Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 [Reprint 2016 ed.] 9781512806205

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Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to

1850

Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to l8$0

by

Clyde de L.

Ryals

University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia

Press

© 1964 by the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania

Published in Great Britain, India, and Pakistan by the Oxford University Press London, Bombay, and Karachi

Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 63-7857

7367

Printed in the United States of America

F O R MARK LONGAKER

Foreword

Writing seventeen years after the death of Tennyson, C. F. G. Masterman in his Condition of England defined the possibilities for contemporary writers as "two voyages": "a voyage without in the actual encounter with primitive and hostile forces and in a universe of salt and bracing challenges; and a voyage within and across distant horizons and to stranger countries than any visible to the actual senses." Alfred Tennyson was, I believe, one of the last poets able to make both voyages, but he could do so only with great effort and at great expense. By nature introspective, he found the life of the mind far more appealing than the life of action; yet he knew, like Milton and Keats before him, that great poetry demands the voyage without as well as the voyage within. His early poetry, then, is concerned with the pull of the two voyages; and thus it becomes, in Arnold's words, the dialogue of the mind with itself. There is for modern readers something intensely interesting about such a divided personality, for we see in Tennyson almost the same dilemma that faces contemporary artists. Often when we read his poems we feel that Tennyson is of our age. But then at times he seems as remote from us as Bishop Wilberforce and his anti-Darwin fulminations. What, then, is there about Tennyson that makes him appear so modern and yet so dated? The answer is not easily given, although this has been one of the primary concerns of Tennysonian criticism of the past four decades. 7

8

Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850

Most critics agree that what is dull or bad in Tennyson is something called "Victorianism," that the poet was good so long as he avoided commitment to Victorian ideals. The business of modern critics has been, therefore, to separate the "real" Tennyson from the Victorian bard, a line of inquiry begun by Harold Nicolson in his book Tennyson: Aspects of His Life, Character, and Poetry, first published in 1923. For all recent commentators agree with H. J. C. Grierson in his chapter in the Cambridge History (XIII, 25-50) that the deepest vein of the poet's personality was his preoccupation with the mysteries of life and death and immortality, themes around which his brooding imagination was to circle all his life with a sincerer passionate and pathetic interest than he felt for any other subject that engaged his art—seeking, finding, but never long sure that he really had found, like some lone, ghostly sea-bird wheeling around the luring, dazzling, baffling beams of a lighthouse on some stormy headland. In a sense, my purpose in this book is somewhat the same as that outlined by Nicolson: I have sought to show what there is of the inner nature of the man himself in his poetry and how this was blended with the demands of his friends, his reviewers, his reading public, and, ultimately, of the Zeitgeist itself. Yet I differ from Nicolson and other commentators in denying that there is a break in Tennyson's career, for from the beginning what is called the "Victorian" in Tennyson was present in his poetry. It is in fact my contention that the interplay between the "real" and "Victorian" Tennyson is what makes his early poetry so interesting to us today and so important as documents in the history of the development of twentieth-century man, especially the twentieth-century poet, who experiences many of the moral and spiritual confusions that faced Tennyson. For in

Foreword

9

Tennyson's poetry to 1850 there is, if we look closely enough for it, a faithful record of the growth of a poet's mind: not only the development of an aesthetic but also the development of psychological adaptation. In the following chapters I hope to show how Tennyson became the mental voyager exploring both the inner and outer worlds, and, further, how in making the two voyages he followed the pattern of development of other Romantic artists of the nineteenth century. I have examined certain themes and images in Tennyson's early verse which in their frequent recurrence attain symbolic status; and by doing so I hope to show that there is a very clear-cut pattern in Tennyson's poetry, one which is repeated time and again throughout the poet's work to 1850. I have chosen "In Memoriam" as my stopping-point because it embodies most of the themes and symbols treated in the earlier verses and also because it serves as a turning point—but not a breaking point—in Tennyson's career. I have, in other words, attempted to demonstrate the continuity of Tennyson's development by showing that the poet of "In Memoriam" was essentially the same person as the college boy who wrote "Recollections of the Arabian Nights." To my mind a study of Tennyson's poetry to 1850 proves that the boy is father of the man; it does not prove that the man of 1850 is a repudiation of the boy of 1830. I have attempted to amplify several enlightening studies of Tennyson, and to these I here acknowledge my indebtedness: Arthur J. Carr, "Tennyson as a Modern Poet," University of Toronto Quarterly, XIX, 361-382; Elizabeth H. Waterston, "Symbolism in Tennyson's Minor Poems," University of Toronto Quarterly, XX, 369-380; E. D. H. Johnson, The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry (Princeton, 1952). In treating the poems I have had to consider the poet,

10

Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850

and so my method of attack has been partly biographical. As Mr. Carr has stated, seeing what Tennyson's poetry is like demands that criticism breathe a mixed atmosphere, neither wholly aesthetic nor wholly biographical. It is not a question of choosing to consult biography in order to chart the poem or of preferring to ignore the private reference. In Tennyson's poetry the private and public worlds are fused. In the presence of such poetry, criticism must act upon life as well as upon art. Tennyson's double nature does not divide itself between the poet and the man; his poetry has a double nature and reveals not only itself but also the poet. In my treatment of the poet and his poetry, then, I hope to show how Tennyson was able, from 1842 onward, to make both voyages of which Masterman spoke, so that in "In Memoriam" he could assimilate his inner awareness into poetry addressed to a Victorian reading public. I have examined in detail many poems, and thus the reader should regard my study as a handbook, of sorts, to Tennyson's early poetry, which should be consulted mainly with reference to individual poems. Lastly, a bibliographical note. I have used the text of the Cambridge Tennyson, edited by W. J. Rolfe, for most of my citations. In addition I have used Unpublished Early Poems, edited by Sir Charles Tennyson (London, 1931), citations to which are indicated by an asterisk; The Devil and the Lady, edited by Sir Charles Tennyson (London, 1930); and the unpublished poems included by Hallam Tennyson in his Memoir (London, 1897).

Acknowledgments

I should like to express my thanks to Sir Charles Tennyson for allowing me to quote from his editions of The Devil and the Lady and the Unpublished Early Poems, to the Macmillan Company of London for permission to cite passages from the Memoir, and to the Houghton Mifflin Company for leave to use the Cambridge Edition of Tennyson's poetical works. I am also grateful to Robert Langbaum, who graciously consented to read this study in manuscript and suggest revisions; to Arthur J. Carr, who made helpful suggestions concerning the last chapter; to Maurice Johnson, who has been willing to take time from his own work to help me with mine; and to members of English 252 at the University of Pennsylvania during the Fall Term, 1959-1960, who discussed Tennyson with me and helped me with some of the analyses of his poems.

11

Contents

Foreword

7

Acknowledgments

11

Juvenilia

15

Poems, Chiefly Lyrical

38

III.

Poems of 1832

69

IV.

Poems of 1842

103

V.

The Princess

164

VI.

In Memoriam

195

Afterword

271

I. II.

CHAPTER I

Juvenilia

Alfred Tennyson's poetic endeavors began in early childhood, and even as a child his poetic genius was recognized. "If Alfred die," his father said, "one of our greatest poets will have gone.'" Recognizing his son's talent, the father set the boy at an early age to the writing of verse, to verse translation of Roman poets, to imitations of English authors. At ten or eleven he composed hundreds of lines in imitation of Pope; at twelve he wrote an epic of six thousand lines in the manner of Scott; at fourteen he wrote a drama in blank verse inspired by the Elizabethan dramatists; and when he was eighteen he published, in conjunction with his brothers Frederick and Charles, his first volume, Poems by Two Brothers (1827). Fortunately many of the early poems not included in this collection were preserved, and some of these have been published by his son and grandson. These unpublished early poems are of great interest to the student of Tennyson, for they and the poems in Poems by Two Brothers show that even as an adolescent many of those themes which were to preoccupy his poetry for many years to come were already present in the poet's mind. As Sir Harold Nicolson says of the Poems by Two Brothers, in 15

16

Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850

them one is able "to discover the seeds of many later inspirations, to observe the tender roots of various familiar growths which were later to become so well established.'" The verses in the Poems by Two Brothers are for the most part less interesting to the student of Tennyson's poetry than are the poems which he did not publish; and it is intriguing to guess why the poet undertook to publish these particular works and withhold those other verses, such as "In Deep and Solemn Dreams,"* which are better poetry. Tennyson himself later commented: "I myself at that time had done far better things than any contained in this volume," calling his pre-Cambridge verses "early rot.'" Perhaps the best explanation is the poet's statement that these poems were omitted as "being too much out of the common for the public taste.'" Certainly the poems in the 1827 publication were conventional: "On Sublimity," for example, is clearly imitative of the eighteenth century: it is a conventional ode of eleven stanzas of ten lines each, drawing its inspiration, especially in stanzas six and seven, from the Pre-Romantics, and written in imitation of Collins' "Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland." It is much too long, much of it being given over to a catalogue of splendors: Niagara, Mammoth Cave, Teneriffe, Fingal's Cave, etc. But if we look carefully at many of the poems in this collection, if we examine their themes and images, we can find the expression of a mind which was far from conventional and which, even at so early a stage in its development, was tormented by a reality which it found oppressive. To understand these early poems we must recall a few facts about Tennyson's life prior to his arrival at Cambridge. His father, the Rev. Dr. George Clayton Tennyson, was a man of great learning who, for some reason that has never

Juvenilia

17

been satisfactorily explained or understood, was disinherited by his father in favor of his younger brother. As compensation the Rev. Dr. Tennyson was appointed to several benefices; but since these livings never quite provided enough money for the upkeep of a family of eleven children, the father could not afford the luxury of sending his sons to public schools, and so was forced to undertake the education of his children himself. Dr. Tennyson performed his duties as tutor wonderfully well, but this occupation was timeconsuming, and on top of this he was incessantly worried by arrangements to be made for the service of his livings. In time worry about his children's education and about financial difficulties began to tell on him, and his health, both physical and mental, was seriously affected. T o escape from the worries in a household which at times included twenty-three people in cramped quarters, he turned to drink; and his fits of depression, which hitherto had been bad enough, now became intolerable for his family. The deterioration of his father's condition occurred during the period 1824-1827, when Alfred was between fourteen and eighteen, just the years in which a boy's temperament is most subject to change. As his father's condition worsened, as he suffered from alternate bouts of lethargy and paroxysms of violence, the boy also suffered. During scenes of violence Alfred would run out into the churchyard and throw himself down among the graves, longing to die. By nature Alfred was of a sensitive and impressionable temperament, and his unhappy home life served to intensify the family tendency toward melancholy and depression, the "black-bloodedness" of the Tennysons. His self-confidence disappeared and, says his biographer grandson, "he became subject to those moods of self-torment and remorse which are not uncommon in boys of sensitive nature.'" Such then

18 Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 was the emotional state of the young poet when he wrote his early poems. One of the major themes in the poems contributed to Poems by Two Brothers and in the Unpublished Early Poems is that of loneliness and exile. Even the titles of the poems indicate the extent of this theme: "The Exile's Harp," "I Wander in Darkness and Sorrow," "We Meet No More," "Written by an Exile of Bassorah," "The Outcast."* The speaker in these poems feels himself "Unfriended, and cold, and alone" ("I Wander in Darkness and Sorrow"); his friends are all dead and gone, leaving him "lorn and lonely" ("Memory"); he has parted forever from the one he loves, and his "every hope on earth is past" ("We Meet No More"); he must, consequently, resign himself to wandering exile as a "hopeless outcast" ("Remorse"). The melancholy of these poems is pervasive, very few of them even hinting at happy moments. Now, to express such disaffection with life Tennyson obviously could not speak in propria persona, for even he realized that world- and time-weariness would seem ludicrous coming from the mouth of an eighteen-year-old. No reader could suspend his disbelief to accept even for the moment that a boy of eighteen could wail: Oh! 'tis a fearful thing to glance Back on the gloom of mis-spent years: What shadowy forms of guilt advance, And fill me with a thousand fears! ("Remorse.") He devised, therefore, to speak in the persona of an older man; and he has the speaker in the poem just quoted refer to his "old and aching eyes" and the speaker in "Memory" allude to his "Days of youth, now shaded / By twilight of

Juvenilia

19

long years." He assumed, in other words, what W. D. Paden has called the "mask of age.'" This disaffection and sense of guilt are of course reminiscent of Byron, and in truth Byron's influence is paramount in these poems. One has only to compare these lines from "Remorse" And I was cursed from my birth, A reptile made to creep on earth, An hopeless outcast, born to die A living death eternally! with the introductory stanzas of Canto 111 of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" to see how close the resemblance is between the Tennysonian outcast and the Byronic hero. In rhythm and tone "The Expedition of Nadir Shah into Hindostán" recalls "The Destruction of Sennacherib"; the rhythm of "Mithradates Presenting the Cup of Poison" is that of "Maid of Athens"; "And ask ye why these sad tears stream?" suggests Byron's "On the Death of a Young Lady"; "Come hither, can'st thou tell me if this skull" recalls "Childe Harold," II, 5-7. And if touches of melancholy can be said to be Byronic in inspiration, then certainly such poems as "Midnight." "The Walk at Midnight," "Friendship," and "The Grave of a Suicide" are patterned after Byron. There is certainly no question about the Byronic influence or about Tennyson's early love of Byron: all students of Victorian poetry know how when the young poet heard of the death of his hero in Greece, he ran to the woods and carved the words "Byron is dead" on a rock and felt that the "whole world seemed to be darkened for me" (Memoir, I, 4). What interests us here, however, is not so much the extent of Byron's influence on the young Tennyson as why the young poet chose to model so many of his verses on the Romantic poet. Professor Lounsbury writes:

20

Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to ¡850 It is perhaps natural for a boy to write gloomy poetry; to pretend to be blasé before he has really known what pleasure is; to complain of blighted affections before he could have learned by experience the meaning of that preliminary process of acquiring them which we term falling in love; to find the grave casting its gloomy shadow over life at the very age when life is abounding and fairly exultant in freshness and vigor. It seems for some reason to be always natural; at that particular period Byron had made it fashionable.'

There exists the possibility, however, that the boy was drawn to Byron by a very real feeling of kinship; perhaps the Byronic mood was the best literary mood to correspond to his feeling of despair. Because his home life was unhappy, he perhaps felt that like Childe Harold he must leave his native hearth and wander into the dark world as an outcast. Undoubtedly "The Outcast,"* which is almost certainly Byronic in inspiration, stems also from his own disaffection with home: I will not seek my father's groves, They murmur deeply o'er my head Of sunless days and broken loves. As Professor Paden suggests, perhaps when Tennyson "borrowed themes, tones, and imagery from Byron, the act was indicative of his own emotional state rather than of conventional literary imitation.'" Like Byron, the young Tennyson had had poured into him a strong dose of Calvinism. His Aunt Mary Bourne was rabidly Calvinistic, and she persuaded Alfred that he was one who was determined for everlasting damnation. "Alfred, Alfred," she said to him, "when I look at you, I think of the words of Holy Scripture—'Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire' " (Memoir, I, 15). Certainly her preach-

Juvenilia

21

ing had its effect on her young nephew, for many of his poems of this first period give evidence of a belief in the doctrine of election. T h e speaker in " R e m o r s e " believes that he was "cursed from my birth," " A r m a g e d d o n " * and " T h e Coach of D e a t h " * are concerned with the saved and the damned. When added to the influence of Byron, this streak of Calvinism served to intensify the young poet's own natural predilection toward melancholy and morbidity. T h e picture of life in the early poems is not a happy one. If the speakers in these poems ever find beauty and happiness in the world, it is usually as the remembrance of beauty and happiness, the memory of some bygone day, which can never return. Memory, thus, is doubly b a d : it either recalls the

unhappinesses

and

vices

of

former

years,

as

in

" R e m o r s e , " or it brings back the souvenir of happy days that are dead and can never be recaptured, as in " M e m o r y . " If in the present the speaker does see beauty in the world about him, he is made melancholy by the thought that such beauty is fleeting and will soon pass into decay. This

preoccupation

with

the transience

of

beauty

is

another theme of Tennyson's early poetry. In " T h e E x i l e ' s H a r p , " a poem which recalls the Old English

"Deor's

L a m e n t , " the wandering exile seeks to find comfort in his harp; but this he fails to do because he realizes that the harp too lacks permanence, that just as he himself will die so will the chords of the instrument decay. He decks the harp with roses, but the flowers also offer no comfort

because he

reflects that the blossoms which now are "glowing and r e d " will soon "see their freshness declining." In the " O d e :

O

Bosky B r o o k " * the speaker weeps "Watching the red hour of the dying S u n " ; and in "How gaily sinks the gorgeous sun within his golden bed" the poet looks on the beauty of the setting sun and is made sad by the reflection that soon

22

Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850

it, like all beauty and happiness in life, will be gone and darkness will follow: E'en thus in life our fairest scenes are preludes to our woe; For fleeting as that glorious beam is happiness below. Even in "Why should we weep for those who die," ostensibly about immortality and the happiness of the afterlife, the core of the poem, which sounds a good bit like the Shelley of "To a Skylark," is concerned with the transience of beauty: The noblest songster of the gale Must cease, wheft Winter's frowns appear; The reddest rose is wan and pale, When Autumn tints the changing year. The fairest flower on earth must fade. The brightest hopes on earth must die. These lines remind us of Gray and the "graveyard" poets: the last two lines seem as though they were consciously taken from the "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." To be sure, Tennyson's use of the theme of the brevity of life and beauty was probably taken, consciously or unconsciously, from the Pre-Romantics; but as in the case of Byron's influence, the borrowing or the imitation is interesting in that it reflects the mind of the young poet. Once again the borrowing probably indicates Tennyson's emotional state at the time. The adolescent Tennyson delighted in dwelling on objects and places that have seen better days but now lie in ruin; he loved to contrast beauty and magnificence with destruction and decay, but especially does he seem to find pleasure in describing the decay itself. Nearly all places about which he writes in the Poems by Two Brothers are now in ruin. In

Juvenilia

23

"Persia" he laments the fall of Iran before Alexander; in "The Fall of Jerusalem" he bewails how "the brilliance of thy diadem" is "rent from thee." In the "Lamentation of the Peruvians" and "Babylon" he describes the decay of great states. " T h e Dell of E ," which offers one of the few instances of the luxuriant descriptions of nature which were to flower in " T h e Lotus-Eaters," is a typically Romantic description of a lovely spot that has been ruined by industry. "The Old Sword" contrasts former brilliance with present decay: Old Sword! I would not burnish Thy venerable rust, Nor sweep away the tarnish Of darkness and of dust! Lie there, in slow and still decay, Unfam'd in olden rhyme, The relic of a former day, A wreck of ancient time!

In " T h e Vale of Bones" the speaker looks on the remains of those warriors Upon whose slowly-rotting clay The raven long hath ceas'd to prey, But, mould'ring in the moon-light air. Their wan, white skulls show bleak and bare.

He sees The eyeless socket, dark and dull, The hideous grinning of the skull.

T h e imagery of these poems is extremely interesting, for it suggests the phantasmagoria which haunted the young poet's mind. He speaks continually of "unreal shapes" which

24

Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850

haunt his "worn mind and fevered brain" ("The Outcast"*), of "wonderful gleams" ("Ode: O Bosky Brook"*), of "witching fantasies" ("Sense and Conscience"*). He writes of bazaars, harems, dancing girls ("Ode: O Bosky Brook"*), of asps, poisonous shrubs, and burning sands ("Memory"); waves remind him of an army of the dead ("Oh! ye wild winds, that roar and rave"). Much of this exotic and fantastic imagery derives from Tennyson's reading, and naturally a boy turns to the exotic to convey an air of sophistication; but as Professor Paden has shown, much of this exoticism had become even by 1827 not merely poetic trappings but assimilated imagery. Tennyson had a bizarre theme to expound—disaffection with life—and he turned to the exotic and the bizarre to carry the burden of this theme. Life as the young Tennyson saw it was full of sorrow, and there was no help for it. Time and again the adjective hopeless recurs in his early poetry. And since there was so much unhappiness in the world that he saw about him, the young poet felt it incumbent upon him to escape into another world. Fairly often in his early poetry is the desire for death an important part of the poem. In the sonnet "Alas! how weary are my human eyes"* the poet (since this is a sonnet, one can assume that the speaker is the poet), weary with life, declares "One only thought I have, and that is death." The speaker in "Remorse" cries out: Oh, God! . . . That I might sleep, and never wake Unto the thrill of conscious fear. More often, however, this death-wish is toned down into a desire for the forgetfulness and for the new world of dreams which sleep brings. Like Keats, the young Tennyson longed for a life fairer

Juvenilia

25

than that which he saw in the world of reality. The problem was of course where to look for this more congenial life, and a good part of Tennyson's verse is, consequently, concerned with this very problem. In a search for the answer the poet felt that he had first to know himself, to explore the depths of his own inner being, painful though the process might be. "I must," he says, I must needs pore upon the mysteries Of my own infinite Nature and torment My Spirit with a fruitless discontent. ("Perdidi Diem"*) In "Armageddon"* the seraph tells the speaker that he cannot hope to understand the mysteries of life and death when the sense is "clogg'd with dull Mortality," when the spirit is "fetter'd with the bond of clay"; he must, the angel says, throw off these impediments and "Open thine eyes and see!" He must learn what is real and what is illusion. Already in "The Devil and the Lady," a verse drama written when Tennyson was fourteen, he was concerned with the problem of reality: did what he saw actually exist or was the life of the mind the true reality? O suns Are ye Are ye Of that Are ye Except

and spheres and stars and belts and systems. or are ye not? realities or semblances which men call real? true substance? are ye anything delusive shows . . .? (Act II, Scene 1.)

The conflict in Tennyson's early poems revolves around an epistemological problem: the divergence between objective reality and the subjective realm of the mind. Tennyson's problem as poet, therefore, was to effect some kind of reconciliation between the two. Already in his earliest poems he

26 Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 was seeking for a means to bridge the gulf between self and object, or, put another way, to communicate state of mind in terms of external phenomena. For the young Tennyson the reality that served most often as a sign of inner emotion is landscape: stratified levels of scenery, variation between light and dark. His eye ranges from plain to hill, he watches the sun yield place to the moon. It is as though the poet would have us follow him from the sunlit plain to the gloomy mountain top, from literal level to the dark recesses of the mind. The pattern can be seen in "Ode: O Bosky Brook,"* the first part of which purports to be no more than a tracing of the windings of a brook: How happy were the fresh and dewy years When by thy damp and rushy side, In the deep yellow Eventide, I wept sweet tears, Watching the red hour of the dying Sun, And felt my mind dilate With solemn uncontrollable pleasure, when The sad curve of the hueless Moon, Sole in her state, Varied with steadfast shades the glimmering plain, And full of lovely light Appear'd the mountain tarn's unbroken sleep. . . . When we reach the end of this part we realize the special significance of the scenery in directing our attention towards the almost hieratic utterance: when day's manhood wears his crown Of hottest rays in Heaven's windy Hall, To one who pryeth curiously down, From underneath the infathomable pall And pressure of the upright wave,

Juvenilia

27

The abiding eyes of Space, from forth the grave Of that black Element, Whine out like wonderful gleams Of thrilling and mysterious beauty, sent From gay shapes sparkling thro' the gloom of dreams. Without the copula of logical statement, Tennyson, anticipating the French symbolists, was attempting to make his scenery the reflection of le paysage intérieur. The interplay between high and low and light and dark came, therefore, to signify his own "divided will," a theme examined so thoroughly in his succeeding volumes. Distressed by his personal environment and perplexed by the atomism of his age, which had separated object from value, Tennyson often withdrew into a world of dreams and imagination to find a more congenial reality. In both "Memory"* and "Sense and Conscience"* the poet relates how pleasant it is to sleep and how painful it is to waken. In "visions of the night" he is "shaken with delight" ("Memory"*). In sleep the conscience is drugged and loses its restraining qualities, and thus the poet is allowed to see those witching fantasies which won the heart, Lovely with bright black eyes and long black hair And lips which moved in silence, shaping words With meaning all too sweet for sound. ("Sense and Conscience"*) One of the most interesting of Tennyson's early poems is "In Deep and Solemn Dreams,"* for it mingles the themes of loneliness, exile, and escape. The desire is explicit for escape from the world of conflict, of desire and denial, and in the poem the poet praises the power of dreams as the best means of escape. Only in dreams—that is, when he is divorced from the world of reality—does he find "The sacred

28

Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850

charm of tearless sleep"; in dreams alone does he see those lovely "Forms which live but in the mind." This ability to find another reality in the world of dreams, to conceive of "forms" of life in the realm of the mind, is closely related to that mystic, semidreamlike state to which the poet was subject all his life. Tennyson himself speaks of the experience thus: A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me thro' repeating my own name two or three times to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life. (Memoir, I, 320.) In Tennyson's poetry the transcendent revelation is permitted only after the " I " has successfully circumvented certain restraining forces. There is a very definite pattern that Tennyson's poems follow before the speaker's attainment of mystical vision. First, there is an ominous imagery, which seems to represent the forces seeking to curb the imaginative flight; often this imagery takes the form of heavily foliated vegetation or of strange flying shapes. Secondly, there follow passages of anguish and awe, which apparently signify the imaginative desire for liberation from reality. The pattern is plainly observable in "Armageddon"* (parts of which were later incorporated into the Cambridge prize poem "Timbuctoo"), which is among Tennyson's very earliest verses.

Juvenilia

29

The speaker in "Armageddon"* stands upon a mountain. "Black, formless, unclean things came flitting by"; he hears "Low chauntings, strangled screams"; he is seized by deep fear and trembling. Then a seraph appears and speaks to him, and he finds himself struck with surprise and wonder at his situation: 1 felt my soul grow godlike, and my spirit With supernatural excitation bound Within me, and my mental eye grew large. . . .

After the clash of these two forces the speaker enters into a new level of consciousness, which is the best description of the mystic state to be found in the early poems: My mind seem'd wing'd with knowledge and the strength Of holy musings and immense Ideas, Even to Infinitude. All sense of Time A n d Being and Place was swallowed up and lost Within a victory of boundless thought. I was a part of the Unchangeable, A scintillation of Eternal Mind, R e m i x ' d and burning with its parent fire. Yea! in that hour I could have fallen down Before my own strong soul and worshipp'd it.

The dialectic pattern is also discernable in "In Deep and Solemn Dreams"* and "Sense and Conscience,"* the very title of which indicates the existence of opposing forces. In "The Lover's Tale," written when Tennyson was nineteen but not published until many years later, the process is plainly disclosed. In a dream the speaker hears "The moanings in the forest, the loud brook, I Cries of the partridge like a rusty key I Turn'd in a lock, owl-whoop and dorhawkwhirr"; and at the same time he also hears "voices in the

30

Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850

distance calling to me I And in my vision bidding me dream on." Recognizing the pull of the two sides of his inner consciousness, he wonders "whether the mind, I With some revenge—even to itself unknown— I Made strange division. . . ." Furthermore, he speaks of the experience of dream in terms of opposites: Always the inaudible, invisible thought, Artificer and subject, lord and slave, Shaped by the audible and visible, Moulded the audible and visible. (II, 100-127.) With, then, an "excess of sweetness and of awe," the speaker attains his vision in which his beloved's fair eyes Shone on my darkness, forms which ever stood Within the magic cirque of memory, Invisible but deathless. . . . (II, 153-158.) The moment of profound awareness is not, it must be stressed, like the dark night of the soul: on the contrary, it is an entirely pleasurable moment, one in which the speaker in these poems feels himself released from oppressive reality. When the trance fades, when the dream passes, he feels, as he says in "In Deep and Solemn Dreams,"* that "the hollow dark I dread I Closes round my friendless head" and he is left "Hopeless, heartless and forlorn." Tennyson's exploration of the various levels of consciousness accounts in large part for the presence of the phantasmagoria—"unreal shapes" and "witching fantasies"—which characterizes the diction of his early poems. The poet was attempting to put into words the experiences of his dreams, what he calls in "The Lover's Tale" "delicious dreams, our other life"; and there is a strong suggestion that he was,

Juvenilia

31

perhaps subconsciously, identifying dreams with imaginative freedom. He was, he knew, almost uniquely given the power to transcend the world of reality, and of this he was undoubtedly speaking when in "The Coach of Death"* he says that some have hearts that in them burn With power and promise high, To draw strange comfort from the earth, Strange beauties from the sky. To see such strange beauties in his moments of transcendence was, Tennyson later emphasized, an experience which to him was entirely real. He spoke of the reality of the phenomenon to Tyndall at Farringford in 1858: "By God Almighty, there is no delusion in the matter! It is no nebulous ecstasy, but a state of transcendent wonder, associated with absolute clearness of mind." (Memoir, II, 473-474.) Another theme in Tennyson's early poetry, which also is traceable throughout a good part of the poet's career, is his treatment of the female. Here for the first time appear those maidens who were to play such a large part in Tennyson's next two volumes of verse; and like those later maidens, the ladies here presented are primarily of two types: I shall call them the strong woman and the suffering maiden. The strong woman, who appears most often, is usually fatal to some degree: she rules men and generally causes their destruction; she demands pure devotion and adoration, but she gives nothing in return. She appears as Cleopatra in "Antony to Cleopatra," who causes her lover to give up "a subject world" in favor of her; as Thais in "Persia" leading a mob to the palace of Persepolis; as the dissembling maiden in "Ah! yes, the lip may faintly smile" who with her "wither'd heart" has no consciousness of the ill for which she has been

32

Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850

responsible; as the femme j atale in "Did not thy roseate lips outvie" who is "proud of the fetters" that she has folded "around this fond deluded mind"; as the "half coquette" in "Lisette"* who with her "wilful hands" wants only to play at love. The contrasting type, the suffering maiden, is one who has been mistreated by the male figure or has in some way been subjected to pain. Berenice, "lorn and lost," in "Mithradates Presenting Berenice with the Cup of Poison," is a splendid example of this type of maiden. She is made to drink the poison to save her from shame and "the agonies of woe." In "A Contrast" Laura, whose "soul is riven / By pangs," is contrasted with carefree Chloe, who can play the game of love without giving her heart. There are other females who closely resemble the suffering maiden: these have died or have been lost forever. Like the male speaker in most of the early poems, this type of maiden is one whose situation is hopeless, and often her predicament is connected with that of the speaker. In "And ask you why these sad tears stream?" and "I Wander in Darkness and Sorrow" the maiden is dead; in "Written by an Exile of Bassorah" she is separated from the lover by his exile. In the early poems there is only one example of a woman who is both attractive and attainable, and that is to be found in "Thou earnest to thy bower, my love," verses which are largely based on an Indian poem." That these verses, unique in their treatment of love, are almost wholly a paraphrase of another work indicates how a description of a love affair in which there was a happy, reciprocal love on both sides was largely antithetical to the mind of the young poet. One is tempted to place a psychological interpretation on the young Tennyson's treatment of women and to suspect that there was definitely a subconscious identification between the poet

Juvenilia

33

and the two types of females. The important point to bear in mind, however, is that both types of women are but different manifestations of the male as presented in "Remorse" and "The Outcast."* Some readers will doubtless accuse me of overstressing the "unhealthy" elements in Tennyson's juvenilia. I am quite willing to admit that there are poems that give no indication of the themes I have been discussing, but they do not contain elements that admit of the tracing of the thematic development of Tennyson's poetry; that is, they do not share a common theme. Many of them are but imitations of other poets and nothing more. Besides Byron, the influence of Shelley is apparently discernable from time to time, although Tennyson claimed that "The Lover's Tale," written at nineteen, was composed "before I had ever seen a Shelley" (Memoir, II, 285). "The Lover's Tale" itself offers several passages which seem full of Shelleyan overtones. For example: but how should earthly measure mete The heavenly-unmeasured or unlimited Love, Who scarce can tune his high majestic sense Upon the thunder-song that wheels the spheres, Scarce living in the Aeolian harmony, And flowing odor of the spacious air. Scarce housed within the circle of this earth, Be cabin'd up in words and syllables, Which pass with that which breathes them? (I, 463-471.)

In "Armageddon"* the lines in Section II beginning "I saw / The smallest grain that dappled the earth" are likewise reminiscent of Shelley. The influence of Moore is obvious in nearly all the oriental poems in Poems By Two Brothers. What is missing, or rather what is nearly missing, is the

34

Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to ¡850

influence of Keats, which was to be important in the 1830 and 1832 volumes. We find suggestions of some Keatsian "cockneyisms"—"beamy" ("Thou earnest to thy bower, my love") and "flamy" ("Amy"*)—but only in a few poems such as "The Dell of E " do we find even a hint of those Keatsian luxuriant descriptions of nature which later were to become, for a while, the hallmark of Tennyson's style. Also almost lacking in these early poems is a suggestion of the "idyllic" which was to blossom in "Dora," "Edwin Morris," and numerous other idylls. Only in "The Lover's Tale," the story of a young man who loses his beloved to another man, does such a treatment of love exist, and this poem was not published until many years later. Apparently the sentimental vein was a side of his imagination that the adolescent Tennyson was not yet ready to explore; at any rate, it was not a side of his poetic personality that he yet wanted to present to the public. Nor, as the themes I have been discussing would suggest, is there much hint of the strong Tennysonian moral sense that was later to impress itself upon Victorian readers; and because it is so little present, the sonnets "Conrad! why call thy life monotonous?"* and "Life," published by Hallam Tennyson in the Memoir, strike us as strangely out of place. "We live but by resistance," the poet says in "Conrad"* "and the best / Of Life is but the struggle of the will," an utterance that can have but little meaning in a body of poetry dedicated to escape from life rather than enjoyment of the struggle of existence. Tennyson wrote the poem at Cambridge, so perhaps the influence of his morally minded Cambridge friends is here apparent; but that is another phase in Tennyson's development and belongs to the next chapter. As poetry, Tennyson's juvenilia are very uneven." Metri-

35

Juvenilia

cally his verses range from the mediocre and imperfect to such poems as " M a r i o n " * and "Lisette"* which show great metrical skill. Of all his exercises in the manner of Pope, only the "Translation of Claudian's 'Proserpine,' " * which is a very skillful imitation of eighteenth-century heroic couplets, remains extant. Of blank verse there are no examples in the Poems by Two Brothers and only " A r m a g e d d o n , " * which is highly Miltonic, in the Unpublished Early Poems. What we find in these volumes is a wide variety of verse forms, a variety which indicates the extent of the young poet's experimentation. In tone the juvenilia range from a sophisticated treatment of love in " T h e Devil and the L a d y " to the immature handling of passion in "Antony T o C l e o p a t r a " : O, Cleopatra! We two can This breaking The love to

fare thee well, meet no more; heart alone can tell thee I bore;

from the mawkish doggerel of "Mithradates Berenice with the C u p of Poison":

Presenting

Oh! Berenice, lorn and lost, T h i s w r e t c h e d soul w i t h s h a m e is b l e e d i n g :

Oh! Berenice, I am tost By griefs, like wave to wave succeeding, to the characteristically Tennysonian lines in " L o v e " : Almighty Love! whose nameless power This glowing heart defines too well, Whose presence cheers each fleeting hour, . . . In brief, the majority of Tennyson's very early poetry is not very good. T h e poems may not be as bad as Stopford A . Brooke maintained about the Poems by Two Brothers:

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Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to ¡850

"without one trace of originality, force, or freshness—faded imitations";" yet as poetry most are not of much value. Their interest for the modern reader lies in the introduction and the handling of the themes of loneliness and exile, the mask of age, the theme of loss manifested in the poet's preoccupation with the transience of beauty, the "divided will," the escape from reality, the suffering maiden and the fatal woman. These are the themes that were to characterize Tennyson's poetry for a great part of his career. Later on they may be repressed, ceasing to occur in the stream of conscious thought that went into the making of a poem, but at least one of these themes appears in nearly every poem that Tennyson wrote.

NOTES 1 Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir (London, 1897), I, 12. Hereafter this work will be cited in the text as Memoir. " Harold Nicolson, Tennyson: Aspects of his Life, Character, and Poetry (London, 1925), p. 53. 1 The first of these quotations is from the Memoir included in the DeLuxe Edition (London, 1898), I, 28. The second is f r o m the 1897 Memoir, I, 22. 'Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson (London, 1949), p. 50. s /bid., p. 48. ' W. D. Paden, Tennyson in Egypt (Lawrence, Kansas, 1942). ' T h o m a s R. Lounsbury, Life and Times of Tennyson (1809-1850) (New Haven, 1915), pp. 49-50. ' P. 60. 'Tennyson in Egypt, pp. 31-32. 10 By "juvenilia" I mean Tennyson's verses composed prior to and not included in the Poems, Chiefly Lyrical of 1830. " Stopford A. Brooke, Tennyson: His Art and Relation to Modern Life (London, 1894), p. 58.

37

CHAPTER

Poems, Chiefly

II

Lyrical

Tennyson's next publication was again to have been a joint endeavor, this time the collaborator being Arthur Henry Hallam. But Hallam, mainly because of his father's advice against publication, withdrew from the venture, and Tennyson went ahead with his first solo volume, which he published as Poems, Chiefly Lyrical in June, 1830. There were fifty-six poems in the volume, more than half of which were not reprinted in 1842 and many of which were never reprinted in any authorized edition during Tennyson's lifetime. It is difficult to discuss the Poems, Chiefly Lyrical because the collection is a hodge-podge: the serious alternates with the trifling, the original with the conventional; there is no note of certainty, almost no development of a given tone, subject, or theme. If we do find something by way of thematic development, we must, as is so often the case with Tennyson, look for suppressed emotion beneath the surface to discern the true nature of the poems. Perhaps even more than the Poems by Two Brothers, the 1830 volume is experimental in technique and vacillating in point of view. In the juvenilia we at least knew the character of the speaker in the poems: the mask of age had made for a consistent point of view; the themes of loneliness, exile, and escape had made 38

Poems, Chiefly Lyrical

39

for a consistent tone. In the Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, however, that consistency is lacking. For the reader who hurriedly goes through these poems the major note is that of prettiness. The verses are decorative and graceful, but they seem to lack power and to lead to no appointed end. Many of them appear to be exactly the kind of poetry being written by Mrs. Hemans. In spite of such reservations, the Poems, Chiefly Lyrical does represent an advancement in the growth of the poet's mind and art; for underneath all this prettiness and oscillation, we find Tennyson seeking for a workable construct upon which to base his poetry. Like so many poets who have lived since the beginning of the nineteenth century, Tennyson had to formulate for himself, rather than receive from a cultural tradition, a system of values that would be meaningful for his own time. In doing so he followed the classical pattern for the romantic artist : the period of the Everlasting No, negative romanticism, preceded the period of the Everlasting Yes, positive romanticism. Carlyle described the archetypal pattern when through the thin disguise of Teufelsdroeckh he showed his own transition through these stages. He tells what it was like to live at the end of the eighteenth century when the Enlightenment's preoccupation with the material and mechanical universe had deprived the world of moral meaning. "To me," Teufelsdroeckh explains, "the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility : it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb." He loses the desire to live. The break in this period of negation comes when he discovers that he has the capacity to feel—to feel hatred for and defiance of the mechanical universe. He refuses to submit himself to the Everlasting No, which tells him that he is

40

Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850

fatherless and an outcast: "/ am not thine," says Teufelsdroeckh, "but Free, and forever hate thee!'" After a period of aimless wandering, he comes to perceive the "Everlasting Yea" in the universe; he begins to see that the world is alive and that the pervading spirit is good. Teufelsdroeckh has completed the cycle of spiritual death, characterized by alienation and suffering, and rebirth, marked by an affirmation of the spiritual qualities in the universe. The Tennyson of 1830 was just beginning to indulge himself in those doubts about the validity of life that led Teufelsdroeckh into the period of the Everlasting No, and we will find that only a few years later Tennyson has firmly accepted Carlyle's negation. In Poems, Chiefly Lyrical Tennyson was making further exploratory incursions into the realm of the mind, measuring his own concepts and emotions against the forces of a hostile world. As he continued to examine the themes of the juvenilia, the predominant tone of the volume is, therefore, doubt and vacillation. The tendency toward trancelike isolation from reality, which played so major a role in the juvenilia, recurs even more frequently in the 1830 poems. Because of the frequency with which it occurs, we are inevitably led to postulate a symbolic significance for the phenomenon; and we need feel no equivocation, I think, about relating these descriptions of release from time and space to imaginative freedom. Feeling increasingly stronger the pull of the world after having arrived at Cambridge, Tennyson retreated from the demands of reality by means of dreams and momentary loss of consciousness. The most explicit example of self-withdrawal in Poems, Chiefly Lyrical is the poem entitled "The Mystic." Recalling the passage concerned with transcendent mystical revelation in "Armageddon,"* the poem indicates how visionary power

Poems, Chiefly Lyrical

41

has set the mystic apart from his fellows: "he was not one of ye, I Ye scorned him with an undiscerning scorn." The ominous imagery recalls the "Forms which live but in the mind" of "In Deep and Silent Dreams"*: the mystic perceives "imperishable presences serene, / Colossal, without form, or sense, or sound, / Dim shadows but unwaning presences." In these transcendent moments he is able to divorce himself from the body and remain "apart I In intellect and power and will." It should be noted that however happy the moments of withdrawal are, there is nevertheless a conflicting intuition which pulls the mystic and the dreamer back to reality. We very definitely feel the clash in the poems between the attraction of subjective withdrawal and the resistance of the poet's nature which clings to reality; we note the struggle between desire and denial. In "The Mystic" the conflict is made manifest in two ways: passages of ominous imagery are interspersed among passages of awe; secondly, the poem does not maintain its focus on the central figure, who represents complete isolation, but is shifted to the "ye," who belong to unknowing reality. The same tension was achieved in "Sense and Conscience,"* in which the dialectic clash was more evident. The word evident is perhaps the incorrect adjective, for the conflicting emotions of Tennyson's poems are suppressed to the point where one must nearly always look beneath the surface to discern the clash. In fact, one wonders whether Tennyson himself was fully cognizant at this time of the conflicting claims of his personality. T. S. Eliot maintains that in Tennyson the emotion is so deeply suppressed that even Tennyson himself was unaware of it. ; But whether the poet was aware or not of his own conflicting emotions, the fact remains that they are there.

