Poetry for Students ( PDFDrive )

Ordinary Words

into the present time, as in In an Iridescent Time; You are so smooth and cool and purple,
in “Green Apples” Stone writes: “In August we car- I say. Which of us will it be?
ried the old horsehair mattress / To the back porch
/ And slept with our children in a row. . . .” Such wryness and pithiness characterize this col-
lection, which is tighter, more ironic, and wiser
But for all its moments of stasis, of acceptance, than either of the first two collections.
even at times of brief happiness beyond the grief,
Topography maps no simple country. Section 4, for Styles and themes begun in the earlier volumes
instance, shows Stone’s skill as a naturalist. In po- do continue. In the title poem, “Cheap,” young love
ems such as the comic “Pig Game,” in which pigs, is the subject of fond scorn: “He was young and
like poets, “live within / And scan without,” and cheap . . . I was easy in my sleep”; the boy and girl
the determined “Habitat,” in which the wolverine are “braying, galloping / Like a pair of mules,” run-
“is built for endurance,” Stone moves beyond the ning “blind as moles.” Marriage and betrayal con-
shock and anger of early grief to a wide perspec- tinue as themes. In “Codicil” Stone writes of a
tive and rich connections. There is also much hu- widowed landlady who keeps all the eggs her or-
mor here, especially in the nursery-rhyme-like nithologist husband collected, comparing all the
poems such as “I Have Three Daughters.” The ti- “secret muted shapes” of “unborn wisened eggs”
tle poem, “Topography,” concludes the volume. to the stillborn possibilities for her own marriage.
Wry, wise, funny, and redolent with a sense of the Stone continues to examine her widowhood in po-
possibilities that exist beyond the lost and mourned ems such as “Loss” (“I hid sometimes in the closet
husband, the poem ends, “Yes, I remember the among my own clothes”), “Habit” (“Every day I
turning and holding, / The heavy geography; but dig you up . . . I show you my old shy breasts”),
map me again, Columbus.” and “The Innocent” (“I remember you / in the
sound of an oak stake / Hammered into the frozen
Stone’s 1975 book, Cheap, is characterized by heart of the ground”). Other poems are lighter: “Tic
a movement beyond “the terminal,” beyond the Tac Toe” makes fun of all good intentions, of peo-
paralysis that underlies much of Topography. ple “pulling in their stomachs and promising / To
These poems were written while Stone was slowly exercise more, drink less, grow brilliant.”
migrating across the country, from university to
university. She taught at the University of Illinois Some poems in Cheap use the nursery-rhyme
(1971–1973), at Indiana University (1973–1974), style of earlier poems. “Bargain,” “The Tree,” and
and at Center College in Kentucky (1975). The “The Song of Absinthe Granny” all incorporate sing-
changes since In an Iridescent Time are clear from song rhythms. Diana O’Hehir (in a paper delivered
the titles of poems. In Stone’s first book, poems are at the Modern Language Association convention,
titled “Snow,” “Ballet,” “Collage,” “Swans”; in December 1988) observed that Stone’s use of
Cheap, poems are titled “Cocks and Mares,” rhythms and comical word patterns, often coupled
“Who’s Out,” “The Nose,” “Bazook,” “Bored on a with terrifying subject matter, accounts for much of
Greyhound,” and the much-anthologized “The the poems’ power. As O’Hehir put it, Stone “lures
Song of Absinthe Granny.” the reader in with the familiar rhythms of childhood,
promises a pattern which the reader can join in on
In Cheap Stone’s humor comes into its own. and follow along with, then yanks the entire struc-
Topography was less mannered, less lyrical than In ture out from under the feet,” so that the reader is
an Iridescent Time; Cheap is even less so. The poet “surprised, startled, and made to follow gasping.”
has moved through the country of grief and has
emerged, seeing everything, right down to its Surprising, startling, Cheap was the most di-
frightening, funny core. Connections between hu- rect, the most piercing of Stone’s collections, until
man and nonhuman life are made even clearer—in her Second-Hand Coat: Poems New and Selected
“Vegetables I” eggplants are compared to decapi- was published in 1987. Here one finds a poet writ-
tated human heads, “utterly drained of blood.” In ing in her fullest power, relying upon craft, music,
the market, they seem “to be smiling / In a shy em- wisdom, and humor. “Orange Poem Praising
barrassed manner, / jostling among themselves.” In Brown” captures the anxieties of the writer with
“Vegetables II” Stone writes: admirable wit: “The quick poem jumped over the
lazy woman. / There it goes flapping like an orange
It is the cutting room, the kitchen, with peeling wings.” A dialogue continues between
Where I go like an addict the woman and the brown poem: “Watch it, the
To eat of death. poem cried. You aren’t wearing any pants. . . . /
The eggplant is silent. Praise my loose hung dangle, he said. Tell me about
We put our heads together.

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Ordinary Words

myself in oral fragments. . . .” “Some Things You’ll Right Along” begins, “At the molecular level, / in
Need to Know before You Join the Union” is an- another dimension, oy, are you different! / That’s
other comic poem for poets: where it all shreds / like Watergate.” Like the new
physicists who have come to the conclusion that
At the poetry factory there is no such thing as objectivity, that all de-
body poems are writhing and bleeding. pends on point of view, Stone questions the possi-
................................. bilities for clear answers in “At the Center”; “The
The antiwar and human rights poems center is simple, they say. / They say at the Fermi
are processed in the white room. accelerator, / ‘Rejoice. A clear and clean/explana-
Everyone in there wears sterile gauze. tion of matter is possible. . . .’ ” The poem contin-
These poems go for a lot. ues with the speaker’s questioning: “Where is this
No one wants to mess up. place, / the center they speak of? Currants, / red as
There’s expensive equipment involved. faraway suns, burn on the currant bush.” The eyes
The workers have to be heavy, of the beloved, now long dead, are “far under-
very heavy. ground,” where they “fall apart, / while their par-
These poems are packaged in cement. ticles still shoot like meteors / through space
You frequently hear them drop with a dull thud. making their own isolated trajectories.”

Part of Stone’s humor is based on the charac- In Second-Hand Coat the grief of the widow
ters who populate this volume, characters who may is softened, muted. In “Curtains,” another tragi-
remind readers of Fred and Ida of “Bazook” in comic poem, the speaker asks at the end, “See what
Cheap. Stone’s characters are outrageously funny, you miss by being dead?” In “Winter” she asks,
and very real, similar to those of Charles Dickens “Am I going toward you or away from you on this
and Mark Twain. As Kevin Clark observed (in a train?” “Message from Your Toes” begins, “Even
paper delivered at the 1988 Modern Language As- in the absence of light / there is light. Even in the
sociation convention), they are often grotesques, in least electron / there are photons. / So in a larger
which readers may recognize themselves. As in the sense you must consider your own toes. . . .” Stone
poem “Bazook,” many of the characters in Second- connects electron, photon, and toes in a poem that
Hand Coat have gone “beserk” [sic]; but the po- elicits laughter in the beginning and a deep sense
ems question what is meant by “sanity” and of poignancy at the conclusion: “And your toes,
“insanity.” Mrs. Dubosky in “What Can You Do?”; passengers of the extreme / clustered on your
Aunt Virginia in “Curtains”; Uncle, Little Ivan, and dough-white body, / say how they miss his feet, the
Aunt Bess in “The Miracle”; the Masons in “Sun- thin elegance of his ankles.”
day”—all are a little daft, yet, as Clark noted, they
show readers the truth of who they are. Often poignant, as in “Liebeslied,” some of
these poems are as lyrical as any in In an Irides-
The humor of Second-Hand Coat also extends cent Time. In “Names” the internal rhymes offer
to the poems that show Stone as an avid student of the reader as rich an inheritance as all the “plants
contemporary science. Just as the young Stone took on the mountain,” with their names like “penny-
encyclopedias to bed with her, the mature Stone royal, boneset, / bedstraw, toadflax—from whom I
reads everything she can about astronomy, the new did descend in perpetuity.” The music in Second-
physics, the natural world, the galaxy, neurons, and Hand Coat is far more intricate than that of previ-
protons. Much of the effect of these poems has to ous collections; sound in Stone’s poetry deserves
do with Stone’s immense knowledge of the way the more study.
world actually works, and in many of these poems,
she fuses the wacky humor and drummer’s rhythms Second-Hand Coat is a book that, like the
of her father, the lyricism of her mother’s reading speaker’s mother in the poem “Pokeberries” (as
of Tennyson, and her own relentless curiosity, wit, Donald Hall has observed), splits language in two.
and wisdom. “The bunya-bunya is a great louse that The next-to-last poem in the section of new poems
sucks,” Stone begins in “From the Arboretum,” a in Second-Hand Coat, “Translations,” may well be
poem that goes on to show the intricacy of relat- Stone’s best poem to date. In it one sees the most
edness: “Rings of ants, bark beetles, sponge molds, powerful characteristics of the collection: a tone of
/ even cockroaches communicate in its armpits. / forgiveness and understanding, and, through anger
But it protests only with the voices of starlings, / and aversion, a deep forgiving love.
their colony at its top in the forward brush. / To
them it is only an old armchair, a brothel, the front There is also laughter. “Women Laughing,” for
porch.” Other poems are even more obviously instance, incorporates all the lyricism of In an Iri-
based on Stone’s scientific knowledge. “Moving

184 Poetry for Students

Ordinary Words

descent Time, with a new complexity, a richer, ma- Review of Ordinary Words, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 246,
turer vision: Issue 30, July 26, 1999, p. 86.

Laughter from women gathers like reeds in the Silberg, Richard, Review of Ordinary Words, in Poetry
river. Flash, November–December 1999, p. 47.
A silence of light below their rhythm glazes the
water. Smith, Dinitia, “Poetry That Captures a Tough 87 Years,”
They are on a rim of silence looking into the river. in the New York Times, December 10, 2002, p. B1.
Their laughter traces the water as kingfishers dip-
ping Stone, Ruth, “Then,” in Ordinary Words, Paris Press, 1999,
circles within circles set the reeds clicking; p. 31.
and an upward rush of herons lifts out of the nests
of laughter, Further Reading
their long stick-legs dangling, herons, rising out of
the river. Barker, Wendy, “Ruth Stone,” in Dictionary of Literary Bi-
ography, Vol. 105, American Poets since World War II, Sec-
Ruth Stone’s poems are indeed “nests of laughter,” ond Series, edited by R. S. Gwynn, Gale Research, 1991,
of wisdom and humor. With Second-Hand Coat pp. 241–46.
Stone’s poems have not only moved far beyond
personal grief but have also risen to the stature of Barker offers a thorough overview of Stone’s career
perhaps the finest poetry being written today. through 1990 and includes a useful bibliography of
secondary sources.
Source: Wendy Barker, “Ruth Stone,” in Dictionary of Lit-
erary Biography, Vol. 105, American Poets Since World Barker, Wendy, and Sandra M. Gilbert, eds., The House Is
War II, Second Series, edited by R. S. Gwynn, Gale Re- Made of Poetry: The Art of Ruth Stone, Ad feminam series,
search, 1991, pp. 241–46. Southern Illinois University Press, 1996.

Sources Barker and Gilbert collect essays on Stone’s poetry
by critics and poets such as Willis Barnstone and Di-
Campbell, Gowan, “A Conversation with Ruth Stone,” in ane Wakoski.
12gauge.com, http://www.12gauge.com/ (last accessed Jan-
uary 19, 2003). Bishop, Elizabeth, The Complete Poems, 1927–1979, Far-
rar Straus Giroux, 1983.
Hoffert, Barbara, Review of Ordinary Words, in Library
Journal, Vol. 125, Issue 7, April 15, 2000, p. 95. Critics have often compared Stone’s poetry to that of
Elizabeth Bishop for its attention to detail and the or-
Kreider, Rose M., and Jason M. Fields, “Number, Timing, dinary things of life.
and Duration of Marriages and Divorces,” in U.S. Census
Bureau Current Population Reports, February 2002, p. 18. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, “The War of the
Words,” in No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer
in the Twentieth Century, Vol. 1, Yale University Press, 1989.

Gilbert and Gubar discuss Stone’s place in relation
to other women writers of the late twentieth century.

Volume 19 185

Perfect Light

Ted Hughes What astounds many readers about Ted Hughes’s
1998 Birthday Letters (1998) is the tender, honest, and
confessional voice that rises from the poems.
Hughes is known for his emotional detachment
from the situations about which he wrote, an aloof-
ness of voice that reveals little about his speaker’s
sentiment and even less about his own. His lan-
guage is often harsh and explicit in describing vi-
olence, whether in the natural world of animals or
in human society, and his subjects avoid personal
experience, particularly any overt reference to his
wife, fellow poet Sylvia Plath. But then he pub-
lished an entire book written in memory of her.

Birthday Letters includes eighty-eight poems
composed over a twenty-five- to thirty-year period,
and traces the couple’s brief but saturated life to-
gether, from the first date and marriage to separa-
tion and suicide. Some of the poems are thought to
have been inspired by specific letters and pho-
tographs of Plath that Hughes rediscovered while
preparing her papers for sale to Smith College.
“Perfect Light” is one such poem.

Based on a 1962 photo of Plath in a field of
daffodils holding their two children, “Perfect
Light” describes the physical scene and ends with
an ominous metaphor suggesting the mother’s in-
escapable fate. With atypical softness and senti-
mentality, Hughes addresses Plath directly as the
“you” in the poem, portraying her in angelic terms
and comparing her innocence to that of the chil-
dren, before concluding that such a blissful moment
was doomed to fade into a “perfect light.” Birth-

186

Perfect Light

day Letters is the only collection in which this
poem appears.

Author Biography Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes was born August 17, 1930, in the vil- husband, and worse, as one of the reasons for her
lage of Mytholmroyd in West Yorkshire, England, death.
but grew up in Mexborough. In school Hughes was
encouraged to write poetry by teachers who recog- Scholars, however, have long recognized
nized his talent, and he was later awarded a schol- Hughes’s place as one of England’s greatest poets
arship to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he of the twentieth century. He was made poet laure-
studied English literature. His fascination with an- ate of Great Britain in 1984, and was a recipient of
imals and their connections to humankind caused many literary awards in his long career, including
him to change his major to anthropology, and af- the Guinness Poetry Award in 1958 for The Hawk
ter earning his bachelor’s degree in 1954, he moved in the Rain, and the Whitbread Book of the Year
to London to work as a zoo attendant and gardener. Award in 1998 for Birthday Letters. Birthday Let-
ters, which contains the bittersweet poem “Perfect
Hughes returned to Cambridge for a master’s Light,” is Hughes’s tribute to Plath—to their mar-
degree in the late 1950s. He fell in with the liter- riage, their love, their children, and their grievous
ary crowd and published several poems in local ending. Only months after publication of Birthday
journals. At a party he met a young American Ful- Letters, Hughes died of cancer, October 28, 1998,
bright scholar named Sylvia Plath, who was also a in Devon.
poet, and the two were immediately drawn to one
another. Within months they were married, so be- Poem Summary
ginning a tumultuous relationship that neither could
have anticipated would end in such tragedy. Line 1

The couple moved to America in 1957 and In the first line of “Perfect Light,” the speaker
both taught at universities in Massachusetts. The establishes the second-person address of the poem,
same year, Hughes had his first collection of po- talking directly to a “you” and implying that he is
etry published. In 1959 they moved back to Eng- looking at a photograph of the person. Though he
land. They had a daughter in 1960 and a son in does not mention a picture specifically in this line,
1962, and seemed to live simple, pastoral lives the phrase “There you are” suggests the premise
without much money, encouraging one another’s
poetic efforts and enjoying their children. But a
darker side of their marriage came to light when
Hughes had an affair with a German woman, As-
sia Wevill. Plath committed suicide in 1963, a few
months after her husband left her.

For years to come, Plath followers blamed
Hughes’s infidelity for her death, some even at-
tending his readings only to stand up and shout,
“Murderer!” when he took the stage. Tragedy
struck Hughes again in 1969 when Wevill also
committed suicide, adding to the anguish by first
killing their two-year-old daughter.

