Me my own fate to lasting sorrow doometh
There are three things that fill my heart with sighs
The Golden Year
To the Queen
Edwin Morris, or The Lake
Come not, when I am dead...
The Eagle
To E. L. on his travels in Greece.
The New Timon and the Poet.
After-Thought
Cambridge
The Germ of ‘Maud’
Bewick Fragment
The Skipping-Rope
The New Timon and the Poets
Mablethorpe
Here often, when a child, I lay reclined
What time I wasted youthful hours
Come Not, When I am Dead
Sonnet To W.C. Macready
Britons, Guard your Own
For the Penny-Wise
The Third of February, 1852
Hands all Round
Suggested by Reading an Article in a Newspaper
God bless our Prince and Bride
The Ringlet
Song: Home they brought him slain with spears
Lines 1865-1866
A Welcome to Her Royal Highness Marie Alexandrovna, Duchess of Edinburgh.
Literary Squabbles
The Higher Pantheism
Crossing the Bar
Flower in the crannied wall
Child-Songs
The City Child.
Minnie and Winnie.
Lucretius
The Spiteful Letter
In the Garden at Swainston
The Third of February, 1852
The Victim
The Voice and the Peak
Wages
The Window, or, the Song of the Wrens
Chapel House, now No. 15, Montpelier Row, Twickenham — Alfred Tennyson and his family occupied Chapel House from 1851 to 1853.
A Fragment
[Published in The Gem: a Literary Annual. London: W. Marshall,
Holborn Bars, mdcccxxxi.]
Where is the Giant of the Sun, which stood
In the midnoon the glory of old Rhodes,
A perfect Idol, with profulgent brows
Far sheening down the purple seas to those
Who sailed from Mizraim underneath the star
Named of the Dragon — and between whose limbs
Of brassy vastness broad-blown Argosies
Drave into haven? Yet endure unscathed
Of changeful cycles the great Pyramids
Broad-based amid the fleeting sands, and sloped
Into the slumberous summer noon; but where,
Mysterious Egypt, are thine obelisks
Graven with gorgeous emblems undiscerned?
Thy placid Sphinxes brooding o’er the Nile?
Thy shadowy Idols in the solitudes,
Awful Memnonian countenances calm
Looking athwart the burning flats, far off
Seen by the high-necked camel on the verge
Journeying southward? Where are thy monuments
Piled by the strong and sunborn Anakim
Over their crowned brethren [Greek: ON] and [Greek: ORÊ]?
Thy Memnon, when his peaceful lips are kissed
With earliest rays, that from his mother’s eyes
Flow over the Arabian bay, no more
Breathes low into the charmed ears of morn
Clear melody flattering the crisped Nile
By columned Thebes. Old Memphis hath gone down:
The Pharaohs are no more: somewhere in death
They sleep with staring eyes and gilded lips,
Wrapped round with spiced cerements in old grots
Rock-hewn and sealed for ever.
Anacreontics
[Published in The Gem: a Literary Annual. London: W. Marshall,
Holborn Bars, mdcccxxxi.]
With roses musky breathed,
And drooping daffodilly,
And silverleaved lily,
And ivy darkly-wreathed,
I wove a crown before her,
For her I love so dearly,
A garland for Lenora.
With a silken cord I bound it.
Lenora, laughing clearly
A light and thrilling laughter,
About her forehead wound it,
And loved me ever after.
[Published in The Gem: a Literary Annual. London: W. Marshall,
Holborn Bars, mdcccxxxi.]
O sad No more! O sweet No more!
O strange No more!
By a mossed brookbank on a stone
I smelt a wildweed flower alone;
There was a ringing in my ears,
And both my eyes gushed out with tears.
Surely all pleasant things had gone before,
Low-buried fathom deep beneath with thee,
NO MORE!
Check every outflash, every ruder sally
[Published in the Englishman’s Magazine, August, 1831. London:
Edward Moxon, 64 New Bond Street. Reprinted in Friendship’s Offering:
a Literary Album for 1833. London; Smith and Elder.]
Check every outflash, every ruder sally
Of thought and speech; speak low, and give up wholly
Thy spirit to mild-minded Melancholy;
This is the place. Through yonder poplar alley
Below, the blue-green river windeth slowly;
But in the middle of the sombre valley
The crispèd waters whisper musically,
And all the haunted place is dark and holy.
The nightingale, with long and low preamble,
Warbled from yonder knoll of solemn larches,
And in and out the woodbine’s flowery arches
The summer midges wove their wanton gambol,
And all the white-stemmed pinewood slept above —
When in this valley first I told my love.
Me my own fate to lasting sorrow doometh
[Published in Friendships Offering: a Literary Album for 1832.
London: Smith and Elder.]