42

Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850

The preoccupation with the dream world is ultimately the theme of 01 peovxec, based on the Heraclitean doctrine of flux. Things are, the poem maintains, only in the mind of man. Only dreams are true, and for the speaker of the poem all things "are to me for that I dream." Once again the theme of transience is introduced, and Tennyson continues to contrast the temporal sphere of reality with the inner, fixed core of being. In the world "All truth is change," there is neither "essence nor eternal laws"; there is no static being, only becoming, for "all things flow like a stream." Further evidence of this preoccupation with the gulf between external reality and the realm of the imagination is presented in a series of poems dealing with time, in which the poet forces himself to forget the present. In "The Mystic" the central figure is aware of time present only in the sense that it represents time passing: in his moment of transcendence he knows only "Time flowing in the middle of the night, I And all things creeping to a day of doom." In the sophomoric "The 'How' and the ' W h y ' " Tennyson states that "In time there is no present, I In eternity no future, I In eternity no past," a concept echoed in the first stanza of "Recollections of the Arabian Nights." The poet himself is an extraordinary human being, Tennyson implies in "The Poet," simply because he is removed from the limitations of space and time, because he can escape to a realm where he is "Apart from place, withholding time" ("Recollections of the Arabian Nights"). Oblivion to present time comes, however, only in certain ecstatic moments. For the most part the poems of 1830 deal with the idea of transience. This is the burthen of the two songs "The lintwhite and the throstlecock" and "Every day hath its night," both of which recall the lyrics of Poems by Two Brothers; it is the theme of the companion poems

Poems, Chiefly Lyrical

43

"Nothing Will Die" and "All Things Will Die" and of the poem entitled "Chorus"; and lastly, it is the central idea of "The Sea-Fairies," which was a sort of prelude to "The Lotus-Eaters." At Cambridge Tennyson continued to suffer mental depressions, and his morbid moods manifested themselves in these poems concerned with the passing of time and the fading of beauty. It might be asked why I should devote such attention to Tennyson's treatment of the subject since the theme is a common one in English poetry. A large number of Shakespeare's sonnets, for example, are about the very same thing. There is, nevertheless, a difference in tone and treatment between Tennyson and his predecessors. Introspective though Shakespeare's sonnets are, they turn for their resolution to the outside world. Beauty and youth may fade, Shakespeare says, and the decline is indeed terrifying to contemplate; but there is a certain kind of immortality, of permanence, to be attained through one's children and through art. In other words, Shakespeare offers not a withdrawal from life as his solution but a turning to the greater experiences of existence as an answer for the problem. Tennyson, however, looks at life, and, seeing that all beauty in the world must fade, rejects life by turning inward to a world of make-believe and fancy: he offers no solution, he simply refuses to face the bewildering situation. The inadequacy of such withdrawal was obvious even to him, because he knew that he could not sustain the ecstasy. When faced with the real world of men and women, Tennyson was often miserable. At Cambridge he suffered "moods of misery unutterable," and once in London a fit of melancholy came upon him as he looked upon the people on the streets of the city and contemplated how "in a few years all its inhabitants would be lying horizontal, stark and stiff

44

Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850

in their coffins" (Memoir, I, 40). Because reality was so frightening, he continued to explore the ways by which release from it might be effected. In the poems of 1830 the theme of escape is, however, more deeply submerged than it was in the earlier poetry. Explicitly it occurs only in "The Sea-Fairies," the first of Tennyson's classical poems, in which the sirens beckon to the mariners to forget work and toil and remain on their happy shore, which knows not trouble or sorrow. But even here the poet has tended to objectify the theme by writing a dramatic rather than a personal, introspective lyric. Surprisingly, there are almost no verses in the Poems, Chiefly Lyrical that recount the delight in dreams as such. A glance at the A. E. Baker Concordance will show that the word dream occurs very few times in these poems, a fact that is indeed surprising when the Concordance lists numerous occurrences for the 1832 volume. Here we are led to believe that we are faced with the first evidence of the influence of the famous Apostles, Alfred's friends at Cambridge. There is no need to recount Tennyson's friendship with the Apostolic brotherhood since this part of his life is already well-known, but it is worthwhile to recall that Hallam, Trench, and the others were constantly telling Alfred that great poetry must concern itself with the moral problems of life. To their teachings Alfred responded by suppressing to an even greater degree the emotions and the romantic sensualism that haunted him. This of course does not mean that the desire for escape from reality was obliterated : it simply means that the desire was made less obvious in his poetry. The "Ode to Memory" is a good example of the toning down of the escape theme. Although it appeared in 1830 with the subtitle "Written very Early in Life," the poem

Poems, Chiefly Lyrical

45

seems to belong to the Cambridge period since it expresses a nostalgia for the garden at Somersby and the Lincolnshire landscape. It is not too different from the unpublished lyric "Playfellow Winds,"* which Sir Charles Tennyson ascribes to the poet's first days at Cambridge. But whatever its date, the important fact about the ode is that here memory is treated differently from the earlier poems, where, it will be recalled, memory was identified with unhappiness. Here memory serves as a guide to the world of the imagination; it releases the mind from the sorrows of the present: Whither in after life retired From brawling storms, From weary wind, With youthful fancy re-inspired. We may hold converse with all forms Of the many-sided mind. . . . In the poem memory is identified with the immediate past, which as past is more real than the present. The flowers of the past remain always lovely, they "Never grow sere, / When rooted in the garden of the mind." In "Playfellow Winds"* the poet maintains that memories of nature "wear more light / Than do your present selves." The escapist theme cannot be overlooked: Tennyson was willing to turn anywhere—to the past or to the imagined—to forget about the present; and his preoccupation with the past was to inform a major segment of his works. Tennyson confessed that this " passion of the past" had been part of his nature since early boyhood. In his later years he told his friend Sir James Knowles that "it is the distance that charms me in the landscape, the picture and the past, and not the immediate to-day in which I move." And James Spedding remarked in 1835 that Tennyson was

46 Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 "a man always discontented with the Present till it has become the Past, and then he yearns toward it and worships it, and not only worships it, but is discontented because it is past.'" In other words, Tennyson looked to the past as an escape from the present. This resurrection of the past is indicative of Tennyson's affinity for the Romantics, yet his treatment of the past is peculiarly Victorian. Like Pater and other late Romantics, Tennyson, weary of his time, longed for another age, for tradition and traditional values, a longing that was to make itself plain for all to see in his treatment of the Arthurian story. If the Romantics turned from time to time to the past for some of their subjects, they did so as spectators of history, not as escapists with the desire to recapture the past for their own time. They were like English tourists off on a holiday to some exotic country, viewing the customs and dress-habits of the natives but not going so far as to don the exotic costumes themselves. With the Victorian late Romantics, however, this was not the case. Feeling the desolateness of their own age, they developed a nostalgia for other places and other times; they had, to quote Pater, "that inversion of home-sickness . . ., that incurable thirst for the sense of escape.'" Tennyson was to express this nostalgia for former days time and again. Writing to his aunt when he first went to Cambridge, he lamented, "What a pity it is that the golden days of Faerie are over! What a misery not to be able to consolidate our gossamer dreams into reality!" (Memoir, I, 34). The attempt to effect such a consolidation often took in the 1830 poems the direction of a refusal to face life. Tennyson turned away from flesh and blood to mermaids and mermen who "sit and sing the whole of the day" and frolic in "dreamy dells" and "moss-beds under the sea." This

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is exactly the kind of thoughtless poetry that Keats was writing in "I Stood Tip-toe upon a Little Hill." T h e country he was exploring was a legendary fairyland, and he was learning life f r o m art, as the echoes of his early poetical enthusiasms would indicate. The imagery in detail, while suggestive of Keats, is not, however, literary: it is drawn, as a study of the "Ode to Memory" will show, f r o m a very minute and delicate sensuous observation. When not in his melancholy, questioning moods, Tennyson was un homme pour qui le monde visible existe; and at this stage of his career, the visible world meant chiefly the nature of unanalyzed delightfulness, of living and growing things. T h e delicacy of perception is very striking in the "Ode to Memory," in "Claribel," and in "Mariana"; and the absolute accuracy of description, the numbering of the streaks of the tulip, is as evident in this volume as it was in Tennyson's later years. There is very little in these poems that could not be noticed on a summer afternoon in the wolds of his native Lincolnshire, and though Tennyson might turn to the remote and the exotic, as in "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," this delighted observation of familiar things is almost always present. But real though the details are, the scenery is nevertheless a dream landscape; his poems do not present the fields which one could imagine being plowed for planting; furthermore, they are dream pictures because they do not contain real people. Tennyson is still in Keats's realm of Flora and Pan. The reviewer of the Poems, Chiefly Lyrical for the New Monthly Magazine (March, 1831) rightly described the poems as "full of precisely the kind of poetry for which M r . Keats was assailed," for he perceived that "Nature is the same in both." "Recollections of the Arabian Nights" is plainly in the Keatsian tradition: like Keats's odes it is

48

Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850

an example of negative capability, an acceptance of and a complete involvement in a dream world without any irritable questionings. But it is far less satisfactory than the odes because it does not offer a full account of the momentary poetic release from reality—the poem closes within the dream and fails to relate the painful awakening; and because it seeks its meaning not in a workable symbol but in a private mythology—the "golden days of Faerie" belong to Tennyson's own reading and not to a universal understanding. The poem, the first in which Tennyson uses the sea-voyage as emblematic of the experiences of the imagination, opens with the speaker's release from reality. In one of those timeless moments which Tennyson had described in the earlier poems, the "I" of the poem retires into the past: "The tide of time flow'd back with me, I The forward-flowing tide of time"; and he is borne down the Tigris to the high-walled city of Bagdad. But the sense of being transplanted into this dream of the past is not, in the beginning stanzas, complete; for the magic city is guarded by walls, thick foliage, platans. Even in dream there is that intuitional pull of the speaker's nature which Tennyson in "Sense and Conscience"* had characterized as conscience. The dark images guarding the city are clearly symbolic of all that cannot be apprehended simply as sensuous beauty. The paradise opens only as the voyager enters "another night in night," only when he sheds another layer of the external self and penetrates further into the ego. As paradise is gained, the imagery immediately changes color: whereas the exterior images had been dark, the images concerned with the city itself are those of powerful clearness and luminescence—"clear canal," "diamond rillets," "crystal arches," "sparkling flints." Here within this subtropical paradise, described in exotic images previously

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used in the Poems by Two Brothers, the voyager hears the Keatsian nightingale, apparently representing the permanence of a r t : The living airs of middle night Died round the bulbul as he sung; Not he, but something which possess'd The darkness of the world, delight, Life, anguish, death, immortal love, Ceasing not, mingled, unrepress'd, Apart from place, withholding time. . . . This is a very obvious use of the Keatsian figure, and it is one of the earliest examples of Tennyson's conscious use of symbolism, that is, the attempt to make the image stand for more than itself. Its very existence points to the poet's increasing preoccupation with the gulf between the external world and the world of the imagination in that by the use of a symbol he was attempting to bridge the gulf in order to communicate more effectively. The attempt to find a workable symbol was, however, but half-hearted, as the use of the fanciful word bulbul would indicate. Tennyson was still too concerned with the pretty, the exotic, and the sensuous to turn his energies to the finding of a link between his two worlds. His images, if intended as symbols, are too private. The black grots and garden-bowers may have special meaning, but the meaning is too personal for us to comprehend. The city of Bagdad is not, however, the voyager's ultimate destination. What he has come to see is the palace of Haroun Alraschid, and this becomes visible to him only when, in the ninth stanza, he enters into another sleep. As his journey focalizes on the palace, the voyager is able to attain his goal only by means of deeper withdrawal from reality, and sleep

50 Theme and Symbol in Tennyson s Poems to 1850 serves as the water of Lethe, which allows him his vision. Then with "dazed vision unawares" he enters the pavilion and sees the Persian girl, who seems to serve no function other than a decorative one, and the great Caliph himself, who apparently symbolizes the perfect happy state of nirvana. Here the poem ends, with the poet seemingly having no real sense of identity with his symbol. For thirteen and a half stanzas the stage has been set for the introduction of the Caliph, and then when in the last four lines he appears, the poem closes. There is no development of the symbol. The burden of the poem has been placed on reaching the goal rather than on the goal itself, and the poem has ended almost where it should have begun. Yet in spite of its failure as a symbolist poem or as an allegory, if indeed it was designed as such, "Recollections of the Arabian Nights" is still a delightful poem. Each stanza evokes the charm of a child's picture book, and each image seems to flow into the next, as though in dream we were voyaging with the speaker to a childhood land of fairy tale. Another attempt at symbolism, this effort still more immature, is found in "The Grasshopper." Never again included in any authorized edition, the poem is not well known, so I shall quote the second strophe here: I would dwell with thee, Merry grasshopper, Thou art so glad and free, And as light as air; Thou hast no sorrow or tears, Thou hast no compt of years, No withered immortality, But a short youth sunny and free. Carol clearly, bound along.

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Soon thy joy is over, A summer of loud song, And slumbers in the clover. What hast thou to do with evil In thine hour of love and revel, In thy heat of summer pride, Pushing the thick roots aside Of the singing flowered grasses. That brush thee with their silken tresses? What hast thou to do with evil, Shooting, singing, ever springing In and out the emerald glooms, Ever leaping, ever singing. Lighting on the golden blooms? On the surface the poem is merely another experiment in verse form. But a close reading will show that Tennyson has once again sought to find a symbol with which he can identify himself. Like the bulbul, the insect knows not "sorrow or tears" nor has "compt of years, I N o withered immortality." H e has not known the fever and fret of existence, only the joy of song; and consequently the poet "would dwell with thee." But the strength of the symbol is diminished when we realize that the grasshopper is merely another merman, a creature given to song and play. The descriptive passages in these poems are rich, luxuriant, and fertile in invention; but beautiful though these catalogues of natural splendors are, they clash, sometimes violently, with the seeming seriousness of purpose. They give the impression that the poet does not know in what direction he is heading, that he is chasing through all this loveliness of detail s o m e other kind of loveliness that he is not yet able to conceive or to grasp. The major fault with these poems is that the symbol and the image clusters are not yet in focus, a fact that reflects the

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artistic and cultural crisis of the period in which Tennyson was writing. In an age in which the old common values were breaking up, Tennyson attempted to infuse his poetry with a new meaning while using the technique of his predecessors. His problem was, of course, to find some kind of solid foundation on which to base his poetry; his was the task to determine the role of the artist in a disordered society. His friend R . C. Trench wrote tellingly of this modern crisis: But the future, the future—who shall question that? What will one be? What will this age be? Must one end in a worldling; and our age, will it prove the decrepitude of the world? Are we not gathering up the knowledge of past generations because we are adding nothing ourselves? Do we not place the glory of our century in the understanding of past ages, because our individual energy is extinct, and we are ourselves nothing? After one or two revolutions in thought and opinion, all our boasted poetry, all, or nearly all of Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth and Byron, will become unintelligible. When except in our times, did men seek to build up their poetry on their own individual experiences, instead of some objective foundations common to all menV Without any given "objective foundations common to all m e n " Tennyson had to formulate his own foundations. For this reason he went in quest of a meaningful image in order to find himself and determine his role in modern society. He sought to do exactly as Yeats, caught in the same predicament, was to d o : " B y the help of an image / I call to my own opposite, summon all / That I have handled least, least looked upon" ( " E g o Dominus Tuus"). His poetry was to be, therefore, for many years to come a search for the image by which he would know himself and communicate his sense of identity as artist in the world to his readers.

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Although I have begun by examining Tennyson's early experiments with the symbol, numerous other poems show his use of the image before it had taken on anything like symbolic value. Even as a boy Tennyson recognized the decorative value of the image before he had any clear conception of its organic part in the poem. His maidens such as Claribel are described in imagery that is merely pretty, but in other maiden poems the images, conventional though they are, begin to come into focus by clustering around a central idea. In "Mariana," for example, the use of pathetic fallacy centralizes the imagery around the subject treated. Tennyson makes an equation between the deserted maiden and the desolate house, just as in "The Deserted House" he equates the house to the human body. He begins the poem with a description of the grange, using the strongly suggestive words "blackest," "crusted," "rusted," "broken," "sad," etc.; and only after he has set the tone and described the deserted house does he introduce the central figure, whose own condition mirrors that of the imagery. Tennyson is not willing, however, to allow the reader to overlook the special meaning of the imagery. By using a slowmoving line, achieved by assonance, alliteration, and endstopping, and by intensifying the monotony through repetition of the subtly modulated refrain, he indicates the extraordinary significance of the subject. And as a tour de force he carries one landscape through different times of day and night, the imagery in each stanza being clustered around the changing time. In the fourth stanza the predominant color image is gray, the color of early dawn; and in stanza five as the moon sinks and the sun rises the color subtly begins to lighten. Almost every verse introduces some kind of bird or animal, and there is an obvious correspondence between these and the lonely Mariana. Everything has meaning in

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the poem, in a sense everything utters its own meaning; for the effect is expressed in terms of outward objects. In this respect "Mariana" demonstrates excellently the modernity of Tennyson, for the poem anticipates by some eighty years the method of Eliot's "La Figlia che Piange." In the Poems, Chiefly Lyrical there is no consistency in the use of image and symbol, and an obviously ambitious poem will be preceded and followed by a trifling lyric. The subject matter itself forms a polarity: a serious sagelike poem such as "The Poet," which discusses the prophetic vision of the poet, is preceded by a wistful little song; Shelleyan starry and cloudy imaginings are interspersed among Keatsian luxuries. "The Poet" is a very strange and striking poem because it repudiates Tennyson's very own practice of poetry: it maintains that thought must take precedence over emotion, that morality must be considered before beauty. Discernible here undoubtedly is the influence of the muchmaligned Cambridge Apostles, some of whom were continually trying to convince Tennyson that it is the duty of poetry to guide and teach. Turning his back for the moment on that part of his personality which he described as belonging to another in "A Character," he proclaimed that the poet sees through life and death and sends to the world through his verse the seeds of truth which take root and produce freedom and wisdom. As in the unpublished sonnet "To Poesy," which Hallam Tennyson included in the Memoir, the function of poetry is moral, and the idea is repeated in the companion poem "The Poet's Mind." These utterances sound a good bit like the versification of certain ideas of the Apostles. For example, F. D. Maurice, regarded as the spiritual founder of the group, wrote in The Athenaeum in 1828:

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The mind of a poet of the highest order is the most perfect than can belong to man. There is no intellectual power, and no state of feeling, which may not be the instrument of poetry, and in proportion as reason, reflection, or sympathy is wanting, in the same degree is the poet restricted in his mastery over the resources of his art. The poet is the great interpreter of nature's mysteries, not by narrowing them into the grasp of the understanding, but by connecting each of them with the

feeling which changes doubt to faith. . . . He sympathizes with all phenomena by his intuition of all principles; and his mind is a mirror which catches and images the whole scheme and working of the world. He comprehends all feelings, though he cherishes only the best. . . . He cannot be a scorner, or selfish, or luxurious and sensual. He cannot be untrue, for it is his high calling to interpret those universal truths which exist on earth only in the forms of his creation. Yet however eager he was in the attempt to incorporate the moral ideas of his friends into his poetry, Tennyson continued, almost in spite of himself, to insist upon the isolation of the artist. T h e poet is born in a "golden clime," his mind is "holy ground," his province "would shrink to the e a r t h " if it came in contact with the materialistic questionings of the sophist. Tennyson's treatment of " T h e Poet's M i n d " betrays the same lack of focus in " T h e Mystic." Once again the polarity in the poem is shown in the shifting of point of view f r o m the poet himself to the " y o u " and in the mixing of passages of awe with those of lush imagery. Claiming a Shelleyan messianic confidence for the poet, Tennyson nevertheless retained the Keatsian idea of the artist's isolation. In asserting the supremacy of the poetic imagination, he h a d also, probably unintentionally, canceled out the Apostles' concept of the need for the poet's involvement in the affairs of the world. Tennyson was maintaining the age-old doctrine

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of the poet as nourisher of man's life while also simultaneously suggesting that the poet is a mere spectator who sits on the sidelines of life and dreams. In taking this paradoxical position, Tennyson was but mirroring the thought of his time. His poems and Maurice's essay were directed against the ideas about poetry expounded by Macaulay in his essay on Milton, which maintained that poetry is essentially primitive and must decline with the advance of scientific knowledge. With the loss of religious faith Maurice and many of his contemporaries began to look to literature for the authority and satisfaction that they could not find in religion; and anticipating Arnold and Pater they sought to supplant religion with culture. At Cambridge Tennyson was only too willing to adopt this peculiarly Victorian kind of aestheticism, but he was not yet ready to assume fully the role of teacher and prophet. Again he was caught in the dialectic clash between desire and denial.' The "Supposed Confessions of a Second-Rate Sensitive Mind Not in Unity with Itself" offers the best example of the dialectic clash of all the Poems, Chiefly Lyrical: the conflict between belief and doubt, felicity and despair, aggression and regression (in the Freudian sense). Significantly, Tennyson has used the epithet "supposed" in the title of the poem and has chosen to speak through an alias, a masking device that would not expose the poet and could be repudiated if necessary. This is Tennyson's first real dramatic use of the mask for exploring certain sides of his nature, and it marks an advance in the growth of the poet's mind in that it allows the poet to objectify his situation in a way that is impossible in the introspective lyric. Primarily Tennyson has used the device to explore the religious conflict that had already arisen in his own mind and was to stimulate the writing of "In Memoriam."

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The poem begins in a mood of dejection in which the speaker, because of his loss of religious faith, laments his total isolation and loneliness. "How sweet to have a common f a i t h ! " he exclaims, so that he might feel a sense of belonging with his fellow men. Afraid of his doubt and weary of his isolation, he experiences the regressive impulse to return to his mother's knee and know security once more. " O h ! wherefore do we grow awry / From roots which strike so d e e p ? " he asks himself, and declares himself "void, / Dark, formless, utterly destroyed." In a moment of strength he asserts, in a sentiment foreshadowing one of the themes of "In Memoriam," that "It is man's privilege to doubt"; but immediately afterward he declares that it is perhaps better to be a beast of the field than to be tortured by this very doubt. Shall man analyze his "double nature" and thus find faith, or, the poem implies, does this very analysis kill the life of man? Does one murder to dissect? And so having found no conclusion, the poem ends with a prayer for wider knowledge and a cry of despair: O weary life! O weary death! O spirit and heart made desolate! O damned vacillating state!

The "Supposed Confessions" is virtually unique among the 1830 poems in recognizing the poet's dual nature, the contrary pull of the two sides of his personality. Unlike "The Mystic" or "The Poet's Mind" it does not lack focus; neither dream phantasms nor natural description distorts the central theme. There is a suggestion of Shelley in the poem, especially in the second line ("I faint, I fall"), and a strong hint of Wordsworth in the passage about the beasts of the field:

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Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 For the ox Feeds in the herb, and sleeps, or fills The horned valleys all about, And hollows of the fringed hills In summer heats, with placid lows Unfearing, till his own blood flows About his hoof. And in the flocks The lamb rejoiceth in the year, And raceth freely with his fere, And answers to his mother's calls From the flower'd furrow;

but there is no evidence of Keats. As Mr. Arthur J. Carr wisely remarks, the more complete the damning up of desire —that is, the suppression of emotion—the more certain is the poem to contain a Keatsian lushness of imagery and diction. Here where the emotion is brought to the foreground, although ascribed to a "supposed" person, the simpler Wordsworthian imagery and diction are observable. The "Supposed Confessions" is declaredly a poem of uncertainty and doubt. But Tennyson, unlike modern poets, was no more resigned than Keats to writing poetry of blank conflict. He was not willing to bare his complete nature to his reading public—perhaps, as I have said, he was unwilling fully to admit his "double nature" even to himself; and so he suppressed the "Supposed Confessions" until the 1871 edition of his works and continued on in his usual inexplicit vein. The repression resulted in his writing poetry of wistful melancholy in which desire is all the more frustrated because unformulated. In the melancholy lyrics the theme of weariness, so strongly pronounced in the Poems by Two Brothers, reappears, and even here the explicitness of the early volume has been muted. The morbid preoccupation with age and

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death finds expression only in an occasional line like "The wan dark coil of faded suffering" (Sonnet: "Could I outwear my present state of woe"). More characteristic of the 1830 volume is the "Song: A Spirit haunts the year's last hours," which while Keatsian in diction is peculiarly Tennysonian in tone. The verse of nearly all the Poems, Chiefly Lyrical is complex, and this song is no exception. In the two strophes of twelve lines each, the last four lines constituting a refrain, Tennyson has one- and two-stress lines interspaced among tetrameter lines; anapests alternating with iambs; and the rhymes following no conventional pattern. This complexity in verse is a serious undertaking for a young poet and perhaps accounts for Coleridge's remark that Tennyson undertook the writing of verse without a very clear understanding of meter; but the success of this poem proves that by 1830 Tennyson was a consummate artist as far as versification is concerned. Let us look at the first stanza: A Spirit haunts the year's last hours Dwelling amid these yellowing bowers: T o himself he talks; For at eventide, listening earnestly. At his work you may hear him sob and sigh In the walks; Earthward he boweth the heavy stalks Of the mouldering flowers: Heavily hangs the broad sunflower Over its grave i' the earth so chilly; Heavily hangs the hollyhock, Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.

Here by means of prolonged sibilance Tennyson has managed to retard the lines and to suggest onomatopoetically the spirit's talking to himself; by repetition of "heavily" and

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by aspirant alliteration he has intensified the sense of drowsiness. In the second strophe the tender sadness of the first stanza is developed into outright morbidity in that it associates autumn with sickness, death and putresence. The air is damp, and hush'd, and close, As a sick man's room when he taketh repose An hour before death; My very heart faints and my whole soul grieves At the moist rich smell of the rotting leaves, And the breath Of the fading edges of box beneath, And the year's last rose. The decay does not repel the poet but on the contrary attracts, causing him to indulge in an orgy of sensations. What luxurious sensuous abandonment there is in "the moist rich smell of the rotting leaves." This suggests the morbid melancholy of the "Ode to a Nightingale," and the subject recalls the "Ode to Autumn." In Keats's poem ripeness is all, yet here the stress is on overripeness. Tennyson was taking Romantic practice and adapting it to his own personality. Romantic sensualism is again apparent in the maiden poems, which develop further the two female types found in the earlier poems. The suffering maiden reaches perfection in Mariana, the damsel who, imprisoned in her grange, has been deserted by her lover and languishes soulfully. Mariana is obviously a maiden of Shelleyan origin, the "high-born maiden" found in "To a Skylark.'" Contrasting with her is the jemme fatale figure, who draws her inspiration from Keats, especially from "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." This virago type is found in Lilian, "cruel little Lilian," the coy maiden with a Gioconda smile; in Madeline, who though

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perfect in "love-lore" refuses to love, who though steeped not in "golden languors" is a woman ranging through light and shadow, a woman of mystery; in Adeline, shadowy and vague, who has an enigmatic smile that fascinates the " I " of the poem. Serving as a background for these beguiling ladies, nature is depicted in its more dreary aspects. In the tender and seductive music of his verse Tennyson, displaying once again his melancholy imagination, has painted nature in its dying seasons, the decay of summer into a brown and yellow fall, the bleakness of winter that complements the sterility of his ladies' passions. The persistency with which these two types of females recur leads us almost inevitably to a psychological interpretation of the maidens. Each seems to stand for some state of mind and emotion. The ambivalence and duality evident in the other poems we have been studying are here manifested in the treatment of two different kinds of women. We have seen how one side of the poet's nature cried out for sensual indulgence while the other side, characterized by mysterious images of repression, sought to frustrate this desire. The suffering maiden and the strong woman are, I believe, symbolic of this conflict, the former being the regressive symbol and the latter the aggressive symbol. If we resort to Jungian psychology, we may equate the maidens with the poet's "soul-image," which is always represented, says Jung, in terms of the opposite sex. Into the figure of the suffering maiden Tennyson projected that part of the self which had been frustrated in its desire for articulation and has been left isolated and deserted. But, says Jung, the soul-image is almost always ambiguous and can appear in many forms— as amazon as well as suffering maiden, most often in two basic forms, the "higher" and the "lower." Thus, one form of the soul-image is often the opposite of the outer person-

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ality: Jung explains that it "maintains, on the whole, a complementary relation to the outer character" and contains "all those human qualities the conscious attitude lacks."6 T h e Tennyson, therefore, who was condemning himself for his "damned vacillating state" and identifying himself with the weak, lamenting Mariana was also projecting himself into the soul-image of the strong, resolute female. Let us note that the treatment of love in these maiden poems is the same as that in the juvenilia: either the maiden is disappointed in love or the male speaker has failed to find fruition. In other poems the same attitude—that is, the hopelessness of love—prevails: in "Love, Pride and Forgetfulness" the heart is described as a tomb; in "Lost Hope" the person addressed, presumably a woman, has left the lover's heart a "vacant shrine" where there now can be no hope; in "Love and Sorrow" the lover can give but half his heart since grief holds the other half. But in this volume the tone begins to change: whereas in the earlier poems there was only one example of a woman who is both desirable and attainable, there are in the Poems, Chiefly Lyrical verses about love which regard that emotion as one of the chief virtues of life. Love is regarded as something worthy of attainment, even though at present it may be impossible. Here again the Tennysonian polarity, which we may now recognize as the major characteristic of the 1830 poems, is observable. An examination of the three sonnets grouped under the title "Love" will show how this ambivalence is displayed. In the first sonnet love is apostrophized, in somewhat hazy syntax, as "unborn, undying," although the speaker sees not "thy glories near" and though "night and pain and ruin and death reign here"—the "here" being, I assume, in the kingdom of love. Love surrounds the throne of God and passes on His edicts, the poet says; but in slating this fact he

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uses a violent imagery: "edicts of his fear," "loud winds," "uprend the sea." The second sonnet is still more violent and piercing in tone. Love is wisdom, but it is beheld only through "veils of evil." To know love, "We beat upon our aching hearts in rage; / We cry for thee; we deem the world thy tomb." Here the old phantasmagoria recurs: "awful charms," "wheeling gloom." In the third sonnet love is likened unto "a serpent in his agonies." It would, I think, be profitable to pause here for a moment to discuss in greater detail the third sonnet of this group, for Tennyson's unskillful use of the sonnet form as a means of expression is indicative of the two-directional pull of his personality at this time. Taking the most un-Romantic of poetic forms, he has crammed into the verse his most Romantic imagery, as though he were trying to restrain his free-ranging imagination simply by form. In this particular poem he has taken for theme the conventional subject-matter of the sonnet—love; yet simultaneously he has refused to keep to the topic by shifting to the serpent, the simile, and describing it, evidently attempting to crowd into fourteen lines as much as possible. The parallel between this sonnet and the passage in "Lamia" where the maiden is changed into a serpent is unmistakable. Compare these lines: Already with the pangs of a new birth Strain t h e hot spheres of his convulsed eyes, A n d in his writhings awful hues begin T o w a n d e r d o w n his sable-sheeny sides, . . .

with this passage from "Lamia": H e r eyes in t o r t u r e fix'd, and anguish drear. H o t , g!az'd, and wide, with lid-lashes all sear, Flash'd p h o s p h o r and s h a r p sparks, without one cooling tear.

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Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 The colours all inflam'd throughout her train. She writh'd about, convulsed with scarlet pain. (I, 150-154.)

Ignoring almost completely the structural requirements of the sonnet, Tennyson seems to be denying the special structural nature of the form; taking love for his subject, he shifts the emphasis to the central metaphor, which is indeed a strange one, instead of keeping to the subject itself. Once again, the dialectic is perfectly realized. Even though an ambivalence towards love prevails in these sonnets, it is interesting to see that Tennyson was beginning to treat love as an emotion that need not necessarily lead to frustration and sorrow. In "Love and Death," the only one of these poems directly concerned with the subject of love to be reprinted in 1842, love, although significantly linked with death, is regarded as a kind of immortality, thus hinting at Tennyson's future treatment of the emotion. Already the poet was beginning to seek affirmation of self through love. If we can never be sure of what is illusion and what is real, Tennyson seems to ask, how can we be sure of ourselves, how can we know that the self really exists? The tentative answer is that we can be certain only of our affections. Whether matter be real or not makes ultimately no difference, for love can provide the reality of a world not seen. This was to be the answer that Tennyson later was to propound in "In Memoriam." Here in the 1830 poems he was but commencing to probe the validity of such a conclusion, and significantly he was turning to love as a subject for his poetry. Hints of the Everlasting Yea begin to shine through the veil of despair. I have spoken at length of the polarity in the Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, which has been discernible mainly by a close examination of the poems. All the poems discussed have

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mirrored Tennyson's moral and artistic uncertainty, causing him often to repress his deepest desires and questionings even from himself. If we look to the versification of the poems, we will find uncertainty manifested there. The verse is generally highly irregular, scarcely any two poems being in the same meter. Most of the verse forms are of the poet's own invention, and most of them are highly complex. If he does adopt a stanzaic form, he usually violates it in some unexpected manner. But if he were unsure of himself about the best metrical form for the expression of his ideas and personality, he was not at all uncertain about the use of sound to underscore meaning. That strange poem "The Kraken" makes this abundantly clear. Let us look at the first ten lines: Below the thunders of the upper deep, Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea, His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee About his shadowy sides: above him swell Huge sponges of millennial growth and height; And far away into the sickly light, From many a wondrous grot and secret cell Unnumber'd and enormous polypi Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.

The sinking from the upper deep to the abyss of the sea is suggested by the interplay between light and dark, which leading to the vivid image "slumbering green" casts an unearthly glow over the poem. Underscoring this descent to the depths is the haunting eeriness of the tonal pattern, achieved by repetition of the long "e" and, mainly, the nasals. The significance of the sea-monster is not indicated; we know only that he is some kind of apocalyptic beast.

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But the lavish description of the undersea depths with their sponges, polypi, and seaworms suggests a psychological interpretation. In his discussion of progression and regression Jung says that at certain times there comes a damming up of energy, of libido, and that when this happens neurotic symptoms may be observed. In the patients he has studied he has found repressed contents of the mind to appear. "Slime out of the depths" is the term by which he characterizes such contents, using the came symbolism to be found in the poem under consideration. "The Kraken" is a short poem, but it seems to be a part of the myth of the night journey under the sea that Jung has described as the rebirth archetype." At any rate, the images of the poem seem to be a presentation of the unconscious contents of the poet's mind activated through regression, instances of which have previously been noted. Such explanations of literature are not convincing to everyone and are not easily demonstrable, so I shall not labor the point that the poem is a symbolization of a psychic experience. What I should like to insist upon, though, is the perfectly matched combination of visual imagery and sound pattern to paint in words the mystery of the depths of the sea. Lastly there remains for us to examine the two patriotic songs included in the Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. These lyrics bear no relation whatsoever to the other poems in the volume. Jingoistic and Galliphobic, they are interesting chiefly in that they offer a hint of Tennyson's later patriotic verses. Like many young men, Tennyson in early youth gave vent to a revolutionary ardor. The poems of encouragement addressed to the Greeks in their struggle against the Turks in the Poems by Two Brothers, and his journey to the Pyrenees to aid the Spanish revolutionaries bear witness to

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the young poet's liberal ideals. But the outbreak of disorders over Reform legislation did much to check his revolutionary zeal and give him a strong distaste for revolutionary methods; his objections to "mob rhetoric" and party politics can be seen in the political sonnets in the Unpublished Early Poems. In the 1830 volume the "English War Song" and "National Song" are both poor poems, and Tennyson wisely refused to republish them. But bad though they are, they are characteristically Tennysonian and they show what kind of patriotic verse he was to write when he became the official poetic voice of England. In summary, the 1830 poems are vacillating in subject, style, and tone, and they attest to Tennyson's own indecision and double nature. They are concerned not with the life of flesh and blood, but with the poet's own inner self, and they mark a progression in the growth of the poet's mind only in that they show how he was seeking, however tentatively, to come to terms with the conflict between the self and external reality. Writing under the pseudonym Christopher North in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine for May, 1831, John Wilson in the famous review of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical put his finger on Tennyson's real weakness: "At present he has small power over the common feelings and thoughts of man. His feebleness is distressing at all times when he makes an appeal to their ordinary sympathies. And the reason is, that he fears to look such sympathies in the face." Four poems, however, stand out: "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," with its careful working out of visual images; "Mariana," with its "talking landscape"; "Song: A Spirit haunts the year's last hours," with its rich, beautifully orchestrated sound; "The Kxaken," with its eeriness of sight and sound: these all anticipate the best of Tennyson, and they deserve to be remembered.

NOTES 1 Sartor Resartus, ed. C. F. Harrold (New York, 1937), pp. 164168. Morse Peckham has well described the Romantic pattern in " T o w a r d a Theory of Romanticism," PMLA, LXVI, 5-23. ' " I n M e m o r i a m " in Selected Essays (London, 1953), pp. 328-338. ' Q u o t e d by Arthur J. Carr, "Tennyson as a Modern Poet," University of Toronto Quarterly, XIX, 364. 'Appreciations (London, 1910), p. 248. 1 Richard C. Trench, Letters and Memorials (London, 1888), I, 73. * Something of the confusion in Tennyson's mind about the function of art and the role of the artist in modern society is reflected in Hallam's review of the 1830 volume, "On some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson," which appeared in Englishman's Magazine for August, 1831. Hallam begins his essay by stating, "Whenever the mind of the artist suffers itself to be occupied, during its periods of creation, by any other predominant motive than the desire of beauty, the result is false in art." But he also says, "We do not deny that it is, on other accounts, dangerous for frail humanity to linger with f o n d attachment in the vicinity of sense. Minds of this description are especially liable to moral temptations; and upon them, more than any, it is incumbent to remember, that their mission as men, which they share with their fellow-beings, is of infinitely higher interest that their mission as artists, which they possess by rare and exclusive privilege." ' See Lionel Stevenson, "The 'High-born Maiden' Symbol in Tennyson," PMLA, LXIII, 234-243. "Carl J. Jung, Psychological Types (London, 1949), p. 594. Jung points out that in a man with "an inoffensive outer attitude, the soul-image, as a rule, has a rather malevolent character" (p. 599). 0 Contributions to Analytical Psychology, trans. H. G. and C. F. Baynes (London, 1928), pp. 34-40.

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CHAPTER

Poems

III

0/1832

The 1832 volume contains some of Tennyson's best-known and finest poems. Yet the version in which they are familiar today is not that of 1832. As students of Victorian poetry know, poems such as "Oenone" and "The Palace of Art" were submitted to drastic revision during the "ten years' silence" and appeared in altered form in 1842. Since my primary purpose here is to trace the evolution of the predominant themes and symbols in Tennyson's verse, rather than to discuss the growth of the poet as stylist or metricist, I shall quote from the poems as revised unless, as will be indicated, the original seems to be significant. The 1832 Poems represent a decided advance over the volume of two years earlier. Whereas it was possible, and seemingly most logical, to talk about the Poems, Chiefly Lyrical in terms of themes, this is not the case with the volume under consideration. For unlike the poems of 1830, those in this volume treat not separately of individual themes, but rather bring together and interweave the themes and symbols of the earlier verse. Tennyson's poetry has become more complex; but this is not to say that it has become more precisely oriented. On the contrary, it seems as 69

70 Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 though the polarity noted in the Poems, Chiefly Lyrical has increased its tension to the point where the two-directional pull no longer remains beneath the surface but becomes open and explicit. At this point it might be well to introduce a nomenclature for identifying the two polar points of Tennyson's artistic personality. I shall call that part of his nature which cried out for sensual indulgence "Romantic" (because in the tradition of Keats) and that opposing part which demanded social awareness and involvement "Victorian." With this in mind, let me say that the 1832 Poems represent a conflict, sometimes almost open warfare, between the Romantic and the Victorian Tennyson. The prefatory sonnet to the 1832 volume, "Mine be the strength of spirit, full and free," offers a splendid example of this conflict. Here it is in full: Mine be the strength of spirit, full and free, Like some broad river rushing down alone, With the selfsame impulse wherewith he was thrown From his loud fount upon the echoing lea;— Which with increasing might doth forward flee By town, and tower, and hill, and cape, and isle, And in the middle of the green salt sea Keeps his blue waters fresh for many a mile. Mine be the power which ever to its sway Will win the wise at once, and by degrees May into uncongenial spirits flow; Even as the warm gulf-stream of Florida Floats far away into the Northern Seas The lavish growths of southern Mexico. The main idea of the sonnet is the Wordsworthian theory of poetic communication: an original poet must content

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himself with a limited audience capable of comprehending his work until he slowly educates the common reader to what he is trying to do.1 In Hallam and the other Apostles Tennyson had a select audience, and now he had to create still further the taste by which he was to be enjoyed, "by degrees" to win over "uncongenial spirits," that is, those less enthusiastic than his Cambridge friends. The poem obviously speaks for strength and force of spirit in the poet. He wishes to be like a broad, rushing river flowing past tower, hill, cape, and isle, images which he had used and was to continue in this volume to use as symbolic havens of refuge; seemingly he denies the value of artistic isolation. The sestet asks for power to win the wise and, by implication, the less wise— presumably to teach them. Thus far the Victorian Tennyson has been speaking; but in the last three lines the Romantic Tennyson creeps in, by the back door as it were, and the simile works completely against the preceding part of the poem. Clearly, if the simile makes sense, he is equating "power" with the Gulfstream and his poetry with "lavish growths," thereby suggesting that poetry is concerned with the exotic and the sensual. Furthermore, the Northern Seas are related to the uncongenial minds, and Southern Mexico with the poet's mind. For Tennyson the South was, somewhat like the East, associated with fecundity, exoticism, and moral laxity;' and here in this sonnet he identifies it with the mind of the poet. Undoubtedly in writing the sonnet Tennyson was responding to his friends who were urging him, in Hallam's words, to "do the Lord's work against the Philistines of this viperous generation." J. W. Blakesley wrote to him: "The present race of monstrous opinions and feelings which pervade the age require the arm of a strong Iconoclast. A volume of poetry written in a proper spirit . . . would be, at the

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present juncture, the greatest benefit the world could receive.'" Tennyson was being urged to live up to his responsibility as an oracular poet. But in spite of his attempt to accommodate the demands of his friends, to become spokesman for the age, he could not completely release himself from thinking of poetry as belonging to the realm of Flora and Pan. The sonnet "Mine be the strength" is properly prefatory to the 1832 Poems because in its polarity it is representative of most verses in the collection. If it had also treated of women, it would have been absolutely characteristic of these poems. For the 1832 collection could be called Tennyson's "maiden" volume. Of the thirty poems in the volume, fifteen have women as their subjects or as their protagonists. And in these women, variously represented as suffering maidens and fatal women, Tennyson seems to project his own personality and thus treat by means of the conflict between the two the problems of the artist. The excellent "The Lady of Shalott," which in its revised form is a perfect blending of sight and sound, is concerned with the problem of artistic isolation. As usual with Tennyson, the scene is set before the protagonist is introduced: Shalott characteristically is an island, the island paradise that Tennyson also uses in "The Lotus Eaters" and "The Hesperides" and other poems as a symbol of haven for the poetic imagination. The outside world is fecund, consisting of great fields of barley and rye, but on Shalott there are only lilies, symbols of the purity of the poetic mind. Along the banks of the river, itself a symbol of life, there is action of all kinds, but in Shalott, which "imbowers" the Marianalike Lady, there is almost motionless existence. Already in the land there is an awareness of the Lady, but the people

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know her only by her song; they do not see her as a person, they know her only as an artist. In fact, the reapers, who because they toil are characterized as weary, emphasize the unreality of the artist as person by calling her the "fairy" Lady of Shalott. Part II explains that the Lady is forbidden under pain of a curse to look down from her isolated tower onto Camelot, which apparently represents reality. She knows not the nature of the curse, she knows not even its source (a whisper has told her about it); yet she accepts cheerfully her isolation, having little care for the world or anything else other than her work. Hers is the pursuit of what Mr. Frank Kermode has called the romantic image, a timeless and deathless image insulated from social, in fact all human concerns, having as its sole end its own being.* Her only desire is for the perfection of the image. She knows the real world only by reflections in the mirror at which she looks, and what she sees is shadows. Her art, therefore, is not the mirror held up to nature; rather, it is, at a still greater remove, the shadow of a shadow. This seems to be the poetic theory of Tennyson himself: life is to be used as but the vaguest referent for communication. In practice Tennyson had written, as in the "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," poetry of dream, poetry which would yield its core of meaning only at greater and greater removes from reality. A strong contrast is indicated between the life of external reality and the existence in Shalott. The inhabitants of the outside world lead passionate, active, colorful lives; but the Lady is content to remain simply as a spectator. She knows of love, religion, nature, the court, and knightly adventures, as symbolized in the third stanza of Part II; but she herself is uncommitted ("She hath no loyal knight and true"). Her

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art is, she feels, adequate compensation for that which she is missing in life. But suddenly she realizes when she sees reflected a funeral and a wedding in her mirror that she is divorced from the life cycle, and lured by the real world, she begins to tire of her isolation : "I am half sick of shadows." Her assertion is qualified : "half sick." Having for so long lived as a sensually absorbed spirit, she is incapable of making an unqualified assertion about the nature of external reality or of her own existence. She articulates fully only in song; "factual" statement—and this is her first in the poem— for her demands equivocation, for having been removed from the world of fact she does not comprehend her position in relation to it. Hers is what might be called the late Romantic assertion, for it is exactly the kind of statement made by Keats in the "Nightingale Ode" ("I have been half in love with easeful death") and by nearly all other late Romantics when assertion is required vis-à-vis external reality." Having begun to tire of her situation, she then sees Sir Lancelot, who represents life in all its manifold and most attractive aspects. The images relating to him are those of fertility and passion; the verbs used in connection with him are those of action, all of which are antithetical to the Lady's existence. Only when he appears on the scene, the scene of course reflected in the mirror, is there any action concerned with Shalott : a "bearded meteor, trailing light, / Moves over still Shalott," a symbolic action foreshadowing the Lady's movement. In spite of his attractiveness, however, she has been able to refrain from submitting to the temptation of life. But when he sings and she realizes that song is possible in the outside world, the call of the world becomes irresistible. She leaves her web and looks down on Camelot, and as was foretold, the curse takes effect. The web dis-

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appears and the mirror cracks: her art is lost as well as the means by which she was able to create. She now becomes aware of the consequences of her action. Prior to her action the outside world had been described in terms of gay passionate colors. Now when she tries to partake of that life, the gay colors disappear, and nature takes on a different aspect: In the stormy east-wind straining. The pale yellow woods were waning. The broad stream in his banks complaining. Heavily the low sky raining Over tower'd Camelot. Life is not what she had expected it to be. When seen through reflection and when heightened by art, the world had been beautiful, because it had been an ideal world. When seen in reality, the world is nothing like what she thought it would be. Art had improved on nature. Uncomprehending of this life of which she is now a part, the Lady desires an identity. Heretofore she has been known only as artist, and now so that she will be recognized she writes her name on the boat that she uses to journey down to Camelot. Knowing not what she does or what she must do, she, "Like some bold seer in a trance," looks with uncomprehending eyes to Camelot and starts her journey. Wrapped in a snowy white robe, which symbolizes her shroud and her innocence of the world, she floats down the river singing her last song, symbolic of her death as artist. She undergoes an awful transformation; her song changes to a mournful carol, for she cannot sing of that which she does not know; and before she reaches the "first house by the waterside" in Camelot. she dies: "Singing in her song she died." Even before actual

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contact with reality, comes her demise; the loss of artistic isolation in itself results in death. Tennyson himself hinted at the allegorical nature of the poem. Years after its composition he told Canon Ainger that "The new-born love for something, for some one in the wide world from which she has been so long secluded, takes her out of the region of shadows into that of realities" (Memoir, I, 117). This remark, as well as the commentary on the poem by Hallam Tennyson in the Memoir, indicates that the poem is a moral tale concerned with the inadequacy of an isolated existence. The whole force of the poem, however, is directed toward the dangers that exist for an isolated individual in the world of reality. For the Lady does die, and the whole world of reality changes when she comes in contact with it. The real moral of the poem seems to be that the self-absorbed spirit, no matter how much it desires to enter into the life of other men, may be unable to face reality and thus be destroyed by the attempt. If one wished to see an analogy between the Lady of Shalott and the poet, it might be something like this: Tennyson was happy in his isolation and realized the dangers attendant upon leaving it; but he was being made to feel the necessity for mixing with the world, and so was weighing the possibilities of what the consequences would be if he attempted to reorient his art. "The Hesperides," like "The Lady of Shalott," is concerned with the problem of art and the artist, and in setting forth the poet's views on the subject it employs many of the themes of the other poems of this volume. The dreamlike air of mystery is established in the blank-verse prologue, with its characteristically Tennysonian stratification of scenery: Hanno while navigating the African coast hears the strange song of the Hesperidean maidens:

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from a slope That ran bloom-bright into the Atlantic blue, Beneath a highland leaning down a weight Of cliffs, and zoned below with cedar shade, Came voices, like the voices in a dream, Continuous, till he reach'd the outer sea. Hanno does not follow the song to its source as do the mariners in "The Lotus-Eaters," but the similarity exists in that the land must be reached by means of the sea and also in that the land is an island, again represented as a haven of refuge for the poetic imagination. The Sisters' song is a kind of incantation, and the Golden Apple which they guard they identify as "the treasure I Of the wisdom of the West," which apparently is symbolic of poetry. The fruit can be guarded only by their eternal singing : "If ye sing not, if you make false measure, / We shall lose eternal pleasure, / Worth eternal want of rest." The fruit can be nurtured only by their singing, and they in turn draw their inspiration and vitality from the organicism of the fruit. Equating the apple with poetry and the Sisters with the poet, Tennyson seems to say that the source of poetic inspiration is the world of art, and he insists here once again on the isolation of the artist." "Mariana in the South" is a companion poem to the earlier "Mariana," this time the locale being shifted to reflect Tennyson's visit to the Pyrenees in 1830. As in "Mariana" there is use of pathetic fallacy to centralize the imagery around the subject, but generally the Southern Mariana poem is more complex than the earlier one. As we have noted before, the more complete the frustration of desire the greater the use of Keatsian diction and imagery. This is emphatically the case here where Tennyson even

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resorts to borrowing Keats's phraseology. One must speculate as to whether Tennyson's echoes of and borrowings from other poets were consciously for ironic purposes, as is often the case with T. S. Eliot; but whether these were consciously ironic or not, such is the case. "Her melancholy eyes divine" recalls "her maiden eyes divine" in "The Eve of St. Agnes." The echo is ironic in that Mariana, who has experienced love and has now lost it, is the reverse of Madeline, the virgin who has never known love but finds it. In several ways "Mariana in the South" also recalls "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." Like the knight she has been forsaken in love, even though the lover of each has promised to love truly; and the landscape, a wasteland, mirrors the condition of each. There is not even the sound of a bird. Keats's knight says that "the sedge is wither'd from the lake, I And no birds sing." Tennyson describes the scene at noon: Nor bird would sing, nor lamb would bleat, Nor any cloud would cross the vault, But day increased from heat to heat, On stony drought and steaming salt. There is likewise an ironic echo in the lines " 'Is this the form,' she made her moan, / 'That won his praises night and m o r n ? ' " which bring to mind Marlowe's "Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?" Marlowe's line is of course spoken of Helen of Troy, the fatal woman who caused the misery of many men. Tennyson, on the other hand, echoes this speech by having the forsaken maiden, whose misery has been caused by a man, address these lines to herself. The Southern Mariana is more interesting than her previous incarnation in that she has more force of personality. When we first meet her, she is saying her "Ave Mary,"

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praying to the Madonna who as virgin and mother symbolizes the situation of Mariana, forced to remain continent but yet burning with desire. Surrounded by a glaring, sterile southern landscape, which recalls that of "Egypt" (1827), she sees images of fertility only in dream, which once again is used as a means of escape. When she awakens, she ceases for the first time to bemoan her situation and prays for something. She is no longer the patient sufferer ("she changed her tone"), for she rebels against her plight. She even has moments of hope and seems to see an image which tells her that she will not long be alone. And as the poem ends, she gains some relief by tears; for the first time there appears the image of water in this dry wasteland. Whether she is to die or whether she will quit her stagnant situation, she now is determined that there will be an end to her suffering: The night comes on that knows not morn, When I shall cease to be all alone, To live forgotten, and love forlorn. The suffering female will no longer patiently submit to her condition. "Oenone" presents another deserted maiden who in the beginning of the poem is like those motionless females of the 1830 volume but who in the end determines to act and seek revenge for her plight. Tennyson here does not use pathetic fallacy but rather employs the landscape, rich with such descriptive phrases as "twined with vine," as a contrast to the speaker. When Oenone first speaks, we are led to believe that she is merely another Mariana: "My heart is breaking, and my eyes are dim, I And I am all aweary of my life." Using the customary Tennysonian contrasts of high

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and low, as in the opening lines where the scene is set before the introduction of the protagonist, Oenone speaks of hills and caves; but here these contrasts are obviously sexual symbols, and we are forcefully led to observe their sexual significance in lines like "O caves I That house the cold crown'd snake!" Oenone mourns the loss of Paris because of her love for him, to be sure; but here she bewails her loss primarily because it means frustration of her desire. And to alleviate her suffering, she, like her creator, vows to "build up all I My sorrow with my song." Anticipating Tennyson's own pronouncements on poetic theory in the early parts of "In Memoriam," she looks on art as escape, hoping that by articulation she will find relief: for it may be That, while I speak of it, a little while My heart may wander from its deeper woe. Tennyson's reticence about sexual matters has often been condemned by his critics, who seem to feel that by his lack of candor he has left out of his poetry an important part of man's nature. This was, however, a restraint in part forced on him by his age. And far from limiting him, it served the salutary effect, as I shall note again in the next chapter when speaking of "Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere," of forcing him to resort to ambiguities and paradoxes, indeed to symbols, the very qualities that modern critics most admire, to convey his meaning. On the other hand, many of the sexual images in his verse the poet himself was surely unaware of, and their meaning as symbols is thus doubly potent. One might well argue that Freudianism will end the effectiveness of such symbolism in modern writers. In "Oenone" Paris, "Beautiful Paris, evil-hearted Paris," appears on the scene wearing a leopard skin and leading a

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goat, traditional symbols of concupiscence. And when he appears, Tennyson manipulates the imagery to suggest the sexual nature of Oenone's response to him: "Far up the solitary morning smote I The streaks of virgin snow." Paris has brought her from out of herself, out of the cave ("Faroff the torrent call'd me from the cleft"); and ironically, the one who has brought her out is also the one who sends her back into the cave, where she may witness the actions of life but may not participate in them ("Thou, within the cave . . . Mayst well behold them unbeheld, unheard / Hear all"). The bribes of the three goddesses to Paris offer three choices, which Tennyson himself was debating in his poetry and which are articulated in other poems of 1832 and 1842. Hera offers power, but power which, according to her, leads to the greatest end: inaction; power "Which in all action is the end of all." She would make Paris like the Lucretian gods: men, in power Only, are likest Gods, who have attain'd Rest in a happy place and quiet seats Above the thunder, with undying bliss In knowledge of their own supremacy.

