Tennysoniana/Chapter 1
TENNYSONIANA.
CHAPTER I.
poems by two brothers.
Alfred Tennyson—the third of seven brothers, all or nearly all of whom have written poetry[1]—was born August 5th, 1809, at Somersby, a small village in Lincolnshire, lying about midway between the market-towns of Spilsby and Horncastle, and containing at that time less than a hundred inhabitants. Of this parish, his father, Dr. George Clayton Tennyson, was the rector. Dr. Tennyson was a man of energetic character, remarkable for his great strength and stature, and of very various talents—something of a poet, painter, architect, and musician, and also a considerable linguist and mathematician.[2] He died in 1830. The poet's mother, whose maiden name was Elizabeth Fytche, and who was herself the daughter of a clergyman, lived to see her son famous, and died in 1865 at an advanced age.[3]
Those who care to study pedigrees will find, on referring to Burke's "Dictionary of the Landed Gentry," that our Poet can claim descent from a very ancient family—the D'Eyncourts of the Norman times, whose name has, by royal licence, been resumed by an elder branch of the house.
Early in the year 1827 we find Alfred Tennyson and his elder brother Charles together at the Louth grammar-school, and preparing for the press a volume of juvenile poems, written from the age of fifteen upwards. The copyright was disposed of for a small sum to Messrs. Jackson, booksellers and printers of Louth,[4] who published the volume in the spring of 1827, under the title of "Poems by Two Brothers," and with the modest motto, from Martial, on the title-page, "Hæc nos novimus esse nihil."
These poems are 102 in number, few of them extending to great length, as the volume only contains 228 pages. They are written in all kinds of metre, and on all sorts of subjects—classical and modern—strangely alternating. Nearly all of them are loaded with footnotes, and headed by quotations, chiefly from Addison, Beattie, Byron, Cicero, Claudian, Cowper, Gray, Horace (who is quoted no fewer than eighteen times), Hume, Lucretius, Milton, Moore, Ovid, Racine, Mrs. Radcliffe, Rousseau, Sallust, Scott, Tacitus, Terence, Virgil, and Young—displaying an extent of reading by no means inconsiderable for schoolboys.
The young poets seem to have been much under the then prevalent influence of Byron, since he is not only quoted six times, but the volume also contains a poem on his recent death, an allusion to the same event in another, and several rather obvious imitations of the "Hebrew Melodies."
The book, naturally enough, attracted no notice whatever on its first appearance,[5] as it was little likely that an anonymous volume of poems, published in an obscure country town, should do.
The following is a list of the contents:
Stanzas; "In early youth I lost my sire;" Memory; "Yes, there be some gay souls who never weep;" The Exile's Harp; "Have ye not seen the buoyant orb?" "Why should we weep for those who die?" "Religion! tho' we seem to spurn;" Remorse; "On golden evenings, when the sun;" The Dell of E—; My Brother; Antony to Cleopatra; "I wander in darkness and sorrow;" "To one whose hope reposed on thee;" The Old Sword; "We meet no more;" The Gondola; Written by an Exile of Bassorah, while sailing down the Euphrates; Maria to her Lute, the gift of her dying Lover; The Vale of Bones; To Fancy; Boyhood; "Did not thy roseate lips outvie;" Huntsman's Song; Persia; Egypt; The Druid's Prophecies; Lines to one who entertained a light opinion of an Eminent Character; Swiss Song; The Expedition of Nadir Shah into Hindostan; Greece; The Maid of Savoy; Ignorance of Modern Egypt; Midnight; "In summer, when all Nature glows;" Scotch Song; "Borne on light wings of buoyant down;" Song; "The stars of yon blue placid sky;" Friendship; On the Death of my Grandmother; "And ask ye why these sad tears stream?" The Reign of Love; On Sublimity; The Deity; "'Tis the Voice of the Dead;" Time: an Ode; "All joyous in the realms of day;" God's Denunciations