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So the sky was not only a crystal dome, or a celestial ocean, but it was also the Aleian land through which Bellerophon wandered, the country of the Lotos-eaters, or again the realm of the Graiai beyond the twilight; and finally it was personified and worshipped as Dyaus or Varuna, the Vedic prototypes of the Greek Zeus and Ouranos.
Ah, this is all Polynesian! This must be the land to which the "timid-eyed" lotos-eaters came. There is a strange fascination in the languid air, and it is strangely sweet "to dream of fatherland" . . . I.L.B. I find that I can send another short letter before leaving for the volcano.
A letter to Tennyson in 1884 from so competent a student of Shakespeare as Sir Henry Irving declares that ‘Becket’ is a finer play than ‘King John.’ Still, the ‘Morte d’Arthur,’ ‘The Lotos-Eaters,’ ‘The Gardener’s Daughter,’ outweigh the five-act tragedy in the world of literary art. Of acted drama Tennyson knew nothing at all.
=Lotos-eaters=: the lotos is a date-like fruit, fabled by Homer in the "Odyssey" to be so delicious and possessed of such marvellous properties that those who once tasted it forgot home and friends and wished only to remain where they might continue to eat it forever. =Achæans=: inhabitants of Achaia, in the Peloponnesian peninsula. They were considered the best soldiers in Greece.
"A Mr Wilkinson, a clergyman." The Lotos-Eaters, of course, is at the opposite pole of the poet's genius. A few plain verses of the Odyssey, almost bald in their reticence, are the point de repere of the most magical vision expressed in the most musical verse.
They only cared to lie there as the other lotos-eaters did, doing no work, but just dreaming all their lives, nibbling at the fruit, which was both food and drink, until they grew old and died. Ulysses knew that any life, no matter how wretched, was far better than this death in life.
The same characteristics are more fully developed in Tennyson's "Lotos-Eaters":
Tennyson's "Lotos-Eaters" is a modern echo of this defiant or despairing cry of the "ill-used race of men." The songs of Burns reveal ever-widening circles of sympathy, pure personal egoism, then songs of the family and of clan and of country-side, then passion for Scotland, and finally this fierce peasant affection for his own passes into the glorious
It would be always after dinner in that society, as, in the land of the Lotos-eaters, it was always afternoon; and food, which, when we have it not, seems all-important, drops in our esteem, as soon as we have it, to a mere pre-requisite of living.
But the error seemed to be that one desired to rest there, like the Lotos-eaters in the enchanted land, and not to fare forth as a soldier of God. It spoke of delight, not of hardness; of acquiescence, not of effort. Strange that the sight of a man being guillotined should inspire me with a burning desire to inflict the very thing which I see another suffer!
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