Poems Published in 1842. With an Introd. and Notes by A.M.D. Hughes

by Alfred Tennyson, Arthur Montague D'Urban Hughes

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458 pages, Hardcover

First published January 28, 1981

About the author

Works, including In Memoriam in 1850 and "The Charge of the Light Brigade" in 1854, of Alfred Tennyson, first baron, known as lord, appointed British poet laureate in 1850, reflect Victorian sentiments and aesthetics.

Elizabeth Tennyson, wife, bore Alfred Tennyson, the fourth of twelve children, to George Tennyson, clergyman; he inevitably wrote his books. In 1816, parents sent Tennyson was sent to grammar school of Louth.

Alfred Tennyson disliked school so intensely that from 1820, home educated him. At the age of 18 years in 1827, Alfred joined his two brothers at Trinity College, Cambridge and with Charles Tennyson, his brother, published Poems by Two Brothers , his book, in the same year.

Alfred Tennyson published Poems Chiefly Lyrical , his second book, in 1830. In 1833, Arthur Henry Hallam, best friend of Tennyson, engaged to wed his sister, died, and thus inspired some best Ulysses and the Passing of Arthur .

Following William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson in 1850 married Emily Sellwood Tenyson, his childhood friend. She bore Hallam Tennyson in 1852 and Lionel Tennyson in 1854, two years later.

Alfred Tennyson continued throughout his life and in the 1870s also to write a number of plays.

In 1884, the queen raised Alfred Tennyson, a great favorite of Albert, prince, thereafter to the peerage of Aldworth. She granted such a high rank for solely literary distinction to this only Englishman.

Alfred Tennyson died at the age of 83 years, and people buried his body in abbey of Westminster.

Reviews

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's a coherency to the first volume, with a recurring focus on the striata beneath the ground or from below ground in a grave, contrasted with the above-ground and a world alive, even nourished upon the detritus coming from the layer below. From the stanza of the first poem, in which "Claribel low-lieth", she has been dead long enough for moss to grow on her headstone, and for the "the solemn oak-tree" above her corpse to be "ambrosial", as if feeding upon "an inward agony"--a wonderful metaphor for decay (cp. twenty-fifth poem, vol.2 "kill'd with some luxurious agony"). We are heavily into the Romantic. In the third poem, vol.1, in what is presumably another grave story, what grows out of the lower stratum this time is "A leaning and upbearing parasite, / Clothing the stem" resulting in Isabel below being over-burdened with "rich fruit-bunches leaning on each other—" to "Shadow forth thee." Nature as over-arching frame is a theme taken up again in the fourth poem, where evening-to-morning is the temporal frame, in which "Her tears fell with the dews at even...": her tears not falling by coincidence at the same time but caused by the dews, and lasting all night until gone with the morning sun—a very sad and forlorn figure then, this Mariana; she could have authored the tenth poem, with its repeated couplet: "I faint in this obscurity, / Thou dewy dawn of memory." Further along in the collection, " All Nature widens upward. Evermore / The simpler essence lower lies" (thirty-second poem). Again and again that lower stratum re-asserts itself, as "earth's mouldering sod" (thirty-second poem), as "the mouldering grave" (thirty-fifth poem), or "Heap'd over with a mound of grass" (thirty-seventh poem); or consider: "Shadows of the silver birk / Sweep the green that folds thy grave" (seventeenth poem); or, what's buried is forgotten in "you may lay me low i' the mould and think no more of me / ... / come sometimes and see me where I am lowly laid / [but not] till my grave be growing green" (thirty-fifth poem); or, both layers, below and above in two lines, with "Two graves grass-green beside a gray church-tower, / Wash'd with still rains and daisy-blossomed" (eighteenth poem); and of course: "I dare not think of thee, Oriana. / Thou liest beneath the greenwood tree" (nineteenth poem); etc. And what exactly separates the two realms, above and below: well, Oenone can be found "Walking the cold and starless road of Death / Uncomforted" (twenty-ninth poem). No wonder she could not long bear being in that limbo, perhaps smarting from "the riddle of the painful earth" (thirty-second poem). Finally, consider the line from the penultimate poem of the volume: "we bear blossom of the dead". It would be a challenge to show that this dualism is in every poem of volume 1, and it is not as prevalent in volume 2; there is even perhaps precious little echo of this running metaphor in volume 2, perhaps evident here and there only, as in the collapsing of the two realms into "sapless days" (ninth poem, vol.2). Again, it would be a stretch to say volume 2 is organized around this same duality, but there nonetheless appear to be continuations of the theme in at least some of the poems therein: consider "To that last nothing under earth!" (thirteenth poem, vol.2) contrasted later in the same poem with the above-ground experience regaled in these stanzas:

