Sir Charles Tennyson has described the MSS in Nineteenth Century cix (1931) 632–6, and Cornhill cliii (1936) 672–80. He notes the Cambridge flavour of these fragments (H.Nbk 23) which sketch the layout. Arundel is ‘in some degree a portrait of Tennyson himself. See J. H. Buckley (p. 94).
[introducing ii]
I said my say; when Walter with a glance
At Lilia, meditating malice, took
The person of the Prince; but months have gone,
I can but give the substance not the words.
[iii]
The third that spoke, though steersman of our boat
At college, feared to steer the tale and cried
Against it – nothing could be done – but urged
By common voice, continued as he might.
[iv]
The next that spoke, a wild November fool,
Twice had he been convened and once had fought
A bargeman – he was Irish out of Clare.
For every prize he wrote and failed in all,
And many a song he made which no man knew –
The cleverest man in all our set was he,
And something like the Cyril in the tale.
[vi]
The next that spoke was Arthur Arundel
The Poet: rough his hair but fine to feel,
And dark his skin but softer than a babe’s,
And large his hand as of the plastic kind,
And early furrows in his face he had:
Small were his themes – low builds the nightingale –
But promised more: and mellow was his voice,
He pitched it like a pipe to all he would;
And thus he brought our story back to life.
The last that spoke was one we used to call
The lady: lady-like he read the parts
Of Viola, Beatrice, Hermione:
We thought he fancied Lilia: who could tell?
He coloured at the name of any girl.
He plucked a flower that like a moral grew
From miserere on the broken tomb
Beside us and he held it as he spoke.
[Conclusion]
Here closed our tale: I give it, not as told
But drest in words by Arthur Arundel
In aftertimes, a medley, which at first
Perhaps but meant &c.
H.Lpr 196 has an unadopted passage which relates to [vi] above and to i 176ff:
We called our set The Shakespeare: we were wont
To meet and read him far into the night,
Half-read, half-act together. Arthur Clive
Was as our central star: we loved him well
For candid even to folly were his moods:
His locks were rough to see but fine to feel:
And swarthy his skin but soft as is a child’s,
And early furrows in his face he had:
And large his hand and mellow was his voice,
He toucht it like a pipe to all he would.
The rest were young men full of health and scorn.
And there we seven had met at Vivian Place.
ii ∧ iii (p. 253)
Two alternative versions of Sweet and low. H.Lpr 192 was printed by W. F. Rawnsley, Nineteenth Century xcvii (1925) 191:
Who claps the gate
So late, so late,
Who claps the gate on the windy wold?
O were it he
Come back from sea!
Sleep, sleep, my blossom; the night is cold –
Sleep, dearest dear!
The moon is clear
To light him back to my babe and me
A thousand miles on the silver sea.
Mem. i 255: ‘Two versions of Sweet and low were made, and were sent to my mother to choose which should be published. She chose the published one in preference to that which follows, because it seemed to her more song-like’. This is dated 24 Nov. 1849 (formerly Lincoln); for an earlier draft of it, with minor variants, written on a proof of The Princess (1847, Lincoln), see C. B. Stevenson, TRB ii (1974) 130–31. There are other drafts and versions in ULC MS.
Bright is the moon on the deep,
Bright are the cliffs in her beam,
Sleep, my little one, sleep!
Look he smiles, and opens his hands,
He sees his father in distant lands,
And kisses him there in a dream,
Sleep, sleep.
Father is over the deep,
Father will come to thee soon,
Sleep, my pretty one, sleep!
Father will come to his babe in the nest,
Silver sails all out of the West,
Under the silver moon,
Sleep, sleep!
iv ∧ v (p. 283)
Three alternative versions of Thy voice is heard through rolling drums. ‘My first version of this song was published in Selections, 1865’ (T.); he reprinted it in the Miniature Edition, 1870, only.
Lady, let the rolling drums
Beat to battle where thy warrior stands:
Now thy face across his fancy comes,
And gives the battle to his hands.
