Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson | Page 4

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 see it in 'The Palace of Art', in '‘none' and in the verses 'To J. S.' But in intrinsic merit the poems were no advance on their predecessors, for the execution was not equal to the design. The best, such as '‘none', 'A Dream of Fair Women', 'The Palace of Art', 'The Lady of Shalott'--I am speaking of course of these poems in their first form--were full of extraordinary blemishes. The volume was degraded by pieces which were very unworthy of him, such as 'O Darling Room' and the verses 'To Christopher North', and affectations of the worst kind deformed many, nay, perhaps the majority of