Poetry for Students

218 Poetry for Students

moved successively to Essex and to Kent; but he

was as often to be found in London, staying in

cheap hotels or cadging a bed from friends who

lived there. He was lonely and despondent, and he

drank and smoked far too much. Many of those

who had known him for years believed that his po-

etic inspiration had failed him and that his great

early promise would remain unfulfilled; but this

was to neglect the fact that when all else went

wrong, he clung to the composition of poetry. He

was steadily accumulating a backlog of unpub-

lished poems, and he continued adding to his “ele-

gies” to Hallam’s memory.

One of the friends who worried away at Ten-

nyson to have his work published was Edward

FitzGerald, who loved both the poems and their au-

thor, although he was too stubborn to hide his feel-

ings when a particular poem failed to win his

approval. “Old Fitz” nagged at Tennyson, who in

the spring of 1842 agreed to break his ten long years

of silence.

The two volumes of Poems(1842) were des-

tined to be the best-loved books Tennyson ever

wrote. The first volume was made up of radically

revised versions of the best poems from the 1832

volume, most of them in the form in which they

are now known. The second volume contained new

poems, among them some of those inspired by Hal-

lam’s death, as well as poems of widely varying

styles, including the dramatic monologue “St.

Simeon Stylites”; a group of Authurian poems; his

first attempt to deal with rampant sexuality, “The

Vision of Sin”; and the implicitly autobiographical

narrative“Locksley Hall,”dealing with the evils

of worldly marriages, which was to become one of

his most popular poems during his lifetime.

After the reception of the 1832 Poemsand af-

ter being unpublished for so long, Tennyson was

naturally apprehensive about the reviews of the

new poems; but nearly all were enthusiastic, mak-

ing it clear that he was now the foremost poet of

his generation. Edgar Allan Poe wrote guardedly,

“I am not sure that Tennyson is not the greatest of

poets.”

But the bad luck that Tennyson seemed to in-

vite struck again just as the favorable reviews were

appearing. Two years earlier, expecting to make a

fortune, he had invested his patrimony in a scheme

to manufacture cheap wood carvings by steam-

driven machines. In 1842 the scheme crashed, tak-

ing with it nearly everything that Tennyson owned,

some £4,000. The shock set back any progress he

had made in his emotional state over the past ten

years, and in 1843 he had to go into a “hydropathic”

establishment for seven months of treatment in the

hope of curing his deep melancholia.

This was the first of several stays in “hydros”

during the next five years. Copious applications of

water inside and out, constant wrappings in cold,

wet sheets, and enforced abstinence from tobacco

and alcohol seemed to help him during each stay;

but he would soon ruin any beneficial effects by

his careless life once he had left the establishment,

resuming his drinking and smoking to the despair

of his friends. A rather more effective form of treat-

ment was the £2,000 he received from an insurance

policy at the death of the organizer of the wood-

carving scheme. In 1845 he was granted a govern-

ment civil list pension of £200 a year in recognition

of both his poetic achievements and his apparent

financial need. Tennyson was in reality released

from having to worry about money, but the habit

of years was too much for him; for the rest of his

life he complained constantly of his poverty, al-

though his poetry had made him a rich man by the

time of his death. In 1845 the betterment of his for-

tunes brought with it no effort to resume his en-

gagement to Emily Sellwood, showing that it was

not financial want that kept them apart.

The Princess, which was published on Christ-

mas 1847, was Tennyson’s first attempt at a long

narrative poem, a form that tempted him most of

his life although it was less congenial to him tem-

peramentally than the lyric. The ostensible theme

is the education of women and the establishment

of female colleges, but it is clear that Tennyson’s

interest in the subject runs out before the poem

does, so that it gradually shifts to the consideration

of what he thought of as the unnatural attempt of

men and women to fulfill identical roles in society;

only as the hero becomes more overtly masculine

and the heroine takes on the traditional attributes

of women is there a chance for their happiness.

Considerably more successful than the main narra-

tive are the thematic lyrics that Tennyson inserted

into the action to show the growth of passion and

between the cantos to indicate that the natural end

of the sexes is to be parents of another generation

in a thoroughly traditional manner. The subtitle, A

Medley, was his way of anticipating charges of in-

consistency in the structure of the poem. As always,

the blank verse in which the main part of the poem

is written is superb, and the interpolated lyrics in-

clude some of his most splendid short poems, such

as“Come down, O maid,” “Now sleeps the crim-

son petal,” “Sweet and low,” “The splendour falls

on castle walls,”and“Tears, idle tears.”The emo-

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