Tennyson and his friends

by Unknown

Should my Shadow cross thy thoughts
Too sadly for their peace, remand it thou
For calmer hours to Memory’s darkest hold,
If not to be forgotten—not at once—
Not all forgotten. Should it cross thy dreams,
O might it come like one that looks content,
With quiet eyes unfaithful to the truth,
And point thee forward to a distant light,
Or seem to lift a burthen from thy heart
And leave thee freër, till thou wake refresh’d
Then when the first low matin-chirp hath grown
Full quire, and morning driv’n her plow of pearl
Far furrowing into light the mounded rack,
Beyond the fair green field and eastern sea.

Certain critics have found fault with the splendid description of Dawn, as being untrue to nature; a lover in such a crisis, they think, would not be concerned with such images. I regard this suggestion as wholly at fault. The tragedy, the parting, has come to pass: the vision of dawn is a hope for her, now that the new life, apart from each other, has to begin for both of them. If the broken love was all, if they could not look beyond, the parting would have been different—like Lancelot and Guinevere—“Stammering and staring; a madness of farewells.” But here the note is higher. The passion barred from its issue rushes into new channels, and the exalted mood finds its only adequate vent in the rapturous vision of a future dawn, the symbol of his hopes for her, those hopes into which his sacrificed love is translated.

In the political poems we have a new departure. It is easy to idealize freedom, revolution, or war: and the ancients found it easy to compose lyrics on kings, athletes, warriors, or other powerful persons. From the days of Tyrtaeus and Pindar, to Byron, Shelley, and Swinburne, one or other of these themes has been the seed of song. But the praise of ordered liberty, of settled government, of political moderation, is far harder to idealize in poetry. It has been the peculiar aim of Tennyson to be the constitutional, and in this sense the national, poet: and it is his peculiar merit and good fortune to have succeeded in giving eloquent and forcible expression to the ideas suggested by these aims.

I will not quote the poems about “the Falsehood of extremes,” or “the land of just and old renown where freedom slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent,” because these poems, terse and forcible summaries as they are, have suffered, like other epigrammatic maxims in verse, from vulgarizing quotation. It is not the Poet’s fault in the least; in fact it is due to his very merits—to the memorable brevity, truth, and point of the phrasing. I will quote another—perhaps the most remarkable—of these political poems, “Love thou thy land.” It is close packed with thought, and must have been especially hard to write, since the Poet’s problem was to express in terse and picturesque and imaginative language what at bottom is philosophic and even prosaic detail. Nevertheless, where the material lends itself at all to imaginative handling we get effects that are impressive and even superb. Take a few lines—I cannot quote at length:

Oh yet, if Nature’s evil star
Drive men in manhood, as in youth,
To follow flying steps of Truth
Across the brazen bridge of war—
If New and Old, disastrous feud,
Must ever shock, like armed foes,
And this be true, till Time shall close,
That Principles are rain’d in blood;
Not yet the wise of heart would cease
To hold his hope thro’ shame and guilt,
But with his hand against the hilt,
Would pace the troubled land, like Peace;
Not less, tho’ dogs of Faction bay,
Would serve his kind in deed and word,
Certain, if knowledge bring the sword,
That knowledge takes the sword away.

The last couplet seems to me—where all is powerful and imaginative—to be a master-stroke of terse and pointed expression. It would be hardly an exaggeration to say that it sums up human history in regard to one point—namely, the disturbing and even desolating effect of the new Political Idea, until its triumph comes, bringing a higher and more stable adjustment, and a peace more righteous and secure.

Far more widely known than these didactic poems, rich as they are in poetry and thought, are the patriotic odes—the three greatest being the poems on the Duke of Wellington, the “Revenge,” and Lucknow.

The ode on the Duke is a noble commemoration-poem, grave and stately and solemn—a worthy expression of “the mourning of a mighty nation” with a musical and dignified sorrow—a terse and vivid reference to the Duke’s exploits—a fine imaginative passage where he pictures the dead Nelson asking who the newcomer is, and the stately answer—a striking tribute to the simple and noble character of the dead hero—and then this:

A people’s voice! we are a people yet.
Tho’ all men else their nobler dreams forget,
Confused by brainless mobs and lawless Powers;
Thank Him who isled us here, and roughly set
His Briton in blown seas and storming showers...
O Statesmen, guard us, guard the eye, the soul,
Of Europe, keep our noble England whole,
And save the one true seed of freedom sown
Betwixt a people and their ancient throne...
For, saving that, ye help to save mankind
Till public wrong be crumbled into dust,
And drill the raw world for the march of mind,
Till crowds at length be sane and crowns be just.

Again, for the judgment of the poem, the date is important. It was written only four years after the European earthquake of 1848, and only one year after the Coup d’État. The allusions are not mere commonplaces: they deal with live issues. It is not too much to say that in the great ode Tennyson had a subject after his own heart, and that he has done it magnificent justice.