Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

Transcript (PDF)

The 19th Century
Presentation 9 of 13

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)
Idylls of the King. Arthur’s “World” Reappears.
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, January 31, 1984

Transcript:

There isn’t any figure in literature more distant from us than Tennyson. There isn’t a single great poetic voice that’s more alien to us than Tennyson. And the reason is is that Tennyson is the first great poet to take the temperature of the 20th century and he pronounces dead upon birth. Most of the prejudice against Tennyson originated with T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and W. B. Yeats. The great voices of the early 20th century, in order to be heard at all, had to kill the old king because Tennyson’s poetry and his style were so monumental, such an indelible part of the Victorian world that, until he could be discredited, there could not be any new voice. It’s difficult for us to appreciate or imagine to ourselves a poet so magnificent in his encompassing of his age that he was poetry embodied. He was in fact every inch the poet laureate of the British Empire. And what’s more surprising is that he was one of the really great poets of the English language. We find it difficult to believe. We think in our minds of Tennyson as a puerile sentimentalist whose urge to make nice cute little rhymes was something that he did off the cuff in between state dinners. But the fact is, just as everyone that we’ve investigated in the 19th century course, Tennyson was an extraordinarily complex man, a very great man, whose poetry deserved the accolades that it received, sometimes for more different reasons, more penetrating reasons, than we would like to give credit for.

I think the way for me to start is to quote a paragraph from a letter by Thomas Carlyle to Ralph Waldo Emerson. The first time that Thomas Carlyle met Tennyson as a young man – he was only about thirty years of age – and Carlyle who was a tough old buzzard, writing very openly to his great friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, had this to say about Tennyson as a young man:

“A man solitary and sad dwelling in an element of gloom carrying a bit of chaos about him which he is manufacturing into cosmos. One of the finest looking men in the world. A great shock of rough dusky dark hair, bright laughing hazel eyes, massive aquiline face, almost Indian looking, clothes cynically loose, free and easy, smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is musically loose, fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie in between speech and speculation free and plenteous. I do not meet in these last decades such company over a pipe.” This was Tennyson at thirty.

He was born in 1809. He was born in Lincolnshire and the family was a strange family, almost typical of the time in many ways. There were twelve children all told by the time it was through. Three of them were supposed to be insane. The– the gloomy Victorian mode of covering up personality was just endemic with them. By the time that Tennyson was fifteen years of age his father began to take to alcohol and lived another seven years in sort of a watery patriarchal position. One of Tennyson’s great friends fell in love with one of his sisters and the besotted father refused to let the young man even correspond for a year with the girl. Later on they were pledged for marriage, and had the young man not died prematurely he would have married. We’ll get to him. He forms a very important part of Tennyson’s life.

Tennyson as a young man had a normal impoverished literate childhood and he was precocious. He and two of his brothers published a volume of poems and Tennyson was just sixteen years old and the older brother went off to Trinity College, Cambridge, and within a year or two the other two Tennyson brothers in-line including Alfred went there. Tennyson while he was there at Cambridge became somewhat of a spectacle because he was given great talent and capacity for language. Occasionally it happens that a man a human being a woman sometimes is able to use language as if it were their own. And Tennyson began composing poetry at college, at university in Cambridge. And these poems would circulate in manuscript form. So he became quite famous around the colleges of Cambridge. And in fact won a Golden award from the Chancellor of Cambridge when he was still an adolescent. Very soon, before he was twenty-one years old, he published a volume of poems on his own and was quite disheartened when critics in the London papers took him to task for his sentimentality, for his musical language, which when he was younger seemed to flow so glibly that it must be a constant lie. How could anyone write anything truthfully so beautifully?

By the time that Tennyson realised that he was not going to be able to finish at Cambridge – his father died – he was beginning to live the Bohemian life. He took to a port and tobacco and large quantities. He began affecting a curious kind of– of address. His early portraits all show him with great shocks of hair and loose clothes. His hero had been Lord Byron, and in fact when Byron died, Tennyson was still an adolescent and Tennyson engraved on a rock: “Byron is dead.” He began to show the effects of what we would almost call a transmigration of soul. It seemed as if Lord Byron’s spirit had infused itself in the young Tennyson.

