The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson Part 40

Lo! sweeten'd with the summer light, The full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow, Drops in a silent autumn night.

All its allotted length of days, The flower ripens in its place, Ripens and fades, and falls, and hath no toil, Fast-rooted in the fruitful soil.

4

Hateful is the dark-blue sky, Vaulted o'er the dark-blue sea. [1]

Death is the end of life; ah, why Should life all labour be?

Let us alone.

Time driveth onward fast, And in a little while our lips are dumb.

Let us alone.

What is it that will last?

All things are taken from us, and become Portions and parcels of the dreadful Past.

Let us alone.

What pleasure can we have To war with evil? Is there any peace In ever climbing up the climbing wave? [2]

All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave [3]

In silence; ripen, fall and cease: Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.

5

How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream, With half-shut eyes ever to seem Falling asleep in a half-dream!

To dream and dream, like yonder amber light, Which will not leave the myrrh-bush on the height; To hear each other's whisper'd speech: Eating the Lotos day by day, To watch the crisping ripples on the beach, And tender curving lines of creamy spray; To lend our hearts and spirits wholly To the influence of mild-minded melancholy; To muse and brood and live again in memory, With those [4] old faces of our infancy Heap'd over with a mound of gra.s.s, Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of bra.s.s!

6

Dear is the memory of our wedded lives, And dear the last embraces of our wives And their warm tears: but all hath suffer'd change; For surely now our household hearths are cold: Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange: And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy.

Or else the island princes over-bold Have eat our substance, and the minstrel sings Before them of the ten-years' war in Troy, And our great deeds, as half-forgotten things.

Is there confusion in the little isle? [5]

Let what is broken so remain.

The G.o.ds are hard to reconcile: 'Tis hard to settle order once again.

There 'is' confusion worse than death, Trouble on trouble, pain on pain, Long labour unto aged breath, Sore task to hearts worn out with [6] many wars And eyes grow dim with gazing on the pilot-stars.[7]

7

But, propt on beds [8] of amaranth and moly, How sweet (while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly) With half-dropt eyelids still, Beneath a heaven dark and holy, To watch the long bright river drawing slowly His waters from the purple hill-- To hear the dewy echoes calling From cave to cave thro' the thick-twined vine-- To watch [9] the emerald-colour'd water falling Thro' many a wov'n acanthus-wreath divine!

Only to hear and see the far-off sparkling brine, Only to hear were sweet, stretch'd out beneath the pine.

8

The Lotos blooms below the barren peak: [9]

The Lotos blows by every winding creek: All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone: Thro' every hollow cave and alley lone Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos-dust is blown.

We have had enough of action, and of motion we, Roll'd to starboard, roll'd to larboard, when the surge was seething free, Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea.

Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind, In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined On the hills like G.o.ds together, careless of mankind.

For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurl'd Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curl'd Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world: Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands, Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands, Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships and praying hands.

But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong, Like a tale of little meaning tho' the words are strong; Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil, Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil, Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and oil; Till they perish and they suffer--some,'tis whisper'd--down in h.e.l.l Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell, Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel.

Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the sh.o.r.e Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar; Oh rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more. [10]

[Footnote 1: 'Cf.' Virgil, AEn., iv., 451:--

Taedet caeli convexa tueri.

Paraphrased from Moschus, 'Idyll', v., 11-15.]

[Footnote 2: For climbing up the wave 'cf.' Virgil, 'AEn.', i., 381: "Conscendi navilus aequor," and 'cf.' generally Bion, 'Idyll', v., 11-15.]

[Footnote 3: From Moschus, 'Idyll', v.,'pa.s.sim'.

[Footnote 4: 1833. The.]

[Footnote 5: The little isle, 'i. e.', Ithaca.]

[Footnote 6: 1863 By.]

[Footnote 7: Added in 1842.]

[Footnote 8: 1833. Or, propt on lavish beds.]

[Footnote 9: 1833 to 1850 inclusive. Hear.]

[Footnote 10: 1833 to 1850 inclusive. Flowery peak.]

[Footnote 11: In 1833 we have the following, which in 1842 was excised and the present text subst.i.tuted:--

We have had enough of motion, Weariness and wild alarm, Tossing on the tossing ocean, Where the tusked sea-horse walloweth In a stripe of gra.s.s-green calm, At noontide beneath the lee; And the monstrous narwhale swalloweth His foam-fountains in the sea.

Long enough the wine-dark wave our weary bark did carry.

This is lovelier and sweeter, Men of Ithaca, this is meeter, In the hollow rosy vale to tarry, Like a dreamy Lotos-eater, a delirious Lotos-eater!

We will eat the Lotos, sweet As the yellow honeycomb, In the valley some, and some On the ancient heights divine; And no more roam, On the loud h.o.a.r foam, To the melancholy home At the limit of the brine, The little isle of Ithaca, beneath the day's decline.

We'll lift no more the shattered oar, No more unfurl the straining sail; With the blissful Lotos-eaters pale We will abide in the golden vale Of the Lotos-land till the Lotos fail; We will not wander more.

Hark! how sweet the horned ewes bleat On the solitary steeps, And the merry lizard leaps, And the foam-white waters pour; And the dark pine weeps, And the lithe vine creeps, And the heavy melon sleeps On the level of the sh.o.r.e: Oh! islanders of Ithaca, we will not wander more, Surely, surely slumber is more sweet than toil, the sh.o.r.e Than labour in the ocean, and rowing with the oar, Oh! islanders of Ithaca, we will return no more.

The fine picture in the text of the G.o.ds of Epicurus was no doubt immediately suggested by 'Lucretius', iii., 15 'seq.', while the 'Icaromenippus' of Lucian furnishes an excellent commentary on Tennyson's picture of those G.o.ds and what they see. 'Cf.' too the Song of the Parcae in Goethe's 'Iphigenie auf Tauris', iv., 5.]

A DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN

First published in 1833 but very extensively altered on its republication in 1842. It had been written by June, 1832, and appears to have been originally ent.i.tled 'Legend of Fair Women' (see Spedding's letter dated 21st June, 1832, 'Life', i., 116). In nearly every edition between 1833 and 1853 it was revised, and perhaps no poem proves more strikingly the scrupulous care which Tennyson took to improve what he thought susceptible of improvement. The work which inspired it, Chaucer's 'Legend of Good Women', was written about 1384, thus "preluding" by nearly two hundred years the "s.p.a.cious times of great Elizabeth". There is no resemblance between the poems beyond the fact that both are visions and both have as their heroines ill.u.s.trious women who have been unfortunate. Cleopatra is the only one common to the two poems. Tennyson's is an exquisite work of art--the transition from the anarchy of dreams to the dreamland landscape and to the sharply denned figures--the skill with which the heroines (what could be more perfect that Cleopatra and Jephtha's daughter?) are chosen and contrasted--the wonderful way in which the Iphigenia of Euripides and Lucretius and the Cleopatra of Shakespeare are realised are alike admirable. The poem opened in 1833 with the following strangely irrelevant verses, excised in 1842, which as Fitzgerald observed "make a perfect poem by themselves without affecting the 'dream '":--

As when a man, that sails in a balloon, Downlooking sees the solid shining ground Stream from beneath him in the broad blue noon, Tilth, hamlet, mead and mound: