Tennyson

Over the last couple of weeks or so the BBC has been full of Tennyson, as it's 200 years since he was born.

He's been one of 'my' poets ever since I 'did' him for O levels - say from when I was 15 in 1973. I wrote my first, proper, defensible essay on The Lotus Eaters, because somehow I just got it. I loved - or again, I felt I understood - Crossing the Bar, The Lady of Shalot, The Passing of Arthur, The Revenge, The Kraken, and so forth.

But, when I was fifteen or sixteen, mostly Ulysses - and just one phrase - 'I will live life to the leas'. Spoken by an old man, tired and careworn but still looking forward, reasserting his sense of self. And yet not uncriticised.

By 'A' level and degree, much later, Tennyson had almost disappeared - although I purposefully turned up and focused on the two great and terrible poems I'd missed back in the '70s - Maud and In Memoriam. Both require a lot of time and, well, a bit of a run up. Fantastic, but they take you through intensity - perhaps a little too much. So, in my heart stayed The Revenge, The Lotus, The Lady and Ulysses.

The BBC began with Ulysses:

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honoured of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers;
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle —
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me —
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads — you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
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.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield

(Tennyson's "Ulysses" first appeared in Morte D'Arthur, and Other Idyls. By Alfred Tennyson. London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street, MDCCCXLII. pp. 67. This, however, was a trial book, printed but not published. The first publication of the poem occurred in Poems by Alfred Tennyson. In Two Volumes. London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street. MDCCCXLII. pp. vii, 233; vii, 231. ))

Fantastic.

But I need to take a step back.

Quite precisely Tennyson is not my sort of poet. There is a subtle music, but no story and few linguistic fireworks. Or perhaps the pyrotechnics are purposefully muted. 'My' other poets are Chaucer, Donne, Wyatt, Hopkins, Chaucer, Eliot, Larkin, Marvell, Browning (despite Wilde's perfect insult), Herbert, Herrick, the Mersey Poets, Wendy Cope, and Chaucer. Tennyson, I think, stands out as different from these.

We remember him as baggy, not compressed, and often, understandably, maudlin ('the woods decay...'). He writes under heavy Victorian drapes.

The interesting comparison is perhaps Browning, who is sometimes frankly bizarre. He's very different, and yet also generates those quotable nineteenth century lines. But it's Tennyson who is carved into the floor of the Great Court in the British Museum.

Oh, I agree it would be easy to demonstrate in an essay how every poet I list above is very similar to Tennyson. Something about epic sensibility or semantic confluences. But that isn't the point. Tennyson feels different.

So, anyway, the BBC lead on Ulysses. And it was for me absolutely smashing. I remembered it and felt reinvigorated.

So I felt I ought to include a favourite I discovered much later:

JUNE BRACKEN AND HEATHER

To—
There on the top of the down,
The wild heather round me and over me June’s high blue,
When I look’d at the bracken so bright and the heather so brown,
I thought to myself I would offer this book to you,
This, and my love together,
To you that are seventy-seven,
With a faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven,
And a fancy as summer-new
As the green of the bracken amid the gloom of the heather.

But of course, this isn't really like Tennyson, is it?

So may be it doesn't count, or maybe he wrote across a far wider range than we now remember.