He published in 1833 a volume of– of poems which included a poem which began to make Tennyson quite famous in England. The poem was called The Lady of Shalott. Now when we read the lines of The Lady of Shalott to ourselves today. We miss the ambience that was important to the Victorian mind. I’ll give you a few lines and then I’ll talk about them and you can see.

And moving thro’ a mirror clear
That hangs before her all the year,
Shadows of the world appear.
There. She sees the highway near
Winding down to Camelot;
There the river eddy whirls,
And there the surly village-churls, [surly village churls]
And [there] the red cloaks of market girls,
Pass onward from Shalott.

We are caught up, the same way that the Victorian audiences were caught up, in the glib rhyming lines, in the pure flowing imagery. But what we miss because we have become anesthetized to that sense is an eerie haunting kind of ambience, what the French call a milieu. Tennyson, more than almost any other English poet, with the possible exception of Shakespeare, is able to create an eerie sense of imminent feeling toned-reality something verging on sensibility but not quite able to come through. So that there is a ghostly quality to the imagery of Tennyson. I’ll give you the follow up lines from The Lady of Shalott. Remember he’s only twenty-one years old, twenty-two years old. He’ll live for another sixty years.

Sometimes a troop of damsels glad,
An abbott on an ambling pad,
Sometimes a curly shepherd-lad,
Or long hair’d page in crimson clad,
Goes by to tower’d Camelot;
And sometimes thro’ the mirror blue
The knights come riding two and two:
She hath no loyal knight and true,
The Lady of Shalott.

The constancy of a world in which one must reaffirm oneself by looking in the mirror constantly to reaffirm, daily, the primness and the delicacy because the brittle nature of one’s psyche does not allow for self-continuity, but only for the constant reflectiveness in the mirror, and in the mirror, in its vastest reflection – the blue of the sky and the landscape winding down to Camelot – constantly as a parade of knights going to Arthur’s home and she realizing she has no champion. She is alone in the world with only her mirror and has no champion.

This is the image of the anima of the psyche of that interior part of the man that he calls his soul that first rears itself in Tennyson’s work. It’s the first rumblings. It’s 1833. England in 1833. England was not green in 1833. There were no blue skies, there were no knights. There was the Industrial Revolution. By 1833 The countryside of England and the Midlands was glowing red at night from the coke furnaces of the steelworks, the clank of the railroads being laid across the land, the digging of the great canals. All of this was happening.

The appearance of the Lady of Shalott was an echo of something lost of a poignant image of a character quality of the soul of man that had vanished and was reappearing, ghostlike, as a watery image in the poetic sensibility of this unruly bohemian young Tennyson. Tennyson is peculiar and you’ll see as we get deeper into him how extraordinarily apt to be the poet laureate of the 19th century. He still was a young man. He still was adventurous. He was in his early twenties. He had made a number of friends at Cambridge, in fact, because of his great capacity at writing. There had been a group called ‘The Apostles’ that were formed and The Apostles were interested, vigorous young college men, interested in writing, interested in good conversation among themselves, interested in the politics of the day. So much so that, in 1830 when there was yet another revolution in Spain, The Apostles enlisted in a mercenary army and went to Spain to fight. And while they were there they began touring the continent looking like young men would look to learn from the vast fields of experience – whatever was offered.

One of The Apostles was his good friend Arthur Hallam. Arthur Hallam, writing in July 1832, to Emily Tennyson (Alfred’s sister) whom he had fallen in love, with whom he had been forbid forbade to write to for a year writes this:

“My last letter, I think, was from Rotterdam. But I better tell you what Alfred and I have been doing. We resumed our steamboat last Wednesday morning and came on slowly up the Rhine, the banks of which are more uniformly ugly and flat as far as Cologne, than any country I ever saw of so great an extent.” And talking about Cologne and the cathedral being unfinished. Then he says: “The part completed is very beautiful Gothic. Alfred was in great raptures only complaining he had so little time to study the place.” And then they talk about the paintings of Titian and Raphael and the cathedrals.