As we shall note later, this is exactly the state to which the lotus-eaters aspire. Pallas, who seemingly represents the Victorian side of Tennyson's nature, offers a gift exactly opposite to Hera's. Devoid of the peacock and splendid color of the Queen of the gods, Pallas is characterized without color and without passion: the spear is cold upon her pearly shoulder, her breast is snow-cold. What she offers is the life of action, "Acting the law we live by" and "to follow right." Hers is

82 Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 the offer of "More life, and fuller" of The Two Voices of 1842. Oenone naturally wants Pallas to win out over Hera and Aphrodite because she knows that the colorless Pallas is no rival to her for Paris' affections. Aphrodite is undoubtedly the most attractive of the three goddesses. She is described in Tennyson's richest, most luxurious imagery, imagery suggestive of passion and fertility. Almost immediately we recognize her as Tennyson's femme fatale, the great seductress like Cleopatra in "A Dream of Fair Women"; and her offer, which is "halfwhisper'd" in Paris' ear, is of another femme fatale: Helen, "The fairest and most loving wife in Greece," who, ironically, is already a loving wife and whose fairness will result in the ugliness of war and death. Aphrodite's is the gift of sensual indulgence, the self-gratification examined in "The Palace of Art"; and Paris without hesitation accepts it. Oenone is thereupon left "alone until I die." She recognizes the irony of the situation, for she continues to ask "am I not fair?" "Most loving is she?" Her condition is now completely changed: only in her erotic dreams, which incidentally show very little sexual reticence, does the rich, fertile imagery appear. Her "tallest pines," obviously phallic symbols, are cut away, and she is left with a harsh external world of nature, her only wish being death. Yet no sooner does she express her death-wish, an urge increasingly to be examined by Tennyson, than she resolves, Medea-like, to involve those who have sinned against her in her downfall. She does not remain the patient sufferer: she determines to act. While one is strongly tempted to identify the maidens of these poems with various facets of Tennyson's personality, there has been no real evidence for doing so. "The Palace of

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Art," however, allows us to make this equation, for in the dedicatory poem Tennyson unequivocally states that the poem is an allegory of a soul, thereafter represented as a female, which "did love beauty only." In allegorical terms the palace represents a tower of refuge from the world where the soul of the poet may live the life of the senses. The soul, existing in isolation, cares not for the world but concerns itself only with its "Godlike isolation." Divorced from reality, it lives in an unreality which the poet, as in the earlier "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," communicates only in terms of a personal mythology. For example, this is the description of an arras hanging in one of the rooms: One seem'd all dark and red—a tract of sand, And some one pacing there alone, Who paced for ever in a glimmering land, Lit with a low large moon. Once again Tennyson is still too concerned with the pretty and the exotic (echoes of "Egypt" reappear in this stanza) to direct his energies toward effective communication; the personal remains distinct from the external world. Tennyson had the greatest difficulty in forcing the poem into shape. Stanza after stanza he discarded in order to achieve the allegory that he promised in the dedicatory poem. He had set out to write a poem indicating the harmful effects of indulgence of the senses. And so with almost no motivation, after having lived like Huysmans' Des Esseintes a life that preconceives rather than experiences reality, the soul is brought to its downfall. She continues to enjoy her isolation in artifice, but God, "lest she should fail and perish utterly," "plagued her with sore despair." Whereupon she tires of her solitude and scorns her life and herself. It has been previously noted that when Tennyson is unsure

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of himself there appears an ominous imagery. And such is the case here: But in dark corners of her palace stood Uncertain shapes; and unawares On white-eyed phantasms weeping tears of blood, And horrible nightmares. . . . The imagery seems to restrain the soul from reaching full enjoyment of its life of the senses. It is almost as though Tennyson's artistic inclinations would not allow the poem to be shaped into a moral allegory but would retard the process. Finally, however, the soul realizes the extent of her sin and so throws "her royal robes away," desiring to retire unto "a cottage in the vale," where she "may mourn and pray." Hardly any sensitive reader can leave the poem without the impression that as a moral allegory "The Palace of Art," even in its revised form, is a failure. By far the greater part of the poem is taken up with depicting the sensuous pleasures of the soul, and the moral seems forced, too obviously didactic; for like Keats we are inclined to dislike poetry that has too palpable a design upon us. The last verse serves also to indicate the two-directional pull of the poem: the soul will not suffer its palace, "so lightly, so beautifully built," to be destroyed but insists that it will, when purged of its guilt, return there. Tennyson had set out in the poem to examine the question whether the artist can live isolated in a world of art or whether he must share the experiences of ordinary human life to find fulfillment. But emotionally the question remains unanswered. The poem, consequently, does not move us at all because the poetry belongs to the palace and not to the moral. In writing " T h e Palace of Art" Tennyson was attempting

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to follow the dicta of friends such as R . C. Trench, in whose remark "Tennyson, we cannot live in a r t " the p o e m seems to have had its origin, a n d F. D. Maurice, w h o w r o t e in The Athenaeum in 1828 that the poet "cannot be a scorner, or selfish, or luxurious a n d sensual." Yet his early aestheticism was too strongly implanted within his being to be so soon obliterated. One recalls that in " A r m a g e d d o n , " * after the mystic state is reached, the poet says: " Y e a ! in that h o u r I could have fallen down I Before my own strong soul and worshipped it." Self-absorption had been his goal, a n d now, however hard he tried to cease believing in the poet as " L o r d of the senses five," he could not immediately bring about a complete reversal of his emotional orientation. T h e answer to the soul's predicament, Tennyson tells in the dedicatory verses, is love. If it lives only in itself, how can the soul ever be sure of its own being? It is love that affirms self. Tennyson insists that he w h o "shuts Love out, in turn shall be / Shut out f r o m Love, and on her threshold lie / Howling in outer darkness." L i k e Hyperion, Tennyson seeks to reach the height of poetic knowledge, not simply "Knowledge for its beauty." A n d his statement to his friend is the same as Moneta's to H y p e r i o n : "None can usurp this height," return'd that shade, "But those to whom the miseries of the world Are misery, and will not let them rest. All else who find a haven in the world, Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days, If by a chance into this fane they come, Rot on the pavement where thou rotted'st half." (Keats, "The Fall of Hyperion," I, 147-153.) Tennyson is here taking a step f u r t h e r toward the affirmation of love as the link between self and object that he had

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examined in "Love and Death" of 1830 and was to explore further in "In Memoriam." The transformation of the suffering maiden as a symbolic figure is apparent in "The Palace of Art." No longer does she suffer her isolation unwillingly, but in this case creates her own withdrawal from the world. And far from meek submission to her state, she enjoys living apart, until in her self-sufficiency the soul, tiring of her solitary complacency, falls into despair. But even her despair at the close of the poem is remedied: she acts to save herself. Professor Stevenson in his study of the "high-born maiden" has observed the numerous reminiscences of Shelley in the poem, and he has shown how the soul in "The Palace of Art" is a symbol of Shelleyan origin. But just as the imprisoned maiden has commenced to work her release from her confinement, so does the influence of Shelley fade, to be replaced by that of Keats. There are so many Keatsian overtones in "The Palace of Art" that it is useless to take up space pointing them out. The following lines from Keats, however, offer a parallel for the withdrawal of the soul into an isolation of sensual indulgence: Thou art a scholar, Lycius, and must know That finer spirits cannot breathe below In human climes, and live . . . What serener palaces, Where I may all my senses please . . .? ("Lamia," I, 279-281, 283-284.) A parallel for the last bit of allegory can be found in Endymion: Against his proper glory Has my own soul conspired: so my story Will I to children utter, and repent.

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There never liv'd a mortal man, who bent His appetite beyond his natural sphere, But starv'd and died. (IV, 643-647.)

In other lyrics of the 1832 Poems we find the same ambivalence of response to the maiden symbol. "Margaret" presents a portrait of Adeline's twin sister who, though momentarily sorrowful, suffers only "sorrow's shade." Like her sister femme fatale she is aloof from the world: she loves "To hear the murmur of the strife, I But enter not the toil of life." In "Rosalind" and "Kate" the maidens become more wilful and dangerous. Rosalind is described as a falcon who goes roaming for prey; Kate is a masculine type who "no common love will feel": My woman-soldier, gallant Kate, As pure and true as blades of steel.

The maiden in the sonnet "The form, the form alone is eloquent," not published until 1865 but dating from the period of these earlier poems, is the passionless woman: the slight coquette, she cannot love, And if you kiss'd her feet a thousand years, She still would take the praise, and care no more.

These maidens find their apogee in "Eleanore," the picture of a damsel so withdrawn from reality that she becomes an abstraction, almost an allegorical figure, seemingly representing some state of soul. Thinking of her, the "I" is transported into ecstasy which he cannot describe, and he ardently wishes to maintain this trancelike state so as to "stand apart, and to adore": In thee all passion becomes passionless, Touch'd by thy spirit's mellowness,

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Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 Losing his fire and active might In a silent meditation, Falling into a still delight, And luxury of contemplation.

She cannot partake of man's feelings: she is impervious not only to love's arrows but also to life. By seeking her out and gazing on her, the speaker feels that he can become somewhat like h e r : sterile, and lost in contemplation. For Tennyson, Eleanore is the fatal woman: she is that powerful figure who traps the minds of all men who gaze on her; but she gives nothing. She merely accepts their votive offerings and receives their admiration only with a slight smile, which cannot be comprehended. She is neither human nor divine, but an inhabitant of the dream world of the poet's mind: Far off from human neighborhood, Thou wert bom, on a summer mom, A mile beneath the cedar-wood. The resemblances between Eleanore and Keats's Belle Dame are numerous. Both are beautiful and are of some mysterious origin; both have strange eyes and long, flowing hair. The greatest point of resemblance, however, is the power that each has over men. Keats's lady causes kings, princes, and warriors to become death-pale in her thrall. Tennyson's Eleanore has also the same power: I watch thy grace, and in its place My heart a charmed slumber keeps, While 1 muse upon thy face; And a languid fire creeps Thro' my veins to all my frame. Dissolving and slowly. Soon From thy rose-red lips MY name

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Floweth; and then, as in a swoon, With dinning sound my ears are rife, My tremulous tongue faltereth, I lose my color, I lose my breath, I drink the cup of a costly death, Brimm'd with delirious draughts of warmest life. I die with my delight before I hear what I would hear from thee; Yet tell my name again to me, I would be dying evermore, So dying ever, Eleanore. Eleanore is among the last of Tennyson's fatal women as such. In other maiden poems of the 1832 volume the suffering maiden and the jemme fatale begin to coalesce, so that from their fusion a new type of maiden appears in Tennyson's poetry. In "Fatima," the name given to the poem in 1842, the jemme fatale is somewhat transformed, for she herself has become the pursuer and not the pursued. Fatima is nevertheless the strong woman: she vows, "I will possess him or will die." In "The Sisters," which strangely hints at necrophilia, the one maiden avenges her dead sister, representative of the suffering maiden, by murdering the deceiving lover; and strong woman that she is, she feels no remorse for her deed: I curl'd and comb'd his comely head, He look'd so grand when he was dead. In "The May Queen" the speaker is the proud mistress who demands love but refuses to return it: They call me cruel-hearted, but 1 care not what they say . . . They say he's dying all for love, but that can never be; They say his heart is breaking, mother—what is that to me?

90 Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 The interesting point about these poems is that while Tennyson was trying to reach a larger audience and, in the case of "The May Queen," was making his first attempt at stories of common life, the image of the fatal woman kept reappearing. It was as though he could not dispel the image from his mind. "A Dream of Fair Women" offers a conscious contrasting on the poet's part of the two types of female. In its original form the poem opened with four stanzas which were excised in 1842. They begin with the simile of a man sailing in a balloon, which Freud tells us is a symbolic representation of sexual excitement,' a symbol not ill-suited to serve as introduction to this poem. In a dream the "I" is transported to a land where, reminiscent of a favorite Keatsian theme, he sees "Beauty and anguish walking hand in hand I The downward slope to death." Before he can envision the lovely ladies, however, he passes through stages of semiconsciousness in which he meets with the old phantasmogoria that restrains his complete lapse from waking consciousness. Forms pass at windows and shapes chase shapes, and they frustrate articulation: "I started once, or seem'd to start in pain, I Resolved on noble things, and strove to speak." But retreating deeper within the dream, he feels the "sharp fancies" lose their restraining force: And then I know not how, All those sharp fancies, by down-lapsing thought Stream'd onward, lost their edges, and did creep Roll'd on each other, rounded, smooth'd, and brought Into the gulfs of sleep.

There follows stage after stage of regression. The wood

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which the speaker enters is guarded, as in "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," by heavy vegetation. Death, as the talisman of imaginative liberation, is by-passed: "The dim red Morn had died" and the setting in the wood, like that in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," is "deadly still" without sound of bird or rill and is compared to that of "the inner sepulchre." Further aggressive strides into the dream are made before he attains the vision of the fair women: I knew the flowers, I knew the leaves, I knew The tearful glimmer of the languid dawn On those long, rank, dark wood-walks drench'd in dew, Leading from lawn to lawn. The smell of violets, hidden in the green, Pour'd back into my empty soul and frame The times when I remember to have been Joyful and free from blame. And from within me a clear undertone Thrill'd thro' mine ears in that unblissful clime, "Pass freely thro'; the wood is all thine own Until the end of time." It must be noted that attainment of the vision is not permitted without further regressive movements. In the smell of violets the speaker is recalled for the moment to previous times that were happier, the poet once again resorting to the theme of memory and the mask of age. Aggression and regression thus form a pattern of interplay before the complete release from reality comes. The women whom he sees within the wood are either innocent victims, Iphigenia and Jephthah's daughter, or enchantresses, Helen and Cleopatra. Helen boastfully tells that "Where'er I came / I brought calamity," to which the

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speaker replies that it is no wonder since he himself would have gladly died for such a beautiful face. Cleopatra, like earlier Tennysonian fatal women possessed of a "haughty smile," speaks as the true femme fatale: I govern'd men by change, and so I sway'd All moods. 'T is long since I have seen a man. Once, like the moon, I made The ever-shifting currents of the blood According to my humor ebb and flow. I have no men to govern in this wood: That makes my only woe. Iphigenia and Jephthah's daughter are perfect examples of the suffering maiden and perfect examples of contrast to the jemmes fatales. They have been caused to suffer innocently and they have accepted their plight, the Hebrew maiden even finding comfort in the thought that, unlike Cleopatra who has governed all men, "I subdued me to my father's will." When the dream fades, the speaker seeks to enter again into the vision, and frustrated in desire the poet characteristically calls forth the Keatsian imagery and the mask of age ("Desiring what is mingled with past years"). There is no resolution of the two conflicting feminine types in "A Dream of Fair Women," but out of the dialectic clash there arises a new type of woman in Tennyson's poetry, what Professor Stevenson has called the "matter-of-fact literary stock-character." This new type of female, in a new type of poem, had been foreshadowed in Tennyson's feminine portraits. From studies in mood and meter he had progressed to character studies with narrative elements added; and these elements he com-

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bines to produce the type of poem that he was later to call an idyll, verses that capitalize on the sentimental strain evidently so congenial to Victorian tastes. But it should be noted, by way of apology for the poet, that even though such poems as "The Miller's Daughter" and "The May Queen" seem to be written down to his audience, this is not entirely the case. Tennyson would not have popularity at the expense of integrity. He refused, for example, to allow "The Lover's Tale" to be included in the 1832 volume because, as he wrote to his publisher, "it is too full of faults and tho' I think it might conduce towards making me popular, yet, to my eye, it spoils the completeness of the book, and is better away" (Memoir, I, 90). "The Miller's Daughter" and "The May Queen" stem, perhaps, more from the influence of his friends than from Tennyson's own desire for fame. Hallam had sought to persuade him that "poems are good things but flesh and blood is better," and that if an artist "lacks the inward sense which reveals to him what is inward in the heart, he has left out the part of Hamlet in the play" (Memoir, I, 89, 501). That there was an audience for poetry about the "human heart" in common life is evident from Carlyle's appreciation of "The May Queen": "Oh! but that's tender and true" (Memoir, II, 234). Nor was the concern with the human heart in poetry a taste peculiar to the 1830's. Stopford A. Brooke, writing in 1894, has this to say of Tennyson's achievement in the coronary department: "What Wordsworth has done for the beginning of this century, Tennyson has done for the midst of it. He brought us into touch with the general human heart in the midst of common life." Brooke also adds, "This is the democratic element in Tennyson.'" But though these poems were written to show that flesh

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and blood are better than art, they nevertheless contain the same old themes that had haunted the poet's imagination. "The Miller's Daughter," which discards the exotic landscapes of "Egypt" and "Oenone" for a commoner nature of the "white chalk-quarry," employs the mask of age, in that the speaker is looking back over his life, and, characteristically, the speaker is a fatherless orphan. Before he found his beloved, he relates, he had no sense of direction: "I had no motion of my own"; he languished in a morbid melancholy, fearing "That I should die an early death." Love, however, has for him proved to be the great panacea. The speaker has found the love for which the poet in the sonnet "But were I loved, as I desire to be" was seeking. As in the sonnet, love has caused him not to fear death, it has cleaved "All the inner, all the outer world of pain." The beloved, unlike all other females of the 1832 poems, is a true lover and faithful wife who has provided the speaker with "comfort" and "settled bliss." For almost the first time in Tennyson's poetry a love affair has proved to be happy, and the poet has here begun the first of a series of poems recounting the joys of domestic felicity. "The May Queen," on the other hand, presents another kind of female. On the surface, the speaker is a simple village girl who recounts her delight in having been chosen Queen of the May. Yet the poet cannot forego the opportunity, as was previously pointed out, to associate her, momentarily, with the other heartless females of this volume. She gives a "sharp look" to the young swain Robin, and, completely preoccupied with herself, she passes him by without speaking, proud of being "cruel-hearted." Though one would not characterize the simple girl as a femme fatale, her utterance is nevertheless not too unlike that of other Tennysonian fatal women.

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In the second part of the poem, entitled "New Year's Eve," the girl on her death-bed apologizes for being "wild and wayward." In a frenzy of self-pity she realizes that she is about to die, and she pictures herself, as did so many of ihe speakers in Poems by Two Brothers, lying in her "mouldering grave." The melancholy is here maudlin, but nevertheless it shares the elegiac tone with countless other Tennyson poems. The note of tender sadness of the "Song : A Spirit haunts the year's last hours" Tennyson never abandoned, but he transmuted this oblique, pianissimo expression of wistful sorrow into direct, blatant statement when he made it part of his idylls. This sentimental melancholy informs several other poems of 1832 which are not, strictly speaking, idylls. In the bathetic "To " ("All good things have not kept aloof"), later reprinted as "My life is full of weary days," the speaker, again expressing the world-weariness of the earlier Tennysonian personae. tells that "life is full of weary days"; and like the May Queen, he imagines himself in the grave. In a loftier vein the sadness associated with the transience of beauty is treated in the sonnet "Oh, Beauty, passing beauty, sweetest Sweet!" and in the short "Song: Who can say," in which the theme of time and the mask of age recur: Who can say Why To-day To-morrow will be yesterday? Who can tell Why to smell The violet, recalls the dewy prime Of youth and buried time? Finally, in "The Death of the Old Year" Tennyson personifies the passing year and portrays it as a corpse.

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The themes of grief and transience of love and beauty are brought together in " T o J.S.," the poem addressed to James Spedding on the death of his brother. In these verses Tennyson speaks of the lack of real satisfaction to be gained from human relationships, for when love ripens it is cut off at the source: God gives us love. Something to love He lends us; but, when love is grown To ripeness, that on which it throve Falls off, and love is left alone. This is the curse of time. Faced with the ravages of time, the poet, like the speaker in "In Memoriam," despondently says that "myself could almost take I The place of him that sleeps in peace." And as the poem ends, the poet implies that the dead are perhaps happier in death than man, knowing only change, can ever be in life. For death brings with it the permanence and the rest which man is ever striving for. Addressing the dead friend, Tennyson says: Nothing comes to thee new or strange. Sleep full of rest from head to feet; Lie still, dry dust, secure of change. The desire for escape from a world of change and the wish to be delivered from the world of action find their loveliest expression in "The Lotus-Eaters." Obviously a reworking of "The Sea-Fairies," "The Lotus-Eaters" has been transformed into a more dramatic poem. It is, of course, based on the ninth book of the Odyssey. Homer, however, evidently took no interest in describing the accidia of lotus-

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land, for the incident is but barely mentioned; instead he delighted in relating the adventures of the great Ulysses. Tennyson, on the other hand, took what was but a brief mention in Homer and, omitting almost entirely the restless hero, characteristically described the lethargic joys of those who had eaten the lotus. The poem opens with Ulysses urging his men onward, promising that the waves will soon bring them to shore. On that same afternoon they come to a land which is a kingdom where languor reigns. Here the very landscape reflects the apathy of the inhabitants: there is neither sharp sunlight nor a clear moon, only the haze of a seemingly perpetual afternoon; the air itself is languid and the stream, not full and rushing but slender and slow, seems to pause in its fall from the cliff. In other words, nature reflects the condition of those that eat the lotus. There are many streams, but they all flow outward to the sea from the inner land, the suggestion being that the departing water indicates a flowing out of vitality from the land of the lotus-eaters. In lotus-land things never change but always seem the same. It is the perfect world where all is as one would have it. To those who eat the enchanted flower there is no longer any need to concern oneself with reality: one wants only to dream and forget the cares of the world beyond. All desire for action is obliterated, and absence of energy becomes perfection. And so the men, seduced by the offers of the flower and the fruit, eat the magic lotus and determine never more to roam. The choric song is dramatic in conception, and it makes brilliant use of contrasts. For example, for every stanza that is descriptive there is a following stanza that is rhetorical, in which the men question and rationalize their situation. One

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is led to suspect that Tennyson is here aiming at dramatic objectification of his own problem of artistic isolation. In the odd-numbered sections the mariners are lyrical about the delights of the island paradise; while in the even stanzas, their thoughts for the moment projected beyond the enchanted isle, they speak of "heaviness" and "distress," of death and war and evil. As they sing, the stanzas of their song begin to grow longer and longer—from eleven lines in the first section to twenty-nine in the last—thereby implying the true effects of the lotus, which allows them to forget the world and drowsily sing of their release from reality. The central images of the poem are also contrasting. The images of land and sea are contrasted in the first strophe and are carried throughout to the last section, and they are associated with colors. The land is always described in terms of rosy yellow, the color of the lotus, and the sea is described by dark blue. Furthermore, the adjectives, nouns, and verbs used in connection with land are those of stillness—"In the hollow Lotus-land to live and lie reclined"—while the words referring to the sea are those of turbulent motion—"surge was seething," "gushing of the wave." Surrounded by sweet music and cool mosses, among the delights of sound and sight, the men sing, why should we, the "roof and crown of things," forever toil and find so little rest, while all other things of nature have rest and while our inner spirit tells us that calm is the only joy? Death we know is the end of life, so why labor all our life away? What we do today matters not, because tomorrow it will be part of the past. All we want is "To lend our hearts and spirits wholly / To the influence of mild-minded melancholy." The tone of melancholy permeates "The Lotus-Eaters," for their joy is not in living but in abnegation of life; they sing not of vernal gladness but of autumnal sadness:

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Lo! sweeten'd with the summer light, T h e full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow, Drops in a silent autumn night. All its allotted length of days T h e flower ripens in its place, Ripens and fades, and falls, and hath no toil, Fast-rooted in the fruitful soil.

This is the condition of nature to which they aspire, and they Jong for "long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease." Like the Lady of Shalott, they have become self-absorbed spirits, and they know that they must suffer in any attempt to enter again the outside world. They resolve, therefore, to remain in lotus-land, and they surrender unreluctantly their will to act. "We have had enough of action," they sing, and vow "to live and lie reclined I On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind." The Epicurean gods, which were probably suggested to Tennyson by the third book of Lucretius, were introduced into the poem in the revision of 1842. In his review of the 1842 volumes James Spedding wrote that the introduction of the gods added "touches of deeper significance," and instead of a sense of "sensual ease and luxurious repose, with which it originally ended, a higher strain is substituted, which is meant apparently to show the effect of lotus-eating upon the religious feelings" (Memoir, I, 192). In other words, Tennyson sought by the revision of Section VIII to indicate that abandonment to sense perception contributes to the decay of man's moral and religious nature. If this was Tennyson's intention, he has not fully succeeded. As in "The Palace of A r t " the whole force of the poem works against the didactic intention: by far the greater part is dedicated to the delights of sensuous indulgence, and

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the moral, if such it is, comes only in the last section of the poem. We do not see the harmful effects of lotus-eating on the mariners because we do not see in the beginning of the poem that they believed in some other kind of gods; there has been, so far as the reader can tell, no change. The introduction of the Epicurean deities shows only how the effect of the lotus has been to remove the men's minds from the mundane world of care to the careless repose of the gods. Because in the world of reality one cannot know this carelessness and this repose, the state of the gods serves as a metaphor for the condition of those who have eaten the enchanted flower. In previous sections of the poem the men have asked why they should toil. Now their reflection on the condition of the gods gives them their answer: freedom from labor and care is the divine law; it is the gift that Hera offers to Paris in "Oenone" as the only way to happiness. "The Lotus-Eaters" gives less evidence than most of the poems in the 1832 collection of the two-directional pull of Tennyson's personality. There is here an acceptance of the desire for escape, and in this respect the poem is an example of Keats's negative capability. For the moment the Romantic Tennyson was in complete control, and for this reason "The Lotus-Eaters" is probably the least characteristic poem in this volume. The 1832 Poems are even more vacillating in tone than those of the Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. They show a dialectic clash between the Romantic and Victorian sides of the poet's nature, a conflict in which the Romantic side wins emotionally but loses in the end to the moral element forced—often, as in "The Palace of Art," at the sacrifice of unity of tone— on the poem. Tennyson was apparently seeking by means of (he dialectic to come to terms with the warring sides of his nature, even at times, as in "A Dream of Fair Women,"

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consciously contrasting the two; but there was not to be for some years to come a resolution to the problem. In the meanwhile, Tennyson attempted to give full voice to the Victorian side of his personality not only in the two idylls previously discussed and in the embarrassingly effeminate "O Darling Room" but also in three political sonnets. The sonnet entitled "Buonaparte," which goes even further than the two patriotic songs of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical in jingoism, praises the English for their "stubborn hearts of oak" and speaks in the boastful terms of "We taught him." More and more Tennyson was becoming, like Wordsworth, completely English and proud of his insularity. But these poems bear no relation to the others in this volume. They are worthy of mention solely in that they give a slight hint of the direction in which Tennyson was revising his aesthetic.

NOTES 'See Paul F. Jamieson, "Tennyson and His Audience in 1832," Philological Quarterly, XXI, 407-413. : See, for example, "Egypt," "Fatima," "The Voyage" ; also "The Princess": "bright and fierce and fickle is the South" (IV, 79). 'Quoted by Frances M. Brookfield, The Cambridge "Apostles" (New York, 1907), pp. 137, 88. 'Frank Kermode, The Romantic Image (London, 1957). * The predominance of the subjunctive mood in Tennyson's early poetry has been pointed out by Francis Berry, Poet's Grammar (London, 1958), p. 161. ' I have not discussed this poem at greater length because of G. Robert Stange's excellent treatment "Tennyson's Garden of Art: A Study of The Hesperides," PMLA, LXVII, 732-743. ' A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, trans. Joan Riviere (New York, 1943), p. 138. 'Stopford A. Brooke, Tennyson (London, 1894), pp. 91, 93.

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CHAPTER IV

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Tennyson's "ten years' silence" between the 1832 and 1842 volumes was broken only twice—by the publication of "Saint Agnes" (later entitled "Saint Agnes' Eve") and "Oh, that 'twere possible" (which was to become the germ of "Maud" eighteen years later) in 1837. During this decade his poems were savagely attacked by the reviewers; Arthur Henry Hallam died; he and his family were forced to leave the old rectory at Somersby and he assumed the duties of head of the family; he became engaged to Emily Sellwood and, because of his poverty, was forced to break off the engagement—all of which contributed to the "silence." These years, however, were not idle: Tennyson was revising those of the 1830 and 1832 poems with which he was dissatisfied and he was also composing new ones. When continually urged by his friends and admirers in England and America and when satisfied with his revisions and new compositions, Tennyson in 1842 published the Poems in two volumes. Since I have already considered the earlier verses in their revised forms, I shall here focus attention on the second volume, which contains all except six of the new poems. 103

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This volume includes many of Tennyson's finest and most famous poems, and it gives every indication of artistic growth—of increasingly serious thought, of liberation from excessive concern with self, of poetic felicity. Yet when one has said this, one must also say that the Tennyson of 1842 is not a new Tennyson: the poet of "Ulysses" and "The Two Voices" is but an extension and, in part, a reorientation of the boy poet who published "Remorse" in 1827. Once again the child proves father to the man, and the themes and symbols of Poems by Two Brothers are carried on into the man's mature work. Much that is fine and appealing to modern readers in the 1842 poems stems almost directly from the poet's grief over the loss of his friend Arthur Hallam. During the first weeks following news of his friend's death Tennyson, plunged into despair and an ungovemed sense of grief, often felt that it were perhaps better not to be; and as we shall see, the thought of suicide became almost an obsession. It was to poetry alone that he looked for anodyne, finding in what he called in "In Memoriam" the sad "mechanic exercise" a temporary release from his sorrow. The therapeutic value of poetry informs the lovely "Break, break, break," undoubtedly the best lyric in the 1842 collection. Here again is the strain of tender melancholy, the elegiac tone that Tennyson had expressed exquisitely in the earlier volumes and that had beei) perhaps the most characteristic quality of his poetry. But "Break, break, break" is finer than the earlier introspective lyrics. One need not respond only to the gentle melancholy, as Mr. Cleanth Brooks insists,1 in order to recognize the poetic value of the poem. At the risk of intellectualizing the lyric, let us analyze it. "Break, break, break" is a poem of experience. In the

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previous paragraph the adjective introspective was applied to it, yet this is not entirely a salutary choice of diction. For in this poem there is a kind of objectification which had not been present in Tennyson's previous lyrics. W h a t the poet is here doing is projecting himself into the "object," the sea, and attempting to see himself through the object, to know himself by knowing the object. He seeks not meaning in the writing of the poem but rather an experience by which to become more acutely aware of himself. Through this experience of role-playing he gives himself so completely to the object that the object is allowed to generate its own laws, thereby creating values f r o m its own existence. Mr. Robert L a n g b a u m writes of the values to be gained by the poet f r o m his experience: But since the romanticist finds in the object the values he puts there, he finds also the objectification of at least o n e aspect of the v a l u e s compatible with his o w n fullest existence. T h e romanticist's sympathy with the object leads to an illumination of beauty and truth in the o b j e c t — a n illumination w h i c h involves at the s a m e time an experience of recognition, recognition of this beauty and truth as values he has known potentially all along in himself. A s an experience, the illumination is undeniably valid."

In the opening stanza of the poem, the poet introduces us to the sea in its ambivalent aspects. Archetypally, the sea is symbolic of life, of the very generation of life. Yet this life symbol is addressed as the possessor ("thy") of "cold gray stones," which, because of their association with graveyards, suggest death. T h e sea, nevertheless, is seen by the speaker as something eternal, something that in contrast to himself can speak; but on the other hand, the sea speaks only in broken utterances as the onomatopoetic " b r e a k " indicates.

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Paradoxically, the speaker has thoughts that arise while his tongue is still, and by use of the putative subjunctive he implies that articulation, even like the utterance of the sea, could bring relief. In the second stanza the speaker is led to think of those who are more closely associated with the sea than he: the children of a fisherman, a sailor. And because they have complete identification with the sea, recognizing it as a source of life, they are able not only to "utter" but, more actively, to shout and sing; they are not burdened. In the term "fisherman" there is, of course, a religious overtone; and while one cannot insist on this as a Christian allusion, it seems to link this stanza with "grace" in the last stanza. There is also perhaps a slight play on the repeated word "well" used in connection with the actors of this stanza, for it suggests their health in contrast to the speaker's sickness. The third stanza results from the logical progression of climax from boat to ship. Mr. Brooks finds that the epithet "stately" is "idle and finally irrelevant." Its relevance is, I think, to distinguish the ship from the boat in the second stanza, that is, to indicate a larger vessel. Like other forms of life and movement associated with the sea, the ship goes on without regard to the speaker's situation, or literally, the ship instictively "knows" that the sea is its life. The movement of the ship brings to mind the movement of the "vanish'd hand" which the speaker wishes to touch; and the ships remind him of those who, in stanza two, man the ships and who shout and sing; and he wishes, repeating for the third time the "O" of the second stanza, for "the sound of a voice that is still." The poem thus works out in the reverse pattern of that in which it progressed—movement and sound —until in the last stanza we are back where we started—with the breaking of the waves.

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In stanza four the speaker recognizes fully what he had only half-consciously suspected in the opening lines of the poem: he sees the sea in its dual role—as the nourisher of life that animates the fisherman's boy and girl, the sailor lad, the boat, and the ships, and also as the monotonous sound of seemingly meaningless activity that erodes the crags, which, the speaker points out, belong anyway to the sea. Having recognized the ambivalent aspects of the sea, the speaker is now somehow changed. The process of sympathetic projection has made him see that life, like his symbol, works in a cycle: it gives and it takes away. And even though he is not wholly resigned to the loss of the vanished hand and the still voice, he knows that he must accept the loss. Thus he says almost matter-of-factly that "the tender grace of a day that is dead I Will never come back to me." If, as Mr. Brooks says, the elements of the penultimate line "remain frozen at the conventional prose level," it is because the speaker is saying farewell to the ghost that had haunted him at the beginning of the poem. The "grace," whether it be human or divine or both, will henceforth become less "tender"; it will as the result of this experience be something different: it will not necessarily fade, but it will suffer a sea-change. The fact that the poem is circular in form does not mean that the poem denies itself or that one is left with nothing in the end. For, as in other poems of experience that Mr. Langbaum discusses, the reader is left with the same thing that the speaker is left with: a total movement of soul. The poet has penetrated his object imaginatively, and by complete identification with the object as symbol in his reverie he has somehow gained a meaningful experience. Something has happened to him and he can never be the same again : a kind of resolution and relief has come through self-projec-

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tion: by means of an image he has handled and seen that which he had not hitherto been able to touch or look upon. There is not, however, a complete awareness of the meaning of the experience any more than Keats's is a full comprehension of the meaning of the nightingale's song. It is significant that there are only two other personal lyrics in the new poems of 1842: "A Farewell" and "Move eastward, happy earth." Tennyson in this volume was moving beyond the point of direct self-examination in his poetry, and he was channeling his lyrical impulse into the writing of "In Memoriam," a poem which he probably had not yet recognized as a poem and to the publication of which he had given little thought. It seemingly was only a special event that could cause the poet to return to the lyric, and consequently the two lyrics in the second 1842 volume are occasional poems. "Move eastward, happy earth" was apparently written in 1836 on the occasion of his brother Charles' wedding, at which time Tennyson seems first to have declared his love to Emily Sellwood. "A Farewell" presumably was written in 1837 at the time of the family's removal from Somersby. The personal elegiac tone was being almost entirely relegated to "In Memoriam," and the same brook addressed in "A Farewell" was treated in Section CI of the great elegy. As an artist, Tennyson was not wasting himself in maudlin self-pity. This is not to say, of course, that there is nothing of the poet's grief in the 1842 poems. On the contrary, almost every one of these poems originates in the poet's own plight. The earlier conflicts had not found resolution, and now added to these were further clashing emotions stemming from, among other things, the loss of Hallam and the perplexities of love and family duties. But even though the conflicts were greater. Tennyson as a poet gained more artistic control over them:

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for the most part he is now not merely vaguely aware of their existence but, rather, brings them out in the open so that by weighing them in his verse he may achieve some degree of balance. In other words, Tennyson was becoming increasingly aware of his personal dilemma as an artistic problem, a dilemma that demanded resolution if he were to write meaningful poetry. The artistic problem is manifest in the unpublished poem "Youth," which Hallam Tennyson printed in the Memoir, and which is dated 1833. One can have little doubt that Tennyson is talking about himself or that his subject is himself and his poetry; for in the poem Tennyson is tracing, like Keats in "Sleep and Poetry," to which this poem bears a profound similarity, the necessary pattern of development of the poet. In youth, the speaker declares, he too wandered in the realm of Flora and Pan, "by long glades and meadowy mounds" and "shores with blissful sounds." But soon time sends through his blood a "prophet voice." He hears the voice but cannot respond to it. Like Keats, he questions himself as to whether he will ever be able to bid these joys farewell. As he grows older, more and more voices speak to him, and though they assume a sweeter tone they "did not sound so joyfully." For they tell that he cannot live only in the joy of immediate experience; they remind him, as he certainly did not need reminding since the theme had already become obsessive, that transience is the law of life, "how all things become the past." The speaker cannot, in spite of the pleading, submit to the direction of the voices, and so he clings to his old ways, but now no longer delighted in his communion with nature, with all the external and obvious beauties of the world:

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So lived I without aim or choice, Still humming snatches of old song." The voices increase in number and intensity, and a new, sharper voice crying in the future beckons "Come along." But in opposition to this plea other voices, low and sweet, restrain his departure, crying "Come back, come back." Caught in this conflict between the two opposing forces, the speaker in his confusion does nothing. The process of birth, of a poetic reorientation, is too painful. Employing the language of Freudian regression and of his own imprisoned maidens, the poet remains "in my natal bowers." For the moment he is happy here because no action is necessary; he can be but a spectator of life: Unvext by doubts I cannot solve, I sit among the scentless flowers And see and hear the world revolve. Like the soul in "The Palace of Art," he sits apart "contemplating all." Yet he knows that the birth must take place, that sooner or later the sharper voice will call again. From the security of the womb he must issue forth to study the agonies and the strife of human hearts. In Part II of "Youth" the poet senses "an energy, an agony, / A labour working to an end," and again he debates with himself whether to rest or rise. Another voice cries out for him to follow, and as he does so the ominous imagery appears—shadows striking and sinking, phantasms fighting and dying, here as in the earlier poems symbolizing the forces that must be by-passed in order to achieve liberation of the imagination. As the voice summons, the speaker follows, bidding farewell to sleep and rest. When he reaches the summit, he like the Lady of Shalott having become sick

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of shadows but in language more forceful than hers cries out: "Away with shadows!" And through double arches, the significance of which is not made clear, he sees lying "Fair with green fields the realms of Love." The whole world becomes transformed. Yet here at the summit, presumably of poetic knowledge, he feels insecure: he is overcome with dizziness, his heart beats quickly and his spirit thirsts, he sees cloudy streaks flash by. Suddenly, in a symbolic close, from a golden vapor bursts forth a mountain with triple peaks, almost the same image as in the second stanza of "The Lotus-Eaters," and there on the mountain "sit figures as of Gods I Ray'd round with beams of living light." The meaning of the poem is far from clear, this perhaps being the reason why Tennyson failed to publish it. Presumably the speaker, who is certainly identifiable with the poet, has at the end seen where his direction lies: he must leave the joys of isolated sensuality and tread on to the realms of love, which unite man with man in bonds of sympathy. Yet the poem remains puzzling, mainly because of its unrealized symbolism. Are those double arches the same image as the metaphor of experience which the poet employs in "Ulysses"? Is the mountain with its triple peaks the same image used in "The Lotus-Eaters"? Are the gods at the end of the poem the Epicurean gods of "The Lotus-Eaters"? One cannot, to be sure, answer these questions; yet one is led to suspect that the figures, like the phantasms, form part of Tennyson's storehouse of symbols and that he was attempting to set them up as meaningful images. But whatever their meaning, this much is certain: the poet in these verses is a presentation of the two sides of Tennyson's nature. He is in the valley of luxuries—and this part of the poem is clear because he is writing about what he knows; but he realizes that he must move up to the summit—and here his vision

112 Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 becomes obscured because it is a vision: he is not yet there. The centrifugal impulse has been put into motion, but here it has not yet overpowered the centripetal force. "Youth" is not only an interesting poem, it is also in parts a good one. There is a cleanness here that is not too often found among the "luxuries" of Tennyson's early verse. The first stanza of Part II, for example, has a polish that is almost Yeatsian: A rumour of a mystery, A noise of winds that meet and blend, An energy, an agony, A labour working to an end.

It is a pity that the poem is not better known. Added to the advice from his friends about foreswearing the life of art in favor of flesh and blood came admonitions from the reviewers. The reviewer of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical in the Westminster Review for January, 1831, had written: "It is not for such men to sink into mere verse-makers for the amusement of themselves or others." On the contrary, "A genuine poet has deep responsibilities to his country and the world, to the present and future generations, to earth and heaven." In his review of the 1830 and 1832 poems in the London Review, July, 1835, John Stuart Mill wrote: To render his poetic endowment the means of giving impressiveness to important truths, he must, by continual study and meditation, strengthen his intellect for the discrimination of such truths; he must see that his theory of life and the world be no chimera of the brain, but the well-groomed result of solid and mature thinking;—he must cultivate, and with no half devotion, philosophy as well as poetry.

