Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson | Page 8

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, almost as offensive, is in 'Enoch Arden', where, in an otherwise studiously simple diction, Enoch's wares as a fisherman become
Enoch's ocean spoil?In ocean-smelling osier.
But these peculiarities are less common in the earlier poems than in the later: it was a vicious habit which grew on him.
But, if exception may sometimes be taken to his diction, no exception can be taken to his rhythm. No English poet since Milton, Tennyson's only superior in this respect, had a finer ear or a more consummate mastery over all the resources of rhythmical expression. What colours are to a painter rhythm is, in description, to the poet, and few have rivalled, none have excelled Tennyson in this. Take the following:--
And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain?On the bald street strikes the blank day.
--'In Memoriam'.
See particularly 'In Memoriam', cvii., the lines beginning "Fiercely flies," to "darken on the rolling brine": the description of the island in 'Enoch Arden'; but specification is