Where to have been one had been the roof and crown
Of all I hoped and fear’d? if that same nearness
Were father to this distance, and that one
Vauntcourier this double? If affection
Living slew Love, and Sympathy hew’d out
The bosom-sepulchre of Sympathy.
Chiefly I sought the cavern and the hill
Where last we roam’d together, for the sound
Of the loud stream was pleasant, and the wind
Came wooingly with violet smells. Sometimes
All day I sat within the cavern-mouth,
Fixing my eyes on those three cypress-cones
Which spired above the wood; and with mad hand
Tearing the bright leaves of the ivy-screen,
I cast them in the noisy brook beneath,
And watch’d them till they vanished from my sight
Beneath the bower of wreathed eglantines:
And all the fragments of the living rock,
(Huge splinters, which the sap of earliest showers,
Or moisture of the vapour, left in clinging,
When the shrill storm-blast feeds it from behind,
And scatters it before, had shatter’d from
The mountain, till they fell, and with the shock
Half dug their own graves), in mine agony,
Did I make bear of all the deep rich moss
Wherewith the dashing runnel in the spring
Had liveried them all over. In my brain
The spirit seem’d to flag from thought to thought,
Like moonlight wandering through a mist: my blood
Crept like the drains of a marsh thro’ all my body;
The motions of my heart seem’d far within me,
Unfrequent, low, as tho’ it told its pulses;
And yet it shook me, that my frame did shudder,
As it were drawn asunder by the rack.
But over the deep graves of Hope and Fear,
The wreck of ruin’d life and shatter’d thought,
Brooded one master-passion evermore,
Like to a low hung and a fiery sky
Above some great metropolis, earth shock’d
Hung round with ragged-rimmed burning folds,
Embathing all with wild and woful hues —
Great hills of ruins, and collapsed masses
Of thunder-shaken columns, indistinct
And fused together in the tyrannous light.
So gazed I on the ruins of that thought
Which was the playmate of my youth — for which
I lived and breathed: the dew, the sun, the rain,
Unto the growth of body and of mind;
The blood, the breath, the feeling and the motion,
The slope into the current of my years,
Which drove them onward — made them sensible;
The precious jewel of my honour’d life,
Erewhile close couch’d in golden happiness,
Now proved counterfeit, was shaken out,
And, trampled on, left to its own decay.
Sometimes I thought Camilla was no more,
Some one had told me she was dead, and ask’d me
If I would see her burial: then I seem’d
To rise, and thro’ the forest-shadow borne
With more than mortal swiftness, I ran down
The sleepy sea-bank, till I came upon
The rear of a procession, curving round
The silver-sheeted bay: in front of which
Six stately virgins, all in white, upbare
A broad earth-sweeping pall of whitest lawn,
Wreathed round the bier with garlands: in the distance,
From out the yellow woods, upon the hill,
Look’d forth the summit and the pinnacles
Of a grey steeple. All the pageantry,
Save those six virgins which upheld the bier,
Were stoled from head to foot in flowing black;
One walk’d abreast with me, and veiled his brow,
And he was loud in weeping and in praise
Of the departed: a strong sympathy
Shook all my soul: I flung myself upon him
In tears and cries: I told him all my love,
How I had loved her from the first; whereat
He shrunk and howl’d, and from his brow drew back
His hand to push me from him; and the face
The very face and form of Lionel,
Flash’d through my eyes into my innermost brain,
And at his feet I seemed to faint and fall,
To fall and die away. I could not rise,
Albeit I strove to follow. They pass’d on,
The lordly Phantasms; in their floating folds
They pass’d and were no more: but I had fall’n
Prone by the dashing runnel on the grass.
Always th’ inaudible, invisible thought
Artificer and subject, lord and slave
Shaped by the audible and visible,
Moulded the audible and visible;
All crisped sounds of wave, and leaf and wind,
Flatter’d the fancy of my fading brain;
The storm-pavilion’d element, the wood,
The mountain, the three cypresses, the cave,
Were wrought into the tissue of my dream.
The moanings in the forest, the loud stream,
Awoke me not, but were a part of sleep;
And voices in the distance, calling to me,
And in my vision bidding me dream on,
Like sounds within the twilight realms of dreams,
Which wander round the bases of the hills,
And murmur in the low-dropt eaves of sleep,
But faint within the portals. Oftentimes
The vision had fair prelude, in the end
Opening on darkness, stately vestibules
To cares and shows of Death; whether the mind,
With a revenge even to itself unknown,
Made strange division of its suffering
With her, whom to have suffering view’d had been
Extremest pain; or that the clear-eyed Spirit,
Being blasted in the Present, grew at length
Prophetical and prescient of whate’er
The Future had in store; or that which most
Enchains belief, the sorrow of my spirit
Was of so wide a compass it took in
All I had loved, and my dull agony.
Ideally to her transferred, became
Anguish intolerable.
The day waned;
Alone I sat with her: about my brow
Her warm breath floated in the utterance
Of silver-chorded tones: her lips were sunder’d
With smiles of tranquil bliss, which broke in light
Like morning from her eyes — her eloquent eyes
(As I have seen them many hundred times),
Fill’d all with clear pure fire, thro’ mine down rain’d
Their spirit-searching splendours. As a vision
Unto a haggard prisoner, iron-stay’d
In damp and dismal dungeons underground
Confined on points of faith, when strength is shock’d
With torment, and expectancy of worse
Upon the morrow, thro’ the ragged walls,
All unawares before his half-shut eyes,
Comes in upon him in the dead of night,
And with th’ excess of sweetness and of awe,
Makes the heart tremble, and the eyes run over
Upon his steely gyves; so those fair eyes
Shone on my darkness forms which ever stood
Within the magic cirque of memory,
Invisible but deathless, waiting still
The edict of the will to reassume
The semblance of those rare realities
Of which they were the mirrors. Now the light,
Which was their
life, burst through the cloud of thought
Keen, irrepressible.
It was a room
Within the summer-house of which I spoke,
Hung round with paintings of the sea, and one
A vessel in mid-ocean, her heaved prow
Clambering, the mast bent, and the revin wind
In her sail roaring. From the outer day,
Betwixt the closest ivies came a broad
And solid beam of isolated light,
Crowded with driving atomies, and fell
Slanting upon that picture, from prime youth
Well-known, well-loved. She drew it long ago
Forth gazing on the waste and open sea,
One morning when the upblown billow ran
Shoreward beneath red clouds, and I had pour’d
Into the shadowing pencil’s naked forms
Colour and life: it was a bond and seal
Of friendship, spoken of with tearful smiles;
A monument of childhood and of love,
The poesy of childhood; my lost love
Symbol’d in storm. We gazed on it together
In mute and glad remembrance, and each heart
Grew closer to the other, and the eye
Was riveted and charm-bound, gazing like
The Indian on a still-eyed snake, low crouch’d
A beauty which is death, when all at once
That painted vessel, as with inner life,
‘Gan rock and heave upon that painted sea;
An earthquake, my loud heartbeats, made the ground
Roll under us, and all at once soul, life,
And breath, and motion, pass’d and flow’d away
To those unreal billows: round and round
A whirlwind caught and bore us; mighty gyves,
Rapid and vast, of hissing spray wind-driven
Far through the dizzy dark. Aloud she shriek’d —
My heart was cloven with pain. I wound my arms
About her: we whirl’d giddily: the wind
Sung: but I clasp’d her without fear: her weight
Shrank in my grasp, and over my dim eyes
And parted lips which drank her breath, down hung
The jaws of Death: I, screaming, from me flung
The empty phantom: all the sway and whirl
Of the storm dropt to windless calm, and I
Down welter’d thro’ the dark ever and ever.
POEMS, 1842
In 1842, while living modestly in London, Tennyson published two volumes of Poems, of which the first volume mostly contained works already published in 1832, including a revised The Lady of Shallot, whilst the second volume was comprised almost entirely of new poems. This time, after a ten year hiatus, Tennyson’s publication received immediate success, with both critics and the general public. The collection contains such famous poems as Locksley Hall, Tithonus and Ulysses.
Ulysses was written in 1833 and has since become an often quoted work, popularly used to illustrate the dramatic monologue form. In the poem, Ulysses describes his discontent and restlessness upon returning to his kingdom, Ithaca, after his far-ranging travels. Facing old age, Ulysses yearns to explore again, despite his reunion with his wife Penelope and son Telemachus. The poem has sparked numerous interpretations since its first publication, with some readers viewing Ulysses as resolute and heroic, admiring the Greek hero for his determination for adventure and glory; on the other hand, more recent readers have identified potential ironies in the poem, believing Ulysses wishes to selfishly abandon his kingdom and family, demonstrating the flawed protagonists of early epic poetry.
The first edition, in two volumes
CONTENTS
Œnone, 1842
The Lady of Shalott, 1842
Conclusion.
Lady Clara Vere de Vere
You ask me, why, tho’ ill at ease
Of old sat Freedom on the heights
Love thou thy land, with love far-brought
The Goose
The Epic
Morte d’Arthur
The Gardener’s Daughter
Dora
Audley Court
Walking to the Mail
St Simon Stylites
The Talking Oak
Love and Duty
Ulysses
Locksley Hall
Godiva
The Two Voices
The Day-Dream
The Sleeping Palace
The Sleeping Beauty, 1842
The Arrival
The Revival
The Departure
Moral
L’Envoi
Epilogue
Amphion
Sir Galahad
Edward Grey
Will Waterproof’s Lyrical Monologue made at The Cock.
Lady Clare
The Lord of Burleigh
Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere
A Farewell
The Beggar Maid
The Vision of Sin
The Skipping Rope
Move eastward, happy earth...
Break, break, break...
The Poet’s Song
Tennyson, close to the time of publication
Œnone, 1842
First published in 1833. On being republished in 1842 this poem was practically rewritten, the alterations and additions so transforming the poem as to make it almost a new work. Both versions are provided in this works. Œnone is the first of Tennyson’s fine classical studies. The poem is modelled partly on the Alexandrian Idyll, such an Idyll for instance as the second Idyll of Theocritus or the Megara or Europa of Moschus, and partly perhaps on the narratives in the Metamorphoses of Ovid, to which the opening bears a typical resemblance. It is possible that the poem may have been suggested by Beattie’s Judgment of Paris which tells the same story, and tells it on the same lines on which it is told here, though it is not placed in the mouth of Œnone. Beattie’s poem opens with an elaborate description of Ida and of Troy in the distance. Paris, the husband of Œnone, is one afternoon confronted with the three goddesses who are, as in Tennyson’s Idyll, elaborately delineated as symbolising what they here symbolise. Each makes her speech and each offers what she has to offer, worldly dominion, wisdom, sensual pleasure. There is, of course, no comparison in point of merit between the two poems, Beattie’s being in truth perfectly commonplace. In its symbolic aspect the poem may be compared with the temptations to which Christ is submitted in Paradise Regained. See books iii. and iv.
There lies a vale in Ida, lovelier
Than all the valleys of Ionian hills.
The swimming vapour slopes athwart the glen,
Puts forth an arm, and creeps from pine to pine,
And loiters, slowly drawn. On either hand
The lawns and meadow-ledges midway down
Hang rich in flowers, and far below them roars
The long brook falling thro’ the clov’n ravine
In cataract after cataract to the sea.
Behind the valley topmost Gargarus
Stands up and takes the morning: but in front
The gorges, opening wide apart, reveal
Troas and Ilion’s column’d citadel,
The crown of Troas.
Hither came at noon
Mournful Œnone, wandering forlorn
Of Paris, once her playmate on the hills.
Her cheek had lost the rose, and round her neck
Floated her hair or seem’d to float in rest.
She, leaning on a fragment twined with vine,
Sang to the stillness, till the mountain-shade
Sloped downward to her seat from the upper cliff.
“O mother Ida, many-fountain’d Ida,
Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.
For now the noonday quiet holds the hill:
The grasshopper is silent in the grass;
The lizard, with his shadow on the stone,
Rests like a shadow, and the cicala sleeps.
The purple flowers droop: the golden bee
Is lily-cradled: I alone awake.
My eyes are full of tears, my heart of love,
My heart is breaking, and my eyes are dim,
And I am all aweary of my life.
“O mother Ida, many-fountain’d Ida,
Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.
Hear me O Earth, hear me O Hills, O Caves
That house the cold crown’d snake! O mountain brooks,
I am the daughter of a River-God,
Hear me, for I will speak, and build up all
My sorrow with my song, as yonder walls
Rose slowly to a music slowly breathed,
A cloud that gather’d shape: for it may be
That, while I speak of it, a little while
My heart may wander from its deeper woe.
“O mother Ida, many-fountain’d Ida,
Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.
I waited underneath the dawning hills,
Aloft the mountain lawn was dewy-dark,
And dewy-dark aloft the mountain pine:
Beautiful Paris, evil-hearted Paris,
Leading a jet-black goat white-horn’d, white-hooved,
Came up from reedy Simois all alone.
“O mother Ida, harken ere I die.
Far-off the torrent call’d me from the cleft:
Far up the solitary morning smote
The streaks of virgin snow. With down-dropt eyes
I sat alone: white-breasted like a star
Fronting the dawn he moved; a leopard skin
Droop’d from his shoulder, but his sunny hair
Cluster’d about his temples like a God’s;
And his cheek brighten’d as the foam-bow brightens
When the wind blows the foam, and all my heart
Went forth to embrace him coming ere he came.
“Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.
He smiled, and opening out his milk-white palm
Disclosed a fruit of pure Hesperian gold,
That smelt ambrosially, and while I look’d
And listen’d, the full-flowing river of speech
Came down upon my heart.
“‘My own Œnone,
Beautiful-brow’d Œnone, my own soul,
Behold this fruit, whose gleaming rind ingrav’n
“For the most fair,” would seem to award it thine,
As lovelier than whatever Oread haunt
The knolls of Ida, loveliest in all grace
Of movement, and the charm of married brows.’
“Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.
He prest the blossom of his lips to mine,
And added ‘This was cast upon the board,
Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series Page 28