Faculty of Arts and
Philosophy
The Symbol of Water in Tennyson’s Early Artist
Poems
Supervisor:
Prof. Dr. Marysa
Demoor
Paper submitted in partial fulfilment of the
requirements for the degree of “Master in de
Vergelijkende Moderne Letterkunde”
by Liesbeth Imschoot
August 2009
2
Table of Contents
Preface
5
Introduction
7
1. Thesis Question
7
2. Method
7
3. Corpus
8
4. Relevance
9
Part One: Timbuctoo
10
1. Introduction
11
2. Timbuctoo: a Pool of Inspiration
18
a. Abstract
18
b. Scene 1
18
c. Scene 2
21
d. Scene 3
22
e. Scene 4
24
f. Scene 5 and 6
25
g. Scene 7
27
h. Scene 8
28
i. Scene 9
30
j. Scene 10 and 11
31
k. Scene 12
33
3. Conclusion
Part Two: Timbuctoo’s Daughters
35
37
1. Introduction
37
2. 1830
38
a. “Mine be the strength”
39
b. “The Poet’s Mind”
39
c. “Recollections of the Arabian Nights”
42
3. 1832
a. “The Lotos-Eaters”
47
48
3
b. “The Palace of Art”
4. Conclusion
55
62
Conclusion
64
Works Cited
66
Appendices
71
4
Preface
The matter which this dissertation deals with – the concept of water in Alfred Lord
Tennyson’s early artist poems (1829-1832), starting from a reading of “Timbuctoo” –
is very specific. In this short preface, therefore, I shall briefly explain how such a topic
was born, and how it evolved into its present state.
The first step towards this dissertation was taken in the autumn of 2007, as I
enrolled for a third-bachelor course at the English Literature Department of the
University of Ghent. This course was called “English Literature: Older Period
(Victorian Poetry)” and it was taught by Professor Doctor Marysa Demoor. As a part
of our examination, the students were asked to hand in a 1500-word paper
discussing the imagery of a poem by any of the authors we had talked about in class.
As I had enjoyed the sessions we had spent on Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott,” I
decided that I would look into his poetry, hoping that I would find a suitable subject
for my essay there. Obviously, I did. Before I had gotten very far in Tennyson’s first
volume (the 1830 Poems, Chiefly Lyrical), I was struck by the intriguing, eerie
underwater world of such poems as “The Mermaid” and “The Kraken,” and I decided
to write my paper on the first. This turned out to be a fascinating experience, and I
was sad that, already after 1500 words, I had to let the subject go.
At the beginning of my final year, however, I had to pick a topic for my
Master’s Thesis. As I remembered how passionately I had felt about “The Mermaid,”
my choice for Victorian poetry and Tennyson was easily made, and I ask Professor
Demoor if she would be my supervisor. As I read up on Tennyson, trying to find a
topic which would be more extensive than “The Mermaid” alone, I noticed two things.
The first one is that I apparently have an inclination towards Tennyson’s earlier
works, which, with their lush and ominous imagery, actually hover on the verge
between late-Romanticism and Victorianism.
The second thing which I noticed, is that, if one pays attention to it, the amount
of water symbolism in Tennyson’s work is overwhelming. Around the same time, and
to my great surprise, I also stumbled across the following fragments in the “Memoir”
(which Tennyson’s son, Hallam, had written after his father’s death), which confirmed
my suspicions about the very special place which water occupies in Tennyson’s
poetics:
5
From his boyhood my father had a passion for the sea, and especially for the
North Sea in wild weather […]. (20)
And:
For his exercise he either rowed, or fenced, or took / long walks, and would
go any distance to see "a bubbling brook." " Somehow," he would say,
"water is the element I love best of all the four." (48-49)
Inspired by this, I began to search the enormous amount of articles and books written
about Tennyson’s poetry, looking for any materials which do not just mention water
as one in a line of many other typically Tennysonian images. I did not find a work
which had considered the symbol of water in Tennyson’s work important enough to
devote an entire essay (or book) to it.
Consequently, I established my subject: the concept of water in Alfred Lord
Tennyson’s early works. Or so I thought, because this is not entirely how things
turned out. Somehow, my eye had fallen upon a very early and very complex poem
of Tennyson’s, “Timbuctoo,” and I decided that this would become the starting point
of my Master’s Thesis. I discovered that there are many aspects to this poem, but the
one which most stood out to me from the beginning, was its metafictionality: it was a
poem about being an artist. Simultaneously, as I read more and more of the vast
stack of scholarly works which have been written on Tennyson, I realized that (since I
tend to produce rather in-depth analyses) it would be impossible to deliver a
discussion of the image of water in all of the early-Tennysonian themes which I had
come up with (poems of the deep, the maiden poems, the elegiacs…) in just 20000
words. I had to make a decision – “kill your darlings,” as they say – and I went for the
artist poems, painfully letting loose “The Mermaid” as well.
