Stateliest Measures: Tennyson and the Literature of Greece and Rome 9781442680180

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STATELIEST MEASURES TENNYSON AND THE LITERATURE OF GREECE AND ROME

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Stateliest Measures

Tennyson and the Literature of Greece and Rome

A.A. Markley

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2004 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-8937-2

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Markley, A.A. (Arnold Albert), 1964Stateliest measures : Tennyson and the literature of Greece and Rome / A.A. Markley. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-8937-2 1. Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809-1892 - Criticism and interpretation. 2. English poetry - Classical influences. I. Title PR5581.M375 2004

821'.8

C2004-903457-X

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

For Brian J. Meyer Animae Dimidium Meae

/ salute thee, Mantovano, I that loved thee since my day began Wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man. 'To Virgil,' 1882

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: The English Virgil 3 1 Tennyson's Classicism in Context: The Victorians and the Ancient World 13 2 The Building Blocks of Song: Constructing the Classical Dramatic Monologue 41 3 Et in Arcadia: Transcending the Classical Elegy in In Memoriam 70 4 Classical Prosody and the 'Ocean Roll of Rhythm'

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5 The Trilogy on Death: 'Ulysses,' 'Tithonus,' and 'Tiresias' 6 Old Tales for a New Day: Lucretius, Demeter, and Œnone's Return 140 Appendix: Tables of Contents of the First Editions of Tennyson's Works Discussed in This Study 165 Notes

169

Bibliography 197 Index 223

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Acknowledgments

In conducting the research for this book I have been much indebted to the work of many scholars of Tennyson's poetry and of the Victorians and antiquity. The project was begun under the encouragement and guidance of the late Harold I. Shapiro, and an initial phase of research at the Tennyson Research Centre in Lincoln was funded by the Aleine McLeod McLaurin fellowship, granted by Laurence Avery and the Department of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Further funding was generously provided by the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Penn State University, under the direction of Laura Knoppers; by a grant from Dean Sandra Gleason and Dean Diane Disney of the Commonwealth College, Penn State University; and by the Jane E. Cooper Faculty Fellowship at Penn State University, Delaware County, granted by Edward Tomezsko and George W. Franz. For their numerous readings of the manuscript at various stages and their many suggestions for improvements, I owe a great debt of gratitude to Sara Mack, Allan Life, Beverly Taylor, Mark Reed, and William Harmon. I would also like to thank Jill McConkey, Barb Porter, John St James, and the manuscript's readers at the University of Toronto Press. Donald Hair and Linda K. Hughes raised questions and offered suggestions that proved critical to my thinking regarding Tennyson's classical poems. I wish to thank my colleagues at Penn State University for their advice and support, especially Phyllis Cole, Patricia Hillen, Kathleen Kemmerer, Carol Kessler, Richard Kopley, Jeanette Rieck, Adam Sorkin, and Gail Wray. Particular thanks are due to Vincent Lankewish, and to Elizabeth and Dale Buckmaster, without whose encouragement this project would never have been completed. I would like to thank Rosalind Boyce and the staff members at the

x Stateliest Measures Tennyson Research Centre in the Central Library, Lincoln, who graciously made Tennyson's library available to me. The late Susan Gates of the Tennyson Research Centre provided invaluable assistance in using this resource, and her encyclopedic knowledge of Tennyson, his manuscripts, and books contributed greatly to the success of this project. Sara Whildin, Susan Ware, and Jean Sphar at Penn State Delaware County also provided invaluable research assistance. I would like to acknowledge teachers, colleagues, friends, and family, especially James Hood, Marion Shaw, David Leitao, Lucy Morrison, Pamela Clemit, Jeanne Moskal, Vaneeta D'Andrea, Peter Robbins, Ann Deagon, Rosaria Munson, Grant Moss, Jonathan Esten, Julia, Holley, Mary and Bill Markley, the Meyers, and Charlotte. Finally, I am most grateful to Brian Meyer for his continual support, and for his valuable contributions to the longrunning conversation that produced this book. Unless noted otherwise, all quotations from Tennyson's poetry are taken from The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, 2nd ed., 3 vols (Harlow: Longman, 1987), and all references to Hallam Tennyson's Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by his Son are to the two-volume edition of 1897 (London: Macmillan).

STATELIEST MEASURES TENNYSON AND THE LITERATURE OF GREECE AND ROME

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Introduction: The English Virgil

In 1842 Alfred Tennyson published the poem 'Morte D'Arthur,' the first step in a project that would grow to become his Idylls of the King. He nestled this poem within the frame of The Epic,' a work that raises an important question about the value of retelling ancient stories: if nature 'brings not back the Mastodon,' then 'why should any man / Remodel models?' (lines 36-8). By framing his recast Arthurian tale within a contemporary debate on the value of writing such a work, Tennyson subtly suggests to his reader how a remodelled model can indeed take on new meaning and implications when reinterpreted for a new era. In 'The Epic,' the character of the poet scoffs at a contemporary epic he has written and admits that he had consigned his mere 'faint Homeric echoes' to the fire. But the other characters are intrigued by it. One of them admits to having rescued from the fire a portion of the eleventh book of the work, and the poet is then persuaded to read this fragment, Tennyson's 'Morte D'Arthur.' This account of a poet's dismissal and attempt to destroy his work may remind the reader of Virgil's legendary deathbed request that the unfinished Aeneid be burned, and his friends' refusal to carry out his wishes. Here is an early clue that Tennyson wished to draw an association between his treatment of the Arthurian legends and the poet of Augustan Rome who, despite his own protestations, gave the Roman people a new epic in the Homeric style, yet an epic in their own language, and one devoted to their own history. The concluding lines of 'The Epic' provide the reader with a strong justification for 'remodelling models.' The speaker describes the emotional effect of the Arthurian poem, which causes him to dream that he sailed with Arthur 'under looming shores, / Point after point' (289-90). He then dreams of the return of Arthur to England, 'like a modern gen-

4 Stateliest Measures

tleman / Of stateliest port' (294-5), and the people's crying to this new version of the king: 'Come / With all good things, and war shall be no more' (299-300). At this the speaker awakens to the peal of the bells of Christmas morning, a detail that reinforces the theme of rebirth. Thus, the speaker in 'The Epic' shows us that a truth does not necessarily look 'freshest in the fashion of the day,' and that a remodelled model can indeed be newly inspiring when reframed for the modern era.1 'The Epic' offers not only an early glimpse of Tennyson's ultimate plan in refashioning the Arthurian material in Idylls of the King, but also a more general explanation of his objectives in remodelling material from earlier literatures, a project that characterizes the most creative periods of his literary production at every stage of his career. This book is concerned particularly with the instances in which Tennyson found poetic inspiration in classical literature, to which he turned again and again from his earliest adolescent experiments with verse to the final poems he composed. But why did Tennyson continue to find the literatures of ancient Greece and Rome so particularly inspiring? Moreover, what did he feel these literatures had to offer a modern citizen of Victorian Britain? Of course British poets in all periods have tended to be well educated in the classics and have imitated classical verse in translations and original compositions; many more have composed English poems on classical themes. This book is not intended to show that Tennyson was unique among his fellow poets in finding inspiration in the classics, but focuses instead on the profound degree to which his reworkings of classical material contributed to a lifelong project of attempting to provide modern Britain with a new achievement in literature - a literature comparable to the great works of antiquity. The book explores both Tennyson's techniques and his purposes in recasting classical material and verse forms in such monologues such as 'CEnone,' 'Ulysses,' 'Tiresias,' and 'Lucretius,' and in his great elegy In Memoriam A. H. H. By placing these poems in the context of the Victorians' complex relationship to the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome, and by reconsidering aspects of their composition and their publication histories, this book will show that Tennyson deliberately and consistently invited his readers to measure his work against that of his classical predecessors. Throughout the nineteenth century political and cultural analysts constantly looked back to ancient Greece and Rome as forerunners of a new golden age in Britain. Tennyson clearly wished for the readers of his classical poems to make such comparisons in order to perceive the

Introduction: The English Virgil 5 new themes he had refashioned specifically for the modern age. In the 1820s and 1830s, as he worked to make himself into a poet, he frequently turned to the classics for inspiration in composing poems intended to capture the English mind and spirit - the 'English national character' - and poems characterized by a degree of technical accomplishment reminiscent of Greek and Roman poetry. When Tennyson was made Poet Laureate in 1850, his classical poems continued to be a vital aspect of his work to use verse to underscore the national character and the values of a modern world power that seemed to the Victorians to eclipse the political and cultural achievements of the preceding ages. Nineteenth-century poets, philosophers, cultural critics, and politicians hoped to find inspiration in ancient history for counteracting the effects of such modern phenomena as the rise of democracy and the doctrine of utilitarianism, rapid scientific and industrial developments, the spread of secular materialism, and widespread colonial expansion.2 For Tennyson, poems that embodied the English character and English values would become a means of counteracting the dehumanizing aspects of the profound socio-cultural changes that the Victorians experienced, and a means of continuing to nurture an English national spirit." As modern readers, we must remember that Tennyson was writing for an audience who knew his classical sources well, who understood how he altered and experimented with those sources, and who recognized that new interpretations were being invited for his new twists on familiar tales. The majority of his readers would have had at least a passing familiarity with the epics of Homer and Virgil, the lyric fragments of Sappho, the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the scientific writings of Lucretius, the mythological tales recorded in Ovid's Metamorphoses, and the odes, lyrics, and elegies of Catullus, Horace, Propertius, and Tibullus. Much to Tennyson's chagrin, some readers, such as literary critic John Churton Collins, went so far as to amass long lists of his literary allusions and 'borrowed' material, a method of criticism that Tennyson saw as an offensive affront to the originality of his work.4 Nevertheless, Tennyson was widely acknowledged and respected as a classicist in his own right. Some enthusiasts occupied themselves with the task of translating his verses into Greek or Latin. Oxford Latinist John Conington translated 'O Swallow, Swallow' into Latin verse highly reminiscent of Catullus.5 Similarly, E.G. Wickham, dean of Lincoln Cathedral, sent Tennyson the results of his rendering of 'Frater Ave atque Vale' into both Greek and Latin, also attempting to echo Catul-

6 Stateliest Measures lus's style. C.S. Calverley of Christ's College went so far as to translate some of Horace's Odes into Tennyson's In Memoriam stanzas, and passages from In Memoriam into Horatian Alcaic stanzas.6 Samuel Butler once remarked of Horace's Ode 3.3 that '[s]ome say his Aurum irrepertum, etc. is worthy of Mr. Tennyson himself. Well, I think it is.'7 In understanding the implications of Tennyson's classicism, no ancient figure is more important to consider than the Roman poet Virgil.8 For many of Tennyson's British predecessors, Virgil had provided a model for the development of a literary career. Virgil's career progressed from the short pastoral idylls of his Eclogues, highly influenced by the Greek poet Theocritus, to his didactic poems on farming, the Georgics, and finally to his twelve-book epic on the fall of Troy and the founding of Rome, the Aeneid. In his 1882 poem To Virgil' Tennyson alludes to the progression of his Roman forebear's works in his references first to the Aeneid, next to the Georgics and to the Eclogues, and finally back again to the Aeneid, Virgil's crowning achievement. Following the trajectory of Virgil's career, Spenser had progressed from eclogues to epic with his Shepheardes Calender (1579) and The Faerie Queene (1590-6). Milton mastered first shorter poems, such as his elegiac 'Lycidas' (1637), before moving to Paradise Lost (1667). Milton consciously invoked classical references, yet also strove to improve upon the older materials as he reworked them into modern English, expanding the potential of the epic, for example, by providing it with a Christian moral context. Alexander Pope likewise climbed the 'Virgilian ladder,' mastering first didactic poetry and then moving on to epic forms, although his experiments with epic were mock-heroic, as in 'The Rape of the Lock' (1712-14), or burlesque, as in TheDunciad (1728).9 Tennyson also clearly saw Virgil's poetic career as a model. In a note scribbled on a page of his heavily annotated childhood copy of Virgil's Opera, he scribbled, 'Virgil began his Eclogues when about twenty-six years of age: he finished them when about thirty-three.'10 Interestingly, Tennyson dedicated himself to similar poetic endeavours during these years of his own life. Moreover, like Virgil and the English poets mentioned above, Tennyson was a constant experimenter, and from the beginning he borrowed heavily from multiple genres, producing works that are hard to categorize generically.11 In his 1831 review of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830), Arthur Henry Hallam credited Tennyson with devising 'a new species of poetry' in his 'graft of the lyric on the dramatic,' and praised him as 'an inventor, an enlarger of our modes of knowledge and power.'12 In the 1830s and early 1840s Tennyson worked

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to produce, revise, arid perfect his own brand of short 'English Idyls,' and produced a 'protracted' idyll in The Princess (1847), subtitled 'A Medley.'13 The term 'idyll' or 'idyl' can be applied to a wide variety of Tennyson's works, including such early poems as 'The Palace of Art,' 'The Lady of Shalott,' 'CEnone,' and 'The Miller's Daughter,' as well as to the group Tennyson specifically called his 'English Idyls,' comprising, in Hallam Tennyson's Eversley edition of his father's works (1907-8), 'The Epic,' 'Morte D'Arthur,' 'The Gardener's Daughter,' 'Dora,' 'Audley Court,' 'Walking to the Mail,' 'Edwin Morris,' and 'St. Simeon Stylites.' Clearly, the English Idyls form a coherent group in terms of their particular relationship to the Idylls of Theocritus. That Tennyson was devoted to the idea of mastering this short form of verse is clear from his statement of his early work: ' [I]f I meant to make any mark at all, it must be by shortness, for the men before me had been so diffuse, and most of the big things except "King Arthur" had been done.'15 In devoting himself to such shorter works, Tennyson was following poets of the third century B.C.E. like Callimachus and Theocritus, who chose new, 16 shorter, but highly erudite approaches to retelling mythic stories. Scholars have long acknowledged the importance of Theocritus as a particular influence on Tennyson. F.T. Palgrave recalled an evening in 1857 when Tennyson translated aloud three of Theocritus's Idylls, ending his delivery of Idyll 13 with a deep sigh, and the statement 'I should be content to die if I had written anything equal to this.' 17 In addition to this devotion to the idyll, Tennyson was also experimenting in the 1830s and 1840s with the form of the elegy, a process that culminated in 1850 in the publication of In Memoriam, an English elegy surpassing its predecessors in its expansive attention to the emotional intricacies of the mourning process. The year 1855 saw the publication of Maud, an experiment in extending the dramatic monologue into what the poet called a 'monodrama.' From 1859 to 1885 Tennyson composed, revised, published, and republished his twelve Idylls of the King, episodes of an English poem of epic proportion. The Idylls of the King simultaneously draw on and refashion traditional epic conventions, and likewise amalgamate aspects of the idyll, lyric, drama, chronicle, allegory, and romance, among others.18 The Idylls of the King particularly follow the example of Virgil's Aeneid in their fusing of epic narrative with the romantic and erotic elements of the Theocritean idyll, or 'epyllion.' 19 In addition, the Idylls draw on Ovid's work to the extent that Ovid expanded the scope of epic subject matter and merged a host of

8 Stateliest Measures generic traditions in his Metamorphoses. Finally, as Milton had done in both Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Tennyson strove to imbue his epic Idylls with a Christian morality. Unlike some of their Romantic predecessors who saw Virgil as a mouthpiece of Augustus's court, the Victorians came to value Virgil as a poet capable of acknowledging the tremendous costs of empire building. Virgil is sympathetic, for example, to Aeneas's difficult task in founding a new country, and he portrays such episodes as Aeneas's abandonment of Dido with great pathos.20 It is clear that Tennyson too saw Virgil as a poet of both great patriotism and great sensibility. It was these dual aspects of the Victorian reception of Virgil that informed Tennyson's conception of his Idylls of the King, as he followed the Roman poet in rearranging and reinvigorating earlier literary material in order to contribute a new epic poem to a new age, with Camelot in place of Virgil's Rome as a symbol of moral idealism. Despite continuing debate about whether or not to call the Idylls an epic, Tennyson's contemporaries clearly saw the work as a modern equivalent to this grandest form of ancient poetry; Gladstone, for example, called it a great Christian epic.21 Moreover, critics generally agreed as to its relevance to the present day. In 1872 Richard Holt Hutton in Macmillan's Magazine called it 'significant for modern ears,' and a reviewer in an 1877 issue of the Atlantic Monthly described it as 'intensely modern.'22 Canadian reviewer R.W. Boodle saw in the Idylls a comprehensive reflection of the struggles, issues, and dilemmas of the Victorian period, namely, the failure of Christianity in the modern world.23 In light of the achievement of the Idylls, H.D. Rawnsley directly compared Tennyson to Virgil, citing a similar expression of tenderness and melancholy in the two poets' work, and acknowledging parallels in their philosophy of human life.24 Likewise, John Churton Collins compared Tennyson to Virgil as a great imitative poet, capable of building on and refining the work of his predecessors.25 More recent critics have thoroughly considered both the generic complexity of the Idylls of the King, and their political implications as poems intended both to laud the growing British empire and to respond to its moral and human costs.26 There is no denying that as Poet Laureate, and even before his appointment to that post, Tennyson was a devoted supporter of the interests of the Crown. We must be careful, however, to avoid the mistake of generalizing his work as purely and simply pro-imperial. First of all, as has been argued of his Laureate poetry, 7 to do so would result in seriously reductive readings of his poems.2 What is more, to do so in

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many cases, particularly in reference to his earlier poetry, would lead to an inaccurate understanding of the changes in the way his work was read as the nineteenth century progressed. Tennyson's famous 'Ulysses' provides a perfect example. First published in 1842 as a response to death, 'Ulysses' achieved its prominent place in Tennyson's canon many decades later, ostensibly owing to its embodiment of the values of masculine resolve arid expansionism associated with British imperialist policy late in the century.28 Hallam Tennyson wrote that one of his father's greatest desires 'was to help the realisation of the ideal of an Empire'; his vision for which included the ideal of 'a heightening of individuality of each member' as an accompaniment to 'the most intimate union of every part.The analysis of 'Tiresias' in chapter 5, another response to death that was begun in the 1830s like 'Ulysses,' yet not revised and published until 1885, illustrates one way in which Tennyson deliberately adapted an early draft of a classical monologue to address national issues relevant many decades later. The conflict between Tennyson's devotion to the crown and his feelings about the higher moral purpose of poetry produced a degree of complexity in his poems that is often evident even in his most overtly patriotic Laureate poetry. In 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' (1854), for example, Tennyson ennobles the six hundred by linking them visually to their Greek hoplite compatriots of prior centuries; references to ancient Greek warfare were commonly used to encourage British troops during times of war. ' Nevertheless, the soldiers' sabre work and their embodiment of the values of ancient warfare epitomize the soldiers' vulnerability as well as the futility of the charge — they are, after all, rushing headlong into fire from guns and cannons, the weapons of the modern age. Here is a prime example of Tennyson adding a more complex level of interpretation to a situation that may seem simple and straightforward on first glance. He offers sincere praise for those who have honourably sacrificed their lives for their country, yet he does not fail to condemn the blundering that brought about their disastrous deaths, as well as the foolish romanticizing of aspects of ancient warfare in the face of modern weaponry. A full appreciation of Tennyson's work requires us to acknowledge the ways in which his later poems do more than merely reinscribe the Crown's agenda, arid to recognize that in many cases they simultaneously open up grounds for a reassessment of the effects of social progress and an imperialist national agenda. It is clear that his contemporaries recognized the potential of Tennyson's work for fostering the health of the nation. Regarding a proposed

10 Stateliest Measures edition of Tennyson's collected Poems in 1870, Alexander Strahan boldly iterated the importance of literature as an ideological tool: 'Furnish the people liberally with literature ... We shall find that in the writings of our best authors we possess all we require to strike our grappling-iron into the working people's soul, and chain them, willing followers, to the car of advancing civilization.'31 In this manner Tennyson ultimately found a way to answer what he saw as his moral call as a poet, and particularly as Poet Laureate, a post that he saw as akin to the classical conception of the vates, the poet as seer who can perceive the spiritual health of both the individual and society.32 Some critics have argued that the Victorian poets in general failed to equal the Romantics' rich reinvigoration of ancient mythology, and merely recycled ancient conventions and allegories.33 More specifically, some critics of Tennyson's poetry have dismissed his classical monologues and the Idylls of the King as failures by classical standards, without acknowledging that Tennyson was not attempting to reproduce classical poetry, but rather was working to create modern English verse with a new moral context aimed at a contemporary readership.34 Tennyson's classical poems have never been interpreted as a unified body of work originating in a particular literary goal, nor have they been assessed in the context of the poet's engagement with the long-running and complex nineteenth-century debates concerning Hellenism and modern British culture. Finally, it has never been argued that these works constituted one aspect of a career-long aspiration not only to serve the Crown as a poet of the nation, but to answer the call for a Victorian literature that would spiritually nourish his readership. This book attempts to take a step towards filling this gap in Tennyson scholarship by reconsidering his classical works in these contexts.35 It is hoped that this book will demonstrate that Tennyson's classical poems represent far more than mere rehashings of age-old tales, tricked out with the window dressing of appropriate classical detail. Tennyson himself made it quite clear that he did not believe in reviving classical material simply for the sake of giving it a modern spin. Of his 'Demeter and Persephone' (1886-7) he said, T will write it, but when I write an antique like this I must put it into a frame - something modern about it. It is no use giving a mere rechauffe of old legends.'36 As modern readers we must reconsider the implications of the ways in which Tennyson alters and remodels his classical source materials, and we must consider what he intended for his readers to take from his poems. This book begins with an assessment of the extent of Tennyson's clas-

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sical education within the context of the Victorians' attraction to and fascination with the ancient world. The first chapter moves from a general look at Victorian Hellenism, and the conflicting ways in which the British in the nineteenth century viewed the history of Rome, to an evaluation of the range of classical works that Tennyson himself owned and studied as a student and as an adult. The marginalia in his personal volumes often provide great insight into the nature and degree of his engagement with particular classical texts. In the early stages of Tennyson's career in the 1820s and 1830s classical figures and themes provided him with a wealth of poetic material. Chapter 2 assesses his juvenile experiments in working with classical characters and themes. In addition, it analyses the poet's progress from striving for a classical tone in the choric songs of such poems as 'The Sea-Fairies' and 'The Lotos-Eaters,' to the development of a realistic voice entirely appropriate to a classical speaker's mythic, historical, and cultural context - a technique first fully realized in 'CEnone.' Tennyson's concern with the humanizing of his audience and the promotion of English values through poetry is obvious even in these early works. Next, chapter 3 focuses on a distinctly different aspect of his experimentation with classical forms and themes in composing a new achievement of elegy in In Memoriam. In 1850, upon Tennyson's appointment as Poet Laureate, his classicism continued to play a vital role in his approach to his art. The final three chapters analyse ways in which the poet's uses of his rich classical background formed an integral part of his conception of his role as the national poet of England. Chapter 4 analyses the structural and formal influences of classical prosody on his many metrical experiments in using actual classical meters in English verse, or in approximating the sound and rhythm of specific meters, or of a particular ancient poet's style, in his own poems. These experiments were at first a crucial aspect of the way in which Tennyson learned his art; later they would become critical to his wish that his work as Laureate be judged by classical standards, as the details of their publication history in popular periodicals o *7 will suggest/ Chapter 5 considers the trilogy of poems concerned with death and dying that occupied Tennyson at three distinct phases in his career: 'Ulysses,' 'Tithonus,' and 'Tiresias.' The publication history of these poems allows us to see clearly how his early interest in promoting English values poised him to become a strong national poet later in his career. The final chapter places Tennyson's last classical poems, 'Lucre-

12 Stateliest Measures tius,' 'Demeter and Persephone,' and 'The Death of GEnone' in the context of a burgeoning world empire, and considers reasons for the resurgence of classical figures and themes in his work in the final years of his life. While the Idylls of the King is an important, and in many ways the crowning, aspect of Tennyson's objective to climb the Virgilian ladder from idyll and elegy to epic, a treatment of his work with the Arthurian legends lies beyond the scope of this study. In looking at the manner in which Tennyson's experimentations developed over the span of his career, it is clear that he continued to devote himself to producing English poetry worthy of the Greek and Latin models that influenced it; a new poetry fashioned out of the finest building blocks of the Western poetic tradition, that would equal its forebears in technical accomplishment and surpass them in scope. In order to read his classical poems as the Victorians read them, we must know something about the poet's sources and the ways in which he draws upon and refashions them. This book attempts to assist Tennyson's modern reader in that task. As in the case of all literary pursuits, it is important to consider these poems in the context of their origins by studying what we know of their composition, how and where the poet placed them before the public, and how he chose to alter them in successive revisions. Moreover, it is important to consider their original reception, the role they played in contemporary cultural production, and the extent to which they figure in our own representation and understanding of the Victorian world.

Chapter 1 Tennyson's Classicism in Context: The Victorians and the Ancient World

In order to understand fully Tennyson's relationship to classical literature, it is important to consider the complex ways in which the Victorians viewed the ancient world. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England witnessed a dramatically renewed fascination with the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean world. Debates concerning the relevance of classical scholarship and the efficacy of applying interpretations of ancient Greek and Roman culture to their own era became a national pastime. As Prince Albert said in a speech given in Manchester in 1857, 'We must compare the works of other ages with those of our own age and country; that, while we feel proud of the immense development of knowledge and power of production which we possess, we may learn humility in contemplating the refinement of feeling and intensity of thought manifested in the works of the older schools.' 1 Philhellenes were roused to a new interest in the Greeks' national history when they rallied to Greece's support in the revolution against the Turks in the early 1820s. As Lord Byron's sensationally successful Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812—18) had popularized travel to Greece ten years earlier, Byron's role in this conflict and his death at Missolonghi in 1824 did much to romanticize the Greek struggle for independence for the British, many of whom felt a passion to support the modern Greeks in the name of their glorious ancestors. In the same vein, many Britons became passionate about the issues involved with the short-lived Roman Republic of 1849, and with the Italian Risorgimento later in the century. By the 1860s there was a great number of British citizens residing in Italy, many of whom became drawn into the tumultuous political situation of the times; moreover, Britons' antipathy both for the French and

14 Stateliest Measures for the Catholic church ensured their enthusiastic support for the Italians' struggle to free themselves from papal rule and from the intercession of foreign governments in establishing the Kingdom of Italy in 1870. The British passion for the ancient world was also reignited by the archaeological discoveries of the eighteenth century, most notably the first excavations of Pompeii in 1748. Napoleon substantially expanded these excavations during the French occupation of Naples in 1812 and afterwards, and William Cell's publication of Pompeiana in 1832 and W.A. Becker's Callus; or, Roman Scenes of the Time of Augustus (1838) made detailed descriptions of the artefacts found at Pompeii available to a broad English readership.2 The Temple of Sulis Minerva had been found in 1790 beneath the foundations of the pump room at Bath, reminding the British of their own history as a colony of ancient Rome. Interest in the sites and artefacts of Rome led to the foundation of the British Archaeological Society of Rome in 1865.3 Archaeological enthusiasm would of course soar to new heights later in the century in response to Heinrich Schliemann's excavations at Troy, Mycenae, and Tiryns in the 1870s, and Arthur Evans's work at Knossos on Crete from 1899 to 1935. The cultures of Greece and Rome never strayed far from public consciousness. Indeed, the foundation of higher education in the study of the Greek and Latin languages, and the particular persistence of Latin as the language of the church and of learning - Latin was used in scholarly lectures and publications until the early 1800s - assured a general cultural familiarity with the classical world, its literature, and its history.4 Greece and the Ideals of Hellenism As Richard Jenkyns has written, '[U]nless we realize how much the Victorians thought about Greece, we will not fully understand them.'5 The resurgence of Hellenism in nineteenth-century Britain can be traced to a variety of origins in the middle to late eighteenth century. In 1751, for example, the Society of Dilettanti sent James Stuart and Nicholas Revett to Greece in order to make drawings of the ancient ruins. In 1762 their The Antiquities of Athens, Measured and Delineated was published. Three additional volumes followed in sequence from 1789 to 1830. In 1769 the same society published Ionian Antiquities; or Ruins of Magnificent and Famous Buildings in Ionia. These publications inspired a boom in travel to Greece on the 'Grand Tour,' in addition to countless volumes of

Tennyson's Classicism in Context: The Victorians and the Ancient World

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travel narratives, and exacted an enormous influence on the contemporary taste for Greek Revival architecture.6 Johann J. Winckelmann's Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Art in Painting and Sculpture (1755) and his History of Ancient Art. (1764) were widely read, and British readers who did not read his works in translation absorbed his ideas through the works of other German writers such as Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, and the Schlegels.7 Schiller's widely read poem The Gods of Greece (1788) found reasons to praise the ancient world despite its paganism, not unlike Wordsworth's 1807 sonnet 'The world is too much with us; late and soon,' in which the poet prefers pagan enthusiasm to the enervation of modern spirituality.8 From 1769 to 1790 Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses began a heated debate over the value of the Greeks' artistic achievement that lasted for decades. Reynolds praised Greek sculpture for its achievement of ideal beauty, while others argued that its brilliance lay in its supreme imitation of nature. 9 This debate was revived by the widely influential first public display of the sculptures taken from the Athenian Parthenon, the 'Elgin Marbles,' in London in 1807, and by the 1816 controversy over Parliament's purchase of these famous works of art. In terms of political ideology, interpretations of the government of ancient Athens became a hot topic when American and French revolutionaries championed Athens as the birthplace of democracy. In reaction, British conservatives discredited the Athenian achievement, arguing that the crimes of Athenian democracy far outweighed its virtues.10 William Mitford's mammoth ten-volume The History of Greece (1784-1810) encouraged readers to reconsider the relevance of Athenian history to democratic experiments in the modern world; Mitford himself opposed democracy and saw the Greek system of government by tyrants as more laudable.11 In a review in Blackwood 's Magazine Mitford's work was tellingly referred to as 'a history of Greece in the true English spirit.'12 Controversial for decades, his history represents an important early phase in the British application of Greek history to modern political debate. Widely read and often quoted in tracts written against the French Revolution in the 1790s, Mitford's point of view was later attacked by Whigs in the 1820s in the early stages of the British reform movement. In the 1830s a new wave of histories of Greece, including Connop Thirlwall's eight-volume A History of Greece (1835-45) and George Grote's widely influential twelve-volume A History of Greece (1846-56), turned the tide and argued for the virtues of Athenian democracy.13

