The Columbia History of British Poetry (105 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Page 417
Wordsworth assumed, for the rivers and seas, as Lyellian geology teaches, steadily "Draw down Aeonian hills, and sow / The dust of continents to be." Nor is Nature now so much the nurturing mother unwilling to "betray the heart that loved her"as the predatory force postulated by mid-nineteenth-century evolution, "red in tooth and claw," caring for nothing, but in effect mocking the cherished ideals of a frail humanity:
                                 And he, shall he,
Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair,
    Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
    Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,
 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills,
    Who battled for the True, the Just,
    Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seal'd within the iron hills?
Moreover, the whole round earth, which, "they say," began "in tracts of fluent heat," is but an infinitesimal part of a universe surveyed by the new astronomersworlds upon worlds, where "stars their courses blindly run" in a vastness far less reassuring than Wordsworth's most sublime mountain vistas. Such to Tennyson were the real terrors of space and time, negating man's brave illusions andfor the modern poetdenying altogether the classical faith in the immortality of verse and all poetic fame, and presenting instead (in the words of his late "Parnassus") only a grim new inspiration: "These are Astronomy and Geology, terrible Muses!''
Tennyson's cosmic alarms, however, though anticipating the grimmer despair of Thomas Hardy, scarcely lessened the intensity of his personal dedication to poetry, his warm response to craftsmanship, or his care in poem after poem for what he considered the social responsibilities of his calling. "The Poet," for example, affirms his early regard for the poet's privileged insight, mission, and power ideally to shake the world, an assurance shared with fellow members of the "Cambridge Apostles"the little "band of youthful friends" remembered in
In Memoriam
. And a companion piece, surely with some conscious hyperbole, warns the skeptical rationalist not to dare violate "the poet's mind," for "all the place is holy ground." Many later verses celebrate
 
Page 418
masters in a venerable traditionVirgil, Catullus, and Horace, Dante and Milton, Chaucer and the long-neglected author of
Pearl
.
A number of angry squibs, on the other hand, condemn the mistreatment of the "sacred poets" in an age of prosespecifically the insensitivity of "indolent reviewers," the misguided attempt of bibliographers to reprint all that a poet has chosen to suppress, and the irreverence of biographers intent on exposing a poet's private life. The animus here against harsh criticism and undue intrusion is clearly self-serving: Tennyson himself was perpetually defensive against attack, self-conscious, reticent, and eager to protect the privacy of his family circle and intimate friends.
In Memoriam
, as T. S. Eliot remarked, reads like "the concentrated diary of a man confessing himself," yet the revelation is discreet in detail and often enigmatic in personal reference. Tennyson's other subjective poetry, apart from lyrics in the vein of the elegy, is characteristically more oblique. Yet with safe distance and indirection he is able to view the foibles of his poet-self in amused perspective. He appearsonly at slight removeas Leonard in "The Golden Year," diffident and bewildered, "a tongue-tied Poet in the feverous days." He mocks himself in "The Epic" as Everard Hall, who belittles his own heroic "Morte d'Arthur,'' and then with little urging but "with some prelude of disparagement" reads it aloud, "mouthing out his hollow oes and aes, / Deep-chested music." Again he is the vinous Will Waterproof pondering his poet's role in "maudlin-moral" rhymes. In all of these Tennyson disarms invidious criticism of himself and his work by ironic avowals of ineptitude or indifference, just as in
The Princess
he implicitly defends "Tears, Idle Tears" by allowing the chilly Ida to ridicule its warm nostalgia.
Although able to assess his own conduct and performance with becoming good humor, Tennyson nonetheless affirms the serious obligations of both art and artist. An unfinished Cambridge allegory laments the enslavement of the giant Conscience by amoral irresponsible Sense, as a fate which threatens every susceptible poet. "The Vision of Sin," sharpening the argument, passes judgment on a young poet betrayed by his sensuous gift into an abandoned sensuality and eventually a cynical disregard for sustaining values. The weary aesthetes of "The Lotos-Eaters," no longer rough Homeric mariners, are implicitly condemned by their attempt to rationalize a sensuous escapism. The narrator of
Maud
rails at a dissolute age when "The passionate heart of the poet is
 
