Or else to oblivion! – But thou art not such
A lover, my beloved! – thou canst wait
Through sorrow and sickness, to bring souls to touch,
And think it soon when others cry ‘Too late.’
6 [XLIII]
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways! –
I love thee to the depth & breadth & height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and Ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun & candlelight –
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right, –
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise;
I love thee with the passion, put to use
In my old griefs, . . and with my childhood’s faith:
I love thee with the love I seemed to lose
With my lost Saints, – I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! – and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after my death.
(Hart, Lippé, White)
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
(1809–92)
[…] Maud is not one of his best poems and was far from being one of his most popular performances. But, like many weak but not worthless creations, it is unusually revealing. What it reveals are the three quite distinct levels of Tennyson’s work. On the first level is the rather obscure and melodramatic story of a young man who has been ruined by ‘the old lord of the Hall’; who falls in love with the lord’s beautiful young daughter, Maud; who kills her brother and escapes to France, has a bad breakdown but finally wakens to the call of his country going to war. On this level, making use of such a preposterous narrative, Tennyson is challenging popular romancers and playwrights at their own game, and as an entertainer is reaching out to their large public. On the second level, where throughout the poem he denounces some of the manners and morals of the time and ends by praising the ennobling influence of war, he is writing in his capacity as Poet Laureate and Queen Victoria’s official bard. In this capacity he took himself very seriously. He felt it was his duty not only to write poems on important national events but also to make his poetry a kind of 1851 Exhibition of the representative thought of the time. Now Tennyson was not a foolish man; he read widely and was closely acquainted with many of the best contemporary minds; and if much of what he wrote on this level is silly stuff, the obvious explanation is that his heart and genius were not in it. Only the craftsman – and Tennyson was always a superb craftsman – was there, finding melodious phrases for these newspaper and clubmen’s notions. His poetic genius, which cannot be denied, belongs to the third level, discovered in Maud in the love-songs, poetry that is entirely romantic.
The poet on this level, the real Tennyson, though no doubt haunted by Virgil, looks back to Keats. And odd though it may seem, when we think of the big, shaggy Tennyson, at every age a magnificent figure of a bard, and the consumptive little Keats, the romanticism that Keats was moving away from, to achieve the balance that would have been necessary for the full expression of his virile genius, was not only accepted by Tennyson but also warmed and softened, turned into something dreamy and passive, strangely feminine. So whenever Tennyson writes about duty and action and the like, he is at the best merely acceptable, because of his sheer craftsmanship; but when he conjures us into some luxuriant, listless and melancholy dreamland, as in The Lotus-Eaters and so many of his lyrics, his genius is at work, he is magical.
J. B. PRIESTLEY: Literature and Western Man (1960)
One of eight children, Alfred Tennyson was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, the son of a country rector whose extensive library provided the child with his earliest inspiration. He and his brother Charles published their first book, Poems by Two Brothers, in 1827. The following year Tennyson started his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, but left before taking a degree, partly due to his father’s unexpected death. Poems Chiefly Lyrical, his first important book, was published in 1830 and received mixed reviews. Poems followed in 1832, and fared even worse at the hands of the critics. During the next decade he published nothing: shocked by the death of his friend Hallam, he expressed his mourning in many of the In Memoriam poems, which he refused to publish. After a brief infatuation with Rosa Baring, he began his protracted engagement to Emily Sellwood. Having lost a great deal of money in a woodcarving scheme of his friend Dr Allen, he now felt compelled to publish for financial reasons. Poems appeared in 1842. Volume One contained such masterpieces as ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ – revisions of poems written much earlier; Volume Two a number of new poems, including ‘Locksley Hall’ and ‘Ulysses’. The Princess followed in 1847, In Memoriam in 1850, the year in which Tennyson finally married Emily Sellwood and succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate. Poems such as the ‘Ode on Wellington’ and ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, in their apparent sincerity and prosodic brilliance, are typical of his Laureate art, which has perhaps never been surpassed.
