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Ebook has 424 lines and 47340 words, and 9 pages

Whilst Vengeance, in the lurid air, Lifts her red arm, exposed and bare: On whom that ravening brood of Fate, Who lap the blood of sorrow, wait: Who, Fear, this ghastly train can see, And look not madly wild, like thee?

These excesses were, however, at no time characteristic of the better poets of the time, and were rather the mumbo-jumbo of versifiers who, lacking any personal inspiration, caught a rumour at second or even third hand of a spurious Arcadia, and rhymed it--or blank-versed it--into a spiritless rhetoric. It is only suggestive at a very distant cry, and by the merest implication, of the true nature of Augustan poetry that Richard Jago could write--

And oft the stately Tow'rs, that overtop The rising Wood, and oft the broken Arch, Or mould'ring Wall, well taught to counterfeit The Waste of Time, to solemn Thought excite, And crown with graceful Pomp the shaggy Hill.

No age of English poetry has suffered more in reputation through the malpractices of its more undistinguished writers than that of Pope, and in all its finer expression it worked its own way as closely in touch as any other with the ordinary speech of its own time.

In these references to common speech, the standard referred to, it may be said, is the speech of the intelligent and vivid, though not necessarily the most highly educated, members of the community. There is no telling at any time where exactly you are going to catch the true turn of racy or imaginative idiom, and it is as unsafe to generalize in favour of the rustic as it is to do so in favour of the tutored townsman. Good minds make good speech, and cumulatively they give the common diction of an age a character which cannot escape the poets when poetry has any health in it, which, to do it justice in looking back over five hundred years of achievement, is nearly always. Apart from those lapses of quite unrepresentative poets, the relation which is being discussed was preserved, as we have seen, with unbroken continuity from the beginnings down to the time of the late Augustans, the immediate predecessors of Wordsworth.

Will no one tell me what she sings? Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow For old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago: Or is it some more humble lay, Familiar matter of to-day? Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, That has been, and may be again!

Smart uniforms and sparkling coronets Are spurned in turn, until her turn arrives, After male loss of time, and hearts, and bets Upon the sweepstakes for substantial wives; And when at last the pretty creature gets Some gentleman, who fights, or writes, or drives, It soothes the awkward squad of the rejected To find how very badly she selected ...

and in--

The mountains look on Marathon-- And Marathon looks on the sea; And musing there an hour alone, I dreamed that Greece might still be free; For standing on the Persians' grave, I could not deem myself a slave.

Even Shelley, or that mood in him that was preoccupied with the fiery pinnacles in the clouds, kept the diction of his most ethereal flights in tune with the same instinctive necessity.

He holds him with his skinny hand, "There was a ship," quoth he. "Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!" Eftsoons his hand dropt he.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, Whether the summer clothe the general earth With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch Of mossy apple-tree, while the high thatch Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall Heard only in the trances of the blast, Or, if the secret ministry of frost Shall hang them up in silent icicles, Quietly shining to the quiet moon.

Beside which may be set, as a final example from that age of what poetry can do in the way of transfiguring plain speech, Landor's--

Stand close around, ye Stygian set, With Dirce in one boat convey'd! Or Charon, seeing, may forget That he is old and she a shade.

English poetry was now nearly five hundred years old. In its creation immense demands had been made upon the language, and many characteristic beauties of poetic style might well have been supposed to have been now explored beyond further possibilities. When Chaucer wrote, the inspiration as of divinely wise and happy childhood could shine through the most ingenuous of phrases, and the plainest statement was touched by magic for ever in this playground of poetry's infancy. "O yonge fresshe folkes," he exclaims, or "Now shippes sailinge in the sea," or "A nightingale, upon a cedre grene," or "Ther sprang the violete all newe," and we have with every word the enchanted discovery of poetry. Thereafter a poet might score a great effect now and again by placing some such utter simplicity in the midst of subtler or more elaborate statement, but it could hardly again be used as a customary manner. What was then and has ever since remained triumphantly original in Chaucer could but become commonplace on repetition. His way of saying delightedly that the flowers were fresh and the birds were glad and that apples were sweet, and saying these things just as simply as that, stands beside his humorous invention of character as one of the two chief glories of his poetry, but it was not a case of his faintly suggesting a poetic possibility that could be elaborated by his successors. He took the obvious and without embroidering it with a single word made it into poetry of everlasting freshness, but he did this once and for all, and poets after him would have to add some touch of revelation of their own before they could make good their claim. Chaucer could say that flowers were fresh and leave it at that, giving us a perfect image of spring, but even two hundred years later, in what now seems to us to have been still the dawn of English poetry, Shakespeare had to make his impression with a far more complex image--

daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty.

On one side lay the ocean, and on one Lay a great water, and the moon was full ...

he had to say these things with just as much originality of phrase as would compel attention, and yet with not one word beyond this, or one word too heavily weighted, lest he should be accused of inflation, which is the death of poetry.

