We come, we come, we come, we come,
Says the double, double, double beat of the thundering drum.”
No modern poet has made a more frequent or a more judicious use of onomatopœia than Tennyson. “The Bugle Song,” “The Brook,” “Tears, Idle Tears,” and “Break, Break, Break,” will at once occur to the poet’s admirers as masterpieces of representative art. The second stanza of the “Bugle Song” has few equals in ancient or modern verse:
“ ‘O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going;
O sweet and far, from cliff and scar,
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!’
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying,
Blow, bugle; answer echoes, dying, dying, dying.”