Alfred Lord Tennyson

Tennyson is another poet with more poems worth studying than is comfortable. "Ulysses" and "Break, break break" are both poems that the GRE folks love, but they also want you to know that Tenyyson was interested in both the Arthurian tradition and in Homer (as in "Ulysses" and "The Lotus-Eaters").

*“Ulysses”

This poem is a GRE moneymaker. Know it.

"Ulysses" is a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson, written in 1833 but not published until 1842. It is narrated by an aged Ulysses who has become dissatisfied with his life as king of Ithaca. Ulysses has spent years fighting the Trojans (as described in the Iliad) and trying to return home (which is the subject of The Odyssey), but now that his journey is complete he feels restless and yearns to get back out into the world. He is an "idle king" who is not satisfied with his duties in Ithaca. He declares his intent to leave the throne to Telemachus ("He works his work, I mine") and gather up all of his old sailors for one final voyage:

Tennyson questions what becomes of the hero after the quest. The man who could outwit the Fates could not grow old. Although many readers have accepted the last lines of the poem as inspirational, it is not clear that Tennyson intended them as such. Ulysses's call to action is suicidal and proud. He intends to die contending, rather than in peace.

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vest the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers;
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breath were life. Life piled on life
Were all to little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle-
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me-
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads- you and I are old;
Old age had yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in the old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal-temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

*In Memoriam A.H.H.

In Memoriam A.H.H. is a long poem by the English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. It is a requiem for the poet's Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly of a stroke in Vienna in 1833, but it is also much more. Written over a period of 17 years, it can be seen as reflective of Victorian society at the time, and the poem dicusses many of the issues that were beginning to be questioned. It is the work in which Tennyson reaches his highest musical peaks and his poetic experience comes full circle. It is generally regarded as one of the great poetic works of the British 19th century.

“The Lady of Shalott”

The poem (of which Tennyson wrote two versions: one in 1833, of twenty verses, the other in 1842 of nineteen verses) is based loosely upon a story from Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur concerning Elaine of Astolat, a maiden who falls in love with Lancelot, but dies of grief when he cannot return her love. Tennyson returned to the story in “Lancelot and Elaine” (in his 1859 Idylls of the King). However the original story of Elaine is quite different from that of the Lady, who is never named and who is, it seems, not quite human. It begins:

On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro’ the field the road runs by
To many-tower’d Camelot;
And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below,
The island of Shalott.

“The Lotus-Eaters”

A long poem that begins:

‘Courage!’ he said, and pointed toward the land,
‘This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon.’
In the afternoon they came unto a land
In which it seemed always afternoon.
All round the coast the languid air did swoon,
Breathing like one that hath a weary dream.
Full-faced above the valley stood the moon;
And like a downward smoke, the slender stream
Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem.

“Mariana”

"Mariana of the Moated Grange" first appears in Shakespeare's dark comedy Measure for Measure and is the inspiration for the poem. In Shakespeare's work, Mariana waits in a grange for her lover, who has deserted her. At the end of Shakespeare's work, Mariana is re-united with her lover. However, there is no happy ending in Tennyson's work.

Mariana follows a common theme in much of Tennyson's work: that of despondent isolation. The subject of Mariana is a woman who continuously laments her lack of connection with society. The isolation defines her existence, and her longing for a connection leaves her wishing for death at the end of every stanza. In order to properly portray her horrible plight, Tennyson uses strong imagery to express a parallel between the woman's dilapidated environment and her inner mental/social state. Tennyson's greatest strength may possibly be his ability to create scenery and use this scenery to embody a human's emotional state.

Different stanzas in the poem reflect on either day, night, or her life as a whole. The end result is obvious, that in her current state, hours, days, weeks, months all blend into nothing. They merely create a dull smear of despondency that is her life.

With blackest moss the flower-plots
Were thickly crusted, one and all:
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the pear to the gable-wall.
The broken sheds look’d sad and strange:
Unlifted was the clinking latch;
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.
She only said, ‘My life is dreary,
He cometh not,’ she said;
She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!’

Her tears fell with the dews at even;
Her tears fell ere the dews were dried;
She could not look on the sweet heaven,
Either at morn or eventide.
After the flitting of the bats,
When thickest dark did trance the sky,
She drew her casement-curtain by,
And glanced athwart the glooming flats.
She only said, ‘The night is dreary,
He cometh not,’ she said;
She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!’

Upon the middle of the night,
Waking she heard the night-fowl crow:
The cock sung out an hour ere light:
From the dark fen the oxen’s low
Came to her: without hope of change,
In sleep she seem’d to walk forlorn,
Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn
About the lonely moated grange.
She only said, ‘The day is dreary,
He cometh not,’ she said;
She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!’

