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Updated: July 14, 2025
Here dig a pit, and make it a cubit broad and a cubit long, and pour in milk, and honey, and wine, and the blood of a ram, and the blood of a black ewe, and turn away thy face while thou pourest in, and the dead shall come flocking to taste the milk and the blood; but suffer none to approach thy offering till thou hast inquired of Tiresias all which thou wishest to know."
He was one of the first to appreciate Paradise Lost, and to commend it in some admirable lines. One couplet is exceedingly beautiful, in its reference to the author's blindness: "Just Heaven, thee like Tiresias to requite, Rewards with prophecy thy loss of sight." His poems, written in the "snatched leisure" of an active political life, bear marks of haste, and are very unequal.
As in the Oedipus Tyrannus, Tiresias the soothsayer appears to announce all the terrors that ensue so now, at the crowning desolation of that fated house, he, the solemn and mysterious surviver of such dark tragedies, is again brought upon the stage.
The end of 1884 saw the publication of Tiresias and other Poems, dedicated to "My good friend, Robert Browning," and opening with the beautiful verses to one who never was Mr Browning's friend, Edward FitzGerald. The volume is rich in the best examples of Tennyson's later work.
But leaving me, before you pursue your journey home, you must visit the house of Ades, or Death, to consult the shade of Tiresias the Theban prophet; to whom alone, of all the dead, Proserpine, queen of hell, has committed the secret of future events: it is he that must inform you whether you shall ever see again your wife and country."
Then Tiresias, who bore a golden sceptre, came and lapped of the offering, and immediately he knew Ulysses, and began to prophesy: he denounced woe to Ulysses, woe, woe, and many sufferings, through the anger of Neptune for the putting out of the eye of the sea-god's son.
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 few more sentences introduce to us the old soothsayer Tiresias for whom, at the instigation of Creon, Oedipus had sent. The seer answers the adjuration of the king with a thrilling and ominous burst "Wo wo! how fearful is the gift of wisdom, When to the wise it bears no blessing! wo!" The haughty spirit of Oedipus breaks forth at the gloomy and obscure warnings of the prophet.
But none of them would he suffer to approach, and dip their thin lips in the offering, till Tiresias was served, not though his own mother was among the number, whom now for the first time he knew to be dead, for he had left her living when he went to Troy, and she had died since his departure, and the tidings never reached him; though it irked his soul to use constraint upon her, yet in compliance with the injunction of great Circe he forced her to retire along with the other ghosts.
As for myself, I never venture about after sunset. One grows romantic. Night was evidently made for in-door nature. I propose a rubber. To this popular suggestion Proserpine was pleased to accede, and herself and Tiresias, Manto and the captain of the yacht, were soon engaged at the proposed amusement. Tiresias loved a rubber.
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