[…] Maud is not one of his best poems and was far from being one of his most popular performances. But, like many weak but not worthless creations, it is unusually revealing. What it reveals are the three quite distinct levels of Tennyson’s work. On the first level is the rather obscure and melodramatic story of a young man who has been ruined by ‘the old lord of the Hall’; who falls in love with the lord’s beautiful young daughter, Maud; who kills her brother and escapes to France, has a bad breakdown but finally wakens to the call of his country going to war. On this level, making use of such a preposterous narrative, Tennyson is challenging popular romancers and playwrights at their own game, and as an entertainer is reaching out to their large public. On the second level, where throughout the poem he denounces some of the manners and morals of the time and ends by praising the ennobling influence of war, he is writing in his capacity as Poet Laureate and Queen Victoria’s official bard. In this capacity he took himself very seriously. He felt it was his duty not only to write poems on important national events but also to make his poetry a kind of 1851 Exhibition of the representative thought of the time. Now Tennyson was not a foolish man; he read widely and was closely acquainted with many of the best contemporary minds; and if much of what he wrote on this level is silly stuff, the obvious explanation is that his heart and genius were not in it. Only the craftsman – and Tennyson was always a superb craftsman – was there, finding melodious phrases for these newspaper and clubmen’s notions. His poetic genius, which cannot be denied, belongs to the third level, discovered in Maud in the love-songs, poetry that is entirely romantic.
The poet on this level, the real Tennyson, though no doubt haunted by Virgil, looks back to Keats. And odd though it may seem, when we think of the big, shaggy Tennyson, at every age a magnificent figure of a bard, and the consumptive little Keats, the romanticism that Keats was moving away from, to achieve the balance that would have been necessary for the full expression of his virile genius, was not only accepted by Tennyson but also warmed and softened, turned into something dreamy and passive, strangely feminine. So whenever Tennyson writes about duty and action and the like, he is at the best merely acceptable, because of his sheer craftsmanship; but when he conjures us into some luxuriant, listless and melancholy dreamland, as in The Lotus-Eaters and so many of his lyrics, his genius is at work, he is magical.
J. B. PRIESTLEY: Literature and Western Man (1960)
One of eight children, Alfred Tennyson was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, the son of a country rector whose extensive library provided the child with his earliest inspiration. He and his brother Charles published their first book, Poems by Two Brothers, in 1827. The following year Tennyson started his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, but left before taking a degree, partly due to his father’s unexpected death. Poems Chiefly Lyrical, his first important book, was published in 1830 and received mixed reviews. Poems followed in 1832, and fared even worse at the hands of the critics. During the next decade he published nothing: shocked by the death of his friend Hallam, he expressed his mourning in many of the In Memoriam poems, which he refused to publish. After a brief infatuation with Rosa Baring, he began his protracted engagement to Emily Sellwood. Having lost a great deal of money in a woodcarving scheme of his friend Dr Allen, he now felt compelled to publish for financial reasons. Poems appeared in 1842. Volume One contained such masterpieces as ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ – revisions of poems written much earlier; Volume Two a number of new poems, including ‘Locksley Hall’ and ‘Ulysses’. The Princess followed in 1847, In Memoriam in 1850, the year in which Tennyson finally married Emily Sellwood and succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate. Poems such as the ‘Ode on Wellington’ and ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, in their apparent sincerity and prosodic brilliance, are typical of his Laureate art, which has perhaps never been surpassed.
Abnormally shy, Tennyson responded to fame by withdrawing in 1853 to Farringford on the Isle of Wight. ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ was published in 1854, Maud and Other Poems in 1855, the first four of the Idylls of the King in 1859. In 1862 he had the first of several audiences with Queen Victoria – see Max Beerbohm’s hilarious caricature: ‘Mr Tennyson, reading In Memoriam to his Sovereign’ from The Poets’ Corner (1904). He refused a baronetcy, but eventually agreed to accept a title and took his seat in the House of Lords in 1883. His first play, Queen Mary, was published in 1875, followed by several others such as Harold (1876), Becket (1884) and The Cup (1881), which, despite the thespian talents of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, flopped. The volumes of poetry continued to appear: Ballads and Other Poems (1880), Tiresias and Other Poems (1885), Locksley Hall Sixty Years After (1886), Demeter and Other Poems, which contained ‘Crossing the bar’, in 1889. There were also a number of posthumously published volumes.