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If Tennyson did not give full ear to the reviewers in revising his poetry, he undoubtedly was cognizant of the validity of such criticisms as those quoted, and the new poems of 1842 offer every indication of his attempt to approximate the poetry of "responsibilities," which his friends and public were demanding. But his acquiescence in their demands could not be immediate. M u c h of Tennyson's new poetry is about the poet and his functions and, more specifically, about the difficulty of writing poetry in such an unpropitious age. In " A m p h i o n " he speaks of how wonderful it would have been to sing in a former age "when song was great," when "nature first was fresh to men." At present, "in such a brassy age," the singer finds little response: "I could not move a thistle." All he can now expect is that "if at the end of all / A little garden blossom." In "Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue" he longs for former times "when the Poet's words and looks I H a d yet their native glow." Occasionally the old note of escapism re-enters. Perhaps, he says in " L ' E n v o i " to " T h e Day-Dream," sleep and forgetfulness are best: were it not a pleasant thing To fall asleep with all one's friends; To pass with all our social ties To silence from the paths of men . . .? He knows the kind of poetry that he is expected to write, but he cannot completely forego his preoccupation with sensual beauty. As the poet says about his verse to Lady Flora in " T h e Day-Dream," "So 'Twere to cramp its use if I / Should hook it to some useful end." He is defensive about the iack of a moral in his poetry and is impatient that one should be expected. In the unpublished " A n Idle

114 Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 Rhyme"* he unequivocally declares in favor of poetry that is not topical: "I cannot prate against the Duke, I I love to have an idle rhyme"; and he maintains, as Pater was later to do, that that verse which concerns itself with practical, moral, or political problems will lose much of its interest f o r posterity: What's near is large to modern eyes, But disproportions fade away Lower'd in the sleepy pits where lies The dropsied Epos of the day. Only that poetry which strives for artistic perfection will survive. T h e first aim of poetry, Tennyson implies, is to give the reader a kind of pleasure, and in so doing it conveys to the reader an extraordinary wisdom in the things of life by permitting him to envisage the great facts of human existence. What the poet communicates, therefore, is his own experience in the world, his thoughts and his sensations: As stretched beside the river clear That's round this glassy foreland curled, I cool my face in flowers, and hear The deep pulsations of the world. Yet at the same time he vows that "I will not cramp my heart, nor take / Half views of men a n d things" ("Will Waterproof"). In the unpublished "What T h o r Said to the Bard before Dinner"* he is determined to write unhesitatingly of the abuses of the age and thus gain recognition of his poetry, and in "The Poet's Song" he reverts to the conception of the poet expressed in " T h e Poet" of 1830. "The Poet's Song" presents exactly the opposite idea of "Amphion." The poet is decribed as one who, significantly wandering to a lonely place to sing his melody, enchants

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the birds and beasts. A s in "The Poet," he is a seer and is recognized as such by the things of nature. The nightingale knows that its song is less sweet than that of the poet, "For he sings of what the world will be I When the years have died away." But visionary though the poet is, it is only the birds and beasts that listen to him; there is no suggestion that he has a human audience. Recognizing (he opposing forces within his mind as to the function of poetry, Tennyson began to fear that he would never fully realize himself as poet. A s he says in "Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue," For I had hope, by something rare, To prove myself a poet, But, while I plan and plan, my hair Is gray before I know it. Even the idea that he would cease writing poetry altogether appears to have occurred to him: Half fearful that, with self at strife, I take myself to task, Lest of the fulness of my life 1 leave an empty flask. He was more aware of his double nature than he had ever before been, and he was genuinely disturbed by the conflict within himself. In the unpublished "Fragment"* he wrote: "I wander from my peace, I And still divide the rapid mind / This way and that in search of ease." Or as he wrote of Lady Godiva, "the passions of her mind / A s winds from all the compass shift and blow, / Made war upon each other." His confusion was as noticeable to his friends as to himself. Carlyle described him to Emerson as "a man solitary

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and sad . . ., dwelling in an element ot gloom, carrying a bit of Chaos about him, in short, which he is manufacturing into Cosmos" (Memoir, I, 187). The artistic result of his conflict was a group of poems such as "The Two Voices" and "Love and Duty," poems whose very titles indicate the clash between opposing ideas and emotions. "The Two Voices" carries further the dialectic debate of the earlier poems "Supposed Confessions" and "Sense and Conscience" and the two companion poems "Nothing Will Die" and "All Things Will Die." Originally called "The Thoughts of a Suicide," the poem, says Hallam Tennyson, "was begun under the cloud of this overwhelming sorrow [Hallam's death], which . . . for a while blotted out all joy from his life, and made him long for death" fMemoir, I, 109). "The Two Voices" is thus Tennyson's To be or not to be, a fight between self and soul and between the Everlasting No and the Everlasting Yea. At the beginning of the poem the voice of negation is allowed the argument which wins Ulysses' men in "The Lotus-Eaters." Man, argues the voice, is nothing, and because he is miserable it would be better to die, to find the rest from weariness that death brings. The speaker seeks to refute the arguments but he does so only half-heartedly, for he recognizes that his is a wrecked and utterly miserable existence. If there are to be advances in the march of mankind, he will watch them from "a ruin'd tower." Recognizing that the replies of the speaker are weak, that he is afraid of life and desirous only of an existence in isolation, the voice presses his advantage, charging, Sick art t h o u — a divided will Still heaping on the fear of ill T h e fear of men, a coward still.

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Unable to argue powerfully against such a strong voice, the speaker retreats, as Tennyson countless times in earlier poems, into memory, here once again the recurring poetic strategy of of age:

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seemingly had done employing the mask

When, wide in soul and bold of tongue, Among the tents I paused and sung, The distant battle flash'd and rung. I sung the joyful Paean clear, And, sitting, burnish'd without fear The brand, the buckler, and the spear . . . To search thro' all I felt or saw, The springs of life, the depths of awe, And reach the law within the law. One cannot be certain of what Tennyson alludes to here, for as we have seen, neither his life nor his poetry had been dedicated to such experiences here described. But we may guess that he is referring to his abortive expedition to the Pyrenees in 1830 and to the chimerical ideal expressed in the sonnet "Mine be the strength of spirit, full and free." The voice of negation points out that as a dream his desire to become involved "In some good cause, not in mine own" is good but that it nevertheless is a dream. T o follow knowledge, the voice insists, is to chase shadows; and if one goes on the quest, one cannot be sure of what he has found. As in "Ulysses," experience fades whenever one moves. No, extinction is the only goal worthy of attainment, since death alone brings man's "long disquiet merged in rest." Only after the speaker ceases to confine his argument to life upon earth does he begin to get the better of the voice of despair. Man, the speaker says, has intimations of immor-

118 Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 tality, inklings of an ideal which cannot be found on earth; the mind and heart refuse to accept earthly existence as the only life, they cannot believe in the absolute finality of death. In what is obviously a reference to Hallam, the speaker seems to hear a "Heavenly Friend"—the same locution used in Section C X X I X of "In Memoriam"—and "thro' thick veils to apprehend/ A labor working to an end." "Yet affirmation does not come before the phantasmagoria of the poet's mind can be by-passed. In his conflict the speaker sees that Heaven opens inward, chasms yawn, Vast images in glimmering dawn. Half shown, are broken and withdrawn. Having circumvented the ominous imagery, the poet is now ready to affirm his position, and his answer to the voice of negation is that man's very doubt about the future life is sufficient reason for him to hold onto his present existence. T o be sure, this is not a very affirmative answer, but it is partially the answer provided in "In Memoriam" and it is about as close as Tennyson ever got to religious certainty. And having given this reply, the speaker notes that "the voice with which I fenced / A little ceased." T h e debate, however, is not yet finished. T h e speaker suggests possibilities as to life beyond the grave, speculating that man could come f r o m either a higher existence or f r o m a lower form, one of the first hints in Tennyson of evolutionary doctrine. In discussing a possible previous existence, Tennyson falls back on the recurring metaphor of trance and d r e a m : As here we find in trances, men Forget the dream that happens then, Until they fall in trance again;

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and on the mystical experience expressed in the sonnet "To " ("As when with downcast eyes") of 1832: Moreover, something is or seems That touches me with mystic gleams, Like glimpses of forgotten dreams— Of something felt, like something here; Of something done, 1 know not where; Such as no language may declare. The argument ends with the speaker overcoming the nagging voice, declaring that "No life that breathes with human breath / Has ever truly long'd for death." This is, of course, a repudiation of a large segment of Tennyson's earlier poetic output and indeed of other poems in the second volume of the 1842 collection. His declaration that 'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant, O, life, not death, for which we pant; More life, and fuller, that I want, is the exact opposite of the choice which the men in "The Lotus-Eaters" elect. His affirmative statement, however, does not bring with it happiness of mind, for the voice though quieted still remains. It is as though the statement were somewhat tentative, as though he wants to believe in his answer but cannot quite accept his resolution. He ceases to speak and "sat as one forlorn." The experience has left him, like Coleridge's Wedding-Guest, "like one that hath been stunned, / And is of sense forlorn"; and as in the "Ode to a Nightingale," the very word "forlorn" is like a bell tolling him back from a world of phantasms in which the debate with the "still small voice" takes place, and he is now able to turn his thoughts

120 Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to ¡850 outward. He knows, like the Wedding-Guest, that he is a wiser man as the result of the experience, but for the moment he is not able to formulate the meaning of the encounter. Only when he sees a mother and father walking to church with their daughter does he fully accept the value of his declaration to the voice of despair. This feeling of sympathy with the happy family causes the frozen heart to beat, and where previously he had been unable to feel, he now blesses them. T h e blessing of the family results f r o m a forgetfulness of self in recognizing the beauty of something quite independent; the speaker is now conscious of something other than self and he now realizes that he is part of the universe, that he shares a bond in common with other men. And when he blesses them, the voice of despair disappears, just as the albatross falls from the neck of the Ancient Mariner when he blesses the water snakes. "The T w o Voices" bears many resemblances to "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," yet modern readers are loath to accept in Tennyson's poem what they acclaim in Coleridge's. There is a definite parallel in what the Mariner tells the Wedding-Guest at the close of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" to the speaker's observation of the churchgoing family. The Mariner says: O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been Alone on a wide wide sea: So lonely 'twas, that God himself Scarced seemed there to be. O sweeter than the marriage-feast, 'Tis sweeter far to me, To walk together to the kirk With a goodly company!

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To walk together to the kirk, And all together pray, While each to his great Father bends, Old men, and babes, and loving friends And youths and maidens gay! A f t e r blessing the couple with their child, the speaker in " T h e T w o V o i c e s " feels the s a m e bond of s y m p a t h y , a n d like t h e Ancient M a r i n e r h e once again senses himself in h a r m o n y with the universe: to him now " N a t u r e ' s living m o t i o n lent I T h e pulse of h o p e to discontent." T h e vignette of domesticity at the close of the p o e m is to m a n y m o d e r n readers sentimental a n d absurd, 5 b u t if one has followed the pattern of Tennyson's development it should c o m e as n o surprise. W e have already seen h o w the poet h a d moved tentatively f r o m poems of d o u b t , despair, a n d p r o f o u n d melancholy to verses such as " T h e Miller's D a u g h t e r , " which exalted familial happiness a n d tended to apotheosize domestic love. T h e ending of " T h e T w o Voices," therefore, with the speaker's feeling " T h a t every cloud, that spreads above I A n d veileth love, itáelf is love," carries a step f u r t h e r the idea of love as the transcending and affirming power which was expressed in the three sonnets of 1830 entitled " L o v e . " Here Tennyson relies o n Pascal's m a x i m that the heart has its reasons which reason cannot k n o w , or as he was to say in " I n M e m o r i a m , " h e has accepted ("altho' n o tongue can prove") believing w h e r e we cannot prove. " T h e T w o V o i c e s " is a comedy in the sense that D a n t e ' s p o e m is a c o m e d y : it m a r k s a progression f r o m despair to bliss; a n d as such it is a n excellent document (although, too long a n d too sentimental in the conclusion, not entirely a successful poem) f o r the study of T e n n y s o n ' s development.

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From the same feeling that he shared with Carlyle's Teufelsdroeckh—that the world is ruled only by matter and is devoid of spirit—he passed through the period of denial of life to the period of the Centre of Indifference, in which he refused to accept the voice of negation. As he wrote to Emily Sellwood, he was convinced that "We must bear or we must die. It is easier perhaps to die, but infinitely less noble. The immortality of man disdains and rejects the thought . . ." (Memoir, I, 169). Here he begins to perceive the Everlasting Yea: he apprehends not only that the world is alive but also that the pervading spirit of the universe, love, is good. The idea of immortality leads him on to say with Teufelsdroeckh, "The Universe is not dead and demonical, a charnel-house with spectres; but godlike and my Father's!'" As we have seen in the earlier poems, resolution has proceeded only from the process of dialectic, and this dialectic clash, whether conscious or unconscious, was to inform many of the other poems of 1842. "Love and Duty," which apparently relates to the breaking in 1840 of Tennyson's engagement to Emily Sellwood, presents the conflict between desire and denial; yet the poet fails to formulate it in this way. Though there are suggestions of the idyll, the poem is more an argument than anything else. It argues that duty requires a separation of the lovers but that this does not mean the death of love nor does it mean that their love was vain. Both have grown nobler through love, which brings "The drooping flower of knowledge changed to fruit I Of wisdom." There is a resolution, not a very convincing one, at the close of the poem, but the emphasis remains centered on the conflict itself: For Love himself took part against himself To warn us off, and Duty loved of Love—

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O, this world's curse—beloved but hated—came Like Death betwixt thy dear embrace and mine, And crying, 'Who is this? behold thy bride,' She push'd me from thee. The argument must not have been very comforting either to the poet or to Emily Sellwood, if indeed she is the one addressed, but there is a tone of resignation here that we have not previously met with in Tennyson when he was presented with frustration of desire. In the earlier poems a Keatsian lushness of diction had been symbolic of the frustration, and it is perhaps indicative of Tennyson's increasingly philosophical attitude toward life that he does not rely in "Love and Duty" on romantic decor to carry the burden of his frustration but relates his conflict in blank verse of Wordsworthian simplicity. To show how far he had gone in ridding himself of obsessive sensuality, Tennyson insists that the man who yields to duty does not, like his earlier heroes, "Sit brooding in the ruins of a life, I Nightmare of youth, the spectre of himself." Here the Victorian has triumphed over the Romantic. "Locksley Hall," on the other hand, presents us with another Byronic hero who suffers all the disaffection of earlier Tennysonian protagonists but who in the end yields his sense of alienation to a belief in progress. The poem is, thus, closely allied to "The Two Voices" since there are two conflicting forces—voices of despair and comfort—contending for his soul; and in form the poem is an interplay of opposites: love and hate, regression and aggression, isolation and social involvement, present misery and future progress. Yet "Locksley Hall" is less personal than "The Two Voices," for by means of the monologue employing a

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persona Tennyson is in part objectifying his own situation, seeing his problems through the eyes of someone else. Resorting to a poem relating an experience, he hoped to find vicarious meaning for himself. Furthermore, the mask served as a safety device: the hero could be repudiated if necessary. In fact, Tennyson felt it incumbent upon him to separate the speaker in "Locksley Hall" from himself, for he insisted that "the hero is imaginary," that the poem was merely a representation of "young life, its good side, its deficiencies, and its yearnings" (Memoir, I, 195). By this remark one is reminded of Browning's disclaimer attached to his 1842 Dramatic Lyrics that his monologues were "so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine." In spite of Tennyson's statement, however, we can see fairly clearly through the disguise that the speaker does represent many of the attitudes examined in other Tennyson poems. The monologue opens with the speaker, like other disaffected Tennysonian heroes an orphan, viewing the Hall, and almost immediately he assumes the mask of age, reverting to a happier past when the world offered promises of fruitfulness. In the present, however, "all things here are out of joint," "the individual withers, and the world is more and more"; and Amy's loveless marriage is but symptomatic of the decadent moral state of a commercial society. Better were it to die, to be "Roll'd in one another's arms, and silent in a last embrace," and so to escape by death "the social lies that warp us from the living truth!" But the death wish is fleeting, and the speaker resort« to memory as an escape, which also proves unsatisfying. In a regressive moment he begs, "Hide me from my deep emotion, O thou wondrous Mother Age," at the same time realizing that "I myself must mix with action, lest I wither by despair." In spite of the visions of humanitarian progress, he is not able to shake

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loose from his despair, and he considers escaping to the Orient and becoming the Byronic wanderer. He imagines an island paradise like that in "The Lotus-Eaters" where Droops the heavy-blossom'd bower, hangs the heavy-fruited tree— Summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea, the Keatsian diction (although appropriate to the subject described) once again indicating frustration. At the close of the poem the speaker finds resolution when he, "the heir of all the ages," realizes that the past has made the present and that the past and present together will join to make "the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change." He has been able to find again the inspiration he enjoyed as a child. He can bid farewell to Locksley Hall, for he has ridded himself of his obsessive concern with the Hall as a symbol of despair. Like "The Two Voices," "Locksley Hall" is a poem of tension between the Everlasting No and the Everlasting Yea. Professor William D. Templeman has pointed out the resemblances between the poem and Book II of Sartor Resartus,' but whether Tennyson's is actually a retelling of Carlyle's story of Teufelsdroeckh or not, the fact remains that the speaker undergoes the same pattern of development as that which led Teufelsdroeckh to argue the Everlasting No into the Everlasting Yea. For the speaker, and presumably for Tennyson, positive romanticism has supplanted negative romanticism. A conventional reading of "Ulysses" would permit me to state that this dramatic monologue carries further the resolution and determination that come at the end of "Locksley Hall." But, as Mr. Langbaum says," surely such an interpreta-

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tion is the result of reading only with the mind and not with the heart. Undoubtedly Tennyson himself contributed to the interpretation of "Ulysses" as a "striving" poem with his gloss, which states that "Ulysses" "was written soon after Arthur Hallam's death, and gave my feeling about the need of going forward, and braving the struggle of life perhaps more simply than anything in 'In Memoriam.' " What I find most gloss, which states that "Ulysses" "was written soon after Hallam's death, at a time when, says the poet, "I was so utterly miserable, a burden to myself and to my family, that I said, 'Is life worth anything?' " (Memoir, I, 197, 193). And certainly this questioning might be expected to inform the poem. "Ulysses" is indicative of the growth of Tennyson as an artist, for here we find not only the objectification provided by the mask of age but also that offered by the dramatic monologue; and, furthermore, we see Tennyson taking a character from the past, thus separating himself not only by distance but also by time from the persona about whom he is to write. But when we have said this, we must still apprehend that Ulysses is not the hero of a classical past, but, instead, the perplexed, restless wanderer of Victorian England; we must still see that Ulysses is but the mask of the poet himself. As Stopford Brooke says: Keats went away to Athens or Florence, and living in an alien age forgot his own time. Tennyson said to Ulysses or Arthur, "Come down from the ancient days, and live with me, here in England." And they came; and did their best to wear the modern dress." The retreat to the past, in other words, has become for Tennyson not only a means of escape but also a means by

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which to find value for himself in his own time. The monologue might be dramatic, but still it is not drama; rather, it is the poet himself projected momentarily into another facet of his own personality. To quote Brooke again, "his own personality was too much with him; he could not get rid of it.'"0 In the first part of the poem, in which Ulysses is apparently speaking to himself, we find the speaker, now an old man with his glories behind him, justifying his proposed abandonment of his wife, son, and countrymen. He is restless; he still has an appetite for life; he does not wish to remain "an idle king" by a "still hearth" and "barren crags" with "an aged wife," meting and doling "Unequal laws unto a savage race," who "know not me" and from whom he is estranged. No, he will not rest from travel but will drink life to the lees. Yet no sooner does he express this desire for action—which recalls the line in "Locksley Hall" where the speaker vows, "I myself must mix with action, lest I wither by despair"— than he realizes that he is actually an old man whose desire perhaps exceeds potency. He wants to experience everything, seemingly for the irresponsible joy of the experience itself; yet "all experience is an arch wherethro' / Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades / For ever and for ever when I move"; and he knows, though he will not admit it, that drinking life to the lees is not possible. He is an old man who, in spite of all his cravings, cannot help rusting unburnished and not shining in use; his is the yearning of "this gray spirit" who desires To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. With the simile "like a sinking star" he suggests his own

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condition and what it is that he is looking for: his is the yearning to know all, to go beyond the limits of mortality; his is the desire for death. The second part (lines 33-43) is apparently addressed to an audience, but we cannot be sure who the audience is. We can almost see the gesture by which he points to his son Telemachus, and we cannot fail to catch the note of condescension. Telemachus is the opposite of his father; like the Pallas of "Oenone," he works by reason and law, admonishing his rugged people to live by self-reverence, selfknowledge, self-control. And Telemachus is no more attractive here than Pallas was in "Oenone": Ulysses refers to him as "blameless" and "decent," as one who will not fail "In offices of tenderness" and will pay "Meet adoration to my household gods / When I am gone"; he will lead a proper life, doing all that is expected of him, but, Ulysses implies, he will and can do no more; he is almost completely colorless, possessed of none of the heroic emotions of his father. "He works his work, I mine," says Ulysses, but his way is certainly not that of the father. The last part of the poem is addressed to the mariners, and here Ulysses speaks somewhat like the Byronic wanderers of Tennyson's earlier poems. "There gloom ihe dark, broad seas," he tells his old followers; the journey is to be feared, for it is a voyage into the unknown. This is the symbolic sea-voyage in quest of a new experience, the voyage to death, which is the only experience possible for old men. Resorting to the Tennysonian device of memory, Ulysses recalls the days that were happier than the present, but he realizes that these can be recaptured only in memory, for "you and I are old." For us, he says, night comes on and the darkness beckons:

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The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Better to seek the newer world of death than to remain stagnant here in a kind of death-in-life. My purpose, he says now unequivocally, is To sail beyond the sunset, and the paths Of all the western stars, until I die. There can now be no doubt that it is death which he seeks. We find here not only the metaphor of sunset, used, for instance, in "Crossing the Bar," as the close of life but also the symbol of the western stars. Mr. Robert G. Stange tells us that for Tennyson the West is "a place of twilight, of rest, of warmth and secrecy" and, furthermore, that "Tennyson connects the West with images of the sea, of growth, and, paradoxically, of death."" This is to be a voyage, says Ulysses, to both the old and new: perhaps they shall see the Happy Isles and also find again the great Achilles, with whom they can be reunited in death. Since, as Tennyson tells us, "Ulysses" was written soon after the death of Hallam, we need have little hesitation, I think, about equating Achilles and the poet's dead friend. In seeking for death Ulysses-Tennyson was hoping to find reunion with his beloved Hallam, whose death had caused him to question the value of living. There is not, it must be noted, the certainty on the part of the speaker that AchillesHallam will be found: the assertion is qualified, as is the case with so many statements in early Tennyson poems, with "may be." As yet the possibility of life beyond the grave was only a hope; it would require years of thinking—and of writing "In Memoriam"—for the poet to achieve the quasicertainty of immortality. But even though he is unsure of

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what he will find on this journey, the speaker vows to undertake the voyage, albeit with a sense of diminished strength, as the last thing possible. He chooses, then, the voyage, without physical strength but with the strength of will "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." If this reading of the poem makes of "Ulysses" the expression of a death-wish, it at least carries the poet further than the early sections of "The Two Voices." Here we have not simply a denial of life, as in the other poem, but an active seeking for a new experience, one which is to be greeted as offering a modicum of hope. Ulysses, at the close of the monologue, chooses the life of striving, of pushing onward to some goal. The voice of negation in "The Two Voices," however, urges simply a denial of life and action: 'Twere better not to breathe or speak. Than cry for strength, remaining weak, And seem to find, but still to seek. Moreover, this reading of "Ulysses" indicates that the poem is one of tension between negation and affirmation: Ulysses wants the more life and fuller of "The Two Voices" but realizes that he is unable to have it, and so chooses the voyage to a new world, the realm beyond life. Significantly, Tennyson here does not offer the island-paradise of sensuous bliss, which he had described in "The Lotus-Eaters," but instead presents the Happy Isles, which he does not describe as a valley of Keatsian luxuries. By the time of writing of "Ulysses," Tennyson had already gone a long way toward ridding himself of his preoccupation with escape into a land of sensation. "Tithonus" is much less ambiguous than "Ulysses" in its statement of the death-wish. Again turning to the mask of

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age, Tennyson speaks here through the persona of a man withered and isolated by the curse of physical immortality. All things of nature have rest, Tithonus argues like the mariners in "The Lotus-Eaters," but he is set apart and cannot participate in the cycle of life. Like the "gray spirit" which Ulysses has become, this man once "glorious in his beauty" is now a "gray shadow," no longer a man. He asked for immortality, and now he must suffer because of the remarkable gift that was given him. Too late has he realized that his very extraordinary qualities have set him apart from the rest of mankind and made him suffer the isolation of the extraordinary individual. Why, he asks. Why should a man desire in any way To vary from the kindly race of men, Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance Where all should pause, as is most meet for all? There are things, indeed there are experiences, that man should not undertake, but should be governed by the ordinances that rule all men. Thus far "Tithonus" seems to be a repudiation of the old Byronic hero of "Remorse" who had made himself felt in so many of Tennyson's poems. But as we read on in the poem we see that Tithonus has not fully given over the fascination of his former life: he feels once more, though fleetingly, "the old mysterious glimmer iwhichl steals / From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure, I And bosom beating with a heart renew'd." The old phantasms, here embodied as "the wild team / Which love thee," are still present, and they yearn in sexual desire. Tithonus still feels something of his former desire, and he is made all the more desolate when he reflects on his present impotence. In memory he recalls his former vitality:

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Ay me! ay me! with what another heart In days far-off, and with what other eyes I used to watch—if I be he that watch'd— The lucid outline forming round thee; saw The dim curls kindle into sunny rings; Changed with thy mystic change, and felt my blood Glow with the glow that slowly crimson'd all Thy presence and thy portals, while I lay, Mouth, forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm With kisses balmier than half-opening buds Of April, and could hear the lips that kiss'd Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet, Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing, While Ilion like a mist rose into towers. Now old and withered, he begs for release, he pleads to be restored to the ground. He wants only to be like "happy men that have the power to die." The death- wish of "Tithonus," however, is not the simple longing for rest and oblivion that informs the song of the mariners in "The Lotus-Eaters" and the melancholy lyrics of 1830 and 1832 any more than "Ulysses" is merely about a man who is tired of life. Tithonus desires not so much escape as release; death, the rule of life, is for him a possibility of a rebirth, the means by which he, as a human being, can find identification once more with his fellow men. In this respect "Tithonus" is not too different from "The Two Voices," for in both the promise of resolution to present misery lies in the possibility of sympathy and identification with other men. As a projection of the poet, Tithonus seems to speak, on another level, in terms of poetry. Eos, E. D. H. Johnson has suggested,'" seems to stand for the Keatsian ideal of beauty, which the poet cannot escape. He remembers his first creative

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impulse in the lines beginning "Ay me! ay me!" but he now longs for another orientation, for a poetry directed toward the "kindly race of men." Although "Tithonus" was not published until 1860, it was, says Tennyson, written as "pendent" to "Ulysses" and its first draft dates from around the time of its companion poem, which means that it also was begun soon after the death of Hallam (Memoir, I, 459; II, 9). His friend's death had, as I have previously noted, a profound effect not only on Tennyson's personality but also on his poetry: it served as a complete bouleversement, and its immediate effect was, strangely enough, an enrichment of his poetry. Tennyson did not allow himself to be so completely overwhelmed by the emotional shock as to sit down and cry out in his verse for death; on the contrary, the effect of Hallam's death on Tennyson's poetry was a greater objectification of the poet's inner emotions, and in "Tithonus" he traced his own condition and his own aspirations (already, if half-heartedly, expressed in "The Palace of Art") toward a new poetic orientation. Nevertheless, the fact of Hallam's demise is still present in his verse, and it manifests itself in a veiled deathwish on the part of the poet and in a desire for another kind of life—which is to say that the poetry directly resulting from the loss of Hallam possesses even more fully than the earlier verse the tension between emotional and intellectual meaning. The salutary effect of myth for Tennyson is most prominent in the 1842 poems. It allowed his introspective mind a matrix on which to attach his inmost thoughts, and it gave him an objective basis for personal expression. His phantasmhaunted mind had sought in so early a poem as "Recollections of the Arabian Nights" a mythology which would be meaningful as a medium of communication; but as we saw,

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the mythology belonged so much to the poet's own reading and his own private experience that it failed to carry the burden of the poet's thought. In resorting to classical myth, as in "Ulysses" and "Tithonus," he chose a body of material already part of Western consciousness, and the figures whom he treated already had allegorical significance for his readers. In a like manner Tennyson was served by his use of the Arthurian legend. In the 1832 Poems we saw Tennyson's first handling of an Arthurian theme in "The Lady of Shalott." There his interest was in the legend as romance, although he sought to fit out the romance with allegorical meaning; and because "The Lady of Shalott" is so obviously a romance, the ordinary reader could easily overlook the deeper meaning of the poem. Such is also the case of the "fragment" "Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere," which seems to be of an even earlier date of composition than "The Lady of Shalott"; even so perceptive a critic as Professor Baum calls it "a merely descriptive-decorative piece . . ., with nothing of the story except the closing lines.'"1 The poem is, I believe, far more than a decorative piece: by means of the imagery, which is as much functional as decorative, it tells in miniature the entire story of the two lovers. The poem opens with a group of antitheses that foreshadow the later situation of Launcelot and Guinevere, when they shall experience more sorrow than happiness: joy and pain, tears and smiles, heaven and plain, sun and rain, spring and fall. Quite rightly the season is spring, for their love, like the year, is just beginning. It is the season of burgeoning fertility, and the imagery suggests fruitfulness. In the second stanza the linnet pipes his song and the throstle whistles: all seems to be in tune with the season.

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Yet amid these pleasant images appears the sparrowhawk, which causes all singing to cease. The verb "hush'd" is highly significant here, for it suggests two things: it hints that the lyric happiness of the lovers will cease, and it alludes to those members of Arthur's court who later will talk in whispers about the lovers' illicit relationship. So that the reader will not overlook the fertility symbols of the first stanza, the poet introduces these images again, images of even greater fecundity: the prolific chestnut-buds above the "teeming ground," the river which now grows larger as it passes "grassy capes." As is usual with Tennyson in his early poetry, the scene is set before the central figures are introduced into the poem. Emphasizing the youth of the year, and thereby alluding to the youthfulness of Launcelot, the poet tells us that the pair ride through "coverts of the deer, / With blissful treble ringing clear." The sexual symbolism of these two lines must not be overlooked: "coverts" is, of course, a female symbol, and "treble" ambiguously suggests "three," the masculine number" There is also another play on the word "treble" in that it suggests the impossible triple relationship among Launcelot, Guinevere, and Arthur. At this time, however, the Queen is still pure, and Tennyson informs us of this fact by means of imagery. Her "grass-green" silk gown, the emblem of her sex, is buckled chastely before with clasps; she bears a "tuft of plumes," again a sex symbol, "closed" in a ring." In short, her purity is above suspicion. The imagery of the fourth stanza reflects Guinevere's growing passion. As if the sexual implications of "ivy-net" and "mosses" were not sufficient, the poet modifies these suggestive words with the obviously sexual verbals "twisted" and "mixt." Secondly, the chaste "cream-white" is set against "violet," the color of passion. The verbs become stronger,

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more active as her passion increases—"skimm'd," "springs," "rings"—and the adjectives follow the same course. The comparison introduces night, the time for illicit passion; and the last line, with its play on "bridle," implies the loosening of the marital reins which restrain the Queen from giving expression to her desire. In the last stanza the imagery indicates Guinevere's submission. Riding quickly, she feels the "happy winds"—the seductive setting, the nearness of Launcelot—play upon her; they blow the ringlet, the emblem of her chastity, from her hair. The rein, already slackened, now sways; and overcome by her passion, she loses all sexual restraint. The last lines of the poem hint at the outcome of their affair. Launcelot does give up his worldly worth for her; by his sin he foregoes the bliss of a true vision of the Holy Grail; his heart is wasted upon her lips because he can never know the complete union of marriage: A man had given all other bliss, And all his worldly worth for this, To waste his whole heart in one kiss Upon her perfect lips. But Launcelot and Guinevere do not suffer alone: their adulterous love brings about the downfall of Arthur's whole court, and this is alluded to in the words "whole" and "one." For one misdeed the whole kingdom is wasted. Thus in the "fragment" we find the whole story of their fateful love affair. The companion poems "St. Agnes' Eve" (originally "St. Agnes") and "Sir Galahad" show Tennyson using the Arthurian story for more obvious allegorical purposes. Tennyson wrote to his friend Spedding that Galahad "was intended for something of a male counterpart to St. Agnes"

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(Memoir, I, 142), and indeed there are parallels in diction, imagery, and solution. Both poems speak of chastity in terms of light and whiteness; of trial in terms of cold, storm, and darkness; and of attainment of the goal in terms of warmth and brilliant light. The main difference is that Agnes is passive whereas Galahad is active in pursuit of the goal. For our purposes the most interesting point about the two poems is that both are concerned with a quest, which is to find consummation in a dreamlike vision. On his quest Galahad experiences the phantasmagoria that has presented itself to numerous other Tennysonian seekers: "I hear a voice, but none are there," says the knight, and he also sees "blessed forms." As we know from earlier poems, these ominous images must be by-passed before the object of the quest may be attained. Another recurring Tennysonian symbol appears in this poem: the vision is attained by means of a sea voyage on "a magic bark." Galahad recognizes, however, that what he has seen is only a vision, and passionately desires the attainment of that which he has seen only in dreams; he wishes to find the "Pure lilies of eternal peace, / Whose odours haunt my dreams." Not properly part of the Arthurian legend but medieval in setting, "The Day-Dream," which incorporates "The Sleeping Beauty" of the 1830 volume, is also concerned with a quest, and the pattern of the quest is almost identical with that in "Sir Galahad." In the section entitled "The Arrival" the Prince "comes, scarce knowing what he seeks," but before he can reach his goal he must pass through the field of the bones of those who before him have failed on the same quest. As in "A Dream of Fair Women," death must be bypassed before fulfilment of the quest is possible. Tennyson had long pondered the writing of an epic based on the Arthurian legend. There survives in his son's Memoir

138 Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 a plan for an allegorical poem in which Arthur was to stand for Religious Faith, Modred for Sceptical Understanding, and Merlin for Science. But as yet he presumably was not sure enough of his own poetic powers to undertake a long poem, and thus he settled on one episode, Arthur's death, for the subject of a shorter work. The "Morte d'Arthur" is prefaced and followed in the 1842 volume by a shorter poem entided "The Epic," which serves as a frame for Tennyson's telling of the death of Arthur. •In "The Epic" the poet, Everard Hall, has thrown away his Arthurian epic of twelve books, but his friend Francis Allen has retrieved one book from the fire. In this way Tennyson lets his readers know that the following poem is but part of a longer work, a segment of an epic which apparently has no value for modern life. In the meaningless celebration of Christmas we see the general decay of faith, which Parson Holmes attributes to "Geology and schism." Devoid of faith, Francis believes only in the poet, and the poet believes only in the wassail-bowl. Thus we are impressed with the modern world's loss of faith in Christianity and in poetry. The poet explains that he has destroyed his epic because the genre is not suitable for modern times: Why take the style of those heroic times? For nature brings not back the mastodon, Nor we those times; and why should any man Remodel models?

He implies that the time for heroic action is long past and that, as in "Amphion," such also is the case with heroic poetry. The "Morte d'Arthur" is thus presented as the eleventh book of an epic. Here again we find the mask of age: Arthur is a man who is going to die, a king like Ulysses who greets

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death as a new experience. In some introductory lines, which survive only in manuscript, Arthur, sounding almost like Ulysses when he repeats the words of Merlin, says: Experience never closes all in all But there is always something to be learnt Even in the gate of death."

Bedivere is commanded to fling Excalibur into the mere, but like modern man, deluded by materialism, Bedivere rationalizes his act in refusing to cast the beautiful sword away. He is without faith and denies his vows of obedience to his king, proving unworthy just when he is needed most. After his second failure to perform the deed which his king commands, Arthur charges him: I see thee what thou art, For thou, the latest-left of all my knights, In whom should meet the offices of all, Thou wouldst betray me for the precious hilt; Either from lust of gold, or like a girl Valuing the giddy pleasure of the eyes. Yet, for a man may fail in duty twice, And the third time may prosper, get thee hence.

The third time Bedivere does as he is bidden, but still he performs without faith. When Excalibur is returned to its rightful place, a funeral barge comes to fetch Arthur, and here appears the ominous imagery once again. On the decks of the barge are stately forms Black-stoled, black-hooded, like a dream—by these Three queens with crowns of gold—and from them rose A cry that shiver'd to the tingling stars, And, as it were one voice, an agony

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Of lamentation, like a wind that shrills All night in a waste land, where no one comes, Or hath come, since the making of the world. By means of the symbolic voyage Arthur is to sail to Avilon, the island-paradise that is not too different from lotus-land. Here falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, Nor ever wind blows loudly, but it lies Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard-lawns And bowery hollows crown'd with summer sea. . . . Avilon is the haven of refuge and regeneration: it is here, says Arthur, "Where I will heal me of my grievous wound." In this time of crisis Bedivere thinks only of himself, seeing that he will be left alone in a hostile world where he can no longer be at ease in the old dispensation. "For now I see the true old times are dead," he says, And I, the last, go forth companionless, And the days darken round me, and the years, Among new men, strange faces, other minds. The King bids him to turn his attention to faith, which accepts change, for "God fulfils himself in many ways, / Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." The times may be difficult, but difficulties can be overcome if one turns to God through prayer. At the end of the "Morte d'Arthur" we are returned to the frame enclosing the poem. In a dream the speaker fancies himself sailing with Arthur, who comes "like a modern gentleman." The watchers on the hills cry out in greeting to the returned King and declare that "war shall be no more." At this moment the speaker is awakened by the Christmas

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bells. His faith in human greatness, caused by the response of the listeners to Arthur as hero, is recovered, as is his faith in the Christian tradition when he hears the church-bells on Christmas morn; and by implication he can now insist upon the validity of the epic for modern times." As in the great New Year's hymn in "In Memoriam" (CVI), the bells symbolically ring out "The faithless coldness of the times," and for the poet they "ring out my mournful rhymes" and "ring the fuller minstrel in." Here Tennyson proclaims his willingness to don the bardic mantle, and he accepts fully the concept of poetry as mission which had been tentatively hinted at in "The Palace of Art." Two other poems—"Godiva" and "The Day-Dream"— in the 1842 volumes are prefaced by lines that serve to introduce a medieval story, a device to be used more prominently in "The Princess." Both are, as Tennyson says in "The DayDream," "The reflex of a legend past," just as the "Morte d'Arthur" is a response to an ancient legend. In writing such poems Tennyson was able not only to indulge his passion for the past—"To me," he wrote to Emily Sellwood in 1839, "often the far-off world seems nearer than the present, for in the present is always something unreal and indistinct . . ." (Memoir, I, 171-172)—but also to attempt to make the past meaningful for his own time. The frame allowed him to suggest the vitality of the past for the present. One other poem of 1842 is based on a medieval subject— the dramatic monologue "St. Simeon Stylites." Like the other monologues "Ulysses" and "Tithonus," it has as its theme the wish to die, but here again the death-wish is not a longing for rest but a desire for spiritual enrichment and fulfilment. Simeon is an isolated contemplative living atop a column and scorning the flesh-ridden multitude; essentially,

142 Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 Simeon is the familiar Tennysonian exile. Let us look, for example, at these lines from "Remorse" of 1827: Oh. God! . . . How shall I cast my shroud away, And come into the blaze of day? How shall I brook to hear each crime. Here veil'd by secrecy and time, Read out from thine eternal book? How shall I stand before thy throne, While earth shall like a furnace burn? How shall I bear the with'ring look Of men and angels, who will turn Their dreadful gaze on me alone? This hysterical utterance is very similar to Simeon's, and the consciousness of sin in both speakers owes perhaps not a little to the Calvinism of Tennyson's Aunt Mary Bourne. Simeon prays for the death that will bring him to heaven and canonization. Like Eliot's Becket, Simeon fervently desires martyrdom so that he will be made a saint. We are made to realize, however, that Simeon's suffering is for him a source of sensual pleasure: his awareness of being "From scalp to sole one slough and crust of sin" is a kind of masochistic gratification. Tennyson is obviously seeking to make this very un-Protestant asceticism loathsome, and Spedding was evidently speaking for the poet when he wrote in the Edinburgh Review for April, 1843: "As 'The Palace of Art" represents the pride of voluptuous enjoyment in its noblest form, the 'St. Simeon Stylites' represents the pride of asceticism in its basest." Simeon, nevertheless, is not wholly unsympathetic: we sympathize with him to some degree because we have seen his soul. Like Stephen, whom the voice of affirmation praises

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in "The Two Voices," he, " T h o ' cursed and scorn'd, and bruised," continued "looking upward." And, again like Stephen, he does receive "the warning of the Holy Ghost"; he has his vision, which we are not led to believe is a delusion. But the vision does not come, as it does not in other Tennyson poems, before the appearance of an ominous imagery: Simeon sees "a shape, a shade," and only then does he have his beatific vision. The poem thus seems to work against itself: we are shown what we take to be the baseness of the speaker, but then in the end we are also shown that his denial of the flesh is apparently acceptable unto God. Possibly Simeon's is Tennyson's own conviction that evil lies in matter and that good lies in the subjugation of this matter, an idea suggested in "Love and Duty" and in "Sir Galahad," wherein the hero attains his vision only by his total indifference to sensual appetite. The poem, however, does not wholly deny itself: its meaning is the result of the sympathy engendered by the device of the dramatic monologue, which causes a tension between intellectual and emotional meaning. T o be sure, we can condemn Simeon, but as in Browning's "My Last Duchess," condemnation is not the most interesting response. "The Vision of Sin" also deals with gratification of the senses, but in this poem there is outright condemnation of sensual indulgence that has no end but itself. "The Vision of Sin" is an exercise in the macabre, a type with which Tennyson had experimented in "The Coach of Death." It is an allegorical vision in which the poet follows a youth from his early indulgences in the pleasures of the flesh to cynical old age, when he has completely abandoned himself to gross sensualism. In the beginning we see that the flesh has already become predominant over spirit: the youth "rode a horse

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with wings, that would have flown, / But that his heavy rider kept him down." At first the pleasures of sensual gratification seem attractive, the partakers somewhat like the mariners that eat the lotus: A sleepy light upon their brows and lips— As when the sun, a crescent of eclipse, Dreams over lake and lawn, and isles and capes— Suffused them, sitting, lying, languid shapes, By heaps of gourds, and skins of wine, and piles of grapes. With Section II Tennyson leaves the orderly couplets for trochaics describing the wild music and mad dance. One sin of the flesh has led on to greater sins, and the dancers move more and more furiously: Till, kill'd with some luxurious agony, The nerve-dissolving melody Flutter'd headlong from the sky. The third section returns to the dignified movement of fivestress iambic lines. God shows Himself as "an awful rose of dawn," but is unheeded; and satiety in the form of "A vapour heavy, hueless, formless, cold" overcomes the youthful sinner, who changes into "A gray and gap-tooth'd man as lean as death." In Section IV the man argues, in trochaic quatrains, with cynical bravado like the voice of negation in "The Two Voices"; sensuality and its attendant jadedness have led to sour cynicism. The mask of age and the Byronic pose of other Tennyson heroes are very much evident: the old man, realizing that "We are men of ruin'd blood," remembers "That my youth was half-divine" and is now aware that only death is left:

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Let us have a quiet hour, Let us hob-and-nob with Death. Life, he contends, is a meaningless cycle, in which action, fame, friendship, religion, and politics have no import. There is no permanency in life, he maintains, introducing a favorite Tennysonian theme; change is the law of life and it obviates the value of living. No, in this world "Death is king," and all who understand life must seek to "Hob-and-nob with brother Death." The sinner in "The Vision of Sin" is a far different man from the speaker in "Remorse," who suffers only the agony of his sinful conscience: If I am damn'd, why find I not Some comfort in this earthly spot? . . . And yet I cannot here below Take my full cup of guilt, as some, And laugh away my doom to come. The "gap-tooth'd man" may not find comfort, but at least he can rationalize his plight and in the cup can find something to assuage his present condition. In this respect "The Vision of Sin" shows the poet's maturity in that he is now able to present a speaker into whom he does not necessarily project his own introspective personality. Section V returns to the orderly couplet and gives the poet's apocalytic vision. The sinner has lived without selfreverence and self-knowledge, because, in the words of "In Memoriam," he has not had the "faith which comes of selfcontrol." Instead of advancing up the scale of evolution to "higher forms," the sense-absorbed spirits degenerate into "lower forms." They have sinned not merely by their gross indulgence of the senses but because the satiety that

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indulgence brings has led to scorn of man and God. As in "The Palace of Art," "The crime of sense became / The crime of malice." The sinner, however, need not be entirely without hope, for in answer to the cry "Is there any hope?" an answer comes in an unknown tongue, God once again appearing, in a Turneresque landscape, as "an awful rose of dawn." The close of "The Vision of Sin" is reminiscent of the ending of "The Two Voices." The sudden symbolic close is, I think, indicative of Tennyson's desire to incorporate moral meaning into his poetry without the necessity for direct statement; in other words, to make everything speak for itself. Even though it is a vision poem, there is in "The Vision of Sin" no single speaker; rather, the situations and the landscapes are made to utter themselves. And so instead of mere metaphor of animism, as in the earlier poems such as "Mariana," we find here Tennyson's attempt to set forth a metaphysical presentation in which experience and meaning are united in existence but not in conceptual thought. The product is not, I admit, very sophisticated, but it shows Tennyson's increasing awareness of the possibilities of the symbol. The device of the symbolic close, he must have thought, served him well, for he was to employ it in critical passages of "In Memoriam."

