CHAPTER X.
LATER POEMS.
The volume of "Enoch Arden, and other Poems," first appeared in August, 1864. Several of the minor poems had been published separately at different periods during the previous five years.
"The Grandmother." This poem, under the title of "The Grandmother's Apology," with an illustration by Millais,[1] appeared in July, 1859, in "Once a Week."
"Sea Dreams: an Idyl," appeared in "Macmillan's Magazine" for January, 1860;[2] "Tithonus" in the "Cornhill" of the following month. Both of these poems have been slightly altered.
"The Sailor Boy" appeared in a volume of Miscellanies by various authors, entitled "The Victoria Regia," published by Emily Faithfull, Christmas, 1861.[3]
The "Attempts at Classic Metres in Quantity" appeared in the "Cornhill Magazine" for December, 1863.[4]
"A Selection from the Works of Alfred Tennyson," published early in 1865, contained the following new poems:
"The Captain,"
"On a Mourner,"
"Three Sonnets to a Coquette,"
besides several new Readings of previously published pieces.
In 1867 a series of twelve songs by the Poet Laureate, entitled "The Window, or the Loves of the Wrens," were printed at Canford Manor, at the private printing-press of Sir Ivor Bertie Guest. It is difficult to fix the date of their composition; but in variety and peculiarity of metre they remind us of "Maud."
In the first song a lover, standing on the slope of a hill, perceives the window of his mistress, shining like a jewel in the distance. In a beautiful and melodious soliloquy he calls upon the lights and shadows, the winds and clouds, which are all pursuing one direction the house of his love. This song is divided into four stanzas, each terminating with a refrain.
In the second song the lover has approached his mistress's home, and he invokes the eglantine and rose and clematis and vine, that clasp and trail round her window, to drop him a flower, which request seems to be granted.
On entering the house, however, he
"learns her gone and far from home;"
and the third song is filled with a dolorous lament for her absence, with which all Nature—wrapt in gloom and storm seems to sympathize.
The fourth song is an invocation to the frost, which has "bitten into the heart of earth," but is welcome to our lover as heralding the return of spring and of his mistress.
In the fifth song is that beautiful comparison with the wrens, which gives its second title to the poem. The lover calls his mistress the Queen of the Wrens, and he wishes to be the King of the Queen of the Wrens.
In the sixth song the lover, after dwelling upon the surpassing excellence of his mistress, debates within himself whether he shall let her know of his love, and make his declaration personally or by letter, and at last decides to adopt the latter course. He thus apostrophizes his missive, as if it were a carrier-dove:
Down to the light in the valley fly,
Fly to the light in the valley below,
Tell my wish to her merry blue eye."
There is a jubilant dancing refrain to this song, produced very artfully by the repetition of one little word.
The seventh song shows our lover in a somewhat despondent mood, in keeping with the persistent mist and rain that hide from him the view of his mistress's window. He speculates as to the nature of the answer he is so anxiously awaiting, and dwells on the consequences that will attend her acceptance or refusal of him.
Wet west wind, how you blow, you blow!
And never a line from my lady yet.
Is it ay or no? is it ay or no?"
In the eighth song he has still no answer, and invokes his mistress to accept him. In the ninth he holds her letter doubtfully in his hand before breaking the seal, but at last summons up courage to learn his fate. In the tenth song he breaks forth into exultant joyous exclamation as he reads her consent, and calls on all the birds to rejoice and be merry with him.
In the eleventh song we find him urging his mistress to fix a day for their marriage. She says a year hence, then a month hence, then a week hence, to all of which proposals he listens with various degrees of impatience. At last she requests him to fix the day himself, and he eagerly decides on the morrow.
In the twelfth and last song, he apostrophizes the "light so low in the vale," and tenderly calls on the familiar places of the neighbourhood.
Woods where we hid from the wet,
Stiles where we stay'd to be kind,
Meadows in which we met."
And he ends by interrogating his own heart—
For a love that never tires?
O heart, are you great enough for love?
I have heard of thorns and briers.
Over the meadows and stiles,
Over the world to the end of it,
Flash for a million miles."
In exquisite perfection of workmanship, this poem—conducted like "Maud" (though with a happier termination), almost wholly by a lover's snatches of soliloquy at odd moments and in different moods—has, we think, never been surpassed by the poet in his lengthier and better known works.
In 1868, Mr. Tennyson contributed several poems to two or three of the leading magazines. They are specified in our Bibliographical List at the end of the volume, and, with two exceptions,[5] were reprinted in "The Holy Grail" volume, published in December, 1869. The minor poems which appeared at the end of that volume are as follows:
Northern Farmer. New style.
The Golden Supper.
The Victim.
Wages.
The Higher Pantheism.
"Flower in the crannied wall."
Lucretius.
For an enumeration of Mr. Tennyson's more recent writings we must refer the reader to the Bibliographical List at the end of the volume.
- ↑ Which illustration so beautifully embodies the pathos of the poem, and is so inseparably connected with it in the minds of those who first read it in the magazine, that it seems a pity the two should have ever been dissociated.
- ↑ There is a very wicked parody of this piece, under the title of "See-Saw: an Idyl," in the "West of Scotland Magazine and Review," for February, 1860.
- ↑ Even this little piece has been altered.
- ↑ It is noteworthy that some lines of the passage translated (from the end of the 8th "Iliad") are imitated also in an early poem:ὡς δ᾽ ὁτ᾿ ἐν ουρανῷ ἄστρα φαενὴν ἀμφὶ σελήνην
φαίνετ᾿ ἀριπρεπέα ὅτε τ᾿ ἔπλετο νήνεμος αἰθὴρ,
ἔκ τ᾿ ἔφανον τᾶσαι σκοπιαὶ, καὶ πρώονες ἄκροι,
καὶ νάπαι οὐρανόθεν δ᾽ ἄρ ὑπεῤῥάγη ἄσπετος αἰθὴρ,
πάντα δέ τ᾽ εἴδεται ἄστρα.
Iliad, viii. 551-555."The revelling elves, at noon of night,
Shall throng no more beneath thy boughs,
When moonbeams shed a solemn light
And every star intensely glows."
The Oak of the North.
("Poems by Two Brothers," p. 218.) - ↑ "On a Spiteful Letter;" 1865-1866.