About a stone-cast from the wall
A sluice with blacken’d waters slept,
And o’er it many, round and small,
The cluster’d marish-mosses crept.
Hard by a poplar shook alway,
All silver-green with gnarled bark:
For leagues no other tree did mark
The level waste, the rounding gray.
She only said, ‘My life is dreary,
He cometh not,’ she said;
She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!’

And ever when the moon was low,
And the shrill winds were up and away,
In the white curtain, to and fro,
She saw the gusty shadow sway.
But when the moon was very low,
And wild winds bound within their cell,
The shadow of the poplar fell
Upon her bed, across her brow.
She only said, ‘The night is dreary,
He cometh not,’ she said;
She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!’

All day within the dreamy house,
The doors upon their hinges creak’d;
The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse
Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek’d,
Or from the crevice peer’d about.
Old faces glimmer’d thro’ the doors,
Old footsteps trod the upper floors,
Old voices called her from without.
She only said, ‘My life is dreary,
He cometh not,’ she said;
She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!’

The sparrow’s chirrup on the roof,
The slow clock ticking, and the sound
Which to the wooing wind aloof
The poplar made, did all confound
Her sense; but most she loathed the hour
When the thick-moted sunbeam lay
Athwart the chambers, and the day
Was sloping toward his western bower.
Then, said she, ‘I am very dreary,
He will not come,’ she said;
She wept, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
Oh God, that I were dead!’

“To E. FitzGerald”

Old Fitz, who from your suburb grange,
Where once I tarried for a while,
Glance at the wheeling Orb of change,
And greet it with a kindly smile;
Whom yet I see as there you sit
Beneath your sheltering garden-tree,
And while your doves about you flit,
And plant on shoulder, hand and knee,
Or on your head their rosy feet,
As if they knew your diet spares
Whatever moved in that full sheet
Let down to Peter at his prayers;
Who live on milk and meal and grass;
And once for ten long weeks I tried
Your table of Pythagoras,
And seem’d at first ‘a thing enskied’
(As Shakespeare has it) airy-light
To float above the ways of men,
Then fell from that half-spiritual height
Chill’d, till I tasted flesh again
One night when earth was winter-black,
And all the heavens flash’d in frost;
And on me, half-asleep, came back
That wholesome heat the blood had lost,
And set me climbing icy capes
And glaciers, over which there roll’d
To meet me long-arm’d vines with grapes
Of Eshcol hugeness; for the cold
Without, and warmth within me, wrought
To mould the dream; but none can say
That Lenten fare makes Lenten thought,
Who reads your golden Eastern lay,
Than which I know no version done
In English more divinely well;
A planet equal to the sun
Which cast it, that large infidel
Your Omar; and your Omar drew
Full-handed plaudits from our best
In modern letters, and from two,
Old friends outvaluing all the rest,
Two voices heard on earth no more;
But we old friends are still alive,
And I am nearing seventy-four,
While you have touch’d at seventy-five,
And so I send a birthday line
Of greeting; and my son, who dipt
In some forgotten book of mine
With sallow scraps of manuscript,
And dating many a year ago,
Has hit on this, which you will take
My Fitz, and welcome, as I know
Less for its own than for the sake
Of one recalling gracious times,
When, in our younger London days,
You found some merit in my rhymes,
And I more pleasure in your praise.

The Idylls of the King

The Idylls of the King is a sequence of poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson which portrays the Coming of Arthur, the knights of the Round Table, Guinevere, the decline of Camelot and finally "The Passing of Arthur", the poem Tennyson wrote first, and which inspired the sequence. The episodic poems, are not an epic either in structure or tone, but take their elegaic sadness from the idylls of Theocritus: like the Alexandrian poems an idealized, distant, pastoral review of a lost time. When the poems were published as a set there was a dedication to one, unidentified at first,
And indeed He seems to me

Scarce other than my king's ideal knight,

whom in the course of its development, the reader finds is the late Prince Albert: the Idylls of the King are often read as an allegory of the social conflicts and malaises of mid-Victorian England. There are twelve poems in the suite. For the first poem written, "Morte d'Arthur" Tennyson adapted the well-known title of Sir Thomas Malory's prose romance, which had fixed the imagery of Arthur in the English imagination. The downfall of Arthur lies, not in himself nor in his act of incest with his faery sister, but in the faithless Guinevere.

*“Break, Break, Break”

This is another GRE moneymaker.

Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.

O well for the fisherman's boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill:
But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.

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