And forth into the fields I went,
And Nature's living motion lent
The pulse of hope to discontent.

I wonder'd at the bounteous hours,
The slow result of winter showers:
You scarce could see the grass for flowers.

I wonder'd, while I paced along:
The woods were fill'd so full with song,
There seem'd no room for sense of wrong.

Also in vol.2, the gloriously macabre turn of phrase "the glow-worm of the grave" (twenty-fifth poem), and the lines, again with the contrast between upwards & outwards versus downwards & inwards: "Again arose the mystic mountain-range: / Below were men and horses pierced with worms" (ibidem.) Enough with the memento mori; let's move on.

There also appears, in volume 1, the beginnings of a running dialogue between Tennyson's hated "Sophist" and his hero "the Poet": e.g. "Low-cowering shall the Sophist sit" (fifth poem); e.g. "Dark-brow'd sophist, come not anear" (fifteenth poem); e.g. "The herd... / That every sophister can lime" (penultimate poem of the volume). Whereas the Poet, with "The viewless arrows of his thoughts / ... like the arrow-seeds of the field flower," speaks with "The winged shafts of truth," (fourteenth poem); or, personified as Freedom, the "fragments of her mighty voice / Came rolling on the wind" (pen-penultimate poem, vol.1), the agency Nature provides being as important, if not more so, than the poet. As part of this defense of poetry, Tennyson likens poetic inspiration to those arrow-seeds, which only come to fruition "by degrees" and depend upon the occasion and the right soil to take root, that is, when "The strength of some diffusive thought / Hath time and space to work and spread." (fourty-third poem, vol.1) When afforded what they need, these inspired thoughts form "each a perfect whole / From living Nature" (thirty-second poem). Elsewhere in the collection, personified as Song, the poet does the work of Nature in the autumn, the poet providing the agency that "boweth the heavy stalks / Of the mouldering flowers." (eleventh poem). Meanwhile, Tennyson's animadversion against the partisan demagogues seems to reach a pitch, in volume 2, with these lines from "A Vision of Sin":

"Drink, and let the parties rave:
They are fill'd with idle spleen;
Rising, falling, like a wave,
For they know not what they mean.

"He that roars for liberty
Faster binds the tyrant's power;
And the tyrant's cruel glee
Forces on the freer hour.

The first volume takes some flak, reading sometimes like the poetic equivalent of "Hylas & the Nymphs", and there are some stinker lines, e.g. "I roll'd among the tender flowers" (twenty-eighth poem, vol.1); these can be found in the second volume as well, e.g. "Kissing the rose she gave me o'er and o'er" (third poem vol.2), or the saccharine lines "That every cloud, that spreads above / And veileth love, itself is love." (thirteenth poem, vol.2). But if we're going to take lines out of context, there are just as many noteworthy for their beauty or force:

Do beating hearts of salient springs
Keep measure with thine own?
~from "Adeline"

Chaunteth not the brooding bee
Sweeter tones than calumny?
~from "A Dirge"

A sinful soul possess'd of many gifts,
A spacious garden full of flowering weeds
~from "To - - - with the following poem"

"...gently comes the world to those
That are cast in gentle mould."
~from "To J.S."

