Ever since the inception of this column five years ago, we’ve been borrowing Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s name to use in our title. Today’s piece is a reminder of what a really fine poet he was. As a start. here are the verses he wrote after hearing the church bells of Waltham Abbey on a stormy New Year’s Eve.
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Although Tennyson (1809-1892) is best remembered today for “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and “Crossing the Bar,” he wrote some epic major works including “The Princess,” “Idylls of the King,” and especially “In Memoriam” which includes these lines:
I envy not in any moods
The captive void of noble rage,
The linnet born within the cage,
That never knew the summer woods;
I envy not the beast that takes
His license in the field of time,
Unfetter’d by the sense of crime,
To whom a conscience never wakes;
Nor, what may count itself as blest,
The heart that never plighted troth
But stagnates in the weeds of sloth;
Nor any want-begotten rest.
I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
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Tennyson was born into a dysfunctional family, but found early on that he had a gift for poetry that could help him through difficult times. He published his first book of poems when he was not yet eighteen. In subsequent years the public responded with increasing eagerness to poems like “Locksley Hall.”
Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet ’tis early morn:
Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle-horn.
‘Tis the place, and all around it, as of old, the curlews call,
Dreary gleams about the moorland flying over Locksley Hall;
Locksley Hall, that in the distance overlooks the sandy tracts,
And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts.
Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,
Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.
Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro’ the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.
Here about the beach I wander’d, nourishing a youth sublime
With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time;
When the centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed;
When I clung to all the present for the promise that it closed:
When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see;
Saw the Vision of the world and all the wonder that would be.—
In the Spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin’s breast;
In the Spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest;
In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish’d dove;
In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.
Tennyson became the heart and soul of Victorian poetry, and the Queen rewarded him handsomely. First he was named Poet Laureate. Then he received a knighthood and became Sir Alfred Tennyson. Thereafter the Queen created a baroncy in his name. This was no Don’t-Call-Me-Al gesture; he was now a peer of the realm with the title: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, which was then passed on to future generations. Side note: Lord Byron inherited his great-uncle’s title at the age of ten; it had nothing to do with his poetry. Tennyson’s was clearly in celebration of his literary achievements.
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Tennyson’s descriptive writing provided rich inspiration for painters, especially the pre-Raphaelites and their followers. Here is an illustration based on his Arthurian epic, “Idylls of the King.” I’m glad that the knight remembered his COVID-19 mask!
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Tennyson was not known for his sense of humor, but then, this was the Victorian period, and Queen Victoria set the tone when she famously said,
“We are not amused.”
A prominent line in his poem “Tears, Idle Tears” refers to “The earliest pipe of half-awaken’d birds.” On one occasion Tennyson mentioned to a friend that he liked to have a smoke first thing in the morning. “Ah,” said the friend, “The earliest pipe of half-awaken’d bards.” I think that’s rather clever. Tennyson was royally not amused.
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In his lifetime and in his 42 years as Poet Laureate, Tennyson was far and away Britain’s most popular poet. But the literary critics were not always kind. Of his long narrative poem called “Maud,” a disdainful reviewer said that the title had one vowel too many, and that it made no difference which vowel was deleted. Ouch.
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In July of 1868, a signal event occurred in the world of poetry when America’s literary lion, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, paid a three-day visit to Tennyson at his home on the Isle of Wight off the southern coast of England. It was not exactly a quiet tête-à-tête since Longfellow brought along his two sisters, brother-in-law, three daughters, son and daughter-in-law. Tennyson was impressed to meet a poet who sometimes outsold him in Great Britain. Longfellow was impressed to meet a fellow-poet of such quality and later wrote this sonnet:
POET! I come to touch thy lance with mine;
Not as a knight, who on the listed field
Of tourney touched his adversary’s shield
In token of defiance, but in sign
Of homage to the mastery, which is thine,
In English song; nor will I keep concealed,
And voiceless as a rivulet frost-congealed,
My admiration for thy verse divine.
Not of the howling dervishes of song,
Who craze the brain with their delirious dance,
Art thou, O sweet historian of the heart!
Therefore to thee the laurel-leaves belong,
To thee our love and our allegiance,
For thy allegiance to the poet’s art.
Over the years Tennyson was always viewed as a decorous master of rhyme and cadence. Today he is also considered as a symbolist poet leading us to the ultra-modern T.S. Eliot, who was indebted to Tennyson and whose verse often picks up where Tennyson’s ended. Here’s Tennyson:
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
And here’s T.S. Eliot:
O voyagers, O seamen,
You who came to port, and you whose bodies
Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,
Or whatever event, this is your real destination.
For further proof that Tennyson is still relevant, let me point you to Judy Dench as “M” in the James Bond film, “Skyfall,” where she recites from his poem “Ulysses” as bullets fly about outside.
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
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VIDEO. The members of the First Poetry Quartet in concert present four of Tennyson’s best loved poems, starting with “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Then “The Splendour Falls on Castle Walls” and “Crossing the Bar,” which Tennyson requested always be placed on the last page of his collected works. Finally, in the spirit of New Year’s, our title poem, “Ring Out, Wild Bells.”
CLICK ON THIS LINK FOR VIDEO: RING OUT WILD BELLS