But the indication here– one of the poignant images that appeal to Tennyson in Europe was the refurbishing of the great Gothic cathedral of Cologne, one of the really great Gothic structures in Europe. This immense aspiring unified expression of man’s confidence that he could reach up and touch, through his sacrament of self sacrifice and belief, reach up and touch the very realms of the divine. That God’s home could be on his earth. The confidence that that could be. Tennyson had no such confidence. In fact the 19th century had no such confidence. The 19th century would have looked at Cologne Cathedral from an engineering standpoint. Could it stand the stress? Could it stand the load? And would have busied itself in studies on the soil samples, and the ground compression, and so forth, and completely have disbelieved that there would have been any transcendental purpose really. One might tell visitors this; one might tell children this; but the phrase would have been, come now, surely you don’t believe this. Because the 19th century had begun to suffer from the tremendous lack of confidence.

Arnold Toynbee pointed out once, the fulcrum on which civilizations falter. He said it is simply a failure of nerve. It is a failure to allow for self-manifestation the courage to live life to manifest the confidence that a meaning can be found, that a meaning can be made if not found, that there is efficacy in man’s life to be had. The 19th century is a preaching century where the finger curls slightly at the end and goes completely askew. Every sermon is an oblique and does not address itself to the real issues of the spirit.

Tennyson, like most of the young men of the day, like his family, were being victimized by the Industrial Revolution, by the grinding up of the individual of the families in society at the time. And so, because of the influence of Bentham, because of the influence of the liberal character of early 19th century British reform thought, a reform bill was passed in this time, 1832, and here’s an account by Tennyson’s son:

“My father did not view the political situation so gloomily as did Arthur Hallam. It was the dead waste and middle of the night when the news of the passing of the reform Bill for England and Wales had reached Somersby in Lincolnshire. This firm bill, as the Lincolnshire people called it, had stirred all hearts, and my father and some of his brothers and sisters at once sallied out into the darkness and began to ring the church bells madly. The new parson, horrified at hearing his bells rung, and not merely rung but furiously clashed without his leave, came rushing into the church and then the pitch blackness laid hold of the first thing on which he could clap hand to and this happened to be Aunt Cecilia’s little dog which bit him.”

The pent up frustration; the release of the joy that something was being done; the crestfallenness that whatever was being done was not effective; the sinking in of the fact that this occurrence of expectation, disappointment, despair began to sink into the psyche of not only England, but all of the European mind.

As the 19th century progressed and by the 1840s it began to occur to sensitive persons like Alfred Lord Tennyson – who was still a young man, still 30 years of age – that one must take a different tack. He wrote at this time – in 1842, he would have been thirty-three years of age – a poem called Ulysses. Few lines.

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 [upon] 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 enjoy’d
Greatly, [though] suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext 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 honour’d 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 I have met;
Yet all experiences in arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and [ever] when I move.

Tennyson’s greatness – and one index to it is that there were more studies on Tennyson than any other English writer except for Shakespeare in the 19th century. He portrays, from The Lady of Shalott in 1833, to Ulysses in 1842 – in just nine years – a tremendous growth in capacity. Not only in language, but in sensibility as one of those pioneering angelic spirits which are the real true barometer of the age. He is going to be a Ulysses. He is going to be an Odysseus. He is going to live life to the Lees. But he already can see deep inside, he intuits and he sees that his vision is but an arch through which as he moves the world’s margin fades forever and forever. The more he moves the more it fades.

The subtitle of this course is The Journey through the Permanently Dissolving Inferno.

