THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!
Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.
This is no longer simply an expression of debilitating melancholy or an imagining of restless complacency; it is an
evocation of a desperate sense of exclusion, by private grieving, from a working, rejoicing human community.
Although Tennyson conspicuously placed ‘Break, break, break’ as the penultimate poem in his 1842 volumes, their
overall negatives were also decisively qualified by a group of new poems which suggest a far more positive social
direction in his art. ‘St Simeon Stylites’ rejects ascetic escapism; ‘Ulysses’ emphatically embraces the idea of
progressive development (‘but something ere the end, | Some work of noble note, may yet be done ...'), and the
significantly titled ‘Morte d’Arthur’ ushers in what proved an enduring fascination with cyclic movement and historic
renewal (‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new, | And God fulfils Himself in many ways ...’).
[p. 426]
The Princess: A Medley (1847) suggests both the extent and the frailty of Tennyson’s new commitment to a poetry
of social purpose and communal concern. It is a deeply ambiguous and cautiously ambitious narrative poem, one
which moves uncertainly from a present-day prologue to a story set in an undefined medieval past and which attempts
to explore the pressing modern subject of women’s higher education. Despite its persuasive endorsement of Princess
Ida’s experiment, Tennyson’s poem is ultimately both noncommittal and compromised. It does, however, contain a
series of superbly evocative, and dramatically effective, lyrics, two of them, ‘Now sleeps the crimson petal’ and ‘Come
down, O maid, from yonder mountain height’, being amongst the most suggestively erotic poems of the nineteenth
century. In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850) offers an utterly different view of love and education. It is a tribute to Hallam
as friend and mentor which evokes both an enervating grief and an elevating grasp of an idea of spiritual and physical
evolution. A shifting and developing perception of Hallam as a mortal victim and an immortal spiritual pioneer runs
through the poem, but Tennyson also points its long, steadily ramified argument with recurrent images, with visits to
specific places, and with seasonal and calendar events which suggest the movement and measurement of time. Time
moves painfully for the mourner at the beginning of the poem, its passage through anniversaries, through Christmas
and New Year being marked by comfortless recalls and anguished memorializing. But, as the second lyric (‘Old Yew,
which graspest at the stones ...’) powerfully suggests, nature has other rhythms, impersonal and unsympathetic:
The seasons bring the flower again,
And bring the firstling to the flock;
And in the dusk of thee, the clock
Beats out the little lives of men.
If, as here, Tennyson initially explores the notions of becoming ‘incorporate’ in the ‘grasping’ ‘sullen’ graveyard tree
and of an impersonal time, these are views of growth and time which are not sustained by later perceptions.
Tennyson’s advanced and informed use of nineteenth-century scientific theory, theory which pertained to both the
animal and the mineral universe, also broadens the poem’s intellectual perspectives. In lyric 66, for example, a
geological past in which ‘A thousand types are gone’ and in which ‘dragons of the prime ... tare each other in their
slime’ presents both a fearful retrospect on dinosaurs and a potentially disturbing prophecy of human viciousness and
human futility. Answers may lie hidden behind ‘veils’, but they are also discovered in a now confident and active
participation in the continuing evolutionary process which links the material to the spiritual, the animal to the divine.
Hallam, like Christ, appears as a forerunner, an Adam transformed and resurrected, who quells the doubts associated
in the poem with mortality and agnostic scientific theory. In lyric 123, for example, there is no longer a recoil from
natural flux, from geological change, from death and decay:
[p. 427]
There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
O earth what changes hast thou seen!
There where the long street roars, hath been