And if along with these should come 10 The man I held as half divine, Should strike a sudden hand in mine, And ask a thousand things of home;
And I should tell him all my pain, And how my life had drooped of late, 15 And he should sorrow o'er my state And marvel what possessed my brain;
And I perceived no touch of change, No hint of death in all his frame, But found him all in all the same,
20 I should not feel it to be strange.
15
Tonight the winds begin to rise And roar from yonder dropping day; The last red leaf is whirled away,
The rooks are blown about the skies;
6. By 1850 the accepted pronunciation of 'quay' would rhyme with he}', but Tennyson reverts to an earlier pronunciation, kay.
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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
5 The forest cracked, the waters curled, The cattle huddled on the lea; And wildly dashed on tower and tree The sunbeam strikes along the world: 10And but for fancies, which aver That all thy motions gently pass Athwart a plane of molten glass,7 I scarce could brook the strain and stir isThat makes the barren branches loud; And but for fear it is not so, The wild unrest that lives in woe Would dote and pore on yonder cloud 20That rises upward always higher, And onward drags a laboring breast, And topples round the dreary west, A looming bastion fringed with fire. 19 The Danube to the Severn' gave The darkened heart that beat no more; They laid him by the pleasant shore, And in the hearing of the wave. 5 There twice a day the Severn fills; The salt sea water passes by, And hushes half the babbling Wye,9 And makes a silence in the hills. ioThe Wye is hushed nor moved along, And hushed my deepest grief of all, When filled with tears that cannot fall, I brim with sorrow drowning song. 15The tide flows down, the wave again Is vocal in its wooded walls;1 My deeper anguish also falls, And I can speak a little then.
7. I.e., a calm sea. 1. The water of the Wye River is dammed up as 8. Haliam died at Vienna on the river Danube. His the tide flows in, and its sound is silenced until, burial place is on the banks of the Severn, a tidal with the turn of the tide, its 'wave' once more river in the southwest of England. becomes 'vocal'; these stanzas were written at Tin9. A tributary of the Severn. tern Abbey in the Wye valley.
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IN MEMORIAM, 118 / 1149
115
I sing to him that rests below And, since the grasses round me wave, I take the grasses of the grave,2
And make them pipes whereon to blow.
5 The traveler hears me now and then, And sometimes harshly will he speak: 'This fellow would make weakness weak,
And melt the waxen hearts of men.'
Another answers: 'Let him be, IO He loves to make parade of pain, That with his piping he may gain The praise that comes to constancy.'
A third is wroth: 'Is this an hour
For private sorrow's barren song, 15 When more and more the people throng The chairs and thrones of civil power?
'A time to sicken and to swoon, When Science reaches forth her arms3 To feel from world to world, and charms
20 Her secret from the latest moon?'4
Behold, ye speak an idle thing; Ye never knew the sacred dust. I do but sing because I must,
And pipe but as the linnets sing:
25 And one is glad; her note is gay, For now her little ones have ranged; And one is sad; her note is changed,
Because her brood is stolen away.
22
The path by which we twain did go, Which led by tracts that pleased us well, Through four sweet years arose and fell,
From flower to flower, from snow to snow;
5
And we with singing cheered the way, And, crowned with all the season lent,
2. The poet assumes that the burial was in the 3. Astronomical instruments, such as telescopes. churchyard; in fact, on January 3, 1834, at St. 4. Probably alluding to the discovery in 1846 of Andrews in Clevedon, Somersetshire, Hallam's the planet Neptune and one of its moons. body was interred in a vault inside the church.
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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
From April on to April went, And glad at heart from May to May.