6
Introduction
In this first chapter, I shall try to discuss as briefly and transparently as possible the
following aspects of my Master’s Thesis: What is its thesis question? What method
was used to perform the examination? What is there to say about the corpus utilized
to back up my findings? What is the relevance of this dissertation?
1. Thesis Question
Let us begin with the essential part and elucidate what the next – approximately –
22,0001 words will be about. The main goal of this dissertation will be to reach an
understanding of the ways in which water (in its many manifestations) serves as a
decisive and recurrent symbol in the formation of meaning in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s
early artist poems (1829-1832). These “artist poems” are those poems which, at their
core, deal with the position which the poet (or: artist) occupies within the continuum
which stretches out between the pole of a life devoted entirely to the Aesthetic, and
that of a life revolving around moral and social commitment. What is meant by the
“early poems,” then, are the individual poem “Timbuctoo” (1829) and the poems of
Tennyson’s 1830 and 1832 volumes (Poems, Chiefly Lyrical and Poems). To support
our investigation, apart from “Timbuctoo,” we shall examine five of these poems in
detail: “Mine be the strength,” “The Poet’s Mind” and “Recollections of the Arabian
Nights” (all three from the 1830 volume), and “The Lotos-Eaters” and “The Palace of
Art” (both published in 1832).
2. Method
As regards the overall structure of the dissertation, it will be divided into two main
parts. In the first chapter of the first part, we shall very briefly consider Tennyson’s life
and work, in order to provide the reader with the frame of mind which is needed to
follow the subsequent argumentation. The next portion of the introductory chapter will
be spent on a detailed preface to a reading of “Timbuctoo.” In this somewhat longer
part, we will throw light on a few more general aspects of Tennyson’s work which will
be of interest for an understanding of the material which will be used throughout the
1
As I am a VML-student, my Master’s Thesis counts for 15 credits instead of 20, which is the
equivalent of 20,000 words.
7
entire dissertation. The first part’s second chapter, then, will be dedicated to an indepth reading of “Timbuctoo.” In order to make this division surveyable, the chapter
will open by offering a short abstract of the poem’s story line, before proceeding to a
detailed scene-by-scene discussion of the actual text. To close off, there will be a
short conclusion which will recapitulate on the first part’s main features.
The second major part, then, is called “Timbuctoo’s Daughters,” as it deals
with those (artist) poems of the 1830 and 1832-volumes which can be considered to
be the heirs of “Timbuctoo” (“Mine be the Strength,” “The Poet’s Mind,” “Recollections
of the Arabian Nights,” “The Lotos-Eaters” and “The Palace of Art”). In this part’s
introductory chapter, we will take a look at the evolution which has occurred in the
poems’ lines of thought (and, consequently, in the poems’ water imagery) in the time
span between 1829 and 1832. The bulk of this part will be taken up by two chapters,
“1830” and “1832,” both offering in-depth readings of the above-mentioned poems in
the light of the mental state which defined Tennyson at the time of their publication.
To conclude this part, once more, the reader will be provided with a succinct outline
of “Timbuctoo’s Daughters’” main characteristics.
The remainder of this dissertation will be devoted to a general conclusion,
which will focus on two things. Firstly and most importantly, it will formulate an
answer to the thesis question which we introduced earlier. Secondly, it will make
some suggestions for later research on the subject of water symbolism in Alfred Lord
Tennyson’s work. Finally, of course, an alphabetical list of the works cited will be
provided for.
3.Corpus
As there is no particular work which deals specifically with the symbol of water in
Tennyson’s oeuvre, I did not depart from any key source as a main inspiration for my
findings on Tennyson. I did, however, gather about 100,000 words in quotes from the
articles and books which I read on Tennyson and his work in general – I estimate that
there were approximately forty. Naturally, the vast majority of these sources did not
make it into the final cut, and, in the end, about twenty of them remained (these are
reproduced in the list of Works Cited at the back of the dissertation).
Notwithstanding the aforesaid, there is one source which deserves special
mention, as it has helped me enormously in the devise of my interpretations of the
8
poems (and thus it has shaped this dissertation in decisive ways): the utterly
elucidating The Complete Dictionary of Symbols in Myth, Art and Literature, edited by
Jack Tresidder.
4. Relevance
The main indication of this dissertation’s academic relevance is that – to the best of
my knowledge – it is unique in its kind: there appear to be no other papers which deal
solely with the symbol of water in Tennyson’s (early) work, let alone with the symbol
of water in Tennyson’s early artist poems. Nevertheless, (and even to my own
surprise,) the poems which are here discussed in the light of water reveal an
incredibly rich network of aqueous symbols and their meanings which is well-worth
looking into.
Another element of this dissertation which might grade up its academic
relevance, is the fact that it contains some recurring “new” views on the (water)
imagery in Tennyson’s familiar poems. I here especially allude to the uncanny
Underworldly and (at the same time) Paradisiacal qualities which in this paper will be
attributed to water and its several manifestations.
