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Updated: June 16, 2025
In his thirty-third year , Tennyson broke his long silence by publishing two volumes of verse, containing such favorites as The Poet, The Lady of Shalott, The Palace of Art, The Lotos Eaters, A Dream of Fair Women, Morte d'Arthur, Oenone, The Miller's Daughter, The Gardener's Daughter, Dora, Ulysses, Locksley Hall, The Two Voices, and Sir Galahad.
The wood-nymphs bewail Paris, and a herdsman brings the bitter news to Helen, who chants her lament. But remorse falls on OEnone. She does not go "Slowly down By the long torrent's ever-deepened roar," but rushes "swift as the wind to seek and spring upon the pyre of her lord."
As the work of a youth only twenty-three, this book is remarkable for the variety and melody of its verse. Among its treasures we still read with delight "The Lotos Eaters," "Palace of Art," "A Dream of Fair Women," "The Miller's Daughter," "Oenone," and "The Lady of Shalott"; but the critics of the Quarterly, who had brutally condemned his earlier work, were again unmercifully severe.
She in wonder stretched out her two hands to take the lovely plaything: thereupon the wide-wayed earth opened in the Nysian plain and the king of the great nation of the dead sprang out with his immortal horses. Turn from this to some parallel poem in English literature, such as Oenone or Tithonus.
Tiresias, the monologue of the aged seer, blinded by excess of light when he beheld Athene unveiled, and under the curse of Cassandra, is worthy of the author who, in youth, wrote OEnone and Ulysses. Possibly the verses reflect Tennyson's own sense of public indifference to the voice of the poet and the seer. But they are of much earlier date than the year of publication:
A song of Scyra, Lycidas, is my desire, a sweet love- story, the stolen kisses of the son of Peleus, the stolen bed of love how he, that was a boy, did on the weeds of women, and how he belied his form, and how among the heedless daughters of Lycomedes, Deidamia cherished Achilles in her bower. Lycidas. The herdsman bore off Helen, upon a time, and carried her to Ida, sore sorrow to OEnone.
The days sped swiftly by, and neither of them dreamed that any sorrow was in store for them; and to Oenone her shepherd husband was all the world, because he was so noble and brave and handsome and gentle. "One warm summer afternoon, Paris sat in the shade of a tree at the foot of Mount Ida, while his flocks were pasturing upon the hillside before him.
We venture to describe it as in substance a drama, with a plot imperfectly worked and with characters insufficiently chiselled and relieved. Its author began by presenting, and for many years continued to present, personal as well as natural pictures of individual attitude or movement; and, as in "Oenone" and "Godiva," he carried them to a very high pitch of perfection.
In OEnone and the Lotus Eaters he handled Homeric subjects, but in a romantic fashion which contrasts markedly with the style of his later pieces, Ulysses and Tithonus. These last have the true classic severity, and are among the noblest specimens of weighty and sonorous blank verse in modern poetry. In general, Tennyson's art is unclassical.
Je sais mes perfides, OEnone, et ne suis point de ces femmes hardies, Qui, goûtant dans le crime une tranquille paix, Ont su se faire un front qui ne rougit jamais! How shall I describe what followed?
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