A year later Hughes married again, moving
with his wife to a farm in Devon where they raised
sheep and cattle. For the next three decades, Hughes
wrote prolifically, publishing poetry, drama, liter-
ary criticism, and works for children, though he was
never able to escape completely his fate as Plath’s

Volume 19 187

Perfect Light

and the rest of the poem confirms it. This opening the third use of the word “innocence” describes the
line also contains the first use of the word “inno- boy, the woman is still portrayed in her own child-
cence,” which will be used a total of three times like purity, like a little girl holding a teddy bear.
and here refers to the innocent appearance of the The speaker further glorifies the mother and child
woman in the photograph. by comparing them to the Virgin Mary and the baby
Jesus. Now the woman and her son are not just in-
Lines 2–3 nocent, but “Holy” as well.

These two lines further establish the setting, Lines 11–13
explaining that the woman in the picture is “Sitting
among [her] daffodils,” the latter word another one These lines introduce the third person in the
that will appear repeatedly in the poem—five times photograph, the woman’s “daughter, barely two,”
to be exact. In line 2, the speaker reveals the pic- sitting beside her mother and “laughing up” at her.
ture specifically, suggesting that its subject appears At the end of line 12, the phrase “Like a daffodil”
“Posed” for a photograph that should be called appears to modify the description of the little girl
“ ‘Innocence.’” This second use of the word “in- that comes just before it, but not so. The first word
nocence,” coming so quickly after the first one, in line 13 is “You,” meaning the woman, and this
serves to emphasize the speaker’s opinion that the is again the person who is compared to the flower.
woman is a symbol of purity and childlike naiveté. This time her face is like a daffodil’s when it turns
downward, as she leans over to say something to
Lines 4–5 her daughter.

The phrase “perfect light” is not only the title Line 14
of the poem, but also appears two times within the
poem. In line 4, it refers to the sunlight or daylight This final line of the first stanza marks a shift
that shines on the face of the woman sitting in the in the tone and setting of the poem. Whatever the
field of flowers. The light is “perfect” for picture woman says to her little girl cannot be understood
taking, and the speaker compares the woman’s fa- by the speaker, and the camera of course cannot
cial features to a daffodil. Line 5 contains the sec- capture it either. The word “lost” is especially sig-
ond and third uses of the word “daffodil,” which nificant here in that it describes not only the
create an ironic twist in the way they are presented woman’s fate, but also that of the speaker, their
with the word “Like.” The first phrase—“Like a marriage, even their love.
daffodil”—simply makes the comparison of phys-
ical beauty between the woman and the flower. The Lines 15–17
second phrase—“Like any one of those daf-
fodils”—initially seems to make the same point, to The gentle tone and pastoral imagery of the
be a repetition of the simile just used. The line im- first stanza is replaced with a despairing voice and
mediately following, however, shows that the war images in the second stanza. In these first three
speaker has something different in mind. lines, the speaker describes the hill on which the
woman is sitting as a “moated fort hill, bigger than
Lines 6–7 [her] house.” A moat is generally constructed to
protect a castle from assault, and this image sug-
The comparison in these lines is between the gests that the woman is in need of protection from
brief length of time that the ephemeral daffodils something or someone. The “knowledge / Inside
will exist in the field and the same short amount of the hill” on which she and the children sit refers
time that the woman will have to live among them. back to the final lines of the first stanza, in which
These lines foreshadow her sorrowful fate but still she bowed her head to speak to her daughter. What-
reflect the soft tenderness of the speaker’s feelings. ever her words were, they are now kept secret by
Line 7 ends with an introduction of someone or the earth that took them in.
something else in the photograph, something the
woman holds in her arms. Lines 18–20

Lines 8–10 The phrase “Failed to reach the picture” refers
to the “knowledge” in line 15 and reemphasizes the
The second subject in the picture is the fact that neither the speaker nor the camera knows
woman’s “new son,” whom she holds “Like a teddy what the woman said to her daughter. The speaker
bear” against her. The child is only “a few weeks” personifies time with military imagery, saying it
old, or a few weeks “into his innocence,” and while comes toward her “like an infantryman / Returning

188 Poetry for Students

Perfect Light

slowly out of no-man’s-land.” The location of no- Topics for
man’s land is significant because it means the land Further
between two warring parties, suggesting that the Study
woman is caught up in the middle of her own pri-
vate war, though what its cause is or who the armies • Read some of Plath’s poetry and compare the
are is not revealed. style and voice to that of Hughes’s poems in
Birthday Letters. What are the main similarities
Lines 21–22 and differences?

The phrases “Bowed under something” and • If the Hughes-Plath scandal had occurred today
“never reached you” refer back to the woman’s instead of in the early 1960s, how would it have
“next moment” in line 18. The notion that her fu- been handled differently in the media and by
ture “never reached” her parallels the previous idea British society? Would there be any difference
that the knowledge of her words “Failed to reach” in the British and American responses?
or to be captured in the photograph. The final line
of the poem again foretells the woman’s fate in say- • For years, Plath fans placed blame for her death
ing that her next moment “Simply melted into the directly on Hughes. What does current psychol-
perfect light.” The phrase “perfect light” suggests ogy research suggest about the cause of most
something darker, something far from perfect. suicides? Is it right or wrong to blame the ad-
mittedly unfaithful husband for his wife’s tak-
Themes ing her own life?

The Brevity of Life • What effect does the repetition of the words
“innocence” and “daffodils” have on the first
The repetition of the word “daffodils” in “Per- stanza of this poem? Instead of these words,
fect Light” is more than a technique of style to what other words may have been repeated for a
make the poem cohesive. It is also evidence of the similar effect?
dominant theme that runs through many of the po-
ems in Birthday Letters: life is preciously short, and unexpected. But in “Perfect Light,” the grim real-
even shorter for those who take their own life. The ity of a woman’s death by gassing herself in the
word appears five times in this poem. Three times kitchen oven is remarkably contrasted by the per-
the word “daffodils” is used with the word “like” sonification of her in tender spring flowers. Hughes
to make a direct comparison between the subject, had the advantage of writing this poem some years
Plath, and the daffodils. Hughes presents such a after Plath died; had he written it the same day the
powerful, recurrent connection between them that photograph was taken, he may have concentrated
the flowers become his ill-fated wife as she be- on the beauty of the daffodils and the serenity of
comes them. The basis of this relationship and the the countryside, comparing only those items to his
glue that holds it together is the brevity of life, both wife and children. As it was, however, the flowers
that of the daffodils and Plath’s. In a poem called came to represent something more pressing, some-
“Daffodils” from this collection, Hughes writes that thing darker in their lives, and Hughes makes that
“We knew we’d live for ever. We had not learned clear through the repetition of one word.
/ What a fleeting glance of the everlasting / Daf-
fodils are. . . . the rarest ephemera— / Our own Innocence versus Knowledge
days!” What a fleeting glance and rare ephemera
Plath’s life turned out to be. As “Perfect Light” de- Another compelling theme in this poem is the
clares, she had but one spring to live among her tension between innocence and knowledge, be-
daffodils, and though the flowers would return the tween the perfect light of blameless simplicity and
following year, Plath would not. the perfect light into which knowledge fades, leav-
ing one blind to it. Throughout the entire first
A theme purporting the shortness of human life
may seem too obvious to be of much value, but it
is made more complex here because the brevity is
helped along by suicide. A poem about the death
of an elderly person or someone who is killed or
succumbs to disease is certainly worthwhile and not

Volume 19 189

Perfect Light

stanza, which is nearly twice as long as the second, ond stanza. The first stanza becomes almost rote
Hughes stresses over and over again the innocent with daffodils and innocence, but the technique is
physical appearance and emotional demeanor of his very effective in driving home the speaker’s frame
wife, their children, and the overall setting of the of mind. He relates both flowers and tender naiveté
photograph that inspired the work. If the poem to every aspect of his subject, and manages to keep
ended after line 14, the theme would be only in- the repetition from becoming monotonous by us-
nocence and would conclude with an intriguing yet ing the repeated words in ironic places. Both “daf-
still expected outcome. But the second stanza pre- fodils” and “innocence” are paired with expected
sents an about-face, taking place inside the and unexpected partners, the daffodils expressing
speaker’s mind instead of within the setting of the both physical beauty and a short life and innocence,
photograph and exploring the effect of knowledge foretelling a haunting, lifelong struggle to under-
on the naiveté of both the speaker and the woman stand and overcome past misery.
in the picture.
In the second stanza, the technique of repeti-
Knowledge is ironic here; it is both horrible and tion is more somber and concentrates on the frus-
unattainable. It is horrible for the speaker because tration of failure. “Failed to reach” and “never
he can never know what words of wisdom, or sim- reached you” are phrases that are already effective
ple, loving platitudes his wife spoke to their daugh- by themselves, but they are made more forceful by
ter as the picture was snapped. Just as sadly, it is appearing only three lines apart. In a relatively
unattainable for the woman because she is com- short poem, this technique works especially well,
pletely unaware of what her next moment will bring. and in an otherwise typical free-verse effort, it adds
If there must be a victor in the struggle between in- cohesiveness where there may not seem to be any.
nocence and knowledge, Hughes awards the title to Beyond the technique of simple repetition, “Perfect
the latter, as he expresses by the end of the poem. Light” is in line with ordinary contemporary free
verse, containing no direct rhyme and following no
The word “innocence” is nowhere to be found pattern of meter or poetic form.
in the second stanza. Something quite the opposite
now dominates the scene, along with the concept of Historical Context
failure and inability. Neither knowledge nor time
can make its destination, and both would-be recip- The premise of “Perfect Light” makes it clear that
ients suffer for it—Plath with her life and Hughes Hughes based the poem on a photograph taken in
with a lifetime of haunting memories and unan- 1962, judging from the ages of his children in the
swered questions. The sudden shift from daffodils picture. When he actually wrote the poem is any-
and teddy bears to an infantryman and no-man’s one’s guess, as the so-called “Sylvia” poems were
land gives testament to the tormented emotions with written over a twenty-five- to thirty-year period.
which the poet was left after his first wife’s suicide. This particular poem, however, never appeared in
It was also the knowledge that remained, a knowl- any other collections during those decades, as oth-
edge that came to dominate so much of Hughes’s ers from Birthday Letters did, and may well have
work, though he managed to conceal its direct been penned later in his career. Hughes’s incessant
source until the publication of Birthday Letters. privacy makes it difficult to put an exact date on
much of his autobiographical work, and it is un-
Style likely that any social, cultural, or political events
of the time had any effect on the poems inspired
Contemporary Free Verse solely by his relationship with and love for his first
wife. Nonetheless, despite his reclusive behavior,
The style of “Perfect Light” is contemporary Hughes was certainly a citizen of the world while
free verse, but that does not mean it is totally with- preparing this collection for publication in the
out any structured format. While the voice is con- 1990s, and that decade brought significant changes
versational and the language is unadorned, the to his native Great Britain as it did to many nations
poem is driven by the force of repetition. This work across the globe.
revolves around three central, repeated words and
ideas: the word “daffodil” is mentioned five times, From the outset, the British government was
“innocence” is mentioned three times, and the no- undergoing a shake-up as Prime Minister Margaret
tion of inevitable failure appears twice in the sec-

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Thatcher resigned in 1990 after her economic poli- greatly supported, and Scotland and Wales estab-
cies resulted in decaying inner cities, and her op- lished their own legislative bodies, giving them a
position to greater British intervention in Europe more independent voice in their domestic affairs.
caused a revolt within her own Conservative party. Both houses of Parliament also voted to strip most
The Conservatives, however, managed to hold onto hereditary peers of their right to vote in the House
power in the 1992 elections, as John Major came of Lords, a tradition of British government deemed
to power, bringing with him more moderate, mid- impractical under the Blair administration. The
dle-of-the-road policies than those of his predeces- popularity of Blair’s government was made evident
sor. A central focus of Major was the ongoing again a few years later when the Labour Party
conflict between the government and the Irish Re- handed the Conservatives a sound defeat in the
publican Army of Northern Ireland. A peace ini- 2001 elections.
tiative led to a cease-fire in 1994, but by 1996
renewed violence had erupted again. Peace talks It is doubtful that the affairs of government or
began again in 1997 and within two years both the economy bear any significance on Hughes’s
sides had reached an agreement to end direct rule “Sylvia” poems, and just as unlikely that any gos-
by the British government in Northern Ireland. sip about Royal divorces or marriages, the tragic
death of Princess Diana, or the creation of Dolly
The early 1990s also saw the collapse of the the cloned sheep in Scotland were any source of
Soviet Union and the official end of the Cold War inspiration for such personal poetry. And while one
between the United States and the Soviet Union. can never completely discount the effect of culture
These events also had a positive impact on Great or society on any individual, those who maintain a
Britain, America’s staunchest ally, particularly highly private life and derive creativity from within
with a greater unification of Europe. But being an seem less susceptible to either. As poet laureate,
ally also meant supporting the United States in a Hughes was compelled to meet his public duties,
time of war and in 1991, when the Americans but when it came to Plath, he was definitely one of
bombed Iraq in Operation Desert Storm, the British the private ones.
were there as well.
Critical Overview
Another critical development in Great Britain
during the 1990s was the nation’s participation in Unfortunate for both Hughes and poetry readers in
the European Union, or EU. While some Britons general, the critical reception to his work has often
called for a limited role, others said the country been based more on the man’s personal life than
should be vigorously active in the organization, but on the poet’s talent for writing. But Hughes-the-
previous disputes with other member nations did ogre did not hit the presses until 1963 after Plath’s
not always make that possible. In 1996 an outbreak death, meaning that Hughes-the-poet enjoyed at
of mad cow disease in England worsened rela- least six years of keen interest, even high praise,
tionships when other EU nations banned the im- for his early poetry. Following the publication of
port of British beef. By 1999 the ban was lifted his first collection, revered fellow poet W. S. Mer-
when the EU approved Britain’s plans for con- win lauded the young Hughes’s work in “Some-
trolling the disease, but France continued its own thing of His Own to Say,” a 1957 article for the
ban, further straining British-French relations. The New York Times Book Review: “Mr. Hughes has
two nations experienced an on-again-off-again re- the kind of talent that makes you wonder more than
lationship throughout the decade, with one high commonly where he will go from here, not because
point being the completion of the Channel Tunnel you can’t guess but because you venture to hope.”
project in 1994, which began in France eight years
earlier. This tunnel linked England not only to As it turns out, it really was not possible to
France, but to the entire European mainland. guess, for after the highly publicized scandal re-
garding Hughes’s unfaithfulness to Plath and her
Still another point of contention in Great subsequent suicide, many critics and scholars be-
Britain was the proliferation of the “Euro” mone- gan reading his work more to find hidden refer-
tary system in the late 1990s, which some Euro- ences to the tragic marriage and violent ending than
pean countries embraced immediately and others for mere poetic creativity. Those critics who did
more reluctantly accepted. A supporter of the new concentrate on the poems themselves highlighted
European currency, Labour Party leader Tony Blair
became prime minister of Great Britain in 1997.
Blair’s move to decentralize the government was

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the overuse of violent animal imagery, dark set- fair or about his reaction to the suicide and by hav-
tings, and bleak themes, usually considering the ve- ing the gall to edit Plath’s poetry and fiction, burn
hemence and gloominess a reflection of the poet’s one of her journals, and limit access to all of it.
personality. Nonetheless, Hughes’s raw gift for po- Some say those were grounds enough to brand him
etry did not go unrecognized by British literati, and an arrogant rogue and coldhearted brute for life.
he was made poet laureate of the nation and Perhaps Hughes’s stony silence on this terrible
awarded several prestigious awards over the years, episode was not an attempt to conceal how little he
despite the personal controversy. cared but, rather, how much he grieved. Perhaps
his inhospitable aloofness was really painful inse-
After the publication of New Selected Poems, curity. Maybe he loved his wife more than the
1957–1994, a shift in criticism began. Hughes was world had a right to know.
finally recognized for having a side—a tender, re-
flective, loving side—that the public had not seen Emory University in Atlanta now houses the
before. Writing a review of this collection for two-and-a-half ton Hughes collection of manu-
World Literature Today, critic Peter Firchow ob- scripts, journals, and letters acquired about a year
serves about the sixteen “Sylvia” poems in the “Un- before the poet’s death. Opened exclusively to
collected” section at the end of the book: “Hughes scholars in 1999, the archive has proven to be an
had never before permitted so intimate a poetic eye-opener for those privileged to have seen the
glimpse into this much-excavated-and-speculated- material that comprises it. In an article for the At-
about patch of his life. . . . [These poems] are by lanta Journal-Constitution titled “In a New Light,”
themselves worth the price of the entire collection.” journalist Bo Emerson writes about the scholars’
reactions, saying, “Their early verdict: Hughes is a
In an article called “Owning the Facts of His different man and a different poet than we knew.”
Life: Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters,” from the Lit- One visiting researcher, poet Carolyn Wright
erary Review, critic Carol Bere writes, “While there (quoted in Emerson), notes that the writings pre-
is little question that much of the impact of poems sent “a consistent voice, the voice of a man who is
turns on the immediacy of biography . . . this should deeply, deeply marked by this violent death of this
not override the realization that Birthday Letters is woman he loved so much.” Summing up the pre-
a major work of poetry by Hughes, containing some viously undisclosed material most poignantly,
of the most visceral, accessible writing that he has Emerson asserts that “Birthday Letters was, in a
produced to date.” Hughes would enjoy this kind way, the interview that Hughes never gave.” From
of criticism only a few short months before his that final collection, the poem “Perfect Light” is an
death, but perhaps the praise was at least a small apt representative of what the poet may have felt
satisfaction for him, even if it came much too late. in his heart but refused to speak with his tongue.