But by far the best lines in the first volume are the famously psychologically-terrifying ones, in the moments of her metamorphosis that she undergoes consciously, because she's self-aware of her doom, much like Daphne transformed in Ovid :

"...singing her last song [she]"
Chanted loudly, chanted lowly,
Till her blood was frozen slowly,
And her eyes were darken'd wholly,
~from "The Lady of Shalott"

While from volume 2, I would single out (because in keeping with what I'm arguing above):

A crowd of hopes,
That sought to sow themselves like winged seeds
~from "The Gardener's Daughter"

...and the wonderfully sodden forest depicted in these two lines:

When the rotten woodland drips,
And the leaf is stamp'd in clay.
~from "The Vision of Sin"

On the whole, there's remarkable variety of form, range of subject matter, and quality of execution that justifies this collection of Tennyson's being the favorite of many readers.

[Jesse Field · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lord Tennyson, Sir -- or Alfred, if I may?
Your verse says simple faith and kindness belie
The folly bred by title, England’s shame.

Poor women, boys, the tillers of the fields，
Who work and live and love and pray for grace,
Are truest subjects of song in all the land.

From Bedivere to Vere de Vere, we learn
That "only love were cause enough for praise,"
And when we feel "the true old times are dead,"
We must send them off in style.
For each new day still brings a chance,
New nations and new worlds must now be led,
"Among new men, strange faces, other minds,"
"Companionless," we call ourselves, if we’re blind.
The old order renews; customs corrupt,
And Life it is that makes them rot away.

[Stewart Lindstrom]

Quite a bit of the Medieval here. "Morte d'Arthur" and "Sir Galahad" stand out. The opening poem is a long monologue between two internal voices, one that urges the poet to kill himself and another that urges him to keep going. And of course "Ulysses" is here as well, surely one of my favorite poems of all time.

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve been searching for an (affordable) copy of this book for some time. It wasn’t easy to find. But I was determined to read the book that introduced the world to Ulysses, Morte d’Arthur, Two Voices, St. Simeon Stylites and Break, Break, Break – all favorites of mine. Surely it had some other gems I hadn’t read.

I must admit to being underwhelmed. The book is full of maudlin, melodramatic poems full of stories of true love, broken hearts and a guy talking to a tree. Well, in all fairness, the tree does most of the talking. And then the man kisses his acorns. Really.

This volume appeared just 40 years after Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which reminds me of Tennyson’s Poems. Yet in that short time, Byron, Shelley and Keats had made their mark (just 20 years prior). But by 1825, they were all dead.

Tennyson also suffers in comparison to the early moderns. Having died in 1892 as the grand man of poetry, it was easy to make him a straw man for Yeats, Pound and Eliot.

Beneath the conventional surface, Tennyson struggled with doubts, with the bleakness of life, and the absurdity felt by 20th century mankind. But he always pulled up short of completely acknowledging these views. His poems are struggles against these feelings, never giving in. By the early 20th century, the poets had given in to this – for right or wrong.

A poet is the product of his or her time. Tennyson was no different. He was conventional, yes. But also an outstanding craftsman. The world wasn’t ready for The Wasteland in 1850. The world was ready for Tennyson.

[Paul · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a crashing bore this Hughes must have been. He’s edited this book in such a way in so that it only appeals to academics. His actual introduction to the life of Tennyson does give a good insight to the man behind the poems. It’s also not clear as to why the author selected 1842 or whether he has published volumes in other years. Now I’ve got to go and look for a set. The book itself is not an easy one to browse. If you’re looking for a particular poem, first you have to browse which contents page to read before scrolling through to find the page number for the poem itself. There’s also an index of first lines. What use is that in today’s society? But the final nail in the coffin is Hughes’s appendix. As well as notes; there’s a separate appendix of different versions of the poems. Even if you did want to compare versions through the ages; you still have to go to the front of the book to re-browse the contents page to find the poem again. A small footnote under each poem would have been much more useful. Still, it’s nice to have a musty old book on the shelves that you can say that you’ve actually read; even if it did take three months.