Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series
Page 44
The phantom-circle of the moaning main.
What time I wasted youthful hours
Published in The Keepsake for 1851: an illustrated annual, edited by Miss Power. London: David Bogue. To this issue of the Keepsake Tennyson also contributed ‘Come not when I am dead’ now included in the collected Works.
What time I wasted youthful hours
One of the shining wingèd powers,
Show’d me vast cliffs with crown of towers,
As towards the gracious light I bow’d,
They seem’d high palaces and proud,
Hid now and then with sliding cloud.
He said, ‘The labour is not small;
Yet winds the pathway free to all: —
Take care thou dost not fear to fall!’
Come Not, When I am Dead
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.
Sonnet To W.C. Macready
FAREWELL, Macready, since to-night we part;
Full-handed thunders often have confessed
Thy power, well-used to move the public breast.
We thank thee with our voice, and from the heart.
Farewell, Macready, since this night we part,
Go, take thine honors home; rank with the best,
Garrick and statelier Kemble, and the rest
Who made a nation purer through their art.
Thine is it that our drama did not die,
Nor flicker down to brainless pantomine,
And those gilt gauds men-children swarm to see.
Farewell, Macready, moral, grave, sublime;
Our Shakespeare’s bland and universal eye
Dwells pleased, through twice a hundred years, on thee.
Britons, Guard your Own
Published in The Examiner, January 31, 1852.
Rise, Britons, rise, if manhood be not dead;
The world’s last tempest darkens overhead;
The Pope has bless’d him;
The Church caress’d him;
He triumphs; maybe, we shall stand alone:
Britons, guard your own.
His ruthless host is bought with plunder’d gold,
By lying priest’s the peasant’s votes controlled.
All freedom vanish’d,
The true men banished,
He triumphs; maybe, we shall stand alone.
Britons, guard your own.
Peace-lovers we—sweet Peace we all desire—
Peace-lovers we—but who can trust a liar?—
Peace-lovers, haters
Of shameless traitors,
We hate not France, but this man’s heart of stone.
Britons, guard your own.
We hate not France, but France has lost her voice
This man is France, the man they call her choice.
By tricks and spying,
By craft and lying,
And murder was her freedom overthrown.
Britons, guard your own.
‘Vive l’Empereur’ may follow by and bye;
‘God save the Queen’ is here a truer cry.
God save the Nation,
The toleration,
And the free speech that makes a Briton known.
Britons, guard your own.
Rome’s dearest daughter now is captive France,
The Jesuit laughs, and reckoning on his chance,
Would, unrelenting,
Kill all dissenting,
Till we were left to fight for truth alone.
Britons, guard your own.
Call home your ships across Biscayan tides,
To blow the battle from their oaken sides.
Why waste they yonder
Their idle thunder?
Why stay they there to guard a foreign throne?
Seamen, guard your own.
We were the best of marksmen long ago,
We won old battles with our strength, the bow.
Now practise, yeomen,
Like those bowmen,
Till your balls fly as their true shafts have flown.
Yeomen, guard your own.
His soldier-ridden Highness might incline
To take Sardinia, Belgium, or the Rhine:
Shall we stand idle,
Nor seek to bridle
His vile aggressions, till we stand alone?
Make their cause your own.
Should he land here, and for one hour prevail,
There must no man go back to bear the tale:
No man to bear it—
Swear it! We swear it!
Although we fought the banded world alone,
We swear to guard our own.
For the Penny-Wise
First published anonymously in Fraser’s Magazine in 1852.
We used to fight the French,
And beat them, says the story;
But now the cry retrench
Has a little dock’d our glory.
We meant to beat the Kaffirs,
We had the best intentions;
But the Kaffirs knock’d us over,
With the last inventions.
Poor little people, we,
And in the world belated!
Our musket, as it seems,
Is superannuated.
Friends! the soldier still
Is worthy of his calling,
But who are they that want
A little over-hauling?
The Third of February, 1852
First published in Examiner in 1852, signed under the name ‘Merlin’.
MY LORDS, we heard you speak: you told us all
That England’s honest censure went too far,
That our free press should cease to brawl,
Not sting the fiery Frenchman into war.
It was our ancient privilege, my Lords,
To fling whate’er we felt, not fearing, into words.
We love not this French God, the child of hell,
Wild War, who breaks the converse of the wise;
But though we love kind Peace so well,
We dare not even by silence sanction lies.