Criticism The primary evidence that “Perfect Light” was
written with honesty and openness is that the sub-
Pamela Steed Hill ject of the poem is addressed directly. Hughes did
not attempt to evade forthright expression by using
Hill is the author of a poetry collection, has a more distant third-person “she” or hiding behind
published widely in literary journals, and is an ed- any ambiguity in who the person he is speaking to
itor for a university publications department. In the really is. “There you are” (italics mine) starts this
following essay, Hill addresses the turnaround in poem off with unmistakable candor from the
scholarly opinion on Hughes’s personality after the speaker to Plath, essentially leaving the reader on
publication of his last collection of poetry. the sidelines to be a mere observer of or eaves-
dropper on an intensely personal utterance. And
Now that both Plath and Hughes are dead, consider this: nineteen times in this brief poem
more fair and equitable analyses of their tragic re- Hughes uses the word “you” or “your.” Nineteen
lationship is being written than was ever afforded times in twenty-two lines he directly addresses his
them while alive. This is especially true for Hughes, dead wife, creating such a compact, feverish at-
of course, who spent the last thirty-five years of his tempt to communicate his feelings about her, for
life fending off scornful reports of his marital infi- her, and to her that it seems almost overkill. Al-
delity and evading accusations of near-murder in most, but not quite. Here, what may appear to be
Plath’s death. Truly, he did not help himself much exaggeration and overuse of a technique is really
by refusing to be interviewed about the entire af- something as simple and honest as desperation. Re-

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peating “you” and “your” over and over is the What Hughes will
method of a man compelled to get his message really never know is why
across, not to the world, but to the only one who she did it. In spite of his
matters to him, dead or alive. obvious infidelity, in spite
of the trouble between
The first stanza of “Perfect Light” in particular them, in spite of any
is loaded with repeating words, and both “inno- painful influence his
cence” and “daffodils” embrace a tender affection leaving had on her, why
and sweet lovingness that seem so unlikely coming did she take her own life?”
from Hughes. How odd for a husband accused of
driving his wife to suicide to compare her beauty to the benefit of the doubt, at least in order to give the
a flower, her gentleness to that of a child holding a poet a fair chance to live his own life and create
teddy bear. This suspected lout even goes so far as his own work, which was admittedly some of the
to liken Plath to the mother of Jesus and to portray best poetry of the time. It was as though they were
the entire family setting as not only pastoral and willing to accept the fact that only Hughes would
comforting, but supernatural and holy. The first ever be the one to know how he really felt about
fourteen lines of this poem are so saturated with Plath’s suicide and public opinion did not matter.
sweetness that they beg for a touch of bitterness, or In the same vein, the “knowledge / Inside the hill”
at least a good reason for their candy coating. And on which Plath was sitting in the “Perfect Light”
Hughes does not disappoint. Ironically, as sappy and photograph would forever be lost to Hughes who
sentimental as the first stanza is, it in no way can could not hear what words his wife had spoken to
overshadow the brutal reality of grief and sorrow their daughter when the picture was taken. Most
that permeates the second. Yet the poet does not likely they were only benign phrases of love from
lose his tenderness in the last eight lines, only the a mother to a daughter, but casting them off misses
premise in which it exists. the point. What Hughes will really never know is
why she did it. In spite of his obvious infidelity, in
If a sunlit field of daffodils and Plath’s inno- spite of the trouble between them, in spite of any
cent appearance early on represent the youthful, painful influence his leaving had on her, why did
sincere love of a young married couple, then the she take her own life?
“moated fort hill” and infantryman returning from
no-man’s land later must symbolize the vulnera- This is undoubtedly a difficult question to an-
bility and grief of the one left behind. But even in swer regarding anyone who chooses suicide as a
the midst of such harsh military verbiage, the tone way out. First, one must ask, “A way out of what?”
is still soft, the voice still placid. Hughes turns to In Plath’s case, many of her friends, mourners, and
images of violence because he must in order to keep fans were quick to answer, “A life made miserable
the poem honest. Plath may have died peacefully by her lousy husband.” But how can one individ-
in her sleep when her lungs filled with gas from ual truly force such a final, self-imposed sentence
the oven, but the circumstances of such a demise on someone else, especially when that someone is
are truly horrible. When one considers the entire a young mother with two beautiful children who
situation, all of it reeks of violence and misery and surely adore her? The fact is Plath had problems
pain. Like war. These images in the second stanza long before she met Hughes. Her journals and her
suggest a sudden and complete turnaround in the poems reflect a less-than-perfect childhood and a
emotions of both Plath and Hughes, a change that volatile relationship with both parents. Her autobi-
neither could foresee nor, more sadly, prevent. ographical novel The Bell Jar portrays the life of
an emotionally unstable young woman bent on self-
The sentiment of “Perfect Light” is not that of
a man who had no feelings for his wife while she
was alive and certainly not that of one who was un-
affected by her death. While Plath fans were busy
shouting down Hughes at his own poetry readings
and chiseling his name off their heroine’s tomb-
stone, no one really knew what was going on in-
side the very private, estranged husband whose
feelings must have run the gamut from guilt to ex-
oneration, anger to grief. Still other more sober,
nonjudgmental readers and critics allowed Hughes

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destruction. And most importantly, at least in An historical example of this relationship be-
Hughes’s defense, she had already attempted sui- tween the visual and literary arts will suggest, by
cide in the early 1950s—years before ever meeting analogy, what happens to any reader of “Perfect
the young British poet. This, of course, is not to Light” who knows the basic story of Sylvia Plath.
detract from the sorrowful fact of Plath’s death nor In 1555, Pieter Brueghel painted “The Fall of
to sympathize with an unfaithful husband who Icarus,” a work depicting the mythological charac-
surely could have handled his personal life with ter who flew too close to the sun on his man-made
less selfishness and more consideration of how his wings. The painting shows Icarus plummeting into
behavior would affect others. But to place whole- the sea—but doing so far in the background. The
sale blame on Hughes for his wife’s suicide seems, foreground features scenes from the daily grind of
at best, a reactionary move on the part of shocked peasant life: plowing and shepherding are given
and misinformed groupies, and, at worst, a pathetic much more space on the canvas than Icarus, who
attempt to further the cause of feminism by glam- is a mere speck near the horizon. Almost four-hun-
orizing the suicide and acting as judge and jury to dred years later (in 1938), W. H. Auden published
publicly convict the “guilty.” After Birthday Let- “Musee de Beaux Arts,” a poetic appreciation of
ters, some members of the jury have rescinded their Brueghel’s painting and an insight into the vanity
verdict. of human literal (and figurative) attempts at flight.
The lines in which Auden praises the old masters
In the Atlanta Journal-Constitution article, (like Brueghel) because they “never forgot” that
Emerson contends that “Through it all, Hughes re- “dreadful martyrdom must run its course” in a “cor-
fused to explain himself or to be interviewed about ner” or “some untidy spot” offer a critical com-
Plath.” It was likely this profound obstinacy that mentary on the painting; they also, however, affect
fed much of the accusatory outcry from a public the way that any viewer of the painting will re-ex-
already hungry for the juicy details. But would the amine it. Reading Auden’s poem affects the way a
condemned poet have been able to appease angry viewer sees Breughel’s painting and, of course,
Plath supporters by laying open his heart on the looking at Breughel’s painting will affect the way
matter? Would they have had sympathy for a a reader understands Auden’s poem. “The Fall of
thoughtless scoundrel who walked out on his wife Icarus” and “Musee de Beaux Arts” exist indepen-
and children for another woman if he had gone be- dently from each other, yet they are welded to-
fore a microphone and confessed his true love for gether in a kind of artistic Gestalt.
the one he abandoned? Not likely. Hughes had
every right and every reason to keep his private Ted Hughes’s “Perfect Light” works in much
thoughts private, his personal grief personal. In the the same way as Auden’s poem: it is the speaker’s
end, though, he came forward to let the world know reaction to a work of visual art (in this case, a pho-
that he did indeed love Plath and that he did indeed tograph) that changes the way the reader looks at
mourn her loss. and understands the work being described.

Source: Pamela Steed Hill, Critical Essay on “Perfect But what exactly changes? How does this
Light,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003. change occur? A simple experiment will illustrate
the change in a less profound but more immediate
Daniel Moran way: show anyone the photograph of Plath and her
children on which the poem is based but do not iden-
Moran is a teacher of English and American tify the people in it. What does the unassuming
literature. In this essay, Moran examines the ways viewer see? A woman, thirty or so, sitting in a field
in which Hughes’s poem evokes a sense of “dou- with two children (presumably her own). She is
ble time” in the viewer. smiling at one of them, a girl; with her left arm she
cradles an infant. The setting is pastoral; the daf-
The literary and the visual arts are very similar. fodils in the foreground and held in the little girl’s
Each strives to capture a moment, tell a story or pin hand are in tune with the mood of the photograph.
down something that would otherwise be lost in the It is a picture of motherhood, of a quiet day in the
flow of time. When a writer composes a piece of country—or of “innocence,” as Hughes labels it.
written work about a piece of visual art, neither of
the original pieces remain unchanged: the written Now, tell the person to whom you have shown
work affects how one views the visual and the vi- the photograph that the woman is Sylvia Plath, the
sual work informs the way a reader approaches the poet who would commit suicide less than a year af-
written. Understanding this relationship is key to un- ter the photograph was taken. Everything changes.
derstanding Hughes’s “Perfect Light” and its issues.

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Her smile becomes more complex. The children be- Knowledge is power,
come objects of pathos rather than only “cute kids.” but it also pulls one out of
All of the ideas a viewer had about the photograph paradise, in this case, the
are exploded. The daffodils, once finishing touches paradise of innocence where
on a bucolic scene, become ironic commentators there is no suicide or torrent
on the people they surround; the viewer searches of emotions that need to be
for clues or some indication in the photograph that sorted out in verse.”
suggests Plath’s later fate.
The daffodils and “perfect light” of the title are
The photograph has not changed, but the similarly viewed as both innocent and ironic. Plath
viewer has. What brought about this change? is, in one sense, like the daffodils surrounding her:
Knowledge. The discovery that the smiling woman beautiful and positioned so as to catch the rays of
in the photograph is dead and died at her own hand. the sun just so. The light illuminates Plath’s face
The meanings of words and images are ambiguous “like a daffodil” while Plath turns her face to her
and complex enough, but they become even more daughter in the posture of a daffodil. However, such
complex and ambiguous in the flow of time. This comparisons also invite another, more sobering
is not to suggest that a modern viewer’s ideas about one: “Like any of those daffodils / It was to be your
the photograph are more profound or complex, in- only April on earth / Among your daffodils.” As
stead, they have been informed and shaped by the Robert Frost remarked, “Nothing gold can stay,”
knowledge brought with time. Shakespeare’s rous- and the thoughts of the natural death of the daf-
ing play about Henry V conquering France meant fodils in the photograph serve as a reminder of the
one thing in 1599 and quite another in 1944, when unnatural death of Plath. On one level, the April
England was in the throes of World War II. referred to here is the April of Chaucer’s Canter-
bury Tales, a time of life and growth (“that Aprill,
“Perfect Light” works by evoking this sense of with his shoures soote”), but in another sense it is
“double time,” the sense that there are, in a way, the April of Eliot’s The Waste Land (“April is the
two “versions” of the photograph. First, there is a cruelest month”). Both Aprils are present, in the
kind of prelapsarian one in which Plath and her photograph and the poem, simultaneously.
children seem posed “as in a picture” titled “Inno-
cence,” and a kind of postlapsarian version in As Hughes’s eye scans the photograph, it finds
which the viewer’s knowledge of good and evil other details that suggest a longed-for (yet impossible
(and suicide) make Plath’s smile more enigmatic. to attain) prelapsarian view. Her “new son” is “Like
Knowledge is power, but it also pulls one out of a teddy bear” and “only a few weeks into his in-
paradise, in this case, the paradise of innocence nocence”; he and Plath seem the epitome of
where there is no suicide or torrent of emotions that “Mother and infant, as in the Holy portrait.” The
need to be sorted out in verse. infant Jesus is, of course, a symbol of innocence,
yet one is also reminded of another time in which
The poem begins by addressing Plath directly: the Virgin Mary held her son: the Pieta. Any de-
“There you are, in all your innocence, / Sitting piction of the infant Jesus brings with it the knowl-
among your daffodils, as in a picture / Posed as for edge of his ultimate fate on the cross, just as any
the title: ‘Innocence.’” To an innocent observer photograph of Sylvia Plath brings with it the knowl-
who had never heard of Sylvia Plath, Hughes’s de- edge of her suicide.
scription would seem an apt one, but those who
know her fate cannot be so comfortable. Plath The stanza break signifies the moment in
seems posed “as in a picture” titled “Innocence,” Hughes’s apprehension of the photograph when he
but she is not. Instead, she is posed for a picture deals directly with the fact that he is looking at a
with a much different and unspoken title, a title that soon-to-be suicide: the “knowledge” that she would
would (if one could) encapsulate all of the contrary
emotions felt by Hughes while viewing this pho-
tograph. The only way in which the photograph
could be titled “Innocence” would be if the person
bestowing the title were wholly unaware of its sub-
ject’s tragic end. Yet, Plath’s own innocence of
what would be her fate can still be perceived by
Hughes and it is his perception of this innocence
that he tries to convey to the reader.

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kill herself is “Inside the hill” on which she is posed.
The landscape itself seems pregnant with meaning.
Hughes remarks that this knowledge “Failed to
reach the picture,” but this is only true in one sense.
While Plath is innocent of the knowledge of what
she will do to herself, Hughes (and, by extension,
any informed viewer) is not. The hill is compared
to a “moated fort hill” to make it seem like a bas-
tion of innocence, a place protected from the
knowledge that time will bring. This knowledge,
however, is “Inside the hill”—in other words, the
very thing against which this bastion of innocence
is supposed to stand has already corrupted it. One
cannot pretend that the knowledge of Plath’s sui-
cide is not there. Thus, Plath’s “next moment,” a
moment that would both disrupt the “perfect light”
and bring her closer to her suicide, was “coming to-
wards” her “like an infantryman / Returning slowly
out of no-man’s-land”—but never “reached” her.
In other words, the moment is static, frozen in time
by the photograph, and in that frozen moment, the
violence that the “infantryman” time would bring
to her is no match for the power of her innocence.
Therefore, it “Simply melted into the perfect light.”
The poet thus stands in awe of Plath’s innocence
while simultaneously struggling with the knowl-
edge that longs to assault such innocence. One can-
not avoid the knowledge brought about by time,
nor can one pretend that such knowledge does not
affect one’s perceptions of the past. Before Plath’s
suicide, the “perfect light” is that of perfect inno-
cence; today, the light seen in that photograph is
painful and ironic.

