Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson | Page 4

Poet', where
the edition of 1830 reads:--
And in the bordure of her robe was writ
Wisdom, a name to shake

Hoar anarchies, as with a thunderfit.
This in 1842 appears as:--
And in her raiment's hem was trac'd in flame
Wisdom, a name to
shake
All evil dreams of power--a sacred name.
Again, in the 'Lotos Eaters'
Three thunder-cloven thrones of oldest snow
Stood sunset-flushed
is changed into
Three silent pinnacles of aged snow.
So in 'Will Waterproof' the cumbrous
Like Hezekiah's backward runs The shadow of my days,
was afterwards simplified into
Against its fountain upward runs
The current of my days.
Not less felicitous have been the additions made from time to time.
Thus in 'Audley Court' the concluding lines ran:--

The harbour buoy,
With one green sparkle ever and anon
Dipt by
itself.
But what vividness is there in the subsequent insertion of
"Sole star of phosphorescence in the calm."
between the first line and the second.
So again in the 'Morte d'Arthur' how greatly are imagery and rhythm
improved by the insertion of
Across the ridge, and paced beside the mere,
between
Then went Sir Bedivere the second time,
and
Counting the dewy pebbles, fix'd in thought.
There is an alteration in ‘none which is very interesting. Till 1884 this
was allowed to stand:--
The lizard, with his shadow on the stone,
Rests like a shadow, and
the cicala sleeps.
No one could have known better than Tennyson that the cicala is
loudest in the torrid calm of the noonday, as Theocritus, Virgil, Byron
and innumerable other poets have noticed; at last he altered it, but at the
heavy price of a cumbrous pleonasm, into "and the winds are dead".
He allowed many years to elapse before he corrected another error in
natural history--but at last the alteration came. In 'The Poet's Song' in
the line--
The swallow stopt as he hunted the bee,

the "fly" which the swallow does hunt was substituted for what it does
not hunt, and that for very obvious reasons. But whoever would see
what Tennyson's poetry has owed to elaborate revision and scrupulous
care would do well to compare the first edition of 'Mariana in the
South', 'The Sea-Fairies', 'OEnone', 'The Lady of Shalott', 'The Palace
of Art' and 'A Dream of Fair Women' with the poems as they are
presented in 1853. Poets do not always improve their verses by revision,
as all students of Wordsworth's text could abundantly illustrate; but it
may be doubted whether, in these poems at least, Tennyson ever made
a single alteration which was not for the better. Fitzgerald, indeed,
contended that in some cases, particularly in 'The Miller's Daughter',
Tennyson would have done well to let the first reading stand, but few
critics would agree with him in the instances he gives. We may perhaps
regret the sacrifice of such a stanza as this--
Each coltsfoot down the grassy bent, Whose round leaves hold the
gathered shower, Each quaintly folded cuckoo pint, And silver-paly
cuckoo flower.
II
Tennyson's genius was slow in maturing. The poems contributed by
him to the volume of 1827, 'Poems by Two Brothers', are not without
some slight promise, but are very far from indicating extraordinary
powers. A great advance is discernible in 'Timbuctoo', but that Matthew
Arnold should have discovered in it the germ of Tennyson's future
powers is probably to be attributed to the youth of the critic. Tennyson
was in his twenty-second year when the 'Poems Chiefly Lyrical'
appeared, and what strikes us in these poems is certainly not what
Arthur Hallam saw in them: much rather what Coleridge and Wilson
discerned in them. They are the poems of a fragile and somewhat
morbid young man in whose temper we seem to see a touch of Hamlet,
a touch of Romeo and, more healthily, a touch of Mercutio. Their most
promising characteristic is the versatility displayed. Thus we find
'Mariana' side by side with the 'Supposed Confessions', the 'Ode to
Memory' with Greek['oi rheontes'], 'The Ballad of Oriana' with 'The
Dying Swan', 'Recollections of The Arabian Nights' with 'The Poet'.

Their worst fault is affectation. Perhaps the utmost that can be said for
them is that they display a fine but somewhat thin vein of original
genius, after deducing what they owe to Coleridge, to Keats and to
other poets. This is seen in the magical touches of description, in the
exquisite felicity of expression and rhythm which frequently mark them,
in the pathos and power of such a poem as 'Oriana', in the pathos and
charm of such poems as 'Mariana' and 'A Dirge', in the rich and almost
gorgeous fancy displayed in 'The Recollections'.
The poems of 1833 are much more ambitious and strike deeper notes.
Here comes in for the first time that Greek[spondai_otaes'], that high
seriousness which is one of Tennyson's chief characteristics--we