II Of the new poems in the 1842 volume almost one third are idylls, and others, "Locksley Hall" for instance, contain idyllic touches. That Tennyson devoted so great an amount of time to this kind of poem is unquestionably indicative of his growing desire to reach a larger reading public. Also,

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the reviewers had lavishly praised the idylls of 1832. The Atlas (December 16, 1832) called "The Miller's Daughter" "pure verse that will outlive the memory of his affectations" and the True Sun (January 19, 1833) described it as "exquisite throughout—full of the calm beauty of contented happiness, reflecting back a youthful passion—of heart-affection— of simplicity and homely truth." Finally, the New Monthly (January, 1833) stated that to be popular Tennyson had only to lean "more to the vein manifest" in "The May Queen" and "New Year's Eve." In expending so much of his poetic energy on these poems of common life, Tennyson was undoubtedly following in part the admonitions of the reviewers. Hallam Tennyson called these poems "English Idyls and Eclogues, pictures of English and country life," adding that "Upon the sacredness of home life he [Tennyson] would maintain that the stability and greatness of a nation largely depend" (Memoir, I, 189). Nearly all the idylls have love true and false as their subject and women as their protagonists. The women in the idylls are for the most part stock characters and provide little evidence of Tennyson's former preoccupation with the suffering maiden and the femme fatale. "Lady Clara Vere de Vere" is one of the few poems that even offer a hint of the women such as Cleopatra and Helen in "A Dream of Fair Women," but here there is a change on the part of the speaker in his response to her. Haughty and proud and possessed of the enigmatic smile, Lady Clara is the cruel mistress, the "great enchantress" the speaker calls her, who seeks "to break a country heart / For pastime." But this time the Fatal Woman does not predominate, for the " I " of the poem reacts with disdain to her enticements. To him no longer is the lady a fascinating symbol; but rather

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he recognizes an unwholesomeness about her, charging that she is "sickening of a vague disease" and admonishing her to cease her idle snares and devote herself to social-welfare work. "Lady Clara Vere de Vere," then, marks a turning point in the development of the poet's psychology: the bewitching female is no longer the enchanting Belle Dame Sans Merci who captures all men in her thrall; now she has become the dread Scylla who lures the unwary to death, and she is recognized as such by the speaker. There is no essential physical or psychological difference between Lady Clara and the earlier Tennyson femmes fatales: she is, like them, proud, enigmatic, and cruel; but unlike them, she is not irresistible. The difference lies in the speaker's reaction to her. The process of projecting the relationship dramatically in "Lady Clara Vere de Vere" instead of writing introspective lyrics, like those in the 1830 and 1832 volumes, is indicative of the poet's further emancipation from romantic sensualism. Tennyson recognized the necessity for objectifying his problem, and this he undoubtedly felt that he could best do by conveying his ideas dramatically through the village youth. Significantly, Tennyson placed "Lady Clara" among the poems published in 1832, that is, in the first volume of the 1842 Pdems; for he recognized that Lady Clara belonged among her sister femmes jatales. There are hints of the Fatal Women in "Tithonus" and "Locksley Hall." Eos holds Tithonus in her arms and will not let him go, but the speaker realizes that even "The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts" and that Eos may be an unwilling captivator. In "Locksley Hall" the speaker is obsessed by Amy, and he calls her "shallow-hearted"; but he is aware that her cruel desertion of him was the result more of her parents' demands than of her own volition. In

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the end, however, he is able to free himself of his obsession with her and to turn his thoughts elsewhere. Again we find Tennyson in these two poems projecting the relationship between lover and cruel mistress dramatically. The jemme fatale is chastened further in the Conclusion to "The May Queen" added in 1842. Where there had been suggestions of the Fatal Woman in the maiden who was to be Queen of the May, in the Conclusion she becomes a good bit like the suffering maiden of "Mariana" who longs for death: "and sweeter far is death than life to me that long to go." The same change occurs in her as in the male speakers of "The Two Voices" and "Locksley Hall": from preoccupation with self she moves to sympathy with nature and mankind. She blesses the violets and the lambs, and, more importantly, she feels compassion for, rather than indifference to Robin, her love-sick swain. She tells her mother: And say to Robin a kind word, and tell him not to fret; There's many worthier than I, would make him happy yet. If I had lived—I cannot tell—I might have been his wife. Not only Tennyson's males but also his females have progressed from the Centre of Indifference to the Everlasting Yea. The maidens of 1842 seem to have far more in common with the Marianas of the earlier poems than with the Cleopatras. In "Edward Gray" the speaker relates that he loved Ellen Adair, who against her parents' will returned his love. She was, however, shy and he took her shyness for coldness and hauteur. To escape her, he fled over the sea and tried to forget her, charging, "You're too slight and fickle," I said, "To trouble the heart of Edward Gray."

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But Ellen was not the coquette that he took her for; and so pining for him she dies, apparently of a broken heart. Here we see how Tennyson has taken elements from his earlier two types of females and merged them: the speaker suspects her of being a jemme jatale but she turns out to be the suffering maiden who is deserted by her lover. Furthermore, "Edward Gray" provides us with almost the perfect idyllic situation: a blending of lyrical and narrative elements in a poem about love, with an English setting and with a touch of pathos added to satisfy the requirements of sentimentality. "Dora" gives us another maiden who in spite of adversity proved true, and it enlarges the idyllic picture by presenting the cousin-lover, a favorite figure in Tennyson and, indeed, in a large body of Victorian literature. Dora, who lives with her uncle, loves her cousin William, and the uncle orders his son to marry her. William, however, refuses to submit to the tyrannical father, another common Tennysonian idyllic figure, and goes off to marry another girl, by whom he has a child. William falls on hard times and soon dies, leaving his family destitute. During all this time Dora remains true, and in spite of her uncle's command never to see William's family she succeeds in reuniting her uncle with his grandson and daughter-in-law. Like Isabel of 1830, Dora has "A courage to endure and to obey," proving, as Tennyson says in the early poem "The Flight," that "every heart that loves with truth is equal to endure." The technique of "Dora" and other idylls of 1842 is somewhat different from that of earlier poems such as "Oenone," which treat of maidens disappointed in love. It will be recalled that in the previous poems Tennyson in nearly every case set the scene before introducing the central figure. In almost all the 1842 idylls, on the other hand, he provides no introductory setting. Seemingly he is more interested in

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character, in the "human heart," than in decor. "Dora" is Wordsworthian in its simplicity of diction. In fact, Wordsworth greatly admired the poem: "Mr. Tennyson," he told the poet, "I have been endeavouring all my life to write a pastoral like your 'Dora' and have not succeeded."" "The Gardener's Daughter" is the opposite kind of idyll from "Dora": it is rich in its diction and is almost entirely descriptive rather than narrative. The speaker, an artist, goes with a fellow artist to visit the gardener's daughter. Several favorite Tennysonian themes appear in the poem: the artist speaks with some of the aestheticism of the soul in "The Palace of Art," calling beauty the "mistress of the world"; but he says that it is love which creates ideal beauty: "Love, unperceived, I A more ideal Artist he than all." Like so much that is beautiful in Tennyson's earlier verses, the gardener's daughter lives secluded: "In that still place she, hoarded in herself, / Grew, seldom seen." He has only heard of her beauty, and before he actually sees this object of his desire there appears the familiar ominous imagery. His fancy plays "with flying forms and images," his hopes "Flutter'd about my senses and my soul," and his "vague desires" are "like fitful blasts of balm." The artist speaks through the mask of age, exploring "this orbit of the memory [which] folds I For ever in itself the day we went I To see her." He remembers vividly how, as in "Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere," nature was in harmony with his youthful desire: The steer forgot to graze, And, where the hedge-row cuts the pathway, stood, Leaning his horns into the neighbor field, And lowing to his fellows From the woods Came voices of the well-contented doves. The lark could scarce get out his notes for joy,

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But shook his song together as he near'd His happy home, the ground. To left and right, The cuckoo told his name to all the hills; The mellow ouzel fluted in the elm; The redcap whistled; and the nightingale Sang loud, as tho' he were the bird of day. His friend asks: "Think you they sing / Like poets, from the vanity of song? I Or have they any sense of why they sing? / And would they praise the heavens for what they have?" Strangely enough, Tennyson does not refute this description of the poet as one who sings not to serve a purpose but simply for the joy of song; for the artist replies not directly to his friend's question but answers: Were there nothing else For which to praise the heavens but only love, That only love were cause enough for praise. He sees the gardener's daughter, "a Rose / In roses," and immediately falls in love with her. When he returns home, he has a dream and he speaks, as Tennyson has previously spoken, of "The drowsy hours, dispensers of all good." His whole life is now directed by his love for the maiden, and on every pretext he goes to visit her, seeing each time that she grew in beauty "Like one that never can be wholly known." Returning to the present, he has a momentary tendency toward morbid regression: But while I mused came Memory with sad eyes, Holding the folded annals of my youth. But this very Tennysonian proneness to return to earlier stages of development is here checked by love, which will

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not allow the speaker to open "The secret bridal chambers of the heart." His beloved is now but a blessed memory, but she lives on in art, in the picture which he has painted of her. Significantly, the picture is kept veiled, for it "May not be dwelt on by the common day." "The Gardener's Daughter" is an interesting poem in that it shows Tennyson at a turning point in his career. In writing such a poem he was attempting to reach a wider audience by turning to scenes and characters from ordinary English life, yet so deeply embedded was his aestheticism that he could not completely erase his belief in beauty as something extraordinarily special, which, like the poet's mind, would be corrupted "by the light of common day." We also find the previous Tennyson characteristics of Keatsian lushness in diction, the ominous imagery, and the mask of age. Yet on the other hand, there is in the poem a maiden who bears little resemblance to earlier Tennyson maidens and there is a story of love which proved entirely true. "Lady Clare," "The Lord of Burleigh," and "The Beggar Maid" introduce us to another situation in Tennyson's idylls: the case of the lover who loves either below or above his station. Lady Clare learns that she is not of noble birth, but Lord Ronald loves her all the same. The Lord of Burleigh pretends to a village maiden that he is only a landscape-painter and marries her; but he takes her to Burleigh House to live as his countess, a life in which till her death she always feels out of place. King Cophetua is captivated by the beggar maid and vows to make her his queen. All these poems seem to be based on the premise advanced in "Lady Clara Vere de Vere" that " A simple maiden in her flower / Is worth a hundred coats-of-arms." "Walking to the Mail" is unique among the 1842 idylls in that it is related in dialogue. As in the preceding poems,

154 Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 there is the situation of the wife who marries above her class. "She was the daughter of a cottager," says the speaker named James, "Out of her sphere." But this time the mixedclass marriage has resulted in domestic tragedy. Her husband, Sir Edward Head, possesses most of the characteristics of the Byronic hero: he was Vext with a morbid devil in his blood That veil'd the world with jaundice, hid his face From all men, and commercing with himself, He lost the sense that handles daily life— That keeps us all in order more or less— And sick of home went overseas for change. The conversation also turns to politics with a reference to the Chartists, and here we see Tennyson crowding into his idylls all that might be expected to interest the readers of the day. "The Talking Oak" is also a conversation, this time the speakers being a lover and an oak tree. They discuss their love for the fair Olivia, and the oak tells the lover that she is still faithful to him. The poem ends with the lover blessing the tree and the acorn which will grow into a fine oak. "Audley Court" is more nearly like Theocritus than any of the other idylls of this volume. Perhaps Tennyson wrote it to indulge his love of landscape painting. "A known landskip is," he wrote, "to me an old friend, that continually talks to me of my own youth and half-forgotten things, and indeed does more for me than many an old friend I know. An old park is my delight, and I could tumble about it for ever" (Memoir, I, 172). Two friends picnic at Audley Court by the sea, and they speak of various matters. Francis sings a song of carpe diem, with the refrain "but let me live my life," and

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the speaker sings a love song, in which the lover must part from his beloved. By 1842, then, the pattern for the idyll had become more or less set. Within the pattern there was, to be sure, a certain variety, but in all of them there was a direct appeal to the heartstrings. They offered a glimpse of common life, an angle from which the poet saw the everyday world of men and women with its joys and sorrows. There is no attempt on the poet's part to interpret the meaning or to explain, as in "The Two Voices," the value of the common experience; rather, there is an acceptance—an easy acceptance the modern reader is tempted to say—of simple everyday life, as though Tennyson believed with Wordsworth that in humble life the essential passions of the heart are less under restraint and thus speak a plainer and more emphatic language. Yet Tennyson was not the poetic theorist or the philosopher that Wordsworth was, and if this was his doctrine he nowhere has informed us of this fact. Furthermore, in his idylls Tennyson for the most part did not go to humble and rustic life for his subjects: his characters are mostly drawn from the middle class, such as the artist in "The Gardener's Daughter" and the landed gentry in "Walking to the Mail," or from the nobility, as in "Lady Clare" and "The Lord of Burleigh." He did not take the elemental life as his subject nor did he attempt to show that in such an existence the passions of men are at their most beautiful and most understandable; instead of interpreting, Tennyson portrayed, and to this extent the idylls fall in with the mission imposed on the poet by his friends and the reviewers who admonished him to become the mirror of his age. In writing the idylls, Tennyson was bidding farewell to the romantic sensualism of the early maiden portraits, which

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themselves had provided the germ for this new kind of poem: he had now removed himself and, to a great extent, his obsessions from his pictures of life, and with the idylls he was, as Wordsworth had put it, saying Farewell, farewell, the heart that lives alone, Housed in a dream, at distance from the kind. He could now look back on the time when he had "lived shut up within himself, / A tongue-tied Poet in the feverous days" who had said "count not me the herd" ("The Golden Year"). The idylls and the political poems of 1842 show just how far he had advanced from the Palace of Art to concern with the practical affairs of his age. "The Golden Year," which was added to the Poems in the fourth edition, 1846, is a good example of his combining the idyllic with the topical. With a frame for the poet's hymning of the golden year of distant progress, the poem offers, with the idyll's characteristic touch of humor, also the view of immediate progress. Tennyson was by nature conservative, but he was quite willing to admit that change is necessary. In the "Morte d'Arthur" he had Arthur explain to Bedivere that the old order must give way to the new "Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." But change for Tennyson meant gradual change, and it is the elements of society that must change and not the identity itself. His passion for the past resulted in his looking to the past as a reservoir of experience on which to draw, and like Burke he believed that societies live by their continuity, which as tradition is the essential spiritualizing and unifying force. In a series of poems written about the time of the Reform Bill agitation Tennyson attempted to show how the benefits of the Radical program would prove either illusory or harmful. "The Goose" is an allegory in which an old woman is

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presented with a white goose that lays golden eggs. For a while she is overjoyed with her gift and retires from her labors, "feeding high, and living soft." But the more eggs the goose produces the louder it cackles, until finally the old woman can stand the clamor no longer and returns the goose to the stranger who had originally given it to her. Tennyson was not antidemocratic; indeed, he had, as we have seen, visions of the future when all mankind should live with plenty in a world of peace, where, he says in "Locksley Hall," "the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, / The kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law." But the fulfilment of this vision should be gradual, and it cannot be effected by political parties that appeal to demogoguery. For, Tennyson says in the unpublished poem "The Statesman" printed by Hallam Tennyson in the Memoir, "in the hurry and the noise" of radical or revolutionary programs, "Great spirits grow akin to base." Ill fares a people passion-wrought, A land of many days that cleaves In two great halves, when each one leaves The middle road of sober thought! The true statesman accepts the traditional structure of society, and he seeks To shape, to settle, to repair, With seasonable changes fair, And innovation grade by grade. He works with "a mighty plan" in mind, and "despising party-rage," he seeks "To hold the Spirit of the Age / Against the Spirit of the Time." Party strife, Tennyson contends over and over again, is an appeal to demagoguery,

158 Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 and, he says in "Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue," "some true result of good" can come only when "All parties work together." Like Burke, Tennyson had a fear of extreme measures, and he was almost obsessed with the thought that the world was standing on the brink of ruin, that his society was to undergo not an evolution but a violent revolution—a last battle in the West such as that which caused Arthur, the embodiment of good and wise government, to "perish by this people which I made" ("Morte d'Arthur"). He scorns the "falsehood of extremes" and praises the middle way. In "You ask me, why, tho' ill at ease" he eulogizes England as A land of settled government, A land of just and old renown, Where Freedom broadens slowly down From precedent to precedent; Where faction seldom gathers head, But by degrees to fullness wrought, The strength of some diffusive thought Hath time and space to work and spread; and in the companion poem "Of old sat Freedom on the heights" he teaches that freedom in coming to men only "part by part" reveals "The fullness of her face." "Love thou thy land" offers perhaps the best example of Tennyson's political philosophy, and it echoes Burke's idea of the state as a partnership "between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born." Tennyson sees the English state as a social organism which exists with love far-brought From out the storied past, and used Within the present, but transfused Thro' future time by power of thought . . .

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Not clinging to some ancient saw, Not master'd by some modern term, Not swift nor slow to change, but firm. Perhaps thinking of the changes that were taking place within himself the poet says, Meet is it changes should control Our being, lest we rust in ease. We all are changed by still degrees, All but the basis of the soul. Change must come for society as well as for the individual, and Tennyson recognizes that his is an age of transition when the old order must yield place to the new. Recalling the speaker's self-admonition " I myself must mix with action, lest I wither by despair" in "Locksley Hall," the poet says that Ev'n now we hear with inward strife A motion toiling in the gloom— The Spirit of the years to come Yearning to mix himself with Life. T h e political poems give further evidence of the change within Tennyson's own personality. In his poetry he was moving f r o m introspection and artistic isolation toward society a n d to an examination of men in their civil state. T h e political poems are, therefore, complementary to the idylls, and indeed the two often seem to fuse. T h u s we find allusions to the Corn Laws in "Audley Court," to Chartism in "Walking to the Mail," to heavy taxation in "Godiva," to party divisions in "Will W a t e r p r o o f . " Whereas the political poems of the 1830 and 1832 volumes stood in isolation f r o m the rest of the poems in those two volumes, the political

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poems of 1842 seem to be closely related to the other verses of the collection. They show that Tennyson was becoming more and more the social philosopher and the voice of his age. The 1842 Poems show not only the growth of the poet's mind but also his poetic confidence and mastery of verse forms. Where formerly his poems had been in a wild array of irregular meters, nearly every new poem in the 1842 volumes was in some standard meter and observed a definite stanzaic order. J. F. A. Pyre in his study of Tennyson's style writes: Of these 36 poems [the new poems of 1842] . . . , only one, "The Vision of Sin," has any radical change of metre, and all the rhymed poems, with this exception, are in fixed strophic or couplet forms. Twenty of the poems are consistently iambic and, of these, all but two are in simple quatrain arrangements of four-stress or four-and-three-stress verses.1' This willingness on the poet's part to shape his ideas into conventional patterns indicates further his desire to eradicate the idiosyncracies of his early verse in favor of a kind of poetry which would go along with the general impulse of his countrymen. James Spedding in the Edinburgh Review, April, 1843, well summarized the 1842 Poems. He found "more humanity with less image and drapery; a closer adherence to truth; a greater reliance for effect upon the simplicity of nature. Moral and spiritual traits of character are more dwelt upon, in place of external scenery and circumstances. He addresses himself more to the heart, and less to the ear and eye." The Poems show at least a partial resolution of Tennyson's conflict concerning the function of the poet: in this collec-

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tion he seems to accept the ideals set forth in "The Poet" and in the sonnet "Mine be the strength," in which he declared the poet's desire to influence his age; and he seems to deny that part of his poetry which had treated of escape into an imaginative land of sensation. The victory of the Everlasting Yea meant an eschewal of the influence of Keats, and the triumph of the voice of affirmation resulted in the repression of what I have termed the Romantic side of his nature. In looking back over the 1842 Poems I find that I cannot leave my consideration of them without expressing my own personal feeling about them. To my mind the collection is one of the strangest publications ever to come from the mind of man. There is much that is fine, but almost as much that is dross. It is almost unbelievable that the man who could write "Ulysses" could also write "The Talking Oak," that the author of "St. Simeon Stylites" be also the author of "The Lord of Burleigh." "Ulysses" is so characteristically Tennysonian that it could never be mistaken for the work of some other poet. Excepting the verse technique, almost any third-rate Victorian poet could have written "The Talking Oak," or "The Lord of Burleigh," or "The Beggar Maid," or any of several other poems. In writing "Ulysses" and "Locksley Hall" Tennyson tapped a deep level of poetic consciousness which he was not often to touch again. With these poems he let himself go—for the moment he forgot that he was supposed to be an oracle—and these poems consequently are personal utterances, full of "the old champagne flavour" that Fitzgerald found lacking in most of the later poems (Memoir, I, 253). As for the domestic idylls, their flavor is that of the machine: they lack the force of personal conviction, their production seemingly stemming not from a centric need but from a peripheral demand.

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Yet this is not entirely true: for the idyllic strain was as firmly embedded in Tennyson's nature as the lyric, elegiacal strain that produced "Ulysses." To see that this is true, we have only to recall "Claribel" of 1830 or "The May Queen" of 1832. We wish that such were not the case, because it is painful to watch a good poet compose bad poems; but we must be wary of excusing Tennyson's inferior poems by blaming them on the influence of his friends or the reviewers. To be sure, the demands of his friends and his reading public made themselves felt, as I have occasionally tried lo point out; but they did not bring out anything new in Tennyson's nature. The sentimentalism of the idylls goes all the way back to Wordsworth, and the best that we can say for Tennyson is that he inherited this particular taste, along with many good things, from Romantic tradition. There is both good and bad in Tennyson, just as there is, say, in Dickens, and at times unfortunately they exist in about equal proportion. Though Tennyson had begun to reorient his poetry along an altered course, many of the themes and symbols explored in his earlier works were to continue to inform a great part of his verse. As I said at the beginning of this discussion of the 1842 Poems, the child was to prove father to the man. The same themes and symbols continue, but the difference lies in the fact that they no longer exist simply for themselves: they now inform rather than control his poetry.

NOTES I Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn (New York, 1947), pp. 175-177. : Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience (New York, 1957), p. 26. 'These lines should be compared with the second stanza of lyric X X X I V of "In Memoriam." * The line "A labor working to an end" is repeated from "Youth." 5 For Victorian readers the end of the poem was the most appealing part. Stopford A Brooke writes: "The best part is where the disputing voices have ceased to talk, where the poet throws open the window, and sees every one going to church in the summer morning" (Tennyson [London, 1894], p. 106). 'Sartor Resartus, ed. C. F. Harrold (New York, 1937), p. 188. ' William D. Templeman, "Tennyson's 'Locksley Hall' and Thomas Carlyle," Booker Memorial Studies, ed. Hill Shine (Chapel Hill, 1950), pp. 34-59. ' The Poetry of Experience, pp. 90-93. " Tennyson, p. 95. ,0 Ibid, p. 24. II "Tennyson's Garden of Art: A Study of 'The Hesperides,'" PMLA, L X V I I , 736. 12 E. D. H. Johnson, The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry (Princeton, 1952), p. 13. 11 Paull F. Braum, Tennyson Sixty Years After (Chapel Hill, 1948), p. 176. " Freud writes that "the sacred number three is symbolic of the whole male genitalia" (A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, trans. Joan Riviere [New York, 1943], p. 137. " Modern students of literature are of course aware of the sexual significance of hair, but even pre-Freudian poets and novelists recognized the sexual meaning. This has been convincingly demonstrated by Cleanth Brooks in his essay on 'The Rape of the Lock' in The Well-Wrought Urn, and by Maurice Johnson in "The Device of Sophia's Muff in Tom Jones," Modern Language Notes, L X X I V , 685-690. An examination of the A. E. Baker Concordance to Tennyson's poems will indicate the number of times Tennyson used hair to suggest erotic situations. "Thomas J . Wise, A Bibliography of the Writings of Alfred Lord Tennyson (London, 1908), II, 211. " I am indebted for this reading to J. S. Lowry, "Tennyson's 'The Epic': A Gesture of Recovered Faith," Modern Language Notes, L X X I V , 400-403. "Quoted by John M. Moore. Three Aspects of the Late Lord Tennyson (Manchester, 1901), p. 113. " J . F. A. Pyre, The Formation of Tennyson's Style (Madison, Wise., 1921), pp. 101-102. 163

CHAPTER V

The

Princess

Though "The Princess" owes much to the idyllic strain in Tennyson's nature, it is also the result of the poet's acquiescence to the demands that he write poetry relating to the problems of the age. The reviewers of the 1842 volumes had been very insistent on this point, and in their considerations of what was expected of the poet they had stated that "(1) modern poetry must idealize and mirror contemporary life and thought; (2) the highest type of poetry must be concerned with human existence; (3) the poet's primary duty is to teach; (4) Tennyson's poetry must display more human sympathy; and (5) Tennyson, if he is 10 establish his claims to greatness, must write a long poem—a sustained work on a single theme.'" Tennyson was often heedful of the advice of his friends and the reviewers, even though at times discouraged by their counsel. Aubrey de Vere reports a visit with Tennyson, who was upset over a review of his poems that he had been reading : "Said that he could not stand the chattering and conceit of clever men, or the worry of society, or the meaness of tuft-hunters, . . . or the labour of a place, or the preying of the heart on itself." Yet, how much the poet listened to the 164

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admonitions of the reviewers is indicated by another extract from de Vere's diary: "I went to Alfred Tennyson, who read me a part of his 'University of Women,' and discussed poetry, denouncing exotics, and saying that a poem should reflect the time and place.'" This statement is, of course, a complete repudiation of Tennyson's earlier poetic practice: the singer of "an idle rhyme" was now ready to assume the bardic mantle. Tennyson had been toying with the idea of writing an epic, as noted in the preceding chapter; but as he stated in "The Epic" there were "a mint of reasons" for his not doing so, the main reason being, one might guess, that he distrusted his capability of sustaining a long poem. He is quoted as saying that "if 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" (Memoir, I, 166). But by 1842 he had already fully explored the lyric, the idyll, the dramatic monologue, and a variety of short narratives; he had made his mark by shortness, and now he realized that he must at least attempt a longer work. As in "In Memoriam" not daring to "trust a larger lay" (XLVIII), Tennyson hit upon the happy idea of blending the elements of his earlier poetry and parceling the story out to seven different speakers. Thus he could excuse any lack of unity by the plan of the poem itself; or, in other words, he could produce a long poem by joining together a series of shorter ones.' For his theme Tennyson chose the subject of women's rights, a question on which there was already a small body of literature and which was very much in the minds of Victorian Englishmen. The theme was not new to Tennyson's poetry: in the 1842 Poems, "Godiva" had treated of a

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woman who had "built herself an everlasting name" by interposing herself between an overtaxed people and a tyrannical lord; in "Locksley Hall" the speaker had in anger cried out that woman is inferior to man: Weakness to be wroth with weakness! woman's pleasure, woman's pain— Nature made them blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain: Woman is the lesser man; in "Edwin Morris," added to the Poems in 1851 but written much earlier, the curate insisted that "God made the woman for the man, / And for the good and increase of the world." The problem of woman's place in society was, however, a subject that might evoke both enthusiasm and ridicule, and too it might not be considered as a proper subject for a long poem. In what one might regard as an attempt to please all sides Tennyson chose to make his poem as remote from his own age as possible by placing the setting in some far-off, unspecified time, vaguely medieval in manners but Renaissance in architecture. In this way he might escape writing on a purely sociological plane and avoid direct discussion of the problem. But to show that he was writing for his own age, the poet used the device of the "frame," a Prologue and Conclusion with a modern setting, from which the story proper takes its theme. This also was not new with Tennyson: he had used the device in "Godiva," "The DayDream," and "Morte d-Arthur" to point up the meaning for modern times that might be derived from the tale. To complicate the poem still further, Tennyson not only provided "The Princess" with a variety of settings but also gave it two different tones, which are at variance with each other. In the Prologue the poet promises to write

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something made to suit with time and place, A Gothic ruin and a Grecian house, A talk of college and of ladies' rights, A feudal knight in silken masquerade, . . . (224-227.)

and the first four parts proceed in mock-heroic vein, as though the subject of woman's education were not really to be taken seriously. But in the Interlude following Part IV, Lilia, the feminist among the group, "feigning pique at what she call'd I The raillery, or grotesque, or false sublime," cries out against the mockery of the preceding parts and asks for "some grand fight to kill and make an e n d " so that women may be made "all we would be, great and good." There then follow three episodes, almost entirely solemn in tone, which seriously treat of the rights of women. With such a mixture of settings and tones the poem could be little other than a pastiche or potpourri. T h e poet himself called "The Princess" a medley, perhaps hoping by the use of that term (if one is suspicious of Tennyson's motives) to excuse the lack of unity in the poem. In the Conclusion the poet himself discusses the problems that he must face in writing such a poem. "What style could suit?" he asks, The men required that I should give throughout The sort of mock-heroic gigantesque, With which we banter'd little Lilia first; The women—and perhaps they felt their power, For something in the ballads which they sang, Or in their silent influence as they sat, Had ever seem'd to wrestle with burlesque, And drove us, last, to quite a solemn close. (Prologue 10-17.)

The ladies demand that he make the Princess "true-heroic— true-sublime," and the poet, caught between the mockers and the realists, must try to please both sides. And so "I

168 Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 moved as in a strange diagonal, / And maybe neither pleased myself nor them" (Prol. 27-28). It is not only in style that "The Princess" is a medley, for the poet apparently sought to include as much in his poem as he could possibly cram into it. Thus the reader finds a story based on incidents from Persian tales,1 on which are superimposed digressions about scientific discoveries and the rights of women, medieval tournaments, mother-love, cataleptic attacks, and a number of other matters. In determinedly speaking to his age Tennyson was seemingly trying to speak out on as many matters as he thought might be pertinent to his time, and in this respect the structure of "The Princess" was perhaps appropriate for the age for which it was written. For the age itself, Aubrey de Vere in his review of the poem in The Edinburgh Review (October, 1849) noted, was a medley: If a man were to scrutinise the external features of our time, for the purpose of characterising it compendiously, he would be tempted, we suspect, to give up the task before long, and to pronounce the age a Medley. It would be hard to specify the character of our Philosophy, including as it does fragments of all systems, sometimes at open war, and sometimes eclectically combined. Not less various is the texture of Society among us, in which time-honoured traditions are blended with innovations which a few months make antiquated. The Political condition of our day is a war of great principles. As heterogeneous in character is Art amongst us. Here we have an imitation of the antique, there a revival of the middle ages; while sculpture itself is sometimes compelled to relax its severity, and copy the rude attire of our northern yeomen. By what term could we describe the architecture of the day? In our rising cities we find a Gothic church close to a Byzantine fane or an Italian basilica; and in their immediate neighbourhood a town-hall like a Greek temple, a mansion like a Roman

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palace, and a clubhouse after the fashion of Louis XIV. The age in which we live may have a character of its own; but that character is not written in its face. From this point of view one might look on "The Princess" as a poem that even in structure reflected its age. The main theme of the poem is, of course, the place of woman in the modern world; it is introduced in the Prologue by Lilia, who insists that there are many noble women like her warrior ancestress in present times but that "convention beats them down" (Prol. 128). Lilia would like to build a college and teach women all that men are taught, for "We are twice as quick" (Prol. 137). In the following tale, which takes its cue from Lilia's idea of a college for women, we learn that Princess Ida, fed theories that "The woman were an equal to the man" (I. 130) by Lady Psyche and Lady Blanche, has set up a woman's college where no man may enter. In the college Ida hopes to ameliorate the lot of females who at present are but "toys of men" (II. 49), and she designs her classes so that her collegians will be taught about the great women of history in hope that they will seek "To lift the woman's fallen divinity I Upon an even pedestal with men" (III. 207-208). She tells the disguised Prince how women have been trodden down, "Cramp'd under worse than South-sea-isle taboo" (III. 261); and the Prince, primarily, one suspects, because of his love for Ida, becomes persuaded that women do not enjoy their rightful place in society. The anti-feminist position is maintained by the Prince's father. The northern king writes Ida that it is a "rampant heresy" to "hold the woman is the better man" (IV. 391-392), for his philosophy of the sexes is this:

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Man for the field and woman for the hearth; Man for the sword, and for the needle she; Man with the head, and woman with the heart; Man to command, and woman to obey; All else confusion. (V. 437-441.)

Woman's primary duty, he insists, is "The bearing and the training of a child" and therein lies her wisdom (V. 455456). At the end of the poem after Ida has become convinced of the falseness of her extreme views, she still is hesitant to give in to the Prince, who she thinks will not work for the cause of women "Against the sons of men and barbarous laws" (VII. 219). But the Prince tells her that "Henceforth thou hast a helper, me, that know I The woman's cause is man's; they rise or sink / Together" (VII. 242-244). Woman, he says, is not undeveloped man but is diverse. He maintains that woman is complementary to man, since either sex alone Is half itself, and in true marriage lies Nor equal, nor unequal. Each fulfils Defect in each, and always thought in thought, Purpose in purpose, will in will, they grow, The single pure and perfect animal, The two-cell'd heart beating, with one full stroke. Life. . . . (VII. 283-290.)

The resolution of the poem follows very closely the pattern that we have witnessed in Tennyson's earlier verse, and the answer to the problem is found by the same means that the poet used previously : that is, by a dialectic clash of attitudes and ideas. Both Ida and the Prince's father stand for extreme positions on the question—in effect they argue against each other—and from the polarity of their attitudes there arises

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a third way, the way of the Prince, who mediates and moderates their extreme views. This was the method of "The Two Voices." It was also the pattern followed in the development of Tennyson's depiction of females: out of the contrasting portraits of femmes fatales and suffering maidens there arose, as in the idylls, the maiden who was neither one nor the other but who represented an ideal of womanhood. Princess Ida herself approximates the development of the femme fatale. That she closely resembles Tennyson's previous strong women there can be no doubt: Her father says that "all she is and does is awful" (I. 139); the host at the inn near the college, who frankly admits that he is scared of her, says that she "look'd as grand as doomsday and as grave" (I. 184-185); Psyche calls her "That axelike edge unturnable" (II. 186); the Princess herself tells the disguised Prince that "no doubt we seem a kind of monster to you" (III. 259); Cyril calls her a lioness "That with your long locks play the lion's mane" (VI. 147-148); her father refers to her "steel temper" (VI. 213-215)—in all of which respects we see her as the reincarnation of, for example, the virago Kate of 1832. Nor is Ida the only femme fatale in "The Princess." The first mention of such a woman comes in the Prologue in reference to the lady who would not submit to the wild king and who "drove her foes from her walls" (Prol. 123). Lilia is a budding fatal woman, " A rose-bud set with little wilful thorns" (Prol. 153), who would build a college for woman and make it death for any man even to peep in. Her brother suggests that Lilia should be taken for heroine of the tale: "And make her some great princess, six feet high, / Grand, epic, homicidal" (Prol. 218-219). Within the college there are many statues, not of "Sleek Odalisques, or oracles of mode" but of strong women such as the Sabines (II. 62-71).

172 Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 Most fierce of all the ladies in "The Princess" is Blanche, who, "a tiger-cat / In act to spring" (II. 427-428), when dismissed by the Princess "stretch'd a vulture throat, I And shot from crooked lips a haggard smile" (IV. 344-345). In the end, of course, Ida as fatal woman is chastened; for, as was the case with Tennyson's previous strong women, she is conquered by love: love of Psyche's child, fondness for her friend, affection for the man who loves her. Her first admission of anything resembling a purely feminine instinct comes in Part III, wherein she tells of her love for children (III. 234-244);" but it is only in Part V that the maternal instinct begins to subdue her regal haughtiness. She tells how the child has seemed to charm from her bosom "The wrath I nursed against the world" (V. 424-427), thus finding, like the " I " in "The Two Voices," release from isolation in self through the familial instinct. Then follows her reunion with Psyche, whereupon she allows that she is not now what formerly she had been, saying, "/ seem no more, I want forgiveness too" (VI. 272). As the soul in "The Palace of Art," who had lived only in egotistical pride, cries out for something above and beyond self-absorption, so too Ida admits her need for something quite independent of self; and she speaks of love as "some touch of that / Which kills me with myself, and drags me down I From my fixt height . . ." (VI. 287-289). "I cannot keep," she says, "My heart an eddy from the brawling stream" (VI. 301-302). Finally, she succumbs to the Prince. Touched by his devotion, she listens to his entreaties, and then "Her falser self slipt from her like a robe, / And left her woman" (VII. 146-147). Because she had insulated herself from the human heart, she had failed in her endeavor to help woman: "She said / Brokenly, that she knew it, she had fail'd I In sweet humility, had fail'd in all" (VII. 212-214). But with the realization of why she had

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failed she now, aided by the Prince, can have hope of success. In the end, therefore, the Princess turns out to be like the maidens of "The Gardener's Daughter" and "The Miller's Daughter," women who achieve happiness through conjugal love. The impression that most readers will gain from the poem is that it is not really the Prince who wins Ida, because she seems to give herself to love rather than to a lover. For her the Prince is, for the most part, the equivalent of the soul's "cottage in the vale" in "The Palace of Art": that is, he will be but the instrument by which she can purge herself of guilt, and her marriage to him will be but the equivalent of the soul's throwing her royal robes away. But one can hardly blame Ida if she does not really love the Prince: weak, effeminate, and cataleptic, he certainly is not a very lovable creature. When Tennyson in the fourth edition of The Princess in 1851 added the "weird seizures," he succeeded not in elucidating the character of the Princess or the action of the poem but in confusing his readers. Why, critics have asked, did the poet superimpose this feature on the poem? To answer this question, we must review Tennyson's earlier poetry. It will be remembered that in every instance trance, a state resembling the Prince's seizures, was employed in the previous poems as a release from an uncongenial present. In the poet's own words moments of transcendence allowed an isolation of the spirit from the body, "the loss of personality . . . seeming no extinction but the only true life" (Memoir, I, 320). In other words, the transcendental state was the only reality of which he could be positively certain. Man is, the poet believed, separated by a gulf between self and the external world, and the only way to affirm the reality of self is, as we have seen in numerous poems, by love.

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In "The Princess" we find, in connection with the "weird seizures," the same pattern as that displayed in Tennyson's earlier poetry: the Prince's strange affliction, his remoteness from reality, ceases when his love for Princess Ida finds fulfillment. Once again the poet seems to say that the reality of self can only be affirmed by the principle of love. In the poem there are fifteen passages in which allusion is made to the Prince's seizures. These may be summarized as follows: 1. I. 5-18. An old sorcerer, who had been burned by one of the Prince's ancestors, had foretold "that one / Should come to fight with shadows and to fall." "Waking dreams" are an inherited weakness of his whole family, and the Prince himself has while in the midst of company "seem'd to move among a world of ghosts, I And feel myself the shadow of a dream." 2. I. 81-84. The Prince's friend Cyril insists that he should accompany the Prince on his journey to the southern kingdom, where the Prince is to claim Princess Ida, so that he can aid the Prince if a seizure were to occur. 3. II. 386-393. Cyril, who immediately falls in love with Lady Psyche, maintains that in his love of the lady he does not mistake the shadow for the substance, that he has "No ghostly hauntings like his Highness." 4. III. 167-173. While gazing on the Princess, the Prince undergoes a seizure in which Ida, the whole college, and he himself all seem unreal. 5. IV. 537-545. After the Prince and his two friends have been discovered and have been cast out of the college gates, he experiences the affliction in which he "seem'd to move among a world of ghosts." 6. V. 31-32. When the Prince, weary and bedraggled after his escape from the college, appears before his father, who

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has come to rescue him, one of the king's followers jests, "Look, / He has been among his shadows." 7. V. 145-146. The Prince counsels against war as a means to win the Princess, and his father says sneeringly: "Boy, when I hear you prate I almost think / That idiot legend credible." 8. V. 464-470. Ida's fate is to be decided by a contest between her brother and the Prince and their followers. Just before the battle, the Prince remembers the sorcerer's curse and "like a flash the weird affection came." 9. V. 481-482. Entering into the battle, the Prince feels that the battle is all a dream. 10. V. 508-509. Even though the battle does seem somehow unreal, the Prince will nevertheless attempt to make the most of the dream: "Yea, let me make my dream / All that I would." 11. V. 530-531. Wounded by Ida's brother, the Prince experiences dream and truth alike leave him. 12. VI. 1-3. The Prince lies in "some mystic middle state" and is completely oblivious to everything. 13. VII. 32-39. Moved into the college so that he may be nursed by the Princess, the Prince remains in a motionless state, completely divorced from "the moving Universe." 14. VII. 315-317. Ida says that she has heard of the Prince's strange affliction, and she admits that the "doubts" may have some validity since she herself now seems "A mockery to my own self." 15. VII. 327-329. The Prince says that because of Ida's love the weird seizures, "My haunting sense of hollow shows," have left him. "This truthful change in thee has killed it," he says to her. It will be noted from the foregoing summary that the seizures occur at crucial moments within the action of the

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poem. When the Prince looks at the Princess and knows that he can't claim her for his own, when he is forced from Ida's presence, when he doubts the validity of a battle as a means of winning his beloved, when he is engaged in actual combat, when he is defeated in the fight—in each case the Prince withdraws into his trancelike state; in other words, he retreats by means of the seizures from an uncongenial reality. As in the earlier poems, Tennyson's protagonist looks to trancelike isolation as a means of escape. Within the poem there are hints that a reciprocal love on the part of Ida would bring an end to the seizures. Before he is cast out of the college confines, he tells Ida that he is "but half I Without you; with you whole" (IV. 440-441). Love is, he claims, completely necessary for him and for all men. He tells Ida that the man who does not know love lives "A drowning life, besotted in sweet self, I Or pines in sad experience worse than death, / Or keeps his wing'd affections dipt with crime" (VII. 295-297). The seizures form part of the theme of regression that began with Tennyson's earliest poetry. We have often seen that before the speaker can attain the object of his desire he must, as in "A Dream of Fair Women," retreat into an inner core of consciousness. Such also is the case with the Prince. Like the speaker in "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," who must penetrate the thick foliage before he attains the vision of the Persian girl; like the prince in "The DayDream," who must pass through a dangerous thicket surrounding the castle before he reaches the sleeping princess; like the speaker in "A Dream of Fair Women," who must engage in a fight before he encounters the fair ladies—like all these the Prince must endure great hardship before he wins his beloved. When he falls in battle, he lies, in an embryolike state, "silent in the muffled cage of life" (VII.

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32), f r o m which h e is t o r e t u r n r e f r e s h e d a n d r e a d y to w i n the prize. H e is still, h o w e v e r , p r e v e n t e d f r o m his goal. T h e o m i n o u s imagery, the " s h a p e s " of the earlier poems, r e s t r a i n h i m . W h e n h e w a k e n s f r o m his regressive state, h e sees p a i n t e d o n t h e walls Two grand designs; for on one side arose The women up in wild revolt, and storm'd At the Oppian law. Titanic shapes, they cramm'd The forum, and half-crush'd among the rest A dwarf-like Cato cower'd. On the other side Hortensia spoke against the tax; behind. A train of dames. By axe and eagle sat, With all their foreheads drawn in Roman scowls, And half the wolf's-milk curdled in their veins, The fierce triumvirs; and before them paused Hortensia, pleading; angry was her face. I saw the forms; I knew not where I was. (VII. 106-118.) T h e P r i n c e has n o w by-passed d e a t h a n d the p h a n t a s m a g o r i a , a n d a c c o r d i n g to the f o r m u l a established in the earlier p o e m s there r e m a i n s only o n e m o r e f e a t u r e b e f o r e t h e P r i n c e o b t a i n s the object of his d e s i r e : the Keatsian i m a g e r y . T h i s occurs w h e n Ida, w h o has been nursing the w o u n d e d P r i n c e , rises f r o m his a r m s lovelier in her mood Than in her mould that other, when she came From barren deeps to conquer all with love, And down the streaming crystal dropt; and she Far-fleeted by the purple island-sides. Naked, a double light in air and wave, To meet her Graces, where they deck'd her out For worship without end. (VII. 147-154.)

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He retreats once more into dream, and when he awakens he finds his beloved beside him and knows that she is his. From a study of the characters of the Prince and the Princess we see that it is love that brings completeness to their lives. Love is also the unifier of the work. As the poem begins we are presented with a set of characters who in manner and attitude are almost polar opposites, a fact which suggests that Tennyson carried over his liking for natural contrasts, such as his setting of mountains against plains or sea against land, into his creation of characters. Thus we have not only the strong Princess set against the weak Prince but also the weak southern king contrasted with the strong northern king; in short, a pair of complementary parental relationships. Then too there are Psyche and Ida, the loving mother and the emotionally intransigent Princess, and Cyril and the Prince, the one common-sensical and the other visionary. And finally there is the Princess-BlanchePsyche relationship balanced against the Prince-Cyril-Florian friendship. It is ultimately love which sets aside the contrasts and unifies the poem, for by the varieties of love—mother for child, brother for sister, father for child, man for woman, and man for man and woman for woman—the opposites are reconciled. Quite possibly some of the relationships in "The Princess" owe more than a little to Tennyson's biography. Sir Charles Tennyson speculates that the Prince's seizures had for Tennyson a personal meaning in that they "symbolized the effect upon his own mind of his separation from Emily and of his long-deferred union with her. Looking back on his life during those years of loneliness he felt that he had indeed been like one living in a world of illusion, remote from reality."" The friendship between the Prince and Florian, which incidentally is the most satisfactory relationship in

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the poem, is probably based on Tennyson's love for Hallam. The Prince calls Florian "my other heart, / And almost my half-self, for still we moved I Together, twinn'd as horses ear and eye" (I. 54-56), a description closely resembling the sonnet "To " ("As when with downcast eyes") of 1832, wherein the poet speaks of his friend and himself as "Opposed mirrors each reflecting each." Thirdly, the Prince's description of his mother as one Not learned, save in gracious household ways, Not perfect, nay, but full of tender wants, No angel, but a dearer being, all dipt In angel instincts, breathing Paradise, Interpreter between the gods and men, Who look'd all native to her place, and yet On tiptoe seem'd to touch upon a sphere Too gross to tread, and all male minds perforce Sway'd to her from their orbits as they moved, And girdled her with music . . . (VII. 299-308), recalls the portrait of the poet's mother in "Isabel" of 1830. In his treatment of love in "The Princess" Tennyson sets up a definite distinction between knowledge and wisdom, a discrimination central to the meaning of the poem, which had been alluded to in his previous verse. In "Locksley Hall" the speaker had said, "Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers"; but Tennyson had made no effort to define the difference between the two words. In "Love and Duty," however, the speaker indicates that wisdom is a higher kind of knowledge, a knowledge transformed by love: "Love himself will bring / The drooping flower of knowledge changed to fruit I Of wisdom." There are, Tennyson implies, two ways of knowing: the way of the heart and the way of the mind; and he who takes only the way of the mind, which

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is knowledge, falls into a kind of self-deluding vanity, which is the corrupter of noble causes. For Tennyson the quest after knowledge for its own sake is ultimately an antisocial endeavor and cannot be condoned. The sinful soul of "The Palace of Art" seeks to follow knowledge for its beauty, and does not see, as the dedicatory poem states, "That Beauty, Good, and Knowledge are three sisters / That doat upon each other." Ulysses desires "To follow knowledge like a sinking star," but his quest, which is not stimulated by wisdom, will result in his abnegating his duties as king, husband, and father. Like these, the Princess places her faith in the way of the mind, for she believes that knowledge alone is sufficient to lift women to equality with men. Her credo is, her father says, that knowledge is "all in all" (I. 134-135), a totality in which love can have no part. In the end, of course, she sees her mistake, and she admits that she had "sought far less for truth than power / In knowledge" (VII. 221-222). Love has caused her to perceive that knowledge as an end in itself is not a valid goal in life, because in its extremist form it denies the very basis of life, which is love. And ultimately love conquers her, for, she admits, "Something wild within her breast, I A greater than all knowledge, beat her down" (VII. 222-223). Both the Prince and the Princess, then, undertake a quest, but only the Prince's is prompted by a supernatural agency. The Princess begins hers at the instigation of Lady Blanche and Lady Psyche, while the Prince is induced to begin his by a voice from out of the wind that cries, "Follow, follow, thou shalt win" (I. 99). Because of this mystic summons to the quest, the Prince can be assured of success, for he is not guided by purely rational faculties. Like the speaker in "The Two Voices," the Prince will win because he is beckoned by

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the visionary gleam. He is in fact reminded of the voice on the eve of battle, and the memory of it causes him to retreat into the trance, which as we have seen is the prelude to fulfillment. The Princess, on the other hand, is doomed to failure because her desire proceeds only from rational demands. As is so often the case with Tennyson, the intellect cannot succeed without the aid of mystical insights. It would probably not be too much of an overstatement to say that the Princess is generally for Tennyson an unsympathetic figure. Her pronouncements are usually antithetical to the poet's practices and beliefs. There is, for example, her aversion to the past. Certainly the lyric ' T e a r s , Idle Tears" represents the very essence of Tennyson's elegiac vein. In fact, he himself said of the poem: "The passion of the past, the abiding in the transient, was expressed in 'Tears, idle Tears,' which was written in the yellowing autumn-tide at Tintern Abbey, full for me of its bygone memories" (Memoir, I, 253). The voice of the past, we have already noted time and again, was for him an alluring siren song. Yet when one of the maidens attendant to the Princess sings the lyric, Ida reproves her: If indeed there haunt About the moulder'd lodges of the past So sweet a voice and vague, fatal to men, Well needs it we should cram our ears with wool And so pace by. But thine are fancies hatch'd In silken-folded idleness; nor is it Wiser to weep a true occasion lost, But trim our sails, and let old bygones be, While down the streams that float us each and all To the issue, goes, like glittering bergs of ice, Throne after throne, and molten on the waste Becomes a cloud. (IV. 44-55.)