Source: Daniel Moran, Critical Essay on “Perfect Light,”
in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.

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Bere, Carol, “Owning the Facts of His Life: Ted Hughes’s
Birthday Letters,” in Literary Review, Vol. 41, No. 4, Sum-
mer 1998, pp. 556–61.

Emerson, Bo, “In a New Light,” in the Atlanta Journal-Con-
stitution, March 19, 1999.

Firchow, Peter, Review of New Selected Poems, 1957–1994,
in World Literature Today, Vol. 70, No. 2, Spring 1996, pp.
407–08.

Merwin, W. S., “Something of His Own to Say,” in New
York Times Book Review, October 6, 1957, p. 43.

Sources Further Reading

Auden, W. H., “Musée de Beaux Arts” in Collected Poems, Hughes, Ted, New Selected Poems, 1957–1994, Faber and
Random House, 1991. Faber, 1995.

When Hughes came out with this collection, many
readers were surprised to find a selection at the
end of this book of previously unpublished poems
that were unmistakably written to and about his
late wife Sylvia Plath. This comprehensive book
provides an excellent overview of Hughes’s entire
career and a first glimpse of the much-sought
“Sylvia” poems.

Plath, Sylvia, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath,
edited by Karen V. Kukil, Anchor Books, 2000.

Kukil, the supervisor of the Plath collection at Smith
College, has carefully transcribed the journals Plath
kept between 1950 and a few months prior to her sui-
cide. There is perhaps no better way to try to under-
stand her thoughts, emotions, and feelings about
Hughes than to read them in her own words.

Scigaj, Leonard M., ed., Critical Essays on Ted Hughes,
G. K. Hall, 1992.

This book contains close to twenty essays by various
critics, scholars, and poets and provides a good va-
riety of Hughes analyses. Discussions include
Hughes’s performance as poet laureate, his poetic
style, and several articles on his major volumes of
poems.

Wagner, Erica, Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and
the Story of “Birthday Letters,” Faber and Faber, 2000.

Wagner’s exploration of the intense, destructive re-
lationship between Hughes and Plath is considered
one of the fairest, most comprehensive looks at the
lives of these two poets. She includes commentary to
the poems in Birthday Letters, pointing out the ac-
tual events that inspired them and explaining how
they relate to Plath’s own work. This book is both a
guide and a literary companion to Hughes’s final col-
lection.

204 Poetry for Students

Proem

“Proem” was originally published as the introduc- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
tory passage to Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s book- 1850
length poem In Memoriam A. H. H. The complete
poem consists of 131 sections and was written over
the course of seventeen years, capturing the devel-
opment of the poet’s grief over the death of his
friend Arthur Henry Hallam. The influence of Hal-
lam’s death can be seen in several of Tennyson’s
poems, including “Ulysses,” “Tithonus,” “The Two
Voices,” and “Break, break, break.”

Tennyson met Hallam in the 1820s at Trinity
College, Cambridge. Hallam was considered by his
classmates to be one of the most promising schol-
ars of the day, until his sudden death from a stroke
in 1833, at age twenty-two. Hallam and Tennyson
were close companions. They traveled through Eu-
rope together, and at the time of his death, Hallam
was engaged to Tennyson’s sister Emily.

In Memoriam A. H. H. is considered one of the
single most influential poems of the Victorian age.
It was a favorite of Queen Victoria’s and her hus-
band Prince Albert and was so admired by the royal
couple that Tennyson was appointed poet laureate
the year the poem was published. Throughout the
last half of the century, In Memoriam A. H. H. was
frequently quoted in church sermons, due to Ten-
nyson’s masterful control of the language and the
poem’s mournful contemplation of humanity’s re-
lationship to the eternal. In modern times, the poem
is seldom read in its 2,868-line entirety, but indi-
vidual sections like “Proem” are considered exam-
ples of Tennyson’s poetry at its best.

205

Proem

Alfred, Lord Tennyson son’s older brother Edward committed himself to
a mental asylum, where he lived until his death in
Author Biography 1890. In 1832, Tennyson published Poems, which
was harshly criticized in nearly every review. In
Alfred, Lord Tennyson was born August 6, 1809, 1833, Hallam died suddenly, at the age of twenty-
in Somersby, Lincolnshire, England. His father was two.
a clergyman, the rector of Somersby, a profession
for which he was not well suited and of which he Tennyson was so shocked by Hallam’s death
was not fond. Tennyson was the fourth of twelve that he vowed to publish no more poetry for ten
children. At an early age he showed a talent for years. During that time, he worked on In Memo-
writing, and began writing poetry by age eight. By riam A. H. H., the work that “Proem” introduces.
the time he was eighteen, in 1827, he had published He started the first lines of it within days of hear-
his first volume of poetry, Poems by Two Broth- ing about Hallam’s death.
ers. Though his older brothers Frederick and
Charles wrote some of the poems in the book, most Tennyson barely eked out a living, and was too
were by Alfred. The same year, Tennyson left home poor to marry Emily Sellwood until the publication
to attend Trinity College, Cambridge. There he of Poems in 1843 made him financially indepen-
gained recognition for his work, winning a major dent. He married Emily in 1850, and Queen Vic-
poetry prize. toria, influenced by the publication of In Memoriam
that same year, appointed him to succeed William
While he was at Trinity, Tennyson became Wordsworth as poet laureate.
close friends with Arthur Henry Hallam, who was
considered one of the school’s outstanding literary Tennyson lived the rest of his life in fame and
talents. Hallam introduced Tennyson to Emily prosperity. He wrote poetry, focusing on long ro-
Sellwood, with whom the poet fell in love. In turn, mantic narratives, and a few plays, which were un-
Tennyson introduced Hallam to his sister, also successful. He was one of the most famous and
named Emily, with whom Hallam fell in love. well-recognized men in England when he died Oc-
tober 6, 1892.
Tennyson experienced a series of setbacks af-
ter his book Poems, Chiefly Lyrical was published Poem Summary
in 1830. In 1831, Tennyson’s father died. Tenny-
Lines 1–4

The “Proem” for Tennyson’s long poem In
Memoriam A. H. H. literally opens with a strong be-
ginning: the word “strong” emphasizes the speaker’s
awe and gives the poem a powerful tone. The phrase
“Strong Son of God” can be read in two ways. The
most obvious of these is that it is a reference to Je-
sus, who is referred to frequently in Christian doc-
trine as the Son of God. This emphasis on God’s
human element also serves to imply a human sub-
ject to the poem, perhaps Arthur Henry Hallam, who
is not mentioned in “Proem,” but whose initials ap-
pear in the title of the longer poem. Throughout the
longer poem, readers find more evidence that Ten-
nyson has drawn a connection between Christ and
Hallam, whom he represents as a figure for the
higher race of humanity that is expected to develop
from Christ’s prophesied second-coming.

The last three lines of this first stanza refer to
the unknown aspects of God. Tennyson points out
that human faith is based on a lack of direct expe-
rience, noting that people believe in God even
though they cannot see Him.

206 Poetry for Students

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Lines 5–8 Media
Adaptations
Ancient and medieval astronomers believed
that the Earth was surrounded by a series of trans- • The British actor Sir John Gielgud recorded
parent orbs, or spheres, that rotated around it, ac- “Proem” and other sections from In Memoriam
counting for the change from night to day, which on an audiocassette titled Stanzas from “In
the poem refers to in line 5. Saying that they are Memoriam” (1972). It was produced by the Ten-
God’s is Tennyson’s way of noting that God holds nyson Society and published by the Tennyson
power over all the universe. Even more impressive Research Centre.
is the power, noted in line 6, to make life, and the
corresponding power to make death. Line 8 uses the ists independently of knowledge, because knowl-
image of a foot crushing a skull to show how God edge only applies to things that humans can expe-
maintains control over the life that He has made. rience. In line 22, all knowledge is referred to
generally as things that can be seen. The lack of
Lines 9–12 knowledge is presented as darkness, with faith a
beam of light that cuts through it, giving the faith-
Tennyson follows the brutal image of God’s foot ful person less reason to fear the world.
on man’s skull with the declaration that God is in fact
good and concerned and will not abandon humanity Lines 25–28
to the mechanical world. There is a slight shift in the
voice of the poem’s speaker from line 9, which refers Having identified the differences between faith
to humanity as “us,” to line 10, in which “man” is and knowledge, Tennyson asserts that the two must
referred to as “him.” This shift becomes clear in the coexist. A purely religious poem might dismiss
rest of the stanza, in which the speaker shows that a knowledge of the physical world as unimportant;
normal person feels entitled to more than just death: here, though, Tennyson calls for increasing under-
the poem’s speaker, on the other hand, is willing to standing of the physical world “more to more.”
accept anything that God decides to do for or to hu- He takes a stand against a purely worldly posi-
manity. He has complete faith that, regardless what tion, however, saying that reverence should grow
happens or how it seems at the time, God is just. at the same time that knowledge grows. Line 28
makes the assertion that a proper balance between
Lines 13–16 “mind” and “soul” is the natural, original state of
human understanding, implying that such a bal-
This stanza addresses one of the most basic ance existed “before” the two aspects started
tenets of Christian faith, that of free will. Line 13 growing.
refers back to the issue, raised in the first stanza,
of Jesus being not just God but God’s human son. Lines 29–32
This makes him, according to Tennyson, the ideal
human. Having stressed God’s dominance over all This stanza returns to directly addressing God
things in the universe in the previous stanzas, here and asking for His assistance. The poem claims that
the poem says twice, in lines 15 and 16, that hu- humans are intellectually and physically insignifi-
mans control their own will. cant, and then, in line 30, admits that humans of-
ten will either mock or fear God. Still, the poem
Lines 17–20 asks God to accept human weakness and to ignore
the insults humans direct at Him.
“Little systems” in line 17 refers to all things that
humans have created, from games to governments, In line 32, what is usually referred to as the
arts, and sciences. Saying that they “have their day” “world” is mentioned in the plural, “worlds.” By
emphasizes how temporary they are, how quickly calling mankind “thy vain worlds,” Tennyson
they will be gone, in what must seem no more than
a day in God’s larger perspective. Calling these sys-
tems “broken lights of thee” in line 19 affirms that all
things human are part of God, while line 20 asserts
that even if these parts were all added together, the
mystery of God would be still greater than their sum.

Lines 21–24

At the center of the poem, Tennyson explicitly
states its main point: the fact that faith in God ex-

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Proem

acknowledges all of the variations of social under- Themes
standing, as in the expression that describes some-
one being “in his own world.” While the God that Free Will
Tennyson addresses in the poem is clearly a Chris-
tian God, this plurality indicates an understanding In line 16, the speaker of Tennyson’s “Proem”
of the many different human perspectives, which tells God, “Our wills are ours, to make them
understand existence so differently that they might Thine.” One of the central beliefs of the Judeo-
as well be living on different planets. Christian tradition, within which Tennyson wrote,
is the understanding that human beings are able to
Lines 33–36 make their own decisions and are not just the sum
of their genetic predisposition and experiences.
The speaker of the poem asks God’s forgive- Without free will, humans would not be responsi-
ness, pointing out the fact that his humble behav- ble for their sins or their good deeds but, like ma-
ior cannot be an affront against God, who is too chines, would only behave according to external
great to be affected by human affairs. Line 33 refers influences.
to “what seem’d my sin,” while line 34 mentions
“what seem’d my worth”: both phrases point to the The poem asserts that humans have free will,
same element, that of human pride, which would and points out how this freedom, which could lead
make the poem’s speaker think he is as important, to bad behavior, is ultimately to God’s benefit. Hu-
if not more important, than God himself. In iden- mans have the ability to choose to do God’s bid-
tifying sin and worth as mere illusion, the poem ding, which makes their worship of Him more
stresses the fact that God is far above such mun- significant than it would be if they had no choice.
dane things, which mean so much to humans. Being omnipotent, God does not need this ex-
“Merit,” the measure of human worth, is said to be plained to Him by Tennyson; the poem’s descrip-
only of value to humans, not to God. tion of free will may be phrased as an explanation,
but it serves more as an acknowledgement of the
Lines 37–40 responsibility humans have to actively, consciously
obey the will of God.
As the poem nears its end, Tennyson finally
mentions his grief for his dead friend, the “one re- The emphasis on free will fits in with the
moved,” who is identified in the larger poem but poem’s overall analysis of the symbiotic relation-
not in this “Proem.” Tennyson asks God’s for- ship between knowledge and free will. If humans
giveness for concentrating so much on another hu- could have concrete knowledge of the nature of
man being, excusing the lack of attention to God God and what God wants, then the obvious thing
by showing how much his absent friend is con- to do would be to follow God’s bidding. Without
nected to God. “Thy creature,” he calls his friend, any certainty, though, humans are able to, as the
noting that his belief that his friend has gone to live poem observes, mock God or fear Him. Worship
with God in death makes him, in Tennyson’s opin- becomes a greater achievement, one that is ac-
ion, “worthier to be loved.” complished only through disciplined faith.

Lines 41–44 Reverence

The last stanza apologizes for the poem’s The poem begins with strong praise of God,
weakness in explaining the poet’s ideas, character- mentioning strength, love, and immortality in
izing his words as “wild and wandering cries.” Ad- the very first line. Though it continues its praise,
dressing God, the poet begs forgiveness for being there is emphasis on the fact that reverence is
unable to discuss matters intelligently, identifying based on uncertainty. In effect, the poem puts
his problem as being caused by wasting his youth forth the idea that to revere God, one by definition
away when, presumably, he should have spent does not know what one is talking about. Awkward
more time studying, so that his discussion of reli- as this position seems, it is one with which the
gious topics would be more solid. Ironically, it was poem is comfortable. Tennyson explains faith and
with the dead friend whom he eulogizes in this how it contrasts with knowledge, and how there is
poem that Tennyson spent much time in his youth, much to existence that extends beyond humanity’s
making him the cause of the time that he says was limited knowledge. These explanations add to-
wasted. After apologizing for his intellectual short- gether like a mathematical equation to support the
comings, he ends the poem by asking God to make idea that God is greater than humans can ever
him wise. know.

208 Poetry for Students

Proem

In the poem’s last stanza, the speaker of the Topics for
poem subjugates himself completely to God, dis- Further
missing his own poetry as “wild and wandering Study
cries” and “confusions of a wasted youth.” Al-
though the poem shows a disciplined attempt to • In 1850, the year that “Proem” was published,
make sense out of matters that go beyond human Tennyson became the poet laureate of England,
capacity, the poet still asks God’s forgiveness, for replacing William Wordsworth. Research and
fear that any of the things said in the poem might report on how the differences in the two men’s
be wrong or might offend Him. styles affected British literature.

