There is a story told of how the first verses Alfred Tennyson ever made were written. His father was a clergyman, and Alfred and his brothers and sisters lived all their lives in the country, running wild in the woods and the fields, and learning all about birds and flowers, until they were old enough to go to school. One Sunday morning, when every one but Alfred, who was then very small, was going to church, his elder brother Charles said he would give him something to do, and told him he must write some verses about the flowers in the garden. When they came in, Alfred appeared with his slate covered all over with his first poem. He was very fond of story-telling, and he and his brothers and sisters would combine to make up long and exciting tales which sometimes lasted for months. When he went to school he began to read a great deal, especially poetry. If he found any he particularly liked, he would try to imitate it in poems of his own, and in this way he and his brother Charles, who was with him at school, used to spend a great deal of their spare time.
It would take too long, and it would not be interesting, to tell you the names of even the chief poems which Lord Tennyson wrote. By-and-by you will read many of them for yourselves, and two I am sure you will specially enjoy. One is the “Siege of Lucknow,” which we have so often spoken of; and the other is the “Revenge,” which is also a story of fighting—but a sea-fight in the time of Queen Elizabeth. Lord Tennyson, like most poets, was more fond of the country than of towns, and most of his life he lived either in the Isle of Wight or in Surrey. He used, until quite the end of his life, to enjoy taking long country walks, and he never lost his love for flowers or birds, or failed to notice them; and this in spite of having all his life been very short-sighted. It was said of him that “when he was looking at any object he seemed to be smelling it,” so closely used he to hold it to his eyes.
And yet, with this difficulty, he noticed “more than most men with perfect sight would see. I remember his telling me,” so wrote a friend of his, “if you tread on daisies they turn up underfoot and get rosy. His hearing, on the other hand, was exceptionally keen, and he held it as a sort of compensation for his blurred sight; he could hear the shriek of a bat, which he always said was the test of a quick ear.”
Lord Tennyson was eighty-three when he died, and when he was buried in Westminster Abbey the great church was crowded, not only during the funeral service, but for many days and even weeks afterwards, by hundreds of people, who came to see, and lay flowers on, his grave.
Although so many poets were buried in the Abbey, yet there were many others who when they died were buried in the country, or in other churches in London, and, when this was the case, monuments were often put up in the Abbey in memory of them. For instance, Shakespeare,[20] the greatest of all our great poets, was buried at Stratford-on-Avon, where he had lived for the last part of his life, and where he died.
There is not a very great deal known about his life. He was the son of a country shopkeeper, who was very poor, but who managed to send his son to the grammar school at Stratford-on-Avon, where they lived. When he was fourteen he was taken away from school, and had to earn his own living. It is sometimes said that he was first a butcher’s boy, and had to carry out the meat, but no one knows exactly what he did after he left school until he was about nineteen. Then he went to London, and began to write poetry and plays. He had at this time hardly any money, and was thankful to earn a penny whenever he could by holding horses, or making himself useful in any way he could think of, and was nicknamed by his friends “Jack-of-all-trades.” At last he got employment as a writer of plays for the Globe Theatre. This Globe Theatre was very different from the theatres of nowadays. It was a round wooden building with no roof, except just over the stage, and there it was covered in to protect the dresses of the actors and actresses in case of bad weather. Gradually it became clear that this William Shakespeare, who had come to London quite a poor and unknown man, was a great poet, his plays began to be talked of, and many great and rich men became his friends. In a few years he was no longer poor, and had begun to save money to buy himself a house at Stratford-on-Avon, where he had been born. To do this had always been a dream of his: for a long time his wife and children had been living there while he worked hard for them in London, and when at last he had bought his house, which was called New Place, he left London and went home to them.
Many years passed away, and Shakespeare, who had written great plays such as Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice, which you will all know and perhaps see acted some day, lived quietly in the little town of Stratford-on-Avon, making friends of all the people round him, both rich and poor, and seeing his own plays acted in a great empty barn near his house, for in those days there was no theatre in Stratford.
“Master Shakespeare,” as he was called, was buried in the churchyard of the little town he had been so fond of all his life; and many years afterwards, when his name had become known all over England, and his plays and his poems had become famous as they had never been during his lifetime, a monument was put up to his memory in Westminster Abbey close by the graves of two other poets, Spenser and Drayton, who had been his friends: on it are written these words out of his own play of The Tempest—
“The Cloud-capt Towers,
The Gorgeous Palaces,
The Solemn Temples,
The Great Globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit,
Shall dissolve;
And, like the baseless fabric of a vision,
Leave not a wreck behind.”[21]
Among all the poets who are buried in the south transept, there is one great musician, George Frederick Handel.[22] Dean Stanley says that “Handel, who composed the music of the ‘Messiah’ and the ‘Israel in Egypt,’ must have been a poet no less than a musician, and therefore he was not unfitly buried in Poets’ Corner.”