16 Stateliest Measures It is fair to say that nineteenth-century British scholarship on Greek history and literature tended to reflect the political and cultural climate of the nation in any given period of years.14 Many Victorians believed that the historical situations of ancient Greece and of modern Britain were very similar.15 The major contribution to the Victorians' attitude towards antiquity was Grote's A History of Greece. In addition to challenging earlier conservative arguments about the weaknesses of Athenian democracy, Grote contributed to a mounting interest in classical mythology, emphasizing the psychological content of ancient myth and contributing to a consciousness of the ancient poets' continuous recasting and even 'purifying' of mythic characters and stories.16 Grote's emphasis on the importance of understanding the psychology behind the ancient myths was echoed by John Addington Symonds in his 1873 Studies of the Greek Poets. Grote also influenced a number of studies of the Greek tragedies, which agreed with his notion that these poets had purified much older mythic material in composing their dramatic works. Examples of this new critical movement include R.W. Mackay's The Progress of the Intellect as Exemplified in the Religious Development of the Greeks and Hebrews (1850), John Stuart Blackie's and F.A. Paley's translations of and commentaries on Aeschylus (1850, 1855), and E.H. Plumptre's, Evelyn Abbott's, and R.C. Jebb's work on Sophocles (1865, 1880, and 1894 respectively), to name only a few.17 These scholars saw the tragedians as having reshaped mythology, in Abbott's words, 'in order to bring their conception of the Supreme Being into harmony with their conceptions of justice and law.» yThis new response to the Greek tragedians' methods of recasting traditional myth would be an important influence on Tennyson's and his contemporaries' ideas about the potential of reviving mythological material in the modern age. Denying the importance of a psychological interpretation of myth, Max Miiller made a substantial contribution to the Victorian debate on the proper interpretation of classical mythology. Miiller took an early anthropological approach, arguing that Greek myths had their origins in long-forgotten aspects of ancient languages. He believed that the interpretation of myths could be traced to an ancient culture's understanding of its relationship with the sun.19 In his 1870 The Mythology of the Aryan Nations, George Cox built upon Miiller's linguistic approach and his solar theory, arguing for an etymological basis for the structural features of ancient tales. In refashioning the Greeks into an image agreeable to them, the Victorians tended to ignore the aspects of ancient culture that did not appeal to their sensibilities, slavery and homosexu-

Tennyson's Classicism in Context: The Victorians and the Ancient World 17 ality being perhaps the most obvious examples.20 Cox attributed such disagreeable aspects of the myths to a 'decay' in the meanings of ancient words.21 Miiller's and Cox's work laid the groundwork for important anthropological and later structuralist interpretations of myth by Andrew Lang, J.G. Frazer, and Jane Ellen Harrison, among others. The work of Grote and other historians also led to a resurgence in critical reactions to ancient literature - first and foremost, Homer's epics, which had remained highly popular and much revered in England since the Renaissance, thanks largely to such popular translations as those by George Chapman (1616) and Alexander Pope (Iliad, 1720; Odyssey, 1725-6). Following such influential Homeric critics as Thomas Blackwell and Robert Wood, F.A. Wolf introduced the idea of the multiple authorship of the Homeric epics, and of the possibility of their oral transmission by ancient rhapsodes in his 1795 Prolegomena ad Homerum. The Victorians tended to see the Homeric debates as relevant to the proper modern interpretation of the Bible, a fact that made Homeric criticism highly controversial. Some religious sceptics saw in Homer evidence for questioning the Hebrew tradition's claim for the primacy of the Old Testament as the product of divine revelation. In his Introduction to the Study of the Greek Classic Poets (1830), Henry Nelson Coleridge went so far as to propose that Homer be read as a second, 'secular Bible.'23 Charles Kingsley and F.D. Maurice argued for the potential of looking for divine truth outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition. John Williams and Isaac Williams looked for classical passages that could be interpreted as illustrations of biblical truths. In his Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age (1858), W.E. Gladstone sought a connection between the religion of the ancient Greeks and the Hebrew tradition, hoping to demonstrate that God had revealed himself to the Greeks in another manner. 20 In addition to Homer's importance as a cultural icon, Sappho was considered by many in the nineteenth century to be the greatest lyric poet in history. Referred to by the ancients as 'the tenth Muse' and by the Victorians as 'the poetess,' Sappho became a important symbol of the woman poet in the works of several late-eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury women writers such as Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon ('L.E.L.'), Christina Rossetti, and Caroline Norton. Yopie Prins has explained the way in which earlier treatments of Sappho in the nineteenth century were largely grounded in the model of Ovid's 'Sappho to Phaon' from the Heroides, in which Sappho speaks of her unrequited passion from beyond the grave. Later this popular Ovidian

18 Stateliest Measures model was altered by an emerging image of Sappho as a persona reconstructed from the fragments of her Greek lyrics, and popularized by such works as Henry Wharton's widely read Sappho: A Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation (1885) ,26 Finally, no assessment of the Victorians and ancient Greek culture would be complete without a mention of the importance of Platonic criticism during the nineteenth century. In the early decades of the century, conservatives and liberals alike tended to read Plato's and Socrates' attacks on the sophists according to their own agendas. Defenders of the church and critics of technological progress could use Plato's arguments to bolster their own, as could liberal readers who saw in the Socratic method a means of using pure reason to access moral truth. 27 In the introductory essay to his translation of the Phaedrus in 1834, John Stuart Mill promoted Plato as a reforming voice who offered to people of all periods a new mode of inquiry; this line of thought was revived OQ by George Grote in his 1865 Plato, and the Other Companions of Socrates. Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College, Oxford, saw Plato as an idealist, a seeker of truth, and a moral teacher whose message was even better suited to the present day than to his own. During his tenure at Balliol Jowett made Plato a substantial part of the Oxford curriculum, and worked to alter the purely philological approach to the classical languages in favour of one in which the ancient texts were applied to modern issues. A former clergyman, Jowett redirected his original professional goals when he became an educator, retaining as his mission the cultivation of morality and liberal thought in the minds of his students as the future leaders of Britain. Plato's writings provided him with i • • • • • i • • 2Q his most important instrument in carrying out this project. Certainly the most articulate spokesman for the function of Hellenism in the Victorian period was Matthew Arnold. One of the main ideas behind his 1869 Culture and Anarchy is the distinction between Hebraism and Hellenism as countercurrents of moral influence in the history of Western civilization. Arnold defines the 'uppermost idea' of Hebraism as 'conduct and obedience,' as opposed to Hellenism's quest 'to see things as they are.' Hellenism values 'spontaneity of consciousness' and Hebraism 'strictness of conscience'; 'right thinking' versus 'right acting' (165). Arnold argues for the necessity of maintaining a balance of both of these influences, and explains the reasons for their conflict with each other at different periods of history. The ancient Greeks, he reasons, were not morally prepared to maintain a culture based purely on the values of Hellenism, hence the ascendancy of

Tennyson's Classicism in Context: The Victorians and the Ancient World 19

Hebraism over the ancient world via the Christian church in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Arnold then discusses the re-emergence of the humanistic and aesthetic values of Hellenism in the Renaissance and the English Reformation, an emergence that was countered by the Hebraistic Puritans in the seventeenth century. But, Arnold argues, that re-emergence of Renaissance Hellenism was not merely a passing phase, and the Puritan backlash was nothing more than a 'side stream' that temporarily halted the Renaissance in response to glimmers of moral weakness. The time had come, he reasoned, to recognize that in the grand scheme of human development, the Hellenistic movement that began with the European Renaissance continues in the modern age, despite the fact that the British had wrongfully prioritized largely Hebraistic values, 'making the secondary the principal at the wrong moment' (175). 'Everywhere we see the beginnings of confusion,' he laments, 'and we want a clue to some sound order and authority. This we can only get by going back upon the actual instincts arid forces which rule our life, seeing them as they really are, connecting them with other instincts and forces, and enlarging our whole view and rule of life' (175). For Arnold, Hellenism promised the opportunity to wipe out ignorance; 'to see things as they are, and by seeing them as they are to see them in their beauty' (167). Ten years earlier, in his 1857 lecture 'On the Modern Element in Literature,' Arnold had spoken of the need for intellectual and moral deliverance in the modern age, and he had pointed towards the ancient world as an answer to that need. 'The literature of ancient Greece is,' Arnold pronounced, 'even for modern times, a mighty agent of intellectual deliverance; even for modern times, therefore, an object of indestructible interest' (20). Arnold attributed the problems of modern culture to the necessity of its grappling with both a complex present and a complex past - the need to come to peace with the culture's possession of 'the general ideas which are the law of this vast multitude of facts' (20). In the ancient Greeks Arnold recognized what he called another 'modern' age, in the sense that the Greeks were also 'founded upon a rich past and upon an instructive fulness of experience' (22). That one who is able to comprehend the complexity of both past and present, Arnold wrote in his essay on modern literature, 'has risen to the comprehension of his age,' and 'he who communicates that point of view to his age, he who interprets to it that spectacle, is one of his age's intellectual deliverers' (20). For Arnold, the time had come for a

20 Stateliest Measures

spokesman to lead the English in a reaffirmation of the intellectual and aesthetic values of ancient Greece, to support the nation in a time when age-old religious tenets were being shaken to their foundations. Ideally such a figure would be a literary one. Arnold looked to poetry as the 'most perfect, the most adequate interpretation' of an age to the degree that it represents 'the most energetic and harmonious activity of all the powers of the human mind' ('Modern Element,' 22). 'What we seek, therefore,' he said, 'what will most enlighten us, most contribute to our intellectual deliverance, is the union of two things; it is the coexistence, the simultaneous appearance, of a great epoch and a great literature' (23). Despite the fact that Arnold and Tennyson disliked each other and had few kind things to say about each other's work, the evidence suggests that they placed a similar value on Hellenism and the promise of studying ancient Greek literature as a remedy for the evils of the present age. For as Arnold was calling for modern poets to produce a new English literature based on the supreme example of ancient Greece, Tennyson was busily attempting to answer that very call. Like Arnold, John Stuart Mill also attempted to articulate the cultural problems of the times, grasping, as Linda Bowling has written, 'through the medium of rational discourse what Tennyson was able to intuit only through the incomparably sensitive instrument of his poetry — that the old conceptual categories made available through classical republicanism were emptying and thinning out, slipping away from the new formations being raised throughout mid-Victorian culture by the forces of commercial and industrial modernity.'31 In the wake of the Tractarian movement in the Anglican church and the staggering scientific discoveries of the day, religious faith no longer necessarily offered solace for the rapid changes brought about by modern developments. Mill, like Arnold, and like so many classical scholars such as Grote, Gladstone, and Jowett, looked to Hellenism to counterbalance the stresses of the modern age. A major aspect of Mill's call for change in 'On Liberty' (1859) is succinctly summed up by the epigraph to the essay, which he borrowed from Wilhelm von Humboldt's 1854 Sphere and Duties of Government 'The grand, leading principle towards which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.'32 Like Mill and Arnold, it is clear that Tennyson was strongly committed to the goal of producing a literature that would revitalize the aesthetic and moral standards of his age.

Tennyson's Classicism in Context: The Victorians and the Ancient World 21 Rome and the Ideology of Empire

'In the Roman world,' Arnold pronounced in 'On the Modern Element in Literature,' 'we have found a highly modern, a deeply significant, an interesting period - a period more significant and more interesting, because fuller, than the great period of Greece'; still, he admits that Rome did not produce a literature of a quality comparable to that of Greece.33 Historically the British have felt a particular connection to Rome from their early status as a Roman colony; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, after all, begins with an account of Julius Caesar's visit to Britain, and such figures as Boadicea and Caractacus, who attempted to defend themselves against Roman invasion, have been remembered as early examples of British fortitude. Moreover, Holinshed's Chronicles (1577) links England to the ancient world by perpetuating the legend that Joseph of Arimathea, the early Christian disciple and legendary possessor of the Holy Grail, settled in Glastonbury.34 The presence of Roman ruins throughout Great Britain has always served the British as a constant physical reminder of the vast extent of the Romans' political and technical advancements. Such reminders increased dramatically in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the rapid expansion of civil-engineering projects - the building of new roads, railroads, bridges, and canals - continuously uncovered new evidence of Roman settlement.30 The Roman presence in Britain was enshrined in popular illustrated works such as the eighteen-volume The Beauties of England and Wales, published by E.W. Brayley and John Britton from 1801 to 1815.36 In addition to such physical remains, it is important to consider the proliferation of the Latin language in modern English - imported by Anglo-Saxons both before and after their migration to the British Isles, and, of course, infused into English through French in the years following the Norman Conquest in 1066.37 Indeed, England never lost sight of its connections to classical Rome. In the late 1600s, those who celebrated the restoration of the English monarchy, such as John Dryden, made associations between the court of Charles II and that of the Emperor Augustus - an idea no doubt inspired by Louis XIV of France, who also associated himself with the first Roman emperor.38 The term 'Augustan' would later be widely applied to the reign of Queen Anne (1702-14), during which time English literature was believed to conform to the highest classical standards.

22 Stateliest Measures Italy, and Rome in particular, had always been a popular destination of British tourists, despite the long and arduous journey it required. Following the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, Continental tourism continued to mount throughout the century, attested to by increasing numbers of travel guides and travel narratives, and by the romantic description of ancient sites in literary texts. As early as the mid-eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth, published etchings by such Italian artists as Giambattista Piranesi popularized particular views of ancient Rome for those who could not afford to travel there themselves, or for those wishing to commemorate their visit. The taste for such illustrations in the Victorian period is attested to by such works as Camillo Mapei's popular Italy, Classical, Historical and Picturesque. Illustrations in a Series of Views, published in 1847 and reissued in 1859 and 1864.39 Roman history was widely read in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Histories by Nathaniel Hooke (1738) and by Oliver Goldsmith (1769) were reprinted well into the next century, as was Edward Gibbon's influential The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88). Gibbon's work was re-edited and reprinted continuously in the nineteenth century, and it remained controversial for decades. Gibbon's criticisms of the early Christian church appalled religious conservatives, and resulted in an edition excised by the notorious Thomas Bowdler (1826), as well as a number of pious novels written in reaction against Gibbon's views, such as Cardinal Wiseman's Fabiola. A Tale of the Catacombs (1855).40 In 1811-12 the German historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr published his controversial Romische Geschicte, revised, translated, and published in English from 1827 to 1832. Niebuhr re-examined Roman history with a critical eye, arguing that many of the early details recorded by Livy must have originated in early folklore and legend. Thomas Keightly's History of Rome (1836), as well as Thomas Arnold's work of the same name (1838-43), followed Niebuhr in reassessing previously received fact about the ancient Romans. Theodor Mommsen, another German historian, wrote an influential Romische Geschicte in 1854-6, although his praise of Julius Caesar, among other assessments of Roman imperial thought, caused many empire-wary British readers to dismiss him as a mouthpiece of Bismarck's regime.41 Roman history inspired a wealth of artistic and literary productions throughout the Victorian age. Roman subjects appear time and again in the British art of the period, fromJ.M.W. Turner's paintings of Regulus, of Carthage, and of Hannibal crossing the Alps, to Sir Lawrence Alma-

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23

Tadema's opulent and idyllic depictions of daily life in the classical world. In poetry, Thomas Babington Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome (1842) were widely read; Sydney Dobell's 1850 poem The Roman drew associations between ancient and modern Rome; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Casa Guidi Windows (1848—51) was born of the poet's passion for the cause of the Italian Risorgimento. The ancient world also inspired numerous revivals of such plays as Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (1599) and Coriolanus (c. 1608), and Joseph Addison's Cato (1713), as well as productions of new historical dramas, such as Sheridan Knowles's Caius Gracchus (1815) and Virginius (1820), John Howard Payne's Tragedy of Brutus; or, theFall ofTarquin (1818), Robert Montgomery Bird's The Gladiator (1831), and Jacob Jones's Spartacus; or, the Roman Gladiator (1835).4" Moreover, historical novels set in ancient Rome, such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton's widely read The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) and Rienzi (1835), Charles Kingsley's Hypatia; or, New Foes with an Old Face (1853), and Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean (1885), became extremely popular. Anthony Trollope even devoted himself to a twovolume Life of Cicero (1880). Nevertheless, the issue of Britain's similarity to ancient Rome continued to engender complex controversy. Roman history provided England with plenty of material needed for supporting either side of any argument. 43 Assessing the Victorians' attitude towards ancient Rome thus proves to be a decidedly difficult task. Initially, it is important to consider the inspiration that the French revolutionaries drew from the ideals of the Roman republic in the late 1780s and 1790s. The ancien regime was of course compared to the worst excesses of the Roman Empire. Consequently, Marcus Junius Brutus, the assassin of Julius Caesar, was lauded by the French for his extreme efforts to save the republic from impending tyrraiiy. Robespierre proudly compared himself to the reformist republican leaders of the second century B.C.E., Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus.44 Voltaire's 1730 tragedy Brutus, based on the story of Lucius Junius Brutus, the traditional founder of the Roman republic, was successfully revived in 1790; moreover, the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in 1793 was followed by a revival of Voltaire's 1713 La Mort de Cesar.45 Due also in part to America's self-identification with the Roman republic, associations to that period in Roman history became anathema in England. Responses to the Revolution, from Edmund Burke's conservative critique in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) to Thomas Carlyle's influential The French Revolution (1837), perpetuated the paral46 lels between ancient Roman and more recent French history.

24 Stateliest Measures Napoleon's rise to power only complicated the matter further when his attraction to the figures of Hannibal and Julius Caesar made the British all the more uncomfortable with contemporary parallels to Roman history. Nevertheless, the penchant for looking to ancient history as a locus of potential historical analogies seems never to have waned. Rome's Punic Wars supplied multiple parallels during Britain's war with Napoleon in the early 1800s. In the 1830s, debates on reform in Britain brought a renewed interest in the Roman republic. Similarities between first-century B.C.E. Roman tribune P. Sulpicius Rufus's proposals to offer Roman citizenship to all the inhabitants of Italy were noted by Thomas Arnold during the debates on Catholic emancipation in the 1820s.47 Similarly, the debates in the 1830s concerning the British Corn Laws (ultimately repealed in 1846) were compared to the attempts of the Gracchi to reform corn laws in republican Rome. In the late 1840s Sir Robert Peel was lampooned as a new Julius Caesar and his proposals for Irish reform were compared to Caesar's invasion of Britain.48 In 1850 British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston ardently pushed for a strong military response to Greece's denial of certain claims made by British citizens living in Greece in an international incident that became known as the 'Don Pacifico Affair.' Arguing that any British citizen should be able to count on the 'strong arm' of his country behind him, Palmerston reminded his fellow statesmen of the power of the phrase 'Civis Romanus sum' ('I am a citizen of Rome') in the Roman world. One major opponent to Palmerston's proposal, Gladstone, quickly raised questions about the nobility of the Roman Empire's imperial policy in terms of the rest of the world.49 By the end of the century, Britain's gradual accession of colonies around the world troubled those who feared the idea of an emerging empire. Napoleon Ill's attempt to re-establish a French empire in the 1850s-1860s continued to complicate British attitudes towards empire as a political idea until his defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.5(50 The controversy in England reached a fever pitch in 1876 with Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli's introduction of the Royal Titles bill, designed in part to declare Queen Victoria 'Empress of India.' Disraeli worked hard to promote his vision of a wealthy and powerful, yet peaceful British Empire, proposing the ideal of Imperium et Libertas as a program for the British ministry.51 At this point it had become commonplace to compare the British Empire to that of the Romans, as in such treatments of the imperialism question asJ.R. Seeley's The Expansion of England (1883) and James Bryce's The Roman Empire and the British

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Empire (1901). A few parodies also appeared, perhaps most notably the 1884 publication of The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, by 'Edwarda Gibbon,' claiming a publication date of the year 2884. The issue of comparison remained complex, as spokesmen on both sides of the argument continued to draw on episodes from Roman imperial history in attacking and in defending England's foreign policy. As the British government continued to build its empire, scholarly debates on ancient history became more and more entangled in discourse concerning this expansion. Although there has been debate among twentieth-century scholars about the degree to which the British conceived of themselves as actively developing a global empire before the 1870s, Britain continued to expand its influence around the world from the late eighteenth century with the annexation of colonies in South Africa, Asia, the West Indies, and Canada, and continued through the 1840s with the annexation of New Zealand, the Gold Coast, Labuan, Natal, the Punjab, Sind, and Hong Kong, and in the 1850s and 1860s with Berar, Oudh, Lower Burma, Kowloon, Lagos, Basutolarid, Griqualand, the Transvaal, Queensland, and British Columbia.32 Sir John Seeley's words are often quoted in relation to this phenomenon: 'We seem ... to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.' 13 The British seem to have considered their empire an informal one in the years before 1870; in fact most politicians during these years insisted that colonization efforts resulted strictly from the need to protect British economical interests, and that they were pursued only as a last resort. Despite the rather commonly held belief among governmental leaders that such conquests were 'forced' upon them, the native inhabitants of these colonies suffered chronic and often disastrous pressure from planters, traders, and missionaries to change their lifestyles, their habits of work and consumption, and their religious beliefs.54 Lord Palmerston's strongly nationalistic point of view represented that of many of his fellow Britons in regarding colonization as an entirely noble means of offering civilization to less-developed peoples through the influence of British law and civil order, commerce and economic improvement, Christianity, education, and modern technology.55 Despite debates about Britain's proper role as a colonizing power, however, by the 1870s worries about impending economic crisis led Disraeli and other leaders to strive to put England back on top economically. By this time the concept of British imperialism as an active foreign policy was openly acknowledged.

26 Stateliest Measures Uncovering the Treasures of Tennyson's Library

The backdrop against which we must read Tennyson's classical poems is a complicated one indeed. And, to complicate it further, in assessing what is unique about Tennyson's purposes in turning so frequently to the classics in composing his verse, we must take into account the manner and frequency with which other British poets likewise turned to the classics for thematic inspiration. Indeed, much of the resonance of the classics in Tennyson's work was absorbed from such predecessors as Thomson, Scott, Byron, Moore, Campbell, and Keats, as well as poets who were classical scholars in their own right, such as Milton, Pope, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley. Moreover, many Victorian writers contributed to the popular project of reworking classical materials in modern poetry. Robert Browning drew inspiration from classical characters and stories in such works as 'Cleon' (1855), Balaustion's Adventure (1871), Tan and Luna' (1880), 'Ixion' (1883), and 'Apollo and the Fates' (1887). Browning also translated the Agamemnon of Aeschylus in 1877. In several of her poems, Elizabeth Barrett Browning steeped a modern speculation in a rich classical atmosphere, as in 'Wine of Cyprus' and 'The Dead Pan' (1844), and 'A Musical Instrument' (1860). Barrett Browning also translated Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound (1833), as well as an excerpt from Apuleius, 'Psyche Gazing on Cupid' (1845), and she collaborated with Richard Hengist Home on the unfinished lyrical drama Psyche Apocalypte (1876). Matthew Arnold drew on his extensive classical background in such poems as 'The Strayed Reveller' (1849), 'Philomela' (1853), 'Fragment of Chorus of a "Dejaneira"' and 'Palladium' (1867), and in his long dramatic poem 'Empedocles on Etna' (1852). In their ongoing endeavour to revive stories from history and folk legend in both their poetry and their visual art, the younger generation of the Pre-Raphaelites was also much drawn to the classics, as they were to the literature of medieval Europe. Algernon Charles Swinburne continually engaged himself with classical topics, from such poems as his dra matic monologue 'Itylus' (1866), based on the tragic story of Procne and Philomela, to his verse drama Atalanta in Calydon (1865). Swinburne published his well-known 'Hymn to Proserpine,' a radical critique of Christianity as the conquerer of the more aesthetic religion of the ancient Greeks and Romans, as well as 'The Garden of Proserpine,' a speculation on life and death, in his Poems and Ballads of 1866, twenty years before Tennyson would revisit this story in his 'Demeter and Persephone' (1889).

Tennyson's Classicism in Context: The Victorians and the Ancient World 27 Similarly, William Morris often worked with classical source materials, most particularly in his Chaucerian-inspired collection The Earthly Paradise (1868-70), in which he rewrote two stories from classical, Norse, or medieval sources for each month of the year. Morris's popular narrative poem The Life and Death of Jason (1867) was begun as a piece for this collection, but quickly outgrew the boundaries of The Earthly Paradise. As Tennyson was to do two decades later in 'The Death of CEnone,' Morris rewrote Quintus Smyrnaeus's account of the story of CEnone and Paris in 'The Death of Paris,' one of the two poems written for the month of September in The Earthly Paradise. Morris also translated the Aeneid into ballad meter in 1876. All university-educated men in nineteenth-century Britain were inundated with the classics. Until 1830, the study of classical languages and literature constituted the bulk of an Oxford education, at which time seven terms of ancient history and philosophy were added to a reduced five terms of literature; Cambridge followed suit with similar curricular changes in 1851.56 Despite the fact that a thorough background in Greek and Latin was commonplace, Tennyson's exposure to the classics was more rigorous than most. The poet's father, George Clayton Tennyson, tutored his sons in Greek and Latin from an early age and insisted that they write out lengthy paraphrases of the annotations in their classical texts, characteristically written in Latin during this time, in order to demonstrate their proficiency both with the classical languages and with the content of the texts and notes. Moreover, Tennyson as a child was forced to memorize long passages of verse, including all four books of Horace's Odes. Such experiences had an enormous effect on his ear for poetry, and the rhythms and sounds of classical verse echo resoundingly in many of his poems. Poems on classical themes appear in his earliest collections of poetry, Poems by Two Brothers (1827) and Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830), as well as in his more mature Poems of 1832 and 1842, and In Memoriam (1850) is enriched with a dense fabric of allusions to classical, among other, literatures. In the later decades of his career, Tennyson continued to write classical monologues; his last two volumes of verse, Demeter and Other Poems (1889) and The Death of CEnone, Akbar's Dream, and Other Poems (1892) each bear the name of the classical poems in these collections, as did Tiresias and Other Poems of 1885. But Tennyson clearly had particular reasons for so consistently choosing to recast classical material. To understand these reasons, it is critical to recognize the profound degree to which he was engaged throughout his life with developments in classical scholarship and with the perpet-

28 Stateliest Measures

ual and often heated debates concerning the proper interpretation of the ancient world and the proper application of the example of antiquity to modern life. Of the works on ancient Greece and Rome and on British culture discussed above, those by T. Arnold, Becker, Blackie, Carlyle, Cox, Frazer, Gibbon, Gladstone, Grote, Harrison, Jebb, Jowett, Lang, Maurice, Mill, Mitford, Muller, Niebuhr, Paley, Reynolds, Seeley, and Symonds were on the shelves of the poet's personal library. Tennyson was impressed enough with Seeley's The Expansion of England to send a copy to his friend W.E. Gladstone.57 Benjamin Jowett and R.C. Jebb were close personal friends, and F.D. Maurice was the godfather of the Tennysons' son Hallam. Working from a deep engagement with contemporary controversies over the relevance of studying the ancient world, Tennyson offered his readers new opportunities to consider modern issues against the backdrop provided by antiquity. Perhaps the best source of evidence available to the modern scholar for Tennyson's involvement with specific classical texts is the poet's personal library and that of his father, George Clayton Tennyson, both of which are housed at the Tennyson Research Centre in Lincoln, England. The elder Tennyson's library certainly would have provided a wealth of reading material for Tennyson and his siblings, for George Clayton Tennyson was an active and erudite scholar. The Centre owns several hundred volumes of Dr Tennyson's books, ranging from theological works to editions of classical texts, to volumes of contemporary British literature. The antiquity of the collection is noteworthy; among the elder Tennyson's oldest classical volumes are a 1619 edition of Aristotle (item #13) and an edition of Lucian dated 1563 (#207) .58 The Tennyson Research Centre owns a much larger collection of over two thousand volumes from Tennyson's own library. Tennyson's books provide an invaluable opportunity to assess the reading interests of the poet in a variety of fields. In addition to a wide range of volumes on theology, philosophy, history, geology, biology, and astronomy, the poet's library indicates his broad reading in European, British, and American literature, particularly contemporary nineteenth-century works. The collection is remarkable for its large number of volumes autographed by authors and sent to Tennyson as gifts, including works by Dickens and George Eliot, the Brownings, Swinburne and the Rossettis, Whitman and Longfellow, among many others. Tennyson's library also contains a great number of Greek and Latin texts that represent a wider range of classical literature than the library of his father, a fact that in itself indicates the poet's interest in and dedi-

Tennyson's Classicism in Context: The Victorians and the Ancient World 29

cation to the study of the classics throughout his life. Although Tennyson rarely wrote in the books he obtained in adulthood, the classical volumes, particularly the ones that he used as a student at Somersby and Louth, and later at Cambridge, are very often heavily annotated, offering modern scholars a rare look into the poet's mind as he learned to read the classical languages. In forming an impression of Tennyson's classical background, and specifically which authors and works the poet read, an assessment of the library's holdings provides valuable information simply in the numbers of certain authors' works represented and in the omissions of others. Among the best-represented authors in Tennyson's classical library is, not surprisingly, Homer.59 Perhaps the most valuable edition of Homer to modern scholars investigating Tennyson's study of the classics is a two-volume edition of the Iliad published in 1821 (#1167). Both volumes contain extensive marginalia. Volume 1 also includes in Tennyson's hand the account of his early training in the classics, which was recorded by his son Hallam in the Memoir, and which has provided us with our understanding of the nature of the training that George Claytori Tennyson provided his sons: 'My father who taught us Greek made us - me and my brother Charles - write the substance of Heyne's notes in the margin to show that we had read them & we followed the same command of his, writing in our Horaces, Virgils & Juveiials ... the criticisms of their several commentators. In the little Louth school Cs & I learnt - well - absolutely nothing.' Tennyson was also well read in Greek tragedy. He owned a number of editions of Aeschylus and Sophocles, but far fewer of Euripides' works.60 Tennyson owned three editions of the works of Theocritus, two of which include the poetry of Bioii and Moschus. ' In addition, he owned seven volumes of Pindar (#1783-9), and an 1825 edition of Greek lyric poetry that includes the fragments of Alcaeus, Alcman, Archilochus, Bacchylides, Ibycus, Callistratus, Dionysius, Corinna, Pittacus, Sappho, Simonides, and Stesichorus, in addition to fifteen other poets (#582). Tennyson apparently owned no volumes of Hesiod, although his father had one 1778 edition containing no marginalia (#147). Apollonius is found only in a 1780 volume given to Tennyson by Julia Margaret Cameron as a Christmas gift in 1873 (#425). There is also a scarcity of Greek comedy in the collections.622 Although Tennyson owned eight volumes of Plato (#1790-7), only one 1816-18 edition in the collection was available to Tennyson as a young student (#1791). The other copies date post-1830, and George Clayton Tennyson's library reveals an omission

30 Stateliest Measures

of Plato altogether. The elder Tennyson owned a complete edition of Aristotle and an edition of the Poetics (#13, 12), but these contain no marginalia, and the poet's three volumes of Aristotle were all published after 1850 (#438-40). The best represented of the Latin poets in the Tennysons' libraries is Horace; the Research Centre owns five editions that belonged to George Clayton Tennyson (#162-6), and eight that belonged to Tennyson (#1186-93). Catullus is also well represented, and not surprisingly, for Tennyson's admiration for Catullus was well known. Tennyson owned eight different editions of Catullus's poems (#724—31), including two volumes that also contain the poetry of Tibullus and Propertius (#725,726). The representation of the works of Lucretius is a matter of much interest to Tennyson scholars, because Tennyson's dramatic monologue 'Lucretius' indicates such a thorough knowledge of this poet. An 1807 Oxford edition of De Rerum Natura (#208) can be found in George Clayton Tennyson's library, including marginalia in Book 1 and in parts of Book 2 that appear to be in Tennyson's hand, although the notes tend to consist merely of brief glosses of the Latin. The poet's library contains four volumes of De Rerum Natura (#1437-40). Naturally Virgil also turns up often on the Tennysons' shelves. Two editions of 1746 (#359) and 1774 (#358) in George Clayton Tennyson's library bear Tennyson's name as well as his father's, and there are six volumes of Virgil in Tennyson's own collection (#2276-81), including one with extensive marginal and intertextual notations (#2281 ).63 Those Latin authors represented in notably low numbers of volumes include Ovid, of whom there are only two editions in George Clayton Tennyson's library - a text of the Metamorphosesand one containing the shorter poems of Ovid, including the Heroides - and several of the poems of Tibullus (#245, 246). These volumes contain no marginalia. Tennyson's own library contains only later editions of Ovid: an 1860 edition of the complete works (#1723) and an 1881 Ibis (#1722). Similarly, there is only one volume of Juvenal in Tennyson's library, an 1872 edition (#1284), although George Clayton Tennyson owned three volumes of Juvenal (#184-6).64 The Roman playwrights Terence and Plautus are found only in one 1820 edition of Terence's plays (#2187); George Clayton Tennyson owned one volume of Terence (#342) and two of Plautus (#262-3), although neither provide any evidence of use by the poet. There are no volumes in the poet's library containing the works of Cicero, although his father owned five editions (#82-6) - one of which

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is inscribed with Alfred Tennyson's name, but contains no marginalia (#84). The classical historians are also poorly represented. While George Clayton Tennyson owned several volumes of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophori, and Tacitus, Tennyson himself owned only editions of these authors that were published in the latter half of the nineteenth century, with the exception of a 1760 edition of Tacitus that he apparently used at Cambridge (#2157).fo Seneca and Pliny are represented only on the shelves of George Clayton Tennyson (#309, 264), and the only edition of Livy in either of the two men's libraries is a 1708 edition that Tennyson acquired in 1877 (#1405). Other volumes in the Research Centre's collection that would be of interest in assessing Tennyson's classical background are the poet's Greek and Latin grammar books. These include an 1839 uncatalogued edition of Augustus Matthiae's A Greek Grammar for the Use of Schools, edited by the Rev. J. Edwards, and published by John Murray. The volume contains a number of marginal notes, mostly in Greek, and the only inscription is 'Lord Tennyson' on the front fly-leaf, an inscription obviously made after 1884, and perhaps by someone other than the poet. A Latin grammar in the collection is William Turner's Exercises to the accidence and grammar; or an exemplification of the several moods and tenses ... references to the Latin syntax (1815, #2241). This volume has 'A. Tennyson' written on the outside cover, and 'Alfred Tennyson, Louth, August 13, 1817' on the fly-leaf. Brief Latin and English notes are scribbled throughout. The library also includes a text for Latin composition entitled Exernpla Moralia, or third book of new English examples to be rendered into Latin, adapted to the rules of Latin grammar, lately printed for the use of youth; new ed. (1815, #915). The inscription in this book also dates it to Tennyson's early school days: 'Alfred Tennyson, Louth.' There are also three lexicons for the classical languages: an 1830 Lexicon Graeco-Latinum manuale ex optimis libris concinnatum (#1393), and the 1845 and 1874 editions of the still standard Liddell and Scott Greek-English dictionary (#13945). There is also an 1863 edition of Sir George William Cox's Tales from Greek Mythology m the collection (#791). Even though it was much more common in the nineteenth century than it is today for an educated person to have been well read in the classics, Tennyson's classical library and the evidence in many of these volumes of the manner in which he made use of his texts indicate an unusually broad knowledge of Greek and Latin literature and confirm his biographers' assertions that Tennyson was profoundly engaged with this literature throughout his lifetime.

