Alfred, lord Tennyson (1809 - 1892)

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809 - 1892)

His poetry

When he was 17 years old Tennyson collaborated with his elder brother, Charles in Poems by Two Brothers (1827). The volume is a slight one, but in the light of his later work we can already discern a little of the Tennysonian metrical aptitude and descriptive power.

His volume of Poems (1833) is of a different quality and marks a decided advance. It contains such notable poems as Lady of Shalott, OEnone , The Lotus - Eaters and The Palace of Art, in which we see the Tennysonian technique approaching perfection. Then in 1842 he produced two volumes of poetry  (Poems) that set him once and for all among the greater poets of his day. The first volume consists mainly of revised forms of some of the numbers published previously; the second is entirely new. It opens with Morte d'Arthur, and contains Ulysses, Locksley Hall, and several other poems that stand at the summit of his achievement.

"In order to form a fair appreciation of Tennyson's poetry we have to consider him in the perspective of his age as well as in artistic contexts. We must also view him within the scheme of his psychological process" (J. Carr)

As a result of this careful examination, we shall come to a conclusion: that Tennyson has been subject to a life, subject to a fundamental division of mind. On the one hand, his aesthetic conviction that withdrawal, dream and creaseless contemplation were necessary to art; on the other hand, the conviction of the socially responsible Tennyson, that of being in duty bound to transmit the ethos of the age and who therefore used poetry as a didactic weapon.

The expression of his poetic dream we find in the youthful poem called The Hesperides. The Garden of the Hesperides, the vanished and unattainable paradise, stands for the poet's conception of a poetic Eden, of a life time dedicated to art, a life withdrawn, introspective and sensuous. It is a symbolic presentation of the situation of the artist, a kind of incantation sung by the three Hesperidian maidens invoking the magic of poetry assuming that the poet's art may thrive and be protected.

The Greek myth of the Hesperidian gardens with its tree, golden apple, "the fruit of wisdom" and its blissful atmosphere reminds us of the Garden of Eden. He thereby anticipates the use of mythology as handled by later poets, like W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot. Thus there is no shape break between the poetry of the Romantics (Shelley and Keats), of the Victorians and of the moderns, but simply continuity and transformation. The golden apple is a treasure of the West. The notion of east and west has a special significance, being part of the mythology of Tennyson's early poems. The maidens, daughters of Hesperus, the evening star, are daughters of the West. The West is a place of Twilight of relaxation and death. It is essentially the world of magic twilight of the Lotus-Eaters, a land where it seemed always afternoon, of the Merman and the Mermaid, a land of retreat into fantasy and unreality. The antithesis to this is East, the land of dawn, of activity and strife. The antinomy is constantly emphasized by a light - dark, evening - morning contrast.

He frequently expressed his reasoned intentions to participate in the activities of his fellow - men, for, in spite of the grudges he bore to the utilitarism and mechanization of his period, he was impressed with the scientific advance of his time and could not fail to notice the progress achieved. In spite of his spiritual devotion to the remoteness and isolation of his poetic garden, Tennyson made a conscious effort to transmit the ethos of his age, using poetry as a didactic weapon.

This ambivalence of Tennyson's attitude towards the poetic act of creation expresses itself in thematic images, which, like musical motifs in a symphony, always introduce the same idea and state of mind. The land of Lotus-Eaters is another version of the same poetic garden. A land in which it seemed always afternoon, a land of twilight, "languid air", weary dream of passive stability. A land where all things always seemed the same, the land of muffled noises, the land of the pale-faced melancholy Lotus-Eaters, of the magic fruit of soothing effect, where the inner spirit sinks "There is no joy but calm".

The dreamy melancholy poet and the responsible social being are fused in Ullysses. The poem may be interpreted as one more speculation of Tennyson's on the fate and calling of the poet. The basis of Tennyson's poem is not to be sought in the Homeric poems, but in Dante's Inferno. In the eleventh book of the Odyssey it is foretold that after his return to Ithaca and the slaying of the suitors, he is to set off again on a mysterious voyage. This voyage and its outcome are related by the figure of Ullysses in Dante's Inferno.

The poem, however, expresses a personal emotion of Tennyson's as a man of his own epoch deeply and personally felt. Ullysses, the far - travelled and much - tried, has at last reached his isle of "barren crags", has rejoined "an aged wife" and rules as "an idle king" over a savage race. He has returned but "he cannot rest from travel" and is continuously drawn and bewitched by the mystery of the future so he takes a decision and makes a moving appeal to his former companions.

What sort of poem is Ullysses? It is not epic. The narrative passages are occasional flashbacks in the course of meditation of an internal monologue that expresses the complex mood of a moment; a call of the undiscovered mystery lying ahead; a dramatic resolution; a heroic call to action. (Nature = background for reflecting some human emotions).

When Tennyson was ennobled for his poetry it was because he had become the poet of his times. His representative position and his peerage, both seem to have derived from In Memoriam, his great elegy for his friend and fellow - student Arthur Henry Hallam who died in 1833. In the lyrics that make up In Memoriam he found his own poetic voice properly for the first time, escaping from the influence of Keats.