The Princess, which includes ‘Now sleeps the crimson petal’ and ‘The splendour falls on castle walls’, was published in 1847 and subtitled ‘A Medley’ – a good description of the poem’s structure. The poem describes a Victorian country house party at which a succession of stories are told by the aristocratic guests – Gilbert and Sullivan’s Princess Ida is a burlesque version. The stories are contained in seven sections, all of which are interspersed with songs which, like those in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Mörike’s Maler Nolten, have often been torn from context, featured in poetry anthologies and set to music by composers. The story tells of an arranged marriage between a prince and a princess who have never met. She, a believer in women’s rights and the importance of education, founds a university for women that is infiltrated illegally by the prince and his friends disguised as women. They are discovered, and in the ensuing mock-heroic battle the prince is injured. The princess nurses him back to health, falls in love with her victim – and they eventually marry. ‘Now sleeps the crimson petal’ is a poem that the princess discovered in ‘a volume of the Poets of her land’, which she reads at the bedside of the injured prince while he sleeps. The theme of women’s education and the role of women in society was of great importance in the Victorian era, and often featured in the novels of the time, especially those written by women.
Tennyson’s delight in reciting his own poems is nicely illustrated by an anecdote. Shortly after the publication of Maud, he was staying with the Brownings in London. Depressed by the reception accorded the poem, he consumed two bottles of port and only recovered his good humour when Elizabeth Barrett Browning asked him to read Maud aloud – which he did with tears streaming down his face. There is a charming sketch in the City of Birmingham Museum by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1855) of Tennyson reciting Maud.
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,2
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.
(Dunhill, Homer, Ives, Kelly, Parry, Somervell, Vaughan Williams, Williamson)
Maud, written after In Memoriam, was published in 1855 and received equivocal reviews from the critics, some of whom, alarmed by the hysteria of the poem, suggested that the poem be called Mad or Mud. Tennyson’s own commentary on Maud was recorded by his son, Hallam Tennyson, in Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir in 1897:
[…] ‘This poem is a little Hamlet’, the history of a morbid, poetic soul, under the blighting influence of a recklessly speculative age. He is the heir of madness, an egotist with the makings of a cynic, raised to sanity by a pure and holy love which elevates his whole nature, passing from the height of triumph to the lowest depth of misery, driven into madness by the loss of her whom he has loved, and, when he has at length passed through the fiery furnace, and has recovered his reason, giving himself up to work for the good of mankind through the unselfishness born of his great passion. […] ‘The peculiarity of this poem […] is that different phases of passion in one person take the place of different characters.’
The poem is a monodrama for one speaker and the basic plot was inspired by Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor. Whereas In Memoriam is a sequence of lyric poems on a single theme, Maud is written in a number of sections and a huge variety of poetic forms, but always from the point of view – and with the voice – of a single speaker. Part One describes the hero’s wooing of Maud and culminates in the ecstatic ‘Come into the garden, Maud’. Part Two traces the catastrophe that destroyed their relationship: her brother’s insistence that she marry the nouveau riche grandson of a miner; the hero’s killing of her brother in a duel; his flight from home; his descent into madness. Part Three tells of his recovery, his patriotic commitment to the Crimean War and belief that he will soon die and so join Maud, who has died, in heaven. Somervell, in reducing Tennyson’s Maud to a mere thirteen (and often not entire) poems, jettisons much of the poem’s detail, but still manages to retain a cogent narrative. Attention has frequently been drawn to the biographical relevance of Maud: a father’s rage, a lonely mother, the politician son and, of course, Tennyson’s love for Rosa Baring, Sophy Rawnsley and Emily Sellwood – all evoked in his portrayal of Maud.
I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood,1
Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath,
The red-ribbed ledges drip with a silent horror of blood,
And Echo there, whatever is asked her, answers ‘Death’.
[…]
A voice by the cedar tree
In the meadow under the Hall!
She is singing an air that is known to me,
A passionate ballad gallant and gay,
A martial song like a trumpet’s call!
Singing alone in the morning of life,
In the happy morning of life and of May,
Singing of men that in battle array,
Ready in heart and ready in hand,
March with banner and bugle and fife
To the death, for their native land.1
Maud with her exquisite face,
And wild voice pealing up to the sunny sky,
And feet like sunny gems on an English green,
Maud in the light of her youth and her grace,
Singing of Death, and of Honour that cannot die,
Till I well could weep for a time so sordid and mean,
And myself so languid and base.
Silence, beautiful voice!
Be still, for you only trouble the mind
With a joy in which I cannot rejoice,
A glory I shall not find.