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"Let the past be past," she says (IV. 58). Ida is truly a new woman, one who would forget tradition, "a death's-head at the wine," and deal only "with the other distance and the hues I Of promise" (IV. 67-69). But Ida is not consistent, for earlier in her discussion of the creation of the world she had spoken, with typically Tennysonian overtones, of the continuity of time: "For was, and is, and will be, are but is," she says (III. 307), recalling the poet's pronouncement in "The 'How' and the 'Why' " (1830) that "In time there is no present, I In eternity no future I In eternity no past." Like her creator, who in the political poems of 1842 had preached the Burkean ideal of continuity, the Princess says: but we that are not all, As parts, can see but parts, now this, now that, And live, perforce, from thought to thought, and make One act a phantom of succession. (III. 309-312.) It is more than possible that Ida's speeches about time reflect Tennyson's own changing ideas. The poet had almost foresworn escape into the past, yet here he was in "The Princess" writing about an idealized age of medieval chivalry. Here, however, he was not retreating from the actual world but was using the past to bring home to a modern audience what was of immediate concern to it. And to point up the contemporaneity of his story he provided a modern setting in the Prologue and Conclusion, which showed that the fanciful elements of the poem had a direct bearing on the questions raised by a contemporary audience. This was for Tennyson a happy device because it allowed him, as in "Morte d'Arthur," to indulge his passion for the past and simultaneously to speak, as had been demanded of him, to his own time. Charles Kingsley, in his review in

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Fraser's Magazine (September, 1850), complimented the poet on this very ability to join the past and the present. In " T h e Princess," he says, more than ever the old is interpenetrated with the new—the domestic and scientific with the ideal and sentimental. He dares, in every page, to make use of modern words and notions, from which the mingled clumsiness and archaism of his compeers shrinks, as unpoetical. Though . . . his stage is an ideal fairy-land, yet he has reached the ideal by the only true method—by bringing the Middle age forward to the Present one, and not by ignoring the Present to fall back on a cold and galvanized Medievalism; and thus he makes his 'Medley' a mirror of the nineteenth century, possessed of its own new art and science, its own new temptations and aspirations, and yet grounded on, and continually striving to reproduce, the forms and experiences of all past time. Ida's cold intellectualism could have little appeal to the poet, a n d up to the time when she is defeated by love her utterances are a m o n g the least poetic in the poem. F a r more attractive are the lyrics, which embody irrational or instinctive emotions in contrast to Ida's impassive cerebrations. In the Prologue the poet explains that the ladies are to sing so as to provide breathing-space for the men in the narration of the tale. A n d so the women sing "Between the rougher voices of the men, I Like linnets in the pauses of the w i n d " (Prol., 237-238). But the songs are not purely decorative: they serve to m a k e Psyche's baby the focal point upon which the plot turns, and often they complement the action of the poem, as, f o r instance, the lyric at the end of Part III echoes Ida's speech about great deeds living forever (III. 237-239). A number of songs, especially the intercalary ones, are miniature idylls dealing with the sweet sorrow of domestic

184 Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 tragedy. The lyric at the end of Part I concerns a husband and wife who have a misunderstanding but who make up over the grave of their child; the second intercalary lyric is the song of a mother telling her child that the father who is away at sea will soon come home; the lyric following Part V is about a woman whose husband is killed and who herself is about to die of sorrow until she reflects that she must live for her child. The Prince himself calls "Come down, O maid" a "Sweet idyl" (VII. 176). There are also other characteristics of the idyll in "The Princess." Psyche's baby is certainly an idyllic figure. Like the child in "Dora," who effects the reconciliation between the father and his son's family, Aglaia softens the hardened heart of the Princess. The northern king is the stock idyllic figure of the tyrannical father. Cyril was "a gentleman of broken means— / His father's fault" (I. 51-52), like the hero of "Maud." It is primarily, though, in the Prologue and the Conclusion that we find the most outstanding qualities of the idyll. In the 1842 Poems we witnessed how Tennyson had enlarged the scope of the idyll—for example, in "Audley Court," "Walking to the Mail," "Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue"—to include a consideration of political matters and social conditions. The poet was fully aware of the evils of an industrial society, as he had shown in "Locksley Hall" and "Edwin Morris." His remedy, the logical result of his Burkean thinking, was the guidance and the beneficence of the upper classes, and in his poetry he told the aristocracy that they had a social duty to the lower classes. This was their noblesse oblige, and if they performed their obligation then English life would become an ideal society. The picture that Tennyson paints of England, therefore, is an idealized one, a country "peopled by contented peasants, who bow

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deferentially to their superiors, a society organized in a hierarchy culminating in the great house. Here dwelt a select and cultured few, who discuss mild philosophy, profess a languid enthusiasm for slowly broadening freedom, and, in moments of leisure, thank God for the existence of the narrow seas that protect them from 'the mad fool fury of the Seine.''" In such fashion both the Prologue and the Conclusion to "The Princess," both of which are idylls, present Tennyson's ideal of the perfect society. In the Prologue Sir Walter demonstrates his sense of social responsibility by opening his estate to the people for a summer's day. Aunt Elizabeth, herself something of a feminist, foresees that out of the aristocracy's concern for the lower classes there will come for England an even better society, as she "Took this fair day for text, and from it preach'd / An universal culture for the crowd" (108-109). The description of the setting and of the crowd's activities recalls Tennyson's purely descriptive idylls such as "Audley Court" and in its mixture of the pastoral and modern science resembles "Locksley Hall": For all the sloping pasture murmur'd, sown With happy faces and with holiday. There moved the multitude, a thousand heads; The patient leaders of their Institute Taught them with facts. One rear'd a font of stone And drew, from butts of water on the slope, The fountain of the moment, playing, now A twisted snake, and now a rain of pearls, Or steep-up spout whereon the gilded ball Danced like a wisp; and somewhat lower down A man with knobs and wires and vials fired A cannon; Echo answer'd in her sleep From hollow fields; and here were telescopes

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For azure views; and there a group of girls In circle waited, whom the electric shock Dislink'd with shrieks and laughter; round the lake A little clock-work steamer paddling plied And shook the lilies; perch'd about the knolls A dozen angry models jetted steam; A petty railway ran; a fire-balloon Rose gem-like up before the dusky groves And dropt a fairy parachute and past; And there thro' twenty posts of telegraph They flash'd saucy message to and fro Between the mimic stations; so that sport Went hand in hand with science. (55-80.) At the end of this vignette Tennyson adds another staple of his poetic wares—the lush Keatsian diction with its savoring of onomatopoetic long vowels: The broad ambrosial aisles of lofty lime Made noise with bees and breeze from end to end (87-88.) Not only the setting but also the characters are, Tennyson would remind us, typically English. Lilia, as thoroughly English as the miller's or the gardener's daughter, is "sweet as English air could make her" (154). Her idyllic qualities are further pointed up when she is described, as Tennyson had painted the gardener's daughter, as a rose and as a "little hearth-flower" (153, 165). We know already that Lilia would make an excellent wife, and we are a little disappointed in the end of the poem when no one of the young gentlemen declares his love for her. In the Conclusion we find Tennyson at his worst: the chauvinism and Galliphobia that announced themselves in the "National Song" of 1830 are here taken to their zenith. Speaking with the self-righteousness of Pallas in "Oenone,"

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the "Tory member's eldest son" bursts into a hymn in praise of E n g l a n d : God bless the narrow sea which keeps her off, And keeps our Britain, whole within herself, A nation yet, the rulers and the ruled— Some sense of duty, something of a faith. Some reverence for the laws ourselves have made, Some patient force to change them when we will, Some civic manhood firm against the crowd— (51-57.) A n d following this paean comes a tirade against F r a n c e : But yonder, whiff! there comes a sudden heat, The gravest citizen seems to lose his head, The king is scared, the soldier will not fight, The little boys begin to shoot and stab, A kingdom topples over with a shriek Like an old woman, and down rolls the world In mock heroics stranger than our own. (58-64.) Tennyson was becoming more and more convinced that the old order was changing, that the world was on the brink of revolution; and only in the stability provided by English family life did he see a way of maintaining the traditional values that he so prized. This was, I believe, one of the very reasons that, in speaking to the age, he turned to the idyll to provide for his readers the pattern of social life he advocated as the bulwark against violent change. T h e fate of his world depended on the "great broad-shoulder'd genial Englishman" (85) who assumed the responsibility for bettering the condition of the lower classes. In spite of Tennyson's reservations about the state of the world beyond the English Channel, the predominant tone of "The Princess" is optimistic. Not only does Aunt

188 Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 Elizabeth foresee a universal culture for the crowd "And all things great" (Prol. 108-110), but Ida herself hears 'A trumpet in the distance pealing news I Of better" (IV. 63-64). The Prince predicts that the day will come when men and women will be completely equal. Then will comc "the statelier Eden back to men" and then, anticipatory of "In Memoriam," will spring "the crowning race of humankind" (VII. 277-279). In the Conclusion the poet, who recognizes that "ourselves are full I Of social wrong," is filled with a faith in progress (Conclusion 72-79); and the poem closes with the group sitting "rapt in nameless reverie / Perchance upon the future man" (Conclusion 108-109), whom they doubtless envision as greater in both heart and mind than the man of the present and who will find an important place in "In Memoriam." Tennyson's belief in progress almost certainly was stimulated and reinforced by his reading in evolutionary science, and "The Princess" is crammed, sometimes seemingly to no point, with scientific allusions. Psyche lectures on the development of the world from "fluid haze of light" to planet and on the evolution of man from monster (II. 101-108); the Princess leads her collegians on a geological expedition to examine "certain strata to the north" (III. 154), where the ladies chatter of "shale and hornblende, rag and trap and tuff, I Amygdaloid and trachyte" (III. 344-345); Gama recalls that Ida and Psyche spent whole nights talking of "sine and arc, spheroid and azimuth" (VI. 239). This scientific allusiveness is not new: there are, for example, references to geology in "The Epic," "Audley Court," and "Edwin Morris," to foetal development in the discarded verses of "The Palace of Art," and to the evolutionary idea in "The Two Voices"; but it exists in greater profusion in "The Princess," as though Tennyson would make his poetry

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as reflective of the ideas and problems of his age as possible. In all these respects—the depiction of domestic joy and domestic sorrow, the victory of love, the inculcation of a moral, the consideration of social and scientific matters— "The Princess" follows the idyllic formula as previously outlined by the poet. The poem is indeed what Professor Baum has called it: "a kind of idyll on a large scale.'" Tennyson had learned what was expected of him and he was shrewd enough to know how he pleased most; and in writing "The Princess" he did not allow himself to stray far from the idyll, with which he had gained success in the 1842 Poems. There are very few traces of "The Lotus-Eaters" and the other poems that manifest Tennyson's early aestheticism. Occasionally, though, we find little vignettes of pictorial description, which recall "The Palace of Art." These serve no real purpose and are not required by the dramatic situation; they seem to exist only for their arrangement of vowel and consonant sounds and for their picturesque qualities: We follow'd up the river as we rode, And rode till midnight, when the college lights Began to glitter firefly-like in copse And linden alley; then we past an arch, Whereon a woman-statue rose with wings From four wing'd horses dark against the stars, And some inscription ran along the front, But deep in shadow. Further on we gain'd A little street half garden and half house, But scarce could hear each other speak for noise Of clocks and chimes, like silver hammers falling On silver anvils and the splash and stir Of fountains spouted up and showering down In meshes of the jasmine and the rose; And all about us peal'd the nightingale, Rapt in her song and careless of the snare. (I. 203-218);

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or: we climb'd The slope to Vivian-place, and turning saw The happy valleys, half in light, and half Far-shadowing from the west, a land of peace; Gray halls alone among their massive groves; Trim hamlets; here and there a rustic tower Half-lost in belts of hop and breadths of wheat; The shimmering glimpses of a stream; the seas; A red sail, or a white; and far beyond, imagined more than seen, the skirts of France. (Concl. 39-48.) Dramatically irrelevant though these little pictures are, they had nevertheless become part of Tennyson's idyllic formula, and so they were accepted not as extraneous but as part of the genre—the English eclogue—which Tennyson had perfected. In this way the poet could indulge his love of the picturesque and at the same time make his landscapes appear to serve the purpose of scientific observation and psychological experience. N o doubt Tennyson believed that he was performing the service to the age that Ruskin, in his essay "Pre-Raphaelitism," attributed to the Pre-Raphaelites, who were doing their "true duty" by "the faithful representation of all objects of historical interest, or of natural beauty existent at the period; representation such as might at once aid the advance of sciences, and keep faithful record of every monument of past ages which was likely to be swept away in the approaching eras of revolutionary change."* In short, he was dedicating his poetry to morality, beauty, and science, which are roughly the three sisters of the dedicatory poem to "The Palace of Art." At last Tennyson was beginning to effect, in his own mind, the reconciliation of the qualities that formerly he had, in practice at least, regarded

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as opposites, an act of harmonizing that he saw as the function of the poet who regarded poetry as mission. In one of Ida's pronouncements we suspect that through her voice we can hear the poet himself speaking. As though it were Tennyson with the diffidence of hindsight commenting on his earlier poetic practices, the Princess proclaims that those who sing only as an expression of emotion "blaspheme the muse." But, she says, great is song Used to great ends; ourself have often tried Valkyrian hymns, or into rhythm have dash'd The passion of the prophetess; for song Is duer unto freedom, force and growth Of spirit, than to junketing and love. (IV. 119-124.) Doubtless Tennyson at the time fancied himself in "The Princess" singing to great ends. He had accepted the challenge thrown out by the reviewers to write a long poem and to speak to his age; he had eschewed his earlier aestheticism and written not about himself but about a problem of interest to his time; and thus he probably thought of his poem as a Valkyrian hymn. The judgment of the modern reader, however, is more likely that of the maturer Tennyson who said that though "The Princess" has many good things in it and "though truly original, it is, after all, only a medley" (Memoir, I, 70-71). In spite of its diffuse structure "The Princess" gives every indication of Tennyson's growing confidence in himself as poet. As in the dramatic monologues and idylls of 1842, he has removed himself entirely from the poem. There may be, certainly, overtones of the poet himself in the speeches and in the character of the Prince. At the beginning of the poem the Prince experiences all the uncertainties that the author

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had undergone: unsure of himself and of his actions, he withdraws from external reality whenever he is unable to meet the demands of the present. But the Prince never denies existence by a complete unwillingness to face it. He is not a Lady of Shalott who shuts himself up in a tower and finds himself condemned to see the world forever through shadows. He has a curse placed on him, to be sure, just as the Lady of Shalott has; but he does not submit to it, he tries to overcome it by finding fulfillment in the real world. And the outcome of his quest for identity in the external world is entirely opposite to the Lady of Shalott's: where his fate is to expiate the curse, that of the Lady's is to be broken by it. As allegory, then, if such it can be called, "The Princess" offers an entirely different meaning from "The Lady of Shalott": while in the earlier poem the poet had shown that the self-absorbed spirit may be destroyed by its attempt to mingle with reality, in "The Princess" he insists l hat self-withdrawal and the pains of delusion attendant on it, in the case of Ida as well as in the case of the Prince, can be remedied by involvement in the world and identification through love with other human beings. By a comparison of these two poems we see a complete change in the thinking of the poet. During the nineteen years separating the first publication of "The Lady of Shalott" and the fourth edition of "The Princess," when the seizures were added, Tennyson had found a resolution to his uncertainties concerning the function of the poet: from belief in the poet as one who sings only for the joy and beauty of song he moved to belief in the poet as the spokesman to his age. Occasionally, of course, some of his earlier aestheticism would crop up, just as themes from his previous verse continue to reappear. But these are subordinated to the

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main theme and do not interfere with the focus of the poem, as had been the case in so many instances earlier. Just as his poetry had changed, so had the condition of the man himself altered. By 1851 he was no longer the impecunious, unrecognized poet. His poems had been widely acclaimed, he had overcome his financial difficulties, he had married Emily Sellwood. But even though his status had changed, he was not entirely a changed poet. For in "The Princess," ostensibly designed to treat the problems of his age, he continued to enrich his poetry with his own private vision into the realms of the imagination.

NOTES 1

Edgar F. Shannon, Jr., Tennyson and the Reviewers (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 92. 'Wilfrid Ward, Aubrey de Verc, a Memoir (London, 1904), pp. 87, 74. * "The Princess" underwent great modification in four editions after its first publication in 1847. The second edition of 1848, with the dedication to Henry Lushington, contained only slight alterations. In the third edition of 1850 the text was extensively altered, and the six intercalary songs were added. A fourth edition was issued in 1851, its most prominent additions being the "weird seizures" of the Prince; and the fifth edition of 1853, after which there were only a few minor changes made in the text, marked an expansion of the Prologue. As in the poems treated in previous chapters, I am here interested only in the completed poem. ' The sources of the poem are traced in John Killham, Tennyson and The Princess (London, 1958), Chapter X. 6 The theme of mutability, prominent in Tennyson's earliest poems, finds but small place in "The Princess." One example, however: Ida tells of her love for children, but she will not attach herself to them because they, unlike great deeds, will die (III. 235-237). 'Alfred Tennyson (London, 1949), p. 262. ' C. F. G. Masterman, Tennyson as a Religious Thinker (Boston, 1900), p. 192. ' Paull F. Baum, Tennyson Sixty Years After (Chapel Hill, 1948), p. 162. ' The Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London, 1904), XII, 349.

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CHAPTER

In

VI

Memoriam

"In Memoriam," an elegy on the death of Arthur Henry Hallam, is composed of 131 lyrics, with Prologue and Epilogue. It was not, however, begun as an extended poem. "I did not write them," Tennyson said of his lyrics, "with any view of weaving them into a whole, or for publication, until I found that I had written so many" (Memoir, I, 304). The lyrics that constitute the poem were written over some sixteen years, from receipt of news of Hallam's death in October, 1833, to composition of the Prologue in 1849. A trial issue of the poem entitled "Fragments of an Elegy" was run off in the early spring of 1850, and the poem was published anonymously on June 1. Two sections were added after the first edition of 1850, when there were 129 sections: LIX was inserted in the fourth edition (1851) and XXXIX was added in 1871. The elegy began as the lyric expression of private grief but broadened into an attempt to probe and answer the spiritual problems of the age. "In Memoriam" is thus a lyric and philosophical poem, a very complicated one, and I cannot hope to treat it exhaustively. I shall approach it primarily as poetry and not as a document in the history of 195

196 Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 ideas. I shall follow the schematization of the poem outlined by A. C. Bradley in his Commentary : namely, the three Christmas seasons serving as chronological points dividing the elegy into four parts: Part I, lyrics I-XXVII; Part II, XXVIII-LXXVII; Part III, LXXVIII-CIII; Part IV, CIVCXXXI. Tennyson was insistent that the " I " in the poem "is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking thro' him" (Memoir, I, 305). This statement, on the surface so pontifical, is perhaps more meaningful than it would at first appear; for, using the words of the sage to be sure, he means what Wordsworth meant in the "Intimations Ode" when he switched from "I" in the first part of the poem to "we" in the second part: that is, he attempted to generalize his situation so that the speaker would become representative of all thinking men who have been faced with the loss of a loved one and an attendant loss of religious belief. But surely Tennyson should have amplified his statement to warn his readers of what he himself certainly knew: that the " I " when it does refer to the poet himself does so in a twofold fashion—to Tennyson the man and to Tennyson the poet. Sometimes, it happens, the two are not the same, just as in the "Ode to a Nightingale" when Keats speaks of dying on the midnight with no pain, he speaks as poet and not as man. The persona, therefore, is really personae, and "In Memoriam," besides being the "Way of a Soul," as Tennyson subtitled his elegy, is also the Way of a Poet.' I shall try to point out how in speaking in these two voices Tennyson makes of "In Memoriam" an autobiography which traces, like "The Prelude," the growth of a poet's mind and, like the "Essay on Man," the spiritual character of its era.

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I It is very difficult to date the various sections of "In Memoriam," and all who are unaware of the difficulty should consult the appendix to Mrs. Mattes' book In Memoriam: The Way of a Soul.2 I of course do not know when the first lyric was composed, but I should guess that it was well after a number of other sections of the poem had been written. For in Section I there is a degree of artistic objectivity which would suggest that it does not stem from the period of the initial shock of Hallam's death, but rather that it was affixed at a later date to serve as an introduction to Part 1.1 mention this because I think it would be well to examine closely the first lyric to see what Tennyson is here doing. Too many students of "In Memoriam" are inclined to regard the tone of the first part of the poem as wholly that of despair in which the poet gives vent to an ungovemed sense of grief. This is not entirely true, as an examination of the introductory lyric will indicate. There is no hint in this section that the speaker has given or will give himself over completely to the emotion of grief. It is apparent from lines 5-6 that the possibility of release from and even compensation for his grief may eventually result. The fact that he asks the question—"But who shall so forecast the years / And find in loss a gain to match?"—implies there is an answer. In the meanwhile, before the gain to match the loss can be found, it is better to mix his grief, the negative emotion, with love, the positive emotion, so that both together might triumph over time. There is a note of affirmation and self-control in this assertion. A certain tone of artistic detachment is noticeable in the poet's use of personification and of the obviously "poetic" locution "victor Hours." And upon close inspection

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the reader sees that the poet is setting up the themes that he will use in Part 1 and indeed in the whole p o e m : the interplay between love and grief and the conquest of time by love. The sort of poetic artifice he has here employed cannot, however, carry the burden of expression of what is essentially lyric emotion, and like lyricists of love f r o m Shakespeare onward Tennyson turns to nature for meaning and for metaphor. We have already observed in the previous poems Tennyson's thoroughgoing love of nature. With Hallam's death there was additional reason for his turning to the world of external nature: the mind had suffered profound shock and had proved that it was not sufficient unto itself, yet still the world of men seemed meaningless as a source of comfort (as Poem VI makes clear). Finding the rest of life harsh and repugnant, Tennyson turned, as did Wordsworth in disillusionment with the affairs of men, to nature, which was to serve in the initial stages of his grief as a consolation and as a point of poetic departure. As in the previous poems wherein Tennyson used pathetic fallacy as testimony to his belief in the duality of appearance and reality, he resorts in "In M e m o r i a m " to the same device, hoping to find the ultimate reality by identification of himself with natural things. We find that in Section II, for example, he identifies himself completely with the yew, which serves as a symbol of gloom and also of immortality. He sets up the yew as the opposite of the tree of life: it grasps at the bones of the dead and remains steadfast in its gloom amidst the change and decay of brighter, happier things. We have the impression that we have been introduced to a world that has been completely turned upside down, a world in which the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Life have become a graveyard and a yew. But as in nearly every other

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lyric of Part I, there is a subtle transmutation in tone, for the yew symbol in the closing quatrain becomes a symbol not only of gloom but also in its "stubborn hardihood" of staunch defiance; and in identifying himself with his symbol ("I seem to fail f r o m out my blood / And grow incorporate in thee") the speaker declares his resolve not to be overwhelmed by his sorrow. Already he has found meaning for himself in nature, but he is unwilling to accept unquestioned any kind of comfort. His sorrow will not let him be, and because of her constant companionship he comes to look upon her as almost human, a tormentor, like the voice of negation in "The Two Voices," who must always turn comfort into despair. In the same way as he uses pathetic fallacy Tennyson attempts through personification to find identification with something behind surface appearance, and so after an almost complete sense of oneness with the yew he goes on in Section III to commune with Sorrow. She tells him that Nature is a blind thing, that the music of Nature is but a hollow echo, that Nature is " A hollow form with empty hands"; in other words, Nature is capricious, indifferent, and unstable, the exact opposite of the yew-tree, the thing of Nature, in II, and therefore not worth trusting and identifying oneself with. If Nature is the reflection of man, it is simply the reflection of a hollow form. This marks the first appearance of the speaker's doubt, later so often discussed, whether the universe is not entirely devoid of spirit, operating only through fixed mechanical law. But imbued with years of Romantic teaching about nature, he recoils, almost in horror, from accepting such a notion, and rhetorically asks whether Sorrow should not be crushed. T h e possibility of a blind, indifferent nature is not fully rejected in III, but the reader is made to see that the speaker

200 Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 cannot accept such a belief when in V he speaks of the soul of nature. This oscillation between opposing moods and ideas is, like the natural description, a very functional part of "In Memoriam," for it suggests the whole jnovement of the poem from doubt and despair to a final resolution. Thus we will find Tennyson using the beneficent aspects of nature to mirror his own sense of calm, as in XI, while but a few sections later employing the same autumn setting in an atmosphere of storm to indicate his feeling of unrest. For the most part Tennyson relies on the conventional and familiar associations with various natural scenes to convey his meaning. This is particularly true in his use of light and heat imagery. Part I is shrouded in images of mistiness and darkness. "Dark," "gloom," "haze," "mist," "blind"—these, suggestive of futility and nothingness, are the words that predominate. The friend is dead and the speaker is left in darkness. The "magic light" (VIII) is gone, he has lost "The very source and fount of day" (XXIV), and the poet, who has become "bondsman to the dark" (IV), avers that "all is dark where thou art not" (VIII). And the loss of light has resulted in a cold, damp atmosphere in which the "deep vase of chilling tears" has been turned into frost (IV) and in which tears "at their fountain freeze" (XX). The speaker is thus left "Cold in that atmosphere of death" (XX). At its most intense the absence of heat and light creates the effect of an emotional wasteland, as in the famous Section VII where the break of day brings no light and warmth: And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain On the bald street breaks the blank day. But this mood is not sustained, for the poet never fully rejects the possibility that there will once again be heat and light.

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Even in the earliest sections at least a glimmer of light manages to shine through the surrounding darkness. In IV, where he allows his will to become "bondsman to the dark," the dawn of a new day brings a transition from the feeling of utter loss to a more positive position in which the will affirms, "Thou shalt not be the fool of loss." Another very important tactile image is the human hand, and it is closely associated with the images of light and warmth. In the first sections of "In Memoriam" before Tennyson has had time fully to assess his response to the loss of his friend, he dwells not so much on his deprivation of Hallam's spirit and intelligence as on the loss of the friend's physical presence. He consequently mourns and longs for immediate sensuous contact with the dead man. He speaks of "waiting for a hand, / A hand that can be clasp'd no more" (VII), he laments the loss of the "hands so often clasp'd in mine" (X). To indicate this loss of sensuous presence, Tennyson often compares his loss to that of a widow or to that of a young maiden who has been deprived of her lover. The theme of domestic love is, as we have seen, common fare with Tennyson, and a number of lyrics are written according to the idyllic formula. This is certainly true of VI, which treats of parents' loss of a child and of a maiden's loss of her betrothed. And it is true of VIII, about a lover's loss of his beloved, which is banally redolent of the worst excesses of Wordsworthian domesticity: A happy lover who has come T o look on her that loves him well. Who 'lights and rings the gateway bell, And learns her gone and far from home; He saddens.

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Such vignettes are not, however, purposeless. For by means of them Tennyson introduces the theme of marriage, which plays in the Epilogue such an important part in the poem. In the beautiful stanzas concerned with the ship bringing home Hallam's remains Tennyson contrives once again to set up meaningful symbols. In speaking of himself and Hallam he uses the image of the ship, but the ship identified with Hallam is in marked contrast to the vessel that refers to the speaker. The ship is fair that holds Hallam's remains (IX), is a "sacred bark" (XVII): almost like Noah's ark it holds the only promise of life. The poet's ship, on the other hand, is a "helmless bark" (IV), a "mortal ark . . . of nerves without a mind" (XII), an "unhappy bark," which having struck a rock staggers blindly before it sinks (XVI). His own ship of uncertainty and aimlessness must, therefore, be abandoned. The same contrast is made of the sea when it is associated with Hallam and with the speaker. Most fittingly does Tennyson use this archetypal image: the sea, the symbol of life itself, is calm and quiet when connected with Hallam, but when associated with the speaker it becomes, as in "The Lotus-Eaters" where it is symbolic of external reality, turbulent. In XIX Tennyson very skillfully manipulates the water image to the point where it aptly symbolizes his own condition. As the tide passes by the Severn to the Wye, its flood, the poet says, hushes the babbling river, but as the tide ebbs the river grows shallower and babbles again. His grief is thus like the tide: only when grief recedes a little can he speak. Most of the images that Tennyson uses are those he dredges up out of memory or, more exactly, those he has used before and found meaningful or comforting. This is true, for example, of the dark house of Section VII, which Tennyson uses as he did in "The Deserted House" and

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"Mariana" as symbols of deprivation of love. One is reminded of the early "Ode to Memory" in which he invokes memory "To glorify the present" and to "Strengthen me, enlighten me." In "In Memoriam" the retreat to the past once again manifests itself in several series of retrospective poems, such as XXII-XXV, in which he compares the happy past with the sorrowful present. But Tennyson does not permit himself to escape entirely from present reality: in his previous poetry he had fought too hard with his escapist tendencies to turn completely away from what he was now beginning to recognize as his duty as poet. Thus he speaks in X X I V of his misgivings about the actual happiness of the past: And is it that the haze of grief Makes former gladness loom so great? The lowness of the present state, That sets the past in this relief? Or that the past will always win A glory from its being far, And orb into the perfect star We saw not when we moved therein? And he begins X X V I with the assertion Still onward winds the dreary way; I with it, for I long to prove No lapse of moons can canker Love, Whatever fickle tongues may say. The interplay between past and present is closely allied to the theme of sleep and dream. In Tennyson's previous poetry we have found that escape into the world of sleep and dreams had been restorative or had resulted in profounder insights than could be attained by means of waking consciousness.

204 Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 This, howveer, is not always the case in "In Memoriam." In Poem IV, for example, the speaker avers his desire to sublimate his anxiety by sleep; but the loss of consciousness only brings in tenser grief: Such clouds of nameless trouble cross All night below the darken'd eyes. The conscious will may be put to sleep but no relief comes; and it is only with the dawn that there comes any kind of assuagement, for the will asserts, "Thou shalt not be the fool of loss." The speaker thus vacillates between the urge to escape and the necessity to face his dilemma, between "calm despair and wild unrest" (XVI). Although he may occasionally express a desire to die or to retreat from present reality into a world of fancy, his love for his dead friend causes him to banish all such thoughts, to prove that "No lapse of moons can canker Love" (XXVI). Part I of "In Memoriam" ends with an affirmation which is achieved by negation, and most probably it was written several years after the preceding lyrics. Poem X X V I I states: I envy not in any moods The captive void of noble rage, The linnet born within the cage, That never knew the summer woods; I envy not the beast that takes His license in the field of time, Unfetter'd by the sense of crime. To whom a conscience never wakes; Nor, what may count itself as blest, The heart that never plighted troth But stagnates in the weeds of sloth; Nor any want-begotten rest.

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These statements are, of course, a reversal of the escapist theme in "Supposed Confessions," in which he had envied the beast of the field for the conscience that never wakes. The emotion of love, which in "The Devil and the Lady" he had apostrophized as the "vast link of the creation," and which we have seen him carefully working out as the connecting bridge between self and external reality, has caused the poet to end the first part of his spiritual autobiography with the roundest of declarations: 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all. (XXVII.) In spite of his sorrow he does not long for any kind of noncommitment: henceforth he will recognize himself as part of the universe, a man among men. Such a positive position has been reached, however, only by means of dialectic, which is plainly indicated by the pointcounterpoint effect of the varying images and by the interplay between joy and sorrow, past and present, grief and love. As we have seen already, this is the Tennyson method. Here the poet moves in two conflicting directions at once— the desire to fr^e himself from his dependence on Hallam and the wish to be reunited with Hallam—one direction moving in time, the other in eternity. As in Eliot's "Four Quartets," the poet must "collapse" time before he can resolve his dilemma. The interaction between the temporal and the eternal is particularly noticeable in the subtly changing status of the dead Hallam in response to the psychological and philosophical needs of the speaker. In "In Memoriam" Tennyson substitutes a symbolic and transformed Hallam for the figure of Christ. I hesitate to use the term Christ-figure, which is by

206 Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 now a cliché, but in a sense that is what the dead friend becomes; for within the progression of the elegy from doubt to faith Arthur Henry Hallam becomes for the speaker not only the departed friend who is mourned but also the saviour to whom the speaker looks for rescue from his doubt and despair. None of this is clear in the poem because it comes about rather surreptitiously and confusedly. Tennyson, his son tells us, "disliked discussion on the Nature of Christ" (Memoir, I, 326), which is to say that he did not wish to confront his ideas head on. Instead, he wished to keep his religious belief under the cover of accepted Christian forms and conduct, in other words to breathe new life into an old form. The speaker visits Hallam's house, and using the same language as the Apostles finds "He is not here" (VII). As a burial place for the deceased he suggests "where the kneeling hamlet drains / The chalice of the grapes of God" (X). He nevertheless thinks of Hallam as "The human-hearted man I loved" (XIII), a man all too mortal. Yet as he gives vent to his grief, feeling that life is not worth living and finding relief nowhere, Hallam bit by bit begins to change in his mind and becomes "The man I held as half-divine" (XIV). After the nineteenth poem, the pain of grief having somewhat abated, the speaker begins in XX and XXI to assess his response to the experience of loss and refers to Hallam (or Hallam's body) as "sacred dust" (XXI). Throughout Part I of "In Memoriam" there is only a hint of the religious doubts that were to preoccupy the poet's mind in the succeeding parts of the elegy. The emphasis in Part I is not so much on the speaker's relationship to God and to other men as it is on the speaker's separation from a loved one and on his complete isolation now that his friend is

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gone. We have examined many times in Tennyson's poetry the theme of isolation, weaving its way in and out of his verse as though it were a kind of leimotiv used to signify the poet who experiences a certain lack of communication both as man and as poet with his fellows. One can, I think, argue quite plausibly that if Hallam had not died, Tennyson would never have felt the extreme need to become the bard and sage that he so definitely sought to be. But the loss of Hallam, perhaps the one man who was able to comfort him and alleviate the sense of loneliness, resulted in the poet's feeling himself cut off from nearly all sources of joy and well-being. Like the Ancient Mariner, he felt himself all alone on a wide, wide sea in a kind of moveless state, which he symbolized by the ship. For this reason Hallam's death created, or at least intensified, a need for complete spiritual regeneration. But Tennyson was a poet, a congenital poet if there is any such thing—and the need for spiritual reorientation necessarily meant a synchronous need for poetic redirection. Now, the latter is a very difficult matter to talk about if we do not keep in mind the fact that the poem was begun in 1833 and thus traces Tennyson's poetic development through various stages, which we have regarded in certain poems in the preceding chapters. For in Tennyson's case the new "way" of the soul meant a new "way" of the poet, and, I repeat, as much as "The Prelude," "In Memoriam" testifies to the growth of the poet's mind. We have already noticed Tennyson's early conception of poetry as escape from the demands of reality, and it should come as no surprise that the first reference to poetry in "In Memoriam" alludes to this idea. In Lyric V the poet looks to poetry for anodyne:

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But, for the unquiet heart and brain, A use in measured language lies; The sad mechanic exercise, Like dull narcotics, numbing pain; and he avers that In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er, Like coarsest clothes against the cold. He realizes that in the commonly accepted definition of the word this is not poetry at all; rather, it is simply a private ritual which expresses his grief and which, within the convention of the pastoral elegy, must be sung by one shepherd upon the loss of another: So seems it in my deep regret, 0 my forsaken heart, with thee And this poor flower of poesy Which, littled cared for, fades not yet. But since it pleased a vanish'd eye, 1 go to plant it on his tomb, That if it can it there may bloom, Or, dying, there at least may die. (VIII.) He has doubts, however, whether he will be able to continue even this kind of poetry. His "calm despair and wild unrest" produce, he feels, the lack of emotional tranquillity necessary for poetic creativity. Echoing the mood of "Supposed Confessions," wherein he declared himself "void, / Dark, formless, utterly destroyed," he questions whether his sorrow has not stunn'd me from my power to think And all my knowledge of myself;

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And made me that delirious man Whose fancy fuses old and new, And flashes into false and true, And mingles all without a plan? (XVI) Between conception and creation falls the shadow of death. The distorting power of grief, crippling the shaping power of the imagination, is referred to again in X I X : sorrow, like the sea-water which hushes the babbling Wye, drowns song. Even when he can sing he is incapable of dealing with the enormity of the experience, and only in "lighter moods" can he speak and "out of words a comfort win" (XX). Up to this point the speaker has regarded his poetry only as emotional relief and private ceremony. By the twenty-first lyric Tennyson must have begun to contemplate publication of his poems, for he imagines the comments that critics will make. These imaginary comments are all slighting, denigrating the complete subjectivity of the utterances and their failure to take account of the problems of the age: 'This fellow would make weakness weak, And melt the waxen hearts of men.' Another answers: 'Let him be, He loves to make parade of pain, That with his piping he may gain The praise that comes to constancy.' A third is wroth: 'Is this an hour For private sorrow's barren song, When more and more the people throng The chairs and thrones of civil power? 'A time to sicken and to swoon, When Science reaches forth her arms To feel from world to world, and charms Her secret from the latest moon?'

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The poet's reply to these censorious comments is that he writes only to give vent to his emotion: "I do but sing because I must." His method of composition is the result of a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion: "breaking into song by fits" (XXIII). The most striking characteristic of Part I is that it is so completely Tennysonian. No poem in this part—and I do not think this entirely true of the poems in the other parts— could possibly be mistaken for the work of any poet other than Tennyson. For Tennyson was most himself when his melancholic sensibility was activated and nourished by loss. At such times he was liberated from a concern with his mission as an oracular poet, which role he often assumed with a certain half-hidden misgiving, and was allowed to concentrate his energies on the personal and the lyric. The immediate response to Hallam's death—and this of course is the business of Part I—was a poetry of intensely felt emotion: there is no artificial covering surrounding the early sections, there is only the soul of the poet laid bare. His beautiful pictures of autumn landscapes—sections XI and XV—are not only decorative: his paintings of the fading season—the autumn yellows and reds and browns—are in the Tennysonian mood, a dying nature serving, as in the maiden poems, to complement the cheerlessness of the speaker's passions. Nowhere in Part I do we find directly stated a concern with the major social and religious interests of the three later parts. This does not mean, though, that Part I is unrelated to the other parts, because there is a passing glance cast at all the later themes. Section XXI serves this very purpose since the imaginary critics accuse the poet of failure to treat science and politics. The poet's own reply characterizes the whole subject of the first part: like the linnet whose note is

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sad because her brood has been stolen away, he sings of himself and of the personal meaning of his loss. Part I is thus an introduction that serves to set up the situation and introduce the main themes, which will become enlarged when the crystallization of the feeling of personal loss broadens into a wider range of emotional and intellectual crisis.

II Section XXVIII, which begins the second part of "In Memoriam," is essentially a transitional poem, for it gives a retrospective of the poet's emotional state in the preceding sections and hints at a new direction which the elegy is now to take. He reviews his longing for death, the desire expressed in "Tithonus": This year I slept and woke with pain, I almost wish'd no more to wake, And that my hold on life would break Before I heard those bells again. But the sound of the Christmas bells breaks off this morbid exposition; bringing back fond memories of the past, they evoke a new response: "They bring me sorrow touch'd with joy," an ambivalence that is prepared for in Part I. Bells are mentioned on two occasions in the first twentyseven sections: in VIII a lover rings the gateway bell to call on his beloved, and in X the poet hears the bell of the ship bringing Hallam's body. The sound of the first bell elicits happiness and the second is sad. The response to the bell in XXVIII therefore is a fusion of the previous responses to bells. This may of course be pure accident, but I choose to believe it an example of Tennyson's great artistry. There

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is a further subtlety in the poet's using the glorious and festive aspect of the Christmas bells for purposes of ironic contrast to his own sorrowful state. Mention of Christ and Christmas, neither of which is alluded to in Part I, brings to mind the question of Hallam's continued existence in another world. The speaker's first consideration of the dead man's state is simply that death means rest from toil; this is his first "gentler feeling" after his complete absorption in grief. Echoing almost exactly the mariners' song in "The Lotus-Eaters," he says that "surely rest is meet." But the idea stated in "The Lotus-Eaters," that death brings only inaction and oblivion to mundane care, was the conception, indeed the comfort, of a young man who, posing as the Byronic outcast, had had little personal association with death. When faced with the loss of an intimate friend, he was forced to revise his ideas, because the emotional demands of his nature would not allow him to believe in the absence of life and energy after death; it was necessary to postulate the possibility of reunion with his dead friend. Here for the first time Tennyson enters directly into the main theme of his elegy; for the poem turns away from exclusive concern with loss to a more important concern with reunion, one of the controlling ideas of "Ulysses" and "Morte d'Arthur." More explicitly then, "In Memoriam" becomes involved in a consideration of two planes of existence—the earthly world of time and the timeless other world of eternity—and of the reconciliation of these two levels. To gain the other world of timelessness, the creature in time must in some way transcend time; and this becomes the business of the poet in Part II. From rejection of the idea of death as final oblivion, the poet changes his song at the first Christmas celebration, his voice taking "a higher range" to sing:

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They do not die Nor lose their mortal sympathy, Nor change to us, although they change; Rapt from the fickle and the frail With gather'd power, yet the same, Pierces the keen seraphic flame From orb to orb, from veil to veil. (XXX.) A s in Part I, the ideas of the second part d o not proceed in solely one direction. A progression in thought occurs only after a dialectic treatment of the subject under consideration, and once again this backing and starting is indicated by the movement of the imagery within the individual lyrics. Thus we witness Section X X X moving from the rainy cloud shrouding Christmas Eve in darkness and sorrow to the invocation at the end where the poet sings: Rise, happy morn, rise, holy morn, Draw forth the cheerful day from night: O Father, touch the east, and light The light that shone when Hope was born. The vivid images of light, it should be noticed, do not completely counterbalance the darkness. Hallam has been for the poet the "very source and fount of day," the equivalent in metaphorical terms of Wordsworth's visionary gleam; and the loss of his friend has left the speaker in almost total darkness. He is "An infant crying in the night; I A n infant crying for the light" (LIV), and to Hallam in the world beyond he must appear "a growth of cold and night, . . . blanch'd with darkness" (LX1). Hallam, on the other hand, is encircled by light. The contrasting states of light and darkness are well shown in Section LXV1I, wherein Hallam's grave glows even in the dark:

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Thy marble bright in dark appears, As slowly steals a silver flame Along the letters of thy name. And o'er the number of thy years, while the speaker is left in darkness. The light imagery clearly underscores the meaning of the elegy, for it indicates that were it not for the hope of Hallam's return or of communion with the dead friend— either physically or spiritually—the mind would be permanently diseased and veiled in darkness. This is suggested early in the second part: My own dim life should teach me this, That life shall live for evermore, Else earth is darkness at the core, And dust and ashes all that is. (XXXIV.) Only the hope that Hallam still lives offers release from the "vacant darkness," and only Hallam can point the term of human strife, And on the low dark verge of life The twilight of eternal day. (L.) Determined to believe in the continued existence of his friend, the speaker arrives at a resolution between this conflict of light and dark; in a more stable frame of mind he has come to terms with the fact of Hallam's death. As was suggested in XVIII, the endurance of pain and suffering can stimulate moral progress, and now he realizes that this is true. Speaking still in terms of light, he says, like Wordsworth in "Elegiac Stanzas," that his deep distress has humanized his soul:

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The shade by which my life was crost, Which makes a desert in the mind, Has made me kindly with my kind, And like to him whose sight is lost. He has partially attained the philosophic mind in acceptance of death as part of life: His inner day can never die, His night of loss is always there. (LXVI.) This is ultimately the same assertion as that made in "Ulysses": " T h o ' much is taken, much abides." Through Hallam, "Death has made I His darkness beautiful with thee" (LXXIV). Tennyson's meaning is reinforced by images drawn f r o m nature, yet this is so in spite of the fact that he turns in certain sections of Part II away f r o m belief in nature as a beneficent force to the idea that nature is not merely indifferent, as in III, but actively malevolent. The speaker is led to this conclusion by a second consideration of the yew tree. In II the yew is regarded as preserving an unchanging gloom, but in X X X I X it seems to offer a change to a happier state; its perpetual gloom appears to have been but a falsehood propagated by Sorrow. It comes alive "With fruitful cloud and living smoke," and, apparently offering new life, it has its "golden hour I When flower is feeling after flower." But there can be for the poet no felicitous message in the flowering of the yew, because Sorrow, "fixt upon the dead," whispers that only "gloom is kindled at the tips" and that it "passes into gloom again." The yew's fruitfulness is thus only an illusion: instead of birth or rebirth the symbolic seed of the yew offers only death.