Mourning • Research the seven stages of grief that have been
outlined by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and other
Although death is mentioned frequently in psychiatrists. See which parts of the poem can
“Proem,” Tennyson does not mention the loss of be traced to each stage.
any specific person until the tenth stanza, in which
he asks God to “forgive my grief for one removed.” • The poem refers to the night and day as “orbs
Up to that point, death is discussed in terms of the of light and shade.” Look up the ancient theory
human condition, as a way to show the contrast be- that held that the sun and planets were held in
tween the fleeting nature of human life and God’s spheres that surrounded the Earth and create a
eternal existence, in order to give a context to hu- three-dimensional model to present this idea to
mankind’s limited knowledge. Death is referred to your class.
in the second stanza as a tool which God made and
controls; in the fifth stanza it is mentioned to show • Near the end of the poem, Tennyson, one of
how insignificant human life is; and in the eighth Britain’s most famous poets, asks God to for-
stanza there is a hint it is the fear of death that give his “wild and wandering cries.” Many of
causes humans to turn from God. today’s most popular musicians, by contrast,
tend to brag about their achievements. Write a
When the idea of mourning is added to the poem or essay that outlines your position on the
poem, the discussion about God becomes more per- importance of humility.
sonalized. For most of the poem, Tennyson analyzes
the fact that God cannot be known, but can only be tern. Iambic is a pattern of one unstressed syllable
experienced through blind faith. By noting his de- followed by a stressed syllable, as in “forgive” and
parted friend, “I trust he lives with Thee,” Tennyson “embrace.” This pattern is obviously subject to vari-
creates a connection between God’s omnipotence ation, especially at the beginnings of stanzas: out-
and the limited capacity of humans. The fear and side of the context of the poem, the natural tendency
mocking of death explored earlier in the poem be- for reading such phrases as “strong son” and “thine
comes irrelevant once Tennyson acknowledges are” would be to put the stress on the first syllable,
death leads somewhere, and the meaningless void not the second. Tetrameter contains the Greek pre-
that follows death has meaning in this context. Al- fix “tetra,” meaning “four”: there are four iambs in
though it is only mentioned late in the poem, the each line. This metrical form is so strongly associ-
belief that Tennyson’s friend’s death is not mean- ated with Tennyson’s poem In Memoriam A. H. H.,
ingless, that death has led his friend to God, gives for which “Proem” is a preface, that it has been re-
this poem a reason to tilt toward faith in God even ferred to as the In Memoriam stanza.
when evidence and knowledge of God is lacking.
Monologue
Style
In this poem, the speaker talks directly to God,
Iambic Tetrameter asking for God’s understanding and forgiveness and
taking every possible opportunity to praise God. It
“Proem” is written in quatrains, which are four-
line stanzas. It follows the rhyme scheme abba: the
word at the end of the first line of each stanza rhymes
with the word ending the last line, making the “a”
rhyme, and the two middle lines end with the “b”
rhyme. The lines follow an iambic tetrameter pat-

Volume 19 209

Proem

Compare
&

Contrast

• 1850s: Great Britain is the world’s political and tion of a new custom, afternoon tea, ten years
economic leader. earlier.

Today: Since the fall of the Soviet Union in Today: Though an afternoon break is often con-
1991, America is the single remaining super- sidered impractical in the international business
power in the world. climate, many British citizens still manage to
find time for the traditional tea break.
• 1850: Most of the world is agricultural. The fol-
lowing year, Britain becomes the first nation in • 1850s: In a world with no mass media, the per-
the world to have the majority of its population son holding the post of poet laureate is famous
living in cities. across Great Britain.

Today: Most of the world’s population is clus- Today: Poets are not as important to most citi-
tered into cities and their surrounding suburbs. zens as musicians and movie stars; students in-
terested in finding out about the current poet
• 1850s: Life expectancy in Great Britain is between laureate can, however, learn background infor-
43 and 47 years. Tennyson lived almost twice this, mation within minutes from the Internet.
though his friend Arthur Hallam, memorialized
in this poem, lived less than half the average. • 1850s: If Tennyson wants to visit America, he can
travel from London to New York on the fastest
Today: The average life expectancy for men clipper ship of the time, arriving in ten days.
in Great Britain is 75 years old; for women, it
is 80. Today: Travelling from London to New York
on the Concorde can be done in less than three
• 1850s: Tea outsells coffee for the first time in and a half hours.
Great Britain, due in large part to the introduc-

follows a logical rhetorical structure, establishing particular is considered representative of the Vic-
God’s greatness in the first three stanzas, then ex- torian age. Victoria was born in 1819, and in 1837,
plaining the problem of free will, then explaining not yet twenty years old, she ascended to the throne
how faith can be used to help humans deal with of England, beginning a reign that would last nearly
things they cannot know, and finally referring to the sixty-five years. She was politically active and in-
speaker’s personal grief over the death of his friend, volved in the business of running the country, even
which has been the unexamined reason behind all of from the start.
these ruminations about existence. This monologue
addresses God often, indicating it means to invoke In 1840 Victoria was married to Albert, her
God, to ask Him for help; but the poem can also be first cousin. It was an arranged marriage, but Vic-
read as a display of the mental process through which toria and Albert fell deeply in love and consulted
grief takes a human mind in its quest for consolation. with each other on all matters. It was Albert who
first read Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H. and
Historical Context brought it to Victoria’s attention, directly influenc-
ing Tennyson’s 1850 appointment as poet laureate.
Victoria and Albert Under Albert’s influence, while still in her early
twenties, Victoria changed from a liberal to a con-
Tennyson is the poet most closely associated servative political attitude, which affected the way
with the reign of Queen Victoria, and this poem in England was governed in both domestic and inter-
national affairs. Victoria and Albert were married

210 Poetry for Students

Proem

for twenty years, until Albert’s death in 1861 from in crowded tenements, and the situation was made
typhoid fever. After his death, Victoria remained more perilous by the fact that workers, including
devoted to Albert’s memory, and she never remar- children, worked long hours with little pay. Pollu-
ried. Her popularity as a monarch grew as she aged, tion was blinding, darkening the skies of industrial
as England exerted its dominance over world af- cities at midday. All of these conditions caused a
fairs, becoming the world’s most powerful country crisis of faith: the benefits of industrialization
because of its strong navy and its colonization of turned out to be the cause of misery for millions of
Africa, India, and other territories that raised its fi- British citizens. Tennyson plays off this tension by
nancial power to ever-increasing heights. contrasting knowledge with faith in this poem.

Literary tastes changed during the time of Vic- Critical Overview
toria’s reign, reflecting the queen’s tastes. The
nineteenth century began with the romantic move- Tennyson’s poem In Memoriam A. H. H., which
ment, which was initiated by Wordsworth and Co- “Proem” introduces, has always been considered
leridge and most frequently associated with one of Tennyson’s most important works. George
Shelley, Keats, and Byron. Romantic poetry can be O. Marshall Jr., explained in 1963 in A Tennyson
generalized as focusing on nature and on the im- Handbook, “One of the most remarkable things
portance of individual judgement and emotional re- about In Memoriam was its popularity with Ten-
action over the pressures of social institutions. nyson’s contemporaries. It seemed to be such a sat-
Victorian literature, on the other hand, is generally isfactory answer to the problems of existence,
concerned with how individuals fit into the social especially those raised by the struggle between re-
scheme, with formality and decorum. This poem, ligion and science, that the Victorians clasped it to
an introduction for a work written between 1833 their bosoms to supplement the consolation offered
and 1850, shows the influence of both eras. Ten- by the Bible. This wholehearted acceptance of its
nyson has the romantic’s sense of self-importance teachings went from the highest to the lowest.”
in his telling of his individual experience of grief,
but he also expresses concern about the proper re- Marshall’s account of the poem’s reception is
lationship with God and his fellow humans that at odds, however, with that of G. M. Young, in his
came to characterize most literature during Victo- essay “The Age of Tennyson.” Young’s essay ar-
ria’s reign. gues that Tennyson was less a Victorian poet than
a modern one, explaining:
The Industrial Age
In Memoriam was influential in extending his
At the same time Tennyson was writing this renown, but within limited range: many of its earli-
poem, England was undergoing a major change in est readers disliked it, many did not understand it,
basic economic structure, from agriculture to in- and those who admired it most were not always the
dustrial production. Coal-powered machines made best judges of its poetry.
large-scale manufacturing possible, and this in turn
created a surge in urban populations, which cre- T. S. Eliot, writing in his Selected Essays, has
ated a need for more jobs. London, for example, declared that In Memoriam’s “technical merit alone
which had kept a stable population for centuries, is enough to ensure its perpetuity.” Eliot also noted,
grew fourfold between 1801 and 1841, from “While Tennyson’s technical competence is every-
598,000 to 2,420,000. New technologies made cen- where masterly and satisfying, In Memoriam is
tralized industry possible: rail lines allowed man- the least unapproachable of all his poems.” Eliot’s
ufacturers to produce items by the ton and transport influence is evident in contemporary views of Ten-
them to distant points for sale; electric lighting nyson’s poem: while Tennyson’s other works are
(first invented in 1808) made it possible for work- critically respected, modern readers tend to take
ers to continue to labor beyond normal daylight particular interest in the perspective taken by In
hours; telegraphs allowed businesses to place or- Memoriam, which examines one person’s grief
ders and make arrangements in a fraction of the (though Tennyson himself wanted readers to un-
time it took to send representatives from one town derstand the views held by the speaker of the poem
to another. were not necessarily his own). This directness
makes this poem, of all Tennyson’s works, the
The drawback of the industrial age was that most similar to the poetry with which twenty-first-
rapid expansion caused cities to quickly became century readers are familiar.
overpopulated with people, creating unsanitary
conditions. Diseases such as typhus spread rapidly

Volume 19 211

Proem

Criticism Eliot’s stature, it might be a good idea to do just
as he commands, assuming he knows best on po-
David Kelly etic matters.

Kelly is a creative writing and literature in- Those are the reasons for examining “Proem”
structor at two colleges in Illinois. In this essay, in a larger context. There are also very good rea-
Kelly explains why it is better to analyze Tenny- sons, though, for letting this piece stand as an in-
son’s poem without considering the larger work dividual unit and examining it as such. For one
that it introduces. thing, it was written separately, after the rest of the
poem was already done. This introductory section
The difficulty one finds in approaching a work ends with the date 1849, which shows it to have
like Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Proem” is one that been one of the last pieces written. As much as Ten-
troubles anyone practicing literary criticism and, in nyson wanted it to be a part of In Memoriam, he
fact, anyone trying to understand life: how much also gave it some degree of autonomy by drawing
should be examined at any one time? Even with an attention to the fact that it was written out of se-
average poem, possibilities abound, since there ex- quence with the other sections that have been
ists any extent of background information that pieced together for this poem.
could be useful for helping readers comprehend the
lines on the page in front of them. Biographical in- And, regardless of the poet’s intentions, the
formation is often referred to, and so are similar fact remains that “Proem” actually stands indepen-
poems from the poet’s canon, or poems written dently. It has a definite beginning and end, assigned
around the same time, or poems that clearly influ- to it by the author: looking at this one segment with-
ence the subject matter. out the context of the rest of the poem would not
be anything like, as Eliot implies, taking a random
“Proem” has all of these elements. It is the in- section from the middle and pretending that it is
troduction to a longer piece, In Memoriam A. H. supposed to have meaning. In a case like that, the
H. . The most obvious direction that a line of in- reader defines what the piece is saying by defining
quiry might be inclined to take is toward the larger its length, separating it from other information that
poem, to see how this segment compares to the it is tied to; in this case, though, it already has its
whole. Furthermore, this entire work deals with the own independent identity. As much as the case ex-
most moving, significant event in Tennyson’s oth- ists for looking around any one artistic piece in or-
erwise stuffy literary life, the death of his dear der to draw intellectual connections to the facts of
friend Arthur Henry Hallam. The magnitude of this the author’s life or to other things that he wrote,
one event was so compelling to Tennyson that the still there is at least a reasonable case to be made
bulk of his work in his important formative years, for considering a poem like this as its own free-
from twenty-four to forty, was spent trying to cap- standing entity, in order to see what it, alone, says.
ture the experience in this one work. Most of Ten-
nyson’s poetry deals with subjects drawn from And that, ultimately, is the deciding factor. The
classical literature. The temptation to explore him piece does have a context, as every work of art will,
through In Memoriam is strong, and could easily but focusing too much on the context can actually
be justified as a rare opportunity that must not be drive readers away from its unique significance,
ignored. putting them on the trail of research before they
have given the work itself their fullest attention.
Finally, there is the fact that “Proem” is a part
of the larger work, and should only be separated Examined on its own, “Proem” turns out to be
from it when absolutely necessary. One of the most less a memorial to Hallam than a general statement
influential poets in modern literature, T. S. Eliot, on the author’s insecurity that surrounds his grief.
explicitly warned readers that it would be a mis- There are two defining characteristics of this piece.
take to break down In Memoriam, to examine any One is the hazy way in which it approaches its own
individual part, realizing the damage that such an subject; if it were not in the context of a piece called
act could do to the entire piece. In his discussion In Memoriam, readers would not know until the
of In Memoriam, Eliot asserted that “the poem has end that it is written about the death of a friend.
to be comprehended as a whole. We may not mem- The other is the way that this poem begs for for-
orize a few passages, we cannot find a ‘fair sam- giveness at the end, just as the aspect of grief is be-
ple’; we have to comprehend the whole of a poem ing introduced, a show of humility that reflects the
which is essentially the length that it is.” Given relationships that the poet has with both God and
his departed friend.

212 Poetry for Students

Proem

Starting from the beginning, this does not seem For a person to fall
at first to be a poem about grief, but about God. prostrate before God like
The first nine stanzas, spanning thirty-six lines, this is not at all unusual in
deal solely with the relationship between humans poetry; what is unusual is
and God, focusing on the mysteries that lie beyond that the pleas for mercy
this life, and the proper attitude that one should take come only as the poet’s love
when contemplating the subject of the Almighty. for his departed friend
This extended section, while seeming to be about comes out.”
praise, actually raises some questions about the
speaker’s devotion. The first is, of course, in the of God mixed with acute consciousness of death in
first line, which implies that the poet’s verse might the first three quarters of the poem, and despite the
be aimed at someone other than who it identifies. grief that comes up quickly in the last section, when
On its own, the phrase “Son of God” traditionally the death of the speaker’s friend has finally been
refers to Jesus, who is described in these words in brought out into the open, the one overriding emo-
the New Testament. It is unusual though that the tion that readers are left with is the author’s hu-
poet should address the Son of God here while the mility. For a person to fall prostrate before God like
rest of the poem speaks of the reverence that is usu- this is not at all unusual in poetry; what is unusual
ally accorded to God proper, but it is not unusual is that the pleas for mercy come only as the poet’s
enough to affect any reading of the poem. It is, love for his departed friend comes out. The impli-
however, coupled with “immortal Love” on the cation is that God would be displeased with the un-
same line. This again could be explained as a de- controllable affection that the poem’s speaker has
scription of Jesus, whose philosophy is described for another person. Coming after so much discus-
as being based on love, but it is a noticeably odd sion about the proper way to revere God, there is
reference, and, coupled with the first phrase (and certainly more than a hint that the speaker’s worldly
the fact that Tennyson has begun the poem with love for his friend would detract from his rever-
“strong,” as if God’s power is in any way compa- ence. Directly praising or lamenting his friend
rable to anything) leaves the impression that the could never draw readers to understand the depth
poem has another agenda than just calling on God of emotions as are conveyed here; readers have to
for the sake of praise. put the pieces together in order to see that the
speaker of this poem is so powerfully grief-stricken
When the tenth stanza mentions “my grief for that he fears that God will feel slighted or jealous,
one removed,” the poem’s uncertainties come into and he needs to beg forgiveness for the emotions
sharper focus. Much of the talk of God up to that that he cannot control.
point has centered on death, and that, like the
strange references in the first line, could be con- These facts come from “Proem” itself; the rest
sidered appropriate, but still seems strangely nar- of In Memoriam describes Arthur Hallam in a dif-
row. A reader who knows this poem to be part of ferent way, and develops themes that are not yet
a memorial already knows that the death of a friend begun in this opening section. To understand the
is the reason for its existence, but without this fore- poem in the larger context might be useful. Then
knowledge, the first nine stanzas build a mystery again, it could be distracting: much of what makes
about the speaker’s obsession that the tenth and the eleven stanzas of “Proem” effective is found in
eleventh explain. The introduction of personal the delicate balance and pacing that these ideas
emotion at this late point shades what came before have among each other. One need not know who
it. Suddenly, the poem is less a song of praise for Tennyson lost, how long he grieved, or how long
God than it is a hopeless rant, as if the speaker has he worked on the poem that follows this introduc-
been trying in vain to ignore the looming subject tion in order to feel the poet’s apprehension about
of his friend’s death and, in the end, can no longer
suppress it.

This is why the most crucial aspect to “Proem”
may well be its entreaties for forgiveness. These
pop up suddenly and increase frequently: “forgive”
starts the last three quatrains, and one additional
occurrence starts the third line of stanza eleven,
leaving readers with a final stanza in which half of
the lines ask God for forgiveness. Despite the praise

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Proem

a sorrow so great that all he can think to do about that the family spoke of the “black blood” of the
it is apologize. Tennysons.

Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on “Proem,” in Poetry Part of the family heritage was a strain of
for Students, Gale, 2003. epilepsy, a disease then thought to be brought on by
sexual excess and therefore shameful. One of Ten-
William E. Fredeman nyson’s brothers was confined to an insane asylum
most of his life, another had recurrent bouts of ad-
In the following essay, Fredeman discusses the diction to drugs, a third had to be put into a mental
life and work of Tennyson. home because of his alcoholism, another was inter-
mittently confined and died relatively young. Of the
More than any other Victorian writer, Ten- rest of the eleven children who reached maturity,
nyson has seemed the embodiment of his age, both all had at least one severe mental breakdown. Dur-
to his contemporaries and to modern readers. In his ing the first half of his life Alfred thought that he
own day he was said to be—with Queen Victoria had inherited epilepsy from his father and that it was
and Gladstone—one of the three most famous liv- responsible for the trances into which he occasion-
ing persons, a reputation no other poet writing in ally fell until he was well over forty years old.
English has ever had. As official poetic spokesman
for the reign of Victoria, he felt called upon to cel- It was in part to escape from the unhappy en-
ebrate a quickly changing industrial and mercantile vironment of Somersby rectory that Alfred began
world with which he felt little in common, for his writing poetry long before he was sent to school, as
deepest sympathies were called forth by an unal- did most of his talented brothers and sisters. All his
tered rural England; the conflict between what he life he used writing as a way of taking his mind
thought of as his duty to society and his allegiance from his troubles. One peculiar aspect of his method
to the eternal beauty of nature seems peculiarly of composition was set, too, while he was still a
Victorian. Even his most severe critics have always boy: he would make up phrases or discrete lines as
recognized his lyric gift for sound and cadence, a he walked, and store them in his memory until he
gift probably unequaled in the history of English had a proper setting for them. As this practice sug-
poetry, but one so absolute that it has sometimes gests, his primary consideration was more often
been mistaken for mere facility. rhythm and language than discursive meaning.

The lurid history of Tennyson’s family is in- When he was not quite eighteen his first vol-
teresting in itself, but some knowledge of it is also ume of poetry, Poems by Two Brothers (1827), was
essential for understanding the recurrence in his published. Alfred Tennyson wrote the major part
poetry of themes of madness, murder, avarice, of the volume, although it also contained poems by
miserliness, social climbing, marriages arranged his two elder brothers, Frederick and Charles. It is
for profit instead of love, and estrangements be- a remarkable book for so young a poet, displaying
tween families and friends. great virtuosity of versification and the prodigality
of imagery that was to mark his later works; but it
Alfred Tennyson was born in the depths of is also derivative in its ideas, many of which came
Lincolnshire, the fourth son of the twelve children from his reading in his father’s library. Few copies
of the rector of Somersby, George Clayton Ten- were sold, and there were only two brief reviews,
nyson, a cultivated but embittered clergyman who but its publication confirmed Tennyson’s determi-
took out his disappointment on his wife Elizabeth nation to devote his life to poetry.
and his brood of children—on at least one occa-
sion threatening to kill Alfred’s elder brother Fred- Most of Tennyson’s early education was under
erick. The rector had been pushed into the church the direction of his father, although he spent nearly
by his own father, also named George, a rich and four unhappy years at a nearby grammar school. His
ambitious country solicitor intent on founding a departure in 1827 to join his elder brothers at Trin-
great family dynasty that would rise above their ity College, Cambridge, was due more to a desire
modest origins into a place among the English aris- to escape from Somersby than to a desire to under-
tocracy. Old Mr. Tennyson, aware that his eldest take serious academic work. At Trinity he was liv-
son, the rector, was unpromising material for the ing for the first time among young men of his own
family struggle upward, made his second son, his age who knew little of the problems that had beset
favorite child, his chief heir. Tennyson’s father, him for so long; he was delighted to make new
who had a strong streak of mental instability, re- friends; he was extraordinarily handsome, intelli-
acted to his virtual disinheritance by taking to drink gent, humorous, and gifted at impersonation; and
and drugs, making the home atmosphere so sour

214 Poetry for Students

Proem

soon he was at the center of an admiring group of More than any other
young men interested in poetry and conversation. It Victorian writer, Tennyson
was probably the happiest period of his life. has seemed the embodiment
of his age, both to his
In part it was the urging of his friends, in part contemporaries and to
the insistence of his father that led the normally in- modern readers.”
dolent Tennyson to retailor an old poem on the
subject of Armageddon and submit it in the com- but at the last moment Hallam’s father, perhaps
petition for the chancellor’s gold medal for poetry; worried by some lyrics Arthur had written to a
the announced subject was Timbuctoo. Tennyson’s young lady with whom he had been in love, for-
Timbuctoo is a strange poem, as the process of its bade him to include his poems. Poems, Chiefly
creation would suggest. He uses the legendary city Lyrical appeared in June 1830. The standard of the
for a consideration of the relative validity of imag- poems in the volume is uneven, and it has the self-
ination and objective reality; Timbuctoo takes its centered, introspective quality that one might ex-
magic from the mind of man, but it can turn to dust pect of the work of a twenty-year-old; but scattered
at the touch of the mundane. It is far from a suc- among the other poems that would be forgotten if
cessful poem, but it shows how deeply engaged its they had been written by someone else are several
author was with the Romantic conception of po- fine ones such as “The Kraken,” “Ode to Memory,”
etry. Whatever its shortcomings, it won the chan- and—above all—“Mariana,” which is the first of
cellor’s prize in the summer of 1829. Tennyson’s works to demonstrate fully his brilliant
use of objects and landscapes to convey a state of
Probably more important than its success in the strong emotion. That poem alone would be enough
competition was the fact that the submission of the to justify the entire volume.
poem brought Tennyson into contact with the Trin-
ity undergraduate usually regarded as the most bril- The reviews appeared slowly, but they were
liant man of his Cambridge generation, Arthur generally favorable. Both Tennyson and Hallam
Henry Hallam. This was the beginning of four years thought they should have come out more quickly,
of warm friendship between the two men, in some however, and Hallam reviewed the volume himself
ways the most intense emotional experience of in the Englishman’s Magazine, making up in his
Tennyson’s life. Despite the too knowing skepti- critical enthusiasm for having dropped out of be-
cism of the twentieth century about such matters, ing published with his friend.
it is almost certain that there was nothing homo-
sexual about the friendship: definitely not on a con- The friendship between the young men was
scious level and probably not on any other. Indeed, knotted even more tightly when Hallam fell in love
it was surely the very absence of such overtones with Tennyson’s younger sister, Emily, while on a
that made the warmth of their feelings acceptable visit to Somersby. Since they were both so young,
to both men, and allowed them to express those there was no chance of their marrying for some
feelings so freely. time, and meanwhile Hallam had to finish his un-
dergraduate years at Trinity. All the Tennyson
Also in 1829 both Hallam and Tennyson be- brothers and sisters, as well as their mother, seem
came members of the secret society known as the to have taken instantly to Hallam, but he and Emily
Apostles, a group of roughly a dozen undergradu- prudently said nothing of their love to either of their
ates who were usually regarded as the elite of the fathers. Dr. Tennyson was absent on the Continent
entire university. Tennyson’s name has ever since most of the time, sent there by his father and his
been linked with the society, but the truth is that brother in the hope that he might get over his drink-
he dropped out of it after only a few meetings, al- ing and manage Somersby parish sensibly. Arthur’s
though he retained his closeness with the other father, the distinguished historian Henry Hallam,
members and might even be said to have remained had plans for his son that did not include marriage
the poetic center of the group. The affection and
acceptance he felt from his friends brought both a
new warmth to Tennyson’s personality and an in-
creasing sensuousness to the poetry he was con-
stantly writing when he was supposed to be
devoting his time to his studies.

Hallam, too, wrote poetry, and the two friends
planned on having their work published together;

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Proem

to the daughter of an obscure and alcoholic coun- him to live in a modest manner, but he refused his
try clergyman. grandfather’s offer to help him find a place in the
church if he would be ordained. Tennyson said
In the summer of 1830 Tennyson and Hallam then, as he said all his life, that poetry was to be
were involved in a harebrained scheme to take money his career, however bleak the prospect of his ever
and secret messages to revolutionaries plotting the earning a living. His third volume of poetry was
overthrow of the Spanish king. Tennyson’s political published at the end of 1832, although the title page
enthusiasm was considerably cooler than Hallam’s, was dated 1833.
but he was glad to make his first trip abroad. They
went through France to the Pyrenees, meeting the The 1832 Poems was a great step forward po-
revolutionaries at the Spanish border. Even Hallam’s etically and included the first versions of some of
idealistic fervor scarcely survived the disillusionment Tennyson’s greatest works, such as “The Lady of
of realizing that the men they met were animated by Shalott,” “The Palace of Art,” “A Dream of Fair
motives as selfish as those of the royalist party against Women,” “The Hesperides,” and three wonderful
whom they were rebelling. Nonetheless, in the Pyre- poems conceived in the Pyrenees, “Oenone,” “The
nees Tennyson marked out a new dimension of the Lotos-Eaters,” and “Mariana in the South.” The
metaphorical landscape that had already shown itself volume is notable for its consideration of the op-
in “Mariana,” and for the rest of his life the moun- posed attractions of isolated poetic creativity and
tains remained as a model for the classical scenery social involvement; the former usually turns out to
that so often formed the backdrop of his poetry. The be the more attractive course, since it reflected Ten-
Pyrenees generated such marvelous poems as nyson’s own concerns, but the poems demonstrate
“Oenone,” which he began writing there; “The Lo- as well his feeling of estrangement in being cut off
tos-Eaters,” which was inspired by a waterfall in the from his contemporaries by the demands of his art.
mountains; and “The Eagle,” which was born from
the sight of the great birds circling above them as The reviews of the volume were almost uni-
they climbed in the rocks. Above all, the little village versally damning. One of the worst was written by
of Cauteretz and the valley in which it lay remained Edward Bulwer (later Bulwer-Lytton), who was a
more emotionally charged for Tennyson than any friend of Tennyson’s uncle Charles. The most vi-
other place on earth. He came again and again to walk cious review, however, was written for the Quar-
in the valley, and it provided him with imagery un- terly Review by John Wilson Croker, who was
til his death more than sixty years later. proud that his brutal notice of Endymion years be-
fore was said to have been one of the chief causes
Early the following year Tennyson had to leave of the death of Keats. Croker numbered Tennyson
Cambridge because of the death of his father. Dr. among the Cockney poets who imitated Keats, and
Tennyson had totally deteriorated mentally and he made veiled insinuations about the lack of mas-
physically, and he left little but debts to his family, culinity of both Tennyson and his poems. Ten-
although he had enjoyed a good income and a large nyson, who was abnormally thin-skinned about
allowance from his father. Tennyson’s grandfather criticism, found some comfort in the steady affec-
naturally felt that it was hardly worth his while to tion and support of Hallam and the other Apostles.
keep Alfred and his two elder brothers at Cambridge
when it was only too apparent that they were prof- Hallam and Emily Tennyson had by then made
iting little from their studies and showed no promise their engagement public knowledge, but they saw
of ever being able to support themselves. The al- no way of marrying for a long time: the senior Hal-
lowance he gave the family was generous enough, lam refused to increase his son’s allowance suffi-
but it was not intended to support three idle grand- ciently to support both of them; and when Arthur
sons at the university. Worse still, neither he nor Dr. wrote to Emily’s grandfather, he was answered in
Tennyson’s brother Charles, who was now clearly the third person with the indication that old Mr. Ten-
marked out as the heir to his fortune, attended the nyson had no intention of giving them any more
rector’s funeral, making the division in the family money. By the summer of 1833, Hallam’s father
even more apparent. The widow and her eleven chil- had somewhat grudgingly accepted the engagement,
dren were so improvident that they seemed inca- but still without offering further financial help. The
pable of living on the allowance, and they were protracted unhappiness of both Arthur and Emily
certainly not able to support themselves otherwise. rubbed off on the whole Tennyson family.

This began a very bitter period of Tennyson’s That autumn, in what was meant as a gesture
life. An annual gift of £100 from an aunt allowed of gratitude and reconciliation to his father, Arthur
Hallam accompanied him to the Continent. In Vi-

216 Poetry for Students

Proem

enna Arthur died suddenly of apoplexy resulting such as Maud (1855). Charles Tennyson d’Eyn-
from a congenital malformation of the brain. Emily court’s inheritance was the final wedge driving the
Tennyson fell ill for nearly a year; the effects of two branches of the family apart; he and his nephew
Hallam’s death were less apparent externally in Al- were never reconciled, but Alfred’s dislike of him
fred but were perhaps even more catastrophic than was probably even more influential than admira-
for his sister. tion would have been in keeping Charles as an im-
mediate influence in so much of Alfred’s poetry.
The combination of the deaths of his father and
his best friend, the brutal reviews of his poems, his The details of Tennyson’s romantic attachments
conviction that both he and his family were in des- in the years after Hallam’s death are unclear, but he
perate poverty, his feelings of isolation in the depths apparently had at least a flirtation with Rosa Baring,
of the country, and his ill-concealed fears that he the pretty young daughter of a great banking fam-
might become a victim of epilepsy, madness, alco- ily, some of whose members had rented Harrington
hol, and drugs, as others in his family had, or even Hall, a large house near Somersby. Tennyson wrote
that he might die like Hallam, was more than enough a dozen or so poems to her, but it is improbable that
to upset the always fragile balance of Tennyson’s his affections were deeply involved. The poems sug-
emotions. “I suffered what seemed to me to shatter gest that her position made it impossible for him to
all my life so that I desired to die rather than to live,” be a serious suitor to her, but she may have been
he said of that period. For a time he determined to more important to him as a symbol of wealth and
leave England, and for ten years he refused to have unavailability than as a flesh-and-blood young
any of his poetry published, since he was convinced woman. Certainly, he seems not to have been
that the world had no place for it. crushed when she married another man.

