Published 1855. There are two drafts of the second stanza in T.Nbk 25, immediately following the MS of the Ode on Wellington (1852); T. probably considered using these lines as part of the Ode, with which the first stanza too has affinities. A MS of the second stanza only is at the University of Sydney (all variants from the MSS are below). H.T. relates the second stanza to T.’s religious thinking, especially that of The Vision of Sin (Mem. i 322).
I
O well for him whose will is strong!
He suffers, but he will not suffer long;
He suffers, but he cannot suffer wrong:
For him nor moves the loud world’s random mock,
Nor all Calamity’s hugest waves confound,
Who seems a promontory of rock,
That, compassed round with turbulent sound,
In middle ocean meets the surging shock,
Tempest-buffeted, citadel-crowned.
II
But ill for him who, bettering not with time,
Corrupts the strength of heaven-descended Will,
And ever weaker grows through acted crime,
Or seeming-genial venial fault,
Recurring and suggesting still!
He seems as one whose footsteps halt,
Toiling in immeasurable sand,
And o’er a weary sultry land,
Far beneath a blazing vault,
Sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill,
The city sparkles like a grain of salt.
¶ 1–9. Cp. Horace, Odes III iii 1–8: Iustum et tenacem propositi virum/non civium ardor prava iubentium, /non vultus instantis tyranni/mente quatit solida neque Auster, // dux inquieti turbidus Hadriae,/nec fulminantis magna manus Iovis; / si fractus inlabatur orbis,/impavidum ferient ruinae. (‘The man tenacious of his purpose in a righteous cause is not shaken from his firm resolve by the frenzy of his fellow-citizens bidding what is wrong, not by the face of threatening tyrant, not by Auster, stormy master of the restless Adriatic, not by the mighty hand of thundering Jove. Were the vault of heaven to break and fall upon him, its ruins would smite him undismayed.’) See T.’s schoolboy translation of this ode (I 4).
4. mock: mockery, with an archaic ring by this date. Cp. Shelley, The Cenci IV i 156–7: ‘the clamorous scoffs/Of the loud world’.
5–9. Cp. Aeneid x 693–6: ille velut rupes, vastum quae prodit in aequor,/obvia ventorum furiis expostaque ponto,/vim cunctam atque minas perfert caelique marisque,/ipsa immota manens. (‘Even as a cliff that juts into the vast deep, exposed to the raving winds and braving the main, that endures all the stress, all the menace of sky and sea, itself fixed unshaken.’)
8–9. Sir Charles Tennyson remarks the adaptation of Ode: O Bosky Brook 76, 79: ‘Citadel-crowned and tempest-buffeted …/And in the middle ocean meets the surging shock.’
10] Alas for him whose will [lacuna] vile crime T.MS A. But ill] Alas MSS.
11] Not T.MS A. strength of heaven-descended] God-given force [strength T.MS B] of his own Sydney MS, T.MS B.
12] Is ever weaker made by some one fault T.MS A. And] Which Sydney MS; That T.MS B. acted] some vile Sydney MS, T.MS B.
13] Added in T.MS A. seeming-genial venial] only seeming-venial MSS.
14. suggesting: tempting. Cp. Shakespeare, Sonnet 144: ‘Which like two spirits do suggest me still.’
15. halt] ever halt MS.
16. Cp. Shelley, Queen Mab viii 70: ‘Those deserts of immeasurable sand’.
17. And] While Sydney MS, T.MS A. a] Not T.MS B (slip?). sultry] weary MSS.
18. Far] Far on MSS.
20. Perhaps suggested by ‘the city of salt’, Joshua xv 62.