Lady, let the trumpets blow,
Clasp thy little babes about thy knee:
Now their warrior father meets the foe,
And strikes him dead for thine and thee.
Sir Charles Tennyson has printed two further versions, Nineteenth Century cix (1931) 635–6, describing them as probably the second and third versions. H.Lpr 197. (There is another draft in ULC MS.)
When all among the fifes and the thundering drums
Thy soldier in the battlefield, my Ada, stands,
Thy woman’s face, believe it, across his fancy comes
And gives the battle, the battle to his hands.
Then though many a fatal bullet may whistle near,
And round him half his comrades may reel, may roll,
Thy whispers, O my life, will tremble at his ear,
Thy kisses, ah my darling, burn within his soul.
When the cannons roar and the trumpets, trumpets blow;
He will hear his young ones call him o’er the sea;
When the word is given, like a fire he meets the foe
And strikes a thousand dead for them and for thee.
_______________
When roars the fight to left and right
And on the field thy soldier stands,
When far and wide the cannon booms,
And shrill the fifes and beat the drums,
Thy face across his fancy comes
And gives the battle to his hands.
When roars the fight to left and right
And round him half his comrades roll,
Though many a bullet whistles near,
He fears not death, he knows not fear –
Thy whispers tremble at his ear,
Thy kisses burn within his soul.
When roars the fight to left and right,
He sees his young ones at thy knee.
The word is given; the trumpets blow;
The word is given, and on they go;
He heads the charge, he meets the foe
And strikes a thousand dead for thee.
An alternative version of Home they brought her warrior dead was published in A Selection (1865); it was reprinted in the Miniature Edition, 1870, and then only in Songs (1872). (There are other drafts in ULC MS.)
Home they brought him slain with spears.
They brought him home at even-fall:
All alone she sits and hears
Echoes in his empty hall,
Sounding on the morrow.
The Sun peeped in from open field,
The boy began to leap and prance,
Rode upon his father’s lance,
Beat upon his father’s shield –
‘O hush, my joy, my sorrow.’
The eight following sections which T. did not publish are printed (in the order of the published poem) in this Appendix, since they might distract from the final sequence of the poem. Two unpublished fragments follow.
Printed Mem. ii 517. In H.Lpr 104 it is on the sheet facing vii (p. 351).
Speak to me from the stormy sky!
The wind is loud in holt and hill.
It is not kind to be so still.
Speak to me, dearest, lest I die.
Speak to me: let me hear or see!
Alas my life is frail and weak.
Seest thou my faults and wilt not speak?
They are not want of love for thee.
Unpublished, H.Lpr 103. (S & S note that this is a detached leaf from T.MS.) It is written above xxii (p. 367), with which it has obvious affinities. Cp. Youth (I 633).
The path by which I walkt alone
Ere yet thy motion caught mine eye
Was rich with many a prophecy
In every gale about me blown.
The blackbird warbled, ‘Make thee whole
In spirit. Hear how glad I am.’
The lark on golden vapour swam
And chanted, ‘Find a kindred soul.’
And yearning woke and was not stilled.
I could not find thee here or there.
I cried to all the breezes, ‘Where?’,
For all my want was unfulfilled.
But freshly did my feet advance
For twenty summers all but two
Till when the time was full I drew
To where I met thee as by chance.
Unpublished, Lincoln MS, deleted. It follows lvi (p. 398), and acts as an introduction to lvii which is on the same page.
‘O Sorrower for the faded leaf,
A dark and slothful spirit said,
‘Why lingerest thou beside the dead?
Thy songs are fuel to thy grief.
They help not thee, and who will thank
Thy labour? What are these indeed
But sighings of the withered reed?
A little cry from off a plank
Of shipwreck, lost in shoreless seas,
A print in ever-shifting sands,
A spreading out of feeble hands
To that which hears not?’ Ill at ease
I faltered in my toil and broke
The moulds that Fancy made; and turned
To that fair soul that with me mourned
About his tomb, and sighing spoke.