Tennyson will become a great index to the dismantling of the courage of European man in the 19th century. So much so, though we haven’t time in this course to get to the threshold and the breaking point, the First World War will be an act of fearfulness on the part of European man that he may not even exist. But Tennyson, when Ulysses came out, suffered incredible lambasts. Much of his poetry seemed to offend a large segment of the population. And yet there was a tremendous population of people who found something eerie, haunting in Tennyson. His volumes of poems did not sell so many copies at this time. It was just that he was talked about a great deal. And, in fact, the reform movement had become so much a part of his background many people supposed that Tennyson was secretly trying to put one over on us, that he must be an arch liberal, or that he must must be an arch conservative, or that he must be supporting the Crown, or he must be in rebellion against the Crown. All of the criticisms were laid out on the table come full circle and one can only suppose that what Tennyson has twanged, as he will say in one of his poems, some central chord; that is, it moves its fearful melody down the instrument makes all the sense of music flee.

Then a shock came. His great young friend Arthur Hallam died suddenly, tragically of an accident in Europe. He was engaged to his sister. He was his best friend. Tennyson was crushed. Hallam became the name that he gave his son – Hallam Lord Tennyson – who became the second Lord Tennyson. Tennyson stewed. He stewed for several years. It was an occurrence to him, much like the myth of Sisyphus would be to Albert Camus in the 20th century. It became an absurd example of a fine young man, completely intelligent, alive and alert, just ready to begin life, and he was snuffed out. He was taken away. What God permits this. What order of life has any right to consider itself moral when such an act can occur? These were only the beginning thoughts.

It sunk into Tennyson and he began to in fact find in himself an incredible sense of misapprehension. In fact, there is a sense in Tennyson at this time if I can find it. he wrote a poem called Despair – I don’t know if I– here it is, 495. He wrote a poem called Despair, later on in life, which I think describes, for me, some of the thoughts in a mature reflective vein that were going through his mind. This would be printed in 1881 – Tennyson would be 53 years old.

Is it you, that preach’d in the chapel there
looking over the sand?
Follow’d us too that night, and dogg’d us,
and drew me to land?

The poem is about a man and his wife who have decided to commit suicide together by walking out into the surf and drowning themselves. And in the flip toss of circumstance the waves have cast him onshore and the preacher who delivered this sermon the night before which had been the impetus for them to realize that life was vacuous for them, indefinitely, was the man who had brought him back to life.

What did I feel that night? You are
curious. How should I tell?
Does it matter so much what I felt? You
rescued me – yet – was it well
That you came unwish’d for, uncall’d,
between me and the deep and my
doom,


And then he writes– gives us a beautiful image of the lighthouse there at the end of this spit of rock. And he says the, “When the rolling eyes of the lighthouse.” An image of madness you see.

When the rolling eyes of the lighthouse
there on the fatal neck
Of land running out into rock –

Land that finally peters out into the sparseness and hardness of rock.

– they had saved many hundreds from wreck –
Glared on our way toward death, I remember
I thought, as we past,
Does it matter how many they saved? We
are all of us wreck’d at last –
‘Do you fear?’ and there came thro’ the
roar of the breaker a whisper, [and] a
breath,
‘Fear? am I not with you? I am [frightened]
at life, not death.’

And the suns of the limitless universe
sparkled and shone in the sky.
[Flashed] with fires as of God, but we knew
that their light was a lie –
Bright as with deathless hope – but,
however they sparkled and shone,
The dark little worlds running round them
were worlds of woe [just] like our own –
No soul in the heaven above, no soul on the earth below,
A fiery scroll written with lamentation and woe.

These thoughts began to sink into Tennyson and as they sank in he began to conjure up as a– a great magician would conjure up out of his elements a form and it began to pile up a section upon section upon section almost as if it were some incredible antique Gothic cathedral. And it became, finally, in almost a hundred twenty sections, a great poem called In Memoriam, ostensibly about the death of his friend, about the incredible injustice that occurs in this universe, that such a happenstance could happen. And yet in his brooding Tennyson dropped his self like some sacred needle into the very fabric of existence and began to weave outside of the warp and woof of the regular cultural ethos a new connective tissue and began recording it painstakingly, word by word, line by line, stanza by stanza, section by section, until In Memoriam was built up. And then he published it at the middle of the 19th century.

