Probably no poet ever more thoroughly comprehended the value of words in metrical composition than Mr. Tennyson, but he has issued a new coinage which is not pure. Compound epithets are modelled after the Greek or revived from the uncritical Elizabethan era. Thus, where we should naturally say “The bee is cradled in the lily,” Mr. Tennyson writes, “The bee is lily-cradled.” When a man’s nose is broken at the bridge or a lady’s turns up at the tip, the one is said to be “a nose bridge-broken,” and the other (with much gallantry) to be “tip-tilted, like the petal of a flower.”
The movement of the metre again is very peculiar. Discarding Milton’s long and complex periods, Mr. Tennyson has restored blank verse to an apparently simple rhythm. But this simplicity is in fact the result of artifice, and, under every variety of movement, the ear detects the recurrence of a set type. One of the poet’s favorite devices is to pause on a monosyllable at the beginning of a line, and this affect is repeated so often as to remind the reader of Euripides and his unhappy “oil flask” in The Frogs. Take the following instances:—
And the strange sound of an adulterous race,
Against the iron grating of her cell
Beat.
A sound
As of a silver horn across the hills
Blown.
And then the music faded, and the Grail
Passed.