32 Stateliest Measures The marginalia in Tennyson's volumes of the classical texts provide the modern scholar with invaluable information regarding the poet's relationship to this material. There are, however, two dangers in drawing conclusions concerning this relationship. First, the majority of the books available to Tennyson while beginning his study of the classics at Somersby, mainly the books in his father's library, were used by his brothers Frederick and Charles as well. Thus, the marginalia in many volumes are in several hands, and while it is usually easy to identify Tennyson's mature hand, in certain places it is difficult to distinguish the juvenile hands of the three brothers with absolute certainty. Second, we have no way of knowing which texts Tennyson read at what point in his early education, and while it is quite clear that he discontinued the practice of writing notes and comments in his books after the 1820s, it is impossible to date the marginalia to a specific year. The marginalia range widely in form and content, suggesting that some of the notes were made by a young boy and others by a more mature student. The juvenile marginalia are fascinating, for they provide a sense of the poet as a boy - a glimpse of Tennyson that is rare indeed. An example is found in an 1817 edition of Virgil's Opera that was apparently given to Tennyson by his father when it was new (#2281). The inscription on the front fly-leaf reads 'A. Tennyson, AEtat 9 / ex dono patris ejus / amicissimi.' The page also exhibits a detailed still-life sketch of a flute, a harp, and a violin, several pages of music, some decorative foliage, and an open volume of Virgil. On the opposite page the nine-year-old Tennyson included an additional inscription in a manner typical of a child: A. Tennyson - Somersby 3 in Lincolnshire 4 in England 5 in Europe 6 in the world 7 in the universe

7 in the air 8 in space

Many of the volumes that Tennyson used as a boy contain a variety of doodlings, usually sketches of men's or women's faces, houses, or small cities with many towers and spires. In one of George Clayton Tennyson's volumes of the Iliad (#157), the poet and his brothers had filled the

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blank fly-leaves at the front and rear of the volume with complicated family trees of the gods and heroes. The marginalia in Tennyson's classical texts consist mainly of interlinear Latin, Greek, or English glosses of particular words, with an occasional note in English jotted alongside the text - usually a brief textual translation or note related to the text, or an English translation of a Latin note below. The most heavily annotated books in the collection are the 1817 edition of Virgil (#2281) and the two-volume 1821 edition of the Iliad (#157), both of which are mentioned above. In all three of these volumes the marginalia are profuse and crowded around the printed text on nearly every page, indicating the poet's thorough familiarity with the Aeneid and the Iliad. In certain places the marginalia give the reader more insight into the mind of Tennyson as he was studying these classical texts. A few instances afford a glimpse of certain works that he particularly admired. An example can be found in an 1822 volume of Horace containing copious marginal notes (#1187). Above Horace's poem 1.5 is written, for example, 'He compares the inconstancy of Pyrrha to the sea. A beautiful little Ode.' Likewise, in the heavily annotated 1817 Virgil, a Latin note is scribbled at the top of the page upon which begins Book 2: 'Liber [unclear word] pulcherrimus in tota ^Eniade! [sic],' indicating, obviously, the book he found to be the most beautiful in the epic. Tennyson's notations are often scathingly critical; such comments, however, are always in response to the notes on the text provided by a volume's editor. Tennyson was particularly annoyed by the notes in the 1822 Horace mentioned above, in which the editors consistently attempt to tie Horace's subject matter to contemporary events in Rome. An example is a marginal note on Horace 1.15: 'Some say, perhaps w / no great truth, that this Ode was composed against Antony & Cleopatra: the fact is these commentators have a dextrous knack of twisting whatever H says or does into a compliment to Augustus or an allusion to the civil wars.' A bit of marginalia accompanying Horace's Ode 2.12 states, similarly, that ' [t]hese interpreters do indeed fish out Antony & Augustus wherever they can find the slightest shadow of a resemblance to them.' Such comments as these turn up frequently; perhaps the young Teimysons picked up this particular criticism from their father. In response to Horace 1.28, the following note is written: 'They are (as usual) for twisting this Ode into the Death of Brutus but it is nothing more than a series of philosophical reflections upon Death.' Often the marginal comments in this volume are even more concise,

34 Stateliest Measures

consisting merely of 'Bha!,' 'Nonsense,' or 'tut,' and again they very often respond to the relationship implied by the editors between Horace's poems and events in Augustan Rome. A note beside Ode 1.35 reads, 'Horace can hardly write a single ode but Baxter or some officious interpreter managed to bring in if not Augustus at least something to do with him.' In a note to line 28 of Ode 3.3, a commentator suggests Brutus's actions as a subtext to Juno's discussion of the fate of Troy. The marginal comment: 'he might as well say that Milton's devil meant Oliver Cromwell.' These notations provide intriguing insight and perhaps even an important caveat in light of the topic of the present study. Clearly the notations here indicate a resistance to readings of Horace's odes that reduce the works merely to pro-imperialist propaganda. Interestingly, the writer of these notations is vociferous in insisting that there is more to Horace's verse, despite his stature as a poet at Augustus's court. The marginalia in these volumes on occasion provide us with a glimpse of the poetic persona that was beginning to take shape in the mind of the young Tennyson. Occasionally the notes directly address poetic concerns. In a marginal note beside lines 46-8 of Horace's De Arte Poetica, in an early volume of Horace's Opera that has not been dated because its title page is missing (#1189), Tennyson translates, 'You gain your point, if by a fine & artful connection you can make a new word out of two already known.' One thinks of Tennyson's tendency to invent compound words in his early poems, for example, as in such words as 'tendriltwine' (6) and 'cedarshadowy' (7) in the 1832 version of 'CEnone,' words that he largely removed by 1842.66 There are other bits of marginalia in this text of De Arte Poetica that give the modern scholar a sense of Tennyson's developing attitudes about poetry. In a section beginning around line 119, Horace discusses the necessity of consistency if one chooses to venture into making his own inventions: 'Aut famam sequere aut sibi convenientia finge' ('Either follow tradition or make your inventions consistent with themselves'). Tennyson adds to Horace's admonition to remain consistent: 'which requires that the last agree with the first part of the poem.' In line 131 and following, Horace discusses borrowing material from those who have gone before, and warns poets to take neither the vulgar paths that many have taken nor those paths so difficult that in following one's predecessor it would be impossible to achieve any originality. Tennyson marks this passage and summarizes it in the margin: 'that you may not impose too great restriction upon yourself in imitating everything.'

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In response to Horace's opinion in lines 310-11 that the writings of Socrates' followers would provide excellent material for the writer, Tennyson notes, 'i.e. if you have once fix'd your plan, the words will come easily enough.' One final example of Tennyson's engagement with this text is evident in his comment on line 337, where Horace writes, 'Omne supervacuum pleno de pectore manat.' Tennyson translates, 'i.e. when the breast is full of another subject everything else will run out.' Occasionally the marginalia provide some insight into Tennyson's attitude towards a particular classical figure. For example, in an 1824 volume of four plays of Euripides (#109), the following note is found on the title page of the Hecabe. The most interesting character in this play is that of Polyxena: her affection for her mother, her readiness to submit to death, & her nobleness of disposition, are well drawn. We sympathize with the anguish of Hecuba but her conduct towards the close of the play is so unfeminine that we are rather disgusted. Of the Greeks Agamemnon is placed in the most amiable light. Ulysses is, as usual, crafty & unfeeling. It is particularly interesting to note this generalization concerning the character of Ulysses, considering Tennyson's later treatment of this famous figure in his poem of that name. One of the most intriguing aspects of the 1822 volume of Horace mentioned above (#1187) is the brief synopsis written above the beginning of each poem. Although these seem to be in Tennyson's hand, it is difficult to be completely certain of that; nevertheless, whether written by him, by one of his brothers, or by all three, these 'keys' were certainly a part of Tennyson's early experience of reading Horace. Whether they represent original thought or bits of material translated from Latin commentaries, the keys are of great interest because they suggest what the young Tennyson and his brothers found interesting in a particular poem, or at least what they felt to be the general theme. Often the keys outline the content of a particular poem. For example, poem 1.1 is annotated as follows: 'I. Key: Some follow one pursuit some another: some delight in the games, some in popularity, some in wealth, but I am pleased only with the Muse, particularly if my poems are praised by Maecenas.' Most of the keys refer to Horace in the third person rather than in the first, as in 1.3's 'The poet here requests the vessel wch carried Virgil to land him safely at Athens: hence he takes an opportunity of inveighing the inventor of ships & the enterprising spirit of Mankind

36 Stateliest Measures

in general.' Some of the keys are much less detailed, as in 1.2: 'The Death of Julius Caesar,' and 1.38: 'The poet professes not to be pleased with splendid entertainments.' A noteworthy key is found at poem 2.20, where the marginalia have been expanded into a full page of commentary on this poem, which is interesting indeed because in this ode Horace considers his own reputation and future fame as a poet. The key begins, 'Horace's design in this Ode is merely to tell us that his verses will be immortal, and that the whole world will be full of his praises, after death. Scaliger, tho a bitter scourge of the poet approves of this Ode mightily, & says, that it possesses great fire, & was worthy of so great a genius: Ovid recites his own praises in a similar manner at the end of his Met., & in a more direct manner, ...' What follows is a few Latin phrases from the poem and their English translations, and then the key continues, Tarn, lam &c a very pretty conceit; here the poet feigns, that on acct. of the melody of his measures, that he is metamorphosed into a Swan.' The key ends with a brief summary of the myth of Daedalus and Icarus as a gloss for the poem's allusion to this story. In contrast to the lengthy key to this ode in which Horace refers to his own status as a poet, the key to Ode 3.30, in which Horace writes of his poetry as a monument that will last through the ages, is succinctly arid humorously rendered as 'Poetic Arrogance.' This criticism of Horace's sense of his own importance as a poet emerges in keys here and there, as in the summary of 1.32 as 'An arrogant address to his lyre,' and the summary of 1.12, which criticizes Horace's devotion to Augustus: 'The poet feigns himself at a loss concerning whom he shall sing & at last contrived to bring in Augustus towards whom he makes use of the most abject flattery.' Once again, we see a noteworthy criticism of poetry considered to be distinctively pro-imperial. Another noteworthy characteristic of the marginalia in many of the volumes Tennyson used as a young man is his tendency to draw connections to other literary passages, ranging from classical texts to contemporary British poetry. In the margin beside lines 19-20 of Ode 2.16, in which Horace has commented on one's inability to escape oneself, is the note 'What exile from himself can flee? Child Harold' [sic]. Beside line 29 of Ode 4.5, in which Horace remarks that '[ejvery man spends the day on his own hill,' a marginal note reads, 'There is a senten. I think in Ezekiel sim. to this we sit under the shade of our own fig tree.' In addition, a most interesting comment on genius can be found in the bottom margin of a page as a note to Ode 3.17 in which Horace tells his friend Aelius that tomorrow he will comfort his soul (genius) with a

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piglet and unmixed wine. A corresponding note has been written in what is clearly Tennyson's hand on the facing blank leaf: +Perhaps Spensers description of our Genius is the best to be met with in any author, - 'in the porch there sate A comely personage of stature tall [ 7 lines omitted] They in that place him GENIUS did call [ 9 lines omitted] This is OUR SELF whom though we do not see Yet EACH WITHIN HIMSELF doth well perceive to be" K.T.A.67 FARIE QUEENE. [sic]

In an 1843 edition of Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius (#725) Tennyson jotted on the blank leaf opposite Catullus 61, on the wedding of Julia and Manlius: 'Julia will her Manlius wed / Good with good, a blessed bed! Leigh Hunt.' A final example of a literary association noted by Tennyson can be found in the poet's 1817 edition of Virgil (#2281). In lines 52-4 of Virgil's tenth eclogue, the speaker describes his carving of his name and his lover's name into a tree, after which their love would grow as the tree grows. Tennyson wrote in the margin near these lines: 'How elegantly has Ovid expressed this! / "Et quantum trunci, tantum mea nomina crescunt / Crescite & in titulos surgite recta meos [sic]."' Ofparticular interest to scholars of Tennyson's poetry are the occasional fragments of verse in the poet's hand that can be found scattered among the marginalia. In an 1825 anthology of Greek drama entitled Pentalogia Graeca, several verse fragments in the poet's hand are to be found on the fly-leaves of the volume. One of these is apparently a translation of a passage of the Phoenissae.^ The fragment is reprinted here exactly as it is found in the manuscript: Refulgent Lord of Battle tell me why Thy joy is in the tumult & the strife and the The lawless purple tide of life From gored bosoms freely flowing. and Why shunnest thou the goblet glowing With rosy nectar'd brilliancy? Nor ever do thy martial feet advance In the mazes of the dance.

38 Stateliest Measures Aidan Day points out the similarity of this fragment to Tennyson's prose translation of the passage to be found in the margin of page 350 of the Pentalogia Graeca volume, translating lines 784-92 of the Phoenissae: why I pray art thou so delighted with blood & death so discordant with the revels of Bacchus thou dost not in the circle of beautiful dancers in the bloom of youth having let flow thy hair on the breath of the flute modulate strains in which there is a lovely power to renew the dance. But with they armed men having excited the army of Argives against Thebes with blood thou dancest before the city in a most inharmonious revel.70 A comparison of these two passages illustrates the choices that a translator must make when attempting to translate Greek verse into English verse. The prose translation is more accurate, although Tennyson's gift for poetic expression is evident in the livelier, albeit rough fragment of his verse translation. Several of the texts in Tennyson's classical library provide evidence of the poet's having read them at later points during his life. A good example is an 1854 Teubner edition of Catullus (#729), which was apparently a gift to the poet from his friend F.T. Palgrave, for the title page bears Palgrave's signature and the date 'May 1856,' and on the front fly-leaf is written 'A. Tennyson / Cambridge / 21 Sep 1859.' Tennyson travelled to Portugal with Palgrave in 1859, and marginalia surrounding two poems in the volume suggest that this volume accompanied Tennyson on this trip. Poem 46 is dated 'Bay of Biscay 11 Sept / 59,' and poem 61 is dated 'Aug 18 / 59 / Bay of Biscay.' The marginalia in this volum are characteristic of the middle-aged and older poet, who rarely if ever wrote in his books, but occasionally marked a particular passage with an 'X' or a double vertical line. Two of Tennyson's editions of Lucretius suggest that Tennyson was reading Lucretius in the early 1840s and 1850s. An 1821 edition (#1437) and an 1852 Teubner edition (#1438) contain numerous passages marked by Tennyson. The markings in the former edition appear to indicate passages where the poet started and where he stopped reading on various occasions; at the beginning of book 2, for example, is written the date 'Oct.6.1841' above line 1, and at the end of the book is written 'Dec.9.1841,' and there are at least sixteen marks dividing up the book in between. A third edition of Lucretius, published in 1864 (#1440), again proves the poet's engagement with this poet as late as the 1860s. This text is H.A.J. Munro's influential scholarly edi-

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don and commentary of 1864, one that, as Norman Vance has pointed out, already indicates an absorption of Darwinian terminology. Many passages in the Latin text and in the English translation at the bottom of each page are marked, but there are very few comments on or even glosses of the Latin. Horizontal hatch marks similar to those in the 1821 edition described above are interspersed throughout the text. The only date recorded in the text is found at the end of Book 3: 'April. 19- 1865.' Another interesting feature of the markings in this volume of Lucretius is a reading program written out on the end book leaves. Under the heading marked 'A.' are lists of passages in books 1 and 2 that seem to constitute a plan for reading the text. On the next leaf a similar list is found under the heading 'For Translation.' On a third leaf is found a list for book 3 with some scant notes concerning content as follows: III 41-58 - Sorrow proves a man. 445-458 or to 469 - Mind & Body growing together 832-842 - No Future, anymore than Prior Existence.- [stc] ? 973 - 6 more lines? 1024- 1052 - 'Omnes una manet mors.' 1067-9 more?-

Emily Tennyson's journal confirms particular dates on which Tennyson read Lucretius to her, including 10 and 19 November, 1857, 6 and 13 October, 1865, and 1 January 1866. Her entry for 6 October 1865 indicates that Tennyson had begun composing 'Lucretius' at that time. Therefore the 1864 volume and the marked passages throughout are of great value to the scholar interested in analysing the relationship of De Rerum Natura to this poem. 72 Hallam Tennyson's pencil notations in several volumes indicate the books for which Tennyson asked while bedridden during the week leading up to his death in October 1892. These include a 1721 edition of Horace (#1190), an 1822 Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius (#726), an 1833 translation of the Iliad by Andrew Lang (#1175), and an uncatalogued 1877 edition of Virgil in the series The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age, edited by W.Y. Sellar. Tennyson surrounded himself with his favourite books during those last days, arid even held a volume of

40 Stateliest Measures Shakespeare, opened to the final act of his favourite Cymbeline, as he was dying (#2007, volume 9). One final impression gained from a study of Tennyson's library is the extent to which other scholars arid writers of the day admired the poet. Tennyson's shelves are lined with copies of the works of fellow authors, sent to him as a token of their admiration. Among these gifts to the poet are a large number of classical editions sent to Tennyson by editors or translators in acknowledgment of his reputation as a classical scholar. As mentioned in the Introduction, a volume that provides a telling example of Tennyson's effect on the scholars of his day is an 1877 Oxford Horace with commentary by E.G. Wickham (#1191). Enclosed in this volume is a letter to Tennyson from the translator, who was at the time dean of Lincoln Cathedral. The letter consists of Wickham's rendering of Tennyson's Trater Ave Atque Vale' into both Latin and Greek translations, with the note T enclose an attempt to render the beautiful little poem - I am sorry that it is in the metre you condemned, but I tried the scazons without attaining any echo of Catullus in them and fell back in desperation on the earlier metre.'73 At the end of his letter Wickham refers to the volume that he had sent to Tennyson as a gift: 'I have corrected a few of the misprints in the volume but I fear there are many more.' The corrections to which Wickham refers are a few marginal notations made throughout the volume in pencil. This letter and Wickham's translations of Tennyson into the classical languages suggest the reputation that Tennyson had as a classicist, for here a published editor of the Oxford Horace has expressed his respect for Tennyson and his concern that his own translations please the poet. Tennyson's library is an invaluable resource for the modern scholar in coming to a better understanding of the poet's intellectual life. It offers evidence not only of the particular classical texts Tennyson read and studied, but also of when he read specific texts, what he thought of them, and how he assessed many metrical and thematic concerns. Most importantly, the collection allows for a much fuller impression of the degree to which Tennyson remained an active and devoted classicist throughout his lifetime - an aspect of his career that is crucial to a full understanding of his classical poems. How Tennyson's reworkings of classical material differ from those of his contemporaries will become clear as we look at the earliest examples of his experiments in this vein, the subject of the next chapter.

Chapter 2 The Building Blocks of Song: Constructing the Classical Dramatic Monologue

Tennyson's unusually strong familiarity with Greek and Latin poetry naturally led to attempts to approximate the sound and the rhythm of ancient verse in his own compositions. From the beginning, this task was clearly bound up with his sense of duty as a poet. Dwight Culler has discussed the political implications of such early poems as 'The Poet' (1830) and The Palace of Art' (1832), in which Tennyson defined for himself very early a role of 'a man speaking to men.' 1 Culler points out the relationship of Tennyson's early conception of 'civic poetry' to the work of Alcaeus and Horace, as well as to seventeenth-century English poetry, and notes that the resonance of this political agenda in his work caught the attention of Wordsworth, who called Tennyson's early poems 'very solid and noble in thought,' and said that 'their diction also seems singularly stately.' Culler also notes Arthur Sidgwick's representative assessment of the importance of civic poetry written in praise of 'ordered liberty, of settled government, of political moderation' as opposed to the ancients' idealization in their poetry of freedom, revolution, and war.3 Before turning to Tennyson's earliest classical poems, it would be worthwhile to consider the specific characteristics of the classical monologue as Tenryson developed it in the 1820s. Throughout the Tennyson canon, this form can be distinguished by three main characteristics, which are clearly related to the distinctive features of the classical idyll as enumerated by Robert Pattison and summarized in the Introduction. First, like the ancient Alexandrian poets who sought to retell familiar myths from a novel point of view, Tennyson consistently chooses to give a classical figure a voice at an original point in his or her story; that is, a point appropriate to the mythological account of that character, but one

42 Stateliest Measures

that was not treated in classical epic or tragedy.5 In the Memoir, Hallam Tennyson recorded that his father 'purposely chose those classical subjects from mythology and legend, which had been before but imperfectly treated, or of which the stories were slight, so that he might have free scope for his imagination ... A modern feeling was to some extent introduced into the themes, but they were dealt with according to the canons of antique art. The blank verse was often intentionally restrained.'6 William E. Fredeman has noted how Tennyson often capitalized on the dramatic by situating his speaker just before his or her death.7 Thus Tennyson's Ulysses, for example, speaks after he has returned to Ithaca and re-established control over his household and kingdom, a point in his life long after the events recorded in Homer's Odyssey. Similarly, although Tiresias appears in several Greek tragedies, the private meeting between the old prophet and the boy Menoeceus that Tennyson chose to dramatize in his monologue 'Tiresias' has no antecedent in Greek tragedy. In praising the supreme achievement of the Greek tragedians, Matthew Arnold argued of Aeschylus and Sophocles that in their dramas are the names of the old heroic world, from which they were far separated; but these names are taken, because the use of them permits to the poet that free and ideal treatment of his characters which the highest tragedy demands; and into these figures of the old world is poured all the fulness of life and of thought which the new world had accumulated. This new world in its maturity of reason resembles our own; and the advantages over Homer in their greater significance for us, which yEschylus and Sophocles gain by belonging to this new world, more than compensates for their poetic inferiority to him.8

The quality that Arnold values here in the achievement of Aeschylus and Sophocles is also characteristic of Tennyson's finest classical monologues. Tennyson too pours 'the fulness of life and of thought which the new world has accumulated' into characters whose names we recognize, though the distance of time allows for a new interpretation of their personalities. With the added 'maturity of reason' of the modern world, new works involving familiar characters can indeed surpass their predecessors in terms of their significance for modern readers. Second, Tennyson's manner of retelling a tale characteristically begins with a creative interweaving of the various sources of the story in classical literature. For example, his Tiresias tells the story of his blinding with

The Building Blocks of Song

43

detail borrowed from both the Greek version of Callimachus and the Latin one of Ovid. His Demeter of 'Demeter and Persephone' gives an account of the loss of her daughter that consists of strands from the Homeric hymn to Demeter, from Ovid's Fasti and Metamorphoses, and from Claudian's De Raptu Proserpinae, works that originated over a period of roughly a thousand years of ancient storytelling. In addition, Tennyson follows the classical poets' convention of using subtle references to characters and incidents in a wide variety of other myths in order to underscore the themes of his poems. Behind the speaker's narrative in 'CEnorie,' for example, is a complicated fabric of allusions to other stories that relate to and foretell the fate of Troy, which, like (Enorie, will suffer at Paris's hands. Arthur Henry Hallam recognized the degree to which Tennyson was imitating the ancients' penchant for highly complex allusive patterns to underscore their themes. Hallam described this technique of drawing subtle connections between groups of myths and narratives as a 'way of imaging a mood of the human heart in a group of circumstances, each of which reciprocally affects & is affected by the unity of that mood.'9 Third and finally, Tennyson provides his classical speakers with a voice, or idiom, that is natural to their context and original language. While the words of his Tithonus echo the beauty of ancient Greek epic poetry, those of his Lucretius include vocabulary and phrasing characteristic of the Latin verse of the actual poet Lucretius. As if he were translating classical poetry, Tennyson strives to approximate the sound and rhythm of particular ancient works in his classical poems. Moreover, as in the case of many of his works such as the early poems 'Mariana' arid 'Isabel,' the poem's form, content, and 'the means of poetic expression' are 'built around the personality of the subject.'10 No doubt as a means of increasing the classical ring of these works, Tennyson's classical monologues, like classical idylls, are 'culturally omnivorous,' to use Pattison's words, and consist of intricately patterned borrowings of phrases and images from earlier literature. 11 A work that ideally illustrates these three aspects of Tennyson's remodelling of classical myth is his monologue 'Semele,' composed between 1833 and 1835, but never published until Hallam Tennyson printed it as a fragment in his 1913 edition of Tennyson's works. The text is as follows: I wished to see him: who may feel His light and live? He comes. The blast of Godhead bursts the doors.

44 Stateliest Measures This mortal house is all too narrow To enclose the wonder. His mighty hands entwine The triple forks and when he speaks The crown of starlight shudders round Ambrosial temples. Over me, Fluttering in Elysian airs His green and azure mantles float in wavy Foldings, and melodious thunder Wheels in circles. But, thou, my son, who shall be born When I am ashes, to delight the world Now with measured cymbal-clash Moving on to victory; Now on music-rolling golden orbs, A sliding throne, voluptuously Panther-drawn, To throbbings of the thundrous gong, And melody o' the merrily-blowing flute; Now with troops of clamorous revellers, Noisily, merrily, Rapidly, giddily, Rioting, triumphing, Bacchanalians Rushing in cadence, All in order Plunging down the viney valleys

This brief and rarely read poem beautifully illustrates the three aspects of Tennyson's project in remodelling classical myth. First of all, he chooses a familiar figure from mythology, Semele, the mortal mother of Dionysus, god of wine and ecstatic, irrational behaviour. Having become one of Zeus's mortal lovers, Semele is tempted by Zeus's jealous wife Hera to test his loyalty to her by making him swear that he will grant her one request. The request that the disguised Hera suggests to Semele is that she ask him to prove his love for her by embracing her sexually in the manner in which he embraces his queen, Hera, in the heavens above; that is, in his full majesty as god of the sky, and of lightning and thunder. The unsuspecting Semele obtains Zeus's oath, and makes the request that naturally brings about her death. As the conniving Hera

The Building Blocks of Song 45 knows, no mortal can survive such an encounter with the god of the sky in all of his power. Rescuing Semele's unborn, but divine son from her ashes, a remorseful Zeus sews the fetus into the inside of his thigh and carries the child to term - the child who will become a new Olympian godTennyson's approach to the story is novel. He capitalizes on the dramatic potential of the popular form of the Victorian dramatic monologue, and chooses to give Semele a voice just as her lover is coming to her in his full glory, and as she is destroyed. The reader soon realizes that the consequences of Semele's request are occurring as the poem is progressing, and indeed that the consequences are reflected in the structure of the poem itself, which is metrically blown into chaos along with the poem's speaker. Second, Tennyson reworks more than one classical source into his novel approach to this story. Semele's history survives mainly in Ovid's account in the Metamorphoses, and Tennyson's version is true to Ovid. But Semele is also mentioned in Euripides' tragedy the Bacchae. Euripides dramatizes the establishment of Dionysus's power as a deity through the bloody murder of the doubting King Pentheus by Dionysus's frenzied women followers, the 'maenads.' Tennyson subtly alludes to this tale by bringing these worshippers to mind as Semele imagines her unborn son's future while fading away into death. In this poem, what at first appears to be a short and simple classical monologue proves, on closer inspection, to be much more complex. On one level 'Semele' represents the speaker's sexual encounter with Zeus, which begins with Zeus's entry, 'He comes,' and 'The blast of Godhead bursts the doors.' This event prompts the dying Semele to foresee the nature of her unborn child's godhead in the images that come to her of chaotic Bacchic celebration and revelry: the 'cymbal-clash' and 'thunderous gong' and the 'clamorous revellers ... plunging down the viney valleys' - images of sexually charged, chaotic fury. The fusion of the sexual encounter between Zeus and Semele and the ecstasy of Bacchic worship is an original thematic marriage on Tennyson's part, connecting the story of Dionysus's conception to aspects of the adult god's personality and worship. Third, Semele's words are chosen so as to evoke the feeling of reading classical poetry. The metrical regularity of the opening lines gradually melts into a clustering of phrases and images that recalls passages in classical literature characterized by a freer and more irregular fusion of metrical units and images. Examples of this effect in Greek literature

46 Stateliest Measures can be found in the choric odes of the tragedies, as well as in the occasional choric solos spoken by a tragedy's protagonist in the meters of the choric odes - all the more appropriate when one considers Tennyson's subtle allusion to Euripides' Bacchae. 'Semele' has been almost entirely ignored by Tennyson scholars.12 Nevertheless, the poem illustrates as well as any of the poet's betterknown monologues the richness of the imagination that could recognize enormous poetic opportunity and dramatic potential in a particular moment in a character's story. 'Semele' demonstrates Tennyson's skill at interweaving elements from more than one classical source, and in evoking the sound and rhythm of classical poetry in English verse, in this case to give his speaker a voice that is appropriate to her temporal and cultural context. But how did he go about developing this particular skill? To find out, we must turn to his earliest experiments with classical themes. The First Classical Voices In his earliest experiments with the classical monologue, 'Antony to Cleopatra,' 'Mithridates Presenting Berenice with the Cup of Poison,' and 'Hero to Leander,' Tennyson imitates Ovid's use of the ancient form of the prosopopoeia, or impersonation, in composing an address of a classical figure to his or her lover. This technique involves a speaker from classical antiquity expressing his or her personal reactions to particular events in mythology or history, as in Ovid's Heroides, a series of letters penned by mythological characters, mainly women. " Dwight Culler, who has placed Tennyson's classical monologues in the context of Ovid's work, points out that Tennyson's early monologues 'are not dramatic monologues in the Browningesque sense because there is no revelation of character'; indeed, one is given only the barest glimpse in each of any sort of real psychological insight.14 Nevertheless, these poems are entirely original, despite their being steeped in tradition, and despite the fact that they do not yet show Tennyson at the height of his powers as a poet. The value of studying them lies in the view they offer us of a young poet learning his art - of Tennyson the young scholar becoming Tennyson the poet. In addition, these poems provide a valuable look at Tennyson's earliest attempts to master the irony that is implicit to the dramatic monologue as a form. 'Antony to Cleopatra,' published in the Poems By Two Brothers volume of 1827, is a variation of the aubade, the lovers' parting song at dawn,

The Building Blocks of Song 47

and more particularly of the alba, the Provencal form that is specifically a lament, for the aubadeis typically a joyful poem. In this poem, Antony bids his lover Cleopatra farewell on the brink of their defeat at Actium, and he takes the opportunity to remind her of the sacrifices he has made for their relationship. In composing the poem Tennyson first turned to Horace's Ode 1.37, in which the speaker calls his friends to drink to the defeat of the Egyptian queen. Antony is carefully omitted from Horace's poem, and he is suggested only by Horace's reference to Cleopatra's debauchery in referring to her involvement 'Contaminate cum grege turpium / morbo virorum' ('with a swarm of foul men, contaminated by disease,' 9-10). Horace displays a respect for the queen, however, in referring to her reaction to her defeat. In lines 21-3 he writes, 'Quae generosius / Perire quaerens nee muliebriter / Expavit ensem' ('seeking a nobler death, (she) was not frightened like a woman seeing a sword'). Horace concludes his poem with this nod of approval to Cleopatra's fortitude, calling her 'Non humilis mulier' ('No humble woman,' 32), a woman unwilling to submit to being dragged in chains through the streets of Rome in the ceremony of Augustus's triumph. Tennyson's poem recalls Horace in lines 5-6: 'But wear not thou the conqueror's chain / Upon thy race and thee,' and in lines 11-12: 'Fair daughter of a regal line! / To thraldom bow not tame.' 'Antony to Cleopatra' is clearly a juvenile composition; nevertheless it exhibits traces of the power of suggestion and irony that became a characteristic of Tennyson's mature dramatic monologues. Much more than a simple, sentimental parting song to his lover, Antony's monologue has the carefully meditated purpose of subtly demanding Cleopatra's continued devotion to him, now that they have failed in their attempt to overcome Augustus. In line 3 Antony tells Cleopatra of his 'breaking heart,' and in line 8 he commands her, 'Yet still be true to me: / For I for thee have lost a throne, / To wear the crown of love alone.' The placement of 'alone' at the end of the line gives it a heightened emphasis, and represents a poetic practice in word arrangement characteristic of Latm poetry. In the second stanza Antony follows with a second imperative to Cleopatra not to give in to 'thraldom,' and by now the reader realizes the double intention behind this request. More than his concern that Cleopatra choose a noble death over slavery, he is also concerned that she not fly to safety, leaving him to the enemy, for he reminds her that 'My every wish on earth was thine'; that 'I have moved within thy sphere,' an enormous concession for a Roman to have made for a woman; and finally that 'A subject world I lost for thee' (13-20).

