Tennyson

Published 1842. Written 1837–8; so Rader (pp. 41–2) argues convincingly. (i) Edmund Lushington thought he remembered that it was read to him in 1837 or early 1838 (Mat. i 246). (ii) It relates to T.’s disillusionment with Rosa Baring, and was probably influenced by the talk in 1837 of her engagement, and her marriage in Oct. 1838. (iii) T. read T. Pringle (the source of ll. 135–6) in 1837 (Mem. i 162), and l. 114 was written at High Beech where the Tennysons lived from 1837–40 (Mem. i 150). (iv) Y.MS is watermarked ‘1835’ and is not likely to be very much later. (Rader (p. 41) mistakenly calls this ‘the sole MS of the poem’; in fact the poem appears with the 1842 poems in HnMS (HM 1320), which at this point is watermarked 1838.) Rader adds, for those who wish to associate it with Lincolnshire, that T. was there in the spring of 1838. Furthermore Walter White says that it ‘was written at High Beech’ (Journals, 1898, pp. 151–2), and he corroborates Lushington in that much of it was seen and heard at Mitre Court Buildings, The Temple. W. D. Templeman’s preference for 1840–1 is supported by J. H. Buckley (writing before Rader, however), who believes it refers to T.’s breaking off his engagement with Emily in 1840; Rader’s discoveries make this unnecessary, as is Templeman’s suggestion that T. was adapting the unhappy love affair in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (Booker Memorial Studies, 1950). All variants from Y.MS are given below, as ‘ MS’. In T. Nbk 26 fragment, it is twice spelt ‘Loxley Hall’; cp. ‘Oxley Hall’ (Audley Court) in this Nbk.

Biography. The main source from T.’s life is his unhappy love affair with Rosa; see Thy rosy lips (II 59) and To Rosa (II 75). T.’s experience of ‘marriage-hindering Mammon’ precipitated, among other poems, Locksley Hall, Edwin Morris and Maud. Rader points out that hers was an arranged marriage (cp. ll. 59–62), and that the Hall was suggested by her Harrington Hall (and see ll. 25–6n). Sir Charles Tennyson notes that the story of ‘family estrangement owes much of its form and atmosphere to the feud between Somersby and Bayons’ (p. 194), the latter being the home of Charles Tennyson-d’Eyncourt, in whose favour T.’s father had virtually been disinherited; also that the heroes of Locksley Hall and Maud ‘have more than a little reference to Frederick’, T.’s brother (again, Rader’s discoveries suggest that this might be modified). T., as so often, maintained that it was ‘an imaginary place and imaginary hero’: ‘The whole poem represents young life, its good side, its deficiencies, and its yearnings.’

Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet ’tis early morn:

Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle-horn

’Tis the place, and all around it, as of old, the curlews call,

Dreary gleams about the moorland flying over Locksley Hall;

Locksley Hall, that in the distance overlooks the sandy tracts,

And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts.

Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,

Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.

Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising through the mellow shade,

Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.

Here about the beach I wandered, nourishing a youth sublime

With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time;

When the centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed;

When I clung to all the present for the promise that it closed:

When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see;

Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.–

In the Spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin’s breast;

In the Spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest;

In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnished dove;

In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

Then her cheek was pale and thinner than should be for one so young,

And her eyes on all my motions with a mute observance hung.

And I said, ‘My cousin Amy, speak, and speak the truth to me,

Trust me, cousin, all the current of my being sets to thee.’

On her pallid cheek and forehead came a colour and a light,

As I have seen the rosy red flushing in the northern night.

And she turned – her bosom shaken with a sudden storm of sighs –

All the spirit deeply dawning in the dark of hazel eyes –

Saying, ‘I have hid my feelings, fearing they should do me wrong;’

Saying, ‘Dost thou love me, cousin?’ weeping, ‘I have loved thee long.’

Love took up the glass of Time, and turned it in his glowing hands;

Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.

Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;

Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, passed in music out of sight.

Many a morning on the moorland did we hear the copses ring,

And her whisper thronged my pulses with the fulness of the Spring.

Many an evening by the waters did we watch the stately ships,

And our spirits rushed together at the touching of the lips.

O my cousin, shallow-hearted! O my Amy, mine no more!

O the dreary, dreary moorland! O the barren, barren shore!

Falser than all fancy fathoms, falser than all songs have sung,

Puppet to a father’s threat, and servile to a shrewish tongue!