It was published in 1850 and it was like a watershed of the 19th century. Yet it struck home not only in England, although primarily there at first, it began to have its reverberations in the United States, it began to have its reverberations all over continental Europe. In fact, it drew such a massive attentiveness to Tennyson that it was at this time that Queen Victoria made him Poet Laureate of the British Empire. He would later be raised to the peerage and become Lord Tennyson.

In Memoriam is an uncanny composition. One would like to think this is just Tennyson. It’s just 19th century writing. It’s just a large sentimental poem about the death of a friend. But when you go to it, it sinks in, it bites. A friend of mine once showed me a little– she was a sculptor, a Dutch sculptor – hands tougher than mine, and she showed me a thing called a nibbler, which takes little bites out of steel, which sculptors use. Tennyson’s In Memoriam has these beautiful fluid quatrains which are like a nibbler and they eat away at this steely structure of confidence that one has that. After all it must be all right mustn’t it? And In Memoriam eats away bite by bite until whatever structure of solidity that one supposed one could conjure up one could believe in one could hope to expect that everyone knows that this is so is it not that that confidence is leached away until one realizes that In Memoriam is not for a man but for man for mankind. For Tennyson was the first great English poet to have read widely and science to have experienced widely in politics to have come to terms with the whole age and to have found it lacking not in any one essential, but in every single quality that man would have hoped to have found matured or present for himself that the whole age was not so much rotten but a fiction a fantasy. It was not even there enough to merit rotting.

In Memoriam, after a brief prologue of about twelve quatrains. And it’s interesting that Tennyson uses the wonderful quatrain version of mellifluous English diction to portray this nibbler destruction of the very frame of confidence in Western civilization 1850. The first section:

I held it truth, with him who sings
To one clear harp in divers tones,
That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.
But who shall so forecast the years
And find in loss a gain to match?
Or reach a hand thro’ time to catch
The far off interest of tears?
Let love clasp grief lest both be drown’d,
Let darkness keep her raven gloss
Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss,
To dance with death, to beat the ground.
Than that the victor Hours should scorn.
The long result of love and boast.
‘Behold the man that loved and lost.
But all he was is over worn.’

Tennyson, as he builds, comes to the seventh session. And he presents us with an image that suddenly we realise that the mirror of the Lady of Shalott is showing us a blankness that Tennyson has plumbed into the depths of his angelic messenger poetic sensibility and has found that the mirror of vanity does not even show a world anymore does not even show oneself anymore but a blankness.

This is seventy years before T. S. Eliot would write The Wasteland.

Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,
A hand that can be clasp’d no more –
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.
He is not here; but far away.
The noise of life begins again.
And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

He brings us on a long excursion of images in In Memoriam. Trying to find some toehold of confidence. He tries to go a little bit into theology and slips. He looks to history and there’s no real traction anywhere. He looks to literature; perhaps in literature. And his hands come out empty. In the seventieth section of In Memoriam he says:

I cannot see the features right,
When on the gloom I strive to paint
The face I know; the hues are faint
And mix with hollow masks of night;
Cloud-towers by ghostly masons wrought,
A gulf that ever shuts and gapes,
A hand that points, and palled shapes
In shadowy thoroughfares of thought;
And crowds that stream from yawning doors,
And shoals of pucker’d faces drive;
Dark bulks that half tumble alive,
And lazy lengths on boundless shores;
Till all at once beyond the will
I hear a wizard music roll,
And thro’ a lattice on the soul
Looks thy fair face and makes it still.

The last stability in his psyche, in his anima, is the ability at least in memory to conjure up from this lifetime some meaningful image – a face of a friend. If theology, if history, if philosophy, if literature, if all the artifices of man are falling or failing is there not at least the memory which we have as an existential being? As a man myself, I have a memory. I may have a clear image of a friend. Is this not somewhere to stand. Somewhere in confidence. Then in the 88th section Tennyson trying desperately to believe that memory is a platform firm enough for poetry to found itself on, suddenly exclaims,

Wild bird, whose warble, liquid sweet,
Rings Eden, thro’ the budded quicks,
O, tell me where the senses mix,
O, tell me where the passions meet,
Whence radiate: fierce extremes employ
Thy spirits in the darkening leaf,
And in the midmost heart of grief
Thy passion clasps a secret joy;
And I – my heart would prelude woe –
I cannot all command the strings;
The glory of the sum of things
Will flash along the chords and go.

