Tennyson and his friends

by Unknown

Two years later came the second volume (1832). Again much has been withdrawn, much re-written: but when in this collection we find “Œnone,” “The Palace of Art,” “A Dream of Fair Women,” and “The Lotos-eaters,” we see that we have the real poet at last.

“The Palace of Art” is an attempt to trace the Nemesis of selfish culture, secluding itself from social human life and duty. After three years of these exclusive delights, the man’s outraged nature—or conscience if you will—reasserts itself in a kind of incipient madness: the soul of him sees visions. Then a weird passage:

But in dark corners of her palace stood
Uncertain shapes; and unawares
On white-eyed phantasms weeping tears of blood,
And horrible nightmares,
And hollow shades enclosing hearts of flame,
And, with dim fretted foreheads all,
On corpses three-months-old at noon she came,
That stood against the wall.

The horrors, like Gorgons and Furies of ancient poets, are perhaps a trifle too material; but in the description of the Nemesis there are touches of real power, which at least are impressive and arresting.

“Œnone” is perhaps the most absolutely beautiful of these early poems, and for the triumph of melodious sound, and finished picturesqueness of description, the opening lines are unsurpassed. We should also note that it took more than one edition to bring it to its present perfection of form. It is very well known, but no one will object to hear it again:

There lies a vale in Ida, lovelier
Than all the valleys of Ionian hills.
The swimming vapour slopes athwart the glen,
Puts forth an arm, and creeps from pine to pine,
And loiters, slowly drawn. On either hand
The lawns and meadow-ledges midway down
Hang rich in flowers, and far below them roars
The long brook falling thro’ the clov’n ravine
In cataract after cataract to the sea.
Behind the valley topmost Gargarus
Stands up and takes the morning: but in front
The gorges, opening wide apart, reveal
Troas and Ilion’s column’d citadel,
The crown of Troas.

Before I pass on from “Œnone,” I may perhaps add a word or two on Tennyson’s classical poetry generally, and his debt to the great ancient masterpieces.

He was, perhaps, not exactly a scholar in what I may call the narrow professional sense; but in the broadest and deepest and truest sense he was a great scholar. Direct imitations of classical form, even when they show such power and poetry as Swinburne’s “Atalanta” and “Erechtheus,” have always something artificial about them. But in all Tennyson’s classic pieces—“Œnone,” “Ulysses,” “Demeter,” “Tithonus,” the legendary subjects—and in the two historic subjects, “Lucretius” and “Boädicea,” the classical tradition is there with full detail, but by the poet’s art it is transmuted. “Œnone” is epic in form, the rest are brief monodramas; the material is all ancient, and in many subtle ways the spirit; the handling is modern and original. In translations—too few—Tennyson can only be called consummate: his version of one passage of the Iliad (viii. 552) makes all other translations seem second-rate. Let me quote a few lines:

And these all night upon the bridge of war
Sat glorying; many a fire before them blazed:
As when in heaven the stars about the moon
Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid,
And every height comes out, and jutting peak
And valley, and the immeasurable heavens
Break open to their highest,[86] and all the stars
Shine, and the Shepherd gladdens in his heart:
So many a fire between the ships and stream
Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy,
A thousand on the plain; and close by each
Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire;
And eating hoary grain and pulse the steeds,
Fixt by their cars, waited the golden dawn.

The passage, let me add, is a crucial test of the power of a translator, for this reason: it is a plain, simple description of the Trojan camp-fires in the darkness, with a simile or comparison of the sight to a clearance of the sky at night and the sudden shining of the multitude of stars. With the infallible instinct of Greek Poetry there is a rapid lift in the style, a sudden glorious phrase ὑπερράγη ἄσπετος αἰθήρ, to suggest adequately the magnificent sight of the sudden clearance. It is this effect that is difficult to give in the translation; and it is exactly this splendid climax that Tennyson’s incomparable rendering, “And the immeasurable heavens break open to their highest,” so perfectly conveys.