It might be safe our censures to withdraw,
And yet, my Lords, not well; there is a higher law.
As long as we remain, we must speak free,
Tho’ all the storm of Eurpoe on us break.
No little German state are we,
But the one voice in Europe; we must speak,
That if to-night our greatness were struck dead,
There might be left some record of the things we said.
If you be fearful, then must we be bold.
Our Britain cannot salve a tyrant o’er.
Better the waste Atlantic roll’d
On her and us and ours for evermore.
What? have we fought for Freedom from our prime,
At last to dodge and palter with a public crime?
Shall we fear him? our own we never fear’d.
From our first Charles by force we wrung our claims.
Prick’d by the Papal spur, we rear’d,
We flung the burthen of the second James.
I say, we never fear’d! and as for these,
We broke them on the land, we drove them on the seas.
And you, my Lords, you make the people muse
In doubt if you be of our Barons’ breed —
Were those your sires who fought at Lewes?
Is this the manly strain of Runnymede?
/> O fallen nobility that, overawed,
Would lisp in honey’d whispers of this monstrous fraud!
We feel, at least, that silence here were sin,
Not ours the fault if we have feeble hosts —
If easy patrons of their kin
Have left the last free race with naked coasts!
They knew the precious things they had to guard;
For us, we will not spare the tyrant one hard word.
Tho’ niggard throats of Manchester may bawl,
What England was, shall her true sons forget?
We are not cotton-spinners all,
But some love England and her honor yet.
And these in our Thermopylæ shall stand,
And hold against the world this honor of the land.
Hands all Round
Published in The Examiner, February 7, 1852. Reprinted, slightly altered, in Life, vol. I, p. 345. Included, almost entirely re-written, in collected Works.
FIRST drink a health, this solemn night,
A health to England, every guest;
That man’s the best cosmopolite
Who loves his native country best.
May Freedom’s oak for ever live
With stronger life from day to day;
That man’s the best Conservative
Who lops the mouldered branch away.
Hands all round!
God the tyrant’s hope confound!
To this great cause of Freedom drink, my friends,
And the great name of England round and round.
A health to Europe’s honest men!
Heaven guard them from her tyrants’ jails!
From wronged Poerio’s noisome den,
From iron limbs and tortured nails!
We curse the crimes of Southern kings,
The Russian whips and Austrian rods —
We likewise have our evil things;
Too much we make our Ledgers, Gods.
Yet hands all round!
God the tyrant’s cause confound!
To Europe’s better health we drink, my friends,
And the great name of England round and round.
What health to France, if France be she
Whom martial progress only charms?
Yet tell her — better to be free
Than vanquish all the world in arms.
Her frantic city’s flashing heats
But fire, to blast the hopes of men.
Why change the titles of your streets?
You fools, you’ll want them all again.
Hands all round!
God the tyrant’s cause confound!
To France, the wiser France, we drink, my friends,
And the great name of England round and round.
Gigantic daughter of the West,
We drink to thee across the flood,
We know thee most, we love thee best,
For art thou not of British blood?
Should war’s mad blast again be blown,
Permit not thou the tyrant powers
To fight thy mother here alone,
But let thy broadsides roar with ours.
Hands all round!
God the tyrant’s cause confound!
To our great kinsmen of the West, my friends,
And the great name of England round and round.
O rise, our strong Atlantic sons,
When war against our freedom springs!
O speak to Europe through your guns!
They can be understood by kings.
You must not mix our Queen with those
That wish to keep their people fools;
Our freedom’s foemen are her foes,
She comprehends the race she rules.
Hands all round!
God the tyrant’s cause confound!
To our dear kinsmen of the West, my friends,
And the great name of England round and round.
Suggested by Reading an Article in a Newspaper
Published in The Examiner, February 14, 1852, and never reprinted nor acknowledged. The proof sheets of the poem, with alterations in Tennyson’s autograph, were offered for public sale in 1906.
To the Editor of The Examiner.
SIR, — I have read with much interest the poems of Merlin. The enclosed is longer than either of those, and certainly not so good: yet as I flatter myself that it has a smack of Merlin’s style in it, and as I feel that it expresses forcibly enough some of the feelings of our time, perhaps you may be induced to admit it.
TALIESSEN.
HOW much I love this writer’s manly style!
By such men led, our press had ever been
The public conscience of our noble isle,
Severe and quick to feel a civic sin,
To raise the people and chastise the times
With such a heat as lives in great creative rhymes.
