Thinking Activity : Victorian Poet

Victorian Poet: Alfred Lord Tennyson

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Born:06 August 1809

Died: 06 October 1892

Hope smiles from the threshold of the

year to come, whispering, 'it will be happier'. 

                                  -Alfred Lord Tennyson

Alfred Tennyson was born in the depths of Lincolnshire, the 4th son of the 12 children of the rector of Somersby, George Clayton Tennyson, a cultivated but embittered clergyman who took out his disappointment on his wife Elizabeth and his brood of children—on at least one occasion threatening to kill Alfred’s elder brother Frederick. The rector had been pushed into the church by his own father, also named George, a rich and ambitious country solicitor intent on founding a great family dynasty that would rise above their modest origins into a place among the English aristocracy. Old Mr. Tennyson, aware that his eldest son, the rector, was unpromising material for the family struggle upward, made his second son, his favorite child, his chief heir. Tennyson’s father, who had a strong streak of mental instability, reacted to his virtual disinheritance by taking to drink and drugs, making the home atmosphere so sour that the family spoke of the “black blood” of the Tennysons.

Part of the family heritage was a strain of epilepsy, a disease then thought to be brought on by sexual excess and therefore shameful. One of Tennyson’s brothers was confined to an insane asylum most of his life, another had recurrent bouts of addiction to drugs, a third had to be put into a mental home because of his alcoholism, another was intermittently confined and died relatively young. Of the rest of the 11 children who reached maturity, all had at least one severe mental breakdown. During the first half of his life Alfred thought that he had inherited epilepsy from his father and that it was responsible for the trances into which he occasionally fell until he was well over 40 years old.

It was in part to escape from the unhappy environment of Somersby rectory that Alfred began writing poetry long before he was sent to school, as did most of his talented brothers and sisters. All his life he used writing as a way of taking his mind from his troubles. One aspect of his method of composition was set, too, while he was still a boy: he would make up phrases or discrete lines as he walked, and store them in his memory until he had a proper setting for them. As this practice suggests, his primary consideration was more often rhythm and language than discursive meaning.

When he was not quite 18 his first volume of poetry, Poems by Two Brothers (1827), was published. Alfred Tennyson wrote the major part of the volume, although it also contained poems by his two elder brothers, Frederick and Charles. It is a remarkable book for so young a poet, displaying great virtuosity of versification and the prodigality of imagery that was to mark his later works; but it is also derivative in its ideas, many of which came from his reading in his father’s library. Few copies were sold, and there were only two brief reviews, but its publication confirmed Tennyson’s determination to devote his life to poetry.

Most of Tennyson’s early education was under the direction of his father, although he spent nearly four unhappy years at a nearby grammar school. His departure in 1827 to join his elder brothers at Trinity College, Cambridge, was due more to a desire to escape from Somersby than to a desire to undertake serious academic work. At Trinity he was living for the first time among young men of his own age who knew little of the problems that had beset him for so long; he was delighted to make new friends; he was extraordinarily handsome, intelligent, humorous, and gifted at impersonation; and soon he was at the center of an admiring group of young men interested in poetry and conversation. It was probably the happiest period of his life.

In part it was the urging of his friends, in part the insistence of his father that led the normally indolent Tennyson to retailor an old poem on the subject of Armageddon and submit it in the competition for the chancellor’s gold medal for poetry; the announced subject was Timbuctoo. Tennyson’s “Timbuctoo” is a strange poem, as the process of its creation would suggest. He uses the legendary city for a consideration of the relative validity of imagination and objective reality; Timbuctoo takes its magic from the mind of man, but it can turn to dust at the touch of the mundane. It is far from a successful poem, but it shows how deeply engaged its author was with the Romantic conception of poetry. Whatever its shortcomings, it won the chancellor’s prize in the summer of 1829.

Probably more important than its success in the competition was the fact that the submission of the poem brought Tennyson into contact with the Trinity undergraduate usually regarded as the most brilliant man of his Cambridge generation, Arthur Henry Hallam. This was the beginning of four years of warm friendship between the two men, in some ways the most intense emotional experience of Tennyson’s life.

Timbuctoo

Alfred Lord Tennyson

I Stood upon the mountain which o’erlooks    

The narrow seas, whose rapid interval    

Parts Afric from green Europe, when the sun    

Had fallen below the Atlantic, and above    

The silent heavens were blenched with faery light,            

Uncertain whether faery light or cloud,    

Flowing southward, and the chasms of deep, deep blue    

Slumbered unfathomable, and the stars    

Were flooded over with clear glory and pale.    

I gazed upon the sheeny coast beyond,            

There where the Giant of old Time infixed    

The limits of his prowess, pillars high    

Long time erased from earth; even as the Sea    

When weary of wild inroad buildeth up    

Huge mounds whereby to stay his yeasty waves.            

And much I mused on legends quaint and old,    

Which whilome won the hearts of all on earth    

Toward their brightness, even as flame draws air;    

But had their being in the heart of man,    

As air is the life of flame: and thou wert then            

A centred glory-circled memory,    

Divinest Atalantis, whom the waves    

Have buried deep, and thou of later name,    

Imperial Eldorado, roofed with gold:    

Shadows to which, despite all shocks of change,            

All onset of capricious accident,    

Men clung with yearning hope which would not die.

*        *        *        *        *

    

                    Then I raised    

My voice and cried, “Wide Afric, doth thy sun    

Lighten, thy hills enfold a city as fair            

As those which starred the night o’ the elder world?    

Or is the rumor of thy Timbuctoo    

A dream as frail as those of ancient time?”    

  A curve of whitening, flashing, ebbing light!    