Still! I will hear you no more,
For your sweetness hardly leaves me a choice
But to move to the meadow and fall before
Her feet on the meadow grass, and adore,
Not her, who is neither courtly nor kind,
Not her, not her, but a voice.
(Saint-Saëns)
She came to the village church,
And sat by a pillar alone;
An angel watching an urn
Wept over her, carved in stone;
And once, but once, she lifted her eyes,
And suddenly, sweetly, strangely blushed
To find they were met by my own.
[…]
(Balfe)
O let the solid ground
Not fail beneath my feet
Before my life has found
What some have found so sweet;
Then let come what come may,
What matter if I go mad,
I shall have had my day.
Let the sweet heavens endure,
Not close and darken above me
Before I am quite quite sure
That there is one to love me;
Then let come what come may
To a life that has been so sad,
I shall have had my day.
Birds in the high Hall-garden
When twilight was falling,
Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud,
They were crying and calling.
Where was Maud? in our wood;
And I, who else, was with her,
Gathering woodland lilies,
Myriads blow together.
Birds in our wood sang
Ringing through the valleys,
Maud is here, here, here
In among the lilies.
I kissed her slender hand,
She took the kiss sedately;
Maud is not seventeen,
But she is tall and stately.
[…]
I know the way she went
Home with her maiden posy,
For her feet have touched the meadows
And left the daisies rosy.
[…]
(Delius, Gurney)
Maud has a garden of roses
And lilies fair on a lawn;
There she walks in her state
And tends upon bed and bower,
And thither I climbed at dawn
And stood by her garden-gate.
[…]
I heard no sound where I stood
But the rivulet on from the lawn
Running down to my own dark wood;
Or the voice of the long sea-wave as it swelled
Now and then in the dim-gray dawn;
But I looked, and round, all round the house I beheld
The death-white curtain drawn,
Felt a horror over me creep,
Prickle my skin and catch my breath,
Knew that the death-white curtain meant but sleep,
Yet I shuddered and thought like a fool of the sleep of death.
Go not, happy day,
From the shining fields,
Go not, happy day,
Till the maiden yields.
Rosy is the West,
Rosy is the South,
Roses are her cheeks,
And a rose her mouth.
When the happy Yes
Falters from her lips,
Pass and blush the news
Over glowing ships;
Over seas at rest,
Pass the happy news,
Blush it through the West;
Till the red man dance
By his red cedar-tree,
And the red man’s babe
Leap, beyond the sea.
Blush from West to East,
Blush from East to West,
Till the West is East,
Blush it through the West,
Rosy is the West,
Rosy is the South,
Roses are her cheeks,
And a rose her mouth.
(Balfe, Bridge, Delius, Liszt)
I have led her home, my love, my only friend.
There is none like her, none.
And never yet so warmly ran my blood
And sweetly, on and on
Calming itself to the long-wished-for end,
Full to the banks, close on the promised good.
None like her, none,
Just now the dry-tongued laurels’ pattering talk
Seemed her light foot along the garden walk,
And shook my heart to think she comes once more;
But even then I heard her close the door;
The gates of Heaven are closed, and she is gone.
[…]
Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown,
Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone;
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,
And the musk of the rose is blown.
For a breeze of morning moves,
And the planet of Love is on high,
Beginning to faint in the light that she loves
On a bed of daffodil sky,
To faint in the light of the sun she loves,
To faint in his light, and to die.
All night have the roses heard
The flute, violin, bassoon;
All night has the casement jessamine stirred
To the dancers dancing in tune;
Till a silence fell with the waking bird,
And a hush with the setting moon.
[…]
Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls,
Come hither, the dances are done,
In gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls,
Queen lily and rose in one;
Shine out, little head, sunning over with curls,
To the flowers, and be their sun.
There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate.
She is coming, my dove, my dear;
She is coming, my life, my fate;
The red rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near’;
And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late’;
The larkspur listens, ‘I hear, I hear’;
And the lily whispers, ‘I wait.’
She is coming, my own, my sweet;
Were it ever so airy a tread,
My heart would hear her and beat,
Were it earth in an earthy bed;
My dust would hear her and beat,
Had I lain for a century dead;
Would start and tremble under her feet,
And blossom in purple and red.
(Balfe, Delius, Massenet)
‘The fault was mine, the fault was mine’ –
Why I am sitting here so stunned and still,
Plucking the harmless wild-flower on the hill?
It is this guilty hand! –
And there rises ever a passionate cry,
[…]
A cry for a brother’s blood:
It will ring in my heart and my ears, till I die, till I die.
[…]
Dead, long dead,
Long dead!