48 Stateliest Measures

Antony refers to the end of the battle of Actium in stanza 3, telling Cleopatra that when he saw her flying, 'I followed thee, to save' (24). The inclusion of the infinitive 'to save' seems unnecessary, and can be interpreted as Antony's attempt to convince Cleopatra that he pursued her motivated purely by his interest in her safety. (It is interesting to consider the difference in the effect of this line had Tennyson chosen to place the comma after 'followed' rather than after 'thee.') Antony cleverly echoes Julius Caesar with his 'I sought, I saw, I heard but thee' (29), reminding Cleopatra of her former lover's famous quotation, T came, I saw, I conquered,' and also once again of Antony's own sacrifice, for in his statement Caesar's T conquered' is replaced with T heard but thee' suggesting that it is he who has been conquered. The last stanza of the poem contains Antony's final attempt to secure Cleopatra's ultimate loyalty. He reminds her, 'Thine on the earth, and on the throne, / And in the grave, am F (31-2), for better or for worse, and he makes his final appeal with the joyous exultation: 'How shall my spirit joy to hear / That thou art ever true!' (35-6). Tennyson returns to the alba format in a second dramatic monologue published in the 1827 Poems By Two Brothers, 'Mithridates Presenting Berenice with the Cup of Poison.' As in 'Antony to Cleopatra,' here Tennyson gives a lamenting voice to a male character bidding his lover farewell just before his defeat; this time the impending threat is Mithridates' defeat by Pompey.15 Tennyson has fictionalized much in this account, for tradition holds that Mithridates did not confront the princess Berenice directly, but sent an order that he wished for his entire harem to die, and not merely Berenice. Again, a strong echo of Horace is evident. In the penultimate stanza the speaker's command 'Fill high the bowl! the draught is thine!' reminds the reader of Horace's occasional calls for wine in such carpe diem poems as Odes 1.9 and 1.11, as well as in the opening of Ode 1.37, 'Nunc est bibendum' ('Now is the time for drinking'), the ode on the death of Cleopatra discussed as an influence on 'Antony to Cleopatra.' Like Antony, Mithridates begins to argue against the idea of accepting the shameful fate of slavery to the Romans. He asks Berenice, 'wilt thou basely go, / My love, thy life, thy country shaming' (13-14), and the syntax here leaves his question open to two interpretations. One may at first read 'My love,' as a vocative addressed to Berenice in the middle of the sentence; but 'My love' can also be read as one of the elements, along with her life and her country, that Berenice will be shaming if she chooses to bow to thraldom. This interpretation provides a subtle hint

The Building Blocks of Song 49

of Mithridates' motivations in encouraging Berenice so eagerly to end her life: he wishes to avoid the shame of having his concubine captured by his enemies. In stanza 5 Mithridates' argument continues in an ironic vein as he asks Berenice, 'wilt thou basely go / Proud Rome's triumphal car adorning?' following immediately with his answer for Berenice: 'Hark! hark! I hear thee answer "No!" / The proffered life of thraldom scorning' (1720). In later monologues such as 'Tithonus' and 'Tiresias,' Tennyson would realize the potential of providing the reader with subtle clues concerning the auditor's reaction to the monologist's words; here no such clues are provided. Mithridates ends his monologue with a farewell to Berenice, and the reader imagines that he has handed her the cup and that she is drinking. Perhaps the ultimate irony of the poem lies in the fact that, historically, Mithridates managed to survive this defeat at Nicopolis, and that, according to legend, he had made himself immune to poison by means of a special homeopathic diet.16 A third classical monologue in the 1827 Poems By Two Brothers in which Tennyson chooses a classical theme is 'The High Priest to Alexander.' In this short monologue, the high priest in Jerusalem acknowledges Alexander's prophesied success in his conquests, but also admonishes Alexander to respect the God of Jerusalem. Most of the poem concerns his praise of the 'God of gods.' Christopher Ricks cites Charles Rollin's L'Histoire ancienne as the poem's source. The poem is a good example of the young Tennyson experimenting with such poetic devices as varying metrical patterns and heavy instances of repetition, elements that give this and many of his later and more mature poems the lyrical quality of a song. Along with 'Antony' and 'Mithridates,' this poem also indicates Tennyson's interest in the drama of the rise and fall of ancient empires. Tennyson's first volume of poetry after Poems By Tivo Brothers, his 1830 Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, includes the poem 'Hero to Leander,' another alba in which a tearful Hero begs her lover Leander not to leave her. Douglas Bush has pointed out the similarity of Tennyson's representation of Hero to that in Thomas Hood's 'Hero and Leander' (1827), which likewise begins with the lovers' mournful parting after an amorous meeting.18 Nevertheless, in representing Hero through her own words arid in establishing the interplay between her references to her lover's safety and her presentiments of the danger awaiting him, Tennyson's poem much more closely recalls the letter from Hero to Leander that constitutes the nineteenth poem of Ovid's Heroides.

50 Stateliest Measures Tennyson's poem echoes Ovid from the first stanza, when Hero contrasts Leander's safety in staying with her to the danger of the night outside, and mentions that the waves climb 'high and fast.' In line 9 she states, 'My heart is warmer surely than the bosom of the main,' eroticizing Leander's swim through the sea, much as Christopher Marlowe had done to such great effect in his unfinished 'Hero and Leander' (1598). In both of his epistles in the Heroides based on this myth, Leander to Hero, and Hero back to Leander, Ovid infuses the language of each of the young lovers with eroticism, both in referring to Leander's swim and in anticipating their eventual meeting. In Ovid's poem, Hero wavers between imploring her lover to come to her and acknowledging the danger of Leander's swimming of the Hellespont. Tennyson's version depicts the passion and the youthful impatience of Ovid's Hero and functions as a sequel to Ovid's letter in giving us Hero's words to Leander after their nighttime rendezvous. In 'Hero to Leander' Tennyson develops irony through the heavy use of foreshadowing. Hero warns Leander that if he goes tonight, 'the roaring brine / Will rend thy golden tresses' (23-4), and vows that should he die, 'My soul must follow thee!' (31). Like Ovid, Tennyson uses these clear cases of foreshadowing to emphasize the passion and the irnpetuousness of the young lovers. Nevertheless, Hero's repetitious imploring of Leander as he is clearly walking out the door - in line 38, her 'Leander! go not yet' suggests that he is not heeding her request that he stay explodes much of the tragic romance of Ovid's version, which Ovid achieves by concentrating on the interchange between the lovers before rather than after their meeting. Not his finest moment to be sure, yet Tennyson's experiments in this poem were crucial in the development of the particular characteristics that made his later classical monologues such consummate successes. The relationship of this poem to Ovid's Heroides 19 also clearly demonstrates the debt that the English dramatic monologue owes to this particular collection of Ovid's work. Experiments with Choric Song Rather than always giving a voice to merely one speaker in his classical monologues of the 1820s, Tennyson occasionally experimented with the idea of giving a unified voice to a group of speakers, as in 'The SeaFairies,' 'The Hesperides,' and 'The Lotos-Eaters.' When he did so, he characteristically worked song rhythms and a high degree of repetition into the language of such groups, a technique that often evokes the

The Building Blocks of Song 51

sound and rhythm of the choric odes of ancient Greek tragedy. An early example of Tennyson's attempt to achieve a choric song, albeit for a single singer, can be found in the little-known poem 'Dion, Ilion,' a brief lyric found in a pocket notebook that also contained many manuscripts of the compositions included in the 1830 Poems, Chiefly Lyrical: Ilion, Ilion, dreamy Ilion, pillared Ilion, holy Ilion, City of Ilion when wilt thou be melody born? Blue Scamander, yellowing Simois from the heart of piny Ida Everwhirling from the molten snows upon the mountainthrone, Roll Scamander, ripple Simois, ever onward to a melody Manycircled, overflowing thorough and thorough the flowery level of unbuilt Ilion, City of Ilion, pillared Ilion, shadowy Ilion, holy Ilion, To a music merrily flowing, merrily echoing, When wilt thou be melody born? Manygated, heavywalled, manytowered city of Ilion, From the silver, lilyflowering meadowlevel When wilt thou be melody born? Ripple onward, echoing Simois, Ripple ever with a melancholy moaning, In the rushes to the dark blue brimmed Ocean, yellowing Simois, To a music from the golden twanging harpwire heavily drawn. Manygated, heavywalled, manytowered city of Ilion, To a music sadly flowing, slowly falling, When wilt thou be melody born?

5

10

15

'Ilion, Ilion' imaginatively reproduces the song sung by Apollo, who was credited with building the walls of Troy with the extraordinarily beautiful music of his lyre.19 The refrain of this song consists of the question 'When wilt thou be melody born?' - a refrain that works on two levels, referring on one level to the construction of Troy's walls with the music, while on another suggesting the rebirth of the legendary city in poetic song.20 When 'Ilion, Ilion' is read as a song, the poem takes on a meaning where it may have seemed to have lacked one before. As the rivers near the city do, the poem flows from the 'mountainthrone' of Ida (4), down to the 'lilyflowering meadowlevel' (11), arid finally from the rushes to the 'dark blue brimmed Ocean' (15). In contrast to this downward

52 Stateliest Measures movement, the poet's use of repetition creates a sense of the city's being built upwards, particularly in the opening lines, in which he 'builds' Ilion with a succession of adjectives: 'Ilion, Ilion, dreamy Ilion, pillared Ilion, holy Ilion / City of Ilion' (1-2), and in line 7 in which he repeats 'City of Ilion, pillared Ilion, shadowy Ilion, holy Ilion.' In the second stanza, the construction continues. Here the city is much less 'dreamy' and more substantial: 'Manygated, heavywalled, manytowered city of Ilion.' To contribute to this image of building, Tennyson makes irregular variations in the meter and lengths of the lines, which he gradually builds longer, and then shorter, in each stanza. In addition, stanza one consists of nine lines, while the second consists of ten. Thus, the poem itself constructs the mythical city by placing image on top of image, evoking the rising of the walls and towers out of a slow and steady rhythm that waxes and wanes - the rhythm of the song itself, which Tennyson refers to in lines 16 and 18: 'To a music from the golden twanging harpwire heavily drawn' and 'To a music sadly flowing, slowly falling.' This final image of falling, of course, foreshadows the city's ultimate collapse. Far more than merely an unfinished 'fragment,' 'Ilion, Ilion' provides an important illustration of how Tennyson aimed to wed sound and meaning in the choric songs of his classical monologues. 'The SeaFairies' would prove to be his first experiment in devising such a voice for a group of characters speaking as one. First published in 1830, 'The Sea-Fairies' was the first of several poetic experimentations with the characters and events of Homer's Odyssey. In this poem Tennyson abandons his experiments with the more traditional and more rigid stanza forms of 'Antony to Cleopatra,' and 'Hero to Leander,' and attempts to approximate Homer's dactylic hexameter. In book 12 of the Odyssey, Odysseus describes the song of the Sirens and their promise to sing of the events of the Trojan War, for they state that they know all of the events of the world (lines 184—205). In Tennyson's version, however, the Sea-Fairies go into much more detail in their attempt to lure the mariners to their shore. They describe the geographical characteristics of their island with, appropriately, a great deal of aural imagery, including the calling fountain (9), the 'full-toned sea' (15), the wailing mew (19), and the carolling gales (23). 'The Sea-Fairies' begins by setting the scene with a six-line passage describing Odysseus's mariners sailing slowly by the land of the Sirens. These opening lines are in slowly measured iambic pentameter, drawn out with a high percentage of monosyllables: 'Slow sailed the weary mar-

The Building Blocks of Song 53 iners and saw ...' (1), setting a tone that will provide a sharp contrast to the flowing, rhythmic song of the Sirens to come. Here, Tennyson cleverly alludes to Keats's sonnet 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer,' an allusion that is doubly effective, since the subtle reminder of this sonnet in which Keats describes the experience of reading Homer reinforces in the reader's mind that this poem is an interpretation of Homer's account in the Odyssey^ After line 6 of the poem Tennyson recreates the Sirens' song itself, much as he does the song that built the walls of Troy in 'Ilion, Ilion.' In the original version of 'The Sea-Fairies,' Tennyson placed the title 'SONG' between lines 6 and 7 to ensure that the reader not miss the shift from the narrator's words to the song of the sirens. Surely he realized when he revised the poem in 1853 that the marked shift in the meter and content of the poem made the use of such a section title unnecessary. The song begins in line 7 with seven to eight accented beats per line and then fluctuates between series of three- and four-beat lines, providing this section with an appropriately free-ranging rhythm that underscores the emotive and irrational nature of the Sirens' song. The 1853 revision of the poem is superior to the original in the omission of fourteen lines originally placed between lines 8 and 9 - lines that were overly simplistic in their composition and that evoked a repetitious nursery rhyme more than the mesmerizing song of supernatural beings. The 1853 revision also included the addition of lines 16-31, a rich and descriptive passage depicting the wailing of the mew and the characteristics of the rainbow on the Sirens' island, which fits with and develops the rest of the poem to a far greater degree than the original, simple four lines: 'Merrily carol the revelling gales / Over the islands free: / From the green seabanks the rose down trails / To the happy brimmed sea.' In addition to their heavy use of sensual imagery, Tennyson makes the Sirens' song more alluring with sexual innuendo. In lines 14—15 the natural description of the island is eroticized: 'And thick with whitebells the clover-hill swells / High over the full-toned sea.' The Sirens invite the mariners to 'come hither and frolic and play' (18), they call themselves 'merry brides' (33), and they promise the sailors 'sweet kisses' (34) and eyes glistening 'With pleasure arid love and jubilee' (36). Interestingly, they promise that the sailors' eyes will glisten also, 'When the sharp clear twang of the golden chords / Runs up the ridged sea' (37-9), a bit of synaesthesia that adds to the knowledge the reader already has that all is not right with these beings; the situation is not as innocuous as it may seem to be to the sailors.

54 Stateliest Measures Tennyson continued to experiment with the idea of the choric song for groups of classical speakers in two works in his 1832 Poems. First, in 'The Hesperides' he reproduces the song of the sisters charged with guarding the famous apples of the Hesperides. As in 'The Sea-Fairies,' Tennyson opens 'The Hesperides' with a few lines of iambic pentameter with which he sets the scene before launching into the choric song. The opening lines of the poem describe 'Zidonian Hanno' sailing near the island of the Hesperides. Like Ulysses and his men in 'The Sea-Fairies,' Hanno hears voices 'Blown seaward from the shore' (8), and the mariners can distinguish the song from that of the nightingale or of the 'Lybian lotusflute' (6-7) ,22 After the first thirteen lines the song is recreated for the reader, and it is neatly separated by a sharp shift in meter, and by the heading 'SONG' between lines 13 and 14. In the early editions of Poems, Tennyson emphasized the separation even further by beginning the song on a new page in the text. The song is divided into three sections of unequal length in which the Hesperides sing of the necessity of guarding the golden apple and its 'ancient secret' (72). In their song, the sisters indicate that all around them is mute, and they remind themselves that, 'If ye sing not, if ye make false measure, / We shall lose eternal pleasure' (23-4), which implies the importance of their song as their means of guarding the precious fruit. The implication that the song must neither end nor be sung in false measure also may suggest the pressure upon the artist to guard what is divine with song that is both continuous and consistently well wrought. The sisters sing that 'Five and three ... make an awful mystery' (28-9), referring to their number, plus their father Hesperus, to whom they sing in stanza 2, and the dragon Ladon, who guard the apples with them: 'Five links, a golden chain, are we / Hesper, the dragon and sisters three' (65-6). The sisters also refer to their number, and perhaps also to the three stanzas of their song, as necessary for the life of the tree they guard, which grows and blossoms 'to threefold music' (30, 32). Several of the sisters' statements can be interpreted as referring to the task of the artist. 'Honour comes with mystery,' they sing, and 'Hoarded wisdom brings delight' (47-8). Their task is to maintain that mystery and to hoard wisdom, for 'If the golden apple be taken, / The world will be overwise' (63-4). In the third stanza, the sisters continue to allude to the mystery and wisdom symbolized by the apples in the contrasts that they draw between east and west and day and night. 'Hesper hateth Phosphor, evening hateth morn,' they sing (82), and 'All good things are in the west' (96), for they explain that 'the western sun and the west-

The Building Blocks of Song 55

ern star, / Arid the low west wind, breathing afar, / The end of day and the beginning of night / Make the apple holy and bright' (89-92). Douglas Bush compares Tennyson's treatment of the role of the artist in this poem to that in his 'The Palace of Art,' also published in 1832, and identifies the theme of the poem as the artist's struggle with the question of whether he must live in an intellectual world of his own, or seek 'the nourishment of ordinary human life.'23 He points out that Tennyson's predecessors, particularly Shelley and Keats, also struggled with this question, and that James Spedding, as well as Tennyson's other friends at Cambridge, interpreted 'The Hesperides' in this way.24 'The Hesperides' is more a modern speculation on art and the problem of the artist than a classical piece; indeed, its opening reference to Milton's Comus in the epigram, 'Hesperus and his daughters three, / That sing about the golden tree' (982-3), links the poem's themes with Christian themes relating to both Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained^ Because the poem met with harsh critical reception, Tennyson never reprinted it after its publication in the 1832 Poems. No doubt he came to see it as an early experiment, and he made no further revisions to the poem, as he did with most of his other classical pieces, although Hallam Tennyson noted years later that his father 'regretted that he had done away with it from among his 'Juvenilia.'"26 Tennyson again experimented with choric song in 'The Lotos-Eaters,' which after its 1832 publication he did revise and republish in the Poems of 1842. In this poem he returns to the Odysseyfor his storyline, although the poem itself is riot heavily influenced by Homer or other classical writers. In the first forty-five lines of 'The Lotos-Eaters' Tennyson first gives Ulysses a voice: '"Courage!" he said, and pointed toward the land, / "This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon"' (1-2). These lines begin a rhythmic Spenserian stanza that initially rolls as the 'mounting wave' into the land, and then launches slowly into an extended arid vivid description of the setting of the island of the LotosEaters. The principal attribute of this passage is slowness and languor; the setting is developed as an objective correlative to the slow, dreamy state in which the inhabitants of this island live. In 'The Lotos-Eaters' Tennyson makes use of strikingly pictorial physical description in setting the mood of the poem. One of the most interesting features of the setting is the detailed description of the slow, descending streams that flow 'like a downward smoke,' a peculiar image that Tennyson uses twice in the space of three lines (8 and 10). Several other peculiarities in this description emphasize the strangeness of this

56 Stateliest Measures place; the air itself is said to be 'languid' and to 'swoon' (5), and it is oddly enough described as 'Breathing like one that hath a weary dream' (6), a line that again recalls the state of 'drowsy numbness' Keats describes in his 'Ode to a Nightingale,' the influence of which will be seen in several other places to follow. Similarly, Tennyson manages to describe the movement of the streams of water in terms that make it seem even slower than is physically possible, depicting the 'slow-dropping veils' (11) and the 'slumbrous sheet of foam' rolling downward (13). In the final lines of this opening passage Tennyson describes the state that eating the lotos-flower induces: the men's heartbeats making a music in their ears, and the sounds of sea and of the companions' voices alien and distant. In lines 41-2 Tennyson's mariners repeat the word 'weary' three times as they come to the decision not to return to their homes, which now seem far, far away. The use of repetition here effectively evokes the mariners' state, and reminds the reader of Tennyson's use of this technique in other works, as in the multiple repetitions of T am aweary, aweary' in his 'Mariana.' At line 45 the third-person narrative breaks off and is replaced by the men's actual song, which begins at line 46 under the heading 'CHORIC SONG,' and is divided into eight sections, each under the subheading of a Roman numeral. In the early versions, when the first five stanzas of the poem were also numbered, the significant alterations in the poem's opening regularity were much more noticeable, and the techniques of division that Tennyson uses between each stanza contribute to the effect of the passage of time. In his later and longer poems, particularly In Memoriam and Maud, Tennyson often chose to divide his work into clearly defined and numbered sections and to print them on successive pages, a technique that increases the reader's perception of the passage of time in reading the poem. Both the 1832 and 1842 versions of 'The Lotos-Eaters' indicate early experimentation with this technique. Originally, the opening five Spenserian stanzas of 'The LotosEaters' were spread out over the space of three pages, with the choric song beginning on the fourth page after the poem's beginning. The heightened emphasis on the passage of time in the poem becomes much more pronounced when the sections of the 'choric song' to follow begin to vary in line length as the mariners fall under the spell of the lotos plant and themselves lose consciousness of measured time. In the first five stanzas of the choric song, Tennyson's variation of stanza and line length give the impression that his Spenserian stanzas are gradually changing and growing out of proportion. As Alan Sinfield

The Building Blocks of Song 57 has rioted of this song, 'Victorian culture and the whole western tradition suggest that we should disapprove of intoxicated indolence, but imagery, sound and rhythm all tempt the reader into acquiescence.'28 The mariners begin to become preoccupied with the cycle of life, as in line 82, in which a flower is described, which 'Ripens and fades, and falls, and hath no toil.' Here the poet's use of mainly monosyllabic words and two sharp caesurae, strengthened by the use of commas, draws the line out and emphasizes the action described in the line: the cyclic process of nature.9 Tennyson added the sixth stanza in the 1842 revision of 'The LotosEaters,' and these nineteen lines add much to the reader's impression of the drugged mariners in its ironic allusions to the situation of the Odyssey. In this stanza the sailors speak of their families back home, but decide that there is no reason to return, since 'all hath suffered change' (116), and since they are convinced that their 'household hearths are cold' (117), their sons have succeeded them, or other 'island princes over-bold / Have eat our substance' (120-1). This passage is ironic, since readers of the Odysseyremember that this is exactly what has happened to Odysseus's home on Ithaca, and that the main action of the last half of the epic concerns Odysseus's efforts to re-establish order and control over his home and his kingdom. The mariners' sad assurance that the 'halfforgotten' deeds of the Trojan War are now the stuff of minstrels' songs is also ironic to the reader who recalls that during Odysseus's visit to the land of the Phaeacians in book 8 of the Odyssey, such a 'minstrel' entertains the court with an account of the war, including the heroics of Odysseus and his companions. Moreover, the mariners' imagining of their return home 'like ghosts to trouble joy' (119) recalls the pathos of Odysseus's actual homecoming in the Odyssey, and foreshadows the similarly poignant return of a later Tennysoriian hero, 'Enoch Arden' (1864) .30 Stanza 8 is the longest of the eight stanzas of the choric song with twenty-nine lines, cut from the original forty lines in the 1832 version of the poem. It opens with the mariners' lauding of the lotos, and expressing their disgust with the concept of continual seafaring. At this point Tennyson follows Homer's and Virgil's technique of using rhythm and meter to emphasize the feel of the sea journey with his 'Rolled to starboard, rolled to larboard, when the surge was seething free' (151). F.T. Palgrave recalled that Tennyson greatly admired Virgil's ability to achieve what he called this 'ocean-roll of rhythm,' in such lines as those following line 356 in Georgics 1, in which Virgil describes the rising of a storm."'

58 Stateliest Measures

In 'The Lotos-Eaters' Tennyson mastered the effects of choric song that he had attempted several times before. Much more than do 'Antony,' 'Mithridates,' and 'Hero to Leander,' the choric-song poems and Tennyson's later revisions to them indicate an increasing level of technical skill. Moreover, despite the fact that each of these poems is set in the classical world or the world of even more ancient Greek myth, in each one Tennyson was clearly attempting to write English poems with a modern relevance for an English audience. Both 'The Sea-Fairies' and 'The Lotos-Eaters' represent the danger of allowing oneself to be distracted and waylaid by sensual pleasure. The cry of Ulysses for 'Courage' is a cry to stay on course, to keep one's goals in sight, and to avoid the pitfalls of sexual allure and hedonistic pleasures represented by the metaphor of the lotos as a powerful drug. Ulysses is recast as a spokesman who engages in a contemporary debate about right living; he is an important moral voice in an age in which religious values would continue to be shaken to their foundations. By the end of the century the themes of both poems could also be applied with more relevance to issues concerned with the excesses of colonial expansion, particularly sexual ones.32 In 'The Hesperides,' the opening reference to Hanno suggests that this poem will comment more directly on a national program of expansionism. But why refer to an obscure Punic explorer and not one of the more famous European explorers of the Renaissance? First, Hanno is himself a figure of classical history, and his voyage to west Africa in the fifth century B.C.E. was a voyage beyond the limits of the known world of that time. Indeed, Hanno's journey west may well have brought him within range of the western isle of the Hesperides, as the ancients conceived of it. Second, and more importantly, as a Punic explorer Hanno reminds us of the fact that Carthage was ultimately eradicated by the Romans. 'Kingdoms lapse, and climates change, and races die,' the Hesperides sing (46). As Hanno sails away it seems that he is missing the point of the Hesperides' song, which emphasizes beauty in mystery - art and culture - in contrast to the relentless search for other treasures: 'The world is wasted with fire and sword / But the apple of gold hangs over the sea' (104-5). Of course these three poems can be read on many levels, and can be applied both to the life of the individual as well as to that of a nation. Nevertheless, they clearly reflect early contemporary anxieties about the demise of culture in the wake of scientific and industrial developments, and continuing expansion abroad. As Matthew Rowlinson shows in his oo

The Building Blocks of Song 59

analysis of the ideology of 'Ulysses,' these poems, like 'Ulysses,' are perfect examples of early works in which Tennyson raised questions about particular cultural problems that would remain relevant throughout the century. The Success of 'CEnone' Several of Tennyson's achievements in his earliest classical poems would be repeated in his first fully successful classical monologue, 'CEnone.' Dwight Culler praises this poem's 'purely lyrical element, which moves from the soft complaint of the early lines to the fiery passion of the close' and calls 'CEnone' 'the clearest and purest example of monodrama by a major English poet.'34 Composed between 1830 and 1832, 'CEnone' in many ways exemplifies Tennyson's goal in remodelling classical material in a thoroughly innovative manner and with an updated interpretation for a modern audience. The poem's complex and profoundly interwoven fabric of allusion to its classical sources is achieved with a success that Tennyson would rarely repeat. 'CEnone' also demonstrates his first sustained success in achieving the goal he had struggled with in his earlier classical monologues and in his experiments with choric song in 'suiting an imitation of Greek language to Greek characters.'3r> 'CEnone' opens with a vivid pictorial presentation of 'a vale in Ida, lovelier / Than all the valleys of Ionian hills' (1-2).36 The vale itself is defined for the reader by the landscape around and beyond it. The 'swimming vapour' sloping athwart the glen (3) begins a slow and gradual sense of movement as it creeps to the lawns and meadow-ledges midway down the vale and the roaring cataracts below them that ultimately reach the sea (5-9). Behind the vale stands the mountain Gargarus, and in front of the valley the gorges open wide apart, revealing the citadel of Troy. This opening description closely mirrors Ovid's description of a similar setting in his tale of lo in the first book of the Metamorphoses (lines 568ff). The reason for such careful attention to descriptive detail in this landscape will become clear as the poem progresses and the reader begins to identify CEnone's fate and that of her natural landscape as one and the same. Moreover, the association of CEnone with lo, a mortal woman loved and abandoned by Zeus, likewise becomes clear as the poem progresses. Paul Turner has also pointed out the similarity of these lines to Ovid's description of the setting of his own version of the Judgment of Paris in

60 Stateliest Measures Heroides 16.53-8. Turner describes the poem as a 'distillation' of the works of both the classical and the English Romantic poets, and he argues that the poem fails ultimately because of its unusually heavy allusiveness. It should be noted, however, that Tennyson's project here was not merely to amalgamate multiple literary passages, but to evoke such passages in order to approximate for the English reader the experience of reading Greek and Latin poetry, and to use a classical story to raise questions about responsible civic behaviour in the modern age. Almost all of the features of CEnone's landscape add to the movement of this first stanza: the swimming vapour slopes and creeps among the pines (3-5); the falling brook roars in its long descent (8); Gargarus stands up and takes the morning (11); and the gorges spread apart (12). The reader is struck not only by the unusual sense of movement in this pastoral setting, but also by the type of movement suggested. In lines 5-7 the language is suggestive; here the lawns and meadow-ledges 'midway down / Hang rich in flowers,' conjuring an image of a lush garden. The ravine is 'cloven' by the long brook; and the passage's sexual associations are heightened by the image of the ravine's splitting in two, like the gorges that spread apart in line 12. The language used to describe the ascent of Gargarus is sexual as well when the mountain is described as 'taking' the morn. All of these images combine to set an erotic backdrop for the narrative to follow, as well as to lead the reader from the natural world of Ida to a focus on the columned citadel of Troy - a movement that foreshadows the storyline as events occurring in the vale cause political ramifications for the city beyond it.38 Indeed, the sexual landscape is established here as an objective correlative to the situation of the woman who will describe how she has been loved and rejected. The connection of CEnone with a feminine landscape also establishes an important thematic association, for the landscape, like CEnone, will be destroyed by Paris, as we learn at the end of her lament. The pastoral setting of 'CEnone' is also significant in its association with the stance and complaints of the rejected lover in classical poetry. Examples can be found in such works as the Idyllsof Theocritus and the Eclogues of Virgil. In the third Idyll of Theocritus, for example, a lovesick shepherd laments his rejection by his beloved Amaryllis. One also might recall the spurned Corydon's pining for the beautiful Alexis in the second of Virgil's Eclogues, or the laments of the rejected Gallus, the elegiac poet to whom Virgil gives a voice in the tenth Eclogue. Tennyson's most direct source, however, is the fifth letter of Ovid's Heroides, CEnone's letter to Paris.

