Tennyson

Published 1885, introducing Tiresias (I 622). Written June 1883; Edward FitzGerald died 14 June, and T. wrote to Frederick Pollock: ‘I had written a poem to him within the last week – a dedication – which he will never see’ (17 June 1883; Letters iii). T. therefore concluded Tiresias by returning to FitzGerald and mourning his death (below). The poem recalls the last visit by T. and H.T. to FitzGerald in Sept. 1876, as H.T. points out. For T.’s change of conception, see ll. 50–6n (H.Nbk 46).

Old Fitz, who from your suburb grange,

Where once I tarried for a while,

Glance at the wheeling Orb of change,

And greet it with a kindly smile;

Whom yet I see as there you sit

Beneath your sheltering garden-tree,

And while your doves about you flit,

And plant on shoulder, hand and knee,

Or on your head their rosy feet,

As if they knew your diet spares

Whatever moved in that full sheet

Let down to Peter at his prayers;

Who live on milk and meal and grass;

And once for ten long weeks I tried

Your table of Pythagoras,

And seemed at first ‘a thing enskied’

(As Shakespeare has it) airy-light

To float above the ways of men,

Then fell from that half-spiritual height

Chilled, till I tasted flesh again

One night when earth was winter-black,

And all the heavens flashed in frost;

And on me, half-asleep, came back

That wholesome heat the blood had lost,

And set me climbing icy capes

And glaciers, over which there rolled

To meet me long-armed vines with grapes

Of Eshcol hugeness; for the cold

Without, and warmth within me, wrought

To mould the dream; but none can say

That Lenten fare makes Lenten thought,

Who reads your golden Eastern lay,

Than which I know no version done

In English more divinely well;

A planet equal to the sun

Which cast it, that large infidel

Your Omar; and your Omar drew

Full-handed plaudits from our best

In modern letters, and from two,

Old friends outvaluing all the rest,

Two voices heard on earth no more;

But we old friends are still alive,

And I am nearing seventy-four,

While you have touched at seventy-five,

And so I send a birthday line

Of greeting; and my son, who dipt

In some forgotten book of mine

With sallow scraps of manuscript,

And dating many a year ago,

Has hit on this, which you will take

My Fitz, and welcome, as I know

Less for its own than for the sake

Of one recalling gracious times,

When, in our younger London days,

You found some merit in my rhymes,

And I more pleasure in your praise.

‘One height and one far-shining fire’

And while I fancied that my friend

For this brief idyll would require

A less diffuse and opulent end,

And would defend his judgment well,

If I should deem it over nice –

The tolling of his funeral bell

Broke on my Pagan Paradise,

And mixt the dreams of classic times,

And all the phantoms of the dream,

With present grief, and made the rhymes,

That missed his living welcome, seem

Like would-be guests an hour too late,

Who down the highway moving on

With easy laughter find the gate

Is bolted, and the master gone.

Gone into darkness, that full light

Of friendship! past, in sleep, away

By night, into the deeper night!

The deeper night? A clearer day

Than our poor twilight dawn on earth –

If night, what barren toil to be!

What life, so maimed by night, were worth

Our living out? Not mine to me

Remembering all the golden hours

Now silent, and so many dead,

And him the last; and laying flowers,

This wreath, above his honoured head,

And praying that, when I from hence

Shall fade with him into the unknown,

My close of earth’s experience

May prove as peaceful as his own.

398 To E. FitzGerald