Her voice fled always thro’ the summer land;
I spoke her name alone. Thrice-happy days!
The flower of each, those moments when we met,
The crown of all, we met to part no more.”
Were not his words delicious, I a beast
To take them as I did? but something jarr’d;
Whether he spoke too largely; that there seem’d
A touch of something false, some self-conceit,
Or over-smoothness: howsoe’er it was,
He scarcely hit my humour, and I said: ¬
“Friend Edwin, do not think yourself alone
Of all men happy. Shall not Love to me,
As in the Latin song I learnt at school,
Sneeze out a full God-bless-you right and left?
But you can talk: yours is a kindly vein:
I have I think ¬ Heaven knows ¬ as much within;
Have or should have, but for a thought or two,
That like a purple beech among the greens
Looks out of place: ‘tis from no want in her:
It is my shyness, or my self-distrust,
Or something of a wayward modern mind
Dissecting passion. Time will set me right.”
So spoke I knowing not the things that were.
Then said the fat-faced curate, Edward Bull:
“God made the woman for the use of man,
And for the good and increase of the world”.
And I and Edwin laugh’d; and now we paused
About the windings of the marge to hear
The soft wind blowing over meadowy holms
And alders, garden-isles ; and now we left
The clerk behind us, I and he, and ran
By ripply shallows of the lisping lake,
Delighted with the freshness and the sound.
But, when the bracken rusted on their crags,
My suit had wither’d, nipt to death by him
That was a God, and is a lawyer’s clerk,
The rentroll Cupid of our rainy isles.
‘ Tis true, we met; one hour I had, no more:
She sent a note, the seal an Elle vous suit,
The close “Your Letty, only yours”; and this
Thrice underscored. The friendly mist of morn
Clung to the lake. I boated over, ran
My craft aground, and heard with beating heart
The Sweet-Gale rustle round the shelving keel;
And out I stept, and up I crept: she moved,
Like Proserpine in Enna, gathering flowers:
Then low and sweet I whistled thrice; and she,
She turn’d, we closed, we kiss’d, swore faith, I breathed
In some new planet: a silent cousin stole
Upon us and departed: “Leave,” she cried,
“O leave me!” “Never, dearest, never: here
I brave the worst:” and while we stood like fools
Embracing, all at once a score of pugs
And poodles yell’d within, and out they came
Trustees and Aunts and Uncles. “What, with him!
“Go” (shrill’d the cottonspinning chorus) “him!”
I choked. Again they shriek’d the burthen “Him!”
Again with hands of wild rejection “Go! ¬
Girl, get you in!” She went ¬ and in one month
They wedded her to sixty thousand pounds,
To lands in Kent and messuages in York,
And slight Sir Robert with his watery smile
And educated whisker. But for me,
They set an ancient creditor to work:
It seems I broke a close with force and arms:
There came a mystic token from the king
To greet the sheriff, needless courtesy!
I read, and fled by night, and flying turn’d:
Her taper glimmer’d in the lake below:
I turn’d once more, close-button’d to the storm;
So left the place, left Edwin, nor have seen
Him since, nor heard of her, nor cared to hear.
Nor cared to hear? perhaps; yet long ago
I have pardon’d little Letty; not indeed,
It may be, for her own dear sake but this,
She seems a part of those fresh days to me;
For in the dust and drouth of London life
She moves among my visions of the lake,
While the prime swallow dips his wing, or then
While the gold-lily blows, and overhead
The light cloud smoulders on the summer crag.
Come not, when I am dead...
First published in The Keepsake for 1851.
Come not, when I am dead,
To drop thy foolish tears upon my grave,
To trample round my fallen head,
And vex the unhappy dust thou wouldst not save.
There let the wind sweep and the plover cry;
But thou, go by.
Child, if it were thine error or thy crime
I care no longer, being all unblest:
Wed whom thou wilt, but I am sick of Time,
And I desire to rest.
Pass on, weak heart, and leave me where I lie:
Go by, go by.
The Eagle
A FRAGMENT
He clasps the crag with hooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
To E. L. on his travels in Greece.
This was first printed in 1853. It has not been altered since. The poem was addressed to Edward Lear, the landscape painter, and refers to his travels.
Illyrian woodlands, echoing falls
Of water, sheets of summer glass,
The long divine Peneian pass,
The vast Akrokeraunian walls,
Tomohrit, Athos, all things fair,
With such a pencil, such a pen,
You shadow forth to distant men,
I read and felt that I was there:
And trust me, while I turn’d the page,
And track’d you still on classic ground,
I grew in gladness till I found
My spirits in the golden age.