The Building Blocks of Song

61

In Tennyson's poem CEnone enters the richly described landscape 'wandering forlorn' in lines 14-15.39 She is pale and dejected, and her hair is described as 'floating' around her neck, a watery description that recalls the swimming vapour of stanza 1 and that also begins a series of watery images Tennyson will use to describe CEnone (18). She sings to the stillness of the place (20), until the mountain shade 'sloped downward' to her, a culmination of the movement of the scenery, perhaps also representing Nature's sympathy for CEnone, 'sloping downward,' to comfort her. After all, the addressee and the setting of the poem are one and the same - CEnone's mother, Mount Ida. CEnone begins her song at line 22, a refrain that Tennyson himself called 'Theocritean,' and which will be repeated incrementally throughout the rest of the poem.40 Here Tennyson has at last found a more effective use for a modified choric song in providing a speaker with a refrain, the repetition of which greatly accentuates her emotional state. Alan Sinfield has pointed to the incantatory aspects of CEnone's refrain as an explanation for its 'magical power' to persuade the reader to believe in the Tightness of her prophecy - a Tightness that is also supported by the reader's knowledge of the events that transpire in the ancient story.41 CEnone begins to sing at high noon; her surroundings are hot, still, and deathlike. The grasshopper is silent, the lizard rests like a shadow, and the winds are dead.42 As always, a close look at Tennyson's language reveals complex relationships between sound, meaning, and allusion. As Ricks notes, the antithesis of 'rests' (27) and 'awake' (29) echoes the second idyll of Theocritus, in which a rejected lover speaks of her turmoil as the only interruption in the still night,43 and more so Eclogue 2, which is set in the heat of high noon. Theocritus's speaker says that 'the night is windless, the sea lies still; / Only my turmoil interrupts the calm.'44 Virgil's Corydon, in the Eclogue, tells his beloved Alexis that while all else sleeps in the shade, he alone casts about under the burning sun, retracing his beloved's footsteps (2.12-13). The most important classical source for this scene, however, is Aeneid 4.522ff., which describes Dido's restless longing for Aeneas as the rest of the palace sleeps around her. CEnone's statement, 'And I am all aweary of my life' (32), epitomizes the situation of the rejected lover who identifies his or her pain as a death blow, an example being the figure of Gallus in Virgil's tenth eclogue, who is certain that he is dying from his heartbreak (Eclogue 10.9-10, and 34-5), and again echoes Tennyson's 'Mariana.' In the next

62 Stateliest Measures stanza, beginning at line 33, QEnone cries to the earth, the hills, the caves, and the mountain brooks to witness her despair, echoing a passage in Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, lines 88-91, in which Prometheus calls to the light, the winds, the rivers, the waves of the sea, the earth, and the sun to witness his suffering.45 CEnone concludes her invocation with an appropriate simile comparing the building of the walls around Troy to the building of her sorrow in her song, referring again to the myth that inspired Tennyson's composition of Tlion, Ilion.'46 Tennyson's lines 'Aloft the mountain lawn was dewy-dark, / And dewy dark aloft the mountain pine' (47-8) are reminiscent of Ovid in the chiastic repetition of 'dewy-dark.' The shift from the dewy-dark lawn to the dewy dark pine is a shift from feminine to masculine, from the female valley to a single phallic pine, a perfect lead-in to the entrance of Paris (49). Paris is at once 'beautiful' and 'evil-hearted,' his beauty having trapped CEnone and his evil-heartedness having brought about her suffering. Significantly, Paris comes in the dewy dark of the morning, while CEnone sings her lament at noon. The passage of time in the poem also symbolizes the progression of life, from love in the morning to loss, as day progresses towards night. In the next stanza Tennyson extends the objective correlative that he established in his opening description of CEnone's valley. In the first stanza the valley was alive, dynamic, and sexual, and its movement had begun to reflect the situation of CEnone; here, upon Paris's entry, the environment surges to a new height of activity: the torrent calls to CEnone from the cleft (53), and 'Far up the solitary morning smote / The streaks of virgin snow' (54-5), in an unmistakable image of sexual violence. The description of Paris in 56 as 'white-breasted like a star' again echoes Theocritus's second idyll (line 79), in which a spurned woman recalls her first sight of her lover in a procession, with a bare chest that rivalled the moon in its brightness. The passage also echoes a description of Aphrodite in the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite, in which the radiance of the goddess's breast is likened to the moon.4 Paris shows CEnone the golden apple he has been given, and invites her to witness his judgment of the three goddesses, suggesting that she hide in a cave behind a 'whispering tuft of oldest pine' (86) - making clear male/female contrasts in the imagery of the pine and the cave. The whispering pine is an additional echo of Theocritus, who opens his first idyll with a reference to a whispering pine, the classical reference again underscored by the chiastic arrangement of lines 87-8: 'Mayst well behold them unbeheld, unheard / Hear all, and see thy Paris judge

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of Gods.'48 The sense of the danger of spying present in these lines recalls Euripides' Bacchae, in which Dionysus suggests to Pentheus that he spy on the Bacchic maenads in order to satisfy his curiosity: 'You are eager for things which it is not right to see / pursuing things not to be pursued' (11. 912-13). Thus, Tennyson's play on 'behold' and 'unbeheld' and 'unheard' and 'hear' follows the nature of the Greek pun that Dionysus makes. When the contest begins it is midday, which again suggests that for CEnone noon is an ominous and threatening time of day. The goddesses come into the bower, and at their feet flowers 'brake like fire' (94), recalling the lovemakiiig of Hera and Zeus in Iliad 14,49 and of Adam and Eve in book 4 of Paradise Lost. Overhead wandering ivy and vines run riot to shield the naked goddesses from exposure. The natural description here may remind readers of the story of Diana and Actaeon in Ovid's Metamorphoses 3 (11. 138-252). As in 'CEnone,' Ovid opens this tale with a description of the natural scene: 'There was a vale in that region, thick grown with pine and cypress with their sharp needles,' and the time is noon (145). Diana chooses this thick grotto to bathe in, and upon Actaeon's inadvertent entry into the grotto, her attendants attempt in vain to shield the goddess's nakedness. Tennyson's allusion to Diana and Actaeon here is appropriate considering the echo of Euripides' Bacchae in the lines preceding this passage, for Ovid connects the story of Pentheus with that of his cousin Actaeon in the Metamorphoses. The allusion to the story of Actaeon is interesting, too, when one considers that it represents the reversal of what CErione will experience. In Actaeon's story, a man is destroyed by the rage of a goddess who feels herself insulted by him; the suffering of CEnone and her vale, alternatively, will be caused by a goddess's gift. Tennyson's account of each goddess's temptation of Paris interestingly blends traditional storyline, as it survives in the Latin of Ovid and Hygirius, and altered detail. He adds to Here's offer of kingship and power by having the goddess appeal to Paris's ego - she calls him 'kingborn,' and thus entitled to political power. 'From me, Heaven's Queen, Paris, to thee king-born' (125) is nicely balanced; the arrangement of the modifiers reinforces Here's association of Paris's royalty with her own. In lines 127-31 Here concludes her speech with a final attempt to lure Paris, subtly suggesting that it is men in power who are most like gods. She again flatters him by associating him with herself and with the other gods. Here's promise of kingship and power is clearly reminiscent of Milton's account of the temptation of Christ by Satan in Paradise

64 Stateliest Measures Regained. One also may think of Juno's dialogue with Aeolus in book 1 of the Aeneid, in which the goddess exaggerates Aeolus's power to call up or to disperse the winds. In this passage Juno hopes to flatter Aeolus into helping her destroy the Trojan fleet (11. 65-75). Pallas's speech to Paris, by contrast, is highly invested with erotic images, which is surprising for this virgin goddess. Tennyson appropriately juxtaposes polar images of male and female in describing Pallas's stance, 'O'erthwarted' with her spear leaning cold on her naked shoulder (137-8). Pallas's promise of 'Self-reverence, self-knowledge, selfcontrol' (142) is Tennyson's updated, Victorian version of her promise to Paris of military prowess. Pallas assures Paris that wisdom and strength in facing 'a life of shocks' (160) will come with the attainment of these virtues, but her offer is too abstract for the shallow Paris, who obviously places no value on self-knowledge or self-control. Pallas's offer to 'love thee well and cleave to thee,' wedding her 'vigour' to Paris's blood (157-8) is peculiar, for such overtly sexual language is out of place with the strictly non-sexual Athena of traditional mythology. But Tennyson's Pallas knows with whom she is dealing, and her adoption of sexual language is a clever attempt to lure Paris, not unlike Here's attempt to appeal to his feelings about claiming his regal birthright. As Tennyson's Victorian readers were no doubt meant to do, CEnone recognizes Pallas's offer as the best one for Paris to accept, and she is right to assume that Pallas's promise would not threaten her relationship with Paris. Culler has written that Pallas 'has clearly seized upon the central issue between Utilitarianism and Christian Humanism by emphasizing that values are absolute, not relative, and that we follow the right because of its intrinsic character and not because of its consequences.' Choosing Pallas's offer of self-knowledge and self-control would not only allow Paris to lead a responsible life, but would also avert the massive war that will be brought about by his ultimate choice. Paris does not respond to CEnone's plea in lines 165-6: 'he heard me not, / Or hearing would not hear me,' an example of wordplay that again reveals Tennyson's mastery of the conventions of classical verse. Ricks points out that the antithesis between hearing and not hearing is reminiscent of Prometheus's words about the nature of mankind in Prometheus Bound, 448: 'For men at first had eyes but saw no purpose; they had ears but did not hear.'51 Perhaps the most remarkable of the speeches of the three goddesses is Aphrodite's, whose two lines persuade Paris to award Aphrodite the apple; the other two goddesses' promises ran on for several stanzas.

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Aphrodite's offer is attractive, but her success seems to be largely due to her own sexual charms: 'drawing nigh,' the goddess 'Half-whispered in his ear' (181-2). Aphrodite's overt use of her sex appeal may be inspired by Lucian's exaggerated account of this story in which Aphrodite encourages Paris to 'Look me all over, every detail. Don't skip a 52 thing. Spend all the time you want on every part of my body.' When Paris awards the apple to Aphrodite, CEnone is 'left alone within the bower,' to be alone until she dies (188-90). She describes her emotional state at being rejected and her hatred for Helen, the new object of Paris's love. Her question 'am I not fair? / My love hath told me so a thousand times' (192-3) recalls a pastoral elegiac convention used by both Theocritus and Virgil.53 CEnone's suffering is intensified by the destruction of her beloved landscape on Mount Ida. As in Ovid's account of CEnone's tragedy in Heroidesb, CEnone's 'tallest pines' are cut and dragged away, ironically in order that a boat might be built for Paris's voyage to claim his new wife, Helen. This part of the poem also recalls the opening of Ovid's Amores 2.11, a borrowing from Catullus 64, which describes the transfiguration of ancient trees into ships to build the legendary Argo; Ovid's speaker attributes to the destruction of these trees the advent of sea travel, and thus the cause of all his problems, since his beloved Corinna insists on leaving him to travel. After the destruction of the trees, CEnone will never again see the 'morning mist' sweep through the woods or the 'moon-lit slips of silver cloud' between the 'loud stream' and the 'trembling stars' (212-15). What is lost is the vital moisture of the valley and the images of peaceful night. In describing the destruction of the trees, Tennyson leaves us with an image of a violated grove opened up and exposed to the dry heat of the noon sun. A dramatic shift occurs in the final stanzas of the poem from sexually charged watery images to images of fire and heat. CEnone speaks of 'fiery thoughts' shaping themselves within her, almost as if she were describing a child of her union with Paris (242-4). 'Wheresoe'er I am by night and day, / All earth and air seem only burning fire,' she asserts (263—4). The use of fire imagery here foreshadows the destruction of Troy, but CEnone's association of fiery thoughts with images of childbirth is also reminiscent of the story of Paris's birth. Paris's mother Hecabe (Hecuba) dreamed while pregnant that she would give birth to a firebrand, symbolizing that the unborn Paris would bring about the destruction of his homeland. The reference to childbirth in CEnone's monologue is extended by her prophecy that 'never child be born of me, / Unblest, to vex me with his father's eyes!' (250-1). This passage

66 Stateliest Measures alludes to Dido's lamentation in the Aeneid (4.327-30) that Aeneas is leaving her with nothing, not even a child to remind her of his father. Significantly, both CEnone and Dido, abandoned by their lovers, meet their ends on fiery pyres. 'CEnone' demonstrates Tennyson's first complete success in realizing the three attributes that characterize his mature classical monologues. First, he chooses an original moment in the story of a familiar character - a moment that had not been dramatized before, and indeed a character who, short of Ovid's Heroides, was rarely given either a voice or an important role in the story of the beginning stages of the Trojan War. Second, and perhaps most strikingly, the poet weaves into his updated version of the Judgment of Paris a profoundly complex pattern of allusion to a wide variety of classical texts. Third, Tennyson draws on his many classical sources to provide his CEnone with a manner of speaking that is appropriate for her context in time and place. The complex fabric of allusion begins with Theocritus, on whose work Tennyson draws in constructing his pastoral landscape. His allusions to Theocritus's second idyll are important because of the parallel situation of the rejected lover, the use of a refrain, and the poem's reference to the mythological account of Ariadne's betrayal by Theseus (2.45-6), to which Tennyson also alludes. In addition to Greek lyric poetry, Tennyson refers to Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, and it should be recalled that one of the most important features of this play is Prometheus's prophecy concerning the child of Thetis, who both ancient and modern readers know will be Achilles, the Greek hero of the Trojan War, a cataclysmic event brought about by Paris's abandoning of CEnone for the Greek queen, Helen. Tennyson's allusion to Ovid's tale of lo at the beginning of the poem proves to be all the more appropriate when one considers the important role that lo plays in Prometheus Bound. In addition, the reference to the story of Dido and Aeneas is appropriate because Aeneas's adventures were occasioned by his flight from Troy after the Trojan War. Catullus 64, an epithalamion for the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, ties together elements of all of these stories. Opening with the lines referring to the destruction of the trees that built the Argo,54 the poem describes the wedding festivities of Peleus and Thetis (at which a noteworthy guest is Prometheus), and digresses into a long ecphrasis of the tapestry that covers the marriage bed, which depicts Ariadne's abandonment by Theseus. Ariadne's plight and emotional state are very similar to those of CEnone, and images of fire and burning to describe both Ari-

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adne's love for Theseus (91-3) and her rage at being rejected are also important connections to 'CEnone' (197). Additional connections to 'OErione' lie in the poem's concluding prophecy of Achilles as the offspring of the newly married Peleus and Thetis, and of the fate of the Trojan princess Polyxena, who will be burned on Achilles' funeral pyre, again foreshadowing CEnone's death. In addition to these similarities of image and emotional state, Tennyson's echoing of Catullus 64 is ultimately of thematic significance because it is at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis that the goddess Eris throws down the golden apple of discord 'Into the fair Peleian banquet-hall' (221 ).55 The connection between the story of CEnone and that of the myth of Theseus is also referred to by Ovid in Heroides 5, when CEnone reminds Paris that Helen was abducted by Theseus even before her marriage to Menelaus, and that she is likely to run off with other men. The connection of the stories of Peleus, Thetis, and Achilles, Ariadne and Theseus, and even Prometheus and lo in the fabric of allusion that Tennyson weaves through CEnone's monologue is akin to the complicated ways in which classical poets such as Catullus, Ovid, and Propertius interweave allusions to mythology not only to underscore theme and image, but also to indicate relationships between the stories themselves. The stories of these figures all come to bear on the fate of Troy, a fate that Tennyson conflates with the personal tragedy of CEnone. Although classical allusion has been a common feature of British poetry in every period, Tennyson's replication of the extremely complex relationships between particular myths and mythic figures in 'CEnone' comes closer to this characteristic of classical poetry than do other modern works that use classical allusion merely to underscore theme or image. Finally, CEnone's manner of speaking is entirely appropriate for her context in time and place. Her monologue breaks into a pattern of steady, very carefully measured blank verse, and her language is characterized by a great deal of choric song-like, incantatory repetition, as in the refrain 'O mother Ida, many-fountained Ida, / Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die,' a feature that gives her words the almost ominous quality of a spell or curse, akin to curses such as that of the witch in Theocritus's Idyll 2.°6 Tennyson also uses several Homeric epithets, including 'topmost Gargarus' (10), 'many-fountained Ida' (23), and 'lightfoot Iris' (81), which give certain passages in 'CEnone' the formulaic quality of Homer's Greek verse.5The evocation of Homer is perfectly appropriate inasmuch as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are concerned with the

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end and the aftermath of the destructive Trojan War. In (Enone's language Tennyson has finally learned to capitalize on the potential of the choric song without allowing such a song to take over or to dominate his character's voice. Adding this to what he had learned by experimenting with prosopopoeia in his early classical monologues, Tennyson achieved in 'CEnone' a fully realized monodrama, as Culler has defined it.58 Richard Cronin provides a valuable assessment of the biographical background of the composition of 'CEnone' in the early 1830s, and compares Paris's choice to the dramatic changes in both political values and life choices that Tennyson and his fellow Apostles underwent during their trip to the Pyrenees in support of the Spanish rebels in the summer of 1830 - the setting that in part inspired Tennyson's conception of CEnone's vale.59 For Cronin, Here's and Pallas's speeches in the 1832 version of the poem are complicated by their relevance to the complex contemporary debate concerning how one can 'escape from a secluded life of philosophical speculation into a life of action within a public world.'60 Seen in this light, 'CEnone' proves to be a much more successful treatment of the themes that Tennyson took up in 'The Sea-Fairies,' 'The Hesperides,' and 'The Lotos-Eaters.' In Culler's words, the poem addresses the problem of 'not merely a generation that is too dull to hear but one that listens to the false siren voices of sensuality and pride.'61 Critics have consistently recognized the relevance of 'CEnone' to contemporary Victorian cultural debate; Culler, for example, persuasively characterizes the offers of the three goddesses as representations of three competing 'ways of life' in Victorian discourse: the Utilitarian, the Christian Humanist, and the Romantic.62 Clearly the reader, like CEnone, can see the betrayal and disaster implicit in Paris's choice of Aphrodite, but Tennyson does not make a clear, unambiguous statement concerning Paris's other two choices. As Cronin has written, the poem is a sombre realization of 'the difficulty that attends any attempt to translate thought into action'; every choice is paradoxically accompanied by a simultaneous betrayal of some aspect of oneself.63 Tennyson seems to be suggesting that the key to handling this modern dilemma lies in balance and moderation. Much like the aim of the 'English Idyls' that Tennyson would turn to in the 1830s, the aim of 'CEnone' is clearly that of situating a critical modern philosophical issue in the context of a poem worthy of being compared to those of the ancients in terms of its technical skill and its complex allusiveness. In his later classical monologues, Tennyson would

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rely less heavily on pictorial description and allusions to other myths and more on the language of his characters themselves in making these works inherently classical. In this next phase, as his classical characters begin to sound more authentically classical, their words will be overshadowed by the sudden death of his closest friend Arthur Henry Hallam in September 1833 - an event that inspired not only a group of Tennyson's classical monologues, but his great elegy, In Memoriam, the subject of the next chapter.

Chapter 3 Et in Arcadia:

Transcending the Classical Elegy in In Memoriam

During the 1830s and 1840s Tennyson steadily worked on his short 'Elegies' that were later to be joined and published as In Memoriam in 1850. As was the case with many of the works that he composed during these years, classical literature remained an integral source of inspiration behind this great elegiac achievement. Perhaps more than any other single work in Tennyson's oeuvre, In Memoriam demonstrates the poet's manner of drawing heavily on earlier literary traditions while at the same time doing something entirely new; that is, establishing the conventions and limits of elegy as it was used by both the classical poets and by his British predecessors, and then subverting, modifying, and remodelling the genre in creating an original English elegy designed to subsume and indeed to surpass all prior boundaries. One of remarkable aspects of In Memoriam is the manner in which Tennyson manages to eclipse earlier achievements in the elegiac format by dramatically extending his speaker's point of view in relation to the human experience of love. As John D. Rosenberg, among others, has pointed out, the speaker's love for his friend is compared to that of 'mother, father, fiancee; wife and husband; friend, brother, mate, comrade, widow, and widower; a ghost seeking a ghost; a poor girl in a great man's house; a dog that loves its master; a father giving away a bride.'2 'Assuming a multitude of roles yet always recognizably himself,' Rosenberg writes, 'Tennyson has chosen so many objects of love that it is as if he has not chosen any; or, to turn it around, as if in choosing the godlike Hallam, he has chosen all.'3 Such a pluralistic achievement of narrative voice conveys the intensity of the speaker's particular love for his friend with remarkable success; moreover, it allows any and every reader to identify with some feature or features of that voice. As Tenny-

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son himself put it, '"I" in these poems is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking through him.'4 The speaker of In Memoriam explains in section 6: That loss is common would not make My own less bitter, rather more. Too common! Never morning wore To evening, but some heart did break.

(5-8)

As a statement on the collective human experience of loss, In Memoriam is an extraordinary achievement that goes far beyond memorializing the dead, depicting the range and character of grief, and charting the process of mourning. The multiplicity of strands of the classical tradition that Tennyson drew upon and strove to supersede in composing In Memoriam has not been fully explored. Throughout the poem Tennyson evokes, revises, and reinterprets a variety of sub-genres of ancient poetry, such as the epicedion, or poem for the dead, the genethliakon, or birthday poem, and the epithalamion, or marriage poem, which has been a popular form in English poetry throughout the centuries. Most of these sub-genres originated in early Greek poetry, and in many cases Hellenistic and Roman poets consciously experimented with and reshaped these traditional forms, as does Tennyson himself. A Victorian reader with a university education would certainly have recognized most, if not all, of Tennyson's experiments here as new interpretations of familiar categories of ancient poetry. This chapter will assess the extent to which In Memoriam represents a critical aspect of Tennyson's project of translating classical material into a modern context. The Funeral Elegy and the Pastoral Elegy

As Susan Shatto and Marion Shaw point out in the introduction to their edition of In Memoriam, the larger framework of In Memoriam is modelled on the classical funeral lament.5 The Greeks were the first to develop the genre of elegy, 'flute songs' that were typically symposiastic, historical, or dedicatory lamentations. The fifth-century poet Simonides was particularly known for his beautiful commemorative elegies written as tributes for friends and national heroes. The Latin genre of the epicedion, a poem in honour of the dead, grew out of this original Greek tradition of funeral elegy. Catullus wrote several laments on the death of his brother, poems 65, 68, and the well-

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known 101, in which the poet bids farewell to his brother with the famous phrase 'frater, ave atque vale.' Horace wrote Ode 1.24 in honour of Quintilius, as did Ovid for his fellow poet Tibullus in Amores 3.9, and Propertius on the death of a young noble in Elegy 3.18. The poet Statius is also noted for his longer contributions to the genre among his Silvae.6 There are several recurring elements in the Latin epicedion, including the speaker's description of his overwhelming grief (Catullus 65.1-4); a description of the manner of death (Propertius 3.18, 9-10); and the location of the poem at the funeral, where the laments of the mourners are described (Ovid 3.9, 5-25), or at the tomb, where the dead is addressed directly (Catullus 101). Epicedia often conclude with a prayer that the remains of the dead lie at peace, as in Ovid 3.9, or that they be comforted by the funeral rites, as in Catullus 101. One of the most common elements is the praise of the character and accomplishments of the dead, as in Ovid's laudation of Tibullus in Amores 3.9, and in Propertius's praise of the character of the nobleman whom he mourns in Ode 3.18. In In Memoriam Tennyson makes use of a number of the stock elements from Greek lamentory elegy and the Roman epicedion, and he characteristically expands on the elements he revives. His speaker concentrates on the nature of his own overwhelming grief in sections 3-8, he speculates on the nature of his friendship in 22-5, and he praises the character of his friend in sections 42, 60, 97, 109, and in the epilogue. In section 18 Tennyson describes the friend's funeral, and he sets several sections (2, 39, 67) at the tomb, including section 57, originally conceived as the final poem in the sequence, in which the speaker calls to a fellow mourner to come away from the tomb, and bids him farewell with a direct reference to Catullus 101: I hear it now, and o'er and o'er, Eternal greetings to the dead; And 'Ave, Ave, Ave,' said, 'Adieu, adieu,' for evermore. (13-16)

In addition to his expansion of the classical conventions of the funeral elegy, Tennyson also reshapes several elements that originate in variations on the genre made by Greek bucolic poets, who set their elegies in the pastoral landscape. In Theocritus's first idyll, for example, the shepherd Thyrsis sings a lament for Daphnis. Bion's famous 'Lament for Adonis,' and the 'Lament for Bion,' traditionally though dubiously attributed to Moschus, follow Theocritus in establishing the

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conventions of the pastoral elegy. Virgil continued to develop this tradition in Latin poetry in his Eclogues. In Eclogue 5, for example, one shepherd sings a lament for Daphnis, and another of Daphnis's apotheosis. In the tenth eclogue, Virgil uses elegiac conventions in a lament for the poet Gallus, and in the description of Callus's dying of grief after having been rejected by Lycoris. The tradition of the pastoral elegy was imitated arid expanded widely in British poetry, perhaps most notably in Sidney's Old Arcadia 4.75 (1581); in Spenser's 'November' of The Shepheards Calender (1579), 'Astrophel,' which was written for Sidney (1591-5?), and Daphnaida (1591); and in Milton's influential 'Lycidas' (1637). Tennyson's absorption of the genre of elegy thus included its many manifestations throughout the history of British poetry, as well as more contemporary treatments such as Byron's 'To Thyrza' (1812) and Shelley's 'Adonais' on the death of Keats (1821). But, as Peter Sacks has noted, Tennyson was striving for something beyond literary convention; in In Memoriam elements of the elegiac tradition 'are thoroughly dispersed among details of personal narrative and reflection, which heavily overscore and often contradict the poem's general trend' — creating the sense of an 'accretion of moments.'7 Sacks argues that In Memoriam's iambic tetrameter quatrains and the organization of its 133 sections contribute to a sense of slow, at times even backward-moving, time.8 While Sacks sees Tennyson as attempting to struggle against 'the unfolding of time,' surely it would be more accurate to acknowledge that he is working to achieve a sense of the slowness with which time seems to pass during a period of deep grief. The arrangement of the individual poems in the first edition of In Memoriam, in which each begins on a separate page, literally slows down the experience of reading the elegy, and contributes to the effect that each poem represents a new and particular stage in one individual's progression through mourning. Section 21 exemplifies Tennyson's refashioning of elements borrowed from the classical pastoral elegy.9 Here he adopts the selfconscious role of the poet common to the tradition of pastoral elegy throughout classical and British literature, plucking the grass of the grave with which to fashion a pan pipe: I sing to him that rests below, And, since the grasses round me wave, I take the grasses of the grave, And make them pipes whereon to blow. (1-4)

74 Stateliest Measures The poem concludes with the following stanzas: Behold, ye speak an idle thing: Ye never knew the sacred dust: I do but sing because I must, And pipe but as the linnets sing: And one is glad; her note is gay, For now her little ones have ranged; And one is sad: her note is changed, Because her brood is stolen away. (21-8)

The speaker responds to the voices of the three passersby, each of whom represents a different aspect of public judgment, reflecting a sentiment that goes back as far as the Greek lyric poet Archilochus, of whom the following fragment survives: When you upbraid me For my poems, Catch also a cricket By the wings, And shout at him For chirping.10

The final stanza of section 21 extends the metaphor of the poet as bird, suggesting that not only does the poet sing because he must, but that he sings a happy or a sad song depending upon the situation of his own life. The image of the bird returning to an empty nest, her brood having been robbed, usually by a serpent, is one that is repeated in a great number of Greek and Latin texts.11 Section 23 likewise exemplifies the traditional conventions of the pastoral elegy. In the first stanza, the speaker refers to himself as singing his grief and then describes the path down which he used to travel with his friend as a path in a pastoral landscape through 'lands where not a leaf was dumb,' and where 'all the lavish hills would hum / The murmur of a happy Pan' (10-12).12 The next two stanzas transform this landscape into a metaphor for the ideal, intellectual relationship shared by the two young friends, in which they enjoyed a communion of 'Fancy and Thought,' in a time when the 'secret of the Spring' coursed through their blood. Stanza 6 solidifies this fusion of the pastoral setting with the ideal intellectual landscape:

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And many an old philosophy On Argive heights divinely sang, And round us all the thicket rang To many a flute of Arcady. (21-4)

The image of the ringing thicket developed in this stanza alludes directly to line 8 of Virgil's tenth eclogue: 'Non canimus surdis; respondent omnia silvae,' ('We sing riot to the deaf; the woods answer all'). In addition, the reference to 'Arcady' recalls Callus's words to the Arcadians, also in Eclogue 10: 'tamen cantabitis, Arcades,' inquit, 'montibus haec vestris, soli cantare periti Arcades.' (31-3) 'Yet you, Arcadians,' he said, 'will sing this tale to your mountains, for Arcadians alone are skillful singers.'