And my heart is a handful of dust,
And the wheels go over my head,
And my bones are shaken with pain,
For into a shallow grave they are thrust,
Only a yard beneath the street,
And the hoofs of the horses beat, beat,
The hoofs of the horses beat,
Beat into my scalp and my brain,
With never an end to the stream of passing feet,
Driving, hurrying, marrying, burying,
Clamour and rumble, and ringing and clatter;
And here beneath it is all as bad,
For I thought the dead had peace, but it is not so;
To have no peace in the grave, is that not sad?
But up and down and to and fro,
Ever about me the dead men go;
And then to hear a dead man chatter
Is enough to drive one mad.
[…]
O me, why have they not buried me deep enough?
Is it kind to have made me a grave so rough,
Me, that was never a quiet sleeper?
Maybe still I am but half-dead;
Then I cannot be wholly dumb;
I will cry to the steps above my head
And somebody, surely, some kind heart will come
To bury me, bury me
Deeper, ever so little deeper.
O that ’twere possible
After long grief and pain
To find the arms of my true love
Round me once again!
[…]
My life has crept so long on a broken wing
Through cells of madness, haunts of horror and fear,
That I come to be grateful at last for a little thing:
My mood is changed, for it fell at a time of year
When the face of night is fair on the dewy downs,
[…]
That like a silent lightning under the stars
She seemed to divide in a dream from a band of the blest,
And spoke of a hope for the world in the coming wars –
[…]
And it was but a dream, yet it yielded a dear delight
To have looked, though but in a dream, upon eyes so fair,
That had been in a weary world my one thing bright;
And I stood on a giant deck and mixed my breath
With a loyal people shouting a battle cry,
Till I saw the dreary phantom arise and fly
Far into the North, and battle, and seas of death.
[…]
The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire.
Let it flame or fade, and the war roll down like a wind,
We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still,
I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind,
I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assigned.
In Memoriam A.H.H., written by Tennyson between 1833 and 1850, the year of its publication, was inspired by the death of Arthur Henry Hallam, the poet’s closest friend. They met at Trinity College, Cambridge, and shared a passion for poetry. Hallam met Tennyson’s sister Emily during Christmas 1829, and was soon in love – a relationship of which his father disapproved, insisting that his son should not see or correspond with her till after his twenty-first birthday. Tennyson and Hallam travelled to Spain together in 1830 to take part in the Carlist wars, but only reached the Pyrenees – Tennyson could recall every detail of the trip till the end of his life. When Hallam died of apoplexy in Vienna, Tennyson was devastated. As Sir Charles Tennyson, his brother, wrote:
To both Alfred and Emily, the blow was overwhelming. On Arthur’s betrothed it fell at a moment when, after years of trial and disappointment, there seemed good prospect that their hopes would at last be crowned with marriage. For Alfred, a sudden and brutal stroke had annihilated in a moment a love ‘passing the love of women’. The prop, round which his own growth had twined itself for four fruitful years, was suddenly removed. A lifelong prospect, founded on his own friendship and Emily’s hoped-for union with a friend, was blotted out instantly and for ever.
T. S. Eliot, referring to In Memoriam in 1936, wrote: ‘It is not religious because of the quality of its faith, but because of the quality of its doubt. Its faith is a poor thing, but its doubt is a very intense experience. In Memoriam is a poem of despair, but of despair of a religious kind.’ Tennyson considered two other titles for his great poem: The Way of the Soul and Fragments of an Elegy – an appropriate description of the poem’s structure, which is a sequence of 131 short poems, written over a period of some seventeen years, from Hallam’s death in 1833 to the publication of the poem in 1850. The fragmentary nature of In Memoriam A.H.H. is held together by what Eliot called ‘the greatest lyrical resourcefulness that a poet has ever shown’. The title was suggested by Tennyson’s fiancée, Emily Sellwood, whom he married in 1850, the year that In Memoriam was published.
Liza Lehmann considered In Memoriam one of her greatest works, although it never rivalled the popularity of In a Persian Garden. She chose the words herself from Tennyson’s poem, reducing it to twelve sections.
I sing to him that rests below,
And, since the grasses round me wave,
I take the grasses of the grave,
I do but sing because I must,
And pipe but as the linnets sing:
And one is glad; her note is gay,
For now her little ones have ranged;
And one is sad; her note is changed,
Because her brood is stolen away.
O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me
No casual mistress, but a wife,
My bosom-friend and half of life,
O Sorrow!
