Published 1842. HnMS (HM 1320) is watermarked 1835. Not completed till after 1839. The fountain (ll. 8–32) was ‘partly suggested by Turner’s “Fountain of Fallacy”’ (F. T. Palgrave’s note from T.; see C. Ricks, MP lxii (1964) 139–40). This was exhibited in 1839, and J. M. W. Turner’s verse-fragment in the catalogue spoke of ‘its rainbow-dew’ (cp. ll. 32, 42). Turner (p. 97) quotes contemporary descriptions of the Turner picture, which has not survived, and speculates on what it is likely to have given to T.T. comments: ‘This describes the soul of a youth who has given himself up to pleasure and Epicureanism. He at length is worn out and wrapt in the mists of satiety. Afterwards he grows into a cynical old man afflicted with the “curse of nature”, and joining in the Feast of Death. Then we see the landscape which symbolizes God, Law and the future life.’ In a letter (Brotherton Collection), T. described it as ‘one of my poems, which I confess has always been a favourite with myself’. Allingham quotes Patmore, 18 Aug. 1849: ‘“Tennyson perhaps likes the Vision of Sin best of his own poems. He said it was suggested to him by a line rejected from another poem.” (This line is, I afterwards learned, “A little grain of conscience made him sour”.)’ (Diary, 1907, p. 54). FitzGerald remarks that ‘Johnson’s “Long-expected one-and-twenty” has the swing, and something of the spirit of the old sinner’s lyric.’ Cp. section iv with the drinking-song at the end of Burns’s The Jolly Beggars: ‘What is title? what is treasure? / What is reputation’s care? / If we lead a life of pleasure, /’Tis no matter, how or where!’ J. H. Buckley (p. 72) tentatively compares Keats’s Lamia ii, ‘purple-lined palace of sweet sin’. A few details suggest Shelley’s The Triumph of Life. All variants from HnMS (HM 1320) are given below. The use of the heroic couplet is very unusual for T.
I
I had a vision when the night was late:
A youth came riding toward a palace-gate.
He rode a horse with wings, that would have flown,
But that his heavy rider kept him down.
And from the palace came a child of sin,
And took him by the curls, and led him in,
Where sat a company with heated eyes,
Expecting when a fountain should arise:
A sleepy light upon their brows and lips –
As when the sun, a crescent of eclipse,
Dreams over lake and lawn, and isles and capes –
Suffused them, sitting, lying, languid shapes,
By heaps of gourds, and skins of wine, and piles of grapes.
II
Then methought I heard a mellow sound,
Gathering up from all the lower ground;
Narrowing in to where they sat assembled
Low voluptuous music winding trembled,
Woven in circles: they that heard it sighed,
Panted hand-in-hand with faces pale,
Swung themselves, and in low tones replied;
Till the fountain spouted, showering wide
Sleet of diamond-drift and pearly hail;
Then the music touched the gates and died;
Rose again from where it seemed to fail,
Stormed in orbs of song, a growing gale;
Till thronging in and in, to where they waited,
As ’twere a hundred-throated nightingale,
The strong tempestuous treble throbbed and palpitated;
Ran into its giddiest whirl of sound,
Caught the sparkles, and in circles,
Purple gauzes, golden hazes, liquid mazes,
Flung the torrent rainbow round:
Then they started from their places,
Moved with violence, changed in hue,
Caught each other with wild grimaces,
Half-invisible to the view,
Wheeling with precipitate paces
To the melody, till they flew,
Hair, and eyes, and limbs, and faces,
Twisted hard in fierce embraces,
Like to Furies, like to Graces,
Dashed together in blinding dew:
Till, killed with some luxurious agony,
The nerve-dissolving melody
Fluttered headlong from the sky.
