Fly happy with the mission of the Cross;
Knit land to land, and blowing havenward
With silks, and fruits, and spices, clear
of toll,
Enrich the markets of the golden year.
“But we grow old! Ah! when
shall all men’s good
Be each man’s rule, and universal
Peace
Lie like a shaft of light across the land,
And like a lane of beams athwart the sea,
Thro’ all the circle of the golden
year?”
Thus far he flow’d, and ended; whereupon
“Ah, folly!” in mimic cadence
answer’d James—
“Ah, folly! for it lies so far away.
Not in our time, nor in our children’s
time,
’Tis like the second world to us
that live;
’Twere all as one to fix our hopes
on Heaven
As on this vision of the golden year.”
With that he struck his staff against
the rocks
And broke it,—James,—you
know him,—old, but full
Of force and choler, and firm upon his
feet,
And like an oaken stock in winter woods,
O’erflourished with the hoary clematis:
Then added, all in heat: “What
stuff is this!
Old writers push’d the happy season
back,—
The more fools they,—we forward:
dreamers both:
You most, that in an age, when every hour
Must sweat her sixty minutes to the death,
Live on, God love us, as if the seedsman,
rapt
Upon the teeming harvest, should not dip
[4]
His hand into the bag: but well I
know
That unto him who works, and feels he
works,
This same grand year is ever at the doors.”
He spoke; and, high above, I heard them
blast
The steep slate-quarry, and the great
echo flap
And buffet round the hills from bluff
to bluff.
[Footnote 1: 1846 to 1850.
And joined him in Llanberis; and that
same song
He told me, etc.]
[Footnote 2: Proverbs xxx. 15:
“The horseleach hath two daughters,
crying,
Give, give".]
[Footnote 3: 1890. Altered to “Yet
oceans daily gaining on the land".]
[Footnote 4: ‘Selections’, 1865.
Plunge.]
First published in 1842, no alterations were made
in it subsequently.
This noble poem, which is said to have induced Sir
Robert Peel to give Tennyson his pension, was written
soon after Arthur Hallam’s death, presumably
therefore in 1833. “It gave my feeling,”
Tennyson said to his son, “about the need of
going forward and braving the struggle of life perhaps
more simply than anything in ’In Memoriam’.”
It is not the ‘Ulysses’ of Homer, nor
was it suggested by the ‘Odyssey’.
The germ, the spirit and the sentiment of the poem
are from the twenty-sixth canto of Dante’s ‘Inferno’,
where Ulysses in the Limbo of the Deceivers speaks
from the flame which swathes him. I give a literal
version of the passage:—