Printed TLS, 22 Aug. 1969; T.MS of In Memoriam, where it follows xxx (p. 373). This fragmentary section opens by repeating the last line of xxx.
‘The light that shone when Hope was born’:
So whispers my Melpomene,
‘It was the light that lighted thee,
And it shall make me less forlorn.
And where is hope like this’, she cries
‘That changes human spites and scorns
And all a poor man’s crown of thorns
To glory when the beggar dies;
Who looks upon his girl and boy:
How will they live when he is dead?
Where turn to gain a little bread?
Yet – O the wonder – parts in joy;
A hope that, spite of tribe and clan
Printed Mat. ii 274–5. Mem. i 457 omitted ll. 5–8, 13–16, and placed it as a poem of 1859. But it is in a MS of The Princess (mainly the songs – University Library, Cambridge), which shows that it belongs to c. 1849. It is presumably about Arthur Hallam and connected with In Memoriam; cp. in particular xcvi (p. 440). In Nov. 1882, T. sent four unidentified semi-legible lines in H. T.’s hand (together with England and America in 1782 1–5 and Enoch Arden 906–9) to A. T. Claflin to help raise money to buy Longfellow’s house (Letters iii). The lines have affinities with The Philosopher:
Brave truth [?], somewhat hard to know,
For though not mailed in jealous pride
He shunned to wear his heart outside
Like brides [?] at a new [?] show.
He was too good and kind and sweet,
Even when I knew him in his hour
Of darkest doubt, and in his power,
To fling his doubts into the street.
Our modern authors young and vain
Must print or preach their doubts aloud
And blurt to every passing crowd
Those indigestions of the brain.
Truth-seeking he and not afraid,
But questions that perplex us now –
What time (he thought) have loom or plough
To weigh them as they should be weighed?
But we that are not kind or just
We scatter seeds that spring in flame,
Or bear their fruit in London’s shame –
The Sabbath journal mixt with lust.
We help the blatant voice abroad
To preach the freedom of despair,
And from the heart of all things fair
To pluck the sanction of a God.
Printed Mem. i 306–7, from T.MS of In Memoriam, with the title To A.H.H. (‘originally No. cviii’). In the MS it comes between cxi (p. 458) and Are these the far-famed Victor Hours (p. 985). H.T. wrote in T.MS: ‘(Omitted because the thought did not seem coherent enough)’.
Young is the grief I entertain,
And ever new the tale she tells,
And ever young the face that dwells
With reason cloistered in the brain.
Yet grief deserves a nobler name.
She spurs an imitative will.
’Tis shame to fail so far and still
My failing shall be less my shame,
Considering what mine eyes have seen,
And all the sweetness which thou wast
And thy beginnings in the past
And all the strength thou wouldst have been –
A master mind with master minds,
An orb repulsive of all hate,
A will concentric with all fate,
A life four-square to all the winds.
Printed, from Lincoln MS of In Memoriam, by Valerie Pitt, Tennyson Laureate (1962), p. 97. It comes between cxvii (p. 463) and cxxii. The MS does not include cxvi (which incorporated a line from Let Death) or cxix (for which Let Death furnished the concluding stanza).
Let Death and Memory keep the face
Of three and twenty summers, fair.
I see it and no grief is there,
Nor Time can wrong the youthful grace.
I see it and I scarce repine.
I hear the voice that held me fast.
The voice is pleasant in the past,
It speaks to me of me and mine.
The face is bright, the lips are bland,
He smiles upon me eye to eye,
And in my thoughts with scarce a sigh
I take the pressure of his hand.
Printed Mem. i 306, from T.MS of In Memoriam, with the title The Grave (‘originally No. lvii’). In the MS it comes between cxxvi and cxxv (p. 471).
I keep no more a lone distress.
The crowd have come to see thy grave.