Is it well to wish thee happy? – having known me – to decline

On a range of lower feelings and a narrower heart than mine!

Yet it shall be: thou shalt lower to his level day by day,

What is fine within thee growing coarse to sympathise with clay.

As the husband is, the wife is: thou art mated with a clown,

And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down.

He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force,

Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.

What is this? his eyes are heavy: think not they are glazed with wine.

Go to him: it is thy duty: kiss him: take his hand in thine.

It may be my lord is weary, that his brain is overwrought:

Soothe him with thy finer fancies, touch him with thy lighter thought.

He will answer to the purpose, easy things to understand –

Better thou wert dead before me, though I slew thee with my hand!

Better thou and I were lying, hidden from the heart’s disgrace,

Rolled in one another’s arms, and silent in a last embrace.

Cursèd be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth!

Cursèd be the social lies that warp us from the living truth!

Cursèd be the sickly forms that err from honest Nature’s rule!

Cursèd be the gold that gilds the straitened forehead of the fool!

Well –’tis well that I should bluster! – Hadst thou less unworthy proved –

Would to God – for I had loved thee more than ever wife was loved.

Am I mad, that I should cherish that which bears but bitter fruit?

I will pluck it from my bosom, though my heart be at the root.

Never, though my mortal summers to such length of years should come

As the many-wintered crow that leads the clanging rookery home.

Where is comfort? in division of the records of the mind?

Can I part her from herself, and love her, as I knew her, kind?

I remember one that perished: sweetly did she speak and move:

Such a one do I remember, whom to look at was to love.

Can I think of her as dead, and love her for the love she bore?

No – she never loved me truly: love is love for evermore.

Comfort? comfort scorned of devils! this is truth the poet sings,

That a sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.

Drug thy memories, lest thou learn it, lest thy heart be put to proof,

In the dead unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof.

Like a dog, he hunts in dreams, and thou art staring at the wall,

Where the dying night-lamp flickers, and the shadows rise and fall.

Then a hand shall pass before thee, pointing to his drunken sleep,

To thy widowed marriage-pillows, to the tears that thou wilt weep.

Thou shalt hear the ‘Never, never,’ whispered by the phantom years,

And a song from out the distance in the ringing of thine ears;

And an eye shall vex thee, looking ancient kindness on thy pain.

Turn thee, turn thee on thy pillow: get thee to thy rest again.

Nay, but Nature brings thee solace; for a tender voice will cry.

’Tis a purer life than thine; a lip to drain thy trouble dry.

Baby lips will laugh me down: my latest rival brings thee rest.

Baby fingers, waxen touches, press me from the mother’s breast.

O, the child too clothes the father with a dearness not his due.

Half is thine and half is his: it will be worthy of the two.

O, I see thee old and formal, fitted to thy petty part,

With a little hoard of maxims preaching down a daughter’s heart.

‘They were dangerous guides the feelings – she herself was not exempt–

Truly, she herself had suffered’ – Perish in thy self-contempt!

Overlive it – lower yet – be happy! wherefore should I care?

I myself must mix with action, lest I wither by despair.

What is that which I should turn to, lighting upon days like these?

Every door is barred with gold, and opens but to golden keys.

Every gate is thronged with suitors, all the markets overflow.

I have but an angry fancy: what is that which I should do?

I had been content to perish, falling on the foeman’s ground,

When the ranks are rolled in vapour, and the winds are laid with sound.

But the jingling of the guinea helps the hurt that Honour feels,

And the nations do but murmur, snarling at each other’s heels.

Can I but relive in sadness? I will turn that earlier page.

Hide me from my deep emotion, O thou wondrous Mother-Age!

Make me feel the wild pulsation that I felt before the strife,

When I heard my days before me, and the tumult of my life;

Yearning for the large excitement that the coming years would yield,

Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father’s field,

And at night along the dusky highway near and nearer drawn,

Sees in heaven the light of London flaring like a dreary dawn;

And his spirit leaps within him to be gone before him then,

Underneath the light he looks at, in among the throngs of men:

Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new:

That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do:

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,

Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,

Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew

From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,

With the standards of the peoples plunging through the thunder-storm;

Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled

In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,

And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.