For me the torrent ever pour’d
And glisten’d ¬ here and there alone
The broad-limb’d Gods at random thrown
By fountain-urns;-and Naiads oar’d
A glimmering shoulder under gloom
Of cavern pillars; on the swell
The silver lily heaved and fell;
And many a slope was rich in bloom
From him that on the mountain lea
By dancing rivulets fed his flocks,
To him who sat upon the rocks,
And fluted to the morning sea.
The New Timon and the Poet.
We know him, out of Shakespeare’s art,
And those full curses which he spoke —
The old Timon, with his noble heart,
That strongly loathing, gently broke.
So died the Old: here comes the New.
Regard him: a familiar face —
I thought we knew him. What! it’s you, —
The padded man that wears the stays;
Who kill’d the girls and thrill’d the boys
With dandy pathos when you wrote;
O Lion! you that made a noise,
And shook a mane en papillotes!
And once you tried the Muses too —
You fail’d, sir; therefore, now you turn!
You fall on those who are to you
As captain is to subaltern.
But men of long-enduring hopes,
And careless what the hour may bring,
Can pardon little would-be Popes
And Brummels, when they try to sting.
An artist, sir
, should rest in Art,
And waive a little of his claim;
To have a great poetic heart
Is more than all poetic fame.
But you, sir, you are hard to please,
You never look but half content,
Nor like a gentleman at ease,
With moral breadth of temperament.
And what with spites, and what with fears,
You cannot let a body be;
It’s always ringing in your ears,
‘They call this man as great as me!’
What profits how to understand
The merits of a spotless shirt,
A dapper boot, a little hand,
If half the little soul is dirt?
You talk of tinsel! Why, we see
Old marks of rouge upon your cheeks!
You prate of nature! You are he
That split his life upon the cliques.
A Timon you! Nay, nay, for shame —
It looks too arrogant a jest,
The fierce old man, to take his name!
You bandbox, off, and let him rest!’
After-Thought
Ah God! the petty fools of rhyme
That shriek and sweat in pigmy wars
Before the stony face of Time,
And look’d at by the silent stars;
Who hate each other for a song,
And do their little best to bite
And pinch their brethren in the throng,
And scratch the very dead for spite;
And strain to make an inch of room
For their sweet selves, and cannot hear
The sullen Lethe rolling doom
On them and theirs and all things here;
When one small touch of Charity
Could lift them nearer Godlike state
Than if the crowded Orb should cry
Like those who cried Diana great.
And I too talk, and lose the touch
I talk of. Surely, after all,
The noblest answer unto such
Is perfect stillness when they brawl.
Cambridge
This poem is written in pencil on the fly-leaf of a copy of Poems 1833 in the Dyce Collection in South Kensington Museum. Reprinted with many alterations in Life, vol. I, p. 67.
Therefore your halls, your ancient colleges,
Your portals statued with old kings and queens,
Your bridges and your busted libraries,
Wax-lighted chapels and rich carved screens,
Your doctors and your proctors and your deans
Shall not avail you when the day-beam sports
New-risen o’er awakened Albion — No,
Nor yet your solemn organ-pipes that blow
Melodious thunders through your vacant courts
At morn and even; for your manner sorts
Not with this age, nor with the thoughts that roll,
Because the words of little children preach
Against you, — ye that did profess to teach
And have taught nothing, feeding on the soul.
The Germ of ‘Maud’
There was published in 1837 in The Tribute, (a collection of original poems by various authors, edited by Lord Northampton), a contribution by Tennyson entitled ‘Stanzas,’ consisting of xvi stanzas of varying lengths (110 lines in all). In 1855 the first xii stanzas were published as the fourth section of the second part of ‘Maud.’ Some verbal changes and transpositions of lines were made; a new stanza (the present sixth) and several new lines were introduced, and the xth stanza of 1837 became the xiiith of 1855. But stanzas xiii-xvi of 1837 have never been reprinted in any edition of Tennyson’s works, though quoted in whole or part in various critical studies of the poet. Swinburne refers to this poem as ‘the poem of deepest charm and fullest delight of pathos and melody ever written, even by Mr Tennyson.’ This poem in The Tribute gained Tennyson his first notice in the Edinburgh Review, which had till then ignored him.
XIII
But she tarries in her place
And I paint the beauteous face
Of the maiden, that I lost,
In my inner eyes again,
Lest my heart be overborne,
By the thing I hold in scorn,
By a dull mechanic ghost
And a juggle of the brain.