It’s untenable. We can for an instant, we can for a flash, re-occur a sense of reality to ourselves. But it’s fleeting. It does not stay. We strive through language, through belief, through a society, through an empire to make it stay, will not stay, will not stay towards the end. And he’s growing weary of searching, but strong poetically. Remember this poem appeared in 1850, and the 117th section– 118th section of In Memoriam he writes, “Contemplate all this work of Time.” Take an overview of time. And incidentally Darwin’s evolutionary writings would not appear for another decade. And when they came out Tennyson said, at last, at last, some confirmation.

Contemplate all this work of Time,
The giant laboring in his youth;
Nor dream of human love and truth,
As dying Nature’s earth and lime;
But trust that those we call the dead
Are breathers of an ampler day
For ever nobler ends. They say,
The solid earth whereon we tread
In tracts of fluent heat began,
And grew to seeming-random forms,
The seeming prey of [cyclonic] storms,
Till at last arose the man;
Who throve and branched from clime to clime,
The herald of a higher race,
And of himself in higher place,
If so he type this work of time
Within himself, from more to more;
Or, crown’d with attributes of woe
Like glories, move his course, and show
That life is not as idle ore, [O-R-E]
But iron dug from central gloom,
And heated hot with burning fears,
And dipt in baths of hissing tears,
And batter’d with the shocks of doom
To shape and use. Arise and fly
The reeling Faun, the sensual feast;
Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die.

He’s trying to find something in the grand design, perhaps something which has escaped him. Perhaps something which has escaped philosophy, or theology, or literature. Not something in memory. Perhaps there’s something in a grand vision which has not yet been attainable. And so he carries In Memoriam to this heights of envisioning. He raises up his aquiline face, long hair, leonine hair, and his poetic sensibility, to try and plumb what vast scheme could possibly be sustaining all this?

And then the 122nd stanza, he tries at last to calm himself, to assure himself, and his readers. He’s taken an enormous grand tour de force through the sensibility of an age, at the watershed of the age. 127th:

And hear at times a sentinel
Who moves about from place to place,
And whispers to the worlds of space,
In the deep night, that all is well.
And all is well, tho’ faith and form
Be sunder’d in the night of fear;
Well roars the storm to those that hear
A deeper voice [moves] across the storm,
Proclaiming social truth shall spread,
And justice, even tho’ thrice again
The red fool-fury of the Seine
Should pile her barricades with dead.
But ill for him that wears a crown,
And him, the lazar, in his rags!
They tremble, the sustaining crags;
The spires of ice are toppled down,
And molten up, and roar in flood;
The fortress crashes from on high,
The brute earth lightens to the sky,
And the great Aeon sinks in blood,
And compass’d by the fires of hell;
While thou, dear spirit, happy star,
O’erlook’st the tumult from afar,
And [smiling], knowing all is well.

He divines like some archaic druidic sage, that there is nowhere that he may stand. There is no confidence that he may posit. He cannot give us assurance anywhere, but even through it all, through the dissembling rags of the material world, through the falling empires, through the disappearing act of man like some happy star, there are some smiling spiritual presence somewhere looking through the storm. And Tennyson concludes In Memoriam by the great image that all we can do is to present ourselves in all humility to the universe and hope that we are seen by something inscrutable beyond our kin and that is all that we can do. There is nothing more.