Page 419
whirled into folly and vice." The "I" of
In Memoriam
is loath to think of the whole green earth as simply an aesthetic illusion, "Fantastic beauty; such as lurks / In some wild Poet, when he works / Without a conscience or an aim."
The poet's Soul in "The Palace of Art" creates a pleasure dome of rich impressions, where she basks in a "godlike isolation" from humankind until she becomes so miserable in her solitude, "all alone in crime," that she is eager to seek out "a cottage in the vale" (an odd image of social life), where she may purge her "guilt.'' And
The Princess
, which repeats a similar pattern of retreat into artifice followed by return to reality, depicts the heroine as a "Poet-princess", an austere epic muse as much as an ardent feminist, who must eventually be redeemed by the human emotion she has suppressed.
Behind all these lies a fear of the dangerous seductions of art more intense and persistent than Wordsworth's indictment of a poet's evasion of tragic or merely unpleasant circumstance. For Tennyson's dread of the enticements of poetry testifies in itself to the strength of its contrary, to his perpetual delight in his craft for its own sake and his personal attraction, like that of Keats, to "the life of sensations" and the endless magic of incantatory language, whether it were the deep-chested music of Everard Hall or the horns of elfland echoing through the bugle-song in
The Princess
.
The theme of madness, or dissociation from present reality, also recurs in Tennyson with a greater urgency than Wordsworth brought to it, but again with less apparent self-reference. The Prince who tells the Princess's story suffers "weird seizures" (perhaps representing, as some recent readers suggest, Tennyson's fear of inherited epilepsy), sudden attacks of bedazed confusion during which he cannot distinguish the "shadow" from the "substance." Repeatedly, in Ida's little world of artifice he experiences a "haunting sense of hollow shows" until he sinks into a lingering trance or coma, "quite sunder'd from the moving Universe." The "I" of
In Memoriam
dreads a like schizophrenia, fearful that his grief has destroyed his stability and "all my knowledge of myself," and
        made me that delirious man
   Whose fancy fuses old and new,
   And flashes into false and true,
And mingles all without a plan.
 
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But the elegist succeeds in identifying, resisting, and so dispelling the threat to his sanity. The hero of
Maud
, on the other hand, succumbs to his own morbid sensibility, which has alienated him from a materialistic world and drives him, after an interlude of more lucid passion, into a certifiable psychosis. Short of such derangement, an intemperate violence of rebellious rhetoric invades both "Locksley Hall" and "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After," but the speaker recovers enough self-control in each to recognize his melodramatic rantwhen young, to acknowledge that his "words are wild," and when old, to admit that his "heated'' diatribe may signal his dotage.
The quieter, more characteristic melancholy of "Tears, Idle Tears," still irrational (or at least beyond rational accounting), involves Tennyson's "passion of the past," an unmotivated dissatisfaction with things present, a malaise of the heart rising "from the depth of some divine despair," essentially gentle though "wild with all regret." In his masterly appraisal of
In Memoriam
Eliot declared such meditative melancholy Tennyson's true poetic signature, and Tennyson himself "the saddest of all English poets, among the Great in Limbo, the most instinctive rebel against the society in which he was the most perfect conformist."
Sadness, however, is not the single or even dominant note in Tennyson's register, and melancholy often evokes its positive counterpart. In "The Two Voices" the tempter as the first speaker seeks by a cool logical common sense to abet a suicidal impulse, but the stubborn ego with which he must contend finds its best defense in man's irrational will to live, quite beyond the grasp of logic or any empirical demonstration, simply "That heat of inward evidence / By which he doubts against the sense." And the redeeming doubt leads to a more compelling though elusive insight, the conviction of a larger psychic life and an inexplicable déjà vu:
Moreover, something is or seems,
That touches me with mystic gleams,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams
Of something felt, like something here;
Of something done, I know not where;
Such as no language may declare.
Unlike the Prince's "weird seizures," this mystic intuition is restorative to the brooding ego rather than deranging, normative rather than pathological. Although akin to the Wordsworthian spot of time, it is

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