, or rather aural, dexterity; yet as Tennyson employs it, it is effective to a degree.
His excellent craftsmanship is also apparent in his handling of English meters, in which he is a tireless experimenter. In blank verse he is not so varied and powerful as Shakespeare, nor so majestical as Milton, but in the skill of his workmanship and in his wealth of diction he falls but little short of these great masters.
(b) His Pictorial Quality. In this respect Tennyson follows the example of Keats. Nearly all of his poems, even the simplest, abound in ornate description of natural and other scenes. His method is to seize upon appropriate details, dress them in expressive and musical phrases, and thus throw a glistening image before the reader’s eye:
The silk star-broider’d coverlid
Unto her limbs itself doth mould