(DOWNLOAD) "Guest Editor's Foreword (Alfred Tennyson) (Critical Essay)" by Victorian Poetry " Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Guest Editor's Foreword (Alfred Tennyson) (Critical Essay)
- Author : Victorian Poetry
- Release Date : January 22, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 175 KB
Description
I don't know whether Tennyson liked anniversaries, but he certainly noticed them; and they play a conspicuous role in his poetry for good and ill. "On the Jubilee of Queen Victoria" (1887) can barely rouse itself to go through the Laureate motions. "To Dante (Written at Request of the Florentines)" (1865, the six-hundredth birthday) is not much more than compliant with that request. In contrast, the solicited piece "To Virgil: Written at the Request of the Mantuans for the Nineteenth Centenary of Virgil's Death" (1882) belongs on any short list of the poet's best late lyrics. Evidently Tennyson's inspiration on anniversary occasions came and went-a little like anniversaries, come to think of it-but his susceptibility to them was an acquired one, and its acquisition marks his poetic coming of age. The juvenilia croon around the planet their all-purpose lamentation over black-letter days of infamy and national downfall, be the nation in Mesopotamia, Wales, Hindostan, Peru: take your pick, but don't bother reaching for the almanac, because the poetry hasn't learned yet to care about how significant dates get to be that way. Where poems from the 1830s find their occasion in holidays, the sense of commemorative recurrence that makes a day a holiday still seems conspicuously absent. Thus in "The Death of the Old Year" (1832), when the moribund oldster expires in bed at the midnight knock of his punctual son, there is no irony-enhancing recollection that the poor patient was once just as impatient an heir, or that the newcomer's days too are numbered. "St Agnes' Eve" (1836) might be any winter's night in the ecstatic chastity of its speaker-nun, who if she knows anything pertinent to a certain Keats poem has efficiently sublimated it, along with everything else, into radiant purity-as the poet would appear to have done in submitting his snowy cameo to, of all things, that calendrically savvy genre a Victorian annual (The Keepsake for 1837). It is in the poetry of the 1840s that we find Tennyson first grasping anniversary occasions in the round, which is to say with a feel for the fullness of time. Now holidays begin to look before and after: "This morning is the morning of the day, / When I with Eustace from the city went / To see the Gardener's Daughter." These opening lines from the 1842 poem they name are stereo-tensed: the entire imaginative exercise of earful depiction in "The Gardener's Daughter" depends on the play of "is" against "went," present against past. Once blooming, since dead, but fixed in portraiture and ever beloved there, the speaker's Rose exerts the once-and-future appeal to which Tennyson's imagination seldom failed to make a memorable, because commemorative, response. Since adolescence he had played poetically at impersonating old men, but by 1842 he had learned the better trick of teaching himself and his generation to suppose themselves old and young at once or, as my epigraph has it, "Ancients of the Earth" and by that very token dwellers "in the morning of the times." The primal, renewable persistence of the archaic in memory has its complement in our anticipation of a posterity that must regard us as antiques some day, and never more than on the holidays that will remind them how we too entertained just such ideas as theirs about us. So sad, so strange, so fresh: the days that are no more still are; and no more is, so to speak, what they are-not utterly negatived, but uncannily subsistent in a way to which poetry retains, and may indeed demand, access.