To conclude: I truly feel that, even if a substantial share of my findings would
be rejected, there would still remain a portion of evidence providing some food for
thought – hopefully sparking off new ideas and interpretations.
9
Part One: “Timbuctoo”
Alfred Lord Tennyson has been such an important voice in the history of poetry, that
he hardly needs any introduction. However, for the sake of completeness and before
the actual outset of this dissertation, we will very succinctly try to situate him in time,
with the help of Christopher Ricks’ entry on Tennyson in the Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography:
Tennyson, Alfred, first Baron Tennyson (1809–1892), poet, was born on 6
August 1809 at Somersby rectory, Lincolnshire, the fourth child (there were
to be eight sons and four daughters in fourteen years) of the Revd Dr George
Clayton Tennyson (1778–1831), rector of Somersby, and his wife, Elizabeth
(bap. 1780, d. 1865), daughter of the Revd Stephen Fytche, vicar of Louth,
Lincolnshire.
[…]
Poems, Chiefly Lyrical was published by Effingham Wilson in June 1830;
some of Tennyson's most enduring notes, elegiacally lyrical, with his riven
sensibility (‘Supposed Confessions of a Second-Rate Sensitive Mind Not at
Unity with Itself’), are especially manifest in the volume's most remarkable
achievements, ‘Mariana’, ‘A spirit haunts the year's last hours’, and ‘The
Kraken’.
[…]
Fertile, Tennyson issued in December 1832 Poems (published by Edward
Moxon, the title-page dated 1833). Among its feats were ‘The Lady of
Shalott’, ‘Mariana in the South’, ‘Œnone’, ‘The Palace of Art’, ‘The LotosEaters’, and ‘A Dream of Fair Women’.
[…]
In November 1850 Tennyson was appointed poet laureate, Wordsworth
having died in April (and Samuel Rogers having declined).
[…]
On 6 October 1892, having recently reached his eighty-fourth year, Tennyson
died at Aldworth.
10
1. Introduction
If it had been up to Tennyson, no one would have ever known about a poem called
“Timbuctoo.” In fact, it would have never even existed. Nonetheless, it is exactly this
three-page verse that, in this dissertation, will be considered to be the mother of a
wide variety of typical Tennysonian atmospheres in his artist poems, and a source of
the poet’s many-guised water symbolism.
In 1828, when he was nineteen years old and a first-year student at
Cambridge, Tennyson had written a lavish poem called “Armageddon,” which turned
out to be some kind of “exercise in the visionary mode of the egotistical sublime”
(Riede 664). A year later, Cambridge University set up a competition for its students,
challenging them to write the best poem considering the subject of Timbuctoo. The
young Tennyson did not really want to compete, yet his father insisted on it, “so
unwillingly he patched up [‘Armageddon,’] and came out prizeman over Milnes,
Hallam and others” (Tennyson 46).
As mentioned, Tennyson never was too fond of his youthful experiment, and,
even in his younger years, he was very reluctant to discuss it or to have it published.
As early as 1831, a mere two years after “Timbuctoo” won its Chancellor’s Medal, he
wrote in a letter to a printer that he “could have wished that poor ‘Timbuctoo’ might
have been suffered to slide quietly off, with all its errors, into forgetfulness”
(Tennyson 45).
One might wonder why a young, rising poet would treat one of his first
successes in such a harsh manner. Obviously, as “Timbuctoo” was considered to be
promising by a number of eminent scholars and even caused Matthew Arnold to
prophecy its author’s “greatness” (Tennyson 47), Tennyson must have known that his
poem was not poor in quality. Rather, he seemed to be aware of some intrinsic
difficulty, a problem concerning the line of thought voiced in the poem, causing
Tennyson to wish for it to “slide quietly off […] into forgetfulness.”
It appears to be so that, in writing “Timbuctoo,” the youthful poet had lost
himself in his poetical realm to such an extent that the words which filled the page
were uncannily clear about some of his unconscious obsessions. In transforming
“Armageddon” into “Timbuctoo” – adding “several visionary passages” (Thomson 7)
11
and incorporating his love for myths, legends, and the “far, far away”2 – Tennyson’s
speaker turned out to be someone who “worships his own sublimity,” (Riede 665),
submerging in a “hubristic self-deification” which entails “a dangerous withdrawal
from social involvement” (664).
It cannot be denied that “Timbuctoo” indeed does exhibit signs of the
aforementioned “solipsistic estrangement” (665). However, this does not imply a
lesser value for the poem. On the contrary, the main difference between this very
early piece and the somewhat later ones (from 1830 onwards), is that the voice it
expresses – not having been confronted with the harsh world of criticism yet3 – is still
very bold and untamed, clearly inclining towards that side of the spectre which
glorifies pure sensuousness and considers art as a religion. Yet it is a spectre. This
suggests that there is also another side to things – and there is. Occasionally, one
can discern slight hints of irony in “Timbuctoo,” indicating at least some reserve of the
poet’s towards “the mystic state to be found in the early poems [my italics]” (Ryals
29). This struggle between the glorification and the ironization of the sensuous realm
is a major characteristic of “Timbuctoo” and, by extension, of the early poems.
Here, we have touched upon the “Tennysonian polarity,” which, according to
Ryals, we may “recognize as the major characteristic of the 1830s poems” (Ryals
62). Indeed, as Allan Danzig explains in his enlightening article, “The Contraries: A
Central Concept in Tennyson's Poetry,” “[f]rom his earliest to his latest work,”
Tennyson had an inclination towards “irresolvable polarit[ies]” (Danzig 579). These
dualisms unvaryingly concern Tennyson’s “indecision and double nature” (Ryals 67),
as he hovered continuously between the choice of being a “people’s poet” (Stange
742), striving towards a “social ideal,” and the choice of being a poet-visionary who
resides in “the solitary life of art” (Grob 120). In the camp of the “social ideal”supporters, one may not underestimate the influence which the Apostelic
brotherhood exerted on its young poet-friend. “Hallam, Trench, and the others were
constantly telling Alfred that great poetry must concern itself with the moral problems
of life” (Ryals 44), and once, Trench even made a – currently notorious – remark,
2
In a note to his son Hallam, written in 1890, Tennyson stated that “the words ' far,
far away' had always a strange charm for [him].” (Tennyson 11)
3
“Tennyson suffered acutely under hostile criticism” (Norton 1110). One of his friends, in a letter to
Hallam, has the following to say about it: “Your father was very sensitive and had an honest hatred of
being gossiped about. He called the malignant critics and chatterers ' mosquitoes.' He never felt any
pleasure at praise (except from his friends), but he felt a great pain at the injustice of censure”
(Tennyson 93).
12
stating: “Tennyson, we cannot live in art” (Tennyson 118). In part, the Apostles’
scheme succeeded, for Tennyson “responded by suppressing to an even greater
degree the emotions and the romantic sensualism that haunted him” (Ryals 44), yet,
as is so apparent in “Timbuctoo,” (since it was written in Tennyson’s early days at
Cambridge) “the desire to indulge in an uninterrupted pursuit of beauty” (Grob 125)
remained a force to be reckoned with. “The concrete projection by Tennyson of this
ideal, however, seems almost always to summon forth its symbolic antithesis [my
italics]” (119). Still, in Tennyson’s world view, this is not problematic, as Danzig
explains:
Every quality, every manifestation of the sensual world, inevitably implies its
contrary. It follows that, so long as human life continues, this pair may not
finally be resolved to a third term of synthesis. Rather, they exist in constant
dialectic tension; they do not destroy each other, as do negations. Life and
death, reality and appearance […]: man must recognize and accept their
mutual existence, not seeking to simplify them by denying one or the other.
[my italics] (578)
Before finally turning to the actual text of “Timbuctoo,” We shall briefly glance
through some elements of the poem which seem to keep on reappearing throughout
Tennyson’s oeuvre, and, consequently, also in the specific poems which will be
discussed further on in this dissertation. In the following sub-chapter, these general
observations will be elucidated by applying them to the actual poem. In this context, it
will also become quite obvious that, in order to render his philosophical and
otherworldly statements more tangible, Tennyson very often employs similes
interspersed with a rich water imagery.
A first general feature for which “Timbuctoo” has set a trend in Tennyson’s
work, is the fact that it is a kind of metafictional poem, focusing on the poet-artist and
the extraordinary, Romantic position he occupies in the shadowy zone between the
natural and the supernatural. As “Timbuctoo” is – at least in part – a metafictional
poem, it becomes apparent that “[t]he ostensible subject, set by the prize committee,
is merely the vehicle for a consideration of the opposing claims of fact and
imagination” (Danzig 577). Likewise, other early poems considering the poet’s
struggle between “fact and imagination,” such as “The Hesperides,” “The LotosEaters” and “The Palace of Art,” are also situated in surroundings which show
“Tennyson's familiar love of distance both of time and space […] combined with his
13
equally familiar precision of detail” (579), yet they, too, in theory could have been
located anywhere. Ultimately, these poems, exotic and elaborate as they may be,
“are concerned not with the life of flesh and blood, but with the poet’s own inner self”
(Ryals 67).
A second characteristic of Tennyson’s early work which “Timbuctoo”
introduces, fits in with the previous one. That is to say, it fits in with the given that the
poet finds himself in the shadowy zone between the natural and the supernatural. As
mentioned before, this “polarity” is “irresolvable” (Danzig 579) and it will manifest
itself throughout Tennyson’s further career. Yet what interests us here, is the idea
that Tennyson clearly distinguishes himself – and, by extension, the poet-artist in
general – as superior to common man, being the one who, like some kind of divine
visionary, knows that there is much more to heaven and earth than lies in everyman’s
everyday perception4. However, the poet-artist is not superior to such an extent that
he can control his visions. Rather, he perceives them through his “mental eye”
(“Timbuctoo”) during sudden spells of ecstasy5, yet as soon as the vision is over, he
cannot hold on to their exact information. This mental state is remarkably reminiscent
of Freud’s psychoanalytical notion of the uncanny: that which cannot be expressed or
thought in words, yet is there, exceeding normal human perceptivity6. In “Timbuctoo”
and its followers, there is definitely a strain of supernatural energy and its uncanny
manifestations. Often, das Unheimliche concerns Tennyson’s nostalgia towards the
(purely imaginary) “golden days of Faerie” (Tennyson 34), which the visionary likes to
allude to as the hazy “great vine of Fable, which, out- / spread / With growth of
4
Tennyson also appears to have been perceived as a true elevated visionary by some people. In the
“Memoir,” we can read the following: “[A]s he wandered over the wold, or by the brook, he often
seemed to be in dreamland, so that one who often saw him then called him ‘a mysterious being,
seemingly lifted high above other mortals, and having a power of intercourse with the spirit-world not
granted to others’.” (76)
5
“[T]he ‘sense’ which enabled Tennyson to perceive ‘something unseen before’ can be identified with
the ‘trance states’ which he experienced from time to time. It would appear that Tennyson was capable
of self-hypnosis and that very often, in periods of inner crisis, he resorted to this mechanism for solace
and protection.” (Preyer 250) Tennyson himself describes his “states” like this: “A kind of waking
trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally
come upon me thro’ repeating my own name two or three times to myself silently, till all at once, as it
were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve
and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the
surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost
laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true
life.” (Tennyson 320)
6
Given the presence of some uncanny, unspeakable presence which can be sought for, but which, in
the end, will always remain “Unattainable” (“Timbuctoo”) and volatile, one could perhaps consider the
idea of thinking of Tennyson as a very early precursor of twentieth-century postmodernism and
deconstructionism, with their characteristic sense of dissémination.
14
shadowing leaf and clusters / rare, / Reacheth to every corner under Heaven, / Deeprooted in the living soil of truth” (“Timbuctoo” lines 304-307). In the concrete, the
“great vine of Fable” usually emerges in Tennyson’s poetry through the use of a vast
array of elements taken from legend, myth and folklore.
It must be quite clear by now that Tennyson envisaged his ultimate poet as
someone who possesses the gifts of hypersensitivity and hyperperceptivity – two
characteristics which give the artist’s “mental eye” a chance to blossom. However,
since the mental eye is an “organ” which deals with the uncanny, Tennyson had to
devise some kind of detour for his speakers that would enable them to express states
of mind which simply cannot be put into words. The five senses, which “belong
symbolically to the shadowy world of the unconscious” (Stange 740), in large
measure fill up the abyss which the ineffable uncanny has created. Strikingly often,
these sensuous descriptions are used to spell out the sight, touch, sound, smell and
taste of one of the many manifestations of water.
So far, we have already pointed out “Timbuctoo’s” metafictionality, its
uncanniness, its sensuousness and its striking wealth of water-imagery. The next
element, too, has already been mentioned a few paragraphs before: the abundance
of the essentially Tennysonian dualisms. The first type of opposites which appears in
“Timbuctoo,” is the basic one, the starting point of all the others. It is that of the
chosen one who knows versus the outsiders; of “objective reality” versus “the
subjective realm of the mind” (Ryals 25); and of an amoral lifestyle aiming towards
the “egotistical sublime” and a “mystic” union with the realm of Aestheticism versus a
morally sound integration into society. We know that, as Tennyson deals with the
uncanny, these polarities cannot be voiced. Instead, we must read between the lines,
as T. S. Eliot aptly says: "Tennyson's surface, his technical accomplishment, is
intimate with his depths: what we most quickly see about Tennyson is that which
moves between the surface and the depths, that which is of slight importance” (qt. in
Danzig 577).
Here, in the location assigned by Eliot, we can find the more palpable guises
of the poet’s primordial dualism. “For the young Tennyson the reality that served
most often as a sign of inner emotion is landscape: stratified levels of scenery,
variation between light and dark. His eye ranges from plain to hill, he watches the sun
yield place to the moon. It is as though the poet would have us follow him from the
sunlit plain to the gloomy mountain top, from literal level to the dark recesses of the
15
mind” (Ryals 26). The “quiescence of a Western dreamworld cut off from quotidian
Victorian responsibilities” (Joseph 1973 423), for example, for Tennyson is “a place of
twilight, of rest, of warmth and secrecy” which he connects “with images of the sea, of
growth, and, paradoxically, of death,” while its antithesis, the East, is “conceived as
the land of dawn, bold and strong, full of activity and strife – the world of everyday life
which is always plotting to steal the magic fruit” (Stange 736). Interestingly, the realm
of “water” also has some intriguing dualisms to offer: when reading the early works,
one constantly stumbles across contrasting seas and rivers, moving and still waters,
moist and dry places, and so on7.
