Imagini ale paginilor
PDF
ePub

be trusted) of an Italian romance concerning the Donna di Scalotta. This may have suggested "Shalott" in place of "Astolat," the form used in Sir Thomas Malory's version of the story of Elaine (Morte d'Arthur, Book XVIII, chapters 9-20) and later by Tennyson in his Idylls of the King. The reader will find it profitable to study the present poem in conjunction with Malory's version and Tennyson's "Lancelot and Elaine." Here the treatment is pictorial and mystical. The key to the allegory, according to Tennyson's son, is to be found in lines 69-72. Canon Ainger reported the following explanation by Tennyson himself: "The new-born love for something, for some one, in the wide world from which she has been so long secluded, takes her out of the region of shadows into that of realities."

(301.) 3. wold: a tract of open, rolling land.

5. Camelot: the legendary capital city of King Arthur, commonly placed in Cornwall, southwestern England.

76. brazen greaves: the knight's armor below the knee. (302.) 80. yellow field: Cf. lines 2-3. 84. the golden Galaxy: the Milky

Way. 87. blazoned baldric: a belt worn over the shoulder and across the body and bearing heraldic emblems:

143. They

-

song: Cf. line 30.

THE LOTOS-EATERS

A mood of languorous and sensuous delight, retiring from the energetic and complex life of the time in which he found himself, was a tendency of the young Tennyson. He set himself to control it, in the service of a high moral and artistic purpose; see his "Palace of Art," and the comments upon it in the Memoir by his son, Vol. I, pages 118-121. But the mood provides much of the charm of his early poetry: e.g., "The Lady of Shalott" (page 301), "none" (page 306), "Mariana," "A Dream of Fair Women," and above all, the present poem. Here the mood is most fully grasped and put into verse. The poet's choice of subject-matter was felici

tous. The narrative element of the poem goes back to Homer's Odyssey, IX, 83-97 (see Butcher and Lang's or any other translation), beginning "On the tenth day we set foot on the land of the lotoseaters." Revising the poem for the edition of 1842 (it first appeared in 1833), Tennyson introduced a passage - stanza vi of the Choric Song- in which the Greeks surmise the troubled state of affairs in their island-home Ithaca, the "confusion in the little isle," to which they have now grown languidly indifferent. He thus heightened the contrast between the sweet seductions of the sense-life and the human responsibilities of a life lived among men, and so deepened the spiritual undercurrent of the theme. But the poem as a whole is a chant of delight in a rich and indolent life of the senses. Brooding on Homer's plain account of what happened to the followers of Ulysses, Tennyson sought to make real, through his finely selective imagination, the heavy contentment of the lotos-eaters and the dreamy beauty of the land to which they have come. Toward the attainment of this purpose, he derived valuable suggestions from Spenser's Faerie Queene (the description of the Idle Lake, in particular, Book II, Canto Sixth) and from Thomson's "Castle of Indolence."

A comparison of this poem with Keats's chief odes and "The Eve of St. Agnes," written a dozen years earlier and at about the same age, will bring out the relationship and also the marked difference between Tennyson's style and that of his predecessor.

(303.) 35. deep-asleep he seemed, yet all awake: in a deep languor, yet with senses alive to beauty. Contrast "the wakeful anguish" of Keats's "Ode on Melancholy" (page 252).

38. Between the sun and moon: The phrase recalls the whole picture of the three opening stanzas, since the tone of that picture was largely given by these opposite lights; see lines 7, 12, 14, 17, 19, 26.

(305.) 133. amaranth and moly: Amaranth means in Greek "unfading." Moly is a plant described in the Odyssey as being black at the root but having a flower like

milk: "moly the gods call it, but it is hard for mortal men to dig."

(305.) 142. acanthus-wreath divine: Acantha was a nymph loved by Apollo, and changed into the flower acanthus.

CENONE

Deriving his materials from various sources, Tennyson in this poem retells a famous Greek myth in his modern way, putting into it his own thought and providing a setting elaborated with his usual meticulous art. The myth is the story of the judgment of Paris, here narrated from the point of view of Enone.

