Melancholia, drunkenness, violence, opium and madness visited the Rectory, yet it
produced three poets among its sons. Alfred, taught Greek by his father, imagined
Troy on a North Sea beach: ‘Here often, when a child, I lay reclined; / I took delight
in this fair strand and free: / Here stood the infant Ilion of my mind, / And here
the Grecian ships did seem to be.’
At Cambridge, Alfred became a friend of the brilliant Arthur Hallam, eldest son
of Henry Hallam, a historian who outlived all twelve of his children. Arthur, who
had published theology and literary criticism and was to have married Tennyson’s
sister, died of a brain hæmorrhage at twenty-two. This event darkened Tennyson’s
life.Rejected by his first love in favour of a richer suitor, the poet drifted, staying
with friends,writing:
... for the unquiet heart and brain
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.He married late and lived in the country, on the Isle of Wight and in Surrey. After
Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830),collections came every few years, notably in 1832 and
- Larger works include In Memoriam (1850);Maud (1855),Enoch Arden (1864),
and the Arthurian Idylls of the King (1859–88).
Critical opinion divides over the long poems, except In Memoriam.This elegy for
Hallam,expressing agonized doubts about Christianity and human destiny, is the
most emotional English poem of its length. Its 132 lyrics, all in the same stanza, were
not written as a sequence, but finally arranged to span three Christmasses. The
ke ynote is pure loss:
Old Yew, which graspest at the stones
That name the under-lying dead,
Thy fibres net the dreamless head,
Thy roots are wrapt about the bones .... II
Dark house,by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand .... VIIVICTORIAN ROMANTIC POETRY 275Alfred Tennyson, aged about 30, an
engraving after an oil painting by Samuel
Laurence, c.1840.