In Memoriam made Tennyson the most famous poet in the world. His books of poems began to sell in quantities that were astronomical. And as the volumes came out through the 1850s and through the 1860s and 70s and 1880s Tennyson’s fame spread. And his position as a spokesman for his age spread. In the 1850s, a couple of years after In Memoriam came out, Tennyson finally married. He had fallen in love with a woman named Emily, and he in fact was hoping to be engaged to her as early as 1840. He was considered a bohemian, a loose liver who drank and smoked, and had no real assurance of a life. And so for ten years it was off. And then in 1850, with the publication of In Memoriam, Tennyson suddenly loomed back on the horizon not only as a potential worthwhile suitor but as one of the great men of the age, and almost as if the pattern of life-sensing, the incredible sacrifice of spirit, of energy, of Tennyson having evacuated himself of every conceivable standpoint to try and bring an accurate picture of the whole to his age, almost as if Mother Nature, in fact, seeing the poet’s deep hurt and lament gave him his wife gave him his love to live with to assuage this deep deep wound that he had opened in himself and in the age.

He was married in the spring of 1850 and the conditions were exceptional. Eventually, the Tennysons would move to the Isle of Wight. And Tennyson, after he got the Poet Laureateship he would move his entire family to the Isle of Wight, and Farringford was the name of the– the house that they built there. 1853, Hallam Tennyson writes, “My father writes, ‘I wrote on Friday to accept the house Farringford. I also wrote today to Moxon to advance one thousand pounds, four hundred pounds he owes me, and the odd six hundred to be paid, if he will, in March when I get my money’s in. Why I did it? Because by buying safe debentures in the East Lincolnshire Line for two thousand five hundred pounds with that in five hundred a year, I think we ought to get on.’”

So Tennyson was beginning to have some financial security in his life, some renown, and felt that he was in a position to further stick his neck out. And Tennyson published five years later, in 1855, the same year that saw the Great American Renaissance – the publications of Emerson’s Representative Men; the year after the publication of Walden; the publication of the House of Seven Gables; Melville’s Pierre and the Ambiguities; the first edition of Leaves of Grass. All of this came in 1855. And Tennyson published Maud, which he thought his finest poem, and Maud and other Poems put the teeth on edge of the Victorian age because in Maud the poet took off the gloves and came out from behind the vast edifice of In Memoriam swinging. Maud begins:

I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood;
Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath.
The red-ribb’d ledges drip with a silent horror of blood,
And Echo there, whatever is ask’d her, answers ‘Death.’

For there in the ghastly pit long since the body was found,
His who had given me life – O father! O God! was it well? –
Mangled, and flatten’d, and crush’d, and dinted into the ground;
There yet lies the rock that fell with him when he fell.

Did he fling himself down? who knows? for a vast speculation had fail’d,
And ever he mutter’d and madden’d, and ever wann’d with despair,
And out he walk’d when the wind like a broken worldling wail’d,
And the flying gold of the ruin’d woodlands drove [him] thro’ the air.

And Maud goes on, page after page, section after section, bringing the mature Tennyson into a confrontation with his age. He had been lionized by In Memoriam. He was castigated universally for Maud. Maud brings Tennyson’s language into a juxtaposition where the surrealistic qualities of the age were becoming transparently real to him. He tried in his publications after Maud to recapture the deep spirit of the age. He would publish many popular volumes of poems but already it began to occur to him that there was in fact some eerie crescendo that had already happened to man and, to use a 20th century phrase prematurely, that he was living post-historically. And that post-historic man, like prehistoric-man was in a world of dinosaurs only where the prehistoric dinosaurs were of natural making. The post-historic dinosaurs were of man’s making and that man’s personal size expectation of wholeness was dwarfed by monstrosities of the age whose reverberations of incommensurability with man himself, made man obsolete.

In trying to dig into a deeper memory than the personal, Tennyson then applied himself to going into what he called the memory of the race. He did what Wagner did. He tried to go into the memory of the people; the memory of man in its manifestation in a collective sense. And when he plumbed himself, like Wagner plumbing the Germanic mind, finally came up with the Nibelungen. Tennyson came up with King Arthur and the Arthurian ethos. And so Tennyson, like a vast great sage having beggared himself by having emptied out his entire sensibilities and left himself vacuous, made a valiant attempt for about twenty years to try and resuscitate the Arthurian legends and build them into a new order. And by resuscitating this collective archetypal design, this pattern, hoping that by some chance this would spark and reinstate the age. It became all the rage.