against Pharaoh-Hophra, or Apries; The Thunderstorm; The Battle-field; The Grave of a Suicide; On the Death of Lord Byron; The Walk at Midnight; The Bard's Farewell; Mithridates presenting Berenice with the cup of poison; Epigram; Epigram on a Musician; On being asked for a Simile to illustrate the advantage of keeping the Passions subservient to Reason; The Old Chieftain; Apollonius Rhodius's Complaint; The Fall of Jerusalem; Short Eulogium on Homer; Lamentation of the Peruvians; "A sister, sweet endearing name!" "Oh, never may frowns and dissension molest;" "The sun goes down in the dark blue main;" "Still, mute, and motionless she lies;" On a Dead Enemy; Lines on hearing a description of the Scenery of Southern America; The Duke of Alva's Observation on Kings; "Ah! yes, the lip may faintly smile;" "Thou earnest to thy bower, my love, across the musky grove;" To ———; The Passions; The High Priest to Alexander; "The dew with which the early mead is drest;" On the Moonlight shining upon a Friend's Grave; A Contrast; Epigram; The Dying Christian; "Those worldly goods that distant seem;" "How gaily sinks the gorgeous Sun within his golden bed;" A Glance; "Oh, ye wild Winds, that roar and rave;" Switzerland; Babylon; The Slighted Lover; "Oh! were this heart of hardest steel;" "Cease, railer, cease! unthinking man;" "In Winter's dull and cheerless reign;" Anacreontic; Sunday Mobs; Phrenology; Imagination; Love; To ———; Song; The Oak of the North; Exhortation to the Greeks; King Charles's Vision.
The Preface of the young poets informs us that these pieces "were written, not conjointly, but individually, which may account for their difference of style and matter." In spite of this assurance, it is in some cases not easy to settle with anything like certainty the authorship of a particular piece. An attentive comparison of these poems with later acknowledged writings of Alfred and Charles Tennyson has, however, been rewarded by the discovery of certain parallel passages which, we think, will enable us to apportion a certain number of them to their respective authors, without much hesitation or doubt.
The following twelve pieces, from internal evidence of style, and from parallel passages in later and acknowledged writings which we shall presently adduce, may with tolerable certainty be assigned to the Laureate:
- Antony to Cleopatra.
- The Old Sword.
- The Vale of Bones.
- Persia.
- Egypt.
- Midnight.
- Time: an Ode.
- On a Dead Enemy.
- Lines on hearing a description of the Scenery of Southern America.
- On the Moonlight shining upon a Friend's Grave.
- Switzerland.
- The Oak of the North.
The poem of "Antony to Cleopatra" is so beautiful in itself that we must quote a portion of it. Few students of Alfred Tennyson's poetry, after reading it, could, we think, doubt it to be his work. If further evidence were wanting, further evidence remains; and the stanzas in the "Dream of Fair Women" (a poem published in the volume of 1832), where Cleopatra calls on the name of Antony, must set all doubt at rest on the subject. In the earlier piece Antony is the speaker, and he thus bids his mistress a tragic farewell:
"O Cleopatra! fare thee well,
We two can meet no more;
This breaking heart alone can tell
The love to thee I bore.
But wear thou not the conqueror's chain
Upon thy race and thee;
And tho' we ne'er can meet again
Yet still be true to me:
For I for thee have lost a throne
To wear the crown of love alone.
"Fair daughter of a regal line!
To thraldom bow not tame;
My every wish on earth was thine,
My every hope the same.
And I have moved within thy sphere,
And lived within thy light;
And oh! thou wert to me so dear
I breathed but in thy sight!
A subject world I lost for thee,
For thou wert all my world to me!
"Then, when the shriekings of the dying
Were heard along the wave,
Soul of my soul! I saw thee flying,
I follow'd thee to save.
The thunder of the brazen prows
O'er Actium's ocean rung,
Fame's garland faded from my brows,
Her wreath away I flung.