III
And then I looked up toward a mountain-tract,
That girt the region with high cliff and lawn:
I saw that every morning, far withdrawn
Beyond the darkness and the cataract,
God made Himself an awful rose of dawn,
Unheeded: and detaching, fold by fold,
From those still heights, and, slowly drawing near,
A vapour heavy, hueless, formless, cold,
Came floating on for many a month and year,
Unheeded: and I thought I would have spoken,
And warned that madman ere it grew too late:
But, as in dreams, I could not. Mine was broken,
When that cold vapour touched the palace gate,
And linked again. I saw within my head
A gray and gap-toothed man as lean as death,
Who slowly rode across a withered heath,
And lighted at a ruined inn, and said:
IV
‘Wrinkled ostler, grim and thin!
Here is custom come your way;
Take my brute, and lead him in,
Stuff his ribs with mouldy hay.
‘Bitter barmaid, waning fast!
See that sheets are on my bed;
What! the flower of life is past:
It is long before you wed.
‘Slip-shod waiter, lank and sour,
At the Dragon on the heath!
Let us have a quiet hour,
Let us hob-and-nob with Death.
‘I am old, but let me drink;
Bring me spices, bring me wine;
I remember, when I think,
That my youth was half divine.
‘Wine is good for shrivelled lips,
When a blanket wraps the day,
When the rotten woodland drips,
And the leaf is stamped in clay.
‘Sit thee down, and have no shame,
Cheek by jowl, and knee by knee:
What care I for any name?
What for order or degree?
‘Let me screw thee up a peg:
Let me loose thy tongue with wine:
Callest thou that thing a leg?
Which is thinnest? thine or mine?
‘Thou shalt not be saved by works:
Thou hast been a sinner too:
Ruined trunks on withered forks,
Empty scarecrows, I and you!
‘Fill the cup, and fill the can:
Have a rouse before the morn:
Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one is born.
‘We are men of ruined blood;
Therefore comes it we are wise.
Fish are we that love the mud,
Rising to no fancy-flies.
‘Name and fame! to fly sublime
Through the courts, the camps, the schools,
Is to be the ball of Time,
Bandied by the hands of fools.
‘Friendship! – to be two in one –
Let the canting liar pack!
Well I know, when I am gone,
How she mouths behind my back.
‘Virtue! – to be good and just –
Every heart, when sifted well,
Is a clot of warmer dust,
Mixed with cunning sparks of hell.
‘O! we two as well can look
Whited thought and cleanly life
Leering at his neighbour’s wife.
‘Fill the cup, and fill the can:
Have a rouse before the morn:
Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one is born.
‘Drink, and let the parties rave:
They are filled with idle spleen;
Rising, falling, like a wave,
For they know not what they mean.
‘He that roars for liberty
Faster binds a tyrant’s power;
And the tyrant’s cruel glee
Forces on the freer hour.
‘Fill the can, and fill the cup:
All the windy ways of men
Are but dust that rises up,
And is lightly laid again.
‘Greet her with applausive breath,
Freedom, gaily doth she tread;
In her right a civic wreath,
In her left a human head.
‘No, I love not what is new;
She is of an ancient house:
And I think we know the hue
Of that cap upon her brows.
‘Let her go! her thirst she slakes
Where the bloody conduit runs,
Then her sweetest meal she makes
On the first-born of her sons.
‘Drink to lofty hopes that cool –
Visions of a perfect State:
Drink we, last, the public fool,
Frantic love and frantic hate.
‘Chant me now some wicked stave,
Till thy drooping courage rise,
And the glow-worm of the grave
Glimmer in thy rheumy eyes.
‘Fear not thou to loose thy tongue;
Set thy hoary fancies free;
What is loathsome to the young
Savours well to thee and me.
‘Change, reverting to the years,
When thy nerves could understand
What there is in loving tears,
And the warmth of hand in hand.
‘Tell me tales of thy first love –
April hopes, the fools of chance;
Till the graves begin to move,
And the dead begin to dance.
‘Fill the can, and fill the cup:
All the windy ways of men
Are but dust that rises up,
And is lightly laid again.
‘Trooping from their mouldy dens
The chap-fallen circle spreads:
Welcome, fellow-citizens,
Hollow hearts and empty heads!
‘You are bones, and what of that?