XIV
I can shadow forth my bride
As I knew her fair and kind
r for my wife;
She is lovely by my side
In the silence of my life —
‘Tis a phantom of the mind.
XV
‘Tis a phantom fair and good
I can call it to my side,
So to guard my life from ill,
Tho’ its ghastly sister glide
And be moved around me still
With the moving of the blood
That is moved not of the will.
XVI
Let it pass, the dreary brow,
Let the dismal face go by,
Will it lead me to the grave?
Then I lose it: it will fly:
Can it overlast the nerves?
Can it overlive the eye?
But the other, like a star,
Thro’ the channel windeth far
Till it fade and fail and die,
To its Archetype that waits
Clad in light by golden gates,
Clad in light the Spirit waits
To embrace me in the sky.
Bewick Fragment
On the fly-leaf of a book illustrated by Bewick, in the library of the late Lord Ravensworth, the following lines in Tennyson’s autograph were discovered in 1903.
A gate and a field half ploughed,
A solitary cow,
A child with a broken slate,
And a titmarsh in the bough.
But where, alack, is Bewick
To tell the meaning now?
The Skipping-Rope
This poem, published in the second volume of Poems by Alfred Tennyson (in two volumes, London, Edward Moxon, MDCCCXLII), was reprinted in every edition until 1851, when it was suppressed.
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.
The New Timon and the Poets
From Punch, February 28, 1846. Bulwer Lytton published in 1845 his satirical poem ‘New Timon: a Romance of London,’ in which he bitterly attacked Tennyson for the civil list pension granted the previous year, particularly referring to the poem ‘O Darling Room’ in the 1833 volume. Tennyson replied in the following vigorous verses, which made the literary sensation of the year. Tennyson afterwards declared: ‘I never sent my lines to Punch. John Forster did. They were too bitter. I do not think that I should ever have published them.’ — Life, vol. I, p. 245.
We know him, out of Shakespeare’s art,
And those fine curses which he spoke;
The old Timon, with his noble heart,
That, strongly loathing, greatly broke.
So died the Old: here comes the New:
Regard him: a familiar face:
I thought we knew him: What, it’s you
The padded man — that wears the stays —
Who killed the girls and thrill’d the boys
With dandy pathos when you wrote,
A Lion, you, that made a noise,
And shook a mane en papillotes.
And once you tried the Muses too:
You fail’d, Sir: therefore now you turn,
You fall on those who are to you
<
br /> As captain is to subaltern.
But men of long enduring hopes,
And careless what this hour may bring,
Can pardon little would-be Popes
And Brummels, when they try to sting.
An artist, Sir, should rest in art,
And wave a little of his claim;
To have the deep poetic heart
Is more than all poetic fame.
But you, Sir, you are hard to please;
You never look but half content:
Nor like a gentleman at ease
With moral breadth of temperament.
And what with spites and what with fears,
You cannot let a body be:
It’s always ringing in your ears,
‘They call this man as good as me.’
What profits now to understand
The merits of a spotless shirt —
A dapper boot — a little hand —
If half the little soul is dirt?
You talk of tinsel! why we see
The old mark of rouge upon your cheeks.
You prate of nature! you are he
That spilt his life about the cliques.
A Timon you! Nay, nay, for shame:
It looks too arrogant a jest —
The fierce old man — to take his name
You bandbox. Off, and let him rest.
Mablethorpe
Published in Manchester Athænaum Album, 1850. Written, 1837. Republished, altered, in Life, vol. I, p. 161.
How often, when a child I lay reclined,
I took delight in this locality!
Here stood the infant Ilion of the mind,
And here the Grecian ships did seem to be.
And here again I come and only find
The drain-cut levels of the marshy lea, —
Gray sand banks and pale sunsets — dreary wind,
Dim shores, dense rains, and heavy clouded sea.
Here often, when a child, I lay reclined
Here often when a child I lay reclined:
I took delight in this fair strand and free:
Here stood the infant Illion of my mind,
And here the Grecian ships all seemed to be,
And here again I come and only find
The drain-cut level of the marshy lea,
Gray sand-banks and pale sunsets, dreary wind,
Dim shores, dense rains, and heavy-clouded sea.
Yet though perchance no tract of earth have more
Unlikeness to the fair Ionian plain,
I love the place that I have loved before,
I love the rolling cloud, the flying rain,
The brown sea lapsing back with sullen roar,
To travel leagues before he comes again,
The misty desert of the houseless shore,
Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series Page 43