poems of Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Gerard Hopkins, Thomas Hardy and
Edward Thomas. Thanks to the advance of natural science, particularity increased;
but Tennyson also had the power ‘of creating scenery, in keeping with some state of
human feeling so fitted to it as to be the embodied symbol of it’. So J. S. Mill wrote
of Tennyson’s early poems,Mariana and The Lady of Shalott.Alfred Tennyson
Alfred Tennyson(1809–1892) succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate in 1850. He
became almost universally popular, and at his death in 1892 was mourned as ‘the
voice of England’. The widowed Queen liked him to read Maud to her, and he wrote
grand public poems such as ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ and ‘Ode on the Death
of the Duke of Wellington’. In an Edison recording of the former, he can be heard
‘mouthing out his hollow o’s and a’s’ – his description of himself reading Morte
d’Arthur. It fits such sonorous lines as:
And slowly answered Arthur from the barge
Morte d’Arthur
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees
‘Come Down, O Maid’
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices.
Ulysses
Tennyson hailed Virgil as ‘wielder of the stateliest measure moulded by the lips of
man’. His own orchestral musicality was admired by later writers, though they
mocked him. James Joyce called him ‘Alfred Lawn Tennyson’. Tennyson is the central
poet of the 19th century.
T. S. Eliot did not join in the modernist reaction against Tennyson, but W. H.
Auden once wrote that he was ‘the stupidest of our poets’, if with ‘the finest ear’.
(Auden later confessed that Eliot had pointed out to him poets more stupid than
Tennyson, ‘and I had to agree with him.’) Tennyson was ruminative rather than
clever, yet he was well read in science and religion, and In Memoriam A. H. H.dram-
atizes the struggle of Faith and Doubt better than any other work. Tennyson
subdued everything to his craft, and ideas often melt into music in his verse. His
primary interest was in feelings, as in this Song from The Princess:
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn-fields,
And thinking on the days that are no more.
‘T hese lines,’ Tennyson said, ‘came to me on the yellowing autumn-tide at Tintern
Abbey,full for me of its bygone memories.’ (Tintern is on the Wye, a tributary of the
Severn, on the shore of which his friend Arthur Hallam was buried.) The poems
ec ho with voices and memories. Tennyson both created landscape and inscribed
emotion on real landscapes.
He was the sixth of twelve children of the Rector of Somersby, Lincolnshire. The
disinherited eldest son of a landowner, the Rector was an unwilling clergyman.274 9 · POETRY