Small thanks or credit shall I have
But these shall see it not the less.
The happy maiden’s tears are free
And she will weep and give them way:
Yet one unschooled in want will say,
‘The dead are dead and let them be.’
Another whispers, sick with loss,
‘O let the simple slab remain,
The MERCY JESU in the rain,
The MISERERE in the moss!
I love the daisy weeping dew,
I hate the trim-set plots of Art!’
My friend, thou speakest from the heart,
But look, for these are Nature too.
Printed Mem. i 307, from T. MS of In Memoriam, with the title The Victor Hours (‘originally No. cxxvii’). In the MS it comes between Young is the grief I entertain (p. 983) and cxxviii (p. 474).
Are these the far-famed Victor Hours
That ride to death the griefs of men?
I fear not, if I feared them then.
Is this blind flight the wingèd Powers?
Behold, ye cannot bring but good,
And see, ye dare not touch the truth,
Nor Sorrow beauteous in her youth,
Nor Love that holds a constant mood.
Ye must be wiser than your looks,
Or wise yourselves, or wisdom-led,
Else this wide whisper round my head
Were idler than a flight of rooks.
Go forward: crumble down a throne,
Dissolve a world, condense a star,
Unsocket all the joints of war,
And fuse the peoples into one.
Unpublished, H.Nbk 17, where it follows ix (p. 353), after a stub. Presumably from the earliest fragments, when In Memoriam was still in the abab stanza (cp. iii n, II 320). Cp. the third line with The Lover’s Tale, MS (Appendix A, III 580), draft iii 8–9: ‘and night and day / The hearts of men and angels ache for men’.
Time is not merely lapse of hours.
This yearning is not idly given.
The hearts of angels ache for ours.
Earth’s laws are recognized in Heaven.
Unpublished; H.Nbk 19, facing xcvii; little more than a syntax and an asseveration, but cp. Some pleasure and exceeding pain (III 13).
If love of power [?]
But mean to [I?] fertilize the sod [?]
God knows if then
I would not brook
In the Appendix to The Growth of the Idylls of the King (1895), Richard Jones printed ‘a hitherto unpublished version’ of To the Queen (1851), from the MS at the Drexel Institute, Philadelphia. (This MS was sold at the Parke-Bernet Galleries, Oct. 1944.) Lines that subsequently became part of the published poem are merely listed below, without their variants being given.
The noblest men are born and bred
Among the Saxo-Norman race,
And in this world the noblest place
Madam, is yours, our Queen and Head.
Your name is blown on every wind,
Your flag through Austral ice is borne
And glimmers to the Northern morn
And floats in either golden Ind.
The poets, they that often seem
So wretched, touching mournful strings,
They likewise are a kind of kings,
Nor is their empire all a dream.
Their words fly over land and main,
Their warblings make the distance glad,
Their voices heard hereafter add
A glory to a glorious reign.
A work not done by flattering state,
Nor such a lay should kings receive,
And kingly poets should believe
The king’s heart true as he is great.
The taskwork ode has ever failed:
Not less the king in time to come
Will seem the greater under whom
The sacred poets have prevailed.
[ll. 5–8 of 1851]
I would I were as those of old,
A mellow mouth of song to fill
Your reign with music which might still
Be music when my lips were cold.
That after-men might turn the page
And light on fancies true and sweet,
And kindle with a loyal heat
To fair Victoria’s golden age.
But he your Laureate who succeeds
A master such as all men quote
Must feel as one of slender note
And piping low among the reeds.
