Published 1846. Sir Charles Tennyson (p. 211) says that, like Edwin Morris, it was written at Llanberis in summer 1845. But it was almost certainly written on the visit there in 1839. It is in T.Nbk 26; Edwin Morris is to be dated 1839; the song in The Golden Year (ll. 22–51), which is the core of the poem, is to be found on a sheet of the Y.MS of Locksley Hall (1837–8); and the discussion of free trade resembles, as does the poem in general, Audley Court (1838) and Walking to the Mail (1837–8). See also the reference to Charles Babbage (1837), ll. 59–64n. The incorporated song suggests Theocritus, especially vi. Cp. Audley Court (p. 193). The idea of the golden year is based on the classical conception of the great new era, as in Virgil, Eclogue iv. In the earlier draft (H.Lpr 72), Leonard too had doubts about progress; see ll. 59–64n. All variants from T.MS are below; it ends with l. 21 (foot of page).
Well, you shall have that song which Leonard wrote:
It was last summer on a tour in Wales:
Old James was with me: we that day had been
Up Snowdon; and I wished for Leonard there,
And found him in Llanberis: then we crost
Between the lakes, and clambered half way up
The counter side; and that same song of his
He told me; for I bantered him, and swore
They said he lived shut up within himself,
A tongue-tied Poet in the feverous days,
That, setting the how much before the how,
Cry, like the daughters of the horseleech, ‘Give,
Cram us with all,’ but count not me the herd!
To which ‘They call me what they will,’ he said:
‘But I was born too late: the fair new forms,
That float about the threshold of an age,
Like truths of Science waiting to be caught –
Catch me who can, and make the catcher crowned –
Are taken by the forelock. Let it be.
But if you care indeed to listen, hear
These measured words, my work of yestermorn.
‘We sleep and wake and sleep, but all things move;
The Sun flies forward to his brother Sun;
The dark Earth follows wheeled in her ellipse;
And human things returning on themselves
Move onward, leading up the golden year.
‘Ah, though the times, when some new thought can bud,
Are but as poets’ seasons when they flower,
Yet oceans daily gaining on the land,
Have ebb and flow conditioning their march,
And slow and sure comes up the golden year.
‘When wealth no more shall rest in mounded heaps,
But smit with freër light shall slowly melt
In many streams to fatten lower lands,
And light shall spread, and man be liker man
Through all the season of the golden year.
‘Shall eagles not be eagles? wrens be wrens?
If all the world were falcons, what of that?
The wonder of the eagle were the less,
But he not less the eagle. Happy days
Roll onward, leading up the golden year.
‘Fly, happy happy sails, and bear the Press;
Fly happy with the mission of the Cross;
Knit land to land, and blowing havenward
With silks, and fruits, and spices, clear of toll,
Enrich the markets of the golden year.
‘But we grow old. Ah! when shall all men’s good
Be each man’s rule, and universal Peace
Lie like a shaft of light across the land,
And like a lane of beams athwart the sea,
Through all the circle of the golden year?’
Thus far he flowed, and ended; whereupon
‘Ah, folly!’ in mimic cadence answered James –
‘Ah, folly! for it lies so far away,
Not in our time, nor in our children’s time,
’Tis like the second world to us that live;
’Twere all as one to fix our hopes on Heaven
As on this vision of the golden year.’
With that he struck his staff against the rocks
And broke it, – James, – you know him, – old, but full
Of force and choler, and firm upon his feet,
And like an oaken stock in winter woods,
O’erflourished with the hoary clematis:
Then added, all in heat:
‘What stuff is this!
Old writers pushed the happy season back, –
The more fools they, – we forward: dreamers both:
You most, that in an age, when every hour
Must sweat her sixty minutes to the death,
Live on, God love us, as if the seedsman, rapt
Upon the teeming harvest, should not plunge
His hand into the bag: but well I know
That unto him who works, and feels he works,
This same grand year is ever at the doors.’
