The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson eBook

[Greek:  alla s’ es Elysion pedion kai peirata gaiaes athanatoi pempsousin, hothi xanthos Rhadamanthus tae per rhaeistae biotae pelei anthr_opoisin, ou niphetos, out’ ar cheim_on polus, oute pot’ ombros all’ aiei Zephuroio ligu pneiontas aaetas okeanos aniaesin anapsuchein anthropous.

[But the Immortals will convey thee to the Elysian plain and the world’s limits where is Rhadamanthus of the golden hair, where life is easiest for man; no snow is there, no nor no great storm, nor any rain, but always ocean sendeth forth the shrilly breezes of the West to cool and refresh men],

and Pindar, ’Olymp’., ii., 178 ’seqq’., compared with the splendid fragment at the beginning of the ‘Dirges’.  Elysium was afterwards placed in the netherworld, as by Virgil.  Thus, as so often the suggestion was from the facts of geography, the rest soon became an allegorical myth, and to attempt to identify and localise “the Happy Isles” is as great an absurdity as to attempt to identify and localise the island of Shakespeare’s ’Tempest’.]

LOCKSLEY HALL

First published in 1842, and no alterations were made in it subsequently to the edition of 1850; except that in the Selections published in 1865 in the third stanza the reading was “half in ruin” for “in the distance”.  This poem, as Tennyson explained, was not autobiographic but purely imaginary, “representing young life, its good side, its deficiences and its yearnings”.  The poem, he added, was written in Trochaics because the elder Hallam told him that the English people liked that metre.  The hero is a sort of preliminary sketch of the hero in ‘Maud’, the position and character of each being very similar:  both are cynical and querulous, and break out into tirades against their kind and society; both have been disappointed in love, and both find the same remedy for their afflictions by mixing themselves with action and becoming “one with their kind”.

‘Locksley Hall’ was suggested, as Tennyson acknowledged, by Sir William Jones’ translation of the old Arabian Moallakat, a collection from the works of pre-Mahommedan poets.  See Sir William Jones’ works, quarto edition, vol. iv., pp. 247-57.  But only one of these poems, namely the poem of Amriolkais, could have immediately influenced him.  In this the poet supposes himself attended on a journey by a company of friends, and they pass near a place where his mistress had lately lived, but from which her tribe had then removed.  He desires them to stop awhile, that he may weep over the deserted remains of her tent.  They comply with his request, but exhort him to show more strength of mind, and urge two topics of consolation, namely, that he had before been equally unhappy and that he had enjoyed his full share of pleasures.  Thus by the recollection of his past delights his imagination is kindled and his grief suspended.  But Tennyson’s chief indebtedness is rather in the oriental colouring given to his poem, chiefly in the sentiment and imagery.  Thus in the couplet—­