Published 1832. It is addressed to R. C. Trench (Tennyson and His Friends, p. 79), a remark by whom prompted The Palace of Art (see p. 50). It proclaims the view of poetry (morally opposed to aestheticism) which was strongly held by the Cambridge ‘Apostles’. On Trench, see P. Allen, The Cambridge Apostles (1978), pp. 93–4, 126, in particular. On the affinities with Goethe, see Ian Kennedy, PQ Ivii (1978) 91.
I send you here a sort of allegory,
(For you will understand it) of a soul,
A sinful soul possessed of many gifts,
A spacious garden full of flowering weeds,
A glorious Devil, large in heart and brain,
That did love Beauty only, (Beauty seen
In all varieties of mould and mind)
And Knowledge for its beauty; or if Good,
Good only for its beauty, seeing not
That Beauty, Good, and Knowledge, are three sisters
That doat upon each other, friends to man,
Living together under the same roof,
And never can be sundered without tears.
And he that shuts Love out, in turn shall be
Shut out from Love, and on her threshold lie
Howling in outer darkness. Not for this
Was common clay ta’en from the common earth
Moulded by God, and tempered with the tears
Of angels to the perfect shape of man.
¶166. 1. here] 1842; Friend, 1832.
2] 1842; (You are an artist and will understand
Its many lesser meanings) of a soul, 1832
7. Cp. ‘variety’, ‘moulds of mind’, in The constant spirit (I 317).
10. Cp. Fragment: We have a rumour 4 (III 616): ‘If beauty, then true knowledge. Sisters fair’.
15–16. Cp. Hamlet V i 234–6: ‘I tell thee, churlish priest, / A minist’ring angel shall my sister be, / When thou liest howling.’ Hence ‘he that shuts Love out’ suggests the priest’s ‘She should in ground unsanctified have lodged’. Matthew viii 12, ‘But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth’.
18–19. Cp. Genesis ii 7. But T. uses Sir William Jones’s translation of the Khelassut ul Akhbar of Khondemeer. At the creation of Adam, Gabriel and the other angels were ‘compassionating the earth’s distress’ when the earth feared it might be involved in any ‘offence’ caused by man; ‘In the space of forty days, the clay was kneaded into form by the hands of the angels’. Jones’s Works were at Somersby (Lincoln). It is T. who links the tears and the actual making of man.