Me my own fate to lasting sorrow doometh:
Thy woes are birds of passage, transitory:
Thy spirit, circled with a living glory,
In summer still a summer joy resumeth.
Alone my hopeless melancholy gloometh,
Like a lone cypress, through the twilight hoary,
From an old garden where no flower bloometh,
One cypress on an inland promontory.
But yet my lonely spirit follows thine,
As round the rolling earth night follows day:
But yet thy lights on my horizon shine
Into my night when thou art far away;
I am so dark, alas! and thou so bright,
When we two meet there’s never perfect light.
There are three things that fill my heart with sighs
[Published in the Yorkshire Literary Annual for 1832. Edited by C.F.
Edgar, London: Longman and Co. Reprinted in the Athenæum, 4 May,
1867.]
There are three things that fill my heart with sighs
And steep my soul in laughter (when I view
Fair maiden forms moving like melodies),
Dimples, roselips, and eyes of any hue.
There are three things beneath the blessed skies
For which I live — black eyes, and brown and blue;
I hold them all most dear; but oh! black eyes,
I live and die, and only die for you.
Of late such eyes looked at me — while I mused
At sunset, underneath a shadowy plane
In old Bayona, nigh the Southern Sea —
From an half-open lattice looked at me.
I saw no more only those eyes — confused
And dazzled to the heart with glorious pain.
The Golden Year
This poem was first published in the fourth edition of the poems 1846. No alterations were made
in it after 1851. The poem had a message for the time at which it was written. The country was in a very troubled state. The contest between the Protectionists and Free-traders was at its acutest stage. The Maynooth endowment and the “godless colleges” had brought into prominence questions of the gravest moment in religion and education, while the Corn Bill and the Coercion Bill had inflamed the passions of party politicians almost to madness. Tennyson, his son tells us, entered heartily into these questions, believing that the remedies for these distempers lay in the spread of education, a more catholic spirit in the press, a partial adoption of Free Trade principles, and union as far as possible among the different sections of Christianity.
Well, you shall have that song which Leonard wrote:
It was last summer on a tour in Wales:
Old James was with me: we that day had been
Up Snowdon; and I wish’d for Leonard there,
And found him in Llanberis: then we crost
Between the lakes, and clamber’d half-way up
The counterside; and that same song of his
He told me; for I banter’d him, and swore
They said he lived shut up within himself,
A tongue-tied Poet in the feverous days,
That, setting the how much before the how,
Cry, like the daughters of the horseleech, “Give,
Cram us with all,” but count not me the herd!
To which “They call me what they will,” he said:
“But I was born too late: the fair new forms,
That float about the threshold of an age,
Like truths of Science waiting to be caught ¬
Catch me who can, and make the catcher crown’d ¬
Are taken by the forelock. Let it be.
But if you care indeed to listen, hear
These measured words, my work of yestermorn.
“We sleep and wake and sleep, but all things move;
The Sun flies forward to his brother Sun;
The dark Earth follows wheel’d in her ellipse;
And human things returning on themselves
Move onward, leading up the golden year.
“Ah, tho’ the times, when some new thought can bud,
Are but as poets’ seasons when they flower,
Yet seas, that daily gain upon the shore,
Have ebb and flow conditioning their march,
And slow and sure comes up the golden year.
“When wealth no more shall rest in mounded heaps,
But smit with freer light shall slowly melt
In many streams to fatten lower lands,
And light shall spread, and man be liker man
Thro’ all the season of the golden year.
“Shall eagles not be eagles? wrens be wrens?
If all the world were falcons, what of that?
The wonder of the eagle were the less,
But he not less the eagle. Happy days
Roll onward, leading up the golden year.
“Fly happy happy sails and bear the Press;
Fly happy with the mission of the Cross;
Knit land to land, and blowing havenward
With silks, and fruits, and spices, clear of toll,
Enrich the markets of the golden year.
“But we grow old! Ah! when shall all men’s good
Be each man’s rule, and universal Peace
Lie like a shaft of light across the land,
And like a lane of beams athwart the sea,
Thro’ all the circle of the golden year?”
Thus far he flow’d, and ended; whereupon
“Ah, folly!” in mimic cadence answer’d James ¬
“Ah, folly! for it lies so far away.
Not in our time, nor in our children’s time,
‘Tis like the second world to us that live;
‘Twere all as one to fix our hopes on Heaven
As on this vision of the golden year.”
With that he struck his staff against the rocks
And broke it, ¬ James, ¬ you know him, ¬ old, but full
Of force and choler, and firm upon his feet,
And like an oaken stock in winter woods,
O’erflourished with the hoary clematis:
Then added, all in heat: “What stuff is this!
