Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson | Page 7

4. IDYLLS
(a) Classical.
'‘none'.
'The Lotos Eaters'.
'Ulysses'.
(b) English
'The Miller's Daughter'.
'The May Queen'.
'Morte d'Arthur'.

'The
Gardener's Daughter'.
'Dora'.
'Audley Court'.
'Walking to the
Mail'.
'Edwin Morris'.
'The Golden Year'.
5. BALLADS

'Oriana'.
'Lady Clara Vere de Vere'.
'Edward Gray'.
'Lady Clare'.

'The Lord of Burleigh'.
'The Beggar Maid'.
6. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
'Ode to Memory'.
'Sonnet to J. M. K'.
'To---------with the Palace of
Art'.
'To J.S.'
'Amphion'.
'To E. L. on his Travels in Greece'.

'To--------after reading a Life and Letters'.
'"Come not when I am
Dead'."
'A Farewell'.
"'Move Eastward, Happy Earth'."
"'Break,
Break, Break'."
7. POLITICAL GROUP
'"You ask me."'
'"Of old sat Freedom."'
'"Love thou thy Land."'

'The Goose.'
In surveying these poems two things must strike every one--their very
wide range and their very fragmentary character. There is scarcely any
side of life on which they do not touch, scarcely any phase of passion
and emotion to which they do not give exquisite expression. Take the
love poems: compare 'Fatima' with 'Isabel', 'The Miller's Daughter' with
'Locksley Hall', 'The Gardener's Daughter' with 'Madeline', or 'Mariana'
with Cleopatra in the 'Dream of Fair Women'. When did love find purer
and nobler expression than in 'Love and Duty?' When has sorrow found
utterance more perfect than in the verses 'To J. S '., or the passion for
the past than in 'Break, Break, Break', or revenge and jealousy than in
'The Sisters?' In 'The Two Voices', 'The Palace of Art' and 'The Vision
of Sin' we are in another sphere. They are appeals to the soul of man on
subjects of momentous concern to him. And each is a masterpiece.
What is proper to philosophy and what is proper to poetry have never
perhaps been so happily blended. They have all the sensuous charm of
Keats, but the prose of Hume could not have presented the truths which
they are designed to convey with more lucidity and precision. In that
superb fragment the 'Morte d'Arthur' we have many of the noblest
attributes of Epic poetry. '‘none' is the perfection of the classical idyll,
'The Gardener's Daughter' and the idylls that follow it of the romantic.
'Sir Galahad' and 'St. Agnes' are in the vein of Keats and Coleridge, but

Keats and Coleridge have produced nothing more exquisite and nothing
so ethereal. 'The Lotos* Eaters' is perhaps the most purely delicious
poem ever written, the 'ne plus ultra' of sensuous loveliness, and yet the
poet who gave us that has given us also the political poems, poems as
trenchant and austerely dignified in style as they are pregnant with
practical wisdom. There is the same versatility displayed in the trifles.
But all is fragmentary. No thread strings these jewels. They form a
collection of gems unset and unarranged. Without any system or any
definite scope they have nothing of that unity in diversity which is so
perceptible in the lyrics and minor poems of Goethe and Wordsworth.
Capricious as the gyrations of a sea-gull seem the poet's moods and
movements. We have now the reveries of a love-sick maiden, now the
picture of a soul wrestling with despair and death; here a study from
rural life, or a study in character, there a sermon on politics, or a
descent into the depths of psychological truth, or a sketch from nature.
But nothing could be more concentrated than the power employed to
shape each fragment into form. What Pope says of the 'Aeneid' may be
applied with very literal truth to these poems:--
Finish'd the whole, and laboured every part
With patient touches of
unwearied art.
In the poems of 1842 we have the secret of Tennyson's eminence as a
poet as well as the secret of his limitations. He appears to have been
constitutionally deficient in what the Greeks called 'architektoniké',
combination and disposition on a large scale. The measure of his power
as a constructive artist is given us in the poem in which the English
idylls may be said to culminate, namely, 'Enoch Arden'. 'In Memoriam'
and the 'Idylls of the King' have a sort of spiritual unity, but they are a
series of fragments tacked rather than fused together. It is the same with
'Maud', and it is the same with 'The Princess'. His poems have always a
tendency to resolve themselves into a series of cameos: it is only the
short poems which have organic unity. A gift of felicitous and musical
expression which is absolutely marvellous; an instinctive sympathy
with what is best and most elevated in the sphere of ordinary life, of
ordinary thought and sentiment, of ordinary activity with consummate

representative power; a most rare faculty of seizing and fixing in very
perfect form what is commonly so inexpressible because so impalpable
and evanescent in emotion and expression; a power of catching and
rendering the charm of nature with a fidelity and vividness which
resemble magic; and lastly, unrivalled skill in choosing, repolishing
and remounting the gems which are our