Published 1880, with Charles Tennyson Turner’s Collected Sonnets, where the title was simply the subsequent subtitle; then 1885. In 1880 it has the subtitle only, which provides the date of composition; Charles died 25 April 1879. There are drafts in H. Nbk 33 (A below) and Lpr 186 (B). Cp. ‘Frater Ave atque Vale’ (p. 627). R. Evans (TRB iv, 1983, 81–91) relates T.’s poem to his brother’s poems, citing parallels (including in the movement of T.’s poem): ‘poised at that moment when day succeeds day, when June passes into July … for at midnight on 30 June we are exactly at the year’s centre’.
Midnight – in no midsummer tune
The breakers lash the shores:
The cuckoo of a joyless June
Is calling out of doors:
And thou hast vanished from thine own
To that which looks like rest,
True brother, only to be known
By those who love thee best.
II
Midnight – and joyless June gone by,
And from the deluged park
The cuckoo of a worse July
Is calling through the dark:
But thou art silent underground,
And o’er thee streams the rain,
True poet, surely to be found
When Truth is found again.
III
And, now to these unsummered skies
The summer bird is still,
Far off a phantom cuckoo cries
From out a phantom hill;
And through this midnight breaks the sun
Of sixty years away,
The light of days when life begun,
The days that seem today,
When all my griefs were shared with thee,
As all my hopes were thine –
As all thou wert was one with me,
May all thou art be mine!
¶377. 17–20] Not A.
17] Midnight. The ceaseless shower falls, B.
18. summer] sunless B.
19] Flown! But [At last 1st reading] a phantom cuckoo calls [falls 1st reading] B.
23] The days when life had just begun, A.
24 ^ 25] Our brother-days that will not die –
And, now thou art withdrawn
So far I cannot follow, I cry
To that first light of dawn B
26. As] 1885; And 1880.
27 ^ 28] So, brother, whatsoe’er thou be, A.