Although he was adamant about not having it In 1836, however, at the age of twenty-seven,
published, Tennyson continued to write poetry; and Tennyson became seriously involved with Emily
he did so even more single-mindedly than before. Sellwood, who was four years younger than he. By
Hallam’s death nearly crushed him, but it also pro- the following year they considered themselves en-
vided the stimulus for a great outburst of some of gaged. Emily had been a friend of Tennyson’s sis-
the finest poems he ever wrote, many of them con- ters, and one of her own sisters married his next
nected overtly or implicitly with the loss of his older (and favorite) brother, Charles. Most of the
friend. “Ulysses,” “Morte d’Arthur,” “Tithonus,” correspondence between Tennyson and Emily has
“Tiresias,” “Break, break, break,” and “Oh! that been destroyed, but from what remains it is clear
’twere possible” all owe their inception to the pas- that she was very much in love with him, although
sion of grief he felt but carefully hid from his inti- he apparently withheld himself somewhat in spite
mates. Most important was the group of random of his affection for her. He was worried about not
individual poems he began writing about Hallam’s having enough money to marry, but he seems also
death and his own feeling of loneliness in the uni- to have been much concerned with the trances into
verse as a result of it; the first of these “elegies,” which he was still falling, which he thought were
written in four-line stanzas of iambic tetrameter, connected with the epilepsy from which other
was begun within two or three days of his hearing members of the family suffered. To marry, he
the news of Hallam’s death. He continued to write thought, would mean passing on the disease to any
them for seventeen years before collecting them to children he might father.
form what is perhaps the greatest of Victorian po-
ems, In Memoriam (1850). In the summer of 1840 Tennyson broke off all
relations with Emily. She continued to think of her-
The death of his grandfather in 1835 confirmed self as engaged to him, but he abandoned any hope
Tennyson’s fear of poverty, for the larger part of of marriage, either then or in the future. To spare
Mr. Tennyson’s fortune went to Alfred’s uncle her further embarrassment, the story was put out
Charles, who promptly changed his name to Ten- that her father had forbidden their marriage because
nyson d’Eyncourt and set about rebuilding his fa- of Tennyson’s poverty; this legend has been per-
ther’s house into a grand Romantic castle, with the petuated in the present century.
expectation of receiving a peerage to cap the fam-
ily’s climb to eminence. His hopes were never re- Through the second half of the 1830s and most
alized, but his great house, Bayons Manor, became of the 1840s Tennyson lived an unsettled, nomadic
a model for the home of the vulgar, nouveauriche life. Nominally he made his home with his mother
characters in many of Tennyson’s narrative poems, and his unmarried brothers and sisters, who con-
tinued to rent Somersby rectory until 1837, then

Volume 19 217

Proem

moved successively to Essex and to Kent; but he years, and in 1843 he had to go into a “hydropathic”
was as often to be found in London, staying in establishment for seven months of treatment in the
cheap hotels or cadging a bed from friends who hope of curing his deep melancholia.
lived there. He was lonely and despondent, and he
drank and smoked far too much. Many of those This was the first of several stays in “hydros”
who had known him for years believed that his po- during the next five years. Copious applications of
etic inspiration had failed him and that his great water inside and out, constant wrappings in cold,
early promise would remain unfulfilled; but this wet sheets, and enforced abstinence from tobacco
was to neglect the fact that when all else went and alcohol seemed to help him during each stay;
wrong, he clung to the composition of poetry. He but he would soon ruin any beneficial effects by
was steadily accumulating a backlog of unpub- his careless life once he had left the establishment,
lished poems, and he continued adding to his “ele- resuming his drinking and smoking to the despair
gies” to Hallam’s memory. of his friends. A rather more effective form of treat-
ment was the £2,000 he received from an insurance
One of the friends who worried away at Ten- policy at the death of the organizer of the wood-
nyson to have his work published was Edward carving scheme. In 1845 he was granted a govern-
FitzGerald, who loved both the poems and their au- ment civil list pension of £200 a year in recognition
thor, although he was too stubborn to hide his feel- of both his poetic achievements and his apparent
ings when a particular poem failed to win his financial need. Tennyson was in reality released
approval. “Old Fitz” nagged at Tennyson, who in from having to worry about money, but the habit
the spring of 1842 agreed to break his ten long years of years was too much for him; for the rest of his
of silence. life he complained constantly of his poverty, al-
though his poetry had made him a rich man by the
The two volumes of Poems (1842) were des- time of his death. In 1845 the betterment of his for-
tined to be the best-loved books Tennyson ever tunes brought with it no effort to resume his en-
wrote. The first volume was made up of radically gagement to Emily Sellwood, showing that it was
revised versions of the best poems from the 1832 not financial want that kept them apart.
volume, most of them in the form in which they
are now known. The second volume contained new The Princess, which was published on Christ-
poems, among them some of those inspired by Hal- mas 1847, was Tennyson’s first attempt at a long
lam’s death, as well as poems of widely varying narrative poem, a form that tempted him most of
styles, including the dramatic monologue “St. his life although it was less congenial to him tem-
Simeon Stylites”; a group of Authurian poems; his peramentally than the lyric. The ostensible theme
first attempt to deal with rampant sexuality, “The is the education of women and the establishment
Vision of Sin”; and the implicitly autobiographical of female colleges, but it is clear that Tennyson’s
narrative “Locksley Hall,” dealing with the evils interest in the subject runs out before the poem
of worldly marriages, which was to become one of does, so that it gradually shifts to the consideration
his most popular poems during his lifetime. of what he thought of as the unnatural attempt of
men and women to fulfill identical roles in society;
After the reception of the 1832 Poems and af- only as the hero becomes more overtly masculine
ter being unpublished for so long, Tennyson was and the heroine takes on the traditional attributes
naturally apprehensive about the reviews of the of women is there a chance for their happiness.
new poems; but nearly all were enthusiastic, mak- Considerably more successful than the main narra-
ing it clear that he was now the foremost poet of tive are the thematic lyrics that Tennyson inserted
his generation. Edgar Allan Poe wrote guardedly, into the action to show the growth of passion and
“I am not sure that Tennyson is not the greatest of between the cantos to indicate that the natural end
poets.” of the sexes is to be parents of another generation
in a thoroughly traditional manner. The subtitle, A
But the bad luck that Tennyson seemed to in- Medley, was his way of anticipating charges of in-
vite struck again just as the favorable reviews were consistency in the structure of the poem. As always,
appearing. Two years earlier, expecting to make a the blank verse in which the main part of the poem
fortune, he had invested his patrimony in a scheme is written is superb, and the interpolated lyrics in-
to manufacture cheap wood carvings by steam- clude some of his most splendid short poems, such
driven machines. In 1842 the scheme crashed, tak- as “Come down, O maid,” “Now sleeps the crim-
ing with it nearly everything that Tennyson owned, son petal,” “Sweet and low,” “The splendour falls
some £4,000. The shock set back any progress he on castle walls,” and “Tears, idle tears.” The emo-
had made in his emotional state over the past ten

218 Poetry for Students

Proem

tion of these lyrics does more than the straight nar- would assemble and polish his “elegies” on Hal-
rative to convey the forward movement of the en- lam, to be published as a whole poem. Before the
tire poem, and their brief perfection indicates well year was over he had resumed communication with
enough that his genius lay there rather than in the Emily Sellwood, and by the beginning of 1850 he
descriptions of persons and their actions; this was was speaking confidently of marrying. On 1 June
not, however, a lesson that Tennyson himself was In Memoriam was published, and less than two
capable of learning. The seriousness with which the weeks later he and Emily were married quietly at
reviewers wrote of the poem was adequate recog- Shiplake Church. Improbable as it might seem for
nition of his importance, but many of them found a man to whom little but bad fortune had come,
the central question of feminine education to be in- both events were total successes.
sufficiently considered. The first edition was
quickly sold out, and subsequent editions appeared The new Mrs. Tennyson was thirty-seven years
almost every year for several decades. old and in delicate health, but she was a woman of
iron determination; she took over the running of the
Tennyson’s last stay in a hydropathic hospital externals of her husband’s life, freeing him from
was in the summer of 1848, and though he was not the practical details at which he was so inept. Her
completely cured of his illness, he was reassured taste was conventional, and she may have curbed
about its nature. The doctor in charge apparently his religious questioning, his mild bohemianism,
made a new diagnosis of his troubles, telling him and the exuberance and experimentation of his po-
that what he suffered from was not epilepsy but etry, but she also brought a kind of peace to his life
merely a form of gout that prefaced its attacks by without which he would not have been able to write
a stimulation of the imagination that is very like at all. There is some evidence that Tennyson oc-
the “aura” that often warns epileptics of the onset casionally chafed at the responsibilities of marriage
of a seizure. The trances that he had thought were and paternity and at the loss of the vagrant free-
mild epileptic fits were in fact only flashes of illu- dom he had known, but there is nothing to indicate
mination over which he had no reason to worry. that he ever regretted his choice. It was probably
Had it been in Tennyson’s nature to rejoice, he not a particularly passionate marriage, but it was
could have done so at this time, for there was no full of tenderness and affection. Three sons were
longer any reason for him to fear marriage, pater- born, of whom two, Hallam and Lionel, survived.
nity, or the transmission of disease to his offspring.
The habits of a lifetime, however, were too in- After a protracted honeymoon of some four
grained for him to shake them off at once. The real months in the Lake Country, Tennyson returned to
measure of his relief at being rid of his old fear of the south of England to find that the publication of
epilepsy is that he soon set about writing further In Memoriam had made him, without question, the
sections to be inserted into new editions of The major living poet. It had appeared anonymously,
Princess, in which the hero is said to be the victim but his authorship was an open secret.
of “weird seizures” inherited from his family; at
first he is terrified when he falls into trances, but This vast poem (nearly 3,000 lines) is divided
he is at last released from the malady when he falls into 131 sections, with prologue and epilogue; the
in love with Princess Ida. Not only this poem, but size is appropriate for what it undertakes, since in
his three other major long works, In Memoriam, coming to terms with loss, grief, and the growth of
Maud, and Idylls of the King (1859), all deal in part consolation, it touches on most of the intellectual is-
with the meaning of trances, which are at first sues at the center of the Victorian consciousness: re-
frightening but then are revealed to be pathways to ligion, immortality, geology, evolution, the relation
the extrasensory, to be rejoiced over rather than of the intellect to the unconscious, the place of art
feared. After his death Tennyson’s wife and son in a workaday world, the individual versus society,
burned many of his most personal letters, and in the relation of man to nature, and as many others.
what remains there is little reference to his trances The poem grew out of Tennyson’s personal grief,
or his recovery from them; but the poems bear quiet but it attempts to speak for all men rather than for
testimony to the immense weight he must have felt one. The structure often seems wayward, for in T.
lifted from his shoulders when he needed no longer S. Eliot ’s famous phrase, it has “only the unity and
worry about epilepsy. continuity of a diary” instead of the clear direction
of a philosophical statement. It was bound to be
Tennyson’s luck at last seemed to be on the somewhat irregular since it was composed with no
upturn. At the beginning of 1849 he received a large regard for either chronology or continuity and was
advance from his publisher with the idea that he for years not intended to be published. The vacilla-

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Proem

tion in mood of the finished poem, however, is nei- It was perhaps his very isolation that made him
ther haphazard nor capricious, for it is put together so interested in the Crimean War, for he read the
to show the wild swoops between depression and newspapers voraciously in order to keep current
elation that grief brings, the hesitant gropings to- with world affairs. “The Charge of the Light
ward philosophical justification of bereavement, the Brigade” was one result in 1854 of his fascination
tentative little darts of conviction that may precede with the heroism of that unpopular war. Maud, in
a settled belief in a beneficent world. It is intensely which the hero redeems his misspent life by vol-
personal, but one must also believe Tennyson in his unteering for service in the Crimea, was published
reiterated assertions that it was a poem, not the the following year. In spite of that somewhat con-
record of his own grief about Hallam; in short, that ventional-sounding conclusion, the poem is Ten-
his own feelings had prompted the poem but were nyson’s most experimental, for it tells a thoroughly
not necessarily accurately recorded in it. dramatic narrative in self-contained lyrics; the
reader must fill in the interstices of the story by in-
To the most perceptive of the Victorians (and ference. The lyrics are not even like one another in
to modern readers) the poem was moving for its scansion, length, or style. The narrator of the poem
dramatic recreation of a mind indisposed to deal is an unnamed young man whose father has com-
with the problems of contemporary life, and for the mitted suicide after being swindled by his partner.
sheer beauty of so many of its sections. To a more The son then falls in love with Maud, the daugh-
naive, and far larger, group of readers it was a work ter of the peccant partner; but since he is poor and
of real utility, to be read like the Bible as a man- she is rich, there is no possibility of their marry-
ual of consolation, and it is surely to that group that ing. When he is bullied by her brother, he kills him
the poem owed its almost unbelievable popularity. in a duel. After Maud also dies the narrator goes
Edition followed edition, and each brought Ten- temporarily insane; he finally realizes that he has
nyson more fame and greater fortune. been as selfish and evil as the society on which he
has blamed his bad fortune. In an attempt to make
Wordsworth, who had been poet laureate for up for his wasted life, he goes to the Crimea, with
seven years, had died in the spring of 1850. By the his subsequent death hinted at in the last section of
time Tennyson returned from his honeymoon, it the poem.
must have seemed to many a foregone conclusion
that he would be nominated as Wordsworth’s suc- As always, Tennyson is not at his best in nar-
cessor. Tennyson knew that the prince consort, who rative, but the melodramatic content of the plot fi-
advised the queen on such matters, was an admirer nally matters little in comparison with the startling
of his, and the night before receiving the letter of- originality of his attempt to extend the limits of lyri-
fering the post, he dreamed that the prince kissed cism in order to make it do the work of narrative
him on the cheek, and that he responded, “Very and drama, to capitalize on his own apparently cir-
kind but very German.” Early the following year cumscribed gift in order to include social criticism,
he was presented to the queen as her poet laureate contemporary history, and moral comment in the
and kissed her hand, wearing the borrowed and too- lyric. In part it must have been a deliberate answer
tight court clothes that Wordsworth had worn for to those who complained that his art was too self-
the same purpose on the occasion of his own pre- absorbed and negligent of the world around him.
sentation. The straining court suit was emblematic
of the passing of the office from the greatest of Ro- The experimental quality of Maud has made it
mantic poets to the greatest of the Victorians. one of the most interesting of his poems to modern
critics, but to Tennyson’s contemporaries it seemed
At the end of November 1853 Alfred and so unlike what they expected from the author of In
Emily Tennyson moved into the secluded big house Memoriam that they could neither understand nor
on the Isle of Wight known as Farringford, which love it. An age that was not accustomed to distin-
has ever since been associated with his name. guishing between narrator and poet found it almost
Emily loved the remoteness and the fact that their impossible not to believe that Tennyson was directly
clocks were not even synchronized with those else- portraying his own thoughts and personal history in
where, but her husband sometimes had a recurrence those of the central figure. The result was the worst
of his old longing to be rattling around London. critical abuse that Tennyson received after that di-
Most of the time, however, he was content to walk rected at the 1832 Poems. One reviewer went so
on the great chalk cliffs overlooking the sea, com- far as to say that Maud had one extra vowel in the
posing his poems as he tramped, their rhythm of- title, and that it made no difference which was to
ten deriving from his heavy tread. be deleted. Tennyson’s predictable response was to

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become defensive about the poem and to read it real man,” as he wrote of King Arthur; no doubt both
aloud at every opportunity in order to show how Hallam’s character and Tennyson’s grief at his death
badly misunderstood both poem and poet were. lent color to the entire poem.
Since it was a performance that took between two
and three hours, the capitulation to its beauty that Like The Princess,, In Memoriam, and Maud,
he often won thereby was probably due as much to the idylls were an assembly of poetry composed
weariness on the part of the hearer as to intellectual over a long time—in this case nearly half a century
or aesthetic persuasion. in all, for they were not finished until 1874 and
were not all published until 1885. Taken collec-
Ever since the publication of the 1842 Poems tively, they certainly constitute Tennyson’s most
Tennyson had been something of a lion in literary ambitious poem, but not all critics would agree that
circles, but after he became poet laureate he was the poem’s success is equal to its intentions.
equally in demand with society hostesses, who
were more interested in his fame than in his poetic For a modern reader, long accustomed to the
genius. For the rest of his life Tennyson was to be Arthurian legend by plays, musicals, films, and pop-
caught awkwardly between being unable to resist ular books, it is hard to realize that the story was
the flattery implied by their attentions and the relatively unfamiliar when Tennyson wrote. He
knowledge that their admiration of him usually worked hard at his preparation, reading most of the
sprang from the wrong reasons. It was difficult for available sources, going to Wales and the west
him to refuse invitations, but he felt subconsciously country of England to see the actual places con-
impelled when he accepted them to behave gruffly, nected with Arthur, and even learning sufficient
even rudely, in order to demonstrate his indepen- Welsh to read some of the original documents.
dence. His wife’s bad health usually made it im- “There is no grander subject in the world,” he wrote,
possible for her to accompany him, which probably and he meant his state of readiness to be equal to
increased his awkwardness. It all brought out the the loftiness of his themes, which explains in part
least attractive side of a fundamentally shy man, why it took him so long to write the entire poem.
whose paroxysms of inability to deal with social
situations made him seem selfish, bad-mannered, Although Tennyson always thought of the
and assertive. In order to smooth his ruffled feath- idylls as allegorical (his word was “parabolic”), he
ers, his hostesses and his friends would resort to refused to make literal identifications between in-
heavy flattery, which only made him appear more cidents, characters, or situations in the poems and
arrogant. One of the saddest aspects of Tennyson’s what they stood for, except to indicate generally
life is that his growing fame was almost in inverse that by King Arthur he meant the soul and that the
ratio to his ability to maintain intimacy with oth- disintegration of the court and the Round Table
ers, so that by the end of his life he was a basically showed the disruptive effect of the passions.
lonely man. All the innate charm, humor, intelli-
gence, and liveliness were still there, but it took In all the time that he worked on the idylls Ten-
great understanding and patience on the part of his nyson constantly refined their structure—by fram-
friends to bring them into the open. ing the main action between the coming of Arthur
and his death, by repetition of verbal motifs, by
Idylls of the King was published in 1859; it con- making the incidents of the plot follow the course
tained only four (“Enid,” “Vivien,” “Elaine,” and of the year from spring to winter, by making dif-
“Guinevere”) of the eventual twelve idylls. The mat- ferent idylls act as parallels or contrasts to each
ter of Arthur and Camelot had obsessed Tennyson other, by trying to integrate the whole poem as
since boyhood, and over the years it became a re- closely as an extended musical composition. Con-
ceptacle into which he poured his deepening feelings sidering how long he worked on the poem, the re-
of the desecration of decency and of ancient English sult is amazingly successful, although perhaps
ideals by the gradual corruption of accepted moral- more so when the poem is represented schemati-
ity. The decay of the Round Table came increasingly cally than in the actual experience of reading it.
to seem to him an apt symbol of the decay of nine-
teenth-century England. It was no accident that the As always, the imagery of the poem is superb.
first full-length idyll had been “Morte d’Arthur,” It is less successful in characterization and speech,
which ultimately became—with small additions— which are often stilted and finally seem more Vic-
the final idyll in the completed cycle. It had been torian than Arthurian. Even Arthur, who is meant to
written at the time of the death of Arthur Hallam, be the firm, heroic center of the poem, occasionally
who seemed to Tennyson “Ideal manhood closed in seems merely weak at the loss of his wife and the
decay of the court rather than nobly forgiving. Indi-
vidual idylls such as “The Last Tournament” and