Old writers push’d the happy season back, ¬
The more fools they, ¬ we forward: dreamers both:
You most, that in an age, when every hour
Must sweat her sixty minutes to the death,
Live on, God love us, as if the seedsman, rapt
Upon the teeming harvest, should not dip
His hand into the bag: but well I know
That unto him who works, and feels he works,
This same grand year is ever at the doors.”
He spoke; and, high above, I heard them blast
The steep slate-quarry, and the great echo flap
And buffet round the hills from bluff to bluff.
To the Queen
This dedication was first prefixed to the seventh edition of these poems in 1851, Tennyson having succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate, 19th Nov., 1850.
Revered, beloved ¬ O you that hold
A nobler office upon earth
Than arms, or power of brain, or birth
Could give the warrior kings of old,
Victoria, ¬ since your Royal grace
To one of less desert allows
This laurel greener from the brows
Of him that utter’d nothing base;
And should your greatness, and the care
That yokes with empire, yield you time
To make demand of modern rhyme
If aught of ancient worth be there;
Then ¬ while a sweeter music wakes,
And thro’ wild March the throstle calls,
Where all about your palace-walls
The sun-lit almond-blossom shakes ¬
Take, Madam, this poor book of song;
For tho’ the faults were thick as dust
In vacant chambers, I could trust
Your kindness. May you rule us long.
And leave us rulers of your blood
As noble till the latest day!
May children of our children say,
“She wrought her people lasting good;
“Her court was pure; her life serene;
God gave her peace; her land reposed;
A thousand claims to reverence closed
In her as Mother, Wife and Queen;
“And statesmen at her council met
Who knew the seasons, when to take
Occasion by the hand, and make
The bounds of freedom wider yet
“By shaping some august decree,
Which kept her throne unshaken still,
Broad-based upon her people’s will,
And compass’d by the inviolate sea.”
MARCH, 1851.
Edwin Morris, or The Lake
This poem first appeared in the seventh edition of the Poems, 1851. It was written at Llanberis. Several alterations were made in the eighth edition of 1853, since then none, with the exception of “breath” for “breaths” in line 66.
O Me, my pleasant rambles by the lake,
My sweet, wild, fresh three-quarters of a year,
My one Oasis in the dust and drouth
Of city life! I was a sketcher then:
See here, my doing: curves of mountain, bridge,
Boat, island, ruins of a castle, built
When men knew how to build, upon a rock,
With turrets lichen-gilded like a rock:
And here, new-comers in an ancient hold,
New-comers from the Mersey, millionaires,
Here lived the Hills ¬ a Tudor-chimnied bulk
Of mellow brickwork on an isle of bowers.
O me, my pleasant rambles by the lake
With Edwin Morris and with Edward Bull
&nb
sp; The curate; he was fatter than his cure.
But Edwin Morris, he that knew the names,
Long-learned names of agaric, moss and fern,
Who forged a thousand theories of the rocks,
Who taught me how to skate, to row, to swim,
Who read me rhymes elaborately good,
His own ¬ I call’d him Crichton, for he seem’d
All-perfect, finish’d to the finger nail.
And once I ask’d him of his early life,
And his first passion; and he answer’d me;
And well his words became him: was he not
A full-cell’d honeycomb of eloquence
Stored from all flowers? Poet-like he spoke.
“My love for Nature is as old as I;
But thirty moons, one honeymoon to that,
And three rich sennights more, my love for her.
My love for Nature and my love for her,
Of different ages, like twin-sisters grew,
Twin-sisters differently beautiful.
To some full music rose and sank the sun,
And some full music seem’d to move and change
With all the varied changes of the dark,
And either twilight and the day between;
For daily hope fulfill’d, to rise again
Revolving toward fulfilment, made it sweet
To walk, to sit, to sleep, to wake, to breathe.”
Or this or something like to this he spoke.
Then said the fat-faced curate Edward Bull,
“I take it, God made the woman for the man,
And for the good and increase of the world,
A pretty face is well, and this is well,
To have a dame indoors, that trims us up,
And keeps us tight; but these unreal ways
Seem but the theme of writers, and indeed
Worn threadbare. Man is made of solid stuff.
I say, God made the woman for the man,
And for the good and increase of the world.”
“Parson,” said I, “you pitch the pipe too low:
But I have sudden touches, and can run
My faith beyond my practice into his:
Tho’ if, in dancing after Letty Hill,
I do not hear the bells upon my cap,
I scarce hear other music: yet say on.
What should one give to light on such a dream?”
I ask’d him half-sardonically.
“Give? Give all thou art,” he answer’d, and a light
Of laughter dimpled in his swarthy cheek;
“I would have hid her needle in my heart,
To save her little finger from a scratch
No deeper than the skin: my ears could hear
Her lightest breaths: her least remark was worth
The experience of the wise. I went and came;
Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series Page 42