A second difficulty that Tennyson, to use the one example for the moment, had to meet was in connection with the associative value of words. When Chaucer was writing, words can have had little or no associative value. Even with Shakespeare they must have had far less of this evocative power than they had three hundred years later. Indeed, Shakespeare's own language has unquestionably for us acquired a certain patina from time. We read to-day--

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,

and upon analysis we are aware of two separate sources of our delight in the superbly used word "sessions." Firstly, there is its purely imaginative value. For Shakespeare, "sessions" can have had but one literal meaning. In the framing of that line the common marvel of creative imagination was performed. The poet deliberated upon his thoughts gathering together for the survey of "things past." It was a process something formal and ceremonious that he had in mind, a solemn conclave. Thus the ritual of the law would suggest itself to him, the ordered gravity of a court, the pregnant occasion of a sessions. And thereupon the two ideas would associate themselves, the perfect image would be created, and with it would come the full exercise of our imaginative powers in turn, of our best delight in poetry. For the bare actual setting of the scene in his sonnet Shakespeare might have been content with some such line as--

When to my mind I summon up things past,

but the informing vitality would have escaped. It is one of the mysteries of poetry that when you translate her word into another, although by logic it may seem to be the same thing, it is in truth something essentially different. It is not quite a barren truism to say that you can only say what Shakespeare said by saying what he said--

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past.

This, then, is the first value that we discover in Shakespeare's use in that connection of the word "sessions"--an exact functioning of the poetic imagination. But over and above that there is yet another value, one that is not very easy to define in set terms, and one of which Shakespeare himself can hardly have been consciously aware. "Sessions," as we now read the word, calls to our mind, as it did to his, a court of law with all its weighty circumstance; also, as we read it in the sonnet, we get precisely the effect of pure imaginative effort that Shakespeare got, or as much of it as is possible to our own faculty; but the word has also taken on a strange atmospheric significance, almost a shade of actual meaning that is beyond its original intention. In its strictly imaginative value alone, the word was one that might without offence have been more or less similarly used by one of Shakespeare's contemporaries or early successors, even after his brilliant discovery of it in that context. Shakespeare's choice of the word was entirely admirable for his imaginative purpose, but it was not so astonishing as to make it explicitly his own beyond the use of any other poet who wished to escape the charge of mere theft. But as time went on, the word, fixed there in its sonnet, underwent a spiritual evolution, that for practical purposes was complete in any case by the time Tennyson arrived, until it was in some sense of a newly acquired nature, and no longer safe for any poet's handling. The word could not now be used in anything approaching the same context without calling up in the reader's mind the whole dark and passionate background of Shakespeare's sonnets. It has, in short, acquired a specifically literary association which is to say--although some critics would seem to overlook the fact--that it is the living witness of one of the supreme moments of human experience, but also that it has become so essential a part of that particular moment that it is now almost impossible to use it in the service of any other. And when Tennyson began to write he found a language that was strewn with words that had put on this dangerous nature, beautiful and often as it would appear irreplaceable words, yet now with calamity in their touch for the poet. To reject them was by no means the same thing as rejecting the false "poetic" inflation that had been the mark of Wordsworth's attack. It meant that by now a new discipline of a very arduous and vigilant kind had become necessary in the practice of poetry. On every hand were admirable and seductive instruments the use of which was forbidden. If you were Keats you might privateer among the old poetry with profit, but his success in this matter was the adventure of lucky genius, not an example to be followed. Shakespeare could write

Not poppy nor mandragora Nor all the drowsy syrups of this world ...

and Keats could find his Autumn sleeping

Drowsed with the fume of poppies ...

and be justified of his borrowing, but the exile from poetry of "drowsing" and "poppies" in company, which had at least been suggested by Shakespeare's lines, was now in any case absolute. So that the poet's craft is already complicated in two ways. If Tennyson in his verse wanted to recall the birds in spring, he could no longer rely for his effect upon some simple statement such as "the happy birds sang on the bough," and further, in his elaborated image he had studiously to keep clear, for example, of

Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang--

although the chances were that this superb and complex image would be insinuatingly persistent in his mind.

Finally, Tennyson found a language that as a literary vehicle was nearly five hundred years old, three hundred at least of which had been of rich and unceasing activity. This fact presented a difficulty distinct from that which has been examined in connection with Shakespeare's use of the word "sessions." Not only had particular words acquired a specific associative value which made them dangerous for use again in poetry, but the whole construction of a poetic phrase was now beset by mazes of seductive suggestion, word calling up word in long sequence from the vast stores of poetry that had been accumulated by the race. It was no longer a very easy thing to see the object before you, precisely in its immediate appearance, wholly dissociated from any company that it might have kept in some earlier creative presentation. It needed something of a conscious effort in looking at yellow sands to remind yourself that coral was not necessarily somewhere about, to remember that an albatross was not positively doomed to meet its death from a cross-bow, to hear the nightingale without hearing also the undertones of "tears amid the alien corn," to see a country graveyard wholly unshadowed by the ghosts of village Hampdens and mute inglorious Miltons. There was no simple way of escape for the poet from this storied experience of his ancestry. He had to face it courageously like the rest of experience, to assimilate and master it, and in so far as it passed into his work at all, as it was bound to do in some measure, to stamp it with his own pressure and so recreate it. But it did complicate his task. We may now see how Tennyson dealt with this and the other problems that have been presented.

