Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson | Page 9

needless, it applies to all his descriptive poetry. It is marvellous that he can produce such effects by such simple means: a mere enumeration of particulars will often do it, as here:--
No gray old grange or lonely fold,?Or low morass and whispering reed,?Or simple style from mead to mead,?Or sheep walk up the windy wold.
--'In Memoriam', c.
Or here:--
The meal sacks on the whitened floor,?The dark round of the dripping wheel,?The very air about the door Made misty with the floating meal.
--'The Miller's Daughter'.
His blank verse is best described by negatives. It has not the endless variety, the elasticity and freedom of Shakespeare's, it has not the massiveness and majesty of Milton's, it has not the austere grandeur of Wordsworth's at its best, it has not the wavy swell, "the linked sweetness long drawn out" of Shelley's, but its distinguishing feature is, if we may use the expression, its importunate beauty. What Coleridge said of Claudian's style may be applied to it: "Every line, nay every word stops, looks full in your face and asks and begs for praise". His earlier blank verse is less elaborate and seemingly more spontaneous and easy than his later. [2] But it is in his lyric verse that his rhythm is seen in its greatest perfection. No English lyrics have more magic or more haunting beauty, more of that which charms at once and charms for ever.
In his description of nature he is incomparable. Take the following from 'The Dying Swan':--
Some blue peaks in the distance rose,?And white against the cold-white sky,?Shone out their crowning snows.?One willow over the river wept,?And shook the wave as the wind did sigh;?Above in the wind was the swallow,?Chasing itself at its own wild will,
or the opening scene in '‘none' and in 'The Lotos Eaters', or the meadow scene in 'The Gardener's Daughter', or the conclusion of 'Audley Court', or the forest scene in the 'Dream of Fair Women', or this stanza in 'Mariana in the South':--
There all in spaces rosy-bright?Large Hesper glitter'd on her tears,?And deepening through the silent spheres,?Heaven over Heaven rose the night.
A single line, nay, a single word, and a scene is by magic before us, as here where the sea is looked down upon from an immense height:--
The wrinkled_ sea beneath him _crawls.
--'The Eagle'.
Or here of a ship at sea, in the distance:--
And on through zones of light and shadow?Glimmer away to the lonely deep.
--'To the Rev. F. D. Maurice'.
Or here of waters falling high up on mountains:--
Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke.
--'The Princess'.
Or of a water-fall seen at a distance:--
And like a downward smoke the slender stream?Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem.
Or here again:--
We left the dying ebb that _faintly lipp'd?The flat red granite_.
Or here of a wave:--
Like a wave in the wild North Sea?Green glimmering toward the summit bears with all?Its stormy crests that smoke against the skies?Down on a bark.
--'Elaine'.
That beech will gather brown,?This maple burn itself away.
--'In Memoriam'.
The wide-wing'd sunset of the misty marsh.
--'Last Tournament'.
But illustrations would be endless. Nothing seems to escape him in Nature. Take the following:--
Like _a purple beech among the greens?Looks out of place_.
--'Edwin Morris'.
Or
Delays _as the tender ash delays?To clothe herself, when all the woods are green_.
--'The Princess'.
As black as ash-buds in the front of March.
--'The Gardener's Daughter'.
A gusty April morn?That puff'd_ the swaying _branches into smoke.
--'Holy Grail'.
So with flowers, trees, birds and insects:--
The fox-glove clusters dappled bells.
--'The Two Voices'.
The sunflower:--
Rays round with flame its disk of seed.
--'In Memoriam'.
The dog-rose:--
Tufts of rosy-tinted snow.
--'Two Voices'.
A million emeralds_ break from the _ruby-budded lime.
--'Maud'.
In gloss and hue the chestnut, _when the shell?Divides threefold to show the fruit within_.
--'The Brook'.
Or of a chrysalis:--
And flash'd as those?Dull-coated_ things, that making slide apart?Their dusk wing cases, all beneath there burns?A Jewell'd harness_, ere they pass and fly.
--'Gareth and Lynette'.
So again:--
Wan-sallow, as _the plant that feeds itself,?Root-bitten by white lichen_.
--'Id'.
And again:--
All the silvery gossamers?That twinkle into green and gold.
--'In Memoriam'.
His epithets are in themselves a study: "the dewy-tassell'd wood," "the tender-pencill'd_ shadow," "_crimson-circl'd_ star," the "_hoary clematis," "creamy_ spray," "_dry-tongued laurels". But whatever he describes is described with the same felicitous vividness. How magical is this in the verses to Edward Lear:--
Naiads oar'd?A glimmering shoulder_ under _gloom?Of cavern pillars.
Or this:--
She lock'd her lips: she left me where I stood:?"Glory to God," she sang, and past afar,?Thridding the sombre boskage of the wood,?Toward the morning-star.
--'A Dream of Fair Women'.
But if in the world of Nature nothing escaped his sensitive and sympathetic observation,--and indeed it might be said of him as truly as of Shelley's 'Alastor'
Every sight?And sound from the vast earth and ambient air?Sent to his heart its choicest impulses,
--he had studied the world of books with not less sympathy and attention. In the sense of a profound and extensive acquaintance with all that is best in ancient