Elegiac Note in Tennyson's Verse:
W.H. Auden, commenting on Tennyson, said: "There was little about melancholia that he (Tennyson) did not know; there was little else that he did." While the second part of this comment is an unkind cut, the first part emphasizes an essential truth about the poetry of Tennyson. T.S. Eliot called Tennyson "the saddest of all poets". Tennyson's poetry is, indeed, the poetry of sadness. The note of lament, or the elegiac note, is very pronounced in Tennyson's verse. The Lady of Shalott, Oenone, The Palace of Art, The Lotos-Eaters, Morte d'Arthur, Tithonus, Locksley Hall, The Two Voices, The Vision of Sin, Maud, In Memoriam, and several shorter pieces amply illustrate this aspect of the Laureate's poetical output. Tennyson's was a temperamental melancholy, fostered and reinforced by his experiences as a child and subsequently by his religious doubts and spiritual uncertainties and by the premature death of A.H. Hallam.
His Love for Solitude:
As a child he loved solitude, and in this respect one side of his childhood was not unlike Wordsworth’s. A moody and introspective child, he liked to lose himself under the skies, walking all day over the world, or roaming along the coast. Often he would walk all night, hardly conscious of his body, and rapt in the mystery of darkness and starred sky.
Theme of Loss:
The theme of loss appeared very early in Tennyson's poetry. Whenever this theme reappears, even after In Memoriam, it works its magic. This fact may explain why Tennyson often seems to force himself to remember the loss of Hallam, enclosing him in the figure of King Arthur in The Idylls of the King, performing again the ritual of loss and recovery in Vastness, In the Valley of Cauteretz, Marlin and the Gleam, and Crossing the Bar, and implicitly in many other poems. When the private sensibility was not stirred, the awareness was wanting, and "stupid" “Alfred Lord Tennyson", the Victorian, wrote masterly bathos.
The finest poems in the first collection, Poems Chiefly Lyrical (1830), reveal the world of Tennyson's imagination centered upon solitary and isolated figures, the intense and disturbing experiences of melancholy, frustration, horror, madness and death. In these early poems, he is concerned with the evocation of deep moods, morbid states of mind and feeling, rather than the play of ideas which become more prominent in the Poems (1833).
His Morbid Painfulness:
Tennyson's home life—centring around a disinherited, embittered and often deranged father—brought upon him, sensitive as he was, acute and prolonged strains. With the father's death, he had to leave Cambridge and steer a numerous and problematical family through difficult waters. His sense of isolation was aggravated by concern about his poetic direction, by harsh reviews, by religious problems and by the shock of Arthur Hallam's death. Thus, we can, in the main, trace the origins of his "morbid painfulness" back to the family melancholia, to the miseries of his childhood and youth, and to the death of Arthur Hallam. We can follow its manifestations in his behaviour, and its expression in his poetry. We are able to see that he and his writings are of a piece—that his private, interior life, the world he lived in and his art are intimately related. Sometimes this relationship seems to be clearly defined, as in the poems inspired by persons, by well-loved scenes, or special occasions. Sometimes the relationship is mysterious, as in The Kraken and many of the lyrics, where we feel a connection without being impelled to define it.
Increasing of his Melancholy:
The intense solitude of Tennyson's soul appears abnormal even in a poet. The rhetoric of passion and melancholy increases with his later years. In The Vision of Sin, we see the beginning of that melancholy which gained such hold upon him in later years. His poetic originality of form, his individual imagination and expression, still remain unrecognised by the present age. At his best he is magnificent and many of his lyrics are flawless; too flawless perhaps for the modern ear. The patient reader alone will discover the underlying of despair. His sorrow was the sorrow of a great genius, who, despite the savage attacks of his critics in early life, achieved unique recognition as a poet in England. And yet, though honoured by the Laureateship and a peerage, he did not reach that poetic goal which he set before himself in his Ulysses.
Pathos and Tragedy:
The note of pathos and tragedy is very pronounced in most of the poems of Tennyson. The elegiac strain seems to pervade the bulk of his work. A few illustrations would make this point clear.
In Mariana in the Moated Grange, we have the mournful aspect of a decaying house in a level waste and the varying moods of despondency of a solitary watcher who looks vainly for someone who never comes:
“She only said, "My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"
In The Lady of Shalott, the atmosphere is sad throughout (except a few stanzas), the climax of the tragedy being reached the Lady's death:
“For ere she reach'd upon the tide
The first house by the water-side,
Singing in her song she died,
The Lady of Shalott.”