O you, the Press! what good from you might spring!
What power is yours to blast a cause or bless!
I fear for you, as for some youthful king,
Lest you go wrong from power in excess.
Take heed of your wide privileges! we
The thinking men of England, loathe a tyranny.
A freeman is, I doubt not, freest here;
The single voice may speak his mind aloud;
An honest isolation need not fear
The Court, the Church, the Parliament, the crowd.
No, nor the Press! and look you well to that —
We must not dread in you the nameless autocrat.
And you, dark Senate of the public pen,
You may not, like yon tyrant, deal in spies.
Yours are the public acts of public men,
But yours are not their household privacies.
I grant you one of the great Powers on earth,
But be not you the blatant traitors of the hearth.
You hide the hand that writes: it must be so,
For better so you fight for public ends;
But some you strike can scarce return the blow;
You should be all the nobler, O my friends.
Be noble, you! nor work with faction’s tools
To charm a lower sphere of fulminating fools.
But knowing all your power to heat or cool,
To soothe a civic wound or keep it raw,
Be loyal, if you wish for wholesome rule:
Our ancient boast is this — we reverence law.
We still were loyal in our wildest fights,
Or loyally disloyal battled for our rights.
O Grief and Shame if while I preach of laws
Whereby to guard our Freedom from offence —
And trust an ancient manhood and the cause
Of England and her health of commonsense —
There hang within the heavens a dark disgrace,
Some vast Assyrian doom to burst upon our race.
I feel the thousand cankers of our State,
I fain would shake their triple-folded ease,
The hogs who can believe in nothing great,
Sneering bedridden in the down of Peace
Over their scrips and shares, their meats and wine,
With stony smirks at all things human and divine!
I honour much, I say, this man’s appeal.
We drag so deep in our commercial mire,
We move so far from greatness, that I feel
Exception to be character’d in fire.
Who looks for Godlike greatness here shall see
The British Goddess, sleek Respectability.
Alas for her and all her small delights!
She feels not how the social frame is rack’d.
She loves a little scandal which excites;
A little feeling is a want of tact.
For her there lie in wait millions of foes,
And yet the ‘not too much’ is all the rule she knows.
Poor soul! behold her: what decorous calm
!
She, with her week-day worldliness sufficed,
Stands in her pew and hums her decent psalm
With decent dippings at the name of Christ!
And she has mov’d in that smooth way so long,
She hardly can believe that she shall suffer wrong.
Alas, our Church! alas, her growing ills,
And those who tolerate not her tolerance,
But needs must sell the burthen of their wills
To that half-pagan harlot kept by France!
Free subjects of the kindliest of all thrones,
Headlong they plunge their doubts among old rags and bones.
Alas, Church writers, altercating tribes —
The vessel and your Church may sink in storms.
Christ cried: Woe, woe, to Pharisees and Scribes!
Like them, you bicker less for truth than forms.
I sorrow when I read the things you write,
What unheroic pertness! what un-Christian spite!
Alas, our youth, so clever yet so small,
Thin dilletanti deep in nature’s plan,
Who make the emphatic One, by whom is all,
An essence less concentred than a man!
Better wild Mahmoud’s war-cry once again!
O fools, we want a manlike God and Godlike men!
Go, frightful omens. Yet once more I turn
To you that mould men’s thoughts; I call on you
To make opinion warlike, lest we learn
A sharper lesson than we ever knew.
I hear a thunder though the skies are fair,
But shrill you, loud and long, the warning-note: Prepare!
God bless our Prince and Bride
Lord Tennyson wrote, by Royal request, two stanzas which were sung as part of God Save the Queen at a State concert in connection with the Princess Royal’s marriage: these were printed in the Times of January 26, 1858.
God bless our Prince and Bride!
God keep their lands allied,
God save the Queen!
Clothe them with righteousness,
Crown them with happiness,
Them with all blessings bless,
God save the Queen.
Fair fall this hallow’d hour,
Farewell our England’s flower,
God save the Queen!
Farewell, fair rose of May!
Let both the peoples say,
God bless thy marriage-day,
God bless the Queen.
The Ringlet
Published in Enoch Arden volume (London: E. Moxon & Co, 1864) and never reprinted.
‘Your ringlets, your ringlets,
That look so golden-gay,
If you will give me one, but one,
To kiss it night and day,
Then never chilling touch of Time
Will turn it silver-gray;
And then shall I know it is all true gold