United States or Malawi ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
'And Knightley to the listening earth Repeats the story of his birth." Surely the force of apt citation can no further go. When Lord Tennyson chanced to say in Sir William Harcourt's hearing that his pipe after breakfast was the most enjoyable of the day, Sir William softly murmured the Tennysonian line "The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds."
That this diversion into the region of didactics is accompanied, on our poet's part, with every ingenuity of ornament, and every grace of a style which people have learned to like and which he has made his own, need not be said. The Tennysonian beauties are all there.
He had published four books of verse and four books of prose, leaving many poems, essays, short stories, and two plays, in manuscript. All his best poetry is now included in the Collected Poems . Flecker had the Tennysonian habit of continually revising; and in this volume we are permitted to see some of the interesting results of the process.
The poet laureate added little to his fame by his previous dramatic work, "Queen Mary"; he will gain less by this. It is good of course to a certain degree, but it is only "fair to middling" Tennysonian work. We find in it not a passage that stirs us, not one that charms.
I already knew pretty well the origin of the Tennysonian line in English poetry; Wordsworth, and Keats, and Shelley; and I did not come to Tennyson's worship a sudden convert, but my devotion to him was none the less complete and exclusive.
The pathos of early death in the prime of beauty is less obvious in Homer, where Achilles is to be the victim, or in the laments of the Anthology, where we only know that the dead bride or maiden was fair; but the poor May Queen is of her nature rather commonplace. "That good man, the clergyman, has told me words of peace," strikes a note rather resembling the Tennysonian parody of Wordsworth
He is healthy-minded, without a trace of affectation or decadence. He follows the Tennysonian tradition in seeing that "Beauty, Good, and Knowledge are three sisters." He is religious. A clear-headed, pure-hearted Englishman is Alfred Noyes.
A few songs of genuine Tennysonian harmony, pitched in the keys that most fittingly suit the singer's mood, are interspersed through the drama, and serve to relieve the narratives of their gloom and plaint. Their presence, we cannot help thinking, recalls work better done, and more within the limitations of the poet's genius, than this drama of "Queen Mary."
Sonnets, stanzas of Tennysonian sweetness, tales imbued with German mysticism, versions from Jean Paul, criticisms of the old English poets, and essays smacking of Dialistic philosophy, were among his multifarious productions.
Possibly parts of his work may be textually derived from the Cyclics, but the topic is very obscure. In Quintus, Paris, after encountering evil omens on his way, makes a long speech, imploring the pardon of the deserted OEnone. She replies, not with the Tennysonian brevity; she sends him back to the helpless arms of her rival, Helen. Paris dies on the hills; never did Helen see him returning.
Word Of The Day