The Arcadian flute also represents the poetry of the ancients, which Tennyson and his friend 'sang and piped' in this place along with 'old philosophy.' The self-consciousness of the speaker and his identity as a poet is a recurrent element in In Memoriam, and it is significant largely because of the speaker's unique emphasis on his own grief and on his shortcomings in trying to express his grief through his poetry. Shatto and Shaw have noted that in the few instances where the speaker acknowledges the grief of others for his friend (as in section 57 as quoted above, where he calls a fellow mourner to come away from the tomb), he returns to focus on his own grief and on his own role as chief mourner in this grand treatment of 'The Way of a Soul.' In this sense In Memoriam is distinct from many classical and British lamentatory elegies that are more ostensibly designed to console other friends or family members of the deceased. Roman Love Elegy

In Memoriam also owes much to another tradition of elegy, that of Roman love elegy as developed by Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid. These poets used the traditional elegiac couplets to chronicle the tempestuous love affair of their speaker and his invariably beautiful yet cruel domina. The first indication of the influence of this body of Latin

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literature on In Memoriam comes at the opening of the poem, section 1, in which Tennyson echoes Propertius's elegy 1.1: Thine are these orbs of light and shade; Thou madest Life in man and brute; Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot Is on the skull which thou hast made. (5-8)

While this stanza obviously refers to the victory of Christ over Death, here Tennyson also grounds In Memoriam in the Roman elegiac tradition by making use of an image borrowed from Propertius, Ode 1.1: Cynthia prima suis miserum me cepit ocellis, contactum nullis ante cupidinibus. turn mihi constantis deiecit lumina fastus et caput impositis pressit Amor pedibus. (1-4) It was Cynthia who first captured miserable me with her eyes, Me, never before touched by desire. Then Love forced me to cast down my eyes of steady haughtiness, and stepped on my head with his foot.

In this stanza Tennyson makes the first of several references throughout the poem to a personified 'Love.' In section 35 the speaker converses with Love on the ravages of time. In 126 he proclaims Love as 'my lord and king,' and refers to Love's command over him with military language. Similarly, the Roman elegists often cast Amor, or Cupid, in the role of a military commander.14 As repeatedly with Love, Tennyson's speaker also addresses 'Sorrow' in sections 3 and 16, and refers to her as the cause of his misery, much as the Roman elegist referred to his domina. This association is taken furthest in section 59, in which the speaker proposes marriage to Sorrow. Like the anguished elegiac lover, he invites Sorrow to 'rule my blood,' and 'put thy harsher moods aside' - a reference that particularly recalls the cruel personality of the typical domina as she was characterized by the Roman elegists. Another element common to both In Memoriam and Roman love elegy is the speaker's emphasis on the eternal love he has for his beloved. In section 26 Tennyson writes, 'No lapse of moons can canker Love, / Whatever fickle tongues may say' (3-4), a passage that echoes two of

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Catullus's most famous poems. In poem 5, Catullus writes that he will exchange so many kisses with Lesbia that the numbers will be thrown all into confusion, so that no malcontent will be able to cast an 'evil eye' on the lovers when he sees their kisses to be so many. Similarly, in poem 7, Catullus writes of innumerable kisses that 'an evil tongue' will not be able to curse (11-12). Tennyson's speaker also testifies to the all-encompassing love he has for his friend in section 129, and in 130 he acknowledges that his friend has become part of the living world around him, saying, 'I seem to love thee more and more,' and 'I shall not lose thee though I die' (12, 16). These lines recall similar statements made by the Roman elegists, as in Propertius 1.19, where the speaker declares his love for Cynthia that will persist even beyond the grave: illic quidquid ero, semper tua dicar imago: traicit et fati litora magnus amor. (11-12) There, wherever I may be, may I always be called your shade: Great Love crosses the shores of fate.

An additional characteristic of Roman elegy upon which Tennyson builds is the hyperbolic listing of the mistress's highly idealized virtues. Propertius lists Cynthia's beauty, her gait, and her graceful mannerisms in 2.1; in 2.2, he compares her beauty to that of the goddesses, and in 2.3 he denies that he loves her merely for her physical virtues, praising instead her accomplishments as a dancer and singer. In Amores 1.5, Ovid likewise praises Corinna, cataloguing the specific charms of her body in anticipating a sexual encounter with her. In 2.15 he again refers to her ideal physical features in an expression of envy for a ring that will be touched and worn by her. Tennyson modifies this tradition in an encomium of his own in section 109 that praises the virtues of the lost friend. The speaker lists his friend's 'critic clearness,' 'seraphic intellect,' pure passion, and love of freedom; he characterizes his friend as an ideal human being, embodying a manhood 'fused with female grace,' and possessed of extraordinary wisdom. In the epilogue to the poem, this characterization culminates in the suggestion that Hallam manifested on earth a nobler type of human being that is to come, the 'crowning race' of the future, 'Appearing ere the times were ripe' (139).15 One of the closest parallels between In Memoriam and Roman love elegy is found in Tennyson's use of the elegist's characteristic grief and

78 Stateliest Measures anguish at being separated from his beloved. In both Propertius 1.8 and Ovid 2.16, the speaker laments his separation from his lover occasioned by travel. Tennyson builds on the anxiety implicit in this situation in the cycle of poems concerned with the ship bearing Hallam's body (9-17), as well as in section 67, in which the narrator speculates on the distance between himself and his friend's sepulcher. Similarly, in section 98, the speaker expresses his hatred for Vienna, the city in which his friend died.16 Tennyson returns to the theme of separation in section 117, in which the speaker addresses the 'days and hours' that separate him from his friend's embrace. Here the speaker's expression of the delight that will accrue 'a hundredfold' following his friend's embrace (8) recalls Catullus's estimation of the hundreds and thousands of kisses that he requests from Lesbia in poem 5. Likewise, the mention of the innumerable grains of sand in line 9 of section 117 and the reference to the 'kiss of toothed wheels' in line 11 recalls Catullus 7, which compares the speaker's numbering of desired kisses to the number of grains of sand on the beach of Gyrene. The reference to the 'courses of the suns' made in the final line of the section is a convention also used by Catullus in poem 5, as well as by Andrew Marvell in 'To His Coy Mistress' (1650), which itself owes a debt to Catullus: 'Thus, though we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run' (45-6). The most notable aspect of the theme of anxiety brought about by separation is Tennyson's use of the classical tradition of the paradausithyron, the address of the excluded lover to the bolted doors of his mistress's house. Tibullus 1.1 and 1.2 provide good examples of the paradausithyron; particularly 1.2, in which the speaker curses the door and hopes that it will be struck by thunderbolts for its cruelty to him. Ovid's Amores also provide several examples of the form. In 1.6, the speaker begs the doorkeeper to open the door, and in 2.1 assures himself that his songs will eventually succeed in making the doors give way. In 3.11 he complains of his weariness from long hours of lying in vigil before Corinna's house, watching in anguish as other men slip out after meetings with her at night. In Propertius 1.16, the door itself repeats the typical speech of the excluded lover, making fun of the lover's doleful complaints. Tennyson uses the tradition of the paradausithyron in sections 7 and 119, in which the speaker addresses the doors of his friend's former home with the lines 'Doors, where my heart was used to beat / So quickly' (7.3-4 and 119.1-2). In both sections the narrator has come to

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his friend's house and reflects on times they spent together. A distinct progression in his psychological state is evident in comparing the two sections. In 7 he stands in the 'unlovely street,' waiting in vain for his friend's hand, and finally creeping away as the 'blank day' breaks. In 119, however, the speaker can smell the meadow in the street, he hears birds singing, and, in a vivid memory, he takes his friend's hand. The doors remain closed, but unlike the disappointed elegiac lovers, Tennyson's speaker has at last found a way to get beyond them. 17 The Genethliakon and the Carpe Diem Theme Although In Memoriam is a modern and expanded version of the classical and British tradition of the elegy in its funereal, pastoral, and amatory manifestations, the influence of classical literature on the poem is not limited to elegiac traditions. A number of allusions link the poem to other classical pieces and generic conventions. An example is Tennyson's use of the classical convention of the genethliakon, or birthday ode, in his celebration of Hallam's birthday in section 107:l8 It is the day when he was born, A bitter day that early sank Behind the purple-frosty bank Of vapour, leaving night forlorn. (1-4) 'But fetch the wine, / Arrange the board and brim the glass,' the speaker calls, and 'Bring in great logs and let them lie' (15-18). Not to be limited by the genethliakon tradition, section 107 thus also alludes to several of Horace's poems that address the carpe diem theme. The most direct allusion is to Horace 1.9, which includes the following passage:19 Dissolve frigus ligna super foco Large reponens atque benignius Deprome quadrimum Sabina, O Thaliarche, merum diota. Dispel the cold by piling up abundant logs beside the fireplace, and unstintingly draw a four-year-old Sabinian wine, O Thaliarchus, unmixed, from the wine-jar.20

80 Stateliest Measures

Tennyson's marriage of the genethliakon to the classical carpe diem theme in section 107 represents his original reshaping of two traditions, resulting in a poem that effectively fuses the age-old tradition of honouring a birthday with the classical value of living for the present. As such, section 107 functions both as a commemoration of the dead and as a reminder to the living to enjoy life while they can. The Propemptikon One of the cycles of sections in In Memoriam that draws particularly heavily on classical literature is the group concerned with the voyage of the ship bearing the body of the speaker's dead friend, sections 9-17. Several of these sections make use of the conventions of the classical propemptikon. Meaning 'sending someone forth,' the propemptikon is usually an address to a traveller, or occasionally an address to the ship bearing a particular traveller. In section 9, for example, the first of the sections of In Memoriam to be composed, the speaker addresses the ship bearing his friend's body: Fair ship, that from the Italian shore Sailest the placid ocean-plains With my lost Arthur's loved remains, Spread thy full wings, and waft him o'er. (1-4)

Theocritus's Idyll 7 is an obvious precedent to this section. This idyll includes a song sung by the shepherd Lycidas, who prays for the safe sea-voyage of his loved one, Ageanax. Lycidas prays for fair weather and for calm wind and waves. Another classical precedent of such an apostrophe is found in Horace's Ode 1.3, in which the poet addresses the ship that bears the poet Virgil, whom Horace calls 'animae dimidium meae' ('half of my soul'). Like Lycidas, the speaker in Horace's ode prays for the ship's safety at sea and thus for his friend and fellow poet's safe homecoming. Section 10 continues the ship imagery with the speaker's reflection on the desirability of burial over the loss of a body at sea, indicating his uneasiness over the safe return of his friend's body. This theme recalls the ancients' anxiety over an inability to bury the dead, a situation that would preclude a soul from entering the Underworld. The speaker speculates on the odd but popular conception that it is sweeter to rest in a church vault or a graveyard than to be lost at sea. He also catalogues

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the happier cargo carried by the ship alongside the 'dark freight' of his friend's body - letters and travellers, and sailors coming home to their wives, a poignant contrast to the shipment he awaits. Section 11 brings to mind an example of Augustan poetry that uses the word otium (peace, calm, idleness) in repetition in an attempt to evoke that particular emotional state. Horace's Ode 2.16 repeats otium at the beginnings of several lines in referring to the peace that a sailor prays for when caught in a wild storm at sea. The second stanza describes peace as the object of warring nations: Otium divos rogat in patenti prensus Aegaeo, simul atra nubes condidit lunam neque certa fulgent sidera nautis; otium hello furiosa Thrace, otium Medi pharetra decori, Grosphe, non gemmis neque purpura venale neque auro. (1-8) Peace, he begs of the gods, he who is caught in the open Aegean, when black clouds hide the moon and no stars shine with steady light for sailors. For Peace, beg the war-mad Thracians; For Peace, beg the Persians with the adorned quivers; Grosphus, it can neither be sold for jewels, nor purple cloth, nor gold.

As Horace repeats otium in this poem, Tennyson repeats the word 'calm' at the beginning of the first line of each stanza in section 11 in describing a calm morning and the peaceful state of nature around him, as well as the 'calm despair' (16) in the speaker's own breast, and the 'dead calm' in the breast of his friend who is still somewhere at sea (19). This repetition, coupled with the poet's use of the word 'calm' eleven times throughout the section, thoroughly achieves an atmosphere of calm, despite the reader's apprehension that the calm will not last.21 In section 17 the ship finally arrives, and the speaker addresses it once again. He blesses the ship that has done him 'so kind an office' in bring-

82 Stateliest Measures ing his friend safely home. This blessing brings to a close the depiction of the ship's journey with its repetition of lines 17-18 of section 9, the reference to his friend as the one 'I shall not see / Till all my widowed race be run.' In describing the answer to the speaker's prayers in the ship's safe arrival, and in blessing its future voyages, the language of section 17 closely resembles that of section 9, which originally articulated these prayers. Section 18 brings the ship cycle to completion with an account of the funeral of the dead friend. The section opens with lines that allude to Ovid's Tristia, 'est aliquid, fatove suo ferrove cadentem / in solida moriens ponere corpus humo,' which are translated, "Tis something worth if falling by fate or by the steel one rests in death upon the solid ground.'22 The recollection of this Ovidian passage with the opening words of section 18, "Tis well; 'tis something,' reinforces the speaker's relief that the body of his friend has arrived home safely and can be safely buried in the earth. In addition, the pathos of the situation is reinforced by the situation of Ovid's Tristia, or 'Poems of Sadness.' Ovid wrote the Tristia after his exile to Tomis, and in them he adapts the conventional situation of the excluded lover from the Amores to that of the banished poet.23 Ovid's speculation on the blessing of a burial in the earth in this passage reveals the desperation and sadness he felt in his banishment. Thus, Tennyson's allusion to Ovid's emotional state in the Tristia contributes to the emotional resonance of his own poem of mourning. The Epithalamion A final classical genre on which Tennyson draws in In Memoriam is that of the epithalamion, or marriage hymn, the word literally meaning 'outside the bed chamber.'24 The development of this genre began as early as Sappho, and important examples survive in the eighteenth idyll of Theocritus and in Catullus 61 and 62, which provide detailed descriptions of the Roman marriage ceremony, the procession of the bride to the groom's home, and the marriage hymns that were sung as part of the ritual. Conventions common to the genre include the naming of an actual bride and groom, encomia on the beauty and virtues of the wedding couple, the setting of the ceremony in the present, the role of the narrator as an initiator and a participator in the action of the wedding, a farewell to the couple, and a prayer for plentiful offspring. Later writers on the continent and in England experimented with the

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epithalamion, including Spenser, Ron sard, Jon son, and Donne, and Tennyson's epilogue to In Memonam conforms in many ways to the conventions of the genre as it developed in Europe over the centuries. Tennyson's speaker assumes an active role as an initiator and participator in the festivities, using several imperatives in calling forth the succeeding events, and the poem is written in the present tense. Like Spenser's 'Epithalamion' (1595), which chronicles the passage of the entire wedding day, Tennyson's epilogue moves gradually through the events of the day from morning to night. The speaker begins the description of the ceremony by paying brief attention to the particular virtues of the bride and the groom, Tennyson's sister Cecilia and his friend Edmund Lushirigton (33-40). He describes the bride's entrance and records the details of both the ceremony and the festivities afterwards, from pelting the bridal couple with flowers to toasting their health and future. In describing the departure of the bridal couple, the speaker moves symbolically from sadness at their departure to an optimistic acceptance of the continuing nature of life within the space of a single stanza, pro viding a miniature version of the progression of the complete In Memonam itself: A shade falls on us like the dark From little cloudlets on the grass, But sweeps away as out we pass To range the woods, to roam the park,

(93-6)

By using the conventions of the epithalamion in the epilogue of In Memonam, Tennyson effectively demonstrates the speaker's progression through grief to an optimistic view of the future, transforming the entire poem into what Tennyson himself referred to as his own Divina

Corn-media."^

Tennyson moves from the couple's departure to the gradual dispersing of the guests and reflects on the moon's shining down on the doors of the wedding chamber, a detail that is true to the classical tradition, which often includes joking aimed at the bridal couple from outside their bedroom door. Also firmly within the boundaries of the tradition, the speaker takes the opportunity at the end of the poem to prophesy the birth of noble offspring to the newly married couple, arid then follows this prophecy with a speculation on a new race of humanity that is to come: a higher, nobler breed of which his lost friend was a harbinger.

84 Stateliest Measures Once again Tennyson masters a traditional form and then departs from it, adding his own variation to its age-old structure to produce a poem that reflects his own personal experience and his vision for the future. In Memoriam and Victorian Britain Published in June 1850, In Memoriam was an achievement that brought Tennyson lasting fame and the Laureateship in November of that year. Yet from the beginning the poem has raised questions for some readers in terms of the sexuality of the speaker and his beloved friend. Manley Hopkins, father of the poet Gerard, complained of the 'amatory tenderness' expressed in In Memoriam towards a Hallam that Hopkins characterized as an 'Amaryllis of the Chancery Bar' - a reference to Virgil's Eclogues that makes it clear that the resonance of classical pastoral poetry in the poem was quite palpable to Victorian readers.26 Charles Kingsley linked the poem to the tradition of 'love passing the love of woman' and, as Hopkins did, cited Shakespeare's sonnets as an obvious influence. 27 Tennyson's friend Benjamin Jowett likewise saw the importance of Shakespeare's sonnets as a major influence in what he called Tennyson's 'sympathy with Hellenism,' and avowed that 'it would not have been manly or natural to have lived in it always.'28 Readers have continued to be perplexed by the unusually strong expression of desire evident throughout the poem, many following such early critics as Hopkins and Kingsley in inferring a homosexual relationship between the speaker and his friend.29 Indeed, Tennyson himself made corrections that indicate his own anxieties about such a construction, arid Hallam Tennyson went to further lengths to prevent such an interpretation in the Memoir?0 There is no doubt that In Memoriam, like Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855), exerted a profound influence on contemporary homosexual writers such as Edward Carpenter, John Addington Symonds, A.E. Housman, and Oscar Wilde, who struggled to express their own feelings of same-sex desire in their work. Yet as Rosenberg has put it, the speaker's sexuality in In Memoriam is perhaps best described as 'polymorphous unperverse.' As he explains, '[T]he pertinent critical distinction for us in reading In Memoriam is not between the homosexual and the heterosexual, but between the sexual... and the erotic.'31 That there is a sexual component to the speaker's desire is undeniable. Whether or not there was an actual sexual component to Tennyson's relationship with Hallam is a question of little relevance to an interpretation of the poem.

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In the years following the publication of In Memoriam, as the Victorians began to hear more and more about the value of masculine heroism, 'Muscular Christianity,' and the nobility of military action, how could a poem such as In Memoriam survive charges of effeminacy? Surely the answer lies in the poem's progression through grief and towards a validation of life and a faith in the future. For Richard Dellamora, Tennyson's 1847 publication of The Princess represents a critical step in the process by which he was able so boldly to subordinate the 'domestic sanctities' to his friendship with Hallam.32 Dellamora argues that Tennyson allows for subtle redefinition of both masculine and feminine ideals in The Princess before concluding the work with the conventional union of his Prince and Princess in marriage, much as he ends In Memoriam by resolving the issue of male intimacy in the glorification of the marital bond. Jeff Nunokawa has provided an insightful discussion of the homoeroticism of In Memoriam within its socio-cultural context. Nunokawa reads the sections of the poem as 'different moments in a narrative of development, a narrative which includes, as one of its passages, the exodus of the male subject out of the blighted pastoral regions of the homoerotic.'^ Nunokawa argues that Tennyson carefully alters his allusions to Shakespeare's sonnets to emphasize the mortality of his passion rather than its deathlessness. Section 53 perfectly illustrates Nuriokawa's reading of the poem's ultimate valorizing of traditional masculine attributes: How many a father have I seen, A sober man, among his boys, Whose youth was full of foolish noise, Who wears his manhood hale and green: And dare we to this fancy give, That had the wild oat not been sown, The soil, left barren, scarce had grown The grain by which a man may live? (1-8)

After its powerful and profound expression of same-sex desire, In Memoriam closes with the speaker's movement through his grief to a recognition of the ultimate value of the marital bond as a means of achieving a nobler race in future generations. Victorian readers clearly identified this aspect of the poem as an expression of contemporary val-

86 Stateliest Measures ues concerning personal duty and duty to country. Certainly the ultimate proof that the poem could be read in such a way lies in the grieving Queen Victoria's own testimonial: 'Next to the Bible "In Memo... „ ,24 riam is my comfort. In composing an elegy worthy of commemorating Arthur Henry Hallam, Tennyson appropriated dozens of themes and conventions from a wide range of ancient literature to form the groundwork of his poem. His familiarity with the conventions of funeral and pastoral elegy, Roman love elegy, the genethliakon, the propemptikon, and the epithalamion, and his absorption of the many manifestations of these traditions from the classical period through the generations of his British predecessors, became integral to his plan to produce an elegy that explores the whole range of the experience of human grief. In Memoriam is a Victorian elegy that builds on the traditions that it follows, but it is also a new achievement in elegy. As Peter Sacks has pointed out, its sheer length, the length of the mourning period that it seeks to commemorate, and its concentrated emphasis on the psychology of the individual set it apart as a new and significant accomplishment.35 In grounding so much of his poem in the classical tradition, Tennyson boldly asks that his work be measured by classical standards and against its classical forebears. In its length, scope, and multiplicity of voice, In Memoriam reproduces and supersedes all of the established conventions of the classical elegy, and with it Tennyson earned for himself once and for all the title of Poet of the Nation. This new position provided him with a new and more clearly articulated agenda for his classical poems, a progression that is also clearly seen in his lifelong experiments with classical meters and verse forms, the subject of chapter 4.

Chapter 4 Classical Prosody and the 'Ocean Roll of Rhythm'

Considering the nature and extent of Tennyson's classical background, it is no surprise that his absorption of Greek and Latin verse left an indelible impression on the sound of his own poetry. As he began to experiment with composing his own verses as a child, he also began translating favourite classical passages and works into English, as many of his contemporaries and predecessors had done. In these early translations Tennyson undertook his first attempts to approximate the sound and the rhythm of the original verse in English verses, and to compose poems that were worthy of comparison to the metrical perfection of their classical antecedents. Much more than mere exercises, Tennyson's metrical experiments ultimately became an important part of the way he used his classicism to solidify his reputation as a poet of the nation, as the details of these poems' publication history will suggest. Charles Tennyson has provided a good introduction to the various meters that Tennyson used throughout his poetic career in his essay 'Tennyson's Versification,' but the nature of his essay as a concise survey precludes a thorough discussion and analysis of each of the various meters Tennyson used.1 The aim of this chapter is to extend this work in a more thorough analysis of the poems in which Tennyson either made use of an actual classical meter or found a way to approximate it in his own style, usually with an English meter altered and adapted to reproduce the sound and rhythm of the classical original. This chapter will also consider ways in which these metrical experiments relate to the aims of Tennyson's mature works, particularly his Laureate poetry. Quantitative Verse and Accentual Verse Tennyson was born at a time when philological scholars were carrying on extremely controversial debates about the proper way to scan Greek

88 Stateliest Measures and Latin verse, and whether or not English could effectively be adapted to classical meters and verse forms. An excellent example of the kind of scholarship being published on this topic in the eighteenth century is John Foster's An Essay on the Different Nature of Accent and Quantity, with their Use and Application in the English, Latin and Greek Languages. Originally published in 1762, with a second edition in 1763, the later editions of Foster's Essay included rebuttals from fellow scholars attacking Foster's theories, as well as Foster's heated replies. Still considered a standard work decades later, the Essay was issued in a third edition in 1820, and this edition can be found among the volumes in George Clayton's Tennyson's library (Campbell #117). Alfred's inscription of 'A. Tennyson' on the inside front board of this volume suggests his familiarity with this work, which indeed may have been an important influence on his early understanding of metrical theory. In his Essay, Foster writes that the subject of accentual versus quantitative verse has been 'much puzzled' by the use of undefined terms (Introduction, xl). He explains that accent is the 'elevation, or prolongation of sound' in the pronunciation of a word, or a stress resulting from the combination of the two (xl). The human voice, he writes, can have a wide variety of tones, both high and low, which he calls accent; and it has the power to shorten or lengthen sounds, which is referred to as quantity (1-3).2 Both are 'equally founded in the very nature of the human voice' he writes (5). In Greek and Latin verse quantity is inherent and fixed, and is unaffected by accent or pronunciation. The length of a vowel is determined not merely by the vowel sound itself, but also by the consonants that follow it.3 Nevertheless, the determination of long and short sounds in English has always caused confusion, because the terms 'long' and 'short' have been used to designate both the inherent quantity of the vowel in a given syllable, and the actual duration of sound when pronouncing the syllable.4 Taking issue with many of his contemporaries, Foster places a great importance on accent, insisting that it is 'not only distinct from but antecedent to quantity' (7). He then provides a lengthy discussion of how properly to place accent in English, a thorough understanding of which, he insists, is a fundamental aspect of scanning English verse. Foster admits that long syllables are very often given a stress in pronunciation, thus confusing the degree to which accent and quantity can be distinguished (25-6). Drawing an important distinction between meter and rhythm, he points out that meter depends on quantity alone, while rhythm depends on a more complicated comprehension of accent

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along with quantity (36). To illustrate his points, he provides numerous examples of English words in which quantity is fixed, though accent may vary widely according to the particular dialect of the speaker. Scholars of Foster's day hotly debated the degree to which accent should be considered in scanning Greek poetry, which was widely accepted as being governed by quantity. Many prosodists argued passionately that the pronunciation of Greek and Latin poetry was based solely on quantity, and that English poetry is based entirely on accent; thus the inherent problem in attempting to use classical meters in English verse. This dichotomy is commonly accepted even today, despite the arguments of scholars such as Foster who have insisted that the issue is much more complex, and that 'accent and quantity belong to every language' (14). A second work on prosody in Tennyson's library, Edwin Guest's A History of English Rhythms (1838), succeeded Foster as the standard and exhaustive treatment of the topic in its day. Like Foster, Guest writes that a speaker will have a tendency to lengthen an accented syllable by dwelling on it longer than on an unaccented one. Nevertheless he denies that accent will always lengthen the quantity of a syllable, which he calls 'a vulgar notion' (1: 77). Guest confidently points out cases in which great minds such as Milton and Johnson have made mistakes on this count. Of quantity in the English language, Guest writes that there has been much dispute, 'and more learning has been shown in the discussion, than either good sense or good temper' (1: 105). Although he allows that some words necessarily do take more time to pronounce than others, he writes that 'the notion that is generally attached to the word quantity, is that which is connected with its metrical value. In this sense, therefore, it may fairly be said, that we have no quantity in the English language' (ibid.). Ultimately, Guest argues that accent should be the sole principle for regulating English verse, although he admits that English has no rules for regulating it. He also admits, like Foster, that accent and quantity work together in achieving the effect of a verse. But for Guest, 'the time [quantity] is, occasionally, of great importance to the beauty of a verse, but never an index of its rhythm' (1: 112). An opponent of Guest's theory was E.S. Dallas, who published his Poetics: An Essay on Poetry in 1852. Dallas refutes Guest's emphasis on the importance of accent by writing that 'if the essential of accent be an increase of loudriess, it must follow that the melody of English verse depends on the relative loudness of its sounds - a camel not to be swal-

90 Stateliest Measures

lowed' (161). For Dallas, the sharpness of accent 'depends upon time; upon the number of their vibrations in a given time ... These we may not be able to trace knowingly,' he admits, 'but they have their effect' (164). Re-emphasizing the importance of quantity in verse, Dallas's simplest definition of meter is merely 'time heard' (ibid.). A few years later Coventry Patmore would attempt to show that accent and quantity must be emphasized equally. In his Essay on English Metrical Law of 1857, Patmore writes that those who see Latin and Greek as 'metrical' and 'temporal' and English as 'rhythmical' and 'accentual' 'have fallen into the strange error of not perceiving that these four epithets must apply to all possible kinds of metre' (19). One of the most heated aspects of the debate over accent versus quantity involved whether or not the heroic verse of the ancient Greek and Latin epics, dactylic hexameter, could be reproduced in English verse.5 Most prosodists and poets concluded that this meter could not be used effectively in English. Indeed, Robert Southey's choice of hexameter for 'A Vision of Judgment' in 1821 had been controversial enough to necessitate a defence of the meter in his Preface.6 Like many of his predecessors and contemporaries, Tennyson wrestled with the problem himself before choosing blank verse as an appropriate substitute for heroic verse. Foster devotes much time to the question of why English cannot be adapted to the hexameter line satisfactorily. Explaining that there is naturally a difference in what is pleasing to the modern English ear and what was pleasing to the ancient Roman or Greek, Foster insists that English is highly characterized by bisyllabic words, that it is dominated by iambs and trochees, and that there are very few dactyls in English, and no spondees (33). 'Thus we are deprived,' he writes, 'of that kind of metre considered most noble and solemn' by Longinus and Aristotle; still, Foster praises the English poets, particularly Milton, for overcoming this challenge in their use of other meters (34). Guest goes even farther in condemning the limitations of English heroic verse, which he feels fail in part because English poets never successfully adopted the 'favourite pause,' or 'caesura,' of the classical poets, and thus the rhythm is entirely too quick. Guest sees the common use of blank verse for an approximation of ancient heroic verse as a 'thralldom' for our poets, who have struggled to alter and vary it. Of Milton, he writes, 'The giant put on the habiliments of the dwarf could he do otherwise than rend them?' For Guest the rhythm of blank verse is 'so obvious, that we often use it when writing prose.' In his view

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the English meter that has best succeeded in reconciling the poet's freedom with the 'demands of science' is the alliterative verse of the AngloSaxons (2: 276). Tennyson's familiarity with Guest's History and his engagement with the metrical issues it explores are evident from marginalia in his copy of the second volume of the edition (Campbell #1077). In the bottom margin of page 270 in this volume, in the section 'Imitations of Classical Metres,' Tennyson emended a quotation from Coleridge used to illustrate an English version of the Ovidian (elegiac) couplet. Where Coleridge had written 'In the hexameter rises: the fountain's silvery column, / In the pentameter aye: falling in melody back,' Tennyson provided what he must have felt to be an improved example: 'Up goes the Hexameter with might as a fountain rising. / Lightly the fountain falls, lightly the Pentameter.' Whether or not one judges this couplet as an improvement, Tennyson places the caesura within each line at a much more natural point, and as a result the smooth rhythm of each line is unbroken. Both the congruences and the contradictions evident in a comparison of Foster's and Guest's treatises indicate the highly technical nature of the arguments involving metrical theory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Scholars tended to contradict each other on the most minute points. Ultimately, it must be said that determining the laws that govern the pronunciation of a language and the rhythm of its poetry, particularly scanning for the proper placement of accent, are too various arid subjective to allow for the purely scientific type of systemization towards which Foster, Guest, and their contemporaries devoted themselves. Thus, it is often difficult to determine exactly how a poet wished a line of his work to be scanned. As Yopie Prins has written, Tennyson's recitation of his own poetry 'was a meticulous reinscription of the meter, which Tennyson considered inadequately voiced in any reading except his own. The Edison recordings of Tennyson himself reading passages from 'The Charge of the Light Brigade,' 'The Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava,' 'Maud,' 'Lancelot and Elaine,' and 'Northern Farmer, New Style' make it clear that his own manner of reciting his verses was highly idiosyncratic and heavily characterized by emphatic sound effects. He recites with a greater emphasis on quantity than accent, although some scholars have argued that, rather than contrasting accent and quantity, Tennyson attempted 'to unite them in one syllable.'8 Regardless of the inherent difficulties, however, it is critical to consider carefully the degree to which Tennyson made use of both

92 Stateliest Measures accent and quantity in his verse, particularly in his efforts to echo ancient poetry. Tennyson's Uses of Actual Greek and Latin Meters

Many of the fruits of Tennyson's early experimentation with prosody were published in the 1830 volume Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, a collection that shows a remarkable maturity in handling an extremely wide range of verse forms, especially when one considers that the poet was only twenty years old when the volume was published. In two experiments with the classical form of the elegiac couplet, Tennyson began to struggle to adapt English to the hexameter line. The classical elegiac couplet consists of a line of dactylic hexameter followed by a line of dactylic pentameter. The substitution of a spondee ( — ) for a dactyl ( -w w) is common: 9

The first of Tennyson's two experiments with the elegiac couplet is his poem 'Leonine Elegiacs': Low-flowing breezes are roaming the broad valley dimmed in the gloaming: Thorough the black-stemmed pines only the far river shines. Creeping through blossomy rushes and bowers of rose-blowing bushes, Down by the poplar tall rivulets babble and fall. Barketh the shepherd-dog cheerly; the grasshopper carolleth clearly; 5 Deeply the wood-dove coos; shrilly the owlet halloos; Winds creep; dews fall chilly: in her first sleep earth breathes stilly: Over the pools in the burn water-gnats murmur and mourn. Sadly the far kine loweth: the glimmering water outfloweth: Twin peaks shadowed with pine slope to the dark hyaline. 10 Low-throned Hesper is stayed between the two peaks; but the Naiad Throbbing in mild unrest holds him beneath in her breast. The ancient poetess singeth, that Hesperus all things bringeth, Smoothing the wearied mind: bring me my love, Rosalind. Thou comest morning or even; she cometh not morning or even. 15 False-eyed Hesper, unkind, where is my sweet Rosalind?

