Idylls of the King and a New Selection of Poems

by Alfred Tennyson

  ROMAN VIRGIL, thou that singest

  Ilion’s lofty temples robed in fire,

  Ilion falling, Rome arising,

  wars, and filial faith, and Dido’s pyre;

  Landscape-lover, lord of language,

  more than he that sang the Works and Days,

  All the chosen coin of fancy

  flashing out from many a golden phrase;

  Thou that singest wheat and woodland,

  tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd;

  All the charm of all the Muses

  often flowering in a lonely word;

  Poet of the happy Tityrus

  piping underneath his beechen bowers;

  Poet of the poet-satyr

  whom the laughing shepherd bound with

  flowers;

  Chanter of the Pollio, glorying

  in the blissful years again to be,

  Summers of the snakeless meadow,

  unlaborious earth and oarless sea;

  Thou that seest Universal

  Nature moved by Universal Mind;

  Thou majestic in thy sadness

  at the doubtful doom of human kind;

  Light among the vanish’d ages;

  star that gildest yet this phantom shore;

  Golden branch amid the shadows,

  kings and realms that pass to rise no more;

  Now thy Forum roars no longer,

  fallen every purple Caesar’s dome—

  Tho’ thine ocean-roll of rhythm

  sound for ever of Imperial Rome—

  Now the Rome of slaves hath perish’d,

  and the Rome of freemen holds her place,

  I, from out the Northern Island,

  sunder’d once from all the human race,

  I salute thee, Mantovano,

  I that loved thee since my day began,

  Wielder of the stateliest measure

  ever moulded by the lips of man.

  [publ. 1882]

  CROSSING THE BAR

  SUNSET and evening star,

  And one clear call for me!

  And may there be no moaning of the bar,

  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 tho’ 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.

  [1889; publ. 1889]

  1 Ricks, Christopher, ed. Tennyson: A Selected Edition. University of California Press, 1989, p. 669.

  2 Ricks, pp. 671-72.

  3 Girouard, Mark. The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman. Yale University Press, 1981, p. 90.

  4 Girouard, pp. 90-110; see also the Eglinton Tournament Web site, http://eglinton-history.tripod.com/tournament.htm.

  5 Shaw, M. “Tennyson and His Public 1827-1859,” in Tennyson. Ed. D. J. Palmer. Writers and Their Background series. Ohio University Press, 1975, p. 82.

  6 Ricks, p. 672.

  7 Ricks, pp. 875-76.

  8 Ricks, p. 667.

  9 Martin, Robert Bernard. Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart. Oxford University Press, 1980, p. 310.

  10 Martin, p. 403.

  11 Ricks, p. 667.

  12 Tennyson, Hallam. Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir. 2 vols. New York, 1897, Vol. II, p. 129.

  13 Buckley, Jerome H. Introduction to Poems of Tennyson. Houghton Mifflin, 1958, p. xvii.

  14 Stanzas 26 to 36 of the last poem in In Memoriam.