A rustling of white wings! the bright descent            

Of a young Seraph! and he stood beside me    

There on the ridge, and looked into my face    

With his unutterable, shining orbs,    

So that with hasty motion I did veil    

My vision with both hands, and saw before me            

Such colored spots as dance athwart the eyes    

Of those that gaze upon the noonday sun.    

Girt with a zone of flashing gold beneath    

His breast, and compassed round about his brow    

With triple arch of everchanging bows,            

And circled with the glory of living light    

And alternation of all hues, he stood.    

  “O child of man, why muse you here alone    

Upon the mountain, on the dreams of old    

Which filled the earth with passing loveliness,            

Which flung strange music on the howling winds,    

And odors rapt from remote Paradise?    

Thy sense is clogged with dull mortality;    

Open thine eyes and see.”

*        *        *        *        *

    

  Then first within the south methought I saw            

A wilderness of spires, and crystal pile    

Of rampart upon rampart, dome on dome,    

Illimitable range of battlement    

On battlement, and the imperial height    

Of canopy o’ercanopied.

                    Behind            

In diamond light upspring the dazzling peaks    

Of pyramids, as far surpassing earth’s    

As heaven than earth is fairer. Each aloft    

Upon his narrowed eminence bore globes    

Of wheeling suns, or stars, or semblances            

Of either, showering circular abyss    

Of radiance. But the glory of the place    

Stood out a pillared front of burnished gold,    

Interminably high, if gold it were    

Or metal more ethereal, and beneath            

Two doors of blinding brilliance, where no gaze    

Might rest, stood open, and the eye could scan,    

Through length of porch and valve and boundless hall,    

Part of a throne of fiery flame, wherefrom    

The snowy skirting of a garment hung,            

And glimpse of multitude of multitudes    

That ministered around it—if I saw    

These things distinctly, for my human brain    

Staggered beneath the vision, and thick night    

Came down upon my eyelids, and I fell.            

  With ministering hand he raised me up:    

Then with a mournful and ineffable smile,    

Which but to look on for a moment filled    

My eyes with irresistible sweet tears,    

In accents of majestic melody,            

Like a swollen river’s gushings in still night    

Mingled with floating music, thus he spake:    

  “There is no mightier spirit than I to sway    

The heart of man; and teach him to attain    

By shadowing forth the Unattainable;            

And step by step to scale that mighty stair    

Whose landing-place is wrapt about with clouds    

Of glory of heaven.

*        *        *        *        *

    

                    “I am the spirit,    

The permeating life which courseth through            

All the intricate and labyrinthine veins    

Of the great vine of Fable, which, outspread    

With growth of shadowing leaf and clusters rare,    

Reacheth to every corner under heaven,    

Deep-rooted in the living soil of truth;            

So that men’s hopes and fears take refuge in    

The fragrance of its complicated glooms,    

And cool impeachéd twilights. Child of man,    

Seest thou yon river, whose translucent wave,    

Forth issuing from the darkness, windeth through            

The argent streets o’ the city, imaging    

The soft inversion of her tremulous domes,    

Her gardens frequent with the stately palm,    

Her pagods hung with music of sweet bells,    

Her obelisks of rangéd chrysolite,            

Minarets and towers? Lo! how he passeth by,    

And gulfs himself in sands, as not enduring    

To carry through the world those waves, which bore    

The reflex of my city in their depth.    

O city! O latest throne! where I was raised            

To be a mystery of loveliness    

Unto all eyes, the time is wellnigh come    

When I must render up this glorious home    

To keen Discovery; soon yon brilliant towers    

Shall darken with the waving of her wand;            

Darken and shrink and shiver into huts,    

Black specks amid a waste of dreary sand,    

Low-built, mud-walled, barbarian settlements.    

How changed from this fair city!”

                        Thus far the Spirit:    

Then parted heavenward on the wing: and I           

Was left alone on Calpe, and the moon    

Had fallen from the night, and all was dark!

In 1829, nineteen-year-old Alfred Tennyson (he went by "Fred") won the Chancellor's Medal for poetry at Cambridge. The assignment was to write a poem on the subjet of "Timbuctoo."

The subject was not really surprising. This was the beginning of European colonization of the interior of Africa. There were legends of a great civilization in what is now Mali. Timbuctoo had been visited by a modern European for the first time in 1826, by the Scottish explorer, A.G. Laing, who was murdered soon after.

Tennyson's father urged him to enter, writing "You're doing nothing at the university; you might at least get the English poem prize."

Tennyson reworked a poem which he had written at age 15 ("Armageddon") to meet the subject requirement. "Armageddon" includes a vision of the distant human future, in outer space, followed by a vision of a lifeless earth and a final impending battle of the good and evil spiritual powers.

Entries were expected to be in heroic couplets, but Tennyson's entry was in Miltonic blank verse. Nevertheless, he won.

Tennyson didn't think his poem was any good, and called it "a wild and unmethodized performance". He was too embarrassed to read it himself at commencement, so the previous year's winner did it for him. For the rest of his life, he forbade publication of "Timbuctoo."

Tennyson did not sing the praises of England's world conquest. But he did not express any objections it, either. And Tennyson's later poetry showcases the "modern" expectation that the human race, guided by reason and science, would come together and build a better world for everyone. If you are a postmodernist, you won't like Tennyson.

Instead, "Timbuctoo" is about how fantasy helps the human race make progress. Whether or not we share Tennyson's optimism about the ultimate triumph of human wisdom, goodness, and science, we have all built castles in the air. Tennyson would write much better verse as an adult. But the theme of "Timbuctoo" is still remarkable.