Typically for the High Victorian era that was to follow it, the themes of the poem are death and doubt. The first of these was always popular with the Victorians who invented a complexity of mourning and a style of funerary art. That can seem exaggerated to a later generation. The second theme, doubt, is profoundly connected in the poem to the new evolutionary explanation of the universe that was emerging in the 1840's and 1850's. This did not find its full expression until the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859, but it was "in the air" around Tennyson at Cambridge and elsewhere much earlier than that. Tennyson had a difficult engagement to his future wife, Emily Sellwood, during the years of composition of the poem and it appears that it needed, finally, to convince her that his Christian faith was sound before she would agree to marry him. With this in view he sent her privately - printed version of In Memoriam, to which he had recently added the prologue, some months before its official publication. Astonishingly, it convinced her that her fiancé was indeed a Christian.

Perhaps the prologue goes some way towards explaining this. With its addition the poem at least opens with a direct invocation of Christ: "Strong Son of God, Immortal Love". But a careful reading of the rest of the poem reveals more of doubt than of faith while much of the prologue itself shows anxiety about religious faith. Having invoked Christ, it continues:

"Whom we, that have not seen thy face

By faith and faith alone embrace

Believing where we cannot prove."

The emphasis is on the reasons to doubt, rather than on the reasons to believe, and this tone remains dominant throughout the poem. "Thine are these orbs of light and shade

Thou madest Life is man and brute

Thou madest Death; and I, thy foot

Analiza: Tesuturile - tesutul epitelial, tesutul conjunctiv, tesutul nervos Eseu: Structura genomului la procariote

Is on the skull which thou hast made.

Thou wilt not live us in the dust:

Thou madest man, he knows not why;

He thinks he was not made to die;

And thou hast made him: thou art just."

These words "trust" and "somehow" are repeated in the poem on several occasions always stressing the uncertain nature of good. ("Oh yes we trust that somehow good

Will be the final goal of ill",

"Yet if some voice that man could trust,

Should murmur from the narrow house " and so on) along with words such as "yet" and "but", they offer a key to the poem.

The doubt comes from the fact of death. Tennyson said that he would despair if he ever came truly to doubt God or Immortality, Yet Hallam's death and the anguished questrim as to where Hallam now was and whether they would meet again put an immense strain on these beliefs. Death in In Memoriam "keeps the key to all the creeds" for only after death will the truth be revealed though it may be the truth that all religion is untrue.

The poem's lyrics are separate from one another and most of them can be read as units more or less successfully; a lyric such as: "I envy not in any moods" (no 27) could be anthologized separately without huge loss. But undoubtedly the poem works best as a whole. It has a vague structure, passing through three years of mourning, showing us three Christmases and moving towards some sort of very tentative resolution. Above all, its emotional register pervades all its constituent parts, which would therefore lose something if cut off from it. When evolution is the topic (in lyrics 54-56 for instance) we are still aware that it is personal grief that has provoked these thoughts and that it is not only the answer to life's mysteries that is "Behind the veil, behind the veil", but the whereabouts of Tennyson's friend, too. A good comparison in this respect would be Shakespeare's sonnets which can be read separately, but which are nonetheless a sequence.

Lyric 48, in which Tennyson describes his own method in the poem, asks us not to take his "short shallow- flights of song" too seriously as intellectual arguments; the "slender shade of doubt", he protests, has become "vassal onto love". But this is nonetheless the great poem of Victorian doubt as the poet himself recognizes when he proclaims, in an astute move, that "There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds".

In Memoriam is a great elegy, a great poem of doubt, and an excellent picture of Victorian frame of mind. Last but not least, it is also characterised by an extraordinary euphony and a masterly use of the rhythms in English.

In one of his dramatic monologues, Tennyson interprets the myth of Ulysses. Dante, Shakespeare, Joyce, and many others have recast the role of the legendary hero. Interpretations have varied, from Dante's condemnation of him to the circles of hell as a symbol of overreaching pride and ambition, to Tennyson's espousal of him as a symbol of the human desires for experience, physical prowess, courage, adventure, and knowledge.

You must establish the dramatic situation. Ulysses is now an elderly king as he addresses the people of Ithaca. He is about to set off again in quest of great adventures and plans to leave the management of the kingdom to his son Telemachus. To establish the character of the speaker, consider the following excerpts.

"I will drink/Life to the less"

Ulysses is in an active, vibrant human being who wants to experience as much as possible in life. He wants to move out into realms of the unknown in an effort to live life to the fullest and to increase the knowledge of all people.

"It little profits that an idle king

. mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race."

Ulysses plans to leave Ithaca because he feels no challenge in the calm, rustic routine of slowly building a society from a backward nation.

"I am a part of all that I have met"

Ulysses is an inextricably linked to the past experiences which built his fame. He needs to reach out into experience, to sail again the seas of the unknown and to grow even more. His past shaped his present character:

"How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!"