The term 'Leonine' refers to a popular Medieval verse form charac-

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terized by internal rhyme in which the last stressed syllable before the caesura rhymes with the last stressed syllable in the same line. While the form is usually attributed to Leoninus, a Parisian canon of the Middle Ages, an example of such a use of internal rhyme can be found occasionally in classical hexameters, as in the Aeneid. Tennyson's use of a period after each couplet except for the third (6) helps to give each couplet its own identity; nevertheless the internal rhymes make each line sound like a shorter couplet of its own when it is read aloud. Like these examples, classical elegiac couplets are typically independent, particularly in Augustan Latin, in which this form became much more regularized. In 'Leonine Elegiacs,' we can see the young Tennyson learning to implement a method to provide intrinsic organization in his lines, in addition to using particular metrical effects to reinforce meaning. A few lines are worth noting. In terms of quantity, the first line of the poem is a perfect example of the classical hexameter, arid one in which accent and quantity coincide smoothly. Line 7, however, indicates the sort of effect that can be achieved when accent and quantity do not coincide. The line's first foot is followed by a diaeresis, or slight break, at which a semi-colon is used to emphasize the pause. A colon is likewise used to emphasize the main caesura: 'Winds creep; dews fall chilly: in her first sleep earth breathes stilly.' 'Winds creep' is a spondee, meaning that both syllables are long. Yet both are also accented. The accentuation makes the image emphatic, but it is the quantity of the foot that draws out the line to reflect its meaning. Tennyson also uses multiple pauses and a total of ten monosyllabic words to contribute to this effect. Line 10 is similar in its use of a spondee in the first foot, 'Twin peaks,' to emphasize the line's meaning. Like line 7, line 10 illustrates how variation of the coincidence of accent and quantity and an increased number of internal pauses can dramatically alter the way a verse sounds. Lines 7 and 10 draw attention to themselves in their abrupt variation from the smooth, largely unbroken rhythm of such lines as 1 to 6, which achieve their effect from the regularity of the meter and from Tennyson's heavier use of dactyls, such as 'blossomy' in line 3 and 'rivulets' in line 4. Although not developed into an extended narrative, the subject matter of 'Leonine Elegiacs,' reveals a variety of elements common to Tennyson's other poems of this period. The owlet raises particularly interesting associations with his 'halloos' in line 5, recalling the halloos of the owlet at the opening of Wordsworth's 'The Idiot Boy' (1798): 'The owlet, in the moonlight air, / Shouts from nobody knows where; /

94 Stateliest Measures He lengthens out his lonely shout, / Halloo! halloo! a long halloo!' (3-6).10 Because of these associations, the owlet lends a sense of nocturnal eeriness to the sonorous dove cooings and cattle lowings. The aural imagery of this passage brings to mind Tennyson's arguably most successful poem of the Poems, Chiefly Lyrical volume, 'Mariana,' which likewise employs sounds to reinforce an atmosphere of desperation, and also includes the image of the single poplar. In addition, the natural description in 'Leonine Elegiacs' brings to mind the opening of Tennyson's dramatic monologue 'CEnone,' published in the 1832 Poems, which also sets a scene in a broad valley nestled between twin peaks, including similar natural elements: pines and creeping rivulets. 'CEnone,' 'Mariana,' and this poem are each concerned with the psychological state of the thwarted lover. In line 11 of 'Leonine Elegiacs' Tennyson introduces an erotic element, in which a personified Hesper, 'Throbbing in mild unrest' is held beneath the breast of the 'Naiad' identified with the twin peaks of line 10. In line 13 the speaker refers to Sappho as the 'ancient poetess' who sings that Hesperus brings back all that Dawn scatters abroad (Tennyson noted that the reference is to Fragment 149), and the speaker then requests that his love, Rosalind, also be returned with the evening.11 'Thou comest morning or even,' the speaker says, referring to Hesperus's appearance as Phosphorus at dawn, but 'she cometh not morning or even,' reminding the reader of Mariana's oft-repeated phrase, 'He cometh not.' The repetition of 'even' in this line also achieves the effect of static narcosis, as in Tennyson's repetition of 'land' throughout the first section of his 1832 poem 'The Lotos-Eaters.' 'Elegiacs,' another of Tennyson's experiments with the classical elegiac couplet, is largely metrically successful, though undeveloped: Over an old gate leaning i' the mellow time of the gleaning Pleasant it was to hark unto the merry woodlark, Loudly he sung from the thicket, and nigher the shrilly balm-cricket Under a full-leaved spray chirruped and carolled away. Under a sky red-coped the lights of the evening sloped, 5 All with a roseate heat tipping the points of the wheat; Every cloud over the dim sun was barred and bridged with crimson, Only one great gold star burned through a cleft from afar. Over a brook and two meadows beyond, up among the elm shadows, Steeped in the sunlight calm glowed the white walls of the farm; 10

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Three full wains had been thither with labour, three empty come hither; Half of the gold stack stared over the pales in the yard.

Tennyson never published this fragment; it first appeared in print in 1931 after Charles Tennyson discovered it in one of Tennyson's notebooks, inscribed 'A. Tennyson, Trin. Coll., Cambridge,' and watermarked 1826.l2 The most obvious influence here is that of Keats's 'To Autumn.' 13 The couplets of 'Elegiacs' are much more consistently regular than in 'Leonine Elegiacs,' and the rhythm is smoother, and for the most part unbroken. Here again, Tennyson's use of internal rhyme makes his caesurae emphatic, although rarely as much so as in lines 4 to 16 of 'Leonine Elegiacs.' Here and there Tennyson's adherence to the regularity of the meter requires some odd phrasing, such as 'Under a sky red-coped' (line 5), much like 'Barketh the shepherd-dog cheerly' in line 5 of 'Leonine Elegiacs.' A second pair of experimental poems in which Tennyson successfully used actual classical meters is 'Milton. Alcaics' and 'Hendecasyllabics,' which the poet first published together as 'Attempts at Classical Metres in Quantity' in the Cornhill Magazine in 1863. Tennyson later published these poems in the Enoch Arden volume of 1864, and in collected editions of his works under the heading 'Experiments in Quantity,' or merely 'In Quantity.' The Alcaic meter consists of a quatrain of two eleven-syllable 'hendecasyllabics,' followed by a nine-syllable line and a decasyllabic, consisting of dactyls and trochees, as follows:

The text of 'Milton. Alcaics' is provided below: O mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies, O skilled to sing of Time or Eternity, God-gifted organ-voice of England, Milton, a name to resound for ages; Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel, 5 Starred from Jehovah's gorgeous armouries, Tower, as the deep-domed empyrean

96 Stateliest Measures Rings to the roar of an angel onset Me rather all that bowery loneliness, The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring, 10 And bloom profuse and cedar arches Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean, Where some refulgent sunset of India Streams o'er a rich ambrosial ocean isle, And crimson-hued the stately palm-woods 15 Whisper in odorous heights of even.

Metrically 'Milton' is an impressive success in conforming to the classical standard. Tennyson does tend to rely rather heavily on opening each line with a long syllable, although this does not necessarily conflict with the classical model. The result is a bold, stately emphasis at the beginning of the line, as in the 'O might[y-mouthed]' and 'O skilled' of lines 1 and 2, and 'Milton' of line 4. Admittedly, the emphatic 'Me' in line 9 places an unusual stress on this object of the verb 'charm,' which will not come until Iinel2; these four lines are a bit awkwardly phrased.10 In some cases, a substitution results in an unusual variation, as in line 7: 'Tower, as the deep-domed empyrean.' Here it would appear that 'Tower' must be pronounced as one syllable, and it is not entirely clear whether 'domed' should be one or two. Nevertheless, Tennyson's use of dactyls, as in his closing of lines 1 and 10 with 'harmonies' and 'murmuring,' respectively, contributes to a strong resonance of classical heroic verse. Likewise, the opening dactyls of the fourth line of each quatrain successfully echo the quick movement of this line in the classical form, as in 'Rings to the roar of an angel onset' (8). The quantity of each of the verses of 'Milton' is perfectly in accordance with the classical form, and in the majority of the verses accent and quantity are in conjunction, as in line 13, 'Where some refulgent sunset of India,' and line 16, 'Whisper in odorous heights of even.' The use of visual and aural imagery in 'Milton' is exceptional even for Tennyson, especially in the ringing of the 'deep-domed empyrean' with the roar of angels rushing to battle (7-8), and the Edenic 'ambrosial ocean isle' (14). Moreover, 'Milton' offers the reader a view of the poet's own speculations on poetry. Rather like the poems of Horace in which the poet defames himself as a poet of lighter lyrics unworthy of singing epic themes,16 here Tennyson seems to be locating himself more comfortably in poetry of beautiful lyricism and natural description, which he identifies with the parts of Paradise Lost set in Eden, as opposed to the

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loud, resounding episodes of angelic struggle that Milton also depicts in his English epic. 'Hendecasyllabics' provides a perfect pendant to 'Milton. Alcaics.' Rather than addressing a former poet whom he much admires, Tennyson's poem addresses his 'chorus of indolent reviewers,' using the elevensyllable meter that Catullus frequently used for satirical jabs at those who had earned his scorn for one reason or another. In poem 40, for example, Catullus opens a threat to a rival by asking him 'what wretched state of mind led you, miserable Ravidus, headlong into my verses?' ('Quaenam te mala mens, miselle Ravide, / Agit praecipitem in meos iambos?' 1-2). In poem 42, Catullus begins a similar threat to a woman who has refused to return some of his tablets by actually addressing his hendecasyllables themselves: 'Come, hendecasyllables, from all sides, however many you are' ('Adeste, hendecasyllabi, quot estis / Omnes undique, quotquot estis omnes' 1-2). Tennyson renders Catullus's hendecasyllabic (scanned w w _ ^ w _ ^ _ ^ _ w ) with remarkable agility: O you chorus of indolent reviewers, Irresponsible, indolent reviewers, Look, I come to the test, a tiny poem All composed in a metre of Catullus, All in quantity, careful of my motion, Like the skater on ice that hardly bears him, Lest I fall unawares before the people, Waking laughter in indolent reviewers. Should I flounder awhile without a tumble Through this metrification of Catullus, They should speak to me not without a welcome, All that chorus of indolent reviewers. Hard, hard, hard is it, only not to tumble, So fantastical is the dainty metre. Wherefore slight me not wholly, nor believe me Too presumptuous, indolent reviewers. O blatant Magazines, regard me rather Since I blush to belaud myself a moment As some rare little rose, a piece of inmost Horticultural art, or half coquette-like Maiden, not to be greeted unbenignly.

5

10

15

20

Like 'Milton,' 'Hendecasyllabics' is an impressive metrical accom-

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plishment. In every line Tennyson adheres to the required eleven syllables, and in nearly every line he manages to follow a dactyl in the second foot with three trochees, as in 'speak to me not without a welcome' (11), or 'blush to belaud myself a moment' (18). In doing so he often achieves a sense of flourish in choosing such multi-syllable words as 'metrification' (10), 'presumptuous' (16), and especially 'Horticultural' (20). Moreover, he teases the reader with such a lines as 'Hard, hard, hard, is it, only not to tumble' (13), in which the three longs at the start of the line and an excessive use of commas requiring pauses set up a slow and laboured pace, away from which the final three trochees indeed do tumble speedily. 'Hendecasyllabics' offers a fascinating look at the confident side of the poet, which complements his humble stance in praising his great predecessor in 'Milton.' Here Tennyson summons all the outrage and fire of the scorned Catullus in rebutting his critics, and in making a show of his own poetic, and particularly metrical, expertise. 'Hendecasyllabics' provides an unprecedented bit of unguarded satire aimed at the poet's detractors, and a healthy flourish of self-praise.1In asking to be compared to some rare, dainty rose, arid to a 'half coquette-like' maiden - the flirtatious aspect of the 'coquette' reference adding to the humour of the metaphor - Tennyson's hendacasyllables, like Catullus's, strengthen their attack with wit.18 While it is clear that Tennyson was fully aware of the contemporary debate concerning the degree to which classical meters and verse forms could be used in English, it also appears that he ultimately came to an acceptance of the limitations involved in attempting such a feat. More importantly, he wanted those limitations acknowledged by his readers. In a disclaimer in the Eversley edition of his poems he acknowledges the differences and variety of expression intrinsic to every language, and also asks that his work be judged on its own merits: My Alcaics are not intended for Horatian Alcaics, nor are Horace's Alcaics the Greek Alcaics, nor are his Sapphics which are vastly inferior to Sappho's, the Greek Sapphics. The Horatian Alcaic is perhaps the stateliest metre in the world except the Virgilian hexameter at its best; but the Greek Alcaic, if we may judge from the two or three specimens left, had a much freer and lighter movement: and I have no doubt that an old Greek if he knew our language would admit my Alcaics as legitimate, only Milton must not be pronounced Mih'n.19

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But why did Tennyson, in the early 1860s, challenge himself with the task of composing 'Milton. Alcaics' and 'Hendecasyllabics' in accordance with the strict restrictions of these ancient verse forms, and why did he publish them in the Cornhill Magazine? Peter Levi has reminded us of the pride Tennyson took in his experiments with classical meters, and of his conviction that the critics generally failed to notice his metrical accomplishments.20 Indeed, according to Hallam Tennyson, his father once humorously boasted that he knew the quantity of every word in the English language, with the possible exception of 'scissors.'21 Interestingly, the 1860s witnessed a resurgence of interest in classical verse forms, which revived the hexameter debate in the magazines of the day.22 In 1861-2 Matthew Arnold had published his lectures 'On Translating Homer,' in which he criticized English translators' attempts to render the Homeric epics into English verse, and had likewise taken a shot at Tennyson's work in saying that if the epics were to be translated into blank verse, 'it must not be Mr. Tennyson's blank verse.'23 Tennyson wisely chose to respond to this unkind attack not with an angry reply, but by publishing twenty-two lines of a 'Specimen of a Translation of the Iliad in Blank Verse' (to be discussed below) - a gesture which powerfully established that Tennysonian blank verse could be adapted more than adequately for a modern translation of Homer's epics. Alongside this 'Specimen,' Tennyson published 'Milton. Alcaics' and 'Hendecasyllabics,' no doubt as further proof of his mastery of classical meters. Tennyson had earlier engaged in lobbing verses against an adversary in 1846, when he published 'The New Timori, and the Poets' as a heated response to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who had attacked his poetry in his the New Timon earlier that year. The controversy was a fortuitous opportunity for the poet to show off his abilities, arid to remind his readers of the extent to which his technical mastery was informed by the achievements of the Greek and Roman poets. For us, it serves as an important reminder of the degree to which Tennyson prided himself on his expertise in both employing and approximating classical verse forms in his own poetry. Tennyson's Approximations of Classical Meters Although there are few poems in which Tennyson actually endeavoured to write English verse in an authentic classical meter, he experimented

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with approximating the sound and rhythms of classical meters in a great number of his poems. Many of these projects were attempts to approximate the dactylic hexameter of a variety of Greek and Latin authors with blank verse, as many of his English predecessors had done before him. Tennyson's first attempt to reproduce the rhythms of the classical hexameter are to be found in a translation of the first ninety-three lines of Claudian's fourth-century AD epic, De Raptu Proserpinae, a manuscript that survives in the same notebook as his early poem The Devil and the Lady, and which is dated to the years 1820-3, when the poet was between eleven and fourteen years old. Tennyson admitted that he was greatly influenced by Pope's Iliad during this period, and this translation follows Pope's choice of translating classical hexameters into heroic couplets. The opening lines of Claudian's unfinished epic set the stage with a lonely and bitter Pluto resenting the lots of his two brothers, and in particular their female companionship. The following lines on Pluto's resentment and the rushing of the 'monsters' of hell to arms provide a sample of the translation: Hell's haughty Lord in times of old began 45 To rouse 'gainst Heaven the terrors of his clan; Stern fury shook his soul - that he alone Of every God upon his glittering throne, Should lead a dull and melancholy life, Without the fond endearments of a wife 50 Wretch that he was, who knew not how to claim A consort's or a father's dearer name! Now Hell's misshapen monsters rush to arms And fill the wide abyss with loud alarms; The haggard train of midnight Furies meet 55 To shake the Thunderer from his starry seat, And pale Tisiphone, with baleful breath Calls the thin Ghosts within the camp of Death;

Tennyson's translation is faithful to the original in content, and is an impressive accomplishment in the use of the heroic couplet, particularly for so young a poet. The couplets are reminiscent of Pope's, as might be expected, and the description of the various residents of the Underworld as they rouse themselves for battle in the lines that follow the above passage recall Satan's army of demons in Paradise Lost.

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Tennyson also translated several passages from Homer at different points in his life, again choosing blank verse as the best meter with which to translate the rhythm of Homer's hexameters. As had many contemporary prosodists, at least by the 1860s, Tennyson had come to a firm conviction that the classical hexameter could not be reproduced effectively with an English hexameter. His 1863 'On Translations of Homer. Hexameters and Pentameters,' published among his group of 'Attempts at Classical Metres in Quantity' mentioned above, makes his viewpoint on the potential success of using hexameters in English verse quite clear: These lame hexameters the strong-winged music of Homer! No - but a most burlesque barbarous experiment. When was a harsher sound ever heard, ye Muses, in England? When did a frog coarser croak upon our Helicon? Hexameters no worse than daring Germany gave us, Barbarous experiment, barbarous hexameters. Tennyson's juxtaposition of his 'Specimen of a Translation of the Iliad in Blank Verse' with this epigram demonstrates that he was capable of producing classical hexameters and pentameters in English, yet had deliberately chosen blank verse as a much more successful meter for translations of Homer. It is important to acknowledge Tennyson's point that his 'barbarous hexameters' here are actually metrically successful, and yet they are distinctly difficult to read aloud. As a headnote to the Homeric lines, Tennyson wrote: 'Some, arid among these one at least of our best and greatest have endeavoured to give us the Iliadin English hexameters, and by what appears to me their failure, have gone far to prove the impossibility of the task. I have long held by our blank verse in this matter, and now after having spoken so disrespectfully here of these hexameters, I venture, or rather feel bound, to subjoin a specimen, however brief and with whatever demerits, of a blank-verse translation.' 25

Tennyson's twenty-two-line specimen from book 8 of the Iliad(54261) compares the fires of the Greek camp spread out before the walls of Troy at night to the flickering stars of heaven. The final fourteen lines are given here: And these all night upon the bridge of war Sat glorying; many a fire before them blazed:

10

102 Stateliest Measures As when in heaven the stars about the moon Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid, And every height comes out, and jutting peak And valley, and the immeasurable heavens Break open to their highest, and all the stars 15 Shine, and the Shepherd gladdens in his heart: So many a fire between the ships and stream Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy, A thousand on the plain; and close by each ; 20 Sat fifty in the blaze of burningfire And eating hoary grain and pulse the steeds, Fixt by their cars, waited the golden dawn.

This example was a splendid one for Tennyson to include alongside his epigrammatic attack on his contemporaries' attempts to render Homer into English hexameters, for the translation is not only very close to Homer's original in content, but it approximates the rhythm of Homer's Greek, and does justice to the beauty of the Homeric simile in the passage.26 Tennyson translated a second passage from the Iliad (book 18.202f.) around the same time, 1863-4, and entitled it 'Achilles Over the Trench.'27 This fragment was not published until years later, however, first in the August 1877 issue of the Nineteenth Century, and then in Tennyson's 1880 Ballads and Other Poems. The passage describes Achilles' challenging and terrifying war cry to the Trojans in response to the death of his beloved Patroclus, and the flaming cloud that Athena placed around his head. Tennyson recited this passage for the first time in December 1864, but refused to do so the following year, stating, 'It's only a little thing. Must be judged by comparison with the Greek. Can only be appreciated by the difficulties overcome.'28 With this disclaimer, no doubt intended to ward off potential critics, Tennyson again draws attention to the difficulty of approximating the rhythm of the Homeric line in English blank verse while also closely translating its content. The final fifteen lines of the thirty-three-line passage give a sense of the success of Tennyson's achievement in doing just that: For like the clear voice when a trumpet shrills, Blown by the fierce beleaguerers of a town, So rang the clear voice of ^Eakides;29 And when the brazen cry of ^Eakides

20

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Was heard among the Trojans, all their hearts Were troubled, and the full-maned horses whirled The chariots backward, knowing griefs at hand; 25 And sheer-astounded were the charioteers To see the dread, unweariable fire That always o'er the great Peleion's head Burned, for the bright-eyed goddess made it burn. Thrice from the dyke he sent his mighty shout, 30 Thrice backward reeled the Trojans and allies; And there and then twelve of their noblest died Among their spears and chariots.

A look at the original Greek makes this translation far more impressive for its closeness to Homer's original. In addition, it is successful in its merits as English blank verse. The poet's strict dedication to economy of expression, his choice of short, monosyllabic words, and his use of repetition effectively work together to remind the reader of the experience of reading Homer's Greek verses.30 Often Tennyson attempted to evoke the sound and rhythm of classical verse without directly imitating a classical meter per se. An excellent example of such an endeavour is 'To Virgil' (1882), in which the poet achieves with a trochaic line a rhythm highly reminiscent of the Virgilian hexameter, and especially so in the context of the number of thematic allusions to the works of Virgil within the poem. 'To Virgil' commonly has been published in ten numbered stanzas, each of which consists of a couplet broken in each line at the caesura so as to form what appears to be a quatrain, as in the opening lines: Roman Virgil, thou that singest Ilion's lofty temples robed in fire, Ilion falling, Rome arising, wars, and filial faith, and Dido's pyre;

Despite this common presentation of the poem, Tennyson intended 'To Virgil' to be printed as in the manuscript, in which he wrote it as a single unit of ten long trochaic lines rhymed in couplets. When the poem is printed as the poet intended, the lines resemble the hexameters of the Roman poet even more by virtue of their appearance on the page:31

104 Stateliest Measures Roman Virgil, thou that singest Ilion's lofty temples robed in fire, Ilion falling, Rome arising, wars, and filial faith, and Dido's pyre;

'To Virgil' has the heavy stamp of the Roman poet upon it in both sound and image; nevertheless, it is purely Tennysonian in form. While the rhythm of the poem approximates the rhythm of Virgil's hexameters, the allusions in the poem move through Virgil's works, from the Aeneid in the first couplet to the Georgics in the following two, to the Eclogues in couplets 4 and 5, and back to the Aeneid in 6 and 7. Tennyson concludes this tour through Virgil's opera with a salute in the final three couplets to Virgil's poetry generally, which lives on despite the fall of Rome itself. 'To Virgil' exemplifies Tennyson's ability to take an original meter and, with careful choices of sound arid image, fashion it into a line that evokes the experience of reading another poet's verses - in this case the 'ocean-roll of rhythm' of Virgil's hexameters (16). The poem was written at the request of the Vergilian Academy of Mantua in 1882, and Tennyson published it in the September 1882 issue of the Nineteenth Century, and later in a volume headed by another classical piece, Tiresias and Other Poems of 1885. Although he occasionally published new poems in periodicals from the late 1850s and afterwards, incorporating them later into volumes of new poems and editions of his collected works, this pattern is true of nearly all of his Laureate poetry, and of the experiments with classical verse forms that he composed as Laureate. In addition to his imitations of classical hexameters, the verse form of the epics, Tennyson imitated many other classical meters. One example is his attempt to approximate, in 'Anacreontics,' the meter commonly used by the Greek poet Anacreon. The text of the poem is as follows: With roses muskybreathed, And drooping daffodilly, And silverleaved lily, And ivy darkly-wreathed, I wove a crown before her 5 For her I love so dearly, A garland for Lenora. With a silken cord I bound it. Lenora, laughing clearly A light and thrilling laughter, 10 About her forehead wound it, And loved me ever after.

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In its amatory theme, and in its use of a seven-syllable line, this poem follows the English tradition of the 'Anacreontic' - a tradition established most notably by Abraham Cowley's and Thomas Moore's verse translations of Anacreoii's odes. To approximate the meter of Anacreon's Greek verses, Cowley and Moore both alternate between using a more Latinate seven-syllable line beginning with an accented syllable, and an eight-syllable line beginning with an unaccented syllable; Anacreon's verses characteristically consisted of a Pyrrhic foot (two shorts) plus two trochees, and a final spondee. English Anacreontic verse tends to be trochaic, as in the song 'To Anacreon in Heaven,' or 'To Anacreon,' to which Francis Scott Key set 'The Star-Spangled Banner.'32 Departing from Cowley's and Moore's anglicized Anacreontic, Tennyson's twelve Anacreontic lines follow the Greek standard more closely than the Latin, since each line begins with an unaccented syllable. Line 8, for example, is a perfect rendering of the rhythm of the Greek line: 'With a silken cord I bound it.' Thematically, Tennyson's original 'Anacreontics' are very much in the vein of Anacreon's amatory lyrics. The weaving of flowers into a garland is an activity commonly referred to by Anacreon, as in Ode 1, in which the speaker describes Eros's gift of a garland to him, and in Ode 6, in which the speaker reveals having caught Eros asleep among the roses while picking flowers for a wreath. Tennyson contributed 'Anacreontics,' along with 'No More' and 'A Fragment' ('Where is the Giant of the Sun, which stood'), to the 1831 issue of the literary annual The Gem, but never republished it. Kathryn Ledbetter has noted that in his early days as a poet, Tennyson was encouraged by the Cambridge Apostles to publish in the annuals, due to their popularity and wide readership.'' But even in the early days of his career Tennyson hated the idea of seeking publishing venues among such popular publications as the gift books. Of this first experience with publishing in an annual, he wrote to his friend William Brookfield, 'I have been so beGemmed and beAmuletted and be-forget-me-notted that I have given all these things up.'' In 1836 he wrote to Brookfield, T have a sort of instinctive hatred toward annuals each arid all.'35 Nevertheless, he did consign himself to publishing in the annuals again from time to time, taking advantage of the opportunity to try out new lyrics that he later revised, such as 'St. Agnes' Eve' in The Keepsake for 1837 and 'O that 'twere possible' in The Tribute for 1837; and he contributed sonnets and several works entitled 'Stanzas' to Friendship's Offering and The Keepsake from the early 1830s to as late as the early 1850s.36 Whether he continued to do so due to pressure from gift book editors or from his

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friends and supporters, or for financial reasons, is not known. Despite his antipathy for the genre, the annuals did offer him a venue for placing some of his early works before a wide audience. Evoking Horace with English Iambics

Tennyson's thorough study of Horace as a boy, including memorizing all of the odes, clearly left an indelible impression of Horace's verse on his ear. Frequently one can hear an echo of Horace in Tennyson's poetry, whether in image or subject matter, or in the sound and rhythm of the verses themselves. Tennyson commonly used iambic meters to approximate the quantity of Horatian verse. The earliest example of his use of iambics for this purpose can be found in three juvenile translations of Horace, the manuscripts of which exist on the blank interleaves of several pages in Tennyson's heavily annotated 1822 copy of Horace's odes.3In the first of these three pieces, a translation of the first fourteen lines of Horace's fifth epode, the young Tennyson chose to use iambic tetrameter to imitate the rhythm of Horace's epode meter, corresponding lines of iambic trimeter and dimeter. The ancients preferred feet that add up to whole numbers, such as the dactyl ( - « « ) , in which two short syllables are considered the equivalent of one long one, and the spondee (), insisting of two long syllables. Thus, they doubled iambs ( « - ) and trochees ( —w), which measure one and a half units of length each, forming a 'metron' (as opposed to an English 'foot'), which adds up to a total of three long syllables. Because a classical iambic metron is classified as « — « -, Tennyson's iambic tetrameter lines are of the same quantity as Horace's dimeter lines. In addition, Tennyson indents the alternating lines of his poem, which makes the translation more closely resemble Horace's poem, in which the alternating lines are actually shorter in length. Tennyson's translation of this classical passage is fairly close to the original. Epode 5 narrates the story of the witch Canidia's attempt to win back the love of a certain Varus by preparing a love potion for which she must procure the dried marrow and liver of a starved child. The epode gives voice to the child's laments and the curses he calls down upon Canidia. Tennyson's translation reads as follows: 'Ye Gods, who in your azure skies For ever hold your mighty throne, What means this tumult? and the eyes

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Of Furies bent on me alone? O by thine offspring, at their birth 5 If e'er Lucina lent her aid, By Jove, the Lord of Heaven and Earth, And this praetexta's purple shade, Why dost thou bend thy looks on me And gaze so wildly and so wide Like stepdame, or the burning eye Of lion wounded in his pride?' While thus the hapless youth bewail'd, His golden boss away they tore, Sure Thracian hearts to pity steel'd Such helpless mis'ry would deplore.

10

15

The first eight lines of this passage are impressive because of the skill with which Tennyson rhymes words that relate to each other thematically. For example, 'eyes' in line 3 rhymes with 'skies' in line 1, which is appropriate since the speaker is supplicating the gods above, and he refers to the gaze of the Furies upon him in asking for the gods' attention to his plight. Similarly, in line 4 'alone' is rhymed with 'throne' in line 2, emphasizing the difference between the lone child's situation and that of the all-powerful gods who watch from above. Lines 6 and 8 also reveal a thematic relationship in end-rhymes. The boy's reference to the purple 'shade' of his toga in line 8 as a protective symbol relates it to its rhyming antecedent, 'aid' in line 6, a reference to the protection of the goddess Lucina. Tennyson's attempt to recreate the experience of reading Horatian verse in this translation is impressive for several other reasons. First, he closely imitates Horace's pattern of the number of words used in each line. Horace's couplets in this epode dictate a pattern of lines alternating between six to seven words per line and four to five words per line. Tennyson's lines consistently alternate between six to eight and three to five words per line. Tennyson's line lengths also shorten in lines 11-16, imitating this gradual reduction in length in Horace's lines 10-14.38 It is likewise interesting to compare Tennyson's use of monosyllabic words to Horace's. Horace uses more trisyllabic words, which are characteristic of Latin, whereas Tennyson uses only two trisyllabic words, and these happen to be Latin words: Lucina (6) and praetexta (8). Nevertheless the ratios of monosyllabic word usage are comparable between

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Horace and Tennyson, particularly in the gradual trend away from monosyllabic words in the last lines. Horace uses no monosyllabic words in lines 10 and 12-14; Tennyson's ratios fall from a continuous 75 to 85 per cent range in lines 1-10 to a steady 50 per cent in lines 11-15, and 25 per cent in line 16, which imitates the same trend in Horace's lines. Tennyson also imitates Horace in the use of caesurae. Horace's strongest caesurae appear in his longer trimeter lines, a characteristic typical of this Latin meter, and Tennyson carefully imitates this by using stronger caesurae in the odd lines, and by avoiding heavy pauses in his ostensibly 'shorter' even lines. Tennyson also models his verses on Horace's in the use of enjambement. Horace uses enjambement in his couplets 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 9-10, 11-12, and 13-14. Tennyson enjambs lines 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 11-12, and 15-16, thus achieving a similar effect in the progression of the narrative, and in the speed at which the lines are read, both of which contribute to the urgency of the boy's cry to the gods. These careful technical imitations reveal the precision with which the young Tennyson attempted to capture the experience of reading Horace in English verse, and this precision is borne out in close analyses of the other two schoolboy translations of Horace, passages from Odes 1.9 and 3.3 in which Tennyson used iambics again - this time to approximate Horace's Alcaic meter. In these three translations, perhaps Tennyson's earliest extant poetic endeavours, we are provided with a rare glimpse of a young Tennyson learning his craft by a close imitation of both the thematic and technical achievements of a classical predecessor. It was not until the composition of his 'Milton. Alcaics' in 1863 that Tennyson actually used the Horatian Alcaic strophe in English verse. For purposes of comparison, the following scanned strophe from Horace's Ode 1.9 (1-4) demonstrates the Latin Alcaic: Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte, nee iam sustineant onus Silvae laborantes, geluque Flumina constiterint acuto.

