Tennyson, An Unrivalled Lyrical Poet:
Tennyson is the greatest lyrical poet between Shelley and Swinburne. He is an unrivalled lyrical genius of his age. He was endowed with all those qualities which made him the supreme lyric poet of his country. Instead of remaining a singer voicing forth the subjective feelings that welled in his heart, he chose to be a dramatist, a narrative poet, an ethical teacher, and a communal bard. In spite of the fact that Tennyson's lyrical genius was overladen with philosophic thought, his lyrics could not be completely retarded. From time to time he produced songs and lyrics of superb charm and loveliness.
His Lyrical Contribution:
Tennyson produced a large number of long and short lyrical pieces. The restraining force of caution and philosophy could not chill the ardour of his soul, and lyrics and songs continued to flow from his pen right from the age of seventeen to the ripe old age of eighty. During the long span of his poetic career he produced such fine pieces of lyricism as Tears, Idle Tears; Break, Break, Break; Come Into the Garden; Maud; The Splendour Falls on the Castle Walls; The Lotos Eaters; Mariana; The Brook; Oriana; Fatima; The Miller's Daughter; Merman and Mermaid; Locksley Hall; A Dream of Fair Women; The Day-Dream; The May Queen; Crossing the Bar; O Swallow, Swallow and The Change of the Light Brigade. But his longer pieces are not altogether devoid of lyrical passion and intensity. The Princess, Maud, In Memoriam, The Lady of Shalott also contain some very memorable lyrical pieces.
Musical Strain in His Lyrics:
Tennyson's lyrics are musical and melodious. The music flows from each line like a bud from a rose-bush. He knows the art of harmonizing the sense with the sound of the words employed in his lyrics. His music varies according to the thought and emotion. In ‘In Memoriam’, there are subtle variations in pause, cadence and rhyme. The feelings and the emotions give to this long poem its true quality. Even the thought-content, whatever of it is there, is given a lyrical character by virtue of the music and melody found in the expression.
"Oh yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood."
His Reviving the Blank Verse:
Tennyson gave to blank verse a new and lovely life two centuries after it had died. It has a fault; it is in Tennyson's excessive preoccupation with broad vowel sounds. He reached his lyric high-water mark in the songs in The Princess and that supreme passage in Maud 'XVIII' in which he anticipated half the developments in later verse. The songs in The Princess gave him the undisputed title of the monarch of lyric verse. Here are three of the greatest lyrics in the language: Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, Now the White, The Splendour Falls on Caste Walls, and Tears, Idle Tears.
Powerful Emotions in His Lyrics:
His lyrics such as Crossing the Bar, Strong Son of God and Ring Out, Wild Bells strike a note of hope for the future. He expresses his heart-felt emotion of grief in Break, Break, Break. He laments at the death of his friend, Hallam:
"But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
And the sound of the voice that is still!"
And
"But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me."
Melancholic Note in His Lyrics:
Tennyson's lyrical gift is nowhere so well employed as in giving expression to a sense of loss, recollected after the occasion of grief and brooded over intellectual anguish and stoical suffering. The lyric Break, Break, Break is inspired by Arthur Hallam's death. The poet's heart is filled with deep grief. He is pained to think his friend would never come back. His hands would never touch him. His voice has gone forever. The moments of joy which he had spent with Arthur Hallam would never come back. It is the cause of the poet's deep despair. The interest of In Memoriam lies no longer in the religious compromise it embodies but in the moods of terror and despair and haunting wail of fear and loneliness heard again and again in it. Crossing the Bar expresses the poet's pensive but bold mood just on the eve of his death.
Gifted with an Eye for Colour and an Ear for Sound:
The poet is gifted with an eye for colour combination. In Come Into the Garden, Maud, the lover hopes his beloved would remain immortal and her feet will turn the grass on his grave into colourful flowers:
"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."
The description of Maud's face is remarkable:
"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."
He makes a very subtle use of figures of speech like alliteration and onomatopoeia in order to achieve the desired effect. The following are the alliterative lines pictorial in colour and effect:
"Three silent pinnacles of aged snow,
Stood unset flush’d: and, dew'd with showery drops,
Up-Clomb the shadowy pine above the woven copse."
The poet is also gifted with an ear for sound. He hears the sound of bells in Ring Out, Wild Bells. In Break, Break, Break, he hears the rolling sea breaking on the cold gray stones and he utters:
"Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O see!"
His Philosophical Thoughts in His Lyrics:
Tennyson had certain philosophical thoughts which he had expressed with great force in Ulysses and In Memoriam. He believes in action and Ulysses is a standing monument in the glorification of action even in the face of death and decay. He laid emphasis on 'to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield'. He advocates pursuit of knowledge and higher values of life:
"To follow knowledge, like a sinking star
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought."
Tennyson presents equal emphasis on the cultivation of love. He conceives of God as the embodiment of love. In Memoriam opens with the line:
"Strong Son of God, Immortal Love."
He believes in the freedom of Human will. In ‘In Memoriam’, he expresses his faith in free will in the following line:
"Our wills are ours, we know not how."
He believes in the gospel of progress and advancement in human life. He believes in evolution rather than revolution. His faith in life beyond life and life beyond death is expressed in Sir Golahad, Enoch Arden and Locksley Hall Sixty Years After.
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