[ll. 9–12, 17–20, 21–4, of 1851]
As the dedication of Mem., H.T. printed a draft of ll. 1–8 (Drexel text) plus a draft of ll. 17–20 (1851), as ‘An Unpublished Version’. As the dedication of Mat., he had printed a different draft, where the second stanza (ll. 5–8, Drexel) had run: ‘Your power about the world is blown / From under icy Boreal moons, / Through our mid-planet’s sweet lagoons / And downward to the central zone.’ The MS in the Charterhouse School Library (Tile Greyfriar, Dec. 1921) consists of a draft of five stanzas, one of which praises the International Exhibition: A sight more noble on the tides / Of changing time, that forward flow, / Than all your ships of war that blow/The battle from their oaken sides!’ These lines were adapted from Hail Briton 5–8, and the year after To the Queen they became Britons, Guard Your Own 37– 8 (II 472). The above account makes no attempt to give all the variants in these drafts, but it quotes all such stanzas as did not appear in 1851. A torn leaf in a MS at University Library, Cambridge (6346) has a scrap of a draft with links (‘Saxo-Norman’, ‘freedom’, ‘good or sweet’).
Published, as Stanzas, in The Tribute (ed. Lord Northampton), Sept. 1837. T. created it by adding to a poem he had written after the death of Arthur Hallam, 1833–4; this exists in two drafts in Heath MS (A, B). H.Nbk 13 has a draft of ll. 1–16, 23–35, 42–8, 58–64. Later T. took it as the ‘germ’ of Maud (1855), where Oh! that’twere possible falls into place (p. 511). A decision where to place it chronologically is difficult; there are few disadvantages if the poem is given under 1833–4, but in the text which T. published, that of 1837. All the variants between the later version in Heath (B) and 1837 are given below, and the concluding stanzas added in 1837 are placed within square brackets. A full collation of H.MS, Heath A and B, 1837, and 1855 is given under Maud, together with other notes. G. O. Marshall discusses the changes in PMLA lxxviii (1963) 225–9.
In its original form of 1833–4, the poem is plainly precipitated by the death of Hallam, and it has many links with In Memoriam. Heath A is ‘an incomplete fragment’, dated 1833, consisting of 41 lines (6 stanzas). Heath B has 68 lines (10 stanzas). On 19 Sept. 1834 Spedding acknowledged to T., ‘I have also the alterations of Oh that it were possible, improvements I must admit though I own I did not think that could have been’ (Letters i 118; Mem. i 139). Then in Dec. 1836, T. angered Richard Monckton Milnes by refusing to contribute to The Tribute (Letters i 146, c.21 Dec; Mem. i 157–60). T. relented: ‘I will either bring or send you something for your Annual’ (8 or 9 Jan. 1837); and then wrote (? March 1837): ‘I have not been forgetful: these two poems have been causing me confounded bother to get them into shape. One I cannot send: it is too raw, but as I made the other double its former size, I hope it will do’ (Letters i 148–9). R. W. Rader (p. 6) comments: ‘Tennyson finished and published his poem in 1837 against his will, cobbling up an ending for it under pressure because he wished to pacify Milnes and had no other poem to do it with. But that he continued to think of his poem as incomplete (the 1834 version ended unsatisfactorily with “And weep/My whole soul out to thee”) is suggested by the existence of a fair copy, dated April, 1838, in which it has been returned to its pre-1837 form; and by the fact that he did not reprint this lovely lyric in the 1842 volumes or in any other collection before Maud’. Shatto argues that this transcript (by Spedding) need not imply T.’s thinking the poem incomplete. Reviewing The Tribute, the Edinburgh Review said: ‘We do not profess perfectly to understand the somewhat mysterious contribution of Mr Alfred Tennyson, entitled Stanzas’ (E. F. Shannon, Tennyson and the Reviewers, 1952, p. 29). T. later assented to Jowett’s opinion that these were his most touching lines (Mem. ii 466). A. Day notes that the poem has something in common with Fair face! fair form (III 610), not least the word ‘archetype’ (not to be found elsewhere in T.).
Oh! that’twere possible,
After long grief and pain,
To find the arms of my true-love
Round me once again!
When I was wont to meet her
In the silent woody places
Of the land that gave me birth,
We stood tranced in long embraces,
Mixt with kisses sweeter, sweeter,
Than any thing on earth.
A shadow flits before me –
Not thou, but like to thee.