The first installment of Idylls of the King came out in 1859, the year that Darwin published his Origins of Species. And the Origins of Species and the Idylls of the King go together. They are two great English sensibilities of the age who had brooded a lifetime over their respective works, who were trying to present some kind of a structural vast focus for understanding life in total and man in total. He begins the Idylls of the King with the coming of Arthur and he goes through. He did four sections at a time. And late in life he realized that what he was conjuring up – just as Wagner realized what he was conjuring up when he did The Ring – was that he was writing the obituary for the collective psyche of the people. That by refreshing and re-portraying the cycle of the most meaningful mythology of the national spirit (in England’s case, Arthur; in Germany’s case, Siegfried) that he was, instead of re-enthusing the age, he was writing its coda, its last episode. But by having portrayed all this he had led himself to the implications that were always implicit, but never reached in the whole mythological cycle. That they formed a sacred pattern of sacrifice of man towards a transcendent center that left the world. And just as Wagner was left with no choice after writing the Nibelungen Ring but to write Parsifal, towards the end of the Idylls of the King Tennyson had to turn to the Holy Grail, and when he turned to the Grail he found what Wagner found in Parsifal. The Holy Grail begins, and this is one of the last episodes of Idylls of the King.

From noiseful arms, and acts of prowess done
In tournament or tilt, Sir Percivale
Whom Arthur and his knighthood call’d the Pure
Had past into the silent life of prayer,
Praise, fast, and alms; and leaving for the cowl
The helmet in an abbey far away
From Camelot, there, and not long after, died.

It’s an obituary not just for his age, but for the whole psyche of the English people as a national type. And the two episodes that come after the Holy Grail, one is called Guinevere, which he felt equal to Maud as some of the finest writing that he had done; and the final episode called The Passing of Arthur. And it’s a startling realization that the presentation of the Arthurian ethos was always referred to as the death of Arthur. Le Morte d’Arthur. It was not the exploits of Arthur so much but that those exploits signalled the end of an age, the end of a possibility.

In Guinevere, it begins with this ghostly image of the grand wife of Arthur, the queen of Camelot. It’s not just the Lady of Shalott now who sees nothing in her mirror because she can’t go to Camelot and have knights for her. Guinevere has had knights for her, the greatest of them all – Lancelot. The greatest king of them all – Arthur. She was the queen of Camelot.

Queen Guinevere had fled the court, and sat
There in the holy house at Almesbury
Weeping, none with her save a little maid,
A novice. One low light betwixt them burn’d
Blurr’d by the creeping mist, for all abroad,
Beneath the moon unseen albeit at full,
The white mist, like a face-cloth to the face,
Clung to the dead earth, and the land was still.

Then he published Despair in 1881 and he was taken to task by everyone: Gladstone, the Prime Minister, persons of state. Lines like:

Hoped for a dawn, and it came, but the promise had faded away;
We had past from a cheerless night to the glare of a drearier day;
He is only a cloud and a smoke who was once a pillar of fire,
The guess of a worm in the dust and the shadow of its desire –
Of a worm as it writhes in a world of the weak trodden down by the strong,
Of a dying worm in a world, all massacre, murder, and wrong.

Tennyson lived for another ten years but he had become uncomfortable for those in power. He had become uncomfortable as the poet laureate, and so the word was leaked out that he was a sentimentalist that he was out of his age. He really wasn’t that good was he? Something new must be coming along. We shouldn’t really listen to him. We should close his books and discredit the man. He isn’t really important is he? And there are so many new things coming up. We mustn’t really spend much more time with Tennyson.

But when we come to Tennyson’s work a hundred years later, and we find out exactly what he wrote, and the incredible accuracy with which he divined the age and saw our own dilemmas very clearly, we realize that the only place that we can go to, in this course, from Tennyson is to go to that vast soul who did not deceive himself about the true nature of man’s evolving into civilization. The vision of man that Dostoevsky has. So next week we’ll have to take a look at him because he’s also part of that negligible 19th century.