SOURCE: Bidney, Martin. “Nostalgic Narcissism in Comic and Tragic Perspectives: Elizabeth Bowen's Two Fictional Reworkings of a Tennyson Lyric.” Studies in Short Fiction 33, no. 1 (winter 1996): 59-69.

In the following essay, Bidney views “Tears, Idle Tears” and “The Happy Autumn Fields” as Bowen's interpretation of an untitled Tennyson poems.

“Tennis, anyone?” is the opening of Peter De Vries's delightful “Touch and Go (With a Low Bow to Elizabeth Bowen),” and its closing words arc “Tennyson, anyone?” (De Vries 30, 32). Surprisingly, “in conversation Miss Bowen said that she had not realized,” until she read this parody, “how often she relied on Victorian poetry for her titles (e.g., ‘Tears, Idle Tears,’ ‘The Happy Autumn Fields,’ etc.),” according to William Heath's report in 1961 (Heath 166n2). Bowen was not necessarily disingenuous: the creative process arises from deep levels of pre-verbal awareness; memory is unreliable; influences operate deviously (creating and overcoming anxieties as they...