Ah God! that it were possible
For one short hour to see
The souls we loved, that they might tell us
What and where they be.
It leads me forth at Evening,
It lightly winds and steals
In a cold white robe before me,
When all my spirit reels
At the shouts, the leagues of lights,
And the roaring of the wheels.
Half the night I waste in sighs,
In a wakeful doze I sorrow
For the hand, the lips, the eyes –
For the meeting of tomorrow,
The delight of happy laughter,
The delight of low replies.
That I heard her chant of old?
But I wake – my dream is fled.
Without knowledge, without pity –
In the shuddering dawn behold,
By the curtains of my bed,
That abiding phantom cold.
Then I rise: the eave-drops fall
And the yellow-vapours choke
The great city sounding wide;
The day comes-a dull red ball,
Wrapt in drifts of lurid smoke,
On the misty river-tide.
Through the hubbub of the market
I steal, a wasted frame;
It crosseth here, it crosseth there –
Through all that crowd, confused and loud,
The shadow still the same;
And on my heavy eyelids
My anguish hangs like shame.
Alas for her that met me,
That heard me softly call –
Came glimmering through the laurels
At the quiet even-fall,
In the garden by the turrets
Of the old Manorial Hall.
Then the broad light glares and beats,
And the sunk eye flits and fleets,
And will not let me be.
I loathe the squares and streets,
And the faces that one meets,
Hearts with no love for me;
To some still cavern deep,
And to weep, and weep and weep
My whole soul out to thee.
Get thee hence, nor come again,
Pass and cease to move about –
Pass, thou death-like type of pain,
Mix not memory with doubt.
’Tis the blot upon the brain
That will show itself without.
[Would the happy Spirit descend
In the chamber or the street
As she looks among the blest;
Should I fear to greet my friend,
Or to ask her, ‘Take me, sweet,
To the region of thy rest.’
But she tarries in her place,
And I paint the beauteous face
Of the maiden, that I lost,
In my inner eyes again,
Lest my heart be overborne
By the thing I hold in scorn,
By a dull mechanic ghost
And a juggle of the brain.
I can shadow forth my bride
As I knew her fair and kind,
As I wooed her for my wife;
She is lovely by my side
In the silence of my life –
’Tis a phantom of the mind.
’Tis a phantom fair and good;
I can call it to my side,
So to guard my life from ill,
Though its ghastly sister glide
And be moved around me still
That is moved not of the will.
Let it pass, the dreary brow,
Let the dismal face go by.
Will it lead me to the grave?
Then I lose it: it will fly:
Can it overlast the nerves?
Can it overlive the eye?
But the other, like a star,
Through the channel windeth far
Till it fade and fail and die,
To its Archetype that waits,
Clad in light by golden gates –
Clad in light the Spirit waits
To embrace me in the sky.]
Printed from Heath MS by M. J. Donahue, PMLA lxiv (1949) 401–2. Written 1833, it is an early, shorter version of Tithonus (1860, p. 583). The major revisions are noted below, and the details under Tithonus. There are earlier drafts in T.Nbks 20–21 (1833). T.’s revisions are extensively discussed by Miss Donahue and by L. Hughes, PQ lviii, 1979, 82–9. T. remarks that Tithonus was ‘beloved by Aurora, who gave him eternal life but not eternal youth. He grew old and infirm, and as he could not die, according to the legend, was turned into a grasshopper.’ Cp. The Grasshopper 5, 28 (1830): ‘No Tithon thou as poets feign… / No withered immortality.’ Written after the shock of Arthur Hallam’s death, the poem is a companion to Ulysses, which was begun at the same time (Mem. ii 9). The theme may have been influenced by the grief of T.’s sister Emily (Hallam’s betrothed); she wrote to T., 12 July 1834, ‘What is life to me! If I die (which the Tennysons never do)’ (Mem. i 135, cited by Miss Donahue).
