The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson eBook

with what was afterwards substituted:—­

  I loved the brimming wave that swam
  Through quiet meadows round the mill,
  The sleepy pool above the dam,
  The pool beneath it never still.

Another most felicitous emendation is to be found in ‘The Poet’, where the edition of 1830 reads:—­

  And in the bordure of her robe was writ
  Wisdom, a name to shake
  Hoar anarchies, as with a thunderfit.

This in 1842 appears as:—­

  And in her raiment’s hem was trac’d in flame
  Wisdom, a name to shake
  All evil dreams of power—­a sacred name.

Again, in the ‘Lotos Eaters’

  Three thunder-cloven thrones of oldest snow
  Stood sunset-flushed

is changed into

  Three silent pinnacles of aged snow.

So in ‘Will Waterproof’ the cumbrous

  Like Hezekiah’s backward runs The shadow of my days,

was afterwards simplified into

  Against its fountain upward runs
  The current of my days.

Not less felicitous have been the additions made from time to time.  Thus in ‘Audley Court’ the concluding lines ran:—­

  The harbour buoy,
  With one green sparkle ever and anon
  Dipt by itself.

But what vividness is there in the subsequent insertion of

  “Sole star of phosphorescence in the calm.”

between the first line and the second.

So again in the ‘Morte d’Arthur’ how greatly are imagery and rhythm improved by the insertion of

  Across the ridge, and paced beside the mere,

between

  Then went Sir Bedivere the second time,

and

  Counting the dewy pebbles, fix’d in thought.

There is an alteration in ’none which is very interesting.  Till 1884 this was allowed to stand:—­

  The lizard, with his shadow on the stone,
  Rests like a shadow, and the cicala sleeps.

No one could have known better than Tennyson that the cicala is loudest in the torrid calm of the noonday, as Theocritus, Virgil, Byron and innumerable other poets have noticed; at last he altered it, but at the heavy price of a cumbrous pleonasm, into “and the winds are dead”.

He allowed many years to elapse before he corrected another error in natural history—­but at last the alteration came.  In ‘The Poet’s Song’ in the line—­

  The swallow stopt as he hunted the bee,

the “fly” which the swallow does hunt was substituted for what it does not hunt, and that for very obvious reasons.  But whoever would see what Tennyson’s poetry has owed to elaborate revision and scrupulous care would do well to compare the first edition of ‘Mariana in the South’, ‘The Sea-Fairies’, ‘OEnone’, ‘The Lady of Shalott’, ‘The Palace