Tennyson and his friends

by Unknown

If I must quote one passage, let it be abridged from the shepherd’s song which the Princess reads:

Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height:
·······
For Love is of the valley, come thou down
And find him; by the happy threshold, he,
Or hand in hand with Plenty in the maize,
Or red with spirted purple of the vats,[89]
Or foxlike[90] in the vine; nor cares to walk
With Death and Morning on the silver horns...
But follow; let the torrent dance thee down
To find him in the valley; let the wild
Lean-headed Eagles yelp alone, and leave
The monstrous ledges there to slope, and spill
Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke,
That like a broken purpose waste in air:
So waste not thou; but come; for all the vales
Await thee; azure pillars of the hearth
Arise to thee; the children call, and I
Thy shepherd pipe, and sweet is every sound,
Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet;
Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro’ the lawn,
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees.

This is the real idyll, with its central note of love, and wonderful beauty of sound, and vivid vision of every detail of Nature’s sights and life. It suggests a world where all is fresh and sweet, and beautiful and interesting, and simple and wholesome and harmonious.

The year 1850 was marked by three great events in the personal history of Tennyson: his marriage, the publication of his greatest work, “In Memoriam,” and his acceptance of the laureate crown of poetry in succession to Wordsworth, who died in the spring.

When I say that “In Memoriam” is Tennyson’s greatest work, I am of course aware that it is only a personal opinion on a disputable point. But I incline to think that most lovers of poetry would agree that “In Memoriam” is the one of all the Poet’s works the loss of which would be the greatest and most irreparable to poetry.

In the grave and solemn stanzas with which the poem opens, he calls the songs that follow wild and wandering cries, confusions of a wasted youth. But in truth they are the expression of the deepest and most heartfelt sorrow: the most musical and imaginative outpouring of every mood, and every trouble, of a noble love and regret: the cries of a soul stricken with doubt born of anguish, and darkened with shadows of disbelief and despair: the deeper brooding over the eternal problems of life, thought, knowledge, religion: the gradual groping toward a faith rather divined than proved, and slowly passing through storm into peace.

The poem took seventeen years to write, and when it appeared the Poet was at the summit of his great powers. His instinct chose a metre at once strong, simple, fresh, flexible, and grave, and noble—equally adapted to every mood, every form of thought or feeling—the passionate, the meditative, the solemn, the imaginative—for description, argument, aspiration, even for prayer. The tone varies: there are lighter and deeper touches: but it is hardly too much to say, there is not an insignificant stanza, nor a jarring note, from beginning to end.

In a poem where all is so familiar—which has meant and means so much to all who care for poetry—it is difficult to quote. I will take a few stanzas, so chosen, if possible, as to show somewhat of the variety, the range, the subtlety, the charm, and the power of this great work.

He goes to the house in London where the dead friend lived: the gloom without typifies and harmonizes with the darkness of his sorrowful thoughts.

Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street:
Doors, where my heart was wont to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,—
A hand that can be clasped no more—
Behold me—for I cannot sleep—
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.
He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.