The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson eBook

In his power of crystallising commonplaces he stands next to Pope, in subtle felicity of expression beside Virgil.  And, when he says of Virgil that we find in his diction “all the grace of all the muses often flowering in one lonely word,” he says what is literally true of his own work.  As a master of style his place is in the first rank among English classical poets.  But his style is the perfection of art.  His diction, like the diction of Milton and Gray, resembles mosaic work.  With a touch here and a touch there, now from memory, now from unconscious assimilation, inlaying here an epithet and there a phrase, adding, subtracting, heightening, modifying, substituting one metaphor for another, developing what is latent in the suggestive imagery of a predecessor, laying under contribution the most intimate familiarity with what is best in the literature of the ancient and modern world, the unwearied artist toils patiently on till his precious mosaic work is without a flaw.  All the resources of rhetoric are employed to give distinction to his style and every figure in rhetoric finds expression in his diction:  Hypallage as in

  The pillard dusk Of sounding sycamores.

—­Audley Court.

Paronomasia as in

  The seawind sang Shrill, chill with flakes of foam.

—­Morte d’Arthur.

Oxymoron as

  Behold them unbeheld, unheard Hear all.

—­’’none’.

Hyperbaton as in

  The dew-impearled winds of dawn.

—­’Ode to Memory’.

Metonymy as in

  The bright death quiver’d at the victim’s throat.

—­’Dream of Fair Women’.

or in

  For some three careless moans The summer pilot of an empty heart.

—­’Gardener’s Daughter’.

No poet since Milton has employed what is known as Onomatopoeia with so much effect.  Not to go farther than the poems of 1842, we have in the ’Morte d’Arthur’:—­

  So all day long the noise of battle rolled
  Among the mountains by the winter sea;

or

Dry clashed his harness in the icy caves And barren chasms, and all to left and right The bare black cliff clang’d round him, as he bas’d His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels—­

or the exquisite

  I heard the water lapping on the crag,
  And the long ripple washing in the reeds.

So in ‘The Dying Swan’,

  And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds.

See too the whole of ‘Oriana’ and the description of the dance at the beginning of ‘The Vision of Sin.’