By the time that Tennyson began to write, Shakespeare’s necessity was even plainer. The thousand simple circumstances of nature and humanity were still an inevitable part of the poet’s content matter. In the course of a lifework of artistic creation he could not but want to say a dozen times that the grass was green and the sky blue, the water clear and love uncertain, and it is merely pointless to forbid him these things because they have been said before. But apart from that allowance of an occasional cliché, admitted because of some virtue as contrast, as for example when Tennyson says—
On one side lay the ocean, and on one
Lay a great water, and the moon was full ...
he had to say these things with just as much originality of phrase as would compel attention, and yet with not one word beyond this, or one word too heavily weighted, lest he should be accused of inflation, which is the death of poetry.
A second difficulty that Tennyson, to use the one example for the moment, had to meet was in connection with the associative value of words. When Chaucer was writing, words can have had little or no associative value.[2] Even with Shakespeare they must have had far less of this evocative power than they had three hundred years later. Indeed, Shakespeare’s own language has unquestionably for us acquired a certain patina from time. We read to-day—
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,
and upon analysis we are aware of two separate sources of our delight in the superbly used word “sessions.” Firstly, there is its purely imaginative value. For Shakespeare, “sessions” can have had but one literal meaning. In the framing of that line the common marvel of creative imagination was performed. The poet deliberated upon his thoughts gathering together for the survey of “things past.” It was a process something formal and ceremonious that he had in mind, a solemn conclave. Thus the ritual of the law would suggest itself to him, the ordered gravity of a court, the pregnant occasion of a sessions. And thereupon the two ideas would associate themselves, the perfect image would be created, and with it would come the full exercise of our imaginative powers in turn, of our best delight in poetry. For the bare actual setting of the scene in his sonnet Shakespeare might have been content with some such line as—
When to my mind I summon up things past,
but the informing vitality would have escaped. It is one of the mysteries of poetry that when you translate her word into another, although by logic it may seem to be the same thing, it is in truth something essentially different. It is not quite a barren truism to say that you can only say what Shakespeare said by saying what he said—
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought