Poems

Overview

About four hundred pages in most selections, the poems of the Victorian laureate, written between 1830 and 1889, from the early lyrics of the 1830s such as Mariana and The Lady of Shalott to the dramatic monologues Ulysses and Tithonus, the elegy In Memoriam A. H. H. on the death of his friend Arthur Hallam, the public verse of The Charge of the Light Brigade, and the twelve Arthurian Idylls of the King that occupied his last decades.

The selections usually read pair the doubt and faith of In Memoriam with the musical narratives, and Crossing the Bar closes most collections at the poet’s request.

What happens

The early lyrics. Mariana waits in her moated grange for a lover who does not come, and the Lady of Shalott, forbidden to look directly at Camelot, weaves what she sees in a mirror until Lancelot rides past and the curse falls, the two poems establishing Tennyson’s gift for enclosed, musical states of longing.

Ulysses and Tithonus. The aged Ulysses, home at last in Ithaca, resolves to sail again rather than rust unburnished, while Tithonus, granted immortality without youth, begs the dawn goddess for the death that alone would release him.

In Memoriam. Across a hundred and thirty-one sections written over seventeen years, Tennyson mourns Arthur Hallam, passing through Christmases and anniversaries, confronting a nature red in tooth and claw revealed by the new science, and arriving at a faith that has absorbed doubt rather than dismissed it.

The public verse. The Charge of the Light Brigade commemorates the six hundred who rode into the guns at Balaclava, and Locksley Hall lets a jilted speaker rage at his age before turning to a vision of its progress.

The Idylls of the King. Twelve narratives retell the rise of Arthur, the adulteries of Guinevere and Lancelot, the quest for the Grail, and the last battle, the fall of Camelot read as the decay of an ideal order.

Crossing the Bar. The short late lyric, written in a few minutes on a ferry crossing, asks that there be no moaning of the bar when the poet puts out to sea, and he asked that it close every edition of his poems.

How to read it

Read In Memoriam as a poem that takes place in time, its sections dated by the recurring Christmases, so that the movement from despair toward trust is earned by duration rather than argued in a single stroke.

Pay close attention to how Ulysses and Tithonus, read together, let the dramatic monologue hold opposed longings, for more life and for release, without the poet having to decide between them.

Notice how the Idylls of the King turn Arthurian legend into a mirror for Victorian anxieties about order, marriage and the decay of ideals, and ask what the fall of Camelot warns the poet’s own society against.

Consider how Tennyson’s command of sound, the most musical of any English poet of his century, carries even the public verse past the arguments about its politics, and read the poems aloud.

Read these poems alongside Malory’s Morte d’Arthur to see what Tennyson kept, softened and moralised in retelling the Arthurian matter for his own age.

Questions it raises

• Does In Memoriam reach a genuine faith at its close, or does the poem’s honesty about doubt make its final trust feel willed rather than won?
• What does it mean that the two most famous monologues, Ulysses and Tithonus, want opposite things, more striving and an end to it? Is Tennyson’s own longing in either, or in the tension between them?
• How should a modern reader take the Idylls’ treatment of Guinevere, whose adultery is made to bear the weight of Camelot’s fall? Is the poem’s moral scheme its strength or its limitation?
• Is The Charge of the Light Brigade a celebration of obedience or a lament for its cost, and can a poem honour soldiers while questioning the order that sent them?
• Why did Tennyson’s reputation fall so sharply in the early twentieth century, and what did the poets who dismissed him fail to hear?
• What does the request that Crossing the Bar close every collection tell us about how Tennyson wanted his life’s work to be read?