So I triumphed ere my passion sweeping through me left me dry,

Left me with the palsied heart, and left me with the jaundiced eye;

Eye, to which all order festers, all things here are out of joint:

Science moves, but slowly slowly, creeping on from point to point:

Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion creeping nigher,

Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly-dying fire.

Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs,

And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.

What is that to him that reaps not harvest of his youthful joys,

Though the deep heart of existence beat for ever like a boy’s?

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and I linger on the shore,

And the individual withers, and the world is more and more.

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast,

Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest.

Hark, my merry comrades call me, sounding on the bugle-horn,

They to whom my foolish passion were a target for their scorn:

Shall it not be scorn to me to harp on such a mouldered string?

I am shamed through all my nature to have loved so slight a thing.

Weakness to be wroth with weakness! woman’s pleasure, woman’s pain –

Nature made them blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain:

Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions, matched with mine,

Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine –

Here at least, where nature sickens, nothing. Ah, for some retreat

Deep in yonder shining Orient, where my life began to beat;

Where in wild Mahratta-battle fell my father evil-starred; –

I was left a trampled orphan, and a selfish uncle’s ward.

Or to burst all links of habit – there to wander far away,

On from island unto island at the gateways of the day.

Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies,

Breadths of tropic shade and palms in cluster, knots of Paradise.

Never comes the trader, never floats an European flag,

Slides the bird o’er lustrous woodland, swings the trailer from the crag;

Droops the heavy-blossomed bower, hangs the heavy-fruited tree –

Summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea.

There methinks would be enjoyment more than in this march of mind,

In the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake mankind.

There the passions cramped no longer shall have scope and breathing space;

I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.

Iron jointed, supple-sinewed, they shall dive, and they shall run,

Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun;

Whistle back the parrot’s call, and leap the rainbows of the brooks,

Not with blinded eyesight poring over miserable books –

Fool, again the dream, the fancy! but I know my words are wild,

But I count the gray barbarian lower than the Christian child.

I, to herd with narrow foreheads, vacant of our glorious gains,

Like a beast with lower pleasures, like a beast with lower pains!

Mated with a squalid savage – what to me were sun or clime?

I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time –

I that rather held it better men should perish one by one,

Than that earth should stand at gaze like Joshua’s moon in Ajalon!

Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range,

Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.

Through the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day:

Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.

Mother-Age (for mine I knew not) help me as when life begun:

Rift the hills, and roll the waters, flash the lightnings, weigh the Sun.

O, I see the crescent promise of my spirit hath not set.

Ancient founts of inspiration well through all my fancy yet.

Howsoever these things be, a long farewell to Locksley Hall!

Now for me the woods may wither, now for me the roof-tree fall.

Comes a vapour from the margin, blackening over heath and holt,

Cramming all the blast before it, in its breast a thunderbolt.

Let it fall on Locksley Hall, with rain or hail, or fire or snow;

For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go.

3. ’Tis … it] 1843; ’Tis the place, and round the gables 1842; Round the gable, round the turret MS.

3–4. T. says that this means ‘while dreary gleams’, not in apposition to ‘curlews’. Marian Bradley, in her diary (11 Jan. 1870, British Museum), reports: ‘He wishes he had used “sweeping” – instead of “flying” – it would have been more explicit’ (quoted Mem. ii 93). G. G. Loane, Echoes in Tennyson (1928), p. 6, compares John Leyden: ‘But formless shadows seemed to fly / Along the muir-land dun … / And round did float, with clamorous note / And scream, the hoarse curlew.’ Leyden’s The Cout of Keeldar is in Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, which T. certainly knew.

6. Adapted from The Lover’s Tale i 52–61, MS: ‘The roaring ridges into cataracts’ (pointed out by Sir Charles Tennyson, Cornhill cliii (1936) 445).

9–10. From the Moâllakát (see headnote): ‘It was the hour, when the Pleiads appeared in the firmament, like the folds of a silken sash variously decked with gems.’

11–16] Not at first in MS. T. had simply the one visionary passage beginning at l. 119. He then revised that passage, and moved the vision (ll. 11–16, 121–30, as one) to this early point. For publication, he split the vision into two, and repeated ll. 15–16 as ll. 119–20.

12. long] great MS. The Miltonic ‘great result’ (PL ii 515) must have seemed unapt. the long result: In Memoriam i 14. CP. The Day-Dream: L’Envoi 10–12: ‘Science … / As wild as aught of fairy lore.’

