[Footnote 15: ‘Cf’. Shakespeare,
“foreheads villainously low".]
[Footnote 16: 1842. Peoples spin.]
[Footnote 17: Tennyson tells us that when he
travelled by the first train from Liverpool to Manchester
in 1830 it was night and he thought that the wheels
ran in a groove, hence this line.]
[Footnote 18: 1842. The world.]
[Footnote 19: Cathay, the old name for China.]
[Footnote 20: ‘Cf’. Tasso, ‘Gems’,
ix., st. 91:—
Nuova nube di polve ecco vicina
Che fulgori in grembo tiene.
(Lo! a fresh cloud of dust is near which
Carries in its breast thunderbolts.)]
First published in 1842. No alteration was made
in any subsequent edition.
The poem was written in 1840 when Tennyson was returning
from Coventry to London, after his visit to Warwickshire
in that year. The Godiva pageant takes place
in that town at the great fair on Friday in Trinity
week. Earl Leofric was the Lord of Coventry in
the reign of Edward the Confessor, and he and his
wife Godiva founded a magnificent Benedictine monastery
at Coventry. The first writer who mentions this
legend is Matthew of Westminster, who wrote in 1307,
that is some 250 years after Leofric’s time,
and what authority he had for it is not known.
It is certainly not mentioned by the many preceding
writers who have left accounts of Leofric and Godiva
(see Gough’s edition of Camden’s ‘Britannia’,
vol. ii., p. 346, and for a full account of the legend
see W. Reader, ’The History and Description
of Coventry Show Fair, with the History of Leofric
and Godiva’). With Tennyson’s should
be compared Moultrie’s beautiful poem on the
same subject, and Landor’s Imaginary Conversation
between Leofric and Godiva.
[1] I waited for the train at Coventry;
I hung with grooms and porters on the bridge, To
match the three tall spires; [2] and there I shaped
The city’s ancient legend into this: Not
only we, the latest seed of Time, New men, that
in the flying of a wheel Cry down the past, not
only we, that prate Of rights and wrongs, have loved
the people well, And loathed to see them overtax’d;
but she Did more, and underwent, and overcame,
The woman of a thousand summers back, Godiva,
wife to that grim Earl, who ruled In Coventry:
for when he laid a tax Upon his town, and all the
mothers brought Their children, clamouring, “If
we pay, we starve!” She sought her lord, and
found him, where he strode About the hall, among
his dogs, alone, His beard a foot before him, and
his hair A yard behind. She told him of their
tears, And pray’d him, “If they pay
this tax, they starve”. Whereat he stared,
replying, half-amazed, “You would not let
your little finger ache For such as these?”—“But
I would die,” said she. He laugh’d,
and swore by Peter and by Paul; Then fillip’d
at the diamond in her ear; “O ay, ay, ay,