Abnormally shy, Tennyson responded to fame by withdrawing in 1853 to Farringford on the Isle of Wight. ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ was published in 1854, Maud and Other Poems in 1855, the first four of the Idylls of the King in 1859. In 1862 he had the first of several audiences with Queen Victoria – see Max Beerbohm’s hilarious caricature: ‘Mr Tennyson, reading In Memoriam to his Sovereign’ from The Poets’ Corner (1904). He refused a baronetcy, but eventually agreed to accept a title and took his seat in the House of Lords in 1883. His first play, Queen Mary, was published in 1875, followed by several others such as Harold (1876), Becket (1884) and The Cup (1881), which, despite the thespian talents of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, flopped. The volumes of poetry continued to appear: Ballads and Other Poems (1880), Tiresias and Other Poems (1885), Locksley Hall Sixty Years After (1886), Demeter and Other Poems, which contained ‘Crossing the bar’, in 1889. There were also a number of posthumously published volumes.
The Princess, which includes ‘Now sleeps the crimson petal’ and ‘The splendour falls on castle walls’, was published in 1847 and subtitled ‘A Medley’ – a good description of the poem’s structure. The poem describes a Victorian country house party at which a succession of stories are told by the aristocratic guests – Gilbert and Sullivan’s Princess Ida is a burlesque version. The stories are contained in seven sections, all of which are interspersed with songs which, like those in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Mörike’s Maler Nolten, have often been torn from context, featured in poetry anthologies and set to music by composers. The story tells of an arranged marriage between a prince and a princess who have never met. She, a believer in women’s rights and the importance of education, founds a university for women that is infiltrated illegally by the prince and his friends disguised as women. They are discovered, and in the ensuing mock-heroic battle the prince is injured. The princess nurses him back to health, falls in love with her victim – and they eventually marry. ‘Now sleeps the crimson petal’ is a poem that the princess discovered in ‘a volume of the Poets of her land’, which she reads at the bedside of the injured prince while he sleeps. The theme of women’s education and the role of women in society was of great importance in the Victorian era, and often featured in the novels of the time, especially those written by women.
Tennyson’s delight in reciting his own poems is nicely illustrated by an anecdote. Shortly after the publication of Maud, he was staying with the Brownings in London. Depressed by the reception accorded the poem, he consumed two bottles of port and only recovered his good humour when Elizabeth Barrett Browning asked him to read Maud aloud – which he did with tears streaming down his face. There is a charming sketch in the City of Birmingham Museum by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1855) of Tennyson reciting Maud.
CHARLES VILLIERS STANFORD
Crossing the bar (1890/1893)1
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,2
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.
(Dunhill, Homer, Ives, Kelly, Parry, Somervell, Vaughan Williams, Williamson)
ARTHUR SOMERVELL: Cycle of Songs from Tennyson’s ‘Maud’ (1898)
Maud, written after In Memoriam, was published in 1855 and received equivocal reviews from the critics, some of whom, alarmed by the hysteria of the poem, suggested that the poem be called Mad or Mud. Tennyson’s own commentary on Maud was recorded by his son, Hallam Tennyson, in Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir in 1897:
[…] ‘This poem is a little Hamlet’, the history of a morbid, poetic soul, under the blighting influence of a recklessly speculative age. He is the heir of madness, an egotist with the makings of a cynic, raised to sanity by a pure and holy love which elevates his whole nature, passing from the height of triumph to the lowest depth of misery, driven into madness by the loss of her whom he has loved, and, when he has at length passed through the fiery furnace, and has recovered his reason, giving himself up to work for the good of mankind through the unselfishness born of his great passion. […] ‘The peculiarity of this poem […] is that different phases of passion in one person take the place of different characters.’
The poem is a monodrama for one speaker and the basic plot was inspired by Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor. Whereas In Memoriam is a sequence of lyric poems on a single theme, Maud is written in a number of sections and a huge variety of poetic forms, but always from the point of view – and with the voice – of a single speaker. Part One describes the hero’s wooing of Maud and culminates in the ecstatic ‘Come into the garden, Maud’. Part Two traces the catastrophe that destroyed their relationship: her brother’s insistence that she marry the nouveau riche grandson of a miner; the hero’s killing of her brother in a duel; his flight from home; his descent into madness. Part Three tells of his recovery, his patriotic commitment to the Crimean War and belief that he will soon die and so join Maud, who has died, in heaven. Somervell, in reducing Tennyson’s Maud to a mere thirteen (and often not entire) poems, jettisons much of the poem’s detail, but still manages to retain a cogent narrative. Attention has frequently been drawn to the biographical relevance of Maud: a father’s rage, a lonely mother, the politician son and, of course, Tennyson’s love for Rosa Baring, Sophy Rawnsley and Emily Sellwood – all evoked in his portrayal of Maud.