I sought, I saw, I heard but thee;
For what to love was victory?"
The two lines in italics have the true Tennysonian ring. Five years afterwards the poet recurred to the same theme in his "Dream of Fair Women," giving us the reverse of the picture. Here Cleopatra speaks:
"O what days and nights
We had in Egypt, ever reaping new
Harvest of ripe delights.
"What dainty strifes, when fresh from war's alarms,
My Hercules, my gallant Antony,
My mailed captain leapt into my arms,
Contented there to die!
"And in those arms he died; I heard my name
Sigh'd forth with life: then I shook off all fear:
Oh what a little snake stole Cæsar's fame!
What else was left? look here."
The "Old Sword" we take to be Alfred Tennyson's from internal evidence of style.
In the "Vale of Bones" are the following lines:
"When on to battle proudly going,
Your plumage to the wild winds blowing,
Your tartans far behind ye flowing,
Your pennons raised, your clarions sounding,
Fiercely your steeds beneath ye bounding."
This, as Mr. Leicester Warren has pointed out, is very similar, both in rhythm and expression, to a passage in the "Ballad of Oriana," which appeared in the "Poems, chiefly Lyrical" in 1830.
"Winds were blowing, waters flowing,
We heard the steeds to battle going,
Aloud the hollow bugle blowing," &c.
And, as an additional proof, the two following lines:
"At times her partial splendour shines
Upon the grove of deep black pines,"
bear a remarkable resemblance to a stanza in "The Two Voices" (written, though not published, in 1833):
"Sometimes a little corner shines
As over rainy mist inclines
A gleaming crag with belts of pines."
We now come to the very remarkable poem entitled "Persia." The reader will find (on page 65) an allusion to
"the glittering sands
Of bright Pactolus."
In a sonnet in the "Poems, chiefly Lyrical" not reprinted in the later editions, is the following passage:
"And sailing on Pactolus in a boat
Drown soul and sense, while wistfully they strain
Weak eyes upon the glistering sands that robe
The understream."
There is besides (page 63) an allusion to the lotos-stem, which recals some lines in the "Lotos-Eaters."
In the poem entitled "Egypt" are these lines:
"The first glitter of his rising beam
Falls on the broad-based pyramids sublime."
The words italicized occur again in "A Fragment," by Alfred Tennyson, printed in the "Gem" in the autumn of 1830:
"Yet endure unscathed
Of changeful cycles, the great Pyramids
Broad based amid the fleeting sands."
The piece called "Midnight" contains a graphic description of the fen country, near which Tennyson was born. There is, we think, sufficient internal evidence to prove it to be his. In the next poem specified, "Time: an Ode," we should also rely upon the general style, full of that immature grandiloquence which characterizes much of Tennyson's boyish work. The lines "On a Dead Enemy," we assign to the Laureate upon the same grounds as those adduced by Mr. Leicester Warren.
The "Lines on hearing a description of the Scenery of Southern America" remind us of the poem "To E. L. on his Travels in Greece;" and the verses "On the Moonlight shining upon a Friend's Grave" recal inevitably the sixty-seventh section of "In Memoriam."
The poem of "Switzerland" contains the following stanza:
"O when shall Time
Avenge the crime,
And to our rights restore us;
And bid the Seine
Be choked with slain
And Paris quake before us?"
Turning to the hundred and twenty-seventh section of "In Memoriam" we find the same image about the Seine reproduced:
"Even tho' thrice again
The red fool-fury of the Seine
Should pile her barricades with dead."
A few other resemblances of thought or phrase may be added:
Still dwindling as we still draw near;
And yet contracting on the eye
Till the bright circling colours die."
p. 177.
With eager eyes all panting after truth
Shrewd Spurzheim's visionary pages turn,
And, with Napoleon's bust before them, learn
Without the agency of what small bone
Quick-lime had ne'er upon a host been thrown:
In what rough rise a trivial sink had saved
The towns he burnt, the nations he enslaved."