19–20. Recalling the effect of spring in Thomson’s Spring 786–8: ‘the cooing dove / Flies thick in amorous chase, and wanton rolls / The glancing eye, and turns the changeful neck.’

25–6. Rader (p. 45) refers to Rosa’s blush, remembered years after in The Roses on the Terrace (p. 664).

31. glowing hands: traditional; cp. Keats, Eve of St Agnes 271: ‘These delicates he heaped with glowing hand / On golden dishes’. T. had used it, again with personification, in Time 59: ‘Bright Fame, with glowing hand’; and Mithridates 10: ‘The glowing hands of Honour’.

33–4. Cp. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, I xvii: ‘Love ran with a quivering hand, in a thousand moods, over all the chords of his Soul: it was as if the spheres stood mute above him, suspending their eternal song to watch the low melodies of his heart’ (Carlyle’s tr.; C. Y. Lang, introduction to Tennyson in Lincoln, i, 1971, xi).

38. A traditional notion; cp. Fatima 19–21 and n: ‘he drew / With one long kiss my whole soul through / My lips’ (p. 34).

T. deleted these lines from the proofs of 1842 (Lincoln); they became the nucleus, ll. 13–16, of Locksley Hall Sixty Years After.

44. On] To MS 1st reading. narrower] lesser MS. Cp. these lines with Hamlet I v 50–2: ‘To decline / Upon a wretch whose natural gifts were poor / To those of mine’.

50. A common indictment; E. F. Shannon compares Ivanhoe, Chapter 29: ‘His war-horse – his hunting hound are dearer to him than the despised Jewess!’

63. Well … bluster!] Cursèd – No I curse not thee. O MS 1st reading; NO – I curse not thee, my cousin MS.

68. Cp. the ‘treble dated Crow’ in Shakespeare’s The Phoenix and Turtle; Horace, Odes III xvii 13, annosa cornix. T. comments: ‘Rooks are called crows in the Northern counties.’ (Letters iii, to T. Watts, 12 March 1892: ‘In my county and I believe all through the North Rooks are called “Crows”. I am not such a ninny as not to know a crow from a rook.’)

69. Cp. Hamlet I v 98–9: ‘From the table of my memory / I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records’.

70] Can I hate her falsehood now and love the days when she was kind? MS 1st reading.

75–6. the poet: Dante. T.’s note quotes Nessun maggior dolore, / Che ricordarsi del tempo felice / Nella miseria (Inferno v 121–3). At the age of twelve, he had quoted this, via Byron’s Corsair (Mem. i 8; his earliest surviving letter, Letters i 1). These lines are in effect a retort to the Moâllakát’s ‘consolation’: ‘that he had enjoyed his full share of pleasures: thus by the recollection of his passed delight his imagination is kindled, and his grief suspended.’

89–90] Added to MS. The baby as ‘rival’ should be contrasted with the Moâllakát’s very different tone: ‘Many a lovely mother have I diverted from the care of her yearling infant … When the suckling behind her cried, she turned round to him with half her body; but half of it, pressed beneath my embrace, was not turned from me.’

96. Truly … suffered ] She could speak from sad experience MS 1st reading. T. had used ‘sad experience’ in l. 144.

99–100. Turner (p. 90): ‘modelled, both in theme and in tone, on Juvenal, Satire iii’.

103–4. Cp. the aspiration, contrasted with despair, in The Two Voices 149–56: ‘To perish … like a warrior overthrown’ (also ‘foeman’, smoke’), laid: the notion that gunfire stills the waves.

105. jingling … hurt] tightness of the purse-string salves the sore MS. (‘tightness’, because of the weight of the money.)

107–8] … sadness? Shall I not arise and fling / Fancy back a little further through the freshness of the spring? MS 1st reading.

109] When I felt the wild pulsation that is prophet to the strife, MS 1st reading. the wild pulsation: In Memoriam xii 4.

117–40] Deleted in MS, then revised. See ll. 11–16n for the change of plan as to the visions.

117–18] Appearing in MS ll. 174^5. MS at first had instead ll. 13–14 (‘Then …’).

120. Saw … wonder] I had visions in my head of all the wonders MS 1st reading.

121] When a man shall range the spaces, using unimagined sails, MS 1st reading. fill] throng MS.