Oenone, too, breathes the spirit of tragedy, reminiscent of Mariana:
My eyes are full of tears, my heart of love,
My heart is breaking, and my eyes are dim,
And I am all aweary of my life.
In The Palace of Art, the soul, after thriving for three years, falls into the slough of despair:
“And death and life she hated equally,
And nothing saw, for her despair,
But dreadful time, dreadful eternity,
No comfort anywhere.”
The mood of distress verging on despair finds a forceful expression in The Lotos-Eaters:
“Why are we weigh'd upon with heaviness,
And utterly consumed with sharp distress,
While all things else have rest from weariness!”
Here the feeling of despair is given a universal character.
The lament of Tithonus, doomed to immortality and old age, is noteworthy:
“Alas! for this grey shadow, once a man—
So glorious in his beauty and thy choice,
Who madest him thy chosen, that he seem'd
To his great heart none other than a God!”
His Being Depressed and Bewildered:
Locksley Hall depicts a Byronic hero who suffers all the disaffection of earlier Tennysonian protagonists though in the end he yields to a belief in progress. In this poem, we are confronted with the irresolute figure of modern youth, depressed and bewildered by his own inability to face the bustling competition of ordinary English life, disappointed in love, denouncing a shallow-hearted cousin, and nursing a momentary impulse to "wander far away" Restlessness, ennui, impatience of humdrum existence, set him dreaming of something like a new Odysseus. But the hero of this poem is no Ulysses the project of wild adventure is abandoned as it is formed.
The Two Voices was originally called Thoughts of a Suicide, and was begun under the cloud of the over-whelming sorrow of Hallam's death which blotted out all joy from Tennyson's life and made him long for death:
“Again the voice spake unto me;
"Thou art so steep'd misery,
Surely 'twere better not to be."
We might almost regard The Two Voices as continuing in a deeper philosophic key the melancholy musing of Locksley Hall, and the two poems might then be labelled "Dejection". There is a similar disconsolate protest against the vanity and emptiness of life; there is the feeling of doubt and dissolution, the sombre self-examination; and that same vague longing for the battlefield as a remedy for the morbid sensibility that haunts so many studious men, which reappears later in Maud, even though the poem ends like In Memoriam, with a revival of faith and hope under the influences of calm natural beauty, household affections, and the placid ways of ordinary humanity.
But all the anguish of a personal loss and the distress caused by the uncertainties of religion find their consummate expression in the great masterpiece, In Memoriam:
"Calm and deep peace in this wide air,
These leaves that redden to the fall;
And in my heart, if calm at all,
If any calm, a calm despair.
…. …. …. … … … … …
…. …. …. … … ….. …. …
This year I slept and woke with pain,
I almost wish'd no more to wake,
And that my hold on life would break,
Before I heard those bells again:
….. ….. ….. …. …. …. …. …. …
…… ….. ….. ….. …. … … … ….
So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry."
Break, Break, Break, written with Hallam in mind, expresses Tennyson's elegiac mood simply but effectively:
“Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.”
We have a short poem of passionate lamentation, which contains the theme upon which Maud was afterwards marked out dramatically. The elegiac strain of the following lines is remarkable:
"O that' twere possible
After long grief and pain
To find the arms of my true love
Round me once again.
…… ……. ……. ……
……. ……. ….. …. …
Alas for her that met me,
That heard me softly call,
Came glimmering thro' the laurels,
At the quiet even fall,
In the garden by the turrets
Of the old manorial hall."
The sadness and poignancy of Maud are too well-known to need illustration.
Tennyson is the most "occasional" of poets, but the occasions were not public, even when he made them so. His imagination rose only to its own promptings or to the lure of an event that suggested or reproduced the subjective drama of loss, defeat, and disappointment. Then manner and matter would unite, and even in the placid years he could write the Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, of a man who reminded Tennyson of the statesman latent in Arthur Hallam, and The Idylls of the King, which broods over the disintegration of an ideal society and the fall of a heroic lay-figure.