Phrenology (p. 201).
God's Denunciations against Pharaoh-Hophra (p. 121).
Scarce less her anguish, scarce her patience less."
On the Death of my Grandmother (p. 99).
Poems by Alfred Tennyson.
Purple gauzes, golden hazes, liquid mazes,
Flung the torrent rainbow round."
The Vision of Sin (1842).
To feed thy bones with lime, and ran
Their course, till thou wert also man."
The Two Voices.
The giant labouring in his youth;
Nor dream of human love and truth
As dying Nature's earth and lime."
In Memoriam, cxvii. 1.
The Pharaohs are no more."
A Fragment (1830).
Bore and forbore, and did not tire,
Like Stephen, an unquenched fire."
The Two Voices.
By a similar process, applied to the acknowledged poems of Charles Tennyson, we find several interesting parallel passages, which shall be given side by side.
Poems by Two Brothers.
And slings o'er his shoulder his loud bugle-horn!"
Huntsman's Song, p. 62.
His blazing train unfold
Among the many lights that fill
The sapphirine with gold."
p. 95.
The Dying Christian, p. 175.
Poems by Charles Tennyson, 1830.
When the loud pealing of the huntsman's horn
Doth sally forth upon the silent air," &c.
Sonnet 46.
They sped—I saw their trains so bright!"
Comets, p. 71.
Compare with the last poem in Charles Tennyson's volume:
"We all must die but to the good," &c.
Poems by Two Brothers.
Wheeling his circuit of unnumber'd miles."
On Sublimity, p. 108.
Which fell by night inaudible and soft,
Mocks the foil'd glance that would its hues arrest,
That glance, and change so quickly and so oft.
****
"Oh, man! relinquish Passion's baleful joys," &c.
pp. 172, 173.
Poems by Charles Tennyson, 1830.
When flung into the calm of sightless speed.
Sonnet 9 (p. 12).
But th' intellect may rove a thousand ways
And yet be calm while fluctuating so:
The dewdrop shakes not to its shifting rays,
And transits of soft light," &c.
Sonnet 9 (p. 12).
- ↑ Frederick, Charles (born at Somersby, July 4, 1808), Alfred, Edward, Harold, Arthur, and Septimus (died at Cheltenham, September 7, 1866).
- ↑ William Howitt: "Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets" (London, 1847), ii. 48, where there is a view of the house in which Alfred Tennyson was born; "A New Spirit of the Age," edited by R. H. Horne (London, 1844), ii. 31.
- ↑ Mrs. Elizabeth Tennyson, died 21st February, 1865, aged eighty-four years; her sister, Miss Mary Anne Fytche, died March 10th, 1865, aged eighty-three years. These ladies were the mother and aunt of Alfred Tennyson. They both resided for many years in one house near Well Walk, at Hampstead, and they were both buried in one grave at Highgate Cemetery. The Poet Laureate attended as chief mourner on each occasion.
- ↑ "From Grantham, Eyre went to the grammar-school of Louth, in Lincolnshire, which Charles and Alfred Tennyson had left a year or two before. Their fame as poets was still traditionary in the school, and Edward Eyre seemed to feel a kind of noble envy, at once proud of the fact that two of 'our boys' had actually published a volume of poems for which a bookseller gave them ten pounds, and grieved he could not emulate them."—Life of Edward John Eyre, by Hamilton Hume (London, 1867), p. 11.
- ↑ The only contemporary criticism that we have succeeded in tracing, appeared in the "Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review" of May 19, 1827, and is sufficiently mild and reserved in its praise. "This little volume," says the sagacious reviewer, "exhibits a pleasing union of kindred tastes, and contains several little pieces of considerable merit." He subjoins two as deserving of extract, viz. the stanzas commencing "Yon star of eve, so soft and clear," and "God's Denunciations against Pharaoh-Hophra."