Every face, however full,
Padded round with flesh and fat,
Is but modelled on a skull.
‘Death is king, and Vivat Rex!
Tread a measure on the stones,
Madam – if I know your sex,
From the fashion of your bones.
‘No, I cannot praise the fire
In your eye – nor yet your lip:
All the more do I admire
Joints of cunning workmanship.
‘Lo! God’s likeness – the ground-plan –
Neither modelled, glazed, nor framed:
Buss me, thou rough sketch of man,
Far too naked to be shamed!
‘Drink to Fortune, drink to Chance,
While we keep a little breath!
Drink to heavy Ignorance!
Hob-and-nob with brother Death!
‘Thou art mazed, the night is long,
And the longer night is near:
What! I am not all as wrong
As a bitter jest is dear.
‘Youthful hopes, by scores, to all,
When the locks are crisp and curled;
Unto me my maudlin gall
And my mockeries of the world.
‘Fill the cup, and fill the can:
Mingle madness, mingle scorn!
Dregs of life, and lees of man:
Yet we will not die forlorn.’
V
The voice grew faint: there came a further change:
Once more uprose the mystic mountain-range:
Below were men and horses pierced with worms,
And slowly quickening into lower forms;
By shards and scurf of salt, and scum of dross,
Old plash of rains, and refuse patched with moss.
Then some one spake: ‘Behold! it was a crime
Of sense avenged by sense that wore with time.’
Another said: ‘The crime of sense became
The crime of malice, and is equal blame.’
And one: ‘He had not wholly quenched his power;
A little grain of conscience made him sour.’
At last I heard a voice upon the slope
Cry to the summit, ‘Is there any hope?’
To which an answer pealed from that high land,
But in a tongue no man could understand;
And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn
God made Himself an awful rose of dawn.
¶277. 1. vision … was] dream when night was wearing HnMS 1st reading.
3–4. Turner (p. 95) notes that ‘in Plato’s Phaedrus the soul is a chariot (with Reason as charioteer) drawn around heaven by two winged horses, one good and one bad. The weight of the bad horse brings the soul down to earth’.
6. A. A. Mendilow suggests that this ironically adapts the angel of Ezekiel viii 3, ‘And he put forth the form of a hand, and took me by a lock of mine head; and the spirit lifted me up between the earth and the heaven, and brought me in the visions of God to Jerusalem’, Scripta Hierosolymitana xvii (1966) 177.
8. Turner suggests the influence of ‘the Bacchae of Euripides (which T. probably read in connection with his Semele), which one Bacchant produces a spring of water by sticking a thyrsus into a rock, and another creates a fountain of wine by planting her thyrsus in the earth’.
9] A glooming trance of light on brows and lips – MS 1st reading.
12. Suffused] Rained round MS 1st reading.
14. mellow sound: rhyming with ‘ground’, in Keats, Endymion i 146.
17–45. Cp. the Bacchantes in Semele (c. 1833, I 630): ‘voluptuous’, ‘throbbed’, ‘melody’, ‘giddiest’. ‘Music-rolling orbs’ suggests l. 25, ‘orbs of song’.
30–2. Cp. Those worldly goods (1827), by T.’s brother Charles: ‘As torrentrainbows, which appear / Still dwindling as we still draw near; / And yet contracting on the eye, / Till the bright circling colours die.’
31. liquid] lucid MS 1st reading.
32–42. Cp. the unadopted stanza of The Palace of Art (p. 55).
35–6] Added in MS.
40 ^ 1] Fierce embraces, wild grimaces, MS, deleted.
52] The brooding burthen of a nameless fear, MS 1st reading.
58. touched] swam MS.
75–8] MS has, faintly, a half-worked version as well.
87–8] Screw thy fancies up a peg,
Neither take my moods amiss. MS alternative fragment
91. Galatians ii 16.
97 and 98. moment] 1851; minute 1842–50. Locksley Hall 136 ^ 7, MS (p. 190), included the line: ‘Every moment dies a man and every moment one is born.’