For him to stand is tantamount to an admission that his abilities have died. He must set out again on a quest.

" . Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains."

Even one lifetime cannot contain his infinite energies and desires.

"And this grey spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star"

Even in his old age Ulysses' spirit still yearns to uncover new lands and to explore new vistas of human life.

"'Tis not too late to seek a newer world"

For Ulysses, human beings must never surrender their spirit of exploration and their desire for knowledge.

"Though much is taken, much abides "

In spite of the many victories he has won, there are always more awaiting the adventurous person.

"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

This famous closing line of the poem has become a credo for all that is great in human fortitude and strength.

In direct contrast to Ulysses is his son Telemachus. Tennyson purposefully establishes this contrast to represent two separate ways of life. Ulysses, as is quite obvious above, represents the heroic vision of the explorer. But Telemachus, of whom his father says, "He works his work, I mine", represents a different but in many ways equally important role in life. The hero can seek out new experiences, but his constant wanderings leave him little time to contemplate the meaning of his discoveries, to discern what societal benefits they may reap. Telemachus is the thoughtful man of society who places its well being above his own. He can face the daily challenge of dealing with an unenlightened race in an attempt to build a culture and a civilization. Telemachus possesses a "slow prudence to make a mild/A rugged people, and through soft degrees/Subdue them to the useful and the good". He has "tenderness" coupled with a strength to deal with "common duties".

In this poem, Tennyson clearly sides with the individual who seeks personal actualization rather than social involvement. But this is not to condemn the value of either goal. In fact, the biographical fact that Tennyson wrote this poem after the death of his close friend Arthur Hallam in an attempt to emphasize the need to go forward and brave the struggle of life makes his meaning and intention clear.

The many lines which have universal significance reflect the poet's desire to have his speaker relate the value of the heroic way of life. His tone of commitment to his ideals and of lofty aspirations serves to enhance the poem.

The public received Maud and Other Poems (1855) with amazement. The chief poem is called a "monodrama". It consists of a series of lyrics, which reflect the love and hatred, the hope and despair of a lover who slays his mistress's brother and then flees, broken, to France. The only other poem of any length is Enoch Arden (1864), which became the most popular of all. The plot is cheap enough, dealing with a seaman, supposed drowned, who returns and finding his wife happily married to another man, regretfully retires without making himself known.

His Poetical Characteristics

a) His choice of subject. Tennyson's early instincts as seen in his first volumes led him to the lyric and legendary narrative as his principal themes, and these he handled with a skill and artistry which he rarely surpassed. Already, however, in the 1842 volume, there are signs of the ethical interest, which was to be the mainspring of his later work. As a thinker, Tennyson lacked depth and originality. He was content to mirror the feelings and aspirations of his time, and his didactic work lacks the burning fire, which alone can transform the didactic into truly great art. The requirements of his office as Poet Laureate led to the production of a number of occasional poems which have caused him to be described contemptuously, as the newspaper of his age, and it is surprising that they are as good as they are. For the rest, with the exception of In Memoriam and Ulysses, Tennyson's poems are best when he reverts to the lyric or narrative themes, which were his original inspiration.

b) His Craftsmanship. No one can deny the great care and skill shown in Tennyson's work.

His method of producing poetry was slowly to evolve the lines in his mind, commit them to paper and to revise them till they were as near perfection as he could make them. Consequently, we have a high level of poetical artistry. No one excels Tennyson in the deft application of sound to sense and in the subtle and pervading employment of alliteration and vowel-music.

His excellent craftsmanship is also apparent in the handling of English meters in which he is a tireless experimenter. In blank verse he is not so varied and powerful as Shakespeare nor so majestically as Milton, but in the skill of his workmanship and in his wealth of diction he falls but little short of these great masters.

c)     His Pictorial Quality

In this respect, Tennyson follows the example of Keats. Nearly all his poems, even the simplest, abound in ornate description of natural and other scenes. His method is to seize upon appropriate details, dress them in expressive and musical phrases and thus throw a glistening image before the reader's eye ("The Day Dream", "In Memoriam").

Although these verses show care of observation and a studious loveliness of epithet, they lack the intense insight, the ringing and romantic note of the best efforts of Keats.

d) Tennyson's lyrical quality is somewhat uneven.

The slightest of his pieces, like The Splendour Falls, are musical and attractive; but, on the whole, his nature was too self-conscious and perhaps his life too regular and prosperous, to provide a background for the true lyrical intensity of emotion. Once or twice, as in the wonderful Break, break, break and Crossing the bar he touches real greatness. Such lyrics have a brevity, unity and simple earnestness of emotion that makes it truly great.

e) Style

His typical style shows a slow, somewhat sententious progress, heavy with imaging cry and all the other devices of the poetical artist. In particular he is an adept at conceiving phrases - "jewels five words long" as he himself aptly expressed it; and he is almost invariably happy in his choice of epithet.