Revenges and Reworkings

Of course, the Raleigh essay (see blog on holiday books) is also a major source for Tennyson's Revenge. 'Ship after ship', etc.

It is worth looking at both pieces side by side. Not least to see what Tennyson made of his original material.

Sometimes, this kind of historical comparison can be very enlightening. A long time ago C S Lewis wrote an essay entitled 'What Chaucer Really did to Il Filostrato'. This looks at the poem by Boccaccio, and considers how Chaucer reworked the material when he wrote Troilus and Chriseyde. Whatever your opinion of Lewis in general, the essay makes a compelling read, I think.

It is most likely that Chaucer picked up the original poem when he went to Florence and other parts of Italy. This was a Florence in the early stages of the Rennaissance. In fact, although Brunelleschi hadn't yet constructed the cathedral dome, in poetry at least the renaissance was well under way. Boccaccio's poetry is charged with the importance of the individual sensibility, with some limited sense of recovery of the past, of humanitas, as well as the complexities of proper behaviour in romantic love. Chaucer must have admired him - in addition to Troilus, both The Knight's Tale and to a degree The Canterbury Tales as a whole are built upon originals by Boccaccio.

But London in the 1370s and 1380s was a long way from Florence. It did not yet hear or recognise the attractions of the rennaissance. Lewis argues, from a relatively close reading of Troilus, that the changes Chaucer makes to his original all tend in the same direction. He takes a renaissance poem and medievalises it. And amazingly, in shedding some of its renaissance trappings and substituting some of the tropes he knew from, say, French fabliaux writings, he makes it grander, more complex and with a far wider range of references, both literary and philosophical.

As an aside, there has been a bit of a hoo-hah amongst some of the London literati in the last few months about a recent translation of some of Henryson's poems by Seamus Heaney. Henryson was one of a number of later 15th Century poets known as 'The Scottish Chaucerians' who took lessons from Chaucerian poetry and reworked it for themselves. The Testament of Cresseid - the title poem of the collection - is a quite well-known sequel to Troilus. Like Chauser, it doesn't really require translating (IMHO). More importantly for the purposes of this argument, some of the richness and compexity of Chaucer's poem is lost in Henryson's version and its tragic final emphasis.

So what of Raleigh and Tennyson? I'm not sure - they feel somehow much further apart than Boccaccio, Chacuer and Henryson. It isn't just that one text is an essay and the other a poem. There are strong similarities - for example Raleigh, while presenting at least a veneer of balanced consideration, writes in just as biased, nationalist and propagandist way as Tennyson. Both place the Spanish as lesser men, 'dogs' by comparison with Englishmen.

But before that, Raleigh tries to be quite precise about the details of the battle, tries very hard to set out all of the circumstances he can (albeit not necessarily in a totally balanced way). Tennyson certainly uses material from Raleigh, but deploys it in a very different manner. He narrows Raleigh's view, reduces his subtlety, and creates a more direct, popular rabble-rouser. If they both focus on the hero of the battle, Sir Richard Grenville, then Tennyson does so to the exclusion of much that makes Raleigh's essay interesting.

Tennyson does add to his original; he moves the language from that of a rather distanced commentator on the event to that of a melodramatic nationalist. Tennyson is the tub-thumper here. Perhaps not my favourite Tennyson.

One final question: when I read The Revenge in class, no mention was ever made of Raleigh's essay. Does anyone else think it would be useful for students to read the two in parallel?

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.

A New Laureate

Well, so now we know. Carol-Ann Duffy. The first female (and it says here the first openly gay) poet laureate. Fine. Poor woman.

I would have preferred Wendy Cope (who said she didn't want it ages ago), Roger McGough or Tony Harrison. Still, Duffy will do.

The Today programme quoted Mrs Icarus in its entirety:

I'm not the first or the last
to stand on a hillock,
watching the man she married
prove to the world
he's a total, utter, absolute, Grade A pillock.

From The world's wife by Carol Ann Duffy

- and then John Humphries went all grumpy about whether she would be allowed to use language like that when writing for royalty.

Allowed?

I started to write - equally grumpily - that he had rather missed the point of poetry (which, particularly for the poets of the last Century or so, was often arguably about challenging the status quo, and provoking a reaction). But then I realised that, intentionally or not, his musing did rather get to the question of what exactly the point of the poet laureate is. A poet in an official, institutionalised state role nowadays seems quite strange - especially when there is some kind of expectation that he or she will write poems explicitly about great events and affairs of state. Andrew Motion notoriously found this difficult, of course.

But looking further back in time, it may not have seemed anything like such an unusual proposition. I can't help but believe that Wyatt, say, Marvell or even Chaucer would have felt somewhat more comfortable in the position - or at least I have this notion that they would have felt less of a lack of integrity. They might not have written exactly the poems we have now, but there is something in their writings that makes me feel that they would have been perhaps more content in the role.

On the other hand, for all three of them it would surely have been a far riskier proposition. They lived in turbulent times, with Kings and leaders who were dangerous and often brutal men. So I suspect it would have been a differently challenging position then - and not one they could easily refuse.

I end up with a vague disquiet nowadays, settled on and around a dislike of the monarchy and a sense of unecessary compromise. At least if Duffy writes something 'they' don't like she is unlikely to be jailed or worse. So that's an improvement.

And we should also note in passing that U. A. Fanthorpe, one of the very few other women who was ever considered for the laureateship (is that a word?) died on Thursday. As with Duffy, her work is much used in the exam syllabus in the UK. I've just been reading 'Not My Best Side' - which is on one of this years' English Lit booklists.