Readers will recognize in Tennyson's translation of Ode 1.9 the poet's first use of the theme of In Memoriam 107, in which the speaker follows a

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description of the wintery day on which Hallam was born with a sequence of imperatives: 'Bring in the wine, / Arrange the board and brim the glass; / Bring in great logs and let them lie' (15—17). These lines echo Horace's invitation to stoke the fire and pour the wine in lines 5-8 of his ode. The opening lines of Tennyson's translation read as follows: See! how Soracte's hoary brow And melancholy crags uprear Their weight of venerable snow: And scarce the groaning forests bear The burthen of the gloomy year And motionless the stream remains Beneath the weight of icy chains. Thou of the social banquet King, Now store of welcome faggots bring, Now bid a brighter flame arise, Now let the rich and rosy wine Within the joyful goblets shine, That wine whose age hath seen the ray Of four long summers roll away Along yon wintry skies.

5

10

15

In the first stanza Tennyson uses seven lines in translating Horace's first Alcaic quatrain, adding adjectives such as 'hoary,' 'melancholy,' 'venerable,' and 'gloomy' - an overlay of the pathetic fallacy for Horace's original, which simply emphasizes the bright whiteness of Soracte, the weight of the snow on the labouring woods, and the piercing cold that has frozen the river. After line 7 stanza breaks are not indicated in the manuscript. In the following lines Tennyson continues to add a slight flourish to Horace's original, embellishing, for example, Horace's four-year-old, unmixed Sabine wine ('quadrimum Sabina ... merum diota,' 11. 7-8) into 'rich and rosy' wine shining in the 'joyful goblets'; wine 'whose age hath seen the ray / Of four long summers roll away' (11-14). The rest of the translation follows Horace closely in asking, 'Why should we fear tomorrow's woe?' (22), in suggesting that one should rejoice in whatever the powers above provide, and in encouraging one to spurn neither love nor dancing in one's youth. Curiously, although Tennyson

110 Stateliest Measures concludes his translation with Horace's exhortation to the young to enjoy 'the mazy dance - the power of love' (27), he chose not to translate the concluding six and a half lines of Horace's ode that refer to young love. A translation reads, 'Now softly seek the fields and open spaces at nightfall at the arranged hour. Now a girl's quiet laughter betrays her in an intimate corner, and a pledge ring is taken from her arm or her faintly resisting finger' (18-24). It is intriguing to consider why Tennyson omitted these lines. Perhaps the translation is simply incomplete. On the other hand, if the passage had been an assigned exercise in school, it is conceivable that the final stanza and a half may have been considered inappropriate for a schoolboy's translation. The translation of Horace's Ode 3.3 is a longer piece than the previous two. Here Tennyson experiments with the meter to an even greater degree, alternating the line lengths in a far more irregular fashion. The poem alternates between sections of iambic tetrameter and iambic dimeter in a loose approximation of the rhythm of Horace's Alcaic. Tennyson even inserts an alexandrine in line 68 in a description of the Nile: 'Old Nile through all his mouths rebellowing pours along.' Perhaps this particular alteration of the meter is intended to emphasize the expanse of the Nile, for in line 76 another alexandrine seems to be emphasizing the great expanse of the Roman empire: 'Beneath the torrid Sun, and in the frozen Zone.' Ode 3.3 begins with Horace's statement that the man who is just and steady in his purpose is swayed neither by the fury of his fellow citizens nor by the glare of the tyrant. The opening lines of Tennyson's translation read as follows: The people's fury cannot move The man of just and steadfast soul For he can brook The tyrant's look And red right-arm of mighty Jove: What! though the echoing billows roll And on the lonely sea-beach dash, What time the cold and cheerless blast From the dun south has o'er them past, What though upon this earthly ball Heaven's canopy itself should fall, Yet fearless would he brave the crash.

5

10

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The ode continues as summarized in the marginal key in Tennyson's 1822 edition of Horace: 'The poet first praises the justice of Bacchus, Augustus 8c Romulus, then he brings in a long speech of Juno concerning his admission among the gods.'39 Tennyson's use of the image of the 'red right-arm of mighty Jove' in line 5 suggests his familiarity with Byron's juvenile translation of the same passage, in which the elder poet described the 'red right arm of Jove, / Hurtling his lightnings from above.'40 Although countless students of Latin have translated this ode, it is noteworthy that the young Tennyson chose to perfect and preserve his translation of this ode, as Byron did as a boy. Tennyson's boyhood idolization of Byron has been noted in his biographers' frequent acknowledgment of the fourteen-year-old's dejected reaction to Byron's death in 1824. Here that idolization is evident in Tennyson's imitation of an English predecessor who likewise turned to Horace's verses in training himself as a versifier. Tennyson returned to iambics in order to represent the Horatian Alcaic meter in the early 1850s in his composition of 'Will.' Broken into two stanzas, one of nine lines and one of eleven, 'Will' has a rather irregular rhyme scheme. The first stanza reads as follows: O well for him whose will is strong! He suffers, but he will not suffer long; He suffers, but he cannot suffer wrong: For him nor moves the loud world's random mock, Nor all Calamity's hugest waves confound, 5 Who seems a promontory of rock, That, compassed round with turbulent sound, In middle ocean meets the surging shock, Tempest-buffeted, citadel-crowned.

In its theme of the good fortune that befalls the man of conviction, 'Will' represents one of Tennyson's first attempts to translate a purely Horatian idea into an original poem. The particular allusion to Horace is to the first eight lines of Ode 3.3, which Tennyson translated as a schoolboy, as discussed above. In this poem, the 'man of just and steadfast soul' in Tennyson's translation of Ode 3.3 (2), Horace's Tustum et tenacem propositi virum' (1), is distilled into 'him whose will is strong' (1), and the 'people's fury' ('civium ardor prava iubentium,' 2) becomes 'the loud world's random mock' in line 4, and the 'turbulent

112 Stateliest Measures sound' in line 7. Likewise, Tennyson conflates the image of the tyrant's gaze, the thunderous hand of Jove, and the billows dashing on the seabeach from his translation (4-7) into 'all Calamity's hugest waves' (5) and the images of the surging shock and buffeting tempest (8-9). In the second stanza of 'Will' Tennyson develops a contrast to the man of strong will, suggesting that he who becomes corrupt and weak will 'seem as one whose footsteps halt' in a miserable desert atmosphere of 'immeasurable sand,' 'Far beneath a blazing vault' (15-18), images spun perhaps from the 'cold and cheerless blast / From the dun south,' and the crashing of Heaven's canopy in lines 8-11 of his translation. It is noteworthy that he uses images of a city at the conclusion of both stanzas. In the first stanza, the man of will is described as a promontory of rock, 'Tempest-buffeted, citadel-crowned' (9). In the second the weak man's footsteps halt in the sultry desert, and his insignificance is symbolized by the final image: 'Sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill, / The city sparkles like a grain of salt' (19-20). Thematically, this metaphor relates to the content of Ode 3.3, most of which is devoted to Juno's speech to the gods, reminding them of the role of her own rage in the destruction of Troy, and threatening to bring disaster upon the Romans should they attempt to rebuild the Trojan city.41 In 'The Daisy,' written around the same time as 'Will,' Tennyson abandoned the complex, irregular structure of the earlier poem for regular quatrains of iambic tetrameter with a simpler rhyme scheme (a aba cede...). Tennyson dedicated the poem to his wife in remembrance of a trip to Italy in 1851, and he recorded that the poem was written 'in a metre which I invented, representing in some measure the grandest of metres, the Horatian Alcaic.'42 Owing to the arrangement of the verses into stanzas, this meter more closely resembles the Alcaic than Tennyson's juvenile experiments with iambics. Moreover, the poet indents the third line of each stanza in order to make it appear shorter, as it is in the Alcaic. In addition, each third line is compressed, and is followed by a sped-up fourth line, an effect that also imitates the Alcaic. O love, what hours were thine and mine, In lands of palm and southern pine; In lands of palm, of orange-blossom, Of olive, aloe, and maize and vine. What Roman strength Turbia showed In ruin, by the mountain road;

Classical Prosody and the 'Ocean Roll of Rhythm' How like a gem, beneath, the city Of little Monaco, basking, glowed.

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(1-8)

'The Daisy' is largely a Wordsworthian speculation on the power of a pressed flower, a memento of the trip to Italy, to call up pleasant recollections of that tour in a later day when the speaker finds himself back in 'the bitter east, the misty summer / And gray metropolis of the North' (103-4). Nevertheless, the stanzas in which Tennyson records his impressions of the beauty of the Italian landscape call up numerous associations with Latin poetry of that theme, particularly the stanza in which he speaks of his recollection of a particular passage in the Georgics where Virgil describes Lake Larius:43 And in my head, for half the day, The rich Virgilian rustic measure Of Lari Maxume, all the way, Like ballad-burthen music, kept,

(74-77)

In a third poem of this period, 'To the Rev. F. D. Maurice,' Tennyson recycled his 'Daisy' stanza, again with the intention of recalling Horatian verse, even though this poem was inspired by one of Horace's epistles, which were composed in dactylic hexameter. 'To the Rev. F. D. Maurice' is an invitation to the scholar Maurice, the godfather of Hallam Tennyson, to come visit the Tennysons at Farringford. The opening stanza will illustrate the metrical scheme of the poem: Come, when no graver cares employ, Godfather, come and see your boy: Your presence will be sun in winter, Making the little one leap for joy.

(1-4)

Ricks points out that Maurice had recently been forced to resign his teaching position at King's College, London, because of his liberal stance on the theological doctrine of eternal punishment.44 Tennyson's poem alludes to Horace's fifth epistle, which is a dinner invitation to a friend. Metrically, however, Tennyson seems still to be imitating the Horatian Alcaic, for as in 'The Daisy,' the iambic lines are arranged in quatrains and the fourth line of each quatrain is nearly always scanned ( _ w w _ w w - « -). He would use this stanza form twice more, and each

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time in a similar address to a close friend and fellow classical scholar: in 'To Professor Jebb' and 'To the Master of Balliol.' These poems, which were written as prologues for his final classical poems, 'Demeter and Persephone' and 'The Death of CEnone,' will be discussed in chapter 6. As T.S. Omond wrote, these later poems in many ways indicate a much smoother 'union of classical inspiration and native metre' than do Tennyson's attempts to adhere to the confines of pure classical forms in 'Milton' and 'Hendecasyllabics.'41 Interestingly, Tennyson chose to publish 'Will,' 'The Daisy,' and 'To the Rev. F.D. Maurice' together in Maud, and Other Poems in 1855. More intriguing is the fact that the three are positioned together as a unit, and that they are sandwiched between the 'Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington' and 'The Charge of the Light Brigade,' perhaps the two most famous examples of Tennyson's Laureate poetry.46 When one considers that Horace, like Virgil, was considered a major state poet at the height of Augustan Rome, this arrangement suggests that Tennyson may have intended his three experiments in evoking the sound and rhythm of Horatian verse to be associated with his two great paeans to patriotism and public sacrifice. The Varied Rhythms of the Meters of Catullus

Tennyson's great love of and admiration for the poetry of Catullus have long been acknowledged, and as one would expect, he attempted in several poems to approximate the sound of Catullan meters, in particular the galliambic in his 'Boadicea,' the elegiac in 'Frater Ave Atque Vale,' and the glyconic in 'On the Jubilee of Queen Victoria.' Tennyson himself called 'Boadicea' a 'far-off echo of the Attis of Catullus,' and Catullus 63 is an appropriate poem to echo here, for Tennyson's treatment of the outraged Boadicea's battle speech against the Roman invaders of Britain, a topic inspired by Tacitus's Annals (14.29-35) as well as by William Cowper's poem of the same title, is comparable in subject matter to Catullus's highly emotional poem in which the frenzied Attis calls for others to follow him in the worship of the goddess Cybele. In his eight-stress trochaic lines Tennyson approximates the Catullan galliambic, which is characteristically represented as follows: ^ ^-v-^ — I « v - « ^ ^ « - . One of the most notable characteristics of the Catullan galliambic is the resolution of one of the long syllables in the second half of the line into two shorts. An example of Catullus's use of this meter can be seen in the first two lines of poem 63:

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Super alta vectus Attis I celeri rate maria, Phrygium ut nemus citato I cupide pede tetigit,

The opening six lines of 'Boadicea' provide a sense of the meter of Tennyson's poem: While about the shore of Mona those Neronian legionaries Burnt and broke the grove and altar of the Druid and Druidess, Far in the East Boadicea, standing loftily charioted, Mad and maddening all that heard her in her fierce volubility, Girt by half the tribes of Britain, near the colony Camulodune, Yelled and shrieked between her daughters o'er a wild confederacy.

5

The aspect of Tennyson's lines that most clearly recalls the sound of the galliambic is the strong break at the middle of the line, followed by a sped-up ending brought about by the characteristic substitution of two additional short syllables for one of the longs in the second half-line. In this mariner Tennyson manages to imitate closely the rhythm and the quick movement of this meter. Tennyson wrote 'Boadicea' in 1859 and originally believed that his readers would be able to scan the poem without difficulty, stating that '"Yelled and shrieked between her daughters o'er a wild confederacy" is accented as I mark the accents. Let it be read straight like prose and it will come all right.' Apparently by 1861 he realized that the accentual aspect of these verses was difficult to distinguish with precision, for he then wrote, '"Boadicea" - no, I cannot publish her yet, perhaps never, for who can read her except myself?' 'Boadicea' was finally published in the Enoch Arden volume of 1864 among Tennyson's other metrical 'Experiments,' including 'Milton. Alcaics,' 'Hendecasyllabics,' and his 'Specimen' of the Iliad. By grouping these poems together in such a way, Tennyson clearly wished his readers arid critics to recognize them as technical achievements first and foremost, lest they be criticized on any other grounds without such acknowledgment. Tennyson wrote his poignant 'Prater Ave atque Vale' during a visit to Catullus's home, Sirmio, in 1880. The poem achieves a beautiful fusion of images from two of Catullus's poems: poem 31, written in choliambics, which praises the beauty of Sirmio; and poem 101, an elegiac in which Catullus bids his dead brother a final farewell:

116 Stateliest Measures Row us out from Desenzano, to your Sirmione row! So they rowed, and there we landed - 'O venusta Sirmio!' There to me through all the groves of olive in the summer glow, There beneath the Roman ruin where the purple flowers grow, Came that 'Ave atque Vale' of the Poet's hopeless woe, Tenderest of Roman poets nineteen-hundred years ago, 'Prater Ave atque Vale' - as we wandered to and fro Gazing at the Lydian laughter of the Garda Lake below Sweet Catullus's all-but-island, olive-silvery Sirmio!

5

Rather than attempt to approximate the rhythm of Catullus's Latin choliambic, the 'limping iambic,' or Catullan elegiac, Tennyson chose to use trochaic octameter catalectic, often referred to as his 'Locksley Hall' meter.49 One of the marks of Tennyson's ingenuity lies in his use of Catullus's Latin phrase 'Prater Ave atque Vale' in line 7 of the poem. In Catullus 101, the phrase makes up the last half of a pentameter line, and thus would be scanned with elision between 'ave' and 'atque,' as follows: Frater Ave-atque Vale

But Tennyson effectively unelides the phrase arid stresses it as in English, thus handily converting dactyl into trochee to fit his own meter: Frater Ave atque Vale

In both of Catullus's poems, the speaker has just completed a journey; in 31 a return home after a long trip, and in 101, a voyage to visit the foreign grave of the poet's brother. This similarity provides the common point at which Tennyson fuses the two poems, since the speaker in 'Frater Ave Atque Vale' addresses Sirmio upon his arrival there after a long voyage. Tennyson conflates Catullus 31 and 101 to splendid effect. He repeats Catullus's epithets for his home, 'O venusta Sirmio' (venustameaning 'charming' or 'beautiful'); and 'all-but-island,' echoing Catullus's 'Paene insularum.' In addition, he makes use of Catullus's description of the laughing waves of the Lydian lake in line 8. The reference to Catullus 101 lies in lines 5-7, when the speaker recalls that this particular poem was inspired by 'the Poet's hopeless woe.' As Ricks points out in the headnote to this poem in his edition,

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'Frater Ave atque Vale' is significant with respect to Tennyson's personal life because the poet's brother Charles had died the previous year, in 1879.M) Ricks quotes a letter from Tennyson to Gladstone, in which the poet thanks Gladstone for comparing his 'Prefatory Poem to My Brother's Sonnets' to Catullus 101. Tennyson wrote: I am glad too that you are touched by my little prefatory poem so far as to honour it by a comparison with those lovely lines, 'Multas per terras et multa per aequora vectus,' of which as you truly say neither I 'nor any other can surpass the beauty' - no, nor can any modern elegy, so long as men retain the least hope in the afterlife of those whom they loved, equal in pathos the desolation of that everlasting farewell, 'Atque in perpetuum frater Ave atque Vale.' ol

Interestingly, as with most of his metrical experiments, Tennyson seems to have been eager to put his accomplishments before a wide popular audience in a journal format before including them in the published volumes of his works. He first published 'Frater Ave atque Vale' in the March 1883 issue of the Nineteenth Centurybefore including it along with 'To Virgil' and other works in his 1885 volume bearing an appropriately classical title: Tiresias and Other Poems. A third poem in which Tennyson approximates a meter of Catullus is 'On the Jubilee of Queen Victoria,' which was published in Macmillari s Magazine in April 1887 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the queen's reign. This poem was originally published as 'Carmen Saeculare. An Ode in Honour of the Jubilee of Queen Victoria,' and the Latin title asks that the reader consider this poem a modern version of Horace's Carmen Saeculare ('Song of the Age'), a choral lyric commissioned by Augustus for the festival known as the ludi saeculares in 17 BCE. As Horace's lyric celebrates the accomplishments of Augustus, so Tennyson's praises Victoria on a half-century of leadership. Tennyson alternates the meters he uses in the stanzas of the Jubilee Ode. In the odd-numbered stanzas, Tennyson composes the verses in trochaic pentameter, while in the even-numbered ones he imitates the meter that Catullus used in poem 61, 'Collis o Heliconii,' an epithalamion celebrating the marriage of Manlius Torquatus and Vinia Aurunculeia.^ 2 The meter used by Catullus for his marriage hymn is the glyconic (scanned as - ^ - ~ ~ -w- ). His poem opens with a series of calls to various people to join in the wedding celebration, much as Tennyson's ode calls to various groups of the English to praise the queen in

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the even stanzas of the poem. Both stanzas 1 and 2 of the Jubilee Ode are given below for purposes of comparison: I Fifty times the rose has flowered and faded, Fifty times the golden harvest fallen, Since our Queen assumed the globe, the sceptre.

II She beloved for a kindliness Rare in Fable or History, 5 Queen, and Empress of India, Crowned so long with a diadem Never worn by a worthier, Now with prosperous auguries Comes at last to the bounteous 10 Crowning year of her Jubilee. The alternation between the stanzas of trochaic pentameter and those of glyconics gives the glyconic sections the effect of a choral refrain. This effect likewise evokes Catullus's original, in which a refrain consisting of a call to Hymen, the god of marriage, is repeated at intervals throughout the poem. The reader of this ode may recall the epithalamion at the conclusion of In Memoriam, a passage that likewise reveals the influence of Catullus 61, particularly in its consideration of the possibility of the newly married couple's conceiving a child on their wedding night, and of the speculation that this child may represent a new generation, ... a closer link Betwixt us and the crowning race Of those that, eye to eye, shall look On knowledge; under whose command Is Earth and Earth's, and in their hand Is Nature like an open book; (127-32) This prophecy for the future of England relates to Tennyson's praise of Victoria in the Jubilee Ode, which he concludes by describing the queen as the 'Hand of Light' who will lead her people,

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Till the thunders pass, the spectres vanish, And the Light is Victor, and the darkness Dawns into the Jubilee of the Ages. (69-71)53

Again, in a prophetic treatment of the glorious future that awaits his country, Tennyson has drawn on Catullus 61 and its prayer for the future offspring of the newly married couple. Tennyson's reasons for bringing to mind Catullus's marriage hymn in this poem are worth considering. After all, he might have chosen to imitate the Sapphic meter of Horace's Carmen Saeculare if he had wished to emphasize the relationship of this poem to Horace's work. The allusion to Catullus 61 perhaps is intended to emphasize Victoria's role as a wife and mother, as well as that of a queen, as when in line 25 Tennyson calls her 'Queen, as true to womanhood as Queenhood.' Victoria was indeed concerned with setting a supreme example of womanhood and motherhood in addition to nurturing her image as the ruler of her people. The resonances of the epithalamion in the ode contribute to the implication that both the queen's leadership and her role as mother will contribute to Britain's ascendancy into a new era. So why give the ode a Horatian title upon its initial publication? Catullus was a troubling figure to many Victorians. His verse appealed to many readers, particularly those who admired its technical skill and his often startlingly human expressions of emotion. Tennyson often called Catullus his personal favourite, and referred to him as the 'tenderest' of the Roman poets.04 Nevertheless, Catullus appalled pious conservatives with his frank treatments of love and often obscene ripostes to his critics and enemies. Victorians also became fixated on details of his biography, particularly on academic conjectures concerning the identification of 'Lesbia,' the addressee of much of Catullus's more famous love poetry.53 Horace, by contrast, was generally deemed respectable by all readers, although his popularity waxed and waned. He was often quoted in public debate and often parodied, and his popularity experienced a notable rise towards the end of the century, perhaps because some wished to see Victorian Britain as a new golden age.56 Multiple editions of Horace's works appeared in the later nineteenth century, including Gladstone's 1894 translations of the odes. Horace's popularity was also attested to by the continuous stream of English tourists who flocked to visit both his Sabine farm and the putative site of the 'Bandusian' fountain he describes in Ode 3.13.57

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In a poem designed to praise Victoria, therefore, Horace clearly would have been a more respectable influence to invoke than Catullus. Tennyson's allusion to Horace in the original title of 'Carmen Saeculare' suggests his wish that the wide public audience it would reach in Macmillan 's in April 1887 would see a clear parallel between Victoria and the great emperor of Golden Age Rome, Augustus; and, consequently, between Horace and Tennyson as great poets of their ages. Nevertheless, Tennyson dropped 'Carmen Saeculare' from the title when he included the ode in his Demeter and Other Poems in 1889 and afterwards. Whether he did so because he ultimately felt the title was inappropriate for this poem, or because he had already made his point among a wide popular audience is impossible to say. Perhaps he wished to heighten the poem's emphasis on Victoria's role as wife and mother when he chose to place it alongside his great classical monologue on motherhood, 'Demeter and Persephone.' Or perhaps rather than merely a 'song of the age,' he wished the ode to be read as a song for any age. Such speculations aside, the Jubilee Ode reveals that even in the final years of his life, Tennyson continued to find great poetic potential in attempting to adapt a classical verse form in an English poem of thoroughly modern import. The complex and often surprisingly adept metrical experiments discussed in this chapter suggest the breadth and richness of structural material that classical verse provided Tennyson as he developed the metrical achievements of his own poetry. More specifically, his ongoing study of and experimentations with classical prosody clearly became integral to the development of his mature classical monologues, the subject of the next two chapters.

Chapter 5 The Trilogy on Death: 'Ulysses,' 'Tithonus,' and 'Tiresias'

Among the first products of the period immediately following the news of Arthur Henry Hallam's death in 1833 were Tennyson's first drafts of a trilogy of classical monologues dealing with different attitudes towards death: 'Ulysses,' 'Tithon,' and 'Tiresias.'1 These three monologues have a curious publication history: 'Ulysses' was published in the 1842 Poems, but 'Tithon' was not published until it appeared in its revised form as 'Tithonus' in the Cornhill in 1860, and then in Enoch Arden and Other Poems in 1864. Tennyson did riot return to 'Tiresias' until even later; the poem was not completed and published until 1885, when he framed it with 'To E. Fitzgerald,' and made it the title poem of his collection Tiresias and Other Poems. This wide spread in the history of his revision of these poems allows us to see how each poem was shaped and reshaped for public reception at distinctly different periods in the century. As he did in his early classical monologues such as 'CEnone' and 'Semele,' in these three poems Tennyson remains consistent in choosing original moments in the lives of familiar figures for developing his own themes. In addition, he effectively continues his project of weaving together subtle allusions to classical stories from which he draws his materials. But perhaps the most exceptional accomplishment of these poems is Tennyson's success with the third aspect of his project in the classical monologues - that of achieving a voice, or manner of speaking, for his monologists that is entirely appropriate to the time and culture of his speakers. In image, word arrangement, and allusion, Tennyson constantly evokes classical literature in these poems, amalgamating 'numerous adaptations of classical phrasing' that, as Douglas Bush writes, 'gave his earlier if not his modern readers the pleasure of recognizing old jewels in a new setting.' 2 Yet while 'Ulysses' and 'Tithonus'

122 Stateliest Measures have consistently attracted a great deal of critical attention, Tiresias' has received very little. And Tiresias' is, in many ways, a much more striking example of the sustaining of a speaker's natural and appropriately classical idiom throughout the entire poem. In this sense, 'Tiresias' represents an even fuller culmination of the effects Tennyson had achieved in 'CEnone.' After a brief discussion of 'Ulysses' and Tithonus,' both of which have received considerable critical attention since their publication, the bulk of this chapter will focus on Tennyson's achievements in 'Tiresias.' Like 'CEnone,' 'Tiresias' demonstrates one of Tennyson's fullest realizations of his conception of the classical monologue. Tennyson took care to point out that 'Ulysses' was inspired by the death of Hallam in 1833. In a comment printed in the Memoir and later in the Eversley edition of his works, he said that' [t] he poem was written soon after Arthur Hallam's death, and it gave my feeling about the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life perhaps more simply than anything in In Memoriam.^Tennyson again compared the poem to In Memoriam in a comment to James Knowles: ' [T] here is more about myself in "Ulysses," which was written under the sense of loss and all that had gone by but that still life must be fought out to the end. It was more written with the feeling of his loss upon me than many of the poems in In Memoriam.'4 'Ulysses' was written around the time that Tennyson began composing his 'English Idyls,' and was published alongside them in the 1842 Poems. As mentioned in the Introduction, Angela O'Donnell has argued that these poems represent Tennyson's attempt to produce a collection of 'idyls' that were English in terms of language, theme, and content, rather than merely being translations or rehashings of classical originals. It seems clear that Tennyson originally conceived of 'Ulysses' as a poem in this group; nevertheless he excluded it from the English idyls in later publications of his works. O'Donnell argues that he did so because he had begun to conceive of this poem as more of an experiment with suiting the idiom of a character to his particular culture and period, and thus separate from his plan in the English idyls of 'suiting various kinds of language to various subjects.'5 For the purposes of this study, it should be noted that the culture and period to which the idiom of Tennyson's 'Ulysses' is suited are rather more medieval than classical. Scholars have discussed 'Ulysses' in scores of essays from the Victorian period to the present day. It has been generally agreed that the poem is more influenced by Dante's characterization of Ulysses than by Homer's Odysseus. In support of Dante as a predominant influence, one might

The Trilogy on Death: 'Ulysses,' 'Tithonus,' and 'Tiresias'

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recall Tennyson's opinion of the classical Ulysses as expressed in the marginal note mentioned in chapter 1 in a copy of Euripides' Hecabe (catalogue item 109): 'Ulysses is, as usual, crafty & unfeeling.' It is also important to note that Tennyson chooses to set 'Ulysses' after the events of Homer's Odyssey, when an older Ulysses seems to be attempting to round up a group of mariners for a final adventure at sea. The situation may have been suggested in part by Tiresias's cryptic prediction of Odysseus's death in book 11 of the Odyssey, foretelling that Odysseus would return home to Ithaca after many hardships, would slay the suitors in his house, and finally ' [d]eath will come to you from the sea, in / some altogether unwarlike way, and it will end you / in the ebbing time of a sleek old age.'6 Nevertheless, the content of Tennyson's poem does follow Dante more closely than Homer, and indeed Tennyson's choice of 'Ulysses' for the title of the poem was surely intended to emphasize this connection. In Dante's Inferno 26, Ulysses is being punished for his deceitfulness in the Eighth Circle of Hell, a fact that in itself complicates an interpretation of Tennyson's poem. Dante's Ulysses tells Virgil about his final voyage, describing his quest to sail beyond the prescribed limits of the world at Gibraltar, and he professes an attitude of persistence and tireless seeking that is much like that of Tennyson's Ulysses (11. 90-124).7 One part of his speech in particular resonates with Tennyson's speaker: 'O brothers!' I began, 'who to the west Through perils without number now have reach'd, To this, the short remaining watch, that yet Our senses have to wake, refuse not proof Of the unpeopled world, following the track Of Phoebus. Call to mind from whence ye sprang: Ye were not form'd to live the life of brutes, But virtue to pursue and knowledge high.' 8

Interestingly, this speech immediately precedes Ulysses's description of his and his crew's deaths in a violent storm at sea once he has fired their passion to continue their voyage west. William Buckler sees Dante's conception of Ulysses as an important influence on the philosophy behind many of Tennyson's poems. While Dante damned Ulysses to his Inferno, Buckler points out, Tennyson does not do so. Rather, Tennyson epitomizes 'the existential precariousness of man in this world,' he writes, while employing 'two millennia of the very

124 Stateliest Measures richest literary inheritance.'9 Regardless of one's assessment of the importance of Dante to a reading of 'Ulysses,' however, the close similarity between Tennyson's poem and the lines quoted above suggests that, at least for a reader familiar with Dante, Ulysses' courageous words inspiring his crew to make a final glorious voyage are to some degree overshadowed by the disastrous death that immediately awaited them. Of course, complicating the reading of Tennyson's 'Ulysses' as a variation on Dante's conception of the character is the fact that there are several examples of phrasing in the poem that suggest an intention to achieve a Homeric resonance in Ulysses' speech. For example, Ulysses' statement T am become a name' (11) recalls the moving episode in the Odyssey in which Odysseus hears his own adventures sung by Demodocus at the court of the Phaeacians, and acknowledges his fame. Less directly, the reference can be read as a twist on the episode in which Odysseus tells the Cyclops Polyphemus that 'Nobody' ('Oim