Tennyson

Published 1832, with no title, but an epigraph from Sappho’s Fragment 2:φαίνεται µοι κη̂νος ἴσος θέοισιν / ἔµµεν ὤνηρ Especially in ll. 15–19, it closely imitates Sappho, the same poem adapted in Eleänore (I 401). Paden (p. 39) observes that Sappho merges with the story of Jemily from C.-E. Savary’s Letters on Egypt (the acknowledged source of Egypt; T. used the 1799 translation, Lincoln). She waits for her lover who dare not come because of her husband: ‘extending herself on the ground, [she] rolled among and crushed the tender flowers’ (ll. 11–12). Though this stanza did not appear till 1842, Paden (p. 132) points out that: ‘It is not safe to assume that the added stanza was written after 1832, for Tennyson often returned from the published to the manuscript version of a poem.’ The name ‘Fatima’ occurs in the poem of the Moâllakát which inspired Locksley Hall; in Savary; and in the Arabian Nights. See the fragment I sent no ambassador forward (III 621), with its reference to ‘Fatima, Selim’s daughter’. For the scheme of rhyme and metre, cp. The Lady of Shalott, which simply adds rhyming refrains.

O Love, Love, Love! O withering might!

O sun, that from thy noonday height

Shudderest when I strain my sight,

Throbbing through all thy heat and light,

Lo, falling from my constant mind,

Lo, parched and withered, deaf and blind,

I whirl like leaves in roaring wind.

Last night I wasted hateful hours

Below the city’s eastern towers:

I thirsted for the brooks, the showers:

I rolled among the tender flowers:

I crushed them on my breast, my mouth;

I looked athwart the burning drouth

Of that long desert to the south.

Last night, when some one spoke his name,

From my swift blood that went and came

A thousand little shafts of flame

Were shivered in my narrow frame.

O Love, O fire! once he drew

With one long kiss my whole soul through

My lips, as sunlight drinketh dew.

Before he mounts the hill, I know

He cometh quickly: from below

Sweet gales, as from deep gardens, blow

Before him, striking on my brow.

In my dry brain my spirit soon,

Down-deepening from swoon to swoon,

Faints like a dazzled morning moon.

The wind sounds like a silver wire,

And from beyond the noon a fire

Is poured upon the hills, and nigher

The skies stoop down in their desire;

And, isled in sudden seas of light,

My heart, pierced through with fierce delight,

Bursts into blossom in his sight.

My whole soul waiting silently,

All naked in a sultry sky,

Droops blinded with his shining eye:

I will possess him or will die.

I will grow round him in his place,

Grow, live, die looking on his face,

Die, dying clasped in his embrace.

163 Fatima