James Spedding had remarked in 1835 that his friend Tennyson was "a man always discontented with Present till it has become the Past, and then he yearns toward it and worships it, and not only worships it, but is discontented because it is past": Many years later, Tennyson himself speaking about Tears, idle tears, said, "It is what I have always felt even from a boy, and what as a boy I called the passion of the past'. And so it is with me now; it is the distance that charms me in the landscape, the picture and the past, and not the immediate today in which I move."
Yet such moods of melancholy sometimes mellow, sometimes acute, give rise to Tennyson's poetry. T.S. Eliot saw in Tennyson "emotion so deeply suppressed as to tend rather towards the blackest melancholia than towards dramatic action."
The tender melancholy of a feeling that life may be passing without love, of vague regrets and longings, has never been more sympathetically expressed than in the song of "Tears, idle tears", with its refrain of the days that are no more, and the shadow of mortal darkness already falling over the season of youth:
“Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer drawn
The earliest pipe of half-awaken’d birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.”
How closely the dramatic circumstances of poems like The Two Voices, Ulysses, Tithonus, Oenone, and Morte d'Arthur match his own situation we can see, for example, in the Morte d'Arthur, where Hallam's death stands very lightly behind the death of the hero-king, and where Sir Bedivere's questions are his own: What is left in the world when the King is gone ? What hope is there when the fellow- ship of the Round Table is destroyed? Arthur’s answer is the poet's: Change is inevitable and divinely ordered; trust in prayer. The King's speech is directed outwards, beyond the dramatic situation, and beyond Tennyson, and beyond Tennyson's crisis, to meet the problems of the age. The men of Tennyson's generation were also doubtful; in mingled expectation and fear they looked forward to the promise of material power and a test of faith. What were to be the guiding values of the future? To these public questions the Morte d'Arthur returns no precise answer, except only a general sense of trust.
But Tennyson's affirmation of trust in the future was not made easily, as we see in The Two Voices and in In Memoriam. Most seriously of all, Hallam's death shook his religious belief. He was tormented by doubt. How could a God of love allow the death of someone so young, so full of promise, and so good? If this was the way of God, what kind of God do we worship? This spiritual crisis exposed the very narrow foundation of his Christianity, of which the cardinal point was the life after death. A recurrent theme in In Memoriam is the presence of Hallam; and here, as in Ulysses and in such a late poem as Vastness, Tennyson's trust in heavenly life is not communion with God, but the companionship of his friend. Tennyson clung desperately to the hope of personal immortality, so difficult retain yet so essential to his belief.
His trust in Christianity thus disturbed by Hallam's death, his faith was also exposed to external sources of doubt—the findings of science. Like many of his contemporaries, he found it more and more difficult to reconcile the traditional concept of the Christian God with the scientific view of creation and evolution. The evolutionists suggested that man was not a special creation, but a supreme animal that had reached its present state by intellectual power and physical aptitude in the battle for survival. By this theory, there was no need to suppose mankind to be the chosen of God. Indeed, it seemed that the creation of the stars, the earth, animal life and their consequent history were in accordance with the operation of certain arbitrary and mechanical laws of nature. In this there was no evidence of moral law. The evolutionary process was the survival of the fittest, the outcome of age-long battle among the species. If the course of Nature involved the profusion of life and its wastage in mass death, could this be the way of God? Were God and Nature hostile to each other? What was the love of God? How was it shown? Tennyson wrestled with these problems throughout his life. He kept abreast of scientific advances. He understood their implications, and he knew that his faith called for scrutiny and re-establishment. In Memoriam is a record of this struggle. The prefatory lines to In Memoriam, written in 1849, are an address to the "Strong Son of God" and assert that his belief in God has survived the assaults of science and of personal tragedy; that the reconciliation of religious belief and scientific knowledge was effected through faith, and not through logic, or argumentative conviction or factual evidence. Tennyson's trust is staked upon the strength of his love, and its continuance after death. This is a personal position, not a solution. It was reached through his individual journey from a private tragedy. Yet during this trial of faith, Tennyson encountered problems which faced every thinking man of his generation. He was justified in saying that in these elegies it was not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking through him.
"And he was a master in the lyrical expression of a sorrow perhaps more deeply seated than his profoundest personal griefs or religious questionings—a sorrow 'drawn from the depths of some divine despair'. In his verse he has created beauty enough to be beyond fear of the ultimate verdict of posterity."
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