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The epithet "fruitless" is used four times in Part II, and nowhere else in the poem does it appear. Each time it is employed in connection with the speaker or with man on earth, and in each case it is meant to signify the barren state of the man who can find no meaning in life. In contrast to the speaker's sterility, however, Hallam, a man who did find value in life, is said to have led a life which bore "immortal fruit" (XL); he was the "perfect flower of human time" (LXI); he causes the lifeless to spring into bloom (LXIX). Tennyson's reading in evolutionary science temporarily convinced him of the malevolence of nature. As Mrs. Mattes has shown, many passages in Part II are versifications from Chambers, Lyell, and other men of science. The literature of evolution reinforced his pessimism, causing him to believe that Nature is "red in tooth and claw," that God and Nature are at strife (LIV-LVI). The very evidence of nature seemed to obviate any hope of immortality, and offered a definite contradiction to the belief that God is love, that love is the law of creation. For the moment "divine Philosophy" had become "Procuress to the Lords of Hell" (LIII). Tennyson could not, though, accept such a conception of the universe. Brought up in the tradition of the Romantic revolt against rationalism, he could not ultimately allow the dictates of reason, based on the evidence of natural phenomena, to dictate belief. Romantic that he was, he had finally to believe in the noumenon rather than in the phenomenon. From the time of his earliest verse Tennyson had feared that the advance of science would bring about the decay of "natural" life and would lead to belief in a materialism which was opposed to poetry. "Timbuctoo," for example, had expressed his misgivings:

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Oh city! oh latest throne! where I was raised To be a mystery of loveliness Unto all eyes, the time is well-nigh come When I must render up this glorious home To keen Discovery: soon yon brilliant towers Shall darken the waving of her wand; Darken, and shrink and shiver into huts, Black specks amid a waste of dreary sand, Low-built, mud-wall'd, barbarian settlements. How chang'd from this fair city! Like Keats, the young Tennyson was afraid that science, in the name of progress, was taking poetry out of the rainbow. Such a statement as that from "Timbuctoo" is, of course, the result of a refusal or inability to assert the primacy of poetry, as Wordsworth had done in the 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth had written: The knowledge both of the Poet and the Man of Science is pleasure; but the knowledge of the one cleaves to us as a necessary part of our existence, our natural and unalienable inheritance; the other is a personal and individual acquisition, slow to come to us, and by no habitual and direct sympathy connecting us with our fellow-beings. The Man of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude: the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science. . . . Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge—it is as immortal as the heart of man. If the labours of Men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at present; he

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will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of science itself. . . . If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarised to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man. Science is, therefore, to be subservient to poetry since truth is to be apprehended poetically. But Tennyson, a man writing in the mid-nineteenth century and caught up in its scientific maelstrom, was unable to grant this, and he was doomed to failure from the beginning in his effort to apprehend poetically a complete assurance of the spiritual nature of the universe. This is why the affirmation, such as it is, remains so tentative in "In Memoriam." His first reaction to a conception of the universe as spiritually dead is simply one of horror, an automatic recoil, which states blankly and, ultimately, unmeaningfully, "Peace; come away: we do him wrong / To sing so wildly" (LVII). What we see here in the second part of the elegy is the "dissociation of sensibility," which Hallam himself had noted in his review of Tennyson's 1830 volume ( T h e Englishman's Magazine, August, 1831): With the close of the last century came an era of reaction, an era of painful struggle to bring our overcivilised condition of thought into union with the fresh productive spirit that brightened the morning of our literature. But repentance is unlike innocence; the laborious endeavor to restore has more complicated methods of action than the freedom of untainted nature. Those different powers of poetic disposition, the

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energies of Sensitive, of Reflective, of Passionate Emotion, which in former times were intermingled, and derived from mutual support an extensive empire over the feelings of men, were now restrained within separate spheres of agency. The whole system no longer worked harmoniously, and by intrinsic harmony acquired external freedom; but there arose a violent and unusual action in the several component functions, each for itself, all striving to reproduce the regular power which the whole had once enjoyed. The effect of science and philosophy had been to cleave the poetic mind, and as one can plainly see in "In Memoriam," the poetic mind had lost its sense of assurance, its belief in the autonomy of poetry, and hence could not trust itself. Tennyson's interest in science is matched in "In Memoriam" by the desire for escape from the problems created by science. For answers to his problems Tennyson turned to the Bible; but alas, the Bible could be of little help since even the story of Lazarus fails to record what he most wanted to know—where Lazarus was during the days he was dead and what death meant to him. Christianity could not offer full satisfaction about immortality; at the moment all it could offer was the vision of everlasting life. What the speaker wants most in Part II is to learn the means by which he can achieve reunion with his dead friend, and at the present all he can see is death as a barrier to such a reunion. He turns time and again to the question of the afterlife, as in sections XL-XLVII, considering the status of the soul after death. At times the speaker's consideration of the state of his friend's soul is wearying, indeed almost pointless to the modern reader. Is it really necessary, one asks oneself, to

220 Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 examine all possible conditions of the soul in another world? T o Tennyson it apparently is. For these questionings are not abstract theological arguments, they are merely possible conditions for and hindrances to a reunion with Hallam after the poet's death. But somehow even the idea of meeting his friend after death is not satisfying. His desire is for present communion. In section L, for example, he invokes the presence of his friend: Be near me when my light is low, When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick And tingle; and the heart is sick, And all the wheels of being slow. And he suffers the fear that his friend, now in another world, may not remember him (LX-LXV). The desire for the physical presence of Hallam is perhaps stronger in Part II than it is in Part I. There are ten references to the hand in Part II, more than in any other part of the poem. When the hand is associated with the poet, it is lame and groping, as in L V : "I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, / And gather dust and chaff." Hallam's hands, however, can cause the inanimate to spring to life (LXIX). The poet and his friend have shaken hands and are, the speaker fancies, tied forever (XL). The nature of physical loss is again underscored by the poet's use of domestic love. He wishes that the loss of his friend could be as a young bride's separation from her parents and her childhood home, but Ay me, the difference I discern! How often shall her old fireside Be cheer'd with tidings of the bride, How often she herself return,

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And tell them all they would have told. And bring her babe, and make her boast, Till even those that miss'd her most Shall count new things as dear as old. (XL.) In LX he likens himself to a girl who loves a man of higher station, and in LXIV Hallam is compared to a man who exceeded limitations of a humble birth and went on to greater things. One way of getting at his dead friend is to review the greatness of his friend's short life. Accordingly, in Part II Hallam is described as prophet and teacher, as Christ was on earth, and the analogy is carried one step further when the poet conceives of himself as one of Hallam's apostles. The poet recalls "all he said of things divine," which were "dear to me as sacred wine" (XXXVII), and he speaks of the joy of learning from one of such great experience and understanding (XLII). The memory of Hallam, however, is not sufficient comfort. If he exists now solely as memory, then to what purpose was his life? And how can the poet himself find justification for continuing to live on in a world devoid of this precious friend? Tennyson's sense of identification with Hallam was so nearly complete that with the loss of his friend he felt apprehensive of a loss of his own personality. In their friendship he thought to have found that permanence for which he had been seeking in his earlier poetry. Yet when Hallam was suddenly lost to him, their "fair companionship" was interrupted. What had been an integral part of his nature had now ceased to exist, and so he "almost wish'd no more to wake" (XXVIII). Since identification with his friend had been so close, he could not bear to continue without believing that Hallam though dead still lived on. The problem of

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immortality, of personal survival beyond the grave, then becomes uppermost in Tennyson's mind, and appropriately it is the subject of Part II. Faced with religious doubt, Tennyson could not find comfort in the promises of Christ for everlasting life. He might find sanction for immortality in the teachings of Jesus, as indeed he does in Poem XXXVI, but the example of Christ does not offer fully convincing satisfaction; and he clings to Christianity only because it does offer the hope of immortality.1 What actually convinces him of personal survival after death is his own need to believe it; but he explains his conviction as the result of his belief in the reality of self and the reality of love. Unable to conceive of himself as nonexistent, he is likewise unable to think of the self as ceasing to be: "My own dim life should teach me this, / That life shall live for evermore" (XXXIV). The belief in immortality is entirely necessary, for unless life were thought to be immortal, that which is of most value in it would cease to exist. Convinced of the reality of self, the poet is then assured of the reality of love; for Hallam, even though removed from the earthly sphere of love, still remains in the poet's affection and is loved as much after his death as he was before. Belief in immortality thus comes from God by means of love: The wish, that of the living whole No life may fail beyond the grave, Derives it not from what we have The likest God within the soul? (LV.) It is Hallam, therefore, who affirms the speaker's belief in a Christian afterlife, and in Part II Hallam undergoes a further transformation in the mind of the poet. The emphasis begins to change from Hallam as prophet and teacher to Hallam as the resurrected comforter and savior.

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In Poem L , a prayerlike hymn, Tennyson invokes the presence of Hallam as his only source of strength and asks that the departed friend point to him " T h e twilight of eternal day." Being assured of Hallam's continued existence, the speaker begins to endow his friend with superhuman attributes. In L I , for example, he addresses Hallam: " Y e watch, like God, the rolling hours I With larger other eyes than ours, / T o make allowance for us all." Subsequently Hallam becomes " a soul of nobler tone" ( L X ) who now is "richly shrined" ( L V I I ) . T h e identification with Christ becomes almost explicit in L X I , wherein Hallam is called " T h e perfect flower of human time" who lives on now in "thy second state sublime." Even the diction of the poem begins to carry overtones of the Bible, and thus "ransom'd" in the line " T h y ransom'd reason change replied" suggests Christ's sacrifice of His life to save man. In L X I V the poet compares Hallam to "some divinely gifted m a n " who is " T h e pillar of a people's hope, / T h e centre of a world's desire," a passage which certainly does more than hint at Haggai's calling of the Messiah "the desire of all nations." The first anniversary of Hallam's death, which is memorialized in L X X I I , is described in terms that recall the day of the crucifixion. T h e dawn rises and howls "With blasts that blow . . . And lash with storm." This day "sicken'd every living bloom, / And blurr'd the splendor of the sun"; it was a day "mark'd as with some hideous crime" which "cancell'd nature's best." Although the sympathy of nature is part of the pastoral elegiacal convention, the resemblance to the day of Christ's death, as described in all the gospels except that of St. John, is unmistakable. And with likening Hallam's death to Christ's, Tennyson allays on this anniversary of his friend's death some of the bitterness of grief that the initial shock of death had forced on him. Realizing that

224 Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 man's fate rests with God (LXXIII), he says that "now thy brows are cold, I I see thee what thou art"; but refusing to make the parallel with Christ clearly apparent, the poet adds cryptically: "But there is more than I can see, I And what I see I leave unsaid" (LXXIV). There are many enigmatic utterances like this in "In Memoriam." It is as though Tennyson were continually afraid of elucidating his beliefs about the afterlife of his friend, of straying too far from accepted Christian doctrine. Throughout the poem there are lyrics that seemingly proceed with the greatest confidence but that in the end draw back from formulating a conclusion to or a meaning of the statements adumbrated. Such timidity makes nearly everything about the poem seem tentative. The process of elevating his friend to celestial glory did not, however, obviate the poet's desire for reunion with Hallam. And unable to find comfort in the world of reality, he turned, as was so often the case in his early work, to sleep and dreams. He begins in XLIII by imagining that sleep and death are one, and he further equates these two with trance. Now, we have seen in Tennyson's previous poems that the trancelike state is to be eagerly sought, since in such moments of suspended consciousness the mind has its truest insights. And here we are brought back to the old Tennysonian conception that such a state is a salutary condition of mind. For if sleep and death and trance are one, the soul in death is able to escape the mutability of the world of time: So then were nothing lost to man; So that still garden of the souls In many a figured leaf enrolls The total world since life began;

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And love will last as pure and whole As when he loved me here in Time. . . . Death, he for the moment fancifully imagines, is the release from time, the voyage of the imagination which he had described in "Recollections of the Arabian Nights." T h e salutary effects of sleep and dreams are further discussed in L X V I I - L X X I . There the speaker manages effectively to transcend time and find, by means of another level of consciousness, a respite from the problems facing him in the earlier sections of the elegy. In fact, sleep allows him to relive the happy moments of the past: When in Sleep, Sleep, Nor can

the down I sink my head, Death's twin-brother, times my breath; Death's twin-brother, knows not Death, I dream of thee as dead.

I walk as ere I walk'd forlorn. When all our path was fresh with dew, And all the bugle breezes blew Reveillee to the breaking morn. (LXVIII.) And in L X X I sleep brings back " A night-long present of the past / In which we went thro' summer France." It is worth noting that before the speaker actually sees his friend in dream there appear the "shapes" which, as in Tennyson's other poetry, must be by-passed before the object of desire is attained. This is the phantasmagoria which is to be circumvented: hollow masks of night; Cloud-towers by ghostly masons wrought, A gulf that ever shuts and gapes.

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A hand that points, and palled shapes In shadowy thoroughfares of thought; And crowds that stream from yawning doors. And shoals of pucker'd faces drive; Dark bulks that tumble half alive, And lazy lengths on boundless shores. (LXX.) The series of dream poems comes after a discussion of death as a barrier to reunion with Hallam, when seemingly he had found no means by which the obstacle could be hurdled. Temporarily he is obsessed by the fact of loss and wedded to sorrow, caught in a motionless state wherein his "centred passion cannot move" (LIX). But in this group of poems he finds not only a means to recapture his friend f r o m the past but also a way to divorce himself from his thralldom to sorrow. T h e release is nowhere directly stated, but the efficacy of the rite of exorcism is indicated in L X I X . T h e speaker dreams that he wears a crown of thorns and is derided by the populace as he goes through public squares. And then a very strange thing happens: an angel of the night appears unto h i m : He reach'd the glory of a hand, That seem'd to touch it into leaf; The voice was not the voice of grief, The words were hard to understand. I frankly admit that I do not understand what this passage means, nor do I think that the reader is meant to understand. This is Tennyson's favorite device of the symbolic close such as we have already found in "The Vision of Sin," where at the end of the poem "God made Himself an awful rose of dawn." I do think, however, that we are supposed to comprehend that something has happened, that the experience of

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the dream has been meaningful and liberating. F o r in L X X I I , following the group of dream poems, comes the " d i m dawn" of savage ferocity "issuing out of night," which marks the first anniversary of Hallam's death. T h e movement of this section from hideous fierceness to elegiac tranquility, from death to life, signifies that the poet has fought with death and won. T h e section begins in this manner: Risest thou thus, dim dawn, again, And howlest, issuing out of night, With blasts that blow the poplar white, And lash with storm the streaming pane? and it ends with this apostrophe: Lift as thou mayst thy burthen'd brows Thro' clouds that drench the morning star, And whirl the ungarner'd sheaf afar, And sow the sky with flying boughs, And up thy vault with roaring sound Climb thy thick noon, disastrous day; Touch thy dull goal of joyless gray, And hide thy shame beneath the ground. Where previously the speaker had cursed both nature and death, he now sees that death is but part of the law of nature, " F o r nothing is that errs from l a w " ( L X X I I I ) . In other words, he has come to recognize the presence of spirit in the universe, since he sees death not as a meaningless end of life but as part of the cycle of organic law. Perhaps, he reflects, another world had need of Hallam, and he, the speaker, cannot mourn the loss since some other realm of being has perhaps gained by his friend's presence. In this sense, the speaker has found "in loss a gain to m a t c h , " which he spoke of in the first lyric of the elegy. Out of the fight

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with death—which, as we have seen in " A Dream of Fair Women" and other poems, must be overcome before the " I " can win his goal—comes not only a comprehension of death but also the ability to "see" his dead friend: So, dearest, now thy brows are cold, I see thee what thou art, and know Thy likeness to the wise below, Thy kindred with the great of old. (LXXIV). And as in the dream vision of L X I X there follows a cryptic utterance: "But there is more than I can see, I And what I see I leave unsaid." Though "In Memoriam" is commonly called a religious poem, there is very little in Part II that is directly religious. The problems treated are not those that touch on dogma or doctrine. If we look at Tennyson's previous poetry which is in some way concerned with Christianity, we find only such poems as "The Golden Year," in which one of the speakers says that fulfilling "the mission of the Cross" is too visionary, and concludes, but well I know That unto him who works, and feels he works, This same grand year is ever at the doors. Seemingly Tennyson was not worried by dogma, but like the Broad Churchman thought of religion as existing for the sake of practical goodness, as teaching the orphan boy to read. William Allingham recognized this when he wrote, "Tennyson loves the spirit of Christianity, but hates many of the dogmas.'" Instead of being a religious poem "In Memoriam" is a poem like "The Two Voices"—an argument between two opposing points of view, in which the final answer given to the tempter is moral rather than

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religious, treating of the relationship between man and men and between man and the universe, not between man and God. The overriding theme of "In Memoriam" is a fear that is the central concern of " T h e Two V o i c e s " : the fear that the universe is dead, that it is material merely and mechanistic in its nature. I do not mean to imply that this fear is not in some way related to the subject of religion, for undoubtedly it is. If Tennyson had been able to hold on to traditional Christian belief, the fear would never have arisen. But to Tennyson as to Carlyle's Teufelsdroeckh, " T h e loss of his religious belief was the loss of everything," and it is this loss that places Tennyson within the Romantic pattern. It is the result of overpowering awareness of self, the readiness to believe in egocentricity and subsequent isolation of self which Wordsworth called the first and second ages of man. This is the business of Part I of "In Memoriam," wherein because of the loss of his friend the speaker pictures himself in total isolation from all sources of joy. The way— and in this sense "In Memoriam" is the "way of a soul"—to deliver oneself of this burden is by destruction of self. Carlyle speaks of this in " T h e Centre of Indifference" when he says: " T h e first preliminary moral Act, Annihilation of Self." 5 T h e sufferer, the "negative" Romantic, must become resigned to the fact that absolute happiness, joy, and perfection are not to be found in this life. This awareness, Wordsworth, Carlyle, and Mill all found, is central to one's self-discovery and necessary to the taking of right moral action. In the affirmation of Section L X X I I I — " I curse not Nature, no, nor Death; / For nothing is that errs from law" —Tennyson makes the assertion previously stated by Pallas in "Oenone," who offered Paris

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Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, These three alone lead life to sovereign power. Yet not for power (power of herself Would come uncall'd for) but to live by law, Acting the law we live by without fear. In the character of Paris, Tennyson had of course refused to embrace the advice of Pallas. It was to take a complete spiritual upheaval to make him see the Tightness of what he had known all along. The problem for the reader of "In Memoriam" is that the affirmation in Section L X X I I I comes only after the dream sequence. There is in this part of the elegy nothing to correspond to the blessing of the water-snakes in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" or to the blessing of the family on the way to church in "The Two Voices," both of which are symbolic moral acts. Tennyson perhaps purposefully omitted this symbolic act of repentance since he was concerned in the writing of "In Memoriam" not only with his own moral development but also with his poetic development and, further, the memorialization and recapture of his lost friend. And so instead of finding here the climax of the poem, we find only one of several climaxes. It is, I think, significant of Tennyson's interest in the formulation of an aesthetic that Part II ends not with his acceptance of death but with a discussion of the function of poetry in nineteenth-century commercial society. Indeed, this consideration of poetry is of vital concern in this part of the elegy. He begins the discussion in Section X X X I V by looking back not only at Part I but at his other earlier poems as well, speaking of his aestheticism as "Fantastic beauty; such as lurks I In some wild poet, when he works I Without a conscience or an aim." But he has misgivings as to whether

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he is capable of greater poetry. In fact, in XXXVII, a typically Tennysonian poem of dialectic clash, Urania tells him to return to his earlier Keatsian poetry because he is not worthy of greater kinds of poetry; and through Melpomene he replies, disclaiming any higher aims, that he sings only to soothe his aching heart and "render human love his dues." He continues in this vein in XLVIII, where he states that his poetry does not rise to philosophical heights; he does not dare to trust "a larger lay" but rather dwells on "Short swallow-flights of song." After the horror of the evolutionary view of life expressed in Sections LIV-LVI and his recoil from this view in LVII, the poet determines to cease pouring out his grief, which can only bring sorrow to others. But his Muse tells him that out of his involvement in grief there will come a greater ability not only to endure but to become nobler (LVIII). His private grief will thus be changed to nobler emotions, or, in terms of poetry, Melpomene will yield to Urania. As he had suggested in XVIII, suffering can have a purgative effect and can actually cause a better orientation. This is confirmed in L X V when he realizes that "out of painful phrases wrought / There flutters up a happy thought, I Selfbalanced on a lightsome wing." At the end of Part II, after having overcome his doubt about the presence of spirit in the universe, Tennyson expresses another kind of doubt: the value of poetry in modern times. Turning to his favorite theme of mutability, he says, recalling his observations in "Amphion," that "in these fading days" he will not undertake themes of high seriousness because of the unpoetic temper of the times; he will write only to assuage his grief (LXXV). To the present world poetry is soon forgotten: "With fifty Mays, thy songs are vain" (LXXVI). There is no hope for modern poetry:

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What hope is here for modern ihyme To him who turns a musing eye On songs, and deeds, and lives, that lie Foreshorten'd in the tract of time? His own verses, "mortal lullabies of pain," may bind a book, may line a box, May serve to curl a maiden's locks; Or when a thousand moons shall wane A man upon a stall may find, And passing, turn the page that tells A grief, then changed to something else, Sung by a long-forgotten mind. But even though the times are hostile to poetry, he will continue to sing because it is his duty to his friend and to love (LXXVII). There is pessimism at the close of Part II that amounts almost to bitterness, a fact that is strange when one considers that the immediately preceding sections are written in a tone of resignation. But here Tennyson is speaking as poet primarily, not as man. It is this seeming incongruity of moods that gives "In Memoriam" its underlying tensions and makes it interesting through many rereadings. In spite of the pessimism, however, the poet is at the end of Part II defiant rather than apologetic about his elegy: But what of that? My darken'd ways Shall ring with music all the same; To breathe my loss is more than fame, To utter love more sweet than praise. (LXXVII.) Even though his verse may be lost in time, he will continue to find in creative energy a triumph over utter despair.

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III Although it is customary to mark the divisions of "In Memoriam" by the Christmas lyrics, I think that in some cases it would perhaps be better to indicate the beginnings of the various parts after the Christmas poems instead of with them. The lyric concerned with the second Christmas after Hallam's death, for instance, clearly sums up the tone of Part II rather than suggests the mood of Part III. The "silent snow" and the adverb "calmly" are suggestive of the attitude of stoic resignation that evolves during the second part. Indeed, the speaker himself says, in excellent summary of the preceding sections, that his regret remains the same but "with long use her tears are dry." The tone of Part III, on the other hand, is that of the recovery of joy in nature and living things. In L X X I X the poet speaks of nature in Wordsworthian terms: the hill, wood, and field, he tells his brother, imprinted "sweet forms" on their minds; and the stream, the coves, and the winds brought "whispers of the beauteous world." This is the language with which Wordsworth addressed his sister Dorothy in "Tintem Abbey," and the joy of nature in childhood remains as vital to Tennyson now as it did to Wordsworth. This is the "wealth" which he still retains although he has suffered the loss of friendship. In his revitalized mood of harmony with nature the speaker prays in section L X X X I I I for the hastening of spring to thaw the sorrow in the blood. He longs for a rebirth, and he knows like the Wordsworth of the "Intimations Ode" that trouble cannot live with April days or sadness in summer moods. The prayer is answered in L X X X V I , where the poet finds a correspondence between his subjunctive state and the breeze coming after a shower:

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Sweet after showers, ambrosial air, That rollest from the gorgeous gloom Of evening over brake and bloom And meadow, slowly breathing bare The round of space, and rapt below Thro' all the dewy tassell'd wood, And shadowing down the horned flood In ripples, fan my brows and blow The fever from my cheek, and sigh The full new life that feeds thy breath Throughout my frame, till Doubt and Death, 111 brethren, let the fancy fly From belt to belt of crimson seas On leagues of odor streaming far, To where in yonder orient star A hundred spirits whisper 'Peace.' Merging inner feeling with outward natural manifestations, the poet identifies the clearing sky with his own liberation of soul. Nature no longer lends the evil dreams which she seemed to do (LV); now she lends the breath of new life which dispels doubt and obsessive preoccupation with death. Though there is technical competence everywhere in "In Memoriam," the sheer technical virtuosity in Section L X X X V I is overpowering. The process of the union of the visible scene with his own emotions goes forward through four verses moving steadily onward in one long sentence unbroken by any pauses between the quatrains, the retreating clouds of storm giving way to the peaceful sky that tranquillizes the poet's imagination. In this new frame of mind the poet changes in his attitude toward death. Developing further the light and heat imagery, he allows that death has not meant an interruption or

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decrease of his love; on the contrary, death has given ripeness to the grain of love, and thus its "sudden frost was sudden gain" ( L X X X I ) . Echoing the assertion of L X X I I I , the poet says, " I wage not any feud with Death I For changes wrought on form and face," because he knows that his friend will prosper in another world. But in spite of all kinds of assurances about immortality, nothing lessened Tennyson's bitterest grievance against death, namely, physical separation: For this alone on Death I wreak The wrath that garners in my heart: He put our lives so far apart We cannot hear each other speak. (LXXXII.) The pain of separation and the need for reunion are again indicated by the image of the human hand. The speaker imagines that if he had died and Hallam had lived, his friend would have turned his grief into gain; and through this fancy Hallam reaches out "dead hands to comfort m e " ( L X X X ) . The climax of the desire for physical reunion comes in X C V when " T h e dead man touch'd me from the past." The actual communion with the dead man comes only after the usual Tennysonian obstacles have been surmounted. First, the by-passing of death must be effected. This is the burden of L X X X I and L X X X I I , in which the poet considers the meaning of death in his present attitude. Secondly, in typical dialectic fashion these two sections are pitted against the possibility of what might have been had Hallam lived ( L X X X and L X X X I V ) . Thirdly, there comes the retreat to the past in the retrospective poem L X X X V , which gives a résumé of the poet's attitudes in the previous parts of the

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elegy and treats of his seeking for a new friendship, albeit a companionship that can never be like the old. He has progressed from the abject weakness of grief to finding in grief "a strength reserved." His frozen heart has begun to beat again because through love he has found the friendship that masters Time: Which masters Time indeed, and is Eternal, separate from fears. The all-assuming months and years Can take no part away from this.

Out of the clash of weakness and strength, past and present, time and eternity, he is now prepared for the communion with his friend. But he is distrustful of the promptings of the imagination, and he considers that his pretended communion with the dead is no more than self-deception. With distrust of vision he turns away from what he supposes to be fanciful experience and vows that he must quit the dead for the living: My heart, tho' widow'd, may not rest Quite in the love of what is gone, But seeks to beat in time with one That warms another living breast.

The speaker cannot, however, rid himself of his need for reunion with Hallam. Four sections, coming after two long retrospective poems, are devoted to this desire. Lyric XC begs for the return of his friend: Ah, dear, but come thou back to me! Whatever change the years have wrought, I find not yet one lonely thought That cries against my wish for thee.

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Section XCI asks for the return of Hallam in visible form, the Keatsian imagery embleming the conflict between desire and denial; while XCII states that the speaker would most likely not trust the vision if it did appear. Only a communion of souls, then, is possible, and in XCIII he invokes Hallam to Descend, and touch, and enter; hear The wish too strong for words to name, That in this blindness of the frame My Ghost may feel that thine is near. Poem XCIV considers what is required for such communion. In XCV the poet fleetingly achieves the union in spirit with Hallam which he has so earnestly desired. This section is of great importance not only because it forms one of the climaxes of the elegy but also because it tells us a great deal about the workings of the poet's mind: practically all the themes and symbols found in his earlier published volumes are present here. The poem opens with the poet on the lawn at twilight. All is silent. The ominous imagery of the third and fourth quatrains, corresponding to the "shapes" of earlier poems, indicates that something of importance is soon to happen: And bats went round in fragrant skies, And wheel'd or lit the filmy shapes That haunt the dusk, with ermine capes And woolly breasts and beaded eyes; . . . and the trees Laid their dark arms about the field. Left alone by the withdrawing members of his family, the poet is seized with desire: "A hunger seized my heart." Reading old letters from his friend, he finds that the words

238 Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 have a strange effect on him, memory once again performing the function of release from reality. The words seem to become alive and he finds almost a physical reunion with his lost friend in this mystical experience: So word by word, and line by line, The dead man touch'd me from the past, And all at once it seem'd at last The living soul was flash'd on mine, And mine in this was wound, and whirl'd About empyreal heights of thought, And came on that which is, and caught The deep pulsations of the world, Aeonian music measuring out The steps of Time—the shocks of Chance— The blows of Death. The "mystic frame" (XXXVI, LXXVIII) has attained the mystic state like that described in "Armageddon";* the mental voyager has reached his goal. Unlike "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," Poem X C V does not leave us in the vision. The speaker comes out of the trance, and powerful though the vision is, he doubts the validity of the experience. But even though the intellect doubts, he affirms the certainty of the intuitive powers. Such an experience, he says, cannot be put into words: but ah, how hard to frame In matter-moulded forms of speech, Or even for intellect to reach Thro' memory that which I became. The communion has left him dazed, amazed at himself and the experience he has just undergone. The sense of awe

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is expressed in natural images, almost the same images used in " I n Deep and Solemn D r e a m s " * when the speaker wakes from his dream: A breeze began to tremble o'er The large leaves of the sycamore, And fluctuate all the still perfume. And gathering freshlier overhead, Rock'd the full-foliaged elms, and swung The heavy-folded roses, and flung The lilies to and fro. . . . Unable to describe the mystical state, he falls back on the symbolic close used in " T h e Vision of Sin"; the wind says: 'The dawn, the dawn,' and died away; And East and West, without a breath, Mixt their dim lights, like life and death, To broaden into boundless day. Once more the speaker sees the significance of life. Likening life and death to the dawn, he sees the life cycle as part of the clash between life and death. T h e images of the end of X C V indicate a new direction which the movement of the poem is to take. From interplay between various opposing elements in the earlier parts of the elegy, the conflicting forces now seem to fuse in the image of the dawn emerging from the mixed lights of East and West. T h e darkness and the light are no longer opposed, but are united in a single image which is symbolic of a new faith. Tennyson's best poetry arises, I think, when his passions find an adequate symbol, as happens in L X X X V I and X C V . There is nothing in either lyric of arbitrary projection of an emotional state. T h e wind in both exists in its own right, as

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destroyer and vitalizer, sweeping away the old in storms and darkness and bringing the new in peace and light. The identification with the symbol causes the poet to transcend his self-pity and to focus on the powerful themes of death and rebirth, and thus redirects the elegy. Section L X X X V I I I is, I believe, an excellent example of Tennyson's use of the symbol. The nightingale is another symbol of paradoxical nature. To some its song is melancholy and to others it is joyous. Tennyson employs the bird's song in both its aspects; for, identifying himself with the nightingale, he like the bird seems to sing of a joy which breaks from the midst of grief. The nightingale of this short poem is a far different kind of bird from the bulbul in "Recollections of the Arabian Nights." Here it becomes the symbol of the artist who in the midst of woe sings a paean in praise of the beauty and restorative power of the world of nature. While Tennyson was perfecting his symbolic method, he was at the same time continuing to compose picturesque poetry. Section L X X X I X , a retrospective about Hallam's visits to Somersby, is very much in the manner of "Audley Court" and the Prologue to "The Princess": Or in the all-golden afternoon A guest, or happy sister, sung, Or here she brought the harp and flung A ballad to the brightening moon. Nor less it pleased in livelier moods, Beyond the bounding hill to stray, And break the livelong summer day With banquet in the distant woods; Whereat we glanced from theme to theme, Discuss'd the books to love or hate,

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Or touch'd the changes of the state, Or threaded some Socratic dream. . . . We talk'd: the stream beneath us ran, The wine-flask lying couch'd in moss, Or cool'd within the glooming wave. The group of poems concerned with the departure from Somersby (C-CII) are also in this same idyllic vein, and X C V I I belongs to the type of domestic idyll typified by "Dora." Poems XCVI-XCIX are all occasional, mainly designed to show the change that has taken place within the mind of the poet. Section X C I X , treating of the second anniversary of Hallam's death, opens with the same words as L X X I I , the first anniversary; but the tone is far different. The poet now, in contradiction to VI, finds consolation in the idea that a sense of great loss is not unique with him but is shared by others who lose their loved ones. He has, in other words, passed the Centre of Indifference and become fully one with mankind, sharing their sorrows as well as their joys. The departure from Somersby is symbolic in two ways: it emblems the speaker's breaking with the past and also his release from the hold which the dead Hallam has hitherto had on him. On the night before the Tennyson family leaves the old rectory the poet "dream'd a vision of the dead, / Which left my after-morn content." The dream as recounted in CIII is related in terms and themes that had previously made up Tennyson's storehouse of symbols. He fancies that he dwelt within a hall with maidens who according to Tennyson himself stand for the Muses. But as Bradley says, insofar as the dream concerns the life of the poet himself, they must stand also for corresponding aspirations within him, especially for his poetry." These are probably the same

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mysterious maidens of "The Hesperides" who guard the golden apple by their singing, and significantly they sing to a veiled statue. Furthermore, the hall is along, perhaps surrounded by, a river, a situation similar to that in "The Lady of Shalott." Into their midst flies a dove, which brings "a summons from the sea." The image of the dove is, I think, most appropriate, not only as the traditional symbol of peace but also as a symbol that helps to unify the elegy. Often in "In Memoriam" Tennyson uses the image of the bird: as an emblem of happiness and freedom and also of the artist. The speaker compares himself to linnets in X X I : "I do but sing because I must, / And pipe but as the linnets sing"; and in XXXIV he compares his death to the bird's being eaten by a snake. Closer to the point is the simile in XII: the speaker is like a dove that leaves the ark bearing a "dolorous message." In CIII it is also a dove that brings the summons from the sea. Paradoxically then, the dove that left bearing "a tale of woe" returns to bring an offer of a new life. The short swallow-flights of song have been the search for solid ground. The sea voyage is a common metaphor in Tennyson for spiritual adventure; we have seen it used in this respect in, to name only a few poems, "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," "The Hesperides," "The Lady of Shalott," and "The Lotus-Eaters." Indeed, the boat that the maidens and the speaker board is called a shallop, the word employed in "Recollections" and "The Lady of Shalott." The goal is reached only after the speaker and the maidens travel by the "shadowing bluff that made the banks" and glide "winding under ranks / Of iris and the golden reed," images recalling the ominous imagery of "Recollections." Finally, they travel until "the forward-creeping tides / Began to

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foam," an echo of the "forward-flowing tide of time" in "Recollections." They sail on through the water to where they see "A great ship lift her shining sides." The image of the ship as the means by which a lost friend is brought forth is not new to Tennyson's verse. The poet had used it in "Tears, idle tears" in "The Princess": Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail, That brings our friends up from the underworld, Sad as the last which reddens over one That sinks with all we love below the verge; So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more. This time, however, the sinking over the verge is not sad. For the transmogrified Hallam, "thrice as large as man," bids the speaker and the maidens go with him. The quest for communion is consummated; and hereafter, the poem implies since it does not bring the speaker out of the dream, the friend will be forever a part of the poet. The subject of Section CIII is not only the spiritual reunion of the speaker and Hallam but also the redirection and rededication of the poet. Already by Lyric LXXXIII the poet had hinted at his changing views of the elegy he was writing. While he was recovering hope, he ceased to value poetry only as an anodyne but began to look upon his elegy and the experience described therein as prelude to a newer kind of poetry. He thus invokes the new year to bring not only spiritual regeneration but also a new artistic orientation; he longs "to burst a frozen bud I And flood a fresher throat with song." As he gained more and more control over his grief, he realized that poetry had proved to be a means of assimilating experience and had served to soften the shock of Hallam's death:

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Likewise the imaginative woe, That loved to handle spiritual strife, Diffused the shock thro' all my life, But in the present broke the blow. (LXXXV.) Having thus conquered through poetry the overwhelming sorrow that had completely absorbed his mind and art, he was now ready to sing in a different tone. Section CIII can be regarded as the poet's examination of the states through which he has passed and as his assertion that he will dedicate his poetry to more ambitious aims. With the maidens, his muses, he had lived secluded in the hall, like a Lady of Shalott, singing at the shrine of Hallam. But the message brought by the dove is a summons to a new artistic life, the concerns of which are indicated by the maidens' song during the journey: As one would sing the death of war, And one would chant the history Of that great race which is to be, And one the shaping of a star. The end of this allegorical sea voyage brings the poet and the maidens to reunion with Hallam—a Hallam changed into larger than life-size—with whom they sail away. The poet will no longer dedicate his song to the private image of his friend and to the subjective part of the poet's nature; henceforth his poetry will serve Hallam not as a man but as a type of ideal humanity. The transubstantiation of Hallam into the ideal man and the further likening of his friend to Christ can be traced throughout Part III. The acceptance of Hallam as deliverer who has become merged with the image of Christ was not at the end of Part II fully accepted by the poet. To reinforce

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the belief, the speaker goes through a pretended communion with his friend in which Tennyson has Hallam himself support the speaker's provisional faith in immortality and divinity: 'Tis hard for thee to fathom this; I triumph in conclusive bliss, And that serene result of all. (LXXXV.) But the " I " is distrustful of such a fanciful experience, fearing that "so shall grief with symbols play I And pining life be fancy-fed" (LXXXV). As further reinforcement of his new-found faith, the poet undertakes a retrospective poem about his days at Cambridge when Hallam was still alive. At Trinity College, Tennyson and Hallam's other friends saw "The God within him light his face, I And seem to lift the form, and glow / In azure orbits heavenly-wise" (LXXXVII). The picture that comes to the reader's mind is that of Christ, His disciples gathered around Him, preaching the word of God. Hereafter there is little equivocation on the poet's part about fusing the images of Hallam and Christ. Hallam now lives "With gods in unconjectured bliss" (XCIII). Employing the diction of the King James Bible, the transubstantiated Hallam in C1II bids the maidens enter the ship and depart with him and the poet: "Enter likewise ye / And go with us." The Hallam-Christ-figure has thus effected spiritual belief and artistic rededication for the hitherto aimless poet. To paraphrase Milton, Hallam for God, Tennyson for God in him. The exaltation, or, as we shall see in Part IV, the apotheosis, of Hallam bears, I believe, a fairly close resemblance to Nietzsche's glorification of the Übermensch. Like Tennyson, Nietzsche was a child of evolutionary thought. Darwinism, or in the case of the Tennyson of "In

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Memoriam" pre-Darwinism, poses a threat to man's peace of mind because it denies his supernatural origin. If man denies that the source from which he sprang is supernatural, then he must also forego his supernatural destiny. If "God is dead," no one can raise man from the dead. But on the other hand, if there is no creator in heaven, man is free to create his own heaven. Nietzsche, at heart a poet, solved this problem for himself by projecting his hopes into the image of a superman, and this is almost exactly what Tennyson did. Nietzsche gives further clues to the psychology of glorifying the memory of a man until he seems to have become a god. In The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music he maintained that the artist is prone to create something beyond himself which he then worships. If we grant this, we should expect the creation of new objects of worship to spring from the minds of imaginative men. It was indeed a poet—Virgil, in his "Eclogues"—who first addressed Augusas divine. Virgil had a public figure to whom he could pay his respects as a symbol of power, peace, and permanence. The apotheosis of Hallam, however, was a private affair, even though at the end of Part III we witness the aggrandizement of Hallam into an ideal type. Its claims seem extravagant at times because the merits of the man are not universally known. Perhaps it was partly because Tennyson recognized this failing in his elegy that he undertook a retrospective "publicity" poem like LXXXVII. The Arch of Titus in Rome depicts the apotheosis of the emperor. The soul of Titus is carried to heaven by an eagle which, like a phoenix, flies from the flames of the funeral fire. We could, I fancy, use this picture as a gloss on "In Memoriam": Tennyson turns the image of his friend into an eagle on whose wings he and his muses mount to eternal life.

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IV T h e speaker's collapse and transcendence of time through communion with his friend in dream in Section CIII sets the tone for the final sections of the elegy. In the great New Year's hymn following the third group of Christmas poems the poet sings in praise of man's progress toward an earthly paradise, a prophecy recalling the predictions of "Locksley Hall." T h e symbolic bells ring out the old and ring in the new, their tolling performing an ambivalent function like that of the bells in the earlier Christmas lyrics. But they do not contrast to the speaker's emotional state; his response is not that of sorrow touched with joy, as it was at the first Christmas; now his own disposition harmonizes with the ringing of the bells. Like the Wordsworth who, freed f r o m his doubts, resolves in the "Intimations O d e " that " N o more shall grief of mine the season wrong," Tennyson asserts, No more shall wayward grief abuse The genial hour with mask and mime. (CV.) Though much is taken, though, in Wordsworthian terms, the radiance which was once so bright be forever taken away, much remains; a light is shining yet. T h e spring poems of Part IV are in fullest contrast to those of Part II and suggest by means of light imagery the poet's release f r o m despair: Now dance the lights on lawn and lea, The flocks are whiter down the vale. And milkier every milky sail On winding stream or distant sea. . . . (CXV.) The only images of darkness in the last part are those referring to the speaker's former state.

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All things now seem alive. Even at Hallam's house he now smells "the meadow in the street"; he sees "Betwixt the black fronts long-withdrawn I A light-blue lane of early dawn" (CXIX). Where previously the city had been but a thing, it now has a right to be considered as organic. Everywhere nature seems to be flowering. The image of the flower indicates not only the new creative impulse but also the strengthening of soul and mind: "as the flower / And native growth of noble mind [are joined!" (CXI); finally it is emblematic of "The life re-orient out of dust" (CXVI), which has grown from the lifeless dust in XXXV, L, and LV. The speaker's confident assertion of faith, with his attendant feeling of oneness with the natural world, and his affirmation of love as the great cosmological principle are symbolized in the union of Hesper, the evening star, and Phosphor, the morning star, twin aspects of Venus, the planet of love. The two stars are one in one thing—love—which does not change; they are also emblems of the past and present: "Sad Hesper," the watcher of "all things dim / And dimmer, and a glory done"; "Bright Phosphor," the witness of the beginning of "the world's great work" and the herald of "the greater light," uniting in love, which as Venus has merely changed its place in becoming the present out of the past. And so the speaker learns that the stars do not blindly run as Sorrow had insisted in III; nor is Love "a brooding star" whose "province were not large, I A bounded field, not stretching far," as he had thought in XLVI. On the contrary, Love is the Alpha and Omega that shines over all the earth for all time: Sweet Hesper-Phosphor, double name For what is one, the first, the last, Thou, like my present and my past, Thy place is changed; thou art the same. (CXXI.)

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As the transformation of the star and flower indicates a new way of seeing, so does the transfiguration of the hand image suggest a new way of feeling. T h e change is noted in the New Year's hymn, where the bell is invoked to ring in "the kindlier hand." Occasionally this hand is the superhuman hand of Hallam, but more often it is the "higher h a n d " (CXIV), the hands "That reach thro' nature, moulding m e n " (CXXIV). The hand thus becomes something more than mere physical presence: it is now a mysterious shaping power, the guiding hand that leads to wisdom. This new way of feeling is indeed the primary concern of Part I V : it marks the transition from sense to spirit. Throughout Parts II and III Tennyson had suggested that by reasoning man cannot know all truths; rather, in his "mystic f r a m e " man intuits certain truths ( X X X V I , LXXVIII): perhaps the hoarding sense Gives out at times—he knows not whence— A little flash, a mystic hint. (XLIV.) And what the speaker had been seeking throughout the middle parts of the elegy—belief in life beyond the grave— had come to him only in "mystical" moments of dream and trance, wherein he was able to find communion with his dead friend. These trancelike states signified for Tennyson a certainty, for the moment at least, of the existence of spirit divorced from the body, of the survival of the spirit after death. His religious faith could be founded only upon the perception, and in Part IV he confirms the life of imagination as the sole possible basis for his belief: But in my spirit will I dwell, And dream my dream, and hold it true. (CXXI1I.)

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Like Wordsworth, Carlyle, and Mill, Tennyson found that he could not recover from spiritual death by exercise of logic. The facts of life seem to offer not the hope of immortality, but, in LVI, the fear of racial extinction. This is the realm of knowledge, "For knowledge is of things we see" (Prologue). There is, however, a higher power, what Tennyson calls wisdom, which stems from feeling rather than seeing. Tennyson had adumbrated the KantianColeridgean-Carlylean distinction before—in "Love and Duty," "Locksley Hall," and "The Princess"—and in CXIV he traces the distinction between the two ways of knowing in terms which recall the gifts offered to Paris in "Oenone." "Who loves not Knowledge?" the poet asks; "Let her work prevail." But there is danger in worship of knowledge; like Aphrodite, on her forehead sits a fire; She sets her forward countenance And leaps into the future chance, Submitting all things to desire. Half-grown as yet, a child, and vain— She cannot fight the fear of death. Like Hera and Princess Ida, knowledge seeks "to burst / All barriers in her onward race / For power." Wisdom must make her mild, "For she is earthly of the mind, / But Wisdom heavenly of the soul." The realm of spirit is knowable, then, not through ratiocination but through intuition. The spiritual pilgrim finds God only through faith, which results from the wisdom of the intuitions. "I found Him not in world or sun," the poet says in retracing his spiritual quest. If ever a voice like that of the tempter in "The Two Voices" cried "believe no more,"

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A warmth within the breast would melt The freezing reason's colder part, And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answer'd, 'I have felt.' (CXXIV.) T o recover f r o m spiritual d e a t h , h e h a d , again like Wordsw o r t h , Carlyle and Mill, to discover that h e could feel again. Having m a d e this discovery, h e felt his great b u r d e n lifted f r o m h i m . A s Mill wrote, " T h e oppression of the thought that all feeling was d e a d within me, was gone. I was n o longer hopeless: I was not a stock or a stone.'" This is Carlyle's Everlasting Y e a , a n d to T e n n y s o n it is the real " p r o o f " of immortality, a counterevidence to the proofs of science. Because of the experience of feeling, his whole outlook on life changes. His fear of time and racial extinction in Part I I is answered in C X V I I I . N o longer does he " d r e a m of h u m a n love a n d truth, / A s dying N a t u r e ' s earth and lime." N o , time brings the greater m a n , evolution leads to progress instead of to extinction, and the dead " A r e breathers of a n a m p l e r d a y I F o r ever nobler ends." T h r o u g h evolutionary progress m a n can become " T h e herald of a higher r a c e " if he develops m o r a l l y : If so he type this work of time Within himself, from more to more; Or, crown'd with attributes of woe Like glories, move his course, and show That life is not as idle ore, But iron dug from central gloom, And heated hot with burning fears, And dipt in baths of hissing tears, And battcr'd with the shocks of doom To shape and use.