Calm is the morn without a sound, Calm as to suit a calmer grief, And only thro' the faded leaf The chestnut pattering to the ground:

Calm and deep peace on this high wold, And on these dews that drench the furze And all the silvery gossamers That twinkle into green and gold:

Calm and still light on yon great plain That sweeps with all its autumn bowers, And crowded farms and lessening towers, To mingle with the bounding main:

Calm and deep peace in this wide air, These leaves that redden to the fall; And in my heart, if calm at all, If any calm, a calm despair;

Calm on the seas, and silver sleep, And waves that sway themselves in rest, And dead calm in that noble breast Which heaves but with the heaving deep.

First in these lines is apparent a poetic virtue of which Tennyson was an almost constant master, the faculty for seeing a natural object in minutely exact definition. "Thro' the faded leaf The chestnut pattering to the ground," the "dews that drench the furze," the whole of the third stanza, the "waves that sway themselves in rest," each phrase is incontrovertible evidence of a thing personally seen with creative intensity. In the first of these examples we see how Tennyson could manage that elaboration of the simple statement, which is the first of the four problems that have been discussed as awaiting him. If Chaucer had been presenting an autumn landscape--which, in his preoccupation with spring, he very rarely did--and had wanted to use foliage as a figure, he would almost certainly have been content with "the faded leaf" without embellishment, and from his tongue the economy would have been convincing. But by Tennyson's time the phrase by itself would have been something barren, and it needed fertilising by some further imaginative life. To the simple image Tennyson adds another, and together they brighten into one perfect realisation. Faded leaves, falling chestnuts--there for any schoolboy's observation, and yet, placed thus exactly, the witnesses of a rich poetic power in full exercise. And whenever Tennyson felt called upon to intensify the simple statement of a natural object, he was able to do it by reference to his own vivid experience, and thus to deal satisfactorily with the problem in question, and also, so far as the delineation of landscape was concerned, to keep his yellow sands away from coral. If he wants to speak of marshy waste-lands, the "glooming flats" of Lincolnshire are to mind for his purpose, and the "glooming" is the signature written at once; if the violets were to blow, he had seen them "thick by ashen roots"; and even the familiar poppy in sleep he has seen precisely hanging from "the craggy ledge." I have said that Tennyson heightened his images in this way whenever he felt called upon to do so--called upon, that is to say, by the unaccountable poetic impulse. It was, even with so deliberate an artist, no matter of course to do this, and he was often, and by a just instinct, content to leave the simple image in its simplicity, though he would be careful not to leave it unfortified by some such intensification near at hand. Love is to be looked for not only "by the happy threshold" but also

hand in hand with Plenty in the maize, Or red with spirted purple of the vats, Or foxlike in the vine ...

though sometimes the poet leaves magic to the barest statement with an entirely just confidence, as in--

And the sun went down, and the stars came out far over the summer sea ...

A bow-shot from her bower-eaves, He rode between the barley-sheaves, The sun came dazzling thro' the leaves, And flamed upon the brazen greaves Of bold Sir Lancelot. A red-cross knight for ever kneel'd To a lady in his shield, That sparkled on the yellow field, Beside remote Shalott.

All in the blue unclouded weather Thick-jewell'd shone the saddle leather, The helmet and the helmet-feather Burn'd like one burning flame together, As he rode down to Camelot. As often thro' the purple night, Below the starry clusters bright Some bearded meteor, trailing light, Moves over still Shalott.

The missal-like illumination of verse such as this will be further mentioned, but for the moment I want merely to contrast it with this, written sixty years later, when the poet was over eighty:--

Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me! And may there be no moaning of the bar, When I put out to sea.

But such a tide as moving seems asleep, Too full for sound and foam, When that which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell, And after that the dark! And may there be no sadness of farewell, When I embark;

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crost the bar.

In the diction of that there is a serene directness that has been won only out of many years of technical liberality.

Calm is the morn without a sound ...

we cannot but at once allow the obvious excellence of the mere writing, but if we want acute analysis of sorrow in her more elusive moods or discovering flights of mysticism, we shall find little enough of satisfaction. Here is nothing but the most childlike assertion of calm grief and its reflection in the calm dissolution of an autumn landscape. But if we are content with a mood so unvexed by argument, a thought so incapable of obscurity, we shall be well rewarded. For this very fixity of emotional purpose, to be confused perhaps by an unsympathetic judgment with an empty self-sufficiency, achieves its own purity of poetic style with, for us, its accompanying delight. It is just because Tennyson is so singly intent upon the elementary content matter of his poetry that he has no need of care to avoid assuming other men's emotions, or, more precisely, their emotional accent. In the "calm is the morn" passage there is not a word that is obviously reminiscent. Tennyson's mind may be a figure of homespun in the intellectual world, but it can appear in any company without the slightest embarrassment and apparently without any temptation to ape livelier or more ceremonious wits. This poet was in a literal sense too simple to be in even remote danger of borrowing "sessions."

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