Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson | Page 8

common inheritance from the
past: these are the gifts which will secure permanence for his work as
long as the English language lasts.
In his power of crystallising commonplaces he stands next to Pope, in
subtle felicity of expression beside Virgil. And, when he says of Virgil
that we find in his diction "all the grace of all the muses often flowering
in one lonely word," he says what is literally true of his own work. As a
master of style his place is in the first rank among English classical
poets. But his style is the perfection of art. His diction, like the diction
of Milton and Gray, resembles mosaic work. With a touch here and a
touch there, now from memory, now from unconscious assimilation,
inlaying here an epithet and there a phrase, adding, subtracting,
heightening, modifying, substituting one metaphor for another,
developing what is latent in the suggestive imagery of a predecessor,
laying under contribution the most intimate familiarity with what is
best in the literature of the ancient and modern world, the unwearied
artist toils patiently on till his precious mosaic work is without a flaw.
All the resources of rhetoric are employed to give distinction to his
style and every figure in rhetoric finds expression in his diction:
Hypallage as in
The pillard dusk Of sounding sycamores.
--Audley Court.
Paronomasia as in
The seawind sang Shrill, chill with flakes of foam.
--Morte d'Arthur.
Oxymoron as

Behold_ them _unbeheld, unheard Hear all.
--'‘none'.
Hyperbaton as in
The dew-impearled winds of dawn.
--'Ode to Memory'.
Metonymy as in
The bright death quiver'd at the victim's throat.
--'Dream of Fair Women'.
or in
For some three careless moans The summer pilot of an empty heart.
--'Gardener's Daughter'.
No poet since Milton has employed what is known as Onomatopoeia
with so much effect. Not to go farther than the poems of 1842, we have
in the 'Morte d'Arthur':--
So all day long the noise of battle _rolled
Among the mountains by
the winter sea_;
or
Dry clashed his harness in the icy caves
And barren chasms, and all
to left and right
The bare black cliff clang'd round him, as he bas'd

His feet _on juts of slippery crag that rang
Sharp-smitten with the
dint of armed heels_--
or the exquisite
I heard the water lapping on the crag,
And the long ripple washing in

the reeds.
So in 'The Dying Swan',
And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds.
See too the whole of 'Oriana' and the description of the dance at the
beginning of 'The Vision of Sin.'
Assonance, alliteration, the revival or adoption of obsolete and
provincial words, the transplantation of phrases and idioms from the
Greek and Latin languages, the employment of common words in
uncommon senses, all are pressed into the service of adding distinction
to his diction. His diction blends the two extremes of simplicity and
artificiality, but with such fine tact that this strange combination has
seldom the effect of incongruity. Longinus has remarked that "as the
fainter lustre of the stars is put out of sight by the all-encompassing
rays of the sun, so when sublimity sheds its light round the sophistries
of rhetoric they become invisible".[1] What Longinus says of
"sublimity" is equally true of sincerity and truthfulness in combination
with exquisitely harmonious expression. We have an illustration in
Gray's 'Elegy'. Nothing could be more artificial than the style, but what
poem in the world appeals more directly to the heart and to the eye? It
is one thing to call art to the assistance of art, it is quite another thing to
call art to the assistance of nature. And this is what both Gray and
Tennyson do, and this is why their artificiality, so far from shocking us,
"passes in music out of sight". But this cannot be said of Tennyson
without reserve. At times his strained endeavours to give distinction to
his style by putting common things in an uncommon way led him into
intolerable affectation. Thus we have "the knightly growth that fringed
his lips" for a moustache, "azure pillars of the hearth" for ascending
smoke, "ambrosial orbs" for apples, "frayed magnificence" for a shabby
dress, "the secular abyss to come" for future ages, "the sinless years
that breathed beneath the Syrian blue" for the life of Christ, "up went
the hush'd amaze of hand and eye" for a gesture of surprise, and the like.
One of the worst instances is in 'In Memoriam', where what is
appropriate to the simple sentiment finds, as it should do,
corresponding simplicity of expression in the first couplet, to collapse

into the falsetto of strained artificiality in the second:--
To rest beneath the clover sod
That takes the sunshine and the rains,

_Or where the kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of
God_.
An illustration of the same thing,