Ay me! ay me! the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their substance to the ground,
Man comes and tills the earth and lies beneath,
And after many summers dies the rose.
Me only fatal immortality
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-haired shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.
Ay me! ay me! what everlasting pain,
Being immortal with a mortal heart,
To live confronted with eternal youth:
To look on what is beautiful nor know
Enjoyment save through memory. Can thy love,
Thy beauty, make amends, though even now,
Close over us, the silver star, thy guide,
Shines in those tremulous eyes that fill with tears?
Release me: let me go: take back thy gift:
Why should a man desire in any shape
To vary from his kind, or beat the roads
Of life, beyond the goal of ordinance
Where all should pause, as is most meet for all?
Or let me call thy ministers, the hours,
To take me up, to wind me in their arms,
To shoot the sunny interval of day,
And lap me deep within the lonely west.
A soft air fans the cloud apart; there comes
A glimpse of that dark world where I was born.
Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals
From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure,
And bosom throbbing with a fresher heart.
Thy cheek begins to bloom a fuller red,
Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine,
Ere yet they blind the stars, and thy wild team,
Spreading a rapid glow with loosened manes,
Fly, trampling twilight into flakes of fire.
’Tis ever thus: thou growest more beautiful,
Thou partest: when a little warmth returns
Thou partest, and thy tears are on my cheek.
Ay me! ay me! with what another heart,
By thy divine embraces circumfused,
Thy black curls burning into sunny rings,
With thy change changed, I felt this wondrous glow
That, gradually blooming, flushes all
Thy pale fair limbs: what time my mortal frame
Molten in thine immortal, I lay wooed,
Lips, forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm
With kisses balmier than opening buds;
Anon the lips that dealt them moved themselves
In wild and airy whisperings more sweet
Than that strange song I heard Apollo sing,
While Ilion like a mist rose into towers.
Ah! keep me not for ever in the East:
How can my nature longer mix with thine?
Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet
Upon these glimmering thresholds, when the steam
Floats up from those still fields that dream below.
Release me! so restore me to the ground;
Thou seest all things, thou wilt see my grave:
Thou wilt renew thy beauty with the morn;
I earth in earth forget these empty courts,
And thee returning on thy silver wheels.
Some lines on Avalon’ (the Avilion’ of The Passing of Arthur 427) are in T.Nbk 28 (1859); they relate to Lancelot and Elaine 1247– 51.
And she, how fast she sleeps! What is it? truth
Or glamour? fairies come from fairyland
To fetch the king to Avalon
And what is Avalon? Avalon is an isle
All made of apple-blossom in the West,
And all the waves are fragrant and the winds
About it and the fairies live upon it
And there are those have seen it far away
Shine like a rose upon the summer sea
And thither goes the king and thence returns
And reigns: some hold he cannot die
Printed by J. Pfordresher, A Variorum Edition of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1973), with a few errors of transcription. Pfordresher says ‘written in another hand’, but the hand is unquestionably T.’s, H.Lpr 97. Presumably Modred speaks.
Not without reason have we raised the land
And drawn a force together, worthy men,
That think with us. If ancient prophecies
(As human providence forecalculates
The possible) and dim presentiments
That racing with a people’s blood foretell
And fashion sequent change – if these hold firm –
The time is come wherein this state of things
Should fail or alter. Better it should fail
Than not to alter. Who that sees the court
At full spring-tide of profligacy, who
That looks upon the land, the husbandman
Withdrawn from wholesome tillage of the soil
To gaze on pomps and shows – the whole long year
Almost one holiday – so week by week
Much treasure lavisht and the people drained –
Who last, that contemplates our greatest grief
The table round, two hundred knights, maintained
At public charge – who by their vows are bound
To deeds of honour, yet at license ride
And pillage, wringing half the little left
From worthier men – who sees all this can doubt
But that the time is here? Up then and do.