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“Gareth and Lynette” have considerable narrative certainly the queen’s feeling for Tennyson that lay
force, but there is an almost fatal lack of forward behind the unprecedented offer of a baronetcy four
movement in the poem as a whole. times beginning in 1865; Tennyson each time
turned it down for himself while asking that if pos-
The reviewers were divided between those sible it be given to Hallam, his elder son, after his
who thought it a worthy companion of Malory own death.
and those who found it more playacting than
drama, with the costumes failing to disguise Ten- His extraordinary popularity was obvious in
nyson’s contemporaries and their concerns. The di- other ways as well. He was given honorary doc-
vision between critics still maintains that split of torates by Oxford and Edinburgh universities;
opinion, although it is probably taken more seri- Cambridge three times invited him to accept an
ously in the 1980s than it was earlier in the twen- honorary degree, but he modestly declined. The
tieth century. Whether that attitude will last is greatest men in the country competed for the honor
impossible to predict. of meeting and entertaining him. Thomas Carlyle
and his wife had been good friends of Tennyson’s
In spite of the adverse reviews and the reser- since the 1840s, and Tennyson felt free to drop in
vations of many of Tennyson’s fellow poets, the on them unannounced, at last even having his own
sales of Idylls of the King in 1859 were enough to pipe kept for him in a convenient niche in the gar-
gladden the heart of any poet: 40,000 copies were den wall. He had met Robert Browning at about
printed initially and within a week or two more than the same time as he had met Carlyle, and though
a quarter of these were already sold; it was a pat- the two greatest of Victorian poets always felt a
tern that was repeated with each succeeding vol- certain reserve about each other’s works, their mu-
ume as they appeared during the following decades. tual generosity in acknowledging genius was ex-
emplary; Browning, like most of the friends
The death of his admirer Prince Albert in 1861 Tennyson made in his maturity, was never an inti-
prompted Tennyson to write a dedication to the mate, but their respect for each other never faltered.
Idylls of the King in his memory. The prince had Tennyson was somewhat lukewarm in his response
taken an interest in Tennyson’s poetry ever since to the overtures of friendship made by Charles
1847, when it is believed that he called on Ten- Dickens, even after he had stood as godfather for
nyson when the poet was ill. He had written to ask one of Dickens’s sons. It is tempting to think that
for Tennyson’s autograph in his own copy of Idylls some of his reserve stemmed from an uneasy recog-
of the King, and he had come over unannounced nition of the similarity of their features that occa-
from Osborne, the royal residence on the Isle of sionally led to their being confused, particularly in
Wight, to call on Tennyson at Farringford. In spite photographs or portraits, which can hardly have
of the brevity of their acquaintance and its formal- been welcome to Tennyson’s self-esteem.
ity, Tennyson had been much moved by the
prince’s kindness and friendliness, and he had Tennyson maintained a reluctant closeness
greatly admired the way Albert behaved in the dif- with William Gladstone for nearly sixty years. It
ficult role of consort. was generally accepted in London society that if a
dinner was given for one of them, the other ought
Four months after Albert’s death the queen in- to be invited. Yet the truth was that they were never
vited Tennyson to Osborne for an informal visit. on an easy footing, and though they worked hard
Tennyson went with considerable trepidation, fear- at being polite to each other, their edginess occa-
ful that he might in some way transgress court eti- sionally flared into unpleasantness before others. It
quette, but his obvious shyness helped to make the is probable that some of their difficulties came from
visit a great success. It became the first of many their friendship with Arthur Hallam when they
occasions on which he visited the queen, and a gen- were young men; Gladstone had been Hallam’s
uine affection grew up on both sides. The queen best friend at Eton and felt left out after Hallam
treated Tennyson with what was great informality met Tennyson. To the end of their days the prime
by her reserved standards, so that the relationship minister and the poet laureate were mildly jealous
between monarch and laureate was probably more of their respective places in Hallam’s affections so
intimate that it has ever been before or since. She many years before. The feeling certainly colored
had an untutored and naive love of poetry, and he Gladstone’s reactions to Tennyson’s poetry (which
felt deep veneration for the throne; above all, each he occasionally reviewed), and nothing he could do
was a simple and unassuming person beneath a ever made Tennyson trust Gladstone as a politician.
carapace of apparent arrogance, and each recog- The relationship hardly reflects well on either man.
nized the true simplicity of the other. It was almost

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Almost as if he felt that his position as laure- excelled and the poetry in which he felt obliged to
ate and the most popular serious poet in the Eng- speak to his countrymen on more public matters.
lish-speaking world were not enough, Tennyson
deliberately tried to widen his appeal by speaking In the years between 1874 and 1882 Tennyson
more directly to the common people of the coun- made yet another attempt to widen his poetic hori-
try about the primary emotions and affections that zons. As the premier poet of England, he had been
he felt he shared with them. The most immediate compared—probably inevitably—to Shakespeare,
result of his wish to be “the people’s poet” was the and he determined to write for the stage as his great
1864 volume whose title poem was “Enoch Arden” predecessor had done. At the age of sixty-five he
and which also contained another long narrative wrote his first play as a kind of continuation of
poem, “Aylmer’s Field.” These are full of the kinds Shakespeare’s historical dramas. Queen Mary
of magnificent language and imagery that no other (1875) was produced in 1876 by Henry Irving, the
Victorian poet could have hoped to produce, but foremost actor on the English stage; Irving himself
the sentiments occasionally seem easy and sec- played the main male role. It had been necessary
ondhand. The volume also contained a number of to hack the play to a fraction of its original inordi-
much more experimental translations and metrical nate length in order to play it in one evening, and
innovations, as well as such wonderful lyrics as “In the result was hardly more dramatic than the orig-
the Valley of Cauteretz,” which was written thirty- inal long version had been. In spite of the initial
one years after he and Hallam had wandered curiosity about Tennyson’s first play, the audiences
through that beautiful countryside, and “Tithonus.” soon dwindled, and it was withdrawn after twenty-
There was no question that Tennyson was still a three performances; that was, however, a more re-
very great poet, but his ambition to be more than spectable run than it would be today.
a lyricist often blinded him to his own limitations.
His hope of becoming “the people’s poet” was tri- His next play, Harold (1876), about the early
umphantly realized; the volume had the largest English king of that name, failed to find a producer
sales of any during his lifetime. More than 40,000 during Tennyson’s lifetime, although he had con-
copies were sold immediately after publication, and scientiously worked at making it less sprawling
in the first year he made more than £8,000 from it, than its predecessor. Becket (1884), finished in
a sum equal to the income of many of the richest 1879, was a study of the martyred archbishop of
men in England. Canterbury; Tennyson found the subject so fasci-
nating that he once more wrote at length, in this
Popularity of the kind he had earned had its case making a play considerably longer than an un-
innate disadvantages, and Tennyson was beginning cut Hamlet. Becket was, not surprisingly, not pro-
to discover them as he was followed in the streets duced until 1893, the year after Tennyson’s death.
of London by admirers; at Farringford he com- Following Becket in quick succession came The
plained of the total lack of privacy when the park Falcon and The Cup (published together in 1884),
walls were lined with craning tourists who some- The Foresters (1892), and The Promise of May
times even came up to the house and peered into (published in Locksley Hall Sixty Years after, Etc.
the windows to watch the family at their meals. In in 1886), all of which abandoned the attempt to fol-
1867 he built a second house, Aldworth, on the low Shakespeare. On the stage only The Cup had
southern slopes of Blackdown, a high hill near any success, and that was in part due to the lavish
Haslemere, where the house was not visible except settings and the acting of Irving and Ellen Terry.
from miles away. Curiously, the house resembles After the failure of The Promise of May (a rustic
a smaller version of Bayons Manor, the much-hated melodrama and the only prose work in his long ca-
sham castle his uncle Charles Tennyson d’Eyncourt reer), Tennyson at last accepted the fact that nearly
had built in the Lincolnshire woods. To his con- a decade of his life had been wasted in an experi-
temporaries it appeared unnecessarily grand for a ment that had totally gone amiss. Today no one
second house, even slightly pretentious; today it would read even the best of the plays, Queen Mary
seems emblematic of the seriousness with which and Becket, if they were not the work of Tennyson.
Tennyson had come to regard his own public po- They betray the fact that he was not profound at
sition in Victorian England, which was not his most understanding the characters of other persons or in
attractive aspect. For the rest of his life he was to writing speech that had the sound of conversation.
divide his time between Farringford and Aldworth, Even the flashes of metaphor fail to redeem this
just as he divided his work between the essentially reckless, admirable, but totally failed attempt to fit
private, intimate lyricism at which he had always Tennyson’s genius to another medium.

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The climax of public recognition of Ten- spiritualism. His poetry of this period is saturated
nyson’s achievement came in 1883 when Gladstone with the desperation of the search, sometimes in
offered him a peerage. After a few days of consid- questioning, sometimes in dogmatic assertion that
eration Tennyson accepted. Surprisingly, his first scarcely hides the fear underlying it. Yet there were
thought was to change his name to Baron Tennyson moments of serenity, reflected in such beautiful po-
d’Eyncourt in an echo of his uncle’s ambition,but ems as “Demeter and Persephone,” in which he
he was discouraged by the College of Arms and fi- uses the classical legend as a herald of the truth of
nally settled on Baron Tennyson of Aldworth and Christianity. And there was, of course, “Crossing
Freshwater. Since he was nearly seventy-five when the Bar,” written in a few minutes as he sailed
he assumed the title, he took little part in the across the narrow band of water separating the Isle
activities of the House of Lords, but the appropri- of Wight from the mainland. At his request, this
ateness of his being ennobled was generally ac- grave little prayer of simple faith has ever since
knowledged. It was the first time in history that a been placed at the end of editions of his poetry.
man had been given a title for his services to po-
etry. Tennyson claimed that he took the peerage on Tennyson continued to compose poetry during
behalf of all literature, not as personal recognition. the last two years of his life; when he was too weak
to write it down, his son or his wife would copy it
The rest of his life was spent in the glow of for him. When he had a good day, he was still able
love that the public occasionally gives to a distin- to take long walks or even to venture to London.
guished man who has reached a great age. He con- The year before his death he wrote a simple and
tinued to write poetry nearly as assiduously as he delicate little poem, “June Heather and Bracken,”
had when young, and though some of it lacked the as an offering of love to his faithful wife; to her he
freshness of youth, there were occasional master- dedicated his last volume of poetry, which was not
pieces that mocked the passing years. He had al- published until a fortnight after his death. His
ways felt what he once described as the “passion friends noticed that he was gentler than he had been
of the past,” a longing for the days that had gone, for years, and he made quiet reparation to some of
either the great ages of earlier history or the more those whom he had offended by thoughtless
immediate past of his own life, and his poetic ge- brusquerie.
nius always had something nostalgic, even elegiac,
at its heart. Many of the finest poems of his old age On 6 October 1892, an hour or so after mid-
were written in memory of his friends as they died night, he died at Aldworth with the moon stream-
off, leaving him increasingly alone. ing in at the window overlooking the Sussex
Weald, his finger holding open a volume of Shake-
Of all the blows of mortality, the cruelest was speare, his family surrounding the bed. A week
the death from “jungle fever” of his younger son, later he was buried in the Poets’ Corner of West-
Lionel, who had fallen ill in India and was return- minster Abbey, near the graves of Browning and
ing by ship to England. Lionel died in the Red Sea, Chaucer. To most of England it seemed as if an era
and his body was put into the waves “Beneath a in poetry had passed, a divide as great as that a
hard Arabian moon / And alien stars.” It took Ten- decade later when Queen Victoria died.
nyson two years to recover his equanimity suffi-
ciently to write the poem from which those lines are One of the most levelheaded summations of
taken: the magnificent elegy dedicated “To the Mar- what he had meant to his contemporaries was made
quis of Dufferin and Ava,” who had been Lionel’s by Edmund Gosse on the occasion of Tennyson’s
host in India. Hauntingly, the poem is written in the eightieth birthday:
same meter as In Memoriam, that masterpiece of his
youth celebrating the death of another beloved He is wise and full of intelligence; but in mere in-
young man, Arthur Hallam. There were also fine tellectual capacity or attainment it is probable that
elegies to his brother Charles, to FitzGerald, and to there are many who excel him. This, then, is not the
several others, indicating the love he had felt for old direction in which his greatness asserts itself. He has
friends even when he was frequently unable to ex- not headed a single moral reform nor inaugurated a
press it adequately in person. single revolution of opinion; he has never pointed the
way to undiscovered regions of thought; he has never
Lionel’s death was the climax of Tennyson’s stood on tip-toe to describe new worlds that his fel-
sense of loss, and from that time until his own death lows were not tall enough to discover ahead. In all
he became increasingly troubled in his search for these directions he has been prompt to follow, quick
the proofs of immortality, even experimenting with to apprehend, but never himself a pioneer. Where then
has his greatness lain? It has lain in the various per-
fections of his writing. He has written, on the whole,
with more constant, unwearied, and unwearying ex-

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cellence than any of his contemporaries. . . . He has
expended the treasures of his native talent on broad-
ening and deepening his own hold upon the English
language, until that has become an instrument upon
which he is able to play a greater variety of melodies
to perfection than any other man.

But this is a kind of perfection that is hard to
accept for anyone who is uneasy with poetry and
feels that it ought to be the servant of something
more utilitarian. Like most things Victorian, Ten-
nyson’s reputation suffered an eclipse in the early
years of this century. In his case the decline was
more severe than that of other Victorians because
he had seemed so much the symbol of his age, so
that for a time his name was nearly a joke. After
two world wars had called into question most of
the social values to which he had given only the
most reluctant of support, readers were once more
able to appreciate that he stood apart from his con-
temporaries. Now one can again admire without
reservation one of the greatest lyric gifts in Eng-
lish literature, although it is unlikely that he will
ever again seem quite the equal of Shakespeare.

When the best of his poetry is separated out
from the second-rate work of the kind that any
writer produces, Tennyson can be seen plainly as
one of the half-dozen great poets in the English lan-
guage, at least the equal of Wordsworth or Keats
and probably far above any other Victorian. And
that is precisely what his contemporaries thought.

Source: William E. Fredeman, “Alfred Tennyson,” in Dic-
tionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 32, Victorian Poets be-
fore 1850, edited by Ira B. Nadel, Gale Research, 1984, pp.
262–82.

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