Alfred Lord Tennyson 'the saddest of all English poets'
INSIGHTS into the Greats
That Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) was considered great in his own time
there is no doubt. He was the Poet Laureate and a peer of the realm at
the time of his death. What we need to establish, though, is whether he
can be regarded as a great in our time, as the other poets featured so
far in this series have been seen to be. For this purpose we need to
understand the reason for Tennyson's acclaim in his day.
Tennyson was a representative of the Victorian Age, during which
Britannia's rulership of the waves coupled with scientific and
industrial advancements had led to untold power, prosperity and
progress. The resultant national air of confidence and optimism was
undermined, however, by a growing sense of loss and anxiety due to the
erosion of religious belief under the influence of evolutionary theory
and the negative social and environmental effects of industrialisation.
Tennyson's poetry, with its overwhelmingly melancholic strain, evidently
served to project him as the conscience of a society which felt
increasingly cut off from its traditional moorings. England evidently
was only too glad to take this "saddest of all English poets", as TS
Eliot dubbed him, to their bosom. The following is the saddest and most
famous of the short lyrical pieces which generally comprise Tennyson's
most successful poetry:
Desolation
Break, break, break, On thy cold grey sones, o Sea! And I would that
my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me.
"O well for the fisherman's boy, That he shouts with his sister at
play! O well for the sailor lad, That he sings in his boat on the bay!
"And the stately ships go on To their haven under the hill; But O for
the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still.
"Break, break, break, At the foot of thy crags, O Sea! But the tender
grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me."
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Alfred Lord
Tennyson |
Such an evocation of the desolation of bereavement struck a
responsive chord in a generation experiencing the pangs of loss referred
to above. Its appeal was enhanced by the sheer mellifluousness of the
lines, facilitated by Tennyson's unique ear for the music of his verse
and his unerring eye for its pictorial quality. This insistence on
refinement of diction, rhythm and imagery made him to be without peer as
a lyricist
It will be seen that whereas the image of the sea is powerful in its
particularity, the contrasting images of the children, sailor and ships
have a generalised or archetypal quality. This preponderance of the
latter is true of Tennyson's imagery as a whole. Consequently his poetry
tends to communicate moods to which anyone can relate, a further reason
for his popularity, rather than to involve the recreation of felt
experience as is the case with Wordsworth and Keats...
The success of Tennyson's longer poems is due mainly to their being
interspersed with hauntingly beautiful lyrics, eg. the much-loved
"Tears, Idle Tears" and "Sweet and Low" from "The Princess". The
exception is "In Memoriam", Tennyson's most famous and greatest work,
which is an elegy on the death of the beloved friend and brother-in-law
to be of his youth, Arthur Hallam, (undoubtedly the inspiration of
"Break, break, break" as well). "In Memoriam" is not interspersed with
lyrics, it is actually a succession of them, 131 in all not counting the
prologue and epilogue.
Nature
It was composed over a sixteen year period and has been likened to a
diary in verse, of which Tennyson subsequently rearranged the order of
entries to provide some topical coherence. No. 48 describes "these brief
lays of Sorrow born" as "short swallow-flights of song, that dip their
wings in tears, and skim away." This brief quotation is typical of the
intensely musical listenability and readability of the poem, such that
it is hard to put down in spite of its length. Herein, too, are some of
the sayings that have become part of the English-speaking consciousness,
eg. "'Tis better to have loved and lost, Than never to have loved at
all", "Nature, red in tooth and claw" and "There lives more faith in
honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds". Perhaps we could
take them up as pointers to some of the key issues dealt with in the
poem.
The first, "to have loved and lost," is obviously the occasion of the
poem, Tennyson's grief over Hallam's death. He never got over it, but
over time it came to serve, as it does in the poem, as the objective
correlative of all Tennyson's melancholy concerns which, in turn,
reflected those of his age. In this instance, the harshness of
bereavement is seen to be compensated by the enriching memory of the
love that was and the enriching growth of that love in the heart of the
bereaved.
Salvation
"Nature, red in tooth and claw" is a direct reference to the
seemingly drastic change in Nature's role towards mankind. No longer
seen as a benign reflexion of divine order, now it was a fearsome
evolutionary force from which Darwin was soon to extrapolate the harsh
principle of the survival of the fittest. Connected with this was the
new-found belief in the ultimate, far distant, perfectibilty of the
human race which stood in sharp contrast to the Christian doctrine of
man's salvation through redemption, now seemingly untenable from the
standpoint of science. This is why the next phrase, "there lives more
faith in honest doubt", becomes virtually the motto of the poem, of
which Eliot says: "It 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. 'In Memoriam' is a
poem of despair, but of despair of a religious kind." As Tennyson
himself puts it in No. 11, "And in my heart, if calm at all, If any
calm, a calm despair." This sums up the mood and the sense of the entire
poem, the pathetic striving to hold onto a faith for which there seemed
to be no sound basis.
Yet, while thus being the conscience of his age, Tennyson fell short
of "forging anew the conscience of his race", which was how James Joyce
described the task of the creative writer at the end of "Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man". He held up a mirror to his age, as does his
"Lady of Shalott, but unlike her he did not venture into the real world
to form a fresh vision of it whereby to extend the consciousness of his
audience, rather than merely reflect it. As a craftsman he was peerless,
"but", as Emerson said of him, "he wants a subject, and climbs no mounts
of vision to bring its secrets to the people." This was what his
predecessors, Blake, Wordsworth and Keats had done. So, if Tennyson is
great in our time too, it is essentially as a master of technique from
whom many successive poets, including Eliot, have learnt, and from whom
many more need to learn; and as a poet who seems to have heralded a time
of far greater anxiety and despair than his own.
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