A third pair of opposites which we shall introduce here, like Tennyson’s water
symbolism, has not really been unravelled thoroughly by researchers either. As we
will try to demonstrate further on, it seems that Tennyson’s dualisms are not
restrained to the poles of the “social” poet versus the solitary and visionary one.
Rather, the latter side of the spectre also exhibits signs of a blatant chasm, on the
one hand oozing Elysium’s “aura of ineffable beauty” (Joseph 1973 420), while, at
the same time, emitting the “suffocating gloom” of the Underworld.
As the presence of some kind of abyss in heaven indicates, Tennyson’s
double nature could not permanently reside in carefree bliss. This is apparent even in
“Timbuctoo”: despite its general youthful tendency towards the amoral Aesthetic, it, at
times, shows subtle signs of irony and doubt, illustrated by nearly unnoticeable stabs
at the religions of Christianity and that of Art8. The doubt that twenty-year old
Tennyson must have already felt also rises to the surface in a different, non-ironical
way. The fact is that the poems’ main speakers tend to go so far in their selfish
withdrawal, that they get a creepy, unbalanced streak of madness and/or drug abuse
to them.
The previous paragraph has brought us to the final characteristic trait of
Tennyson’s early poetry: its ubiquitous sense of melancholy. The themes exuding
7
As this dissertation is meant to inquire into the possible meaning(s) of water symbolism in
Tennyson’s early poetry, it would be a bit rash to already proclaim a conclusion, before having
performed a close examination of the material.
8
At the beginning of the Victorian Era, “[w]ith the loss of religious faith,” a lot of young intellectuals
“began to look to literature for the authority and satisfaction that they could not find in religion; and
anticipating Arnold and Pater they sought to supplant religion with culture. At Cambridge Tennyson
was only too willing to adopt this peculiarly Victorian kind of aestheticism, but he was not yet ready to
assume fully the role of teacher and prophet. Again he was caught in the dialectic clash between
desire and denial” (Ryals 56).
16
this atmosphere typically are those of “loneliness, exile, and escape” (Ryals 27) and,
of course, of “the turning to the past” (Hughes 107). These very Romantic features,
which we until now have referred to as alien to a sense of community, are abundantly
present in “Timbuctoo.” However, as David G. Riede remarks in his article
“Tennyson’s Poetics of Melancholy and the Imperial Imagination,” ”[i]t has not been
sufficiently recognized […] that Tennyson’s melancholy, usually regarded as an
apolitical character trait, is itself a source of authority that draws not only on the
intensity of mood, but also on current sexist and colonialist discourses, and upon an
idiom of eroticized political imperialism” (Riede 659). Consequently, we have
encountered here yet another Tennysonian dualism, supplementing the already
discussed imaginative flight from society with an “imaginative imperialism” – firmly
embedded in Victorian society – “as an Imaginary response to the increasingly
shapeless and decentered quality of the English empire” (Rowlinson 46).
An element which clearly indicates Tennyson’s affectedness by the notion of
imperialism, is the fact that “[i]n general, […]the reading that most influenced the
poetry of early Tennyson was overwhelmingly constituted of books of exploration and
discovery and such Orientalist writings as Claude Savary’s Letters on Egypt, and the
works of Sir William Jones” (Riede 664)9. Consequently, “[d]espite his recognition
that discovery is a way of discrediting the imagination and that actuality always falls
short of imagination, Tennyson continued to stimulate his imagination with tales of
modern adventure that still provided possibilities of magnificence” (666). If we, to
conclude, apply this imperial hypothesis to “Timbuctoo,” we might state that “near the
end of the poem, the poet achieves a vision of Timbuctoo, or rather, of a rich Oriental
city that he imagines as Timbuctoo” (666).
Our overview of the most important characteristics of Tennyson’s early oeuvre
in the light of dissertation has now come to an end. Below, we shall try to elucidate
the – admittedly – rather abstract notions which have been enumerated in the
previous paragraphs by applying them on the poem “Timbuctoo.”
9
“Another poet might have used Mount Snowden or Mont Blanc, but Tennyson’s construction of
sublimity called for the remote and exotic or, in the phrase that so influenced his childhood, the “far, far
away.” (Riede 664)
17
2. “Timbuctoo”: a pool of inspiration
As we have already mentioned, the early poem “Timbuctoo” should be granted a very
special position within Tennyson’s (early) oeuvre and the discussions thereof. To
substantiate the assertions which we have made so far about “Timbuctoo” as the
mother of the early artist poems, this chapter will concern a full reading of the poem –
which, for convenience’s sake, has been split up into twelve scenes – especially
focalizing on those intrinsic and symbolical aspects which underpin our previous
claims of Tennysonian metafiction, uncanniness, sensuousness, dualisms, irony and
doubt, sense of threat and melancholy (in a Romantic and imperial sense), and, of
course, with special attention to the role which “Timbuctoo’s” abundance of water
symbolism gets to play in all this.
a. Abstract
In an extremely summarized way, one could say that “Timbuctoo” tells the story of a
young man (a poet) who, as night falls, peers at and ponders over the ocean and a
distant continent – a sight which causes him to fall into some state of rapture, which
persists throughout the entire poem (causing him to experience baffling visions), at
the end leaving him behind not knowing whether his adventures were real or not, yet
completed with some invaluable insights in the harmonious realm of the Aesthetic.
b. Scene 1: lines 1-22
In “Timbuctoo’s” opening scene (lines 1-22), we encounter the speaker of the poem
who, as the sun is going down, stands upon a cliff-like “Mountain” and overlooks “the
narrow seas” and the “sheeny coast beyond” (most probably the Strait of Gibraltar10).
Feeling meditative by the agency of his vast, hushed surroundings which bathe in a
“faëry light,” he starts to daydream about days gone by.
“Timbuctoo’s” opening scene is all about setting the tone for the rest of the poem. As
is to be expected from Tennyson, he does not spell out for his readers what they
should feel when they read his work. Rather, he forces the “deliquescent mood of a
10
We know this because, at the very end of the poem, the speaker says “and I / Was left alone on
Calpe,” “Calpe” being an old name for Gibraltar.
18
speaker” upon them “obliquely through the details of a dimly ominous landscape or
architecture, […] exotically distant in time and location from the comfortable bustle of
Victorian life” (Joseph 1973 421). Indeed, “Timbuctoo’s” sheer abundance of those
details which are known to create the typically Tennysonian atmosphere of gloom
and wonder is unmistakeable.
The first scene is determined by three main images which, taken together,
provide immediate indications of what the rest of the poem will bring. These three
images are: the mountain, the sea (water) and the melancholy atmosphere of
approaching darkness (which needs no further discussion). We shall begin with the
mountain, which is important not only in general symbolism, but also in Tennyson's
personal version of it. As Allan Grob says in his article on “The Lotos-Eaters” (an
1832 poem which, naturally, has a lot in common with its predecessor “Timbuctoo”):
Both mountain and valley are recurrent and suggestive images in the early
poetry [...]. [...] The mountain in these works is generally associated with the
supernatural or the divine; but the deity who resides at its summit retains no
fixed character from poem to poem and varies from a god of laws
denouncing the morally indifferent inhabitants of the valley to a deity of art
presiding over the valley and sanctifying it. [my italics] (Grob 120)
As mentioned, the mountain is also a symbol with universal appositeness. According
to The Complete Dictionary of Symbols, the mountain stands for “[t]he spiritual peak
and centre of the world, the meeting place of earth and heaven – a symbol of
transcendence, eternity, purity, stability, ascent, ambition and challenge”
(“Mountain”). It is not a coincidence that Tennyson, who was a man of wide reading,
places his speaker here, in such a divine setting as the ancient mountain overlooking
the Strait of Gibraltar.
As a matter of fact, there are a some things to be said about Tennyson's
specific choice for the Rock of Gibraltar as well. First of all, it is important to know
that, since 1713, Gibraltar has been in British hands. Consequently, as “the
Mountain” (note the definite article and the capital letter) is about the first thing
mentioned in “Timbuctoo,” and as this “Mountain” is British property, David G. Riede
appears to have a point when stating that Tennyson indeed had an active “Imperial
Imagination.” Yet it is not only Gibraltar’s imperial touch which would have roused
Tennyson’s interest: in the mythological sphere it was a place of phenomenal
importance as well. Not only was Hercules said to have performed many of his tasks
19
here (explaining what Tennyson means when, in “Timbuctoo’s” first scene, he talks of
“pillars high”: the Rock of Gibraltar is also known as one of the “Pillars of Hercules”),
this spot on earth in ancient times was also believed to be world’s end. The waters
surrounding it, then, were seen as “Ocean, a great river which, in Greek cosmology,
surrounded the world” (“Okeanos”) and consequently, the land vaguely visible
beyond “Ocean” was a superhuman place of wonder, not accessible to mere mortals.
It is not surprising, then, that Tennyson chooses this spot to let his speaker’s
imagination get carried away, as he is standing on an unusually powerful, mysterious
and diversified crossroads of history and mythology’s main roads.
Now, as we know the specific significance of the Rock and Strait of Gibraltar,
let us plunge into their narrow, deep waters which separate familiar Europe from the
distant, exotic Africa. The Complete Dictionary of Symbols has – among other things
– the following to say about the sea: “[i]n many traditions, [the sea is] the primeval
source of life – formless, limitless, inexhaustible, and full of possibility. […] The sea is
a maternal image even more primary than the earth, but implies also transformation
and rebirth. It is also a symbol of infinite wisdom and, in psychology, of the
unconscious” (“Sea”). When he wrote about such symbols, Tennyson knew exactly
what they meant and how to apply his extensive knowledge in order to make his
setting work.