252 Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 Evolutionary progress is thus predicated on moral development, and the moral man must replace the sensual man: Arise and fly The reeling Faun, the sensual feast; Move upward, working out the beast, And let the ape and tiger die. The concept of mutability had obsessed the young Tennyson, and he could not immediately put out of mind the idea that change means decay. He had, as it were, to drum into his mind that change can mean progress. In CXXIII he reiterates the evolutionary doctrine: There rolls the deep where grew the tree. O earth, what changes hast thou seen! There where the long street roars hath been The stillness of the central sea. The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands; They melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go. But he will not allow this belief in change to shake his faith in immortality; he refuses to be distressed by Lyell's findings as he had been in LVI; he feels that life will not pass into nothingness: "For tho' my lips may breathe adieu, / I cannot think the thing farewell." "All is well," the poet proclaims, "tho' faith and form I Be sunder'd in the night of fear" (CXXVII). Tennyson's faith that all is well has come through his affirmation of the reality of love, a universal principle which joins the living Tennyson and the dead Hallam and unites the hitherto isolated poet with his fellow men. "I will not shut

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me from my kind," the speaker asserts (CVIII), assured that the life of imagination must be connected with the general life by means of love. Tennyson equates this love with Christ, who is the embodiment of G o d ' s love for mankind, calling Him in the Prologue "immortal L o v e . " Although Tennyson speaks of love in terms of the New Testament, his emotions are, I believe, more nearly akin to the feelings and functions of eros as expounded by Plato in the Symposium.

Love in

this sense is the thirst for the true, the good, and the beautiful, a tentative equation made in the dedicatory verses to "The Palace of A r t " ; and Tennyson found these in Hallam. There may occasionally be some hint of the New Testament agape, but it is an agape to be found through eros. T h e concept of love in "In M e m o r i a m " also contains Stoic elements. According to Tennyson, love pervades everything ( X C V I I ) , love is lord and king ( C X X V I ) . This is the Stoic concept of Universal Reason. T h e Stoic also thought that all things work together for good because of the same Universal Reason which is at the heart of things, and which Tennyson under the influence of Christian doctrine calls love. In the light of this, Hallam is often for Tennyson what Universal Reason was for the Stoic, namely the so-called Friend behind the Phenomena. This blending of Stoic and Platonic elements may account for the two main thrusts of the main theme: (1) love and (2) universal law, which assure the immortality of the spirit. For convinced by intuitive reasoning of the presence of love in the universe, Tennyson went a step further in postulating a universal law, which operates over all things: I see in part T h a t all, as in some piece of art, Is toil cooperant to an end.

(CXXVIII.)

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Thus convinced, he knows that all is well and trusts that earthly progress will inevitably result. The evolutionary process is to be transferred from the physical to the moral level; this is his "dream of good" (CXXIX). But in "In Memoriam" Tennyson once more shows his insularity when he tends to equate evolutionary progress with social progress in England. As in "The Princess" he speaks of "freedom in her regal seat I Of England" (CIX), as though England were to have a monopoly on liberty. He declares, as in "Love thou thy land," that social truth shall spread, And justice, even tho' thrice again The red fool-fury of the Seine Should pile her barricades with dead. (CXXVII.) In widening the scope of his elegy to comprehend a treatment of politics, Tennyson answers the imaginary critic in XXI who had objected that in times when democracy was transforming established institutions the poet had no right to withdraw into sorrowful song of private grief. Tennyson responded to the demands of the Zeitgeist, and in so doing he sought to treat within this one work practically all the problems concerning the Englishman of the mid-nineteenth century. It is because "In Memoriam" is such an all-encompassing work that it is so difficult to discuss in purely critical terms. One may object that the affirmation of Part IV is too easily achieved and, further, that it affirms too much. For in "In Memoriam" Tennyson seeks not only to assuage but also to remove the fear that is part of life. He did not share Wordsworth's realization that there must always be terror and fear, and he did not seek like Baudelaire to make a virtue of this realization. Tennyson's paradis artificiel is

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simply a realm beyond reality, which has none of the terrifying beauty of existence. It is, some critics feel, in this sense that "In Memoriam" is a poem of escape, a somewhat halfhearted answer to the problems proposed. Undoubtedly this is what T. S. Eliot means when he says that "In Memoriam" "is not religious because of the quality of its faith, but because of the quality of its doubt. Its faith is a poor thing, but its doubt is a very intense experience."* As far as its faith is concerned, "In Memoriam" is, I find, somewhat similar to Rossetti's "The Blessed Damozel." Ostensibly the elegy is concerned with a quest after belief in immortality. Yet at best the desire for everlasting life is subsumed by the poet's hope for a renewal of friendship with his dead friend. Tennyson may speak of Hallam as the ideal type of humanity, but still the Hallam whom he wishes to find again is the Hallam as he knew him on earth. The Blessed Damozel wishes for this same continuance in heaven of her earthly love. To quote Eliot again, Tennyson's "desire for immortality never is quite the desire for Eternal Life: his concern is for the loss of man rather than for the gain of God."" Yet Tennyson works very hard at making his quest the search for the Incarnate God; he does this, as I have already suggested, by making Hallam a Christ-figure. In the New Year's hymn Hallam is, by implication at least, the prototype of the "larger heart, the kindlier hand," "the Christ that is to be" (CVI). Since the poem is a hymn in praise of a kind of Second Coming, the ringing of the bells which "ring out the old, ring in the new" reminds us of the New Covenant brought by Christ to supersede the Old Covenant made through Moses. This exultant proclamation of progress toward the earthly paradise results in the following lyrics of "In Memoriam" in a nearly complete fusion of Hallam with

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Christ, the new Hallam-Christ serving as the example which aspiring man is to follow and as the symbol by which and through which the poet asserts his confident faith. The third group of Christmas poems brings us in our consideration of Hallam as Christ-figure to a speculation concerning the poet's insertion of these poems to indicate passage of time. One is tempted to associate this device with Tennyson's estimation of the superhuman qualities of Hallam. The traditional merriment of Christmas contrasts strongly with the grief that the Tennyson family experienced; but Tennyson's choice of this particular day of merriment to mark off prominently the divisions of the elegy seems to indicate something deeper than the contrast between extreme joy and sorrow. This supposition is further underlined by the fact that following the third Christmas poems comes a lyric (CVII), which celebrates the anniversary of the birth of Hallam, the first time that such has occurred in the elegy; and significantly it follows immediately upon the poet's representation of Hallam as Christ-figure. If we examine the two celebrations, we shall see that there are distinct similarities between the two. Like Christmas, the anniversary occurs in the dead of winter, and this particular day, though cold, leaves "night forlorn." On Hallam's birthday, as in the second Christmas group, there is a burning log, there is wine drunk in remembrance, and there are songs —all of which, as at Christmastime, remind the family of the dead man. There is, however, a difference in the celebration of the third Christmas. Because the family has moved from the rectory at Somersby to High Beech and is thus in a strange place, Tennyson states that the old customs should not be observed, and consequently there is no burning log or drink or song. Yet, still in "the stranger's land" (CIV), they observe on Hallam's birthday the same customs as in

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the second Christmas poems, as though the anniversary of Hallam's birth has become more meaningful than Christ's, indeed has supplanted it. It is not, however, only because the family has moved to a new home that the old Christmas customs are no longer observed. When the speaker asks, "For who would keep an ancient form / Thro' which the spirit breathes no more?" (CV), the query does not refer only to the removal from Somersby. The "ancient form" is almost certainly the observance of the Nativity, which is rejected in favor of a new nativity, Hallam's, in Section CVII. But the poet is careful to keep the implications muffled. And he ends the lyric with a passage suggesting that it is the spirit instead of the form which retains its vitality. In Part IV we find again a number of retrospective lyrics, nearly all elucidating further Hallam's Christlike qualities. In CX we are told how Hallam, like Christ, delighted both young and old, how he caused the weak to forget their weakness, how near him the storm became mild, how he truly possessed "the Christian art," how the serpent (of Eden?) in his presence is made impotent. Even the imagery of Part IV suggests the likeness of Hallam to Christ, as in CXII where the images of tempest and calm recall Christ's calming the sea. Section CXXVI affirms the reality of love and makes the identification of love with Christ almost explicit. But there is this ambiguity : Tennyson accepted the teaching of the Gospels that "God is Love," but he also made love, not faith, the means by which a knowledge of God is to be attained. God, then, is both Love as absolute and as means of reaching the absolute. Such a conclusion seems to have been entirely necessary for Tennyson's religious faith. Faced with the problem of the nineteenth-century Christian intellectual of

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preserving Christ as an emotionally significant image without going so far as to accept Santayana's later solution, Tennyson vaguely realized that his problem vis-à-vis the dead Hallam was essentially the same as the Christian's with regard to Christ. And realizing this, he sought in writing "In Memoriam" to identify his quest for the recapture of the spirit of a man with his desire for religious faith. Although he knew that he could not recapture the Spirit—that is, Christ as God—he felt that somehow he must receive Christ, an act of faith which could be effected by recreating Him as a person who was identifiable with His example.10 The poem, therefore, came to be not an elegy lamenting the death of a friend, but a religious quest concerned with the preservation of Hallam's personality through the preservation of the poet's personality. Thus Tennyson's faith in Christianity came through love—love of Hallam whom he made his Christ. Tennyson explains his spiritual "way" perhaps best in lyric CXXIV. His faith in the "He, They, One, All; within, without; / The Power in darkness whom we guess" has come not through ratiocination ("I found Him not in world or sun"), but through the heart: "I have felt."" The process can be explained as something like this : God is love; Christ is the embodiment of God's love for mankind; Hallam is identifiable with Christ and thus is himself an embodiment of ideal love which is immortal; I love Hallam; therefore I believe in Christ and in immortality. Having reached such a conclusion, Tennyson in the final lyrics goes still further in mingling the images of Christ and Hallam. In Poem CXXIX, for example, Hallam is addressed as "Known and unknown, human, divine," and as the "Dear heavenly friend that canst not die." In CXXX there is almost a note of jealousy when the poet, realizing that Hallam has become

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universal love and not merely personal love, says that the beloved friend is now a "diffusive power," but quickly adds, "I do not therefore love thee less." Hallam now belongs to every thing and to all; he is everywhere—in air, water, sun, star, and flower. And because the poet now is fully cognizant of his friend's union with the divine, he loses forever the sorrow born of grief and doubt. In its entirety Poem CXXX expresses Tennyson's completely unfolded love, which embraces more than the man he knew; his love now comprehends the man divine, the transcendental power, the God which gives him faith in both life and death: My love involves the love before; My love is vaster passion now; Tho' mixed with God and Nature thou, I seem to love thee more and more. Far off thou art, but ever nigh; I have thee still, and I rejoice; I prosper, circled with thy voice; I shall not lose thee tho' I die. One cannot leave "In Memoriam" without the impression that the elegy is really not a search for God. It is, the reader feels, one man's determination to hold on to God, a determination not to let Him go. The apotheosis of Hallam in the poem stems from the poet's desire to prove that God is, that Christianity, in spite of certain doubts which it must inevitably present to the mind of the thinking man, is the best faith to hold onto. "In Memoriam" is, thus, a refusal to say farewell to what one knows he has lost. Tennyson enforces this impression in the last section. He invokes the "living will," which he explained as free-will (Memoir, I, 319), to rise in "the spiritual rock" and strengthen him in his faith. This is the will to believe in spite

260 Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850 of all "proof" to the contrary, the will that brings the "faith that comes of self-control." As he explains in the Prologue, "Our wills are ours, we know not how; / Our wills are ours, to make them thine." For Tennyson, God is absolutely necessary for man. If He does not exist, then man must create Him. Tennyson is what Professor Fairchild calls "an emotional pragmatist," and C. F. G. Masterman is quite right when he says that Tennyson posited God as "necessary for the satisfaction of the demands of the human race.'"1 Thus the poet in the Prologue affirms his faith in the "Strong Son of God" so that "Thou wilt not leave us in the dust." As he told his son, "I am ready to fight for mein liebes Ich, and hold that it will last for aeons of aeons" (Memoir, I, 320). This approach could be called a prudential proof of the existence of God for the purpose of being saved from extinction. His "living will" therefore is the resolve to "dream my dream, and hold it true" (CXXIII). Part IV thus brings "In Memoriam" near to close with the roundest of declarations affirming the value of the life of the imagination. No longer is he distrustful that "so shall grief with symbols play / And pining life be fancy-fed" (LXXXV); rather, he discovers in the imagination a confirmation of his religious faith. Henceforward he will be a different kind of poet. In the New Year lyric he vows that he will undertake more general themes, will assume the role of bard: "Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes, / But ring the fuller minstrel in." He will cease to be the "phantom chanting hymns" and will concern himself and his poetry with mankind: I will not eat my heart alone, Nor feed with sighs a passing wind . . .

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I'll rather take what fruit may be Of sorrow under human skies. (CVIII.) His creative activity will become an aspect of his faith, and as the fuller minstrel he like the New Year's bell will sing of "the Christ that is to be."

V Tennyson said of " I n Memoriam": " I t begins with a funeral and ends with a marriage—begins with death and ends in promise of new life—a sort of Divine Comedy, cheerful at the close."" The value of the Epilogue has been questioned by critics who feel that this purpose was already achieved in Part I V . But I believe that the Conclusion has its purpose in that it serves to tie together the various themes of the elegy. On the surface the Epilogue is merely another domestic idyll in which a girl marries the man she loves and presumably will live happily ever after. It is not at all strange, I think, that Tennyson, the laureate of domestic life, should begin his poem with his sister Emily's loss of her betrothed and close with his sister Cecilia's marriage to Edmund Lushington, another close friend of the poet; for marriage was very much on the poet's mind, since he was himself to be wedded to Emily Sellwood in the same year that his elegy was published. Furthermore, the frequent allusions to marriage in such metaphors as "widow'd race" constitute a kind of countertheme to the theme of loneliness, and the marriage in the Epilogue seems to serve as a symbol that the old Tennysonian hero, the Byronic outcast, would forever be banished from the poet's verse as a pole of sympathy.

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In part the epithalamium is composed in Tennyson's most mannered, picturesque style. A line like "The foaming grape of eastern France" is the kind of elegant locution that the modern reader cannot abide: it sounds just as artificial as Pope's "finny denizens of the deep," it is as though Wordsworth had never lived. But these faults must not be allowed to obfuscate the good things in the poem. The picture of the bride standing on the tombstones, "pensive tablets round her head, I And the most living words of life I Breathed in her ear"—this is a fine symbolic situation. It is the HesperPhosphor image carried out of art into actuality; for this is a concrete, human image of Life-in-death, a kind of objective correlative uniting all the themes of the elegy. Gone is the grief and despair; the world has become alive and shows its beauty everywhere. The bells have no sorrow touched with joy; they tell only "joy to every wandering breeze." Furthermore, "The dead leaf trembles to the bells," for they herald a new life. The flower image is likewise pushed to its utmost value: today's flowers are only seeds of what will be: For all we thought and loved and did, And hoped, and suffer'd, is but seed Of what in them is flower and fruit. The marriage of the couple is symbolic of a new and better life, for in the child resulting from their union there shall be "a closer link / Betwixt us and the crowning race." The moral exhortation at the end of CXVIII is here developed into a prophecy of a higher plane of human existence in which the individual intelligence participates as a creative energy: A soul shall draw from out the vast And strike his being into bounds,

In Memoriam

263

And, moved thro' life of lower phase, Result in man, be born and think, And act and love, 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; No longer half-akin to brute. . . . T h e prophecy is that through emotional purgation and intellectual aspiration man will be freed f r o m the animal chain to which he is now bound. T h e Epilogue makes it clear that there are two kingdoms with which "In Memoriam" is concerned—an Earthly Paradise, which will result from evolutionary development, and a Heavenly Paradise, which is to be attained through Christian faith. And just as clearly the Epilogue shows that it is Hallam, the Christlike superhuman, who serves as an example and a link by which the two kingdoms are to be gained. T h e poet greets the putative child of his sister Cecilia and Edmund Lushington as a still further link between man at present and the future "crowning race," of whom, it is clearly implied, Hallam was one. Hallam, however, came too early, "Appearing ere the times were ripe." This statement of course suggests Christ's being rejected by those whom He came to help: the world is, the poet says, not ready to receive its saints. But for Tennyson the time for reception of the Christ-figure will come, for eventually the earth shall hold those in whose hand—and here the poet employs one more time the image of the hand—"Is Nature like an open book." And having approached perfection on earth, they shall be

264

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part of the Divine, like "That friend of mine who lives in God." Masterman remarks that Tennyson "looked for the ideal man in man and never found the Christ."" The poet's acceptance of Christianity, however, could for him come only through the finding of the ideal in man. Although he had Scriptural authority for his apotheosis of love (First Epistle of St. John, I V : 7, 16), he was, ironically, led most probably to his religious point of view by Hallam himself. In the "Theodicaea Novissima," an essay read to the Apostles at Cambridge, Hallam, basing his argument on the Biblical statement "God is Love," wrote that that which prompted God to temporal creation was love of Christ. Christ is the Son of God, but "the Godhead of the Son has not been a fixed, invariable thing from the beginning: he is more God now than he was once; and will be perfectly united to God hereafter, when he has put all enemies under his feet." Hallam thus allows for the evolutionary growth of "Godliness" in Christ; and since this is true, it is likewise possible that man through love of Christ may progress toward divinity; for "love of the Eternal Being will require similarity in the object that excites it." To know God, then, one must experience love, and this love of man, God's image, can lead to love and knowledge of God: But God, we have seen is love; love for all spirits in His image, but above all, far above all, for His son. In order to love God perfectly we must love what He loves; but Christ is the grand object of His love; therefore we must love Christ before we can attain that love of the Father, which alone is life everlasting. Before the Gospel was preached to man, how could a human soul have this love, and this consequent life? I see no way; but now that Christ has excited our love for him my shewing unutterable love for us; now that we know

In

Memoriam

265

him as an Elder Brother, a being of like thoughts, feelings, sensations, sufferings with ourselves, it has become possible to love as God loves, that is, to love the express image of God's person: in loving him we are sure we are in a state of readiness to love the Father, whom we see, he tells us, when we see him. Nor is this all : the tendency of love is towards a union so

intimate, as virtually to amount to identification; when then by affection towards Christ we have become blended with his being, the beams of Eternal Love falling, as ever, on the one beloved object will include us in him, and their returning flashes of love out of his personality will carry along with them some from our own, since ours has become confused with his, and so shall we be one with Christ and through Christ with God." There is, of course, an important difference between the love that proceeds from God to man and the love between men or from man toward God. On this point Hallam, in the foregoing quotation, is relatively clear; Tennyson is not. For Hallam, Christ is the expression of God's love toward man; man's love toward God through Christ is the response to that love. Hallam is, I believe, still orthodox enough to mean Christ objectively. Tennyson, on the other hand, means "Christ" subjectively—as a term for the love between human beings, which in its "highest" manifestation is "divine," that is, of transcendent but perhaps not of transcendental value. The knowledge of God through love of the ideal in man is a sentiment which Tennyson was to repeat time and again. "I believe in God, not from what I see in Nature, but from what I see in man," he once said." And it is the idea of love of God through love of man that informs the religious ideal of the Round Table in the "Idylls of the King." Arthur's knights vow to follow the king, who is himself a Christfigure, because he is that type of ideal man which Christ was on earth:

266

Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850

The King will follow Christ, and we the King, In whom high God hath breathed a secret thing. ("The Coming of Arthur," 499-500.) By means of seeking for the Christ in man, Tennyson was able to maintain his faith in Christianity. But his Christianity was, he was aware but never admitted, a deception, not formulated as such because of his willing suspension of disbelief. Tennyson, whatever his limitations as a philosopher, knew he could never take its symbolic Tightness for scientific truth; indeed, approaching religion in the spirit of poetry, transcending its dependence on "science" or "knowledge," is, as I see it, the main business of the poet in "In Memoriam." The lesson which the speaker learns is that religion is an imaginative achievement, a symbolic representation of moral reality having as its most important function the stimulation and vitalization of the mind. In the beginning of the elegy the "I" finds, to his dismay, that religion is not a literal representation of truth and life, yet he also learns that his knowledge is not comprehensive enough to cover all existence. What within the course of the poem he does learn is that religion is a symbolic representation of human experience and, further, that there can be no moral allegiance except to the ideal. It is for this reason, then, that Hallam as the manifestation of the ideal becomes the "Christ," the "divine" man of the "crowning race," who replaces or is to replace the New Testament Christ. It was through this substitution that the speaker could cling to his belief, as expressed in the concluding lines of the Epilogue, in "That God, which ever lives and loves." This was a kind of "new Mythus" for which Carlyle had asked in Sartor Resartus, a mythus embodying "the divine Spirit" of Christianity "in a new vehicle and vesture.""

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267

The speaker in the Epilogue is a far different man from the speaker in Part I : the years have "Remade the blood and changed the frame"; and correspondingly he is a much different kind of poet. He bids farewell to the elegiac vein because, become aware of a new orientation of his thought, expression of personal grief no longer suffices: No longer caring to embalm In dying songs a dead regret . . . For I myself with these [years] have grown To something greater than before. Love has made him as a man greater; he no longer feels imprisoned within the wall of ego, but through love has found the means to bridge the gulf between self and object. With the diffidence of hindsight, then, he looks back on his earlier lyrics As echoes out of weaker times, As half but idle brawling rhymes, The sport of random sun and shade. As the affirmation of love is the great assertion, the Everlasting Yea, of Tennyson the "soul," so the declaration of poetry as the handmaiden to life is the great averment of Tennyson the poet. Art for its own sake, art as escape from life—this kind of art Tennyson emphatically denies. Life is greater than art: In that it is thy marriage day Is music more than any song; and once and for all the poet tears down the Palace of Art, which he had so carefully erected in his early poetry.

268

Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850

The Prologue to "In Memoriam" was written last; in fact, it is dated 1849. Quite wisely Tennyson did not try to make the introduction to his elegy like an overture. No matter how hard he might have tried, he would have been unable to summarize or suggest the themes treated in the poem. So instead, the Prologue is the last stage in Tennyson's "way of the soul." The one thing that the Prologue makes clear is that there is no intellectual advance in "In Memoriam": the dichotomy between faith and science, or between wisdom and knowledge as adumbrated in Section CXIV, remains unresolved: We have but faith: we cannot know, For knowledge is of things we see; And yet we trust it comes from thee, A beam in darkness: let it grow. The progress within the elegy, as the Prologue suggests, is an emotional one; intellectually the speaker is just as uncertain as he was when the elegy began. Faced with a world in which scientific progress was outstripping spiritual progress, the poet desired something of spiritual value to fall back on. But the antagonism between science and religion—and of all English poets Tennyson was probably the most keenly and vitally aware of the scientific advancements in his own day—forbade his intellectual acceptance of a doctrine that could not be proved either through the senses or by the mind. What he learned from the experience of Hallam's death and of elegizing his friend was that no religious assertion is possible; what he does affirm, then, is not God but love. For this reason the Prologue invokes the "Strong Son of God, immortal Love," as evidence that the elegy does not find renewal of faith in God but spiritualizes, indeed Christianizes poetically, the poet's love for Hallam.

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269

Once more Tennyson speaks deprecatingly of the early lyrics in his elegy, calling them "wild and wandering cries, / Confusions of a wasted youth." Undoubtedly he refers not only to the beginning sections of his elegy but also to all his early poetry composed before and soon after Hallam's death. By the time that the Prologue was written and "In Memoriam" finished, Tennyson was ready to say farewell to the subjective vein that had characterized his verses. From this time onward the " I " in his poetry would become "we," and Tennyson as laureate would speak as the official poetic voice of England.

NOTES 1 For my remarks on Tennyson's poetic theory and practice in this chapter I am greatly indebted to E. D. H. Johnson, " 'In Memoriam': The Way of the Poet," Victorian Studies, II, 139-148. 1 Eleanor Bustin Mattes, In Memoriam: The Way of a Soul (New York, 1951). ' Tennyson always maintained, "The cardinal point of Christianity is the Life after Death" (Memoir, I, 321 n). 'A Diary, ed. H. Allingham and D. Radford (London, 1907), p. 149. 'Sartor Resartus, ed. C. F. Harrold (New York, 1937), p. 186. ' A Commentary on Tennyson's In Memoriam (London, 1902), p. 138. ' Autobiography (London, 1873), p. 141. 'Selected Essays (London, 1953), p. 336. ' Ibid., p. 334. " Tennyson once said, "On God and God-like men we build our trust" (Memoir, I, 311). " Tennyson always felt the necessity of Christ as an emotional symbol: "Christianity with its divine Morality," he said, "but without the central figure of Christ, the Son of Man, would become cold, and . . . it is fatal for religion to lose its warmth" (Memoir, I, 325-326). " Hoxie Neale Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry, IV (1830-1880), 119; C. F. G. Masterman, Tennyson as a Religious Teacher (Boston, 1900), p. 52. " Quoted by Bradley, pp. 237-238. " Tennyson as a Religious Teacher, p. 210. Hallam Tennyson writes of his father: "The main testimony to Christianity he found not in miracles but in that eternal witness, the revelation of what might be called 'The Mind of God,' in the Christian morality, and its correlation with the divine in man" (Memoir, I, 325). u The Writings of Arthur Hallcim. ed. T. H. Vail Motter (New York, 1943), pp. 204, 205, 210. " Quoted by Masterman, p. 149. " Sartor Resartus, p. 194.

270

Afterword

By 1850 Tennyson was able to combine the two "voyages" to which I alluded in the Foreword, and the boy affected with the romantic sensualism that characterized "Childe Harold," Wuthering Heights, and a whole host of nineteenthcentury literature turned into the man who became the voice and the conscience of Victorian society. Astounding as the change is to some of his critics, it is foreseeable in his earliest poetry. Although ultimately it was the Victorian part of his nature which he most plainly exposed, Tennyson did not, indeed could not, turn his back completely on his youthful poetry. For the themes and images which controlled his earliest verse continued to inform the lyrics of "In Memoriam." What happened to the poet between 1827 and 1850 was that he grew up, and maturation was largely responsible for his change in outlook. Aestheticism seems to belong largely to youth, and is put by in the process of maturing. Keats, for example, would most likely have obeyed his constant prompting toward poetry interpreting more general human experience had he lived longer. It is futile, then, even for those who most dislike the direction which Tennyson's poetry took, to blame the change on the poet's friends or the reviewers of his poems or his so-called compromise with the age A great poet develops as he must, regardless of the external demands which he encounters; and to my mind Tennyson is a great poet mainly because he was able 271

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Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850

to combine the creative freedom of a dream with truth to human experience. By examination of recurring themes and images in his poetry I have tried to show how Tennyson moved constantly away from direct statement, or rather from self-revelation, to become the man behind the mask. The probable reasons for his course are twofold. First, he feared to confess too much of himself, and stung by hostile reviews he became more and more reluctant to reveal himself in his poetry. Secondly, the use of the mask allowed a great variety of settings and circumstances from which to evolve new meanings and new values, for which the poet, in an age in which nearly all the traditional values had seemed to disappear, was constantly seeking. In his dramatic use of the persona Tennyson stands, along with Browning, as one of the great innovators in nineteenth-century poetry. But not only by his use of the mask did Tennyson veer toward oblique expression. By his constant examination of natural phenomena he sought to determine the value behind the object and to relate that value to himself. His use of pathetic fallacy, his identification of self with object show him moving steadily in the direction of symbolism; for in the union of subject and object he sought, like modern symbolists, to suggest the world both inside and outside the artist himself. At the same time that Tennyson was progressing toward obliquity in poetry he became less tentative in making assertions. His characteristic verbal mood changed, about 1842, from the subjunctive to the indicative governed, as the Prologue to "In Memoriam" exemplifies, by the pronoun "we"; and his verse shows a marked decline of the qualifying words "half," "almost," and "sometimes." His growing confidence in himself is thus made manifest by his grammar.

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273

Tennyson's growth as a poet is indicated to a lesser degree by his diction. From an affected, self-consciously poetic vocabulary, consisting of such words as "pleached" and "eglatare," he toned down his language to less florid terms. But Tennyson liked words too much, and he could hardly ever forego the temptation to employ mellifluous description. This is, I feel, Tennyson's greatest fault, for oftentimes his manner of speaking is inappropriate for the subject treated. "Ambrosial," for instance, strikes the ear not at all strangely in "Claribel" or even in "Oenone," but it seems very much out of place in "In Memoriam," where the "ambrosial air" is invoked to dispel death and doubt (LXXXVI). In this respect Tennyson's poetry reminds me of Turner's paintings, because Turner, like Tennyson, tried to say something that oftentimes is at variance with the way it is said. Both frequently took nature, especially landscape, for their subject, yet neither sought a close transcription of nature as a thing in itself, as earlier nineteenth-century artists seemed to do. Each attempted to transcend the subject at hand, to make the world of nature but a point of departure for imaginative flights into limitless space blazing with light, in which forms lost their structure and solidity and existed mainly for the golden or rosy-yellow light that enveloped them. In other words, both Tennyson and Turner sought to see through or beyond natural shapes, collapsing them as structures in order to illuminate and examine them as essences. In the art of each there is often on the surface little more than close attention to natural detail or direct statement. Yet if one looks beneath the surface of their works, he sees phantom shapes floating in an opalescent mist, as in Turner's water color "Norham: Sunrise" or in Tennyson's "A Dream of Fair Women," or abstract visualizations of space and

274

Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to J850

light, as in the painter's "Rain, Steam and Speed" or the poet's early "Armageddon."* Both have suffered in the twentieth century because neither was an architect: that is, a formalist who adhered to a rigid structure; and to a generation which has witnessed a renaissance of architecture (I suppose I should say architectonics) in all aspects of art this is a serious shortcoming. There seems inevitably something lacking in Turner's pictures and in Tennyson's poems to the eyes of a generation that has learned to understand and enjoy the architectonic achievements of the Cubists in painting and the Symbolists in literature. Both seem too diffuse: they oftentimes appear to take the most circumambulatory route to get where they are going. What the modern generation sometimes fails to comprehend, however, is that each was trying to follow a route which was practically uncharted. Each was seeking to relate the outer objective world to an inner realm of consciousness. This does not mean that they were merely trying to prove the external world upon the pulses. Certainly, they began with sensation, because they took up where Constable and Keats had led them; but in the course of their careers they also discovered abstraction, which directed their attentions toward the metaphysical. The great gift of Turner and Tennyson to art was the expression of effect in terms of outward objects: each was aware of what T. S. Eliot in his well-known essay on Hamlet has called the objective correlative. "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art," writes Mr. Eliot, "is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." Turner found

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it very early, as his drawing of Mont Cenis testifies, and Tennyson was already using the "talking landscape" as early as "Mariana." Thus regarded, Turner becomes the godfather not only of the impressionists (as he is now generally regarded) but also of the abstract expressionists, and Tennyson stands as the major precursor in the first half of the nineteenth century of the modern English symbolists. In his treatment of certain themes, then, Tennyson is modern; but as I have said, in form he is distinctly nineteenthcentury. He inherited a certain artistic tradition and attempted to work with its techniques. Although these techniques had adequately served his predecessors, Tennyson had the misfortune to be born in a time when the old tradition had, under the impact of science, begun to decay. He fully realized the precarious state of his times, and he sought to translate into his art all his misgivings about the society of which he was a part. Yet he had not a suitable means for expressing his disaffection with contemporary society or his desire for a more congenial reality. There is, consequently, a curious texture in Tennyson's art: he is like a man of the mid-twentieth century in the dress of a century earlier. The effect is not ludicrous; rather, it is sad and tensile, as though he were seeking to liberate himself from the bonds of form. His art is melancholy because it looks backward and forward, with regret for a vanished past and often with apprehension to a fearful future.

Index Note:

Poems included in Sir Charles Tennyson's edition of Unpublished Early Poems are indicated by an asterisk.

"Adeline," 61, 87 "Ah! yes, the lip may faintly smile," 31-32 Ainger, Canon, 76 "Alas! how weary are my human eyes,"* 25 "All Things Will Die," 43, 116 Allingham, William, 228 "Amphion," 113, 114, 138, 231 "Amy,"* 34 "And ask ye why these sad tears stream?" 19, 32 "Antony to Cleopatra," 31, 35 Apostles, the Cambridge, 34, 44, 54, 55, 71 "Armageddon,"* 21, 25, 28-29, 33, 35, 40, 85, 238 Arnold, Matthew, 5, 56 Athenaeum, The, 54, 85 Atlas, 147 "Audley Court," 154-55, 159, 184, 185, 188, 240 "Babylon," 23 Baudelaire, Charles, 254 Baum, Paull F„ 134, 189 "Beggar Maid, The," 153, 161 Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 67 Blakesley, J. W„ 71-72

Bourne, Mary (poet's aunt), 2021, 142 Bradley, A. C., 196, 241 "Break, break, break," 104-108 Brooke, Stopford A., 35-36, 93, 126,127 Brooks, Cleanth, 104, 106,107 Browning, Robert, 124,143, 272 ; Dramatic Lyrics, 124; "My Last Duchess," 143 "Buonaparte," 101 Burke, Edmund, 158, 182, 184 Bronte, Emily, Wuthering Heights, 271 Byron, Lord, 19-21, 22, 33, 52, 128, 131, 261 ; "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," 19, 20, 271 ; "Destruction of Sennacherib," 19; "Maid of Athens," 19; "On the Death of a Young Lady," 19 Cambridge University, 16, 34, 40, 43, 44 passim, 56, 71, 245. See also Apostles. Carlyle, Thomas, 39^40, 93, 115116, 121, 125, 229, 250, 251, 266; Sartor Resartus, 39^*0, 121, 125, 229, 266 Carr, Arthur, J., 7, 8, 58

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Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850

Chambers, R. W., 216 "Chorus," 43 "Claribel," 47, 53, 162, 273 "Coach of Death, The,"» 21, 31, 143 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 59, 119-121, 250; "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," 119— 121, 207, 230 Collins, William, 16; "Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands," 16 "Come down, O maid," 184 "Come hither, cans't thou tell me if this skull," 19 "Conrad! why call thy life monotonous?"* 34 Constable, John, 274 "Contrast, A," 32 "Could I outwear my present state of woe," 59 "Crossing the Bar," 129 Dante, 121 Darwinism, 5, 245, 246 "Day-Dream, The," 113, 137, 141, 166, 176 "Death of the Old Year, The," 95 "Dell of E , The," 23, 34 "Deor's Lament," 21 "Deserted House, The," 53, 202 de Vere, Aubrey, 164, 165, 168 "Devil and the Lady, The," 25, 35, 205 Dickens, Charles, 162 "Did not thy roseate lips outvie," 32 "Dora," 34, 150-151, 184, 241 "Dream of Fair Women, A," 82, 90-92, 100, 137, 176, 228, 273 Edinburgh Review, 142, 160, 168

"Edward Gray," 149-150 "Edwin Morris," 34, 166, 184, 188 "Egypt," 79, 83, 94 "Eleanore," 87-89 Eliot, T. S., 41, 54, 78, 142, 205, 255, 274; "Four Quartets," 205 ; "La Figlia Che Piange," 54 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 115 "English War Song," 67 Englishman's Magazine, The, 218-219 "Epic, The," 138, 165, 188 "Exile's Harp, The," 18, 21 "Expedition of Nadir Shah into Hindostan, The," 19 Fairchilde, Hoxie N., 260 "Fall of Jerusalem, The," 23 "Farewell, A," 108 "Fatima," 89 Fitzgerald, Edward, 161 "Flight, The," 150 "Fragment,"* 115 "Fragments of an Elegy," 195 Eraser's Magazine, 183 Freud, Sigmund, 56, 80, 90, 110, 163nl5 "Friendship," 19 "Gardener's Daughter, The," 151-153, 155, 173 "Godiva," 115, 141, 159, 165166 "Golden Year, The," 156, 228 "Goose, The," 156-157 "Grasshopper, The," 50-51 "Grave of a Suicide, The," 19 Gray, Thomas, 22; "Elegy Written in A Country Churchyard," 22 Grierson, H. J. C., 6

Index Hallam, Arthur Henry, 38, 44. 68n6, 71, 103, 104, 108, 118, 126, 129, 133, 195 passim; "Theodicaea Novissima," 264 Hemans, Felicia, 39 "Hesperides, The," 72, 76-77, 242 High Beech, 256 Homer, 96 ; The Odyssey, 96 " ' H o w ' and the 'Why,' The," 42, 182 "How gaily sinks the gorgeous sun," 21-22 Huysmans, J. K., 83 "I Wander in Darkness and Sorrow," 18, 32 "Idle Rhyme, An,"* 113-114 "Idylls of the King," 265-266 "In Deep and Solemn Dreams,"* 16, 27-28, 29, 30, 41, 239 "In Memoriam," 7, 56, 57, 64, 80, 86, 96, 104, 108, 118, 121, 126, 129, 141, 145, 146, 163n3, 165, 188, 195-270, 271, 272, 273 "Isabel," 150 Johnson. E. D. H., 7, 132 Jung, Carl G., 61-62, 66 Kant, Immanuel, 250 "Kate," 87 Keats, John, 5, 24, 34, 47, 48, 49, 52, 54, 55, 58, 59, 60, 70, 74, 77, 78, 84, 85, 86, 88, 90, 92, 109, 123, 125, 126, 130, 153, 161, 177, 186, 196, 216, 231, 237, 271, 274; "Endymion," 86-87 ; "I Stood Tip-toe upon a Little Hill," 47; "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," 60, 78, 88, 91 ; "Ode to a Nightingale,"

279

60, 74, 119, 196; "Ode to Autumn," 60; "The Eve of St. Agnes," 78; "Sleep and Poetry," 109; "The Fall of Hyperion," 85 Kermode, Frank, 73 Kingsley, Charles, 182-183 Knowles, Sir James, 45 "Kraken, The," 65-66, 67 "Lady Clara Vere de Vere," 147— 148, 153 "Lady Clare," 153, 155 "Lady of Shalott, The," 72-76, 99, 110-111, 134, 192, 242. 244 "Lamentation of the Peruvians," 23 Langbaum, Robert, 105, 107, 125 "Life," 34 "Lilian," 60 "Lisette,"* 32, 35 "Locksley Hall," 123-125, 127, 146, 148, 149, 157, 159, 161, 166, 179, 184, 185, 247, 250 London Review, 112 "Lord of Burleigh, The," 153, 155, 161 "Lost Hope," 62 "Lotus-Eaters, The," 23, 43, 72, 77, 96-100, 111, 116, 119, 125, 130, 131, 132, 189, 212, 242 Lounsbury, T. R„ 19-20 "Love" (1827), 35 "Love" (1830), 62-64, 121 "Love and Death," 64, 86 "Love and Duty," 116, 122-123, 143, 179, 250 "Love and Sorrow," 62 "Love, Pride and Forgetfulness," 62

280

Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850

"Love thou thy land," 158-159, 254 "Lover's Tale, The," 29-30, 33, 34 Lucretius, 99 Lushington, Edmund, 261, 263 Lyell, Charles, 216 Macaulay, Thos. Babington, 56 "Madeline," 60-61 "Margaret," 87 "Mariana," 47, 53-54, 60, 62, 67, 72, 77, 78, 79, 146, 149, 203, 275 "Mariana in the South," 77-79 "Marion,"* 35 Marlowe, Christopher, 78 Mastermann, C. F. G., 5, 8, 260, 264 ; Condition of England, 5 "Maud," 103, 184 Mattes, Eleanor Bustin, 197, 216 Maurice, Frederick Denison, 5456, 85 "May Queen, The," 89-90, 9395, 96, 147, 149, 162 "Memory," 18,21,24 "Memory,"* 27 "Mermaid, The," 46 "Merman, The," 46 "Midnight," 19 Mill, John Stuart, 112, 229, 250, 251 "Miller's Daughter, The," 93-94, 121, 147, 173 Milton, John, 5, 35, 56, 245 "Mine be the strength of spirit, full and free," 70-72, 117, 161 "Mithradates Presenting Berenice with the Cup of Poison," 19, 32, 35 Moore, Thomas, 33 "Morte d'Arthur," 138-141, 156, 158, 166, 182, 212

"Move eastward, happy earth," 108 "My life is full of weary days," 95 "Mystic, The," 40-41, 42, 55, 57 "National Song," 67, 186 New Monthly Magazine, 47, 147 Nicholson, Sir Harold, 6, 15-16 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 245-246; The Birth of Tragedy, 246 North, Christopher. See Wilson, John "Nothing Will Die," 43, 116 "O Darling Room," 101 "Ode: O Bosky Brook,"* 21, 24, 26-27 "Ode to Memory," 44-45, 47, 203 "Oenone," 69, 79 82, 94, 100, 128, 186, 229, 250, 273 "Oh, Beauty, passing beauty, sweetest Sweet," 95 "Oh, that 'twere possible," 103 "Oh! ye wild winds, that roar and rave," 24 "Old Sword, The," 23 "On Sublimity," !6 "Outcast, The,"* 18, 20. 24, 33 Paden, W. D„ 19, 20, 24 "Palace of Art, The," 69, 82-86, 99,100, 110, 133, 141, 142, 145, 151, 172, 173, 180, 188, 189, 190, 253 Pascal, Blaise, 121 Pater, Walter, 46, 56 "Perdidi Diem,"* 25 "Persia," 23, 31 Plato, 253 ; Symposium, 253 "Playfellow Winds,"* 45

Index Poems (1832, dated 1833), 69101, 134 Poems (1842), 103-162, 165, 166, 189, 191 Poems by Two Brothers, 15-37, 38, 42, 49, 58, 66, 95, 104 Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, 37-68, 69-70, 100, 101, 112, 218 "Poet, The," 42, 54, 114, 115, 161 "Poet's Mind, The," 54-56, 57 "Poet's Song, The," 114-115 Pope, Alexander, 15, 35, 262; "Essay on Man," 196 "Princess, The,"' 141, 164-194, 240, 243, 250, 254 Pyre, J. F. A., 160 "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," 7, 42, 47-51, 67, 73, 83, 91, 133, 176, 225, 238, 240, 242 "Remorse," 18, 19, 21, 24, 33, 104, 134, 142, 145 Rolfe, W. J., 8 "Rosalind," 87 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 255 ; "The Blessed Damozel," 255 Ruskin, John, 190; "PreRaphaelitism," 190 "Saint Agnes Eve," 103, 136-137 "Saint Simeon Stylites," 141143, 161 Santayana, George, 258 Scott, Sir Walter, 15 "Sea-Fairies, The,' 43, 44, 96 "Sense and Conscience,"* 24, 27, 29,41,48, 116 Shakespeare, William, 43 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 22, 33. 52, 54, 55, 57, 60, 86 ; "To a Skylark," 22, 60

281

"Sir Galahad," 136-137, 143 "Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere," 80, 134-136. 151 "Sisters, The," 89 "Sleeping Beauty, The," 137 Somersby, 45, 108, 240, 241, 256 Song: "A Spirit haunts the year's last hours," 59-60, 67, 95 Song: "Who can say," 95 Spedding, James, 45-46, 99, 142, 160 Stange, Robert G., 129 "Statesman, The," 157 Stevenson, Lionel, 86 Stoicism, 253 "Supposed Confessions of a Second-Rate Sensitive Mind," 56-58, 116, 205, 208 "Talking Oak, The," 154, 161 "Tears, Idle Tears," 181, 243 Templeman, William D., 125 Tennyson, Cecilia (poet's sister), 261, 263 Tennyson, Charles (poet's brother), 15, 108 Tennyson, Sir Charles (poet's grandson), 8, 15, 17, 45, 178 Tennyson, Emily (poet's sister), 261 Tennyson, Emily Sellwood (poet's wife), 103, 108, 122, 123, 141, 193, 261 Tennyson, Frederick (poet's brother), 15 Tennyson, George Clayton (poet's father), 15, 16-17 Tennyson, Hallam, 2nd Lord (poet's son), 8, 15,76, 109, 116, 137, 147, 270nl4 "The form, the form alone is eloquent," 87 Theocritus, 154

282

Theme and Symbol in Tennyson's Poems to 1850

"Thou earnest to thy bower, my love," 32, 34 "Timbuctoo," 28, 216-217 "Tithonus," 129-134, 141, 148, 211 ' T o — " ("As when with downcast eyes"), 119, 179 "To—" ("I send you here a sort of allegory"). See "Palace of Art" "To J. S ," 96 "To Poesy," 54 "Translation of Claudian's 'Prosperine,' "* 35 Trench, Richard Chevenix, 44. 52, 85 Trinity College. See Cambridge University True Sun, 147 Turner, J. M. W., 146, 273-275 ; "Norham: Sunrise," 273; "Rain, Steam and Speed," 274 "Two Voices, The," 82,104,116122, 123, 125, 130, 131, 132, 143, 146, 149, 155, 172, 180, 188, 199, 228, 229, 230, 251 Tyndall, John, 31 "Ulysses," 104, 111, 117, 125-130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 138, 141, 161, 162, 180, 212, 215 Unpublished Early Poems, 1537, 67 "Vale of Bones, The," 23 Virgil, 246 ; "Eclogues," 246

"Vision of Sin, The," 143-146 226, 239 "Walk at Midnight, The," 19 "Walking to the Mail," 153-154, 155, 159, 184 Waterston, Elizabeth H., 7 "We Meet No More," 18 Westminster Review, 112 "What Thor Said to the Bard before Dinner,"» 114 "Why should we weep for those who die," 22 "Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue," 113, 114, 115, 158, 159, 184 Wilson, John, 67 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 233 Wordsworth, William, 52, 57, 58, 71-72, 93, 101, 151, 155, 156, 162, 196, 198, 213, 214, 217, 229, 233, 247, 250, 251, 254, 262; "Elegiac Stanzas," 214; "Intimations Ode," 196, 233, 247; Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, 217-218; "The Prelude," 196, 207; "Tintern Abbey," 233 "Written by an Exile of Bassorah," 18, 32 Yeats, William Butler, 52, 112; "Ego Dominus Tuus," 52 "You ask me, why, tho' ill at ease," 158 "Youth," 109-112, 163n4