51. Simois: a stream rising in Mt.

Ida.
(307.) 72. oread: a mountain-nymph, such
as Enone.
81. light-foot Iris: messenger of
the gods in the Iliad (in the Odyssey, it is
Hermes).

102. peacock: the bird sacred to Hera (Juno) who is introduced in the ensuing lines.

(308.) 162-164. the full-grown will perfect freedom: until the will, full-grown and rounded out by experience, shall, as pure law, coincide with the perfect kind of freedom. Pallas' speech is a noble expression of Tennyson's sense of the inner law; cf. lines 145-146.

170-171. Idalian Aphroditè Paphian wells: Aphrodite (Venus) was said to have sprung from the foam of the sea. She was worshipped especially at Idalium and Paphos in Cyprus.

175-178. From the violets etc.: Observe how the poet here recalls, for the sake of Venus, the noontide lights, flowers, and vines of the "bower" (see lines 90100).

(309.) 204. They came

tallest

apparently the ship-builders, cutting the timber for the ship in which Paris sailed to Sparta.

A son of Priam, king of Troy, the infant Paris was exposed on Mount Ida, but was brought up by a shepherd. He married Enone, daughter of a river-god. Their fates, however, were severed through the part that he played in the quarrel concerning the golden apple. The myth tells that, when Peleus and Thetis were wedded, all the gods were invited with the exception of Eris, or Strife; who, enraged, cast among the guests a golden apple (Tennyson's "fruit of pure Hesper-pines: ian gold," the Hesperides being the guardians of the apples) which bore the inscription "For the fairest." Hera, Pallas Athena, and Aphrodite each claimed it. To settle the dispute, Zeus bade the contestants betake themselves to Mount Ida and assert their claims before Paris. Hera offers the shepherd vast power; Pallas, wisdom and law ("Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control"); Aphrodite, the fairest of women to be his wife. Accepting the last bribe, the shepherd in consequence deserts the nymph Enone, who, filled with her own woe, senses prophetically the dread events that will issue from the decision of Paris, - the long war and the doom of great Troy. In a later poem, "The Death of Enone," Tennyson concludes her story.

(306.) 10. Gargarus: the loftiest peak of Ida, whence, according to Homer, the gods watched the battles in the plains of Troy. slowly

39-40. yonder walls

breathed: Apollo, it is said, raised the walls of Troy with the music of his lyre.

220. The Abominable: Eris. (310) 259. Cassandra: Priam's daughter, who foretold the fall of Troy.

[merged small][ocr errors]

See the note on Disraeli's "Wellington," page 716, above. - This poem gives the political and social aspect of the type of character described in the preceding poem, lines 142-164.

[blocks in formation]

11-12. wild hearts The people are extravagant in desire and feeble in accomplishment, easily led and betrayed by the sophist, like birds ensnared with lime.

20-24. Watch what main-currents etc.: When you have clearly discerned a movement that is soundly progressive, try to stop the growth of prejudices that oppose it. But use no bitter words, remembering that gentleness itself is an advance

[blocks in formation]

The substance of this poem was primarily suggested by a passage in Dante's Inferno, XXVI, 90-142, which the reader should consult (translations by Carey, C. E. Norton, Henry Johnson). Tennyson follows the medieval legend quite closely; but his conception of the character of Ulysses is partly Dante's, partly Homer's, partly his own. Much of the feeling that animates the words of Ulysses is unmistakably modern. It should be noted that the central idea embodied in the poem is quite the opposite of that in Tennyson's other Ulysses poem, "The Lotos-Eaters" (page 303).

