Tennyson

Published Nineteenth Century, Sept. 1882; then 1885. T. wrote to Knowles, Aug. 1882: ‘you can put To Virgil if you like – I don’t think it matters much. I am not quite satisfied with the VIth – but the thing must go’ (Letters iii). The letter of request from the Vergilian Academy of Mantua was dated 23 June 1882: ‘One verse of yours, one writing however small, that could be published in the Vergilian Album will be agreeable, not only to us …’ (Mat. iv 26–7). The poem was acknowledged 10 Sept. Cp. To Dante (II 691). D. Bush points out that the ‘rolling trochaic lines suggest something of the sound of the Virgilian hexameter’ (Major British Writers, 1959, ii 463). J. B. Trapp reproduces the MS from the Academy’s files (TLS, 18 Sept. 1981); he notes the variants, of which the most important is that ‘the lay-out of the manuscript poem differs from all the published versions, which print it in ten numbered stanzas of two lines each, broken at the caesura, so that they look like twice two … When he sent it to Mantua, T. clearly intended it as a single unit of twenty long trochaic lines, rhyming in couplets’.

Roman Virgil, thou that singest

Ilion’s lofty temples robed in fire,

Ilion falling, Rome arising,

wars, and filial faith, and Dido’s pyre;

Landscape-lover, lord of language

more than he that sang the Works and Days,

All the chosen coin of fancy

flashing out from many a golden phrase;

III

Thou that singest wheat and woodland,

tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd;

All the charm of all the Muses

often flowering in a lonely word;

Poet of the happy Tityrus

piping underneath his beechen bowers;

Poet of the poet-satyr

whom the laughing shepherd bound with flowers;

Chanter of the Pollio, glorying

in the blissful years again to be,

Summers of the snakeless meadow,

unlaborious earth and oarless sea;

Thou that seëst Universal

Nature moved by Universal Mind;

Thou majestic in thy sadness

at the doubtful doom of human kind;

VII

Light among the vanished ages;

star that gildest yet this phantom shore;

Golden branch amid the shadows,

kings and realms that pass to rise no more;

VIII

Now thy Forum roars no longer,

fallen every purple Cæsar’s dome –

Though thine ocean-roll of rhythm

sound for ever of Imperial Rome –

Now the Rome of slaves hath perished,

and the Rome of freemen holds her place,

I, from out the Northern Island

sundered once from all the human race,

I salute thee, Mantovano,

I that loved thee since my day began,

Wielder of the stateliest measure

ever moulded by the lips of man.

394 To Virgil

Written at the Request of the Mantuans for the Nineteenth Centenary of Virgil’s Death