122. Pilots … twilight] Merchants in a rosy sunset MS 1st reading; Argosies that roam the twilight MS 2nd reading. T.’s final version, since it omits ‘merchants’, is not quite so clearly related to the Moâllakát. T. translates into prophetic fact the Moâllakát’s beautiful simile for rain: ‘The cloud unloads its freight on the desert of Ghabeit, like a merchant of Yemen alighting with his bales of rich apparel.’ Cp. also The Mermaid 44: ‘the purple twilights under the sea’. After l. 122, MS had at first:

123. Heard … and] Saw [When 1st reading ] the heavens fill with battle, when MS. rained ] rains MS 1st reading. Cp. the blood from the battle in The Vale of Bones 77: ‘the red dew o’er thee rained’. The Oak of the North (1827) , by T.’s brother Frederick, calls blood ‘that deadly dew’. Also Shelley, Mask of Anarchy 192: ‘Blood is on the grass like dew’; and Byron, Childe Harold IV cxxvi: ‘The skies which rain their plagues on men like dew’.

124. E. F. Shannon, PQ xxxi (1952) 441–5, compares the ‘balloon’ stanzas that originally began A Dream of Fair Women, and argues that T. was thinking mainly of balloons here.

127] Saw the peoples brother-minded laying battle-standards furled MS. throbbed … were] throb … are MS 1st reading.

133. Eye, to which all] Nothing pleases, MS 1st reading. Cp. Hamlet I v 188–9: ‘The time is out of joint, O cursèd spite, / That ever I was born to set it right.’

134. Science … creeping] Little moves but Science creeping slowly MS 1st reading.

The lion is from Thomas Pringle’s Travels, which T. read in 1837 (Mem. i 162). Miss M. J. Donahue notes that H.T. confused Pringle’s Travels and his Poetical Works when quoting T.’s letter of 1837 (Mat. i 200); but this need not invalidate the statement in Mem. that T. read the Travels then. T. wrote to Pringle in 1832, and subscribed in 1837 to Pringle’s Poetical Works (1838–9; Letters i 82, 85, 147).

The second line became The Vision of Sin 97–8: ‘Every moment dies a man, / Every moment one is born.’

137. Yet … ages] And through all the generations MS 1st reading; Yet I know through all the ages MS.

141. and … shore] like a beggar at the door MS alternative. ‘Knowledge comes’, exclaims the lover of the age, Æonophilus; see Mechanophilus 4^5n (I 534).

155. Mahratta: soldiers of Bombay who were conquered in 1818. T.MS (O. 15.42) has as 1st reading: ‘In the war with Tippoo Sahib’.

H.T. quotes these lines from the ‘original MS’; Y.MS has about] around; round ] by. ‘In the first unpublished edition … omitted lest the description should be too long’ (Mem. i 195).

162. swings]1851; droops 1842–50. trailer] garland MS. Adapted from Anacaona 39–40, the ‘birds … in the lustrous woodland’, another poem that shows T.’s lifelong interest in island paradises (see Paden, pp. 141–3).

167] There my heart should find expansion and my passions breathing space; MS 1st reading. the] my MS.

168–9. Cp. Beaumont’s Philaster IV i: ‘Oh, that I had been nourished in these woods / … and not known / The right of Crowns, nor the dissembling Trains / Of Women’s looks … / And then had taken me some Mountain Girl / … and have borne at her big breasts / My large coarse issue. This had been a life / Free from vexation.’ Alongside John Churton Collins’s note on this (Cornhill, Jan. 1880), T. wrote ‘possibly’ (Lincoln). The works of Beaumont and Fletcher were at Somersby (Lincoln).

171. Whistle … leap] Shouting in the gorges, leaping through MS 1st reading.

175] Could I live with narrow foreheads! herd with these about the plains, MS.

182. great world] 1843, MS; peoples 1842. T. comments: ‘When I went by the first train from Liverpool to Manchester (1830) I thought that the wheels ran in a groove. It was a black night, and there was such a vast crowd round the train at the station that we could not see the wheels. Then I made this line.’

183. globe] 1843, MS; world 1842. This line stood originally as two lines of The Voyage (T.Nbk 21). shadow … sweep] shadows … rush MS.

Added to a copy belonging to James Knowles (Nineteenth Century xxxiii (1893) 168).

190. roof-tree: the main beam; T.’s hero may include the meaning ‘the whole family, the house’.

271 Locksley Hall