In the choice of scene, Tennyson departs from Dante and follows Homer, representing Ulysses as having returned to the "barren crags" of his island-home Ithaca, after the many long years of the Trojan War and of his subsequent wanderings. Here he is "matched with an aged wife," Penelope, and out of sympathy with the "savage race" over whom he reigns as "an idle king." But to be idle is hateful: he must respond to the active life within, urging strength of will and a quest of fuller experience. Tennyson enlarges, with something of romantic longing, the saying

of Dante's Ulysses: "Consider your origin; ye were not formed to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge." At the end of the quest is the "eternal silence" to which the pagan mind looked forward stoically; or, it may be (though the hope never rises to faith), a new life in the Happy Isles fabled to lie beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the strait of Gibraltar), the dwelling-place of great departed spirits like Achilles.

3. mete: measure out.

4. unequal: above their capacity, and therefore to be "doled" out to them; cf. lines 35-38.

10. rainy Hyades: a group of stars anciently associated with wet weather.

11. I am become a man: I am nothing, now, except the honor that came to me in travel (line 15) and battle (line 16).

18-21. I am a part of all etc.: Ulysses has entered so keenly (lines 7-8) into all his varied experiences that he still lives and moves in them; yet not as in a dwelling where he could happily "make an end" (line 22): for they all converge into a single, endless archway stretching ahead. (312.) 50. Old age hath yet etc.: Contrast "The Lotos-Eaters," lines 51-53.

TITHONUS

According to myth, Tithonus, a mortal, beautiful in his youth, was beloved of Eos, goddess of the dawn, at whose request he was made immortal, like herself. Eos, however, had not besought the gods to endow him with perpetual youth and vigor; accordingly, though immortal, he slowly wasted away to a decrepit old age from which death could not release him. (Eventually, he was transformed into a grasshopper.)

The great though quiet power of the poem in which Tennyson has interpreted this myth, comes from his grasp of two old aims of the heart: one of them youthful, mystic, and intense (lines 50-63), the other more mature and more truly human (lines 64-76). Have any previous poems in this book something of the same general idea?

(313.) 18. Hours: Horæ, goddesses of the

seasons.

25. the silver star, thy guide: the morning-star.

49. "The gods" etc.: probably not a specific quotation, but an epigrammatic rendering of a prevalent Greek thought. 62-63. Like that strange song rose into towers: See note to page 306, lines 39-40, above.

(314.) 76. silver wheels: Eos is generally represented as coming in a chariot.

LOCKSLEY HALL

Beneath the thin fiction, this poem expresses much of Tennyson's own moods and of his reflection upon the activities of his age, sometimes with fine poetic power. 3. curlews: game birds, of the snipe

family.

4. Dreary gleams flying: gleams of light among hurrying clouds or mists; "flying" is used absolutely. This prepares for the storm at the close (line 191).

9. the Pleiads: a group ("swarm") of stars, six of them plainly visible, hundreds of others not definitely distinguishable (probably the "silver braid" of line 10).

12. the fairy-tales of science: the wonderful discoveries and prospects of science. Particulars are mentioned in line 186.

(316.) 75. comfort scorned of devils: alluding to "Paradise Lost," Books First and Second.

75-76. the poet sings etc.: Dante, "Inferno," V, 121-123: "There is no greater grief than to remember a happy time in misery."

49-50.

79-80. Like a dog etc.: Cf. lines

107. that earlier page: See lines

11-16. (317.) 121-124. Saw the heavens etc.: Long before Tennyson's time, the balloon had suggested man's eventual conquest of the air. Shelley, in "Prometheus Unbound," Act Fourth, line 421 (page 199), is vaguely prophetic. Tennyson's prediction is explicit and vivid.

126. through the thunder-storm: What relation does this bear to "in the central blue" (line 124)?

130. And the kindly

universal law: The earth will rest from battle, for men shall be bound ("lapt") by human law, as external nature is by hers. The word "kindly" has bere its old meaning of "natural," i.e., in accord with the law of one's own kind; cf. line 29, and context, in the preceding poem.