1 I hate the dreadful hollow
I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood,1
Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath,
The red-ribbed ledges drip with a silent horror of blood,
And Echo there, whatever is asked her, answers ‘Death’.
[…]
2 A voice by the cedar tree
I
A voice by the cedar tree
In the meadow under the Hall!
She is singing an air that is known to me,
A passionate ballad gallant and gay,
A martial song like a trumpet’s call!
Singing alone in the morning of life,
In the happy morning of life and of May,
Singing of men that in battle array,
Ready in heart and ready in hand,
March with banner and bugle and fife
To the death, for their native land.1
II
Maud with her exquisite face,
And wild voice pealing up to the sunny sky,
And feet like sunny gems on an English green,
Maud in the light of her youth and her grace,
Singing of Death, and of Honour that cannot die,
Till I well could weep for a time so sordid and mean,
And myself so languid and base.
III
Silence, beautiful voice!
Be still, for you only trouble the mind
With a joy in which I cannot rejoice,
A glory I shall not find.
Still! I will hear you no more,
For your sweetness hardly leaves me a choice
But to move to the meadow and fall before
Her feet on the meadow grass, and adore,
Not her, who is neither courtly nor kind,
Not her, not her, but a voice.
(Saint-Saëns)
3 She came to the village church
She came to the village church,
And sat by a pillar alone;
An angel watching an urn
Wept over her, carved in stone;
And once, but once, she lifted her eyes,
And suddenly, sweetly, strangely blushed
To find they were met by my own.
[…]
(Balfe)
4 O let the solid ground
I
O let the solid ground
Not fail beneath my feet
Before my life has found
What some have found so sweet;
Then let come what come may,
What matter if I go mad,
I shall have had my day.
II
Let the sweet heavens endure,
Not close and darken above me
Before I am quite quite sure
That there is one to love me;
Then let come what come may
To a life that has been so sad,
I shall have had my day.
5 Birds in the high Hall-garden
Birds in the high Hall-garden
When twilight was falling,
Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud,
They were crying and calling.
Where was Maud? in our wood;
And I, who else, was with her,
Gathering woodland lilies,
Myriads blow together.
Birds in our wood sang
Ringing through the valleys,
Maud is here, here, here
In among the lilies.
I kissed her slender hand,
She took the kiss sedately;
Maud is not seventeen,
But she is tall and stately.
[…]
I know the way she went
Home with her maiden posy,
For her feet have touched the meadows
And left the daisies rosy.
[…]
(Delius, Gurney)
6 Maud has a garden1
Maud has a garden of roses
And lilies fair on a lawn;
There she walks in her state
And tends upon bed and bower,
And thither I climbed at dawn
And stood by her garden-gate.
[…]
I heard no sound where I stood
But the rivulet on from the lawn
Running down to my own dark wood;
Or the voice of the long sea-wave as it swelled
Now and then in the dim-gray dawn;
But I looked, and round, all round the house I beheld
The death-white curtain drawn,
Felt a horror over me creep,
Prickle my skin and catch my breath,
Knew that the death-white curtain meant but sleep,
Yet I shuddered and thought like a fool of the sleep of death.
7 Go not, happy day1
Go not, happy day,
From the shining fields,
Go not, happy day,
Till the maiden yields.
Rosy is the West,
Rosy is the South,
Roses are he
r cheeks,
And a rose her mouth.
When the happy Yes
Falters from her lips,
Pass and blush the news
Over glowing ships;
Over blowing seas,
Over seas at rest,
Pass the happy news,
Blush it through the West;
Till the red man dance
By his red cedar-tree,
And the red man’s babe
Leap, beyond the sea.
Blush from West to East,
Blush from East to West,
Till the West is East,
Blush it through the West,
Rosy is the West,
Rosy is the South,
Roses are her cheeks,
And a rose her mouth.
(Balfe, Bridge, Delius, Liszt)
8 I have led her home
I have led her home, my love, my only friend.
There is none like her, none.
And never yet so warmly ran my blood
And sweetly, on and on
Calming itself to the long-wished-for end,
Full to the banks, close on the promised good.
None like her, none,
Just now the dry-tongued laurels’ pattering talk
Seemed her light foot along the garden walk,
And shook my heart to think she comes once more;
But even then I heard her close the door;
The gates of Heaven are closed, and she is gone.
[…]
9 Come into the garden, Maud1
Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown,
Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone;
The Penguin Book of English Song Page 38