He spoke; and, high above, I heard them blast
The steep slate-quarry, and the great echo flap
And buffet round the hills, from bluff to bluff.
¶276. 1. song which] Poem T.MS.
2–7] Not T.MS; I came with James upon him while he sat
Beside the mere; and that same song of his H.MS
5–7] 1851; And found him in Llanberis; and that same song 1846–50.
12. Proverbs xxx 15: ‘The horse-leech hath two daughters, crying, Give, give.’
14–15] And Leonard said, half earnest half in jest,
‘They call me what they will – but I, Sir, born
Here at the fag end of a brassy term
With half its freshness gone – the common brain
And so my part within it overworn
From too-long exercise to fatuousness –
I shall not reap my name. Fresh forms and fair T.MS
1st reading of the second and third lines: ‘… will – a Poet, no. / Born at …’
19 ^ 20] The thought itself implies a barren soul. T.MS.
29] 1890; Yet seas that daily gain upon the shore 1846–89. Shakespeare, Sonnet 64: ‘the hungry ocean gain / Advantage on the kingdom of the shore’.
32–3. Cp. a fragment in H.Lpr 210, from ‘an old idyll never published’ (William Allingham, Diary, 1907, p. 303): ‘The rich shall wed the rich, the poor the poor, / So shall this mount of wealth be higher still, / So shall this gulf of want be deeper still, / Until this mountain melt into this gulf / With all confusion.’
37. The antithesis wrens / eagles suggests Richard III I iii 71.
42. Cp. Washington Irving’s Columbus (1828) I vi, on the new uniting forces in the world: ‘light … would still shine on, dispensed to happier parts of the world, by the diffusive powers of the press.’ T. used the book for Anacaona and Columbus.
48–52. Cp. Shelley, Queen Mab viii 53–7: ‘O human Spirit! spur thee to the goal / Where virtue fixes universal peace, / And midst the ebb and flow of human things, / Shew somewhat stable, somewhat certain still, / A lighthouse o’er the wild of dreary waves.’ Cp. also l. 30.
53] Right in his rhythm and cadence answered James. H.MS. James speaks as a Carlylean, as W. C. DeVane observes.
59–64] He said; and having business in the town
Departed, leaving Leonard, who began
To ponder: ‘will it come or, being come,
Be felt as gain? this age of ours is gold
To much before it; yet no happier we,
Nor may our sons be happier than ourselves.
O grand old sites, who wagged their beards in hall
And laughed and let the earth go round, nor knew
The noiseless ether curdling into worlds
And complicated clockwork of the suns.
Motion: why motion? were it not as well
To fix a point, to rest? again, it seems
Most adverse to the nature of a man
To rest if there be any more to gain.
And there is all but what he is: no rest:
Why then, to be resolved into the all.
That will not do, being to lose myself.
What else?’ – And here, methought he seemed to grasp
A pair of shadowy compasses, with these
To plant a centre and about it round
A wide and wider circle: and while he mused
Came James, his business ended, and resumed: H.MS
An important passage in MS, because of its close correspondence with T.’s thinking. For the astronomy, cp. Babbage, The Ninth Bridgetwater Treatise (1837, p. 91), of which T. had a copy (Lincoln); of the heavens, Babbage says ‘nebulous light is just curdling, as it were, into separate systems’. T.’s ‘complicated clockwork’ may owe something to the fact that Babbage passes on to his clockwork ‘calculating engine’.
63. Cp. Twelfth Night III iv 368: ‘empty trunks o’erflourished’.
70. plunge] 1865 Selection; dip 1846–65.
72 ^ 3] Howe’er it be, by some true art of Life, H.MS.
74. above] 1851; above us 1846–50; o’erhead Eversley ‘original reading’.
76. T. comments: ‘Onomatopoeic. “Bluff to bluff ” gives the echo of the blasting as I heard it from the mountain on the counter side, opposite to Snowdon.’ Cp. The Princess vii 229–30, MS: ‘Till the last fire shall catch and flap from peak / To peak across the world.’