For since the older sort with Arthur keep
We younger bloods, that make and suit the time
Must turn it where the choice of judgement leads.
i 2. T. wrote to W. H. Brookfield, mid-March 1832: ‘You came to see us when there was an utter dearth of all beauty in holt and hill’ (Letters i 71).
ii 7. golden vapour: Youth 106.
iii 8–9. Cp. Queen Mary V ii: ‘A voice of shipwreck on a shoreless sea’.
iiiA. 2. Melpomene: the Muse of Tragedy, and of Elegy, who speaks too in xxxvii.
12] MS has no punctuation.
iv 6. print or] MS; point and Mat.
iv 14. in] MS; or Mat.
v 6 Adapted as ‘That spurs an imitative will’, cx 2o.
11. And] T.MS, Eversley; In Mem. Mem. inaccurately transcribed T.MS. The correct reading was supplied by T. (Eversley proofs, Lincoln).
15. Cp. On a Mourner 19–20, MS (also on the death of Hallam, written Oct. 1833): ‘Till all my soul concentric shine/With that wide will that closes mine.’
16. Adapted as ‘Which stood four-square to all the winds that blew!’, Ode on Wellington 39. For the epithet, T. compares Simonides, ‘though I did not think of this parallel when I wrote it.’
vi 2. Arthur Hallam was in his twenty-third year when he died.
7–8. Adapted as cxvi 11–12: ‘And that dear voice, I once have known, / Still speak to me of me and mine.’
9–12. Adapted as cxix 9–12: And bless thee, for thy lips are bland, / And bright the friendship of thine eye;/And in my thoughts with scarce a sigh / I take the pressure of thine hand.’
vii 4. not] T.MS; none Mem.
11–12. ‘As seen by me in Tintern Abbey’ (T.); xix was ‘written at Tintern Abbey’, and is on the same theme of the relationship of the poems to T.’s sense of loss. Cp. The Princess: Prologue, MS (Appendix I, p. 977): ‘He plucked a flower that like a moral grew / From miserere on the broken tomb.’
viii 1. these] T.MS; those Mem., Eversley.
11. wide] T.MS, Eversley; wild Mem.
¶227. 13. God] Christ Heath B, 1855.
17–22] Not Heath A.
18. It] And Heath B.
24] Half, in dreams I sorrow after Heath B, 1855.
25. For] Not Heath B.
26] Not Heath B.
27] The winsome laughter. Heath B.
28] Not Heath B.
29. Do] And Heath B.
30. old?] old; Heath B.
33. dawn] grey Heath B.
35. abiding] dreadful Heath B.
35∧6] Heath B, like 1855, had ll. 65–70 here (they are not in Heath A).
36–41] Not Heath A.
39. The] And Heath B.
40. Wrapt in drifts] In a drift Heath B.
49–57] Not Heath A.
55. Then] Not Heath B.
63. And to] And Heath B.
65–70] See ll. 35∧6n.
66, 68] Transposed in Heath B (Mixing…).
71–6] Not Heath B. In 1855 these lines were incorporated (ll. 54∧5).
77–110] Not Heath B. These lines of 1837 found no place in 1855, except that ll. 83–4 became Maud ii 82, 90.
78–9. A. day compares In Memoriam lxx 2–3: ‘When on the gloom I strive to paint / The face I know’.
¶218. 11–15] Expanded in 1860.
24–7] Not 1860.
29–32] Not T.Nbk 20 1st draft.
36–7] Not T.Nbk 20 1st draft.
35∧6] 1860 added a line.
40∧41] 1860 added four lines. T.Nbk 20 1st draft, from here to the end, differs considerably from Heath MS. It has eight lines, threatening Aurora that he will call up Death; then a shorter version of the closing lines, ending with l. 63 but incorporating a description of Aurora’s horses (different from Heath MS). T.MS 2nd draft has the eight lines on Death following l. 53, and then breaks off.
42] Expanded in 1860.
59∧60] 1860 added two lines.
Lancelot and Elaine
11. some] hereafter written above in MS.