103–6] Systems! we whose bones are chalk
Hear to these when made complete
As to odds and ends of talk
Heard in passing through the street. MS 1st reading
Together with the MS stanza, ll. 114 ^ 5, cp. The Two Voices 207: ‘A dust of systems and of creeds’. Lines 103–6 were adapted from Wherefore, in these dark ages of the Press 11–13: ‘my name / Shot like a racketball from mouth to mouth / And bandied in the barren lips of fools’.
106. by] 1855; in 1842–53.
114 ^ 15 ] Creeds! go up: make straight the hair,
Give the chapter and the verse,
Whine the text and drawl the prayer –
Flee, belovèd, from the curse. MS, deleted
117. his] the MS 1st reading.
121 and 122. moment] 1851; minute 1842–50.
128. a] 1845; the 1842–3.
141–2. S. Shatto and M. Shaw compare In Memoriam cxxvii, MS: ‘The redcapt harlot of the Seine’.
175–8, 179–82] Transposed at first in MS.
188. nor] 1874; or 1842–72.
190 ^ 1] Death is king, and Vivat Rex!
Dance with me, ideal men –
Vivat Rex and Curat Lex,
Hands across and back again. MS, deleted
Alluding to the saying, De minimis non curat lex.
193. heavy Ignorance: Shakespeare, Sonnet 78.
197–8] Drink! I know that I am wrong / But … MS 1st reading; What! I reck not I am wrong … MS 2nd reading, then 1842.
199. by scores,] are free MS 1st reading.
208. Once more uprose] 1851; Again arose 1842–50.
209–10] Methought the men and horse with other forms
Lay under, slowly quickening [from festering] into worms;
MS 1st reading
209. Cp. Perdidi Diem 8: ‘Pierced through with loathly worms of utter Death’. This line is also in Pierced through (I 513).
211. Cp. the landscape of Milton’s Hell, Paradise Lost i 672, 704: ‘shon with a glossie scurff’, ‘scum’d the Bullion dross’.
213. spake] 1843; said 1842.
214] Of sense and it was well avenged by time.’ MS 1st reading.
213–14. ‘The sensualist becomes worn out by his senses’ (T.).
214 ^ 15] Another answered ‘But a crime of sense?
Give him new nerves with old experience.’ 1865 Selection
These lines are in HnMS; F. T. Palgrave reports T. as saying they were ‘omitted from fear of overlength’ (C. Ricks, MP lxii (1964) 140). Since this was at Christmas 1863, it was presumably Palgrave who persuaded T. to include them in 1865.
215. Another said] A third rejoined MS 1st reading.
219] At last a voice called upward from the slope MS 1st reading. voice] trumpet voice MS jotting. upon] from off MS 2nd reading.
220. Cry to] Unto MS 1st reading.
220–4. H. T. relates this to In Memoriam lv 20 (p. 398 and n.): ‘When he speaks of “faintly trusting the larger hope”, he means by “the larger hope” that the whole human race would through, perhaps, ages of suffering be at length purified and saved, even those who “better not with time”; so at the end of this Vision we read: “God made Himself an awful rose of dawn”.’ G. G. Loane (Echoes in Tennyson, 1928, p. 7) compares Keats, Hyperion i 203–12: ‘Hyperion, leaving twilight in the rear, / Came slope upon the threshold of the west; / Then, as was wont, his palace-door flew ope … / And like a rose in vermeil tint and shape, / In fragrance soft, and coolness to the eye, / That inlet to severe magnificence / Stood full blown, for the God to enter in.’ Cp. also The Two Voices 304–6: ‘Heaven opens inward, chasms yawn, / Vast images in glimmering dawn, / Half shown, are broken and withdrawn.’ The ‘voice’ is a traditional folk-motif, cp. The Voyage of Maildun (trans. in P. W. Joyce’s Old Celtic Romances, 1879, p. 151): ‘After this they heard some one speaking on the top of the pillar, in a loud, clear, glad voice; but they knew neither what he said, nor in what language he spoke.’