It would be unwise, however, to ignore all of Tennyson's later productions. In 1855 he published his experimental monologue Maud, in which he presents an alienated hero who feels great bitterness toward society. In 1859 appeared four books of his Idylls of the King, a large-scale epic that occupied most of his energies in the second half of his career. The Idylls uses the body of Arthurian legend to construct a vision of civilization's rise and fall. In this civilization women both inspire men's highest efforts and sow the seeds of those efforts' destruction. The Idylls provides Tennyson's most extensive social vision, one that typifies much social thought of the age in its concern with medieval ideals of social community, heroism, and courtly love and in its despairing sense of the cycles of historical change.
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W. H. Auden stated that Tennyson had 'the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet.' The interesting point is that Tennyson did not 'have' such an ear: he developed it. Studies of the original versions of his poems in the 1830 and 1832 volumes demonstrate how hard he worked at his craftsmanship. Like Geoffrey Chaucer or Alexander Pope or John Keats, Tennyson studied his predecessors assiduously to perfect his technique. Anyone wanting to learn the traditional craft of English verse can study profitably the various stages of revision that poems such as 'The Lotos- Eaters' were subjected to by this painstaking and artful poet. Some lines written in 1988 by the American poet Karl Shapiro effectively characterize Tennyson's accomplishments in these areas: Long-lived, the very image of English Poet, Whose songs still break out tears in the generations, Whose poetry for practitioners still astounds, Who crafted his life and letters like a watch.
Tennyson's early poetry shows other skills as well. One of these was a capacity for linking scenery to states of mind. As early as 1835 J. S. Mill identified the special kind of scene painting to be found in poems such as 'Mariana' (1830): 'not the power of producing that rather vapid species of composition usually termed descriptive poetry . . . but the power of creating scenery, in keeping with some state of human feeling so fitted to it as to be the embodied symbol of it, and to summon up the state of feeling itself, with a force not to be surpassed by anything but reality.'
The state of feeling to which Tennyson was most intensely drawn was a melancholy isolation, often portrayed through the consciousness of an abandoned woman, as in 'Mariana.' Tennyson's absorption with such emotions in his early poetry evoked considerable criticism. His friend R. C. Trench warned him, 'Tennyson, we cannot live in Art,' and Mill urged him to 'cultivate, and with no half devotion, philosophy as well as poetry.' Advice of this kind Tennyson was already predisposed to heed. The death of Hallam and the religious uncertainties that he had himself experienced, together with his own extensive study of writings by geologists, astronomers, and biologists, led him to confront many of the religious issues that bewildered his and later generations. The result was In Memoriam, a long elegy written over a period of seventeen years, embodying the poet's reflections on the relation of human beings to God and to nature.
Tennyson's exploration of these vast subjects prompted some readers, such as T. H. Huxley, to consider him an intellectual giant, a thinker who had mastered the scientific thought of his century and fully confronted the issues it raised. Others dismissed Tennyson, in this phase, as a lightweight. Auden went so far as to call him the 'stupidest' of English poets. He added, 'There was little about melancholia that he didn't know; there was little else that he did.' Perhaps T. S. Eliot's evaluation of In Memoriam is the more thought-provoking: the poem, he wrote, is remarkable not 'because of the quality of its faith but because of the quality of its doubt.' Tennyson's mind was slow, ponderous, brooding; for the composition of In Memoriam such qualities of mind were assets, not liabilities. Very different are the poems Tennyson writes of events of the moment over which his thoughts and feelings have had no time to brood. Several of these are what he himself called 'newspaper verse.' They are letters to the editor in effect, with the heat we expect of such productions. 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' (1854), inspired by a report in the London Times of a cavalry charge at Balaclava during the Crimean War, is one of the most fascinating of his productions in this category.
Tennyson's poems of contemporary events were inevitably popular in his own day. So too were those poems in which, as in 'Locksley Hall' (1842), he dipped into the future. The technological changes wrought by Victorian inventors and engineers fascinated him, sometimes giving him an exultant assurance of human progress. At other times the horrors of industrialism's by-products in the slums, the persistence of barbarity and bloodshed, and the greed of the newly rich destroyed his hopes that human
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ity was evolving upward. In the final book of Idylls of the King (1869), Arthur laments that his 'realm / Reels back into the beast': Tennyson was similarly haunted by the possibility of retrogression.
For despite Tennyson's fascination with technological developments, he was essentially a poet of the countryside, a man whose whole being was conditioned by the recurring rhythms of rural rather than urban life. He had the country dweller's awareness of traditional roots and sense of the past. It is appropriate that so many of his poems are about the past, not about the present or future. Tennyson said that 'the words 'far, far away' had always a strange charm' for him, even in his childhood; he was haunted by what he called 'the passion of the past.' The past became his great theme, whether it be his own past (such as the times he shared with Hallam), his country's past (as in Idylls of the King), or the past of the world itself, as expressed in these lines from In Memoriam:
There rolls the deep where grew the tree. O earth, what changes hast thou seen!
There where the long street roars hath been The stillness of the central sea.
Though Tennyson more often is inspired by the recorded past of humankind, he is the first major writer to express this awareness of the vast extent of geological time that has haunted human consciousness since Victorian scientists exposed the history of the earth's crust.
Mariana1 'Mariana in the moated grange.' Measure for Measure With blackest moss the flower-plots Were thickly crusted, one and all; The rusted nails fell from the knots 5That held the pear to the gable wall. The broken sheds looked sad and strange: Unlifted was the clinking latch; Weeded0 and worn the ancient thatch full of weeds 10Upon the lonely moated grange. She only said, 'My life is dreary, He cometh not,' she said; She said, 'I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!' 15Her tears fell with the dews at even; Her tears fell ere the dews were dried; She could not look on the sweet heaven, Either at morn or eventide. 20After the flitting of the bats, When thickest dark did trance0 the sky, She drew her casement curtain by, And glanced athwart0 the glooming flats. She only said, 'The night is dreary, cross across
He cometh not,' she said;
1. Mariana, in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure 3.1.255, waits in a grange (an outlying farmhouse) for her lover, who has deserted her.
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