If Sleep and Death be truly one,
And every spirit’s folded bloom
Through all its intervital1 gloom
In some long trance should slumber on;
Unconscious of the sliding hour,
Bare of the body, might it last,
And silent traces of the past
Be all the colour of the flower.
Risest thou thus, dim dawn, again,1
And howlest, issuing out of night,
With blasts that blow the poplar white,
Day, when my crowned estate begun
To pine in that reverse of doom,
Which sickened every living bloom,
And blurred the splendour of the sun; […]
Lift as thou mayst thy burthened brows
Through clouds that drench the morning star,
And whirl the ungarnered sheaf afar,
And sow the sky with flying boughs,
And up thy vault with roaring sound
Climb thy thick noon, disastrous day;
Touch thy dull goal of joyless gray,
And hide thy shame beneath the ground.
When on my bed the moonlight falls,
I know that in thy place of rest
By that broad water of the west,1
There comes a glory on the walls;
Thy marble bright in dark appears,
As slowly steals a silver flame
Along the letters of thy name,
And o’er the number of thy years.
The mystic glory swims away;
From off my bed the moonlight dies;
And closing eaves of wearied eyes
I sleep till dusk is dipt in gray:
And then I know the mist is drawn
A lucid veil from coast to coast,
And in the dark church2 like a ghost
Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn.
I cannot see the features right,
When on the gloom I strive to paint
The face I know; the hues are faint
And mix with hollow masks of night;
Cloud-towers by ghostly masons wrought,
A gulf that ever shuts and gapes,
A hand that points, and pallèd shapes
In shadowy thoroughfares of thought. […]
Till all at once beyond the will
I hear a wizard music roll,
And through a lattice on the soul
Looks thy fair face and makes it still.
Wild bird1, whose warble, liquid sweet,
Rings Eden through the budded quicks2,
O tell me where the senses mix,
O tell me where the passions meet,
Whence radiate: fierce extremes employ
Thy spirits in the darkening leaf,
And in the midmost heart of grief
Thy passion clasps a secret joy. […]
To Sleep I give my powers away;
My will is bondsman to the dark;
I sit within a helmless bark,
O heart, how fares it with thee now,
That thou should’st fail from thy desire,
Who scarcely darest to enquire,
‘What is it makes me beat so low?’
Something it is which thou hast lost,
Some pleasure from thine early years,
Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears,
That grief hath shaken into frost!1
Sweet after showers, ambrosial air,
That rollest from the gorgeous gloom
Of evening […]
fan my brows and blow
The fever from my cheek, and sigh
The full new life that feeds thy breath
Throughout my frame, till Doubt and Death,
Ill brethren, let the fancy fly
From belt to belt of crimson seas
On leagues of odour streaming far,
To where in yonder orient star
A hundred spirits whisper ‘Peace’.
Who loves not Knowledge? Who shall rail
Against her beauty? […]
Let her work prevail.
Half-grown as yet, a child, and vain –
She cannot fight the fear of death.
What is she, cut from love and faith,
But some wild Pallas1 from the brain
Of Demons?
Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove;
Thine are these orbs of light and shade1;
Thou madest Life in man and brute;
Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made.
Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:
Thou madest man, he knows not why,
He thinks he was not made to die;
And thou hast made him: thou art just.
Whatever I have said or sung,
Some bitter notes my harp would give,
Yea, though there often seemed to live
A contradiction on the tongue,
Yet Hope had never lost her youth;
She did but look through dimmer eyes;
Or Love but played with gracious lies,
Because he felt so fixed in truth.
Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:
The fire-fly wakens: waken thou with me.
[Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.
Now like the earth all Danaë to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me.
Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.]
Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake:
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.
(Holst, Rorem)
Hapless doom of woman happy in betrothing,1
Beauty passes like a breath and love is lost in loathing:
Low! my lute:
Speak low, my lute, but say the world is nothing.
Love will hover round the flowers when they first awaken;
Love will fly the fallen leaf, and not be overtaken;
Low, my lute!
O low, my lute! We fade and are forsaken,
Low, dear lute, low!
(Stanford)
There is sweet music here that softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass,
Or night-dews on still waters between walls
Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass;
Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,
Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes;
Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies.
Here are cool mosses deep,
And through the moss the ivies creep,
And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep,
And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep.
(Parry)
The splendour falls on castle walls1
And snowy summits old in story:
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.
O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going!
O sweet and far from cliff and scar
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying:
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.
O love, they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river:
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow for ever and for ever.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.
(Bax, Burrows, Gibbs, Holst, Stanford, Thomson, Vaughan Williams, Wood)
Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
(Browne)