Again, in the metrical imitations—which are deliberately somewhat in the vein of sport and artifice—Tennyson alone, it seems to me, has exactly done what he intended, and shown what English effects can be produced by a master’s hand, even in these unfamiliar measures.
Of the serious classic pieces one of the most beautiful and moving is “Tithonus.” The tale is familiar: the beautiful youth Tithonus was beloved by the goddess of the Dawn, and her love bestowed immortality on him; but they both forgot to ask for immortal youth. So he grew old: and the pathos of the boon, granted by love at love’s request, thus turning out a curse, is the motive of the tale. He speaks:
Yet hold me not for ever in thine East:
How can my nature longer mix with thine?
Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet
Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes
Of happy men that have the power to die,
And grassy barrows of the happier dead.
Release me, and restore me to the ground;
Thou seëst all things, thou wilt see my grave:
Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;
I earth in earth forget these empty courts,
And thee returning on thy silver wheels.
A great scholar has said that it is one of the most incomparable powers of poetry to make sad things beautiful, and so to go some way towards healing the sorrow in the reader’s heart. He was speaking of Greek Tragedy; but there is, I think, a deep truth in the saying, and it is not confined to that particular form of poetry. And I know no better instance of the truth than the singularly beautiful poem quoted above.
But the classic influences are, of course, not limited to the avowed borrowings from ancient legend. There are constantly lines in Tennyson where the student of ancient poetry recognizes a phrase—a turn—an echo—beautiful in themselves, and giving a special pleasure to the instructed reader; such a line as “When the first matin-song hath wakened loud,” which occurs in the “Address to Memory”—the striking early poem containing the description of his Somersby home—and is itself an exquisitely turned translation from Sophocles’ Electra. So again we have an echo from Homer through Virgil, in the half-playful line, “This way and that dividing the swift mind”; or, again, the vivid simile from Theocritus in the bold description:
And arms on which the standing muscles sloped,
As slopes a wild brook o’er a little stone,
Running too vehemently to break upon it.[87]
—where the reader with an ear will note the bold metrical variation adding so much to the effect. So again the Poet himself has told us how the famous phrase for the kingfisher, “The sea-blue bird of March,” arose one day when he was haunted by the lovely stanza of Alcman (Greek lyric poet) about the “halcyon” whom he calls “the sea-blue bird of spring.” The fact is that Tennyson had an inborn instinct for the subtle power of language, and for musical sound—in a word, for that insight, finish, feeling for beauty in phrase and thought and thing, and that perfection of form, which, taken all together, we call poetry, and he is, like Virgil and Milton, a true son of the Greeks: and if his open imitations are few, the influence of the springs from which he drank is none the less powerful and pervading.
In 1842 came a carefully revised selection of the earlier books—he was always revising and improving—along with a large number of new poems.
I will pass over the English Idylls, which, in spite of beautiful touches, have never as a whole appealed to me. But, setting these aside, there are a few pieces which I cannot pass by without a word. They are “Love and Duty,” the political poems, and songs. “Morte d’Arthur” I leave over till we reach the Idylls.
“Love and Duty” is a passionate tragedy, the parting of two lovers at the call of duty. Perhaps the high-wrought pathos is a sign of youth; but youth may be a strength as well as a weakness; and the lines are surely of extraordinary beauty and force. I will quote the last passage, for a reason which will appear: