Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series
Page 41
Deeply mourn’d the Lord of Burleigh,
Burleigh-house by Stamford-town.
And he came to look upon her,
And he look’d at her and said,
“Bring the dress and put it on her,
That she wore when she was wed”.
Then her people, softly treading,
Bore to earth her body, drest
In the dress that she was wed in,
That her spirit might have rest.
Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere
A FRAGMENT
Like souls that balance joy and pain,
With tears and smiles from heaven again
The maiden Spring upon the plain
Came in a sun-lit fall of rain.
In crystal vapour everywhere
Blue isles of heaven laugh’d between,
And, far in forest-deeps unseen,
The topmost elm-tree gather’d green
From draughts of balmy air.
Sometimes the linnet piped his song:
Sometimes the throstle whistled strong:
Sometimes the sparhawk, wheel’d along,
Hush’d all the groves from fear of wrong:
By grassy capes with fuller sound
In curves the yellowing river ran,
And drooping chestnut-buds began
To spread into the perfect fan,
Above the teeming ground.
Then, in the boyhood of the year,
Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere
Rode thro’ the coverts of the deer,
With blissful treble ringing clear.
She seem’d a part of joyous Spring:
A gown of grass-green silk she wore,
Buckled with golden clasps before;
A light-green tuft of plumes she bore
Closed in a golden ring.
Now on some twisted ivy-net,
Now by some tinkling rivulet,
In mosses mixt with violet
Her cream-white mule his pastern set:
And fleeter now she skimm’d the plains
Than she whose elfin prancer springs
By night to eery warblings,
When all the glimmering moorland rings
With jingling bridle-reins.
As she fled fast thro’ sun and shade,
The happy winds upon her play’d,
Blowing the ringlet from the braid:
She look’d so lovely, as she sway’d
The rein with dainty finger-tips,
A man had given all other bliss,
And all his worldly worth for this,
To waste his whole heart in one kiss
Upon her perfect lips.
A Farewell
This poem was dedicated to the brook at Somersby described in the Ode to Memory and referred to so often in In Memoriam. Possibly it may have been written in 1837 when the Tennysons left Somersby. Cf. In Memoriam, sect. ci.
Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea,
Thy tribute wave deliver:
No more by thee my steps shall be,
For ever and for ever.
Flow, softly flow, by lawn and lea,
A rivulet then a river:
No where by thee my steps shall be,
For ever and for ever.
But here will sigh thine alder tree,
And here thine aspen shiver;
And here by thee will hum the bee,
For ever and for ever.
A thousand suns will stream on thee,
A thousand moons will quiver;
But not by thee my steps shall be,
For ever and for ever.
The Beggar Maid
Her arms across her breast she laid;
She was more fair than words can say:
Bare-footed came the beggar maid
Before the king Cophetua.
In robe and crown the king stept down,
To meet and greet her on her way;
“It is no wonder,” said the lords,
“She is more beautiful than day”.
As shines the moon in clouded skies,
She in her poor attire was seen:
One praised her ancles, one her eyes,
One her dark hair and lovesome mien:
So sweet a face, such angel grace,
In all that land had never been:
Cophetua sware a royal oath:
“This beggar maid shall be my queen!”
The Vision of Sin
This remarkable poem may be regarded as a sort of companion poem to The Palace of Art; the one traces the effect of callous indulgence in mere intellectual and aesthetic pleasures, the other of profligate indulgence in the grosser forms of sensual enjoyment. At first all is ecstasy and intoxication, then comes satiety, and all that satiety brings in its train, cynicism, pessimism, the drying up of the very springs of life.
1
I had a vision when the night was late:
A youth came riding toward a palace-gate.
He rode a horse with wings, that would have flown,
But that his heavy rider kept him down.
And from the palace came a child of sin,
And took him by the curls, and led him in,
Where sat a company with heated eyes,
Expecting when a fountain should arise:
A sleepy light upon their brows and lips
As when the sun, a crescent of eclipse,
Dreams over lake and lawn, and isles and capes
Suffused them, sitting, lying, languid shapes,
By heaps of gourds, and skins of wine, and piles of grapes.
2
Then methought I heard a mellow sound,
Gathering up from all the lower ground;
Narrowing in to where they sat assembled
Low voluptuous music winding trembled,
Wov’n in circles: they that heard it sigh’d,
Panted hand in hand with faces pale,
Swung themselves, and in low tones replied;
Till the fountain spouted, showering wide
Sleet of diamond-drift and pearly hail;
Then the music touch’d the gates and died;
Rose again from where it seem’d to fail,
Storm’d in orbs of song, a growing gale;
Till thronging in and in, to where they waited,
As ‘twere a hundred-throated nightingale,
The strong tempestuous treble throbb’d and palpitated;
Ran into its giddiest whirl of sound,
Caught the sparkles, and in circles,
Purple gauzes, golden hazes, liquid mazes,
Flung the torrent rainbow round:
Then they started from their places,
Moved with violence, changed in hue,
Caught each other with wild grimaces,
Half-invisible to the view,
Wheeling with precipitate paces
To the melody, till they flew,
Hair, and eyes, and limbs, and faces,
Twisted hard in fierce embraces,
Like to Furies, like to Graces,
Dash’d together in blinding dew:
Till, kill’d with some luxurious agony,
The nerve-dissolving melody
Flutter’d headlong from the sky.
3
And then I look’d up toward a mountain-tract,
That girt the region with high cliff and lawn:
I saw that every morning, far withdrawn
Beyond the darkness and the cataract,
God made himself an awful rose of dawn,
Unheeded: and detaching, fold by fold,
From those still heights, and, slowly drawing near,
A vapour heavy, hueless, formless, cold,
Came floating on for many a month and year,
Unheeded: and I thought I would have spoken,
And warn’d that madman ere it grew too late:
But, as in dreams, I could not. Mine was broken,
When
that cold vapour touch’d the palace-gate,
And link’d again. I saw within my head
A gray and gap-tooth’d man as lean as death,
Who slowly rode across a wither’d heath,
And lighted at a ruin’d inn, and said:
4
“Wrinkled ostler, grim and thin!
Here is custom come your way;
Take my brute, and lead him in,
Stuff his ribs with mouldy hay.
“Bitter barmaid, waning fast!
See that sheets are on my bed;
What! the flower of life is past:
It is long before you wed.
“Slip-shod waiter, lank and sour,
At the Dragon on the heath!
Let us have a quiet hour,
Let us hob-and-nob with Death.
“I am old, but let me drink;
Bring me spices, bring me wine;
I remember, when I think,
That my youth was half divine.
“Wine is good for shrivell’d lips,
When a blanket wraps the day,
When the rotten woodland drips,
And the leaf is stamp’d in clay.
“Sit thee down, and have no shame,
Cheek by jowl, and knee by knee:
What care I for any name?
What for order or degree?
“Let me screw thee up a peg:
Let me loose thy tongue with wine:
Callest thou that thing a leg?
Which is thinnest? thine or mine?
“Thou shalt not be saved by works:
Thou hast been a sinner too:
Ruin’d trunks on wither’d forks,
Empty scarecrows, I and you!
“Fill the cup, and fill the can:
Have a rouse before the morn:
Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one is born.
“We are men of ruin’d blood;
Therefore comes it we are wise.
Fish are we that love the mud.
Rising to no fancy-flies.
“Name and fame! to fly sublime
Thro’ the courts, the camps, the schools,
Is to be the ball of Time,
Bandied by the hands of fools.
“Friendship! to be two in one
Let the canting liar pack!
Well I know, when I am gone,
How she mouths behind my back.
“Virtue! to be good and just
Every heart, when sifted well,
Is a clot of warmer dust,
Mix’d with cunning sparks of hell.
“O! we two as well can look
Whited thought and cleanly life
As the priest, above his book
Leering at his neighbour’s wife.
“Fill the cup, and fill the can:
Have a rouse before the morn:
Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one is born.
“Drink, and let the parties rave:
They are fill’d with idle spleen;
Rising, falling, like a wave,
For they know not what they mean.
“He that roars for liberty
Faster binds a tyrant’s power;
And the tyrant’s cruel glee
Forces on the freer hour.
“Fill the can, and fill the cup:
All the windy ways of men
Are but dust that rises up,
And is lightly laid again.
“Greet her with applausive breath,
Freedom, gaily doth she tread;
In her right a civic wreath,
In her left a human head.
“No, I love not what is new;
She is of an ancient house:
And I think we know the hue
Of that cap upon her brows.
“Let her go! her thirst she slakes
Where the bloody conduit runs:
Then her sweetest meal she makes
On the first-born of her sons.
“Drink to lofty hopes that cool
Visions of a perfect State:
Drink we, last, the public fool,
Frantic love and frantic hate.
“Chant me now some wicked stave,
Till thy drooping courage rise,
And the glow-worm of the grave
Glimmer in thy rheumy eyes.
“Fear not thou to loose thy tongue;
Set thy hoary fancies free;
What is loathsome to the young
Savours well to thee and me.
“Change, reverting to the years,
When thy nerves could understand
What there is in loving tears,
And the warmth of hand in hand.
“Tell me tales of thy first love
April hopes, the fools of chance;
Till the graves begin to move,
And the dead begin to dance.
“Fill the can, and fill the cup:
All the windy ways of men
Are but dust that rises up,
And is lightly laid again.
“Trooping from their mouldy dens
The chap-fallen circle spreads:
Welcome, fellow-citizens,
Hollow hearts and empty heads!
“You are bones, and what of that?
Every face, however full,
Padded round with flesh and fat,
Is but modell’d on a skull.
“Death is king, and Vivat Rex!
Tread a measure on the stones,
Madam if I know your sex,
From the fashion of your bones.
“No, I cannot praise the fire
In your eye nor yet your lip:
All the more do I admire
Joints of cunning workmanship.
“Lo! God’s likeness the ground-plan
Neither modell’d, glazed, or framed:
Buss me thou rough sketch of man,
Far too naked to be shamed!
“Drink to Fortune, drink to Chance,
While we keep a little breath!
Drink to heavy Ignorance!
Hob-and-nob with brother Death!
“Thou art mazed, the night is long,
And the longer night is near:
What! I am not all as wrong
As a bitter jest is dear.
“Youthful hopes, by scores, to all,
When the locks are crisp and curl’d;
Unto me my maudlin gall
And my mockeries of the world.
“Fill the cup, and fill the can!
Mingle madness, mingle scorn!
Dregs of life, and lees of man:
Yet we will not die forlorn.”
5
The voice grew faint: there came a further change:
Once more uprose the mystic mountain-range:
Below were men and horses pierced with worms,
And slowly quickening into lower forms;
By shards and scurf of salt, and scum of dross,
Old plash of rains, and refuse patch’d with moss,
Then some one spake : “Behold! it was a crime
Of sense avenged by sense that wore with time”.
Another said: “The crime of sense became
The crime of malice, and is equal blame”.
And one: “He had not wholly quench’d his power;
A little grain of conscience made him sour”.
At last I heard a voice upon the slope
Cry to the summit, “Is there any hope?”
To which an answer peal’d from that high land.
But in a tongue no man could understand;
And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn
God made Himself an awful rose of dawn.
The Skipping Rope
Sure never yet was Antelope
Could skip so lightly by,
Stand off, or else my skipping-rope
Will hit you in the eye.
How lightly
whirls the skipping-rope!
How fairy-like you fly!
Go, get you gone, you muse and mope
I hate that silly sigh.
Nay, dearest, teach me how to hope,
Or tell me how to die.
There, take it, take my skipping-rope,
And hang yourself thereby.
Move eastward, happy earth...
Move eastward, happy earth, and leave
Yon orange sunset waning slow:
From fringes of the faded eve,
O, happy planet, eastward go;
Till over thy dark shoulder glow
Thy silver sister-world, and rise
To glass herself in dewy eyes
That watch me from the glen below.
Ah, bear me with thee, smoothly borne,
Dip forward under starry light,
And move me to my marriage-morn,
And round again to happy night.
Break, break, break...
This exquisite poem was composed in a very different scene from that to which it refers, namely in “a Lincolnshire lane at five o’clock in the morning between blossoming hedges”. See Life of Tennyson, vol. i., p. 223.
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, 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 vanish’d 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.
The Poet’s Song
The rain had fallen, the Poet arose,
He pass’d by the town and out of the street,
A light wind blew from the gates of the sun,
And waves of shadow went over the wheat,
And he sat him down in a lonely place,
And chanted a melody loud and sweet,
That made the wild-swan pause in her cloud,
And the lark drop down at his feet.
The swallow stopt as he hunted the bee,
The snake slipt under a spray,
The wild hawk stood with the down on his beak,
And stared, with his foot on the prey,
And the nightingale thought, “I have sung many songs,
But never a one so gay,
For he sings of what the world will be
When the years have died away”.
MISCELLANEOUS CONTRIBUTIONS TO PERIODICALS, 1831-1868
CONTENTS
A Fragment
Anacreontics
Check every outflash, every ruder sally