135-136. Slowly comes a hungry people etc.: intended as a contrast to lines 127-128. See the note, above, to Hood's "Song of the Shirt" (page 709), a poem written soon after the present one. In 1843 also appeared Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present, attacking the doctrine of "laissez-faire," and urging active help and guidance for the working-class; see particularly the powerful chapter on "Democracy." Carlyle and others were inveighing against the Corn Laws (finally abolished in 1846), which kept up the price of bread. Earlier, the so-called Corn-Law Rhymer, Ebenezer Elliott (1781-1849) had been producing verse a sample of which is the following, entitled "Spenserian" a grimly ironic use of the Spenserian stanza, usually employed in the realms of romance:

"I saw a horrid thing of many names, And many shapes. Some called it wealth,

[blocks in formation]

in England, where nature is cold and decadent, woman's passion is nothing as compared with mine (the completion of the idea comes in lines 167-168). — The ensuing description of tropic scenery expresses that poetic yearning for a richer climate which entered into the mood of "The Lotos-Eaters" (page 310).

(318.) 173. again the dream: His visionary marriage with "some savage woman" (line 168) reminds him of his former romantic fancies.

180. like Joshua's moon in Ajalon: See Joshua, X, 12-13.

[ocr errors]

182. Let the great world grooves of change: Tennyson explained that when he went by the first train from Liverpool to Manchester, in 1830, he supposed "that the wheels ran in a groove.' Hence the image in this line. - Throughout the nineteenth century the idea of change pervades men's thoughts, impulsively in the era inaugurated by the French Revolution, more soberly in the Victorian age. In Tennyson's "Locksley Hall" period, the enthusiasm for "progress" was feeding optimistically upon the doctrine of evolution as set forth by Darwin's prede

cessors.

182. great world: Tennyson originally wrote "peoples."

183. Through the shadow etc.: Our Western civilization is moving from the old darkness to the new light.

184. Europe Cathay: Europe stands for change or progress, Cathay (China) for a static or stagnant condition. 185. Mother-Age etc.: "mine" refers to his own dead mother (see line 156). Instead of her, he addresses the TimeSpirit (Zeitgeist), which has fostered him like a mother.

186. weigh the sun: alluding, doubtless, to experiments conducted by Francis Baily about this time.

SIR GALAHAD

This poem has a graver, deeper note than may be found in Tennyson's early Arthurian poem "The Lady of Shalott" (page 301). It is a character portrait of the valiant, chaste, saintly hero of the Holy

Grail, whose story is told by Malory in Books XI-XVII and by Tennyson in one of the finest of his Idylls, "The Holy Grail," both of which (or at least the latter) should be read in conjunction with the present poem. The Holy Grail itself is the cup from which Christ drank at the Last Supper, and in which Joseph of Arimathea was said to have caught His blood at the crucifixion; it was afterwards conveyed, in one account, to Britain. The quest of the Grail became the ideal of many knights, but it was visible only to the pure in heart-only, in fact, to the "virgin heart" of the knight Galahad. In the idyl of "The Holy Grail" Tennyson represents King Arthur as deploring the quest: "ye follow wandering fires." "But I," cries Galahad in high rapture,

"But I, Sir Arthur, saw the Holy Grail, I saw the Holy Grail and heard a cry 'O Galahad,' and 'O Galahad, follow

me.

This ringing ecstasy reveals a mystic reach in Tennyson himself far exceeding that of his own early work, and the work of his early master Keats.

Galahad's temper is conveyed partly in the persistent beat of the tetrameter. But, for variety, in each stanza lines 2, 4, and 8 are shortened; and line 11 has an internal instead of an end rhyme.

(319.) 1. casques: helmets.

18. crypt: here, the basement of a church, or other ecclesiastical building, used as a chapel.

moon.

25. the stormy crescent: the cloudy

51. The cock crows etc.: An old belief was that on Christmas Eve "the bird of dawning singeth all night long" (Hamlet, I, 1, 160).

53. the leads: lead-covered roofs. 70-72. This mortal etc.: For an account of Tennyson's own trance experiences, see the Memoir by his son, I, 320, and II, 473.

BREAK, BREAK, BREAK

A sorrower may feel in life a cold, throbbing force - beyond life's simple joys

« ÎnapoiContinuă »