And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.
In the diction of that there is a serene directness that has been won only out of many years of technical liberality.
The second of our problems in diction, that of keeping clear of words with a too definitely associative value, Tennyson met in his best work by a steady concentration on his own subject. Although in actual craftsmanship he was sophisticated and selective in a far more than common degree, an unusually self-conscious artist, in the spiritual and emotional content of his poetry Tennyson had hardly any virtuosity at all. His success or failure in philosophic originality will be discussed in a later section of this essay, but the point here is that in the experiences of his soul he may often have been strangely disingenuous for a major poet, but he was always absolutely himself. His poetic technique is clearly and manifoldly subject to influence—Shakespeare, Milton, Pope even, Byron by glimpses, Keats—without any one of these his manner would have been a little different, but upon the emotional life of his poetry there is practically no literary influence discernible at all. The tumultuous passion of the Elizabethans, the subtle lay metaphysic of Donne, Milton’s darkly voluptuous Puritanism, Herrick’s exquisitely tutored rustic urbanity, Wordsworth’s moral clairvoyance—all these might never have existed in poetry at all for the traces of them to be found in the self-portraiture figured in Tennyson’s art. Whether the fact is to be accounted as a defect or a virtue depends upon what we ask of poetry. To return to our passage from In Memoriam—
Calm is the morn without a sound ...