Alfred Tennyson

Broadview Vic Poetry anthology unless otherwise noted

Mariana

• pub. 1830
• held by Armstrong 1993 to be paradigmatic example of the Victorian "double-poem," in which "the poetic work invites us to consider its expressive lyric utterance [its subject] as itself 'the object of analysis and critique'" ( LaPorte 2016 38).

The poignant expression of exclusion to which Mariana's state gives rise, and which is reiterated in the marking of barriers - the moat itself, the gate with clinking latch, and curtained casement, the hinged doors - is simultaneously an analysis of the hypersensitive hysteria induced by the coercion of sexual taboo. These are hymenal taboos, which Mariana is induced, by a cultural consensus that is hidden from her, to experience as her own condition. Hidden from her, but not from the poem, the barriers are man-made, cunningly constructed through the material fabric of the house she inhabits, the enclosed space in which she is confined. It is the narrative voice which describes these spaces, not Mariana as speaker. (13)

• self-reflexivity in the repetitions: e.g., Keats's "The Eve of St. Agnes" is less self-consciously a work of Romantic medievalism
• enclosure is narrated, anguish is uttered by Mariana

St. Simeon Stylites

• echoes Donne
• "of sin, my flesh, which I despitse and hate, I had not stinted practice" (57-8)
• written about the same time as Ulysses - reaching back to a different ancient mythology
• What question is this poem asking?
  • T taking up icons of the church and saying, what is this?
  • Ideal of mortification
  • question of will like Ulysses
• something of an invitation to irony
• his goodness but not perfection
• a lot of the saints were just good hermits, not good to others
  • the curiosity of these ancient saints in modern perspectives
  • a very foreign model for sainthood to modern believers

Ulysses

• "following knowledge"
• written in a time when a whole culture felt unmoored
• Homeric scholarship destabilizing, like Biblical scholarship
• will is conquest, desire to strive, desire to seek
• "know not me," "I am become a name"
• heavily enjambed, pulling forward
• not just pulling from Homer: also Virgil, Dante
• patronizing despite himself to Telemachus, who's actually pretty good at observing niceties
• Antithesis of time/fate and will

In Memoriam

Alfred, Lord Tennyson. In Memoriam. Pub. 1850. Ed. Erik Gray. New York: Norton, 2004. Print.

• CXVIII does a nice job of encapsulating evolution, time, death themes
• written over a period of 17 years after the death of Hallam
  • "seeming-random forms" (CXVIII.10) - 17 yrs of evolving a poetic form out of a self-described "random process"
  • formally it's non-teleological: fragmentary, diffusive overall and recursive form (except the epilogue, perhaps? Though as an epithalamion it's a new beginning -- his dead friend as a future species, becomes teleological at the end)
  • stanzas as strata that unconform and converge
  • "unplanned" development, retroactively organized (Darwinian in the sense of abandoning teleology) (Chip Tucker)
  • the breadth of the poem shows how grief doesn't go away but it changes. It refuses comfort in existential despair, it takes no comfort except from the person he lost
• poems in the 50s written directly in response to Charles Lyell - the extinction stuff really freaked Tennyson out
• the impermanence of material texts and its implications for rhetorical immortality (the relationship isn't as consistently sure as in, say, Shakespeare's sonnets)
  • or even signification itself: "For words, like Nature, half reveal / And half conceal the Soul within." (V.3-4)
    • LXXV
  • XXXIV, XXXV: recurrence of dust with bodily and textual imagery
• Time, materiality, evolution
  • L: "Be near me when the sensuous frame / is rack'd with pangs that conquer trust; / And Time, a maniac scattering dust, / And Life, a Fury slinging flame." (5-8)
    • though "time" is working against itself in the poem's recursive cycling forward through time back to Christmas
  • XXVII Sequentiality/strata of grief
  • LXXVII: "These mortal lullabies of pain / May bind a book, may line a box, / May serve to curl a maiden's locks"
    • nice tie to Price 2012
  • images of life (birds, insects) (or its memory) contained: XXVII, XVI
• mapping a crisis of faith, part of which came from his engagement with geology
  • XVI: "And mingles all without a plan" (20)
  • CXVIII: directly responding to Lyell
    • Explicitly an evolutionary account but pre-Darwinian
    • teleology
    • one species (monogenesis) of man (vs. polygenesis) a debate being had
    • life metaphorized as an industrial process - the use of life (mining), "let the apes and tigers die"
    • "herald of the higher race": again the tension between Messianic and empty, homogenous time (Walter Benjamin, Anderson 1983) (and that there's not a succession): pre-figuring, forecasting something to come the way the Old Testament does the New
    • CXVIX: the evolution of his grief
  • CXXIII "There rolls the deep where grew the tree" (1) -- Dickens echoes this distantly with his dinosaur going up Holborn Hill at the beginning of Bleak House (1853)
• Tennyson is concerned with the annihilation of humans and their traces
  • XVII: "Such precious relics brought by thee; / The dust of him I shall not see / Till all my widow'd race be run." (18-20)
• Victorian modernity: "the faithless coldness of the times" (as in, ring it out: CVI.18) (ties to Matthew Arnold)

Tithonus

• First published in Cornhill after #2 of Framley Parsonage (Anthony Trollope, 1861); Ricks quotes a letter from Tennyson: "My friend Thackeray and his publishers had been so urgent with me to sent them something, that I ferreted among my old books and found this Tithonus, written upwards of a quarter of a century ago..." (Tennyson ed. Ricks 1112)
• #2 of FP (February 1860, vol 1 ch. 4-6) framed by Thomas Hood's "To Goldenhair (from Horace)" and, most interestingly, Tennyson's "Tithonus" after ch. 6, when Harold Smith is lecturing about "civilizing" Papua New Guinea and making a satirical point about the tension between church and civilization:

"Oh, civilization! thou that ennoblest mankind and makest him equal to the gods, what is like unto thee?" Here Mrs. Proudie showed evident signs of disapprobation, which no doubt would have been shared by the bishop, had not that worthy prelate been asleep. But Mr. Smith continued unobservant; or at any rate, regardless. (173 Cornhill, ~58 in Oxford)

• • Gives a different gloss to "The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts" in "Tithonus"
    • "Tithonus" followed by an essay about Hogarth ("William Hogarth: painter, engraver, philosopher (Part I)") by George Augustus Sala