The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson Part 70

What lips, like thine, so sweetly join'd?

Where on the double rosebud droops The fullness of the pensive mind; Which all too dearly self-involved, [1]

Yet sleeps a dreamless sleep to me; A sleep by kisses undissolved, That lets thee [2] neither hear nor see: But break it. In the name of wife, And in the rights that name may give, Are clasp'd the moral of thy life, And that for which I care to live.

[Foonote 1: 1842. The pensive mind that, self-involved.]

[Foonote 2: 1842. Which lets thee.]

EPILOGUE

(No alteration since 1842.)

So, Lady Flora, take my lay, And, if you find a meaning there, O whisper to your gla.s.s, and say, "What wonder, if he thinks me fair?"

What wonder I was all unwise, To shape the song for your delight Like long-tail'd birds of Paradise, That float thro' Heaven, and cannot light?

Or old-world trains, upheld at court By Cupid-boys of blooming hue-- But take it--earnest wed with sport, And either sacred unto you.

AMPHION

First published in 1842. No alteration since 1850.

In this humorous allegory the poet bewails his unhappy lot on having fallen on an age so unpropitious to poetry, contrasting it with the happy times so responsive to his predecessors who piped to a world prepared to dance to their music. However, he must toil and be satisfied if he can make a little garden blossom.

My father left a park to me, But it is wild and barren, A garden too with scarce a tree And waster than a warren: Yet say the neighbours when they call, It is not bad but good land, And in it is the germ of all That grows within the woodland.

O had I lived when song was great In days of old Amphion, [1]

And ta'en my fiddle to the gate, Nor cared for seed or scion!

And had I lived when song was great, And legs of trees were limber, And ta'en my fiddle to the gate, And fiddled in the timber!

'Tis said he had a tuneful tongue, Such happy intonation, Wherever he sat down and sung He left a small plantation; Wherever in a lonely grove He set up his forlorn pipes, The gouty oak began to move, And flounder into hornpipes.

The mountain stirr'd its bushy crown, And, as tradition teaches, Young ashes pirouetted down Coquetting with young beeches; And briony-vine and ivy-wreath Ran forward to his rhyming, And from the valleys underneath Came little copses climbing.

The linden broke her ranks and rent The woodbine wreathes that bind her, And down the middle, buzz! she went, With all her bees behind her. [2]

The poplars, in long order due, With cypress promenaded, The shock-head willows two and two By rivers gallopaded.

The birch-tree sw.a.n.g her fragrant hair, The bramble cast her berry, The gin within the juniper Began to make him merry.

Came wet-shot alder from the wave, Came yews, a dismal coterie; Each pluck'd his one foot from the grave, Poussetting with a sloe-tree: Old elms came breaking from the vine, The vine stream'd out to follow, And, sweating rosin, plump'd the pine From many a cloudy hollow.

And wasn't it a sight to see When, ere his song was ended, Like some great landslip, tree by tree, The country-side descended; And shepherds from the mountain-caves Look'd down, half-pleased, half-frighten'd, As dash'd about the drunken leaves The random sunshine lighten'd!

Oh, nature first was fresh to men, And wanton without measure; So youthful and so flexile then, You moved her at your pleasure.

Tw.a.n.g out, my fiddle! shake the twigs!

And make her dance attendance; Blow, flute, and stir the stiff-set sprigs, And scirrhous roots and tendons.

'Tis vain! in such a bra.s.sy age I could not move a thistle; The very sparrows in the hedge Scarce answer to my whistle; Or at the most, when three-parts-sick With strumming and with sc.r.a.ping, A jacka.s.s heehaws from the rick, The pa.s.sive oxen gaping.

But what is that I hear? a sound Like sleepy counsel pleading: O Lord!--'tis in my neighbour's ground, The modern Muses reading.

They read Botanic Treatises.

And works on Gardening thro' there, And Methods of transplanting trees To look as if they grew there.

The wither'd Misses! how they prose O'er books of travell'd seamen, And show you slips of all that grows From England to Van Diemen.

They read in arbours clipt and cut, And alleys, faded places, By squares of tropic summer shut And warm'd in crystal cases.

But these, tho' fed with careful dirt, Are neither green nor sappy; Half-conscious of the garden-squirt, The spindlings look unhappy, [3]

Better to me the meanest weed That blows upon its mountain, The vilest herb that runs to seed Beside its native fountain.

And I must work thro' months of toil, And years of cultivation, Upon my proper patch of soil To grow my own plantation.

I'll take the showers as they fall, I will not vex my bosom: Enough if at the end of all A little garden blossom.

[Foonote 1: Amphion was no doubt capable of performing all the feats here attributed to him, but there is no record of them; he appears to have confined himself to charming the stones into their places when Thebes was being built. Tennyson seems to have confounded him with Orpheus.]

[Footnote 2: Till 1857 these four lines ran thus:--

The birch-tree sw.a.n.g her fragrant hair, The bramble cast her berry.

The gin within the juniper Began to make him merry.]

[Footnote 3: All editions up to and including 1850. The poor things look unhappy.]

ST. AGNES

This exquisite little poem was first published in 1837 in the 'Keepsake', an annual edited by Lady Emmeline Stuart Wortley, and was included in the edition of 1842. No alteration has been made in it since 1842.

In 1857 the t.i.tle was altered from "St. Agnes" to "St. Agnes' Eve," thus bringing it near to Keats' poem, which certainly influenced Tennyson in writing it, as a comparison of the opening of the two poems will show.

The saint from whom the poem takes its name was a young girl of thirteen who suffered martyrdom in the reign of Diocletian: she is a companion to Sir Galahad.

Deep on the convent-roof the snows Are sparkling to the moon: My breath to heaven like vapour goes: May my soul follow soon!

The shadows of the convent-towers Slant down the snowy sward, Still creeping with the creeping hours That lead me to my Lord: Make Thou [1] my spirit pure and clear As are the frosty skies, Or this first snowdrop of the year That in [2] my bosom lies.