Tennyson and his friends

by Unknown

Of the “Revenge” I will quote one passage, because it contains what always strikes me as the most wonderful effect of sound in poetry to be found anywhere. The whole poem, I may observe, is full of novel and effective handling of metre: but this is the most remarkable. It occurs in the description of the rising storm in which the gallant little ship went down:

And they mann’d the Revenge with a swarthier alien crew,
And away she sail’d with her loss, and long’d for her own;
When a wind from the lands they had ruin’d awoke from sleep,
And the water began to heave, and the weather to moan,
And or ever that evening ended a great gale blew,
And a wave like the wave that is raised by an earthquake grew,
Till it smote on their hulls and their sails and their masts and their flags,
And the whole sea plunged and fell on the shot-shatter’d navy of Spain,
And the little Revenge herself went down by the island crags
To be lost evermore in the main.

Lastly, in the 1842 volume, there was a little song without a title, which will certainly live as long as the English language.

In 1833, nine years before the volume appeared, had died abroad suddenly the rarely-gifted youth who was bound to Tennyson by the double tie of being his best-loved friend and the betrothed of his sister. The body had been brought home for burial by the sea at a little place called Clevedon.

This is the song:

Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
O well for the fisherman’s boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!
Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.

There is something in the magical expression of deep love and sorrow in these lines—with the swift and vivid touches of scenery, sympathetic and suggestive—which we can only compare to the few greatest outbursts of passionate regret in poetry.

Five years later came “The Princess” (1847). The idea—a bold design—was to treat, by poetic and half-playful narrative, the comparative intellectual and moral natures of men and women, and the right method of education. The Poet’s views may perhaps to-day seem somewhat old-fashioned, the truths that he suggests or enunciates, in very finished and beautiful language, are controversial, and suffer from the inevitable failing of such writing, viz., that the issues of the strife have changed: experience has shown the forecasts, the fears, and the prophetic satire to be misplaced: and what seemed important truths have turned out to be prejudices or irrelevant platitudes.[88]

The one thing that is consummate in “The Princess” is the handful of little songs that come as interludes between the acts. They are so well known that they need no quotation: their titles will suffice: “As through the land at eve we went,” “Sweet and low,” “The splendour falls,” “Tears, idle tears,” “Thy voice is heard thro’ rolling drums,” “Home they brought her warrior dead,” “Ask me no more.”

The extraordinary effect of these songs is not due only to their marvellous poetic force and finish and variety, but perhaps even more to the illuminating and pointed contrast between the true and deep and permanent realities of human experience—life, death, love, joy, and sorrow—each of which is touched in turn in these exquisite little pictures, and on the other hand the fantastic unreality (in the Poet’s view) of the Princess’s ideals and experiment.