Another element which is essential in the context of a reading and
understanding of “Timbuctoo” (and, by extension, of a great deal of Tennyson’s early
poems), is the fact that water in myth and art often serves to “divide the worlds of the
living and the dead, of the natural and the supernatural” (“Water”). Indeed, the narrow
sea which the speaker is pondering over acts as a boundary between the real world
and an unknown magical place which hovers between the dualism ElysiumUnderworld – either way, it is otherworldly and superhuman. In fact, it seems that the
water functions as a double dividing line between the banal and the extraordinary,
namely: horizontally (dividing Europe from Africa) and vertically11, separating land
11
I got the idea of Tennyson’s “horizontal or vertical distancings” from Gerhard Joseph’s article
“Tennyson’s Optics: The Eagle’s Gaze” in which he says that “[i]t was Edgar Allan Poe who most
exactly isolated and valued melancholy diaphaneity and spiritualized amorphousness as Tennyson's
characteristic virtues, when he described Tennyson as working toward a ‘suggestive indefiniteness of
meaning, with the view of bringing about a definiteness of vague and therefore spiritual effect.’ Such
indefiniteness seems to arise from either horizontal or vertical distancings." [my italics] (Joseph 1977
421)
20
from the magical realm of the deep where Atlantis may be or may not be hidden (its
uncertainty only adding to its mythical and “Unattainable” status).
When one reads “Timbuctoo’s” first scene, not considering any information
other than that contained in the poem, the reader will surely already sense its
“suggestive indefiniteness of meaning” (Poe qt. in Joseph 1977 421). Yet supplied
with the last paragraphs’ data, he must be aware of the wealth of layered meanings
and impressions which lie underneath the surface of these mere 22 lines, grounding
the typically Tennysonian atmosphere.
c. Scene 2: lines 23-40
Then, as the speaker gazes at the sea’s “yeasty waves,” we are pulled into the
turbulent waters of the poem’s second scene (lines 23-40), in which the persona
starts to “muse[] on legends quaint and old,” and links these thoughts to the deep
Mediterranean waters which his eyes perceive, thus arriving at a vision of the
mythical sunken city of Atlantis, “whom the waves / Have buried deep.” The
association continues as he connects Atlantis to yet another legendary lost city:
“Imperial Eldorado, roof’d with gold.” The speaker thereupon concludes the second
scene by melancholily regretting the fact that, in times of Victorian progress, people
have lost their belief in such myths as those of Atlantis and Eldorado, and,
consequently, they can no longer escape to a magical world of “Hope” when the
burden of everyday life starts to get to them.
As regards the symbol of water, there is not very much to say about the second
scene that has not already been mentioned in the discussion of the first one. One
fragment concerning Atlantis and its cognitive value, however, is worth noting:
[…] and thou wert
then
A center’d glory-circled memory,
Divinest Atalantis, whom the waves
Have buried deep, and thou of later name,
Imperial Eldorado, roof’d with gold:
Shadows to which, despite all shocks of
Change,
21
All on-set of capricious Accident,
Men clung with yearning Hope which
would not die.
[my italics]
(lines 30-40)
This passage seems to indicate that, for Tennyson, it does not really matter that
much whether the sunken Atlantis – and for that matter Eldorado, Timbuctoo, and all
other lost places of bliss – truly existed at some point or not. On the contrary. It is the
melancholy, shadowy uncanniness – in a way comparable to Christian religion (in
which nobody can really prove God’s existence, yet “he” does give people hope and
courage to go on) – that marks the importance of Tennyson’s realm in the deep. As
Matthew Rowlinson says: “[a]n attentive reading of the lines on Atlantis, for instance,
shows that their nostalgia is not for the city of Atlantis as such but for its memory”
(48). And a bit further on:
[It is] a nostalgia for something that has been lost to narrative – that is to say,
for Atlantis or a Paradise in the West as something of which we could say,
“Once, I could have gone there, even if I can no longer.” It is a nostalgia that
is articulated from the position of someone who knows that Atlantis and the
paradisiacal islands in the West were always fictions, or effects of the
signifier, which never had a place in the subject’s own narrative time. (52)
d. Scene 3: lines 41-59
In the third scene, to expound on his melancholy feelings, the speaker returns to his
vision of Atlantis. This time, the image we get of it is much more concrete and much
more compelling: it describes the night when Atlantis was lost. Here we can see the
“Victorian” non-believers racing chaotically, “with ghastly faces,” through the
crumbling streets while, at the city’s highest point, we encounter the sole believer: a
priestess who remains alone in her temple, weeping over and finding comfort in a
marble statue, or, in other words: in the elevated realm of Beauty and Myth. Despite
the sense of hope that the image of the priestess emits, on second thought we are all
painfully aware of her faith’s irony, as she is bound to eventually (as she finds herself
on the highest point of the city) go down with the crowd. Nevertheless, her death is
somewhat different, since she passes on being connected to a higher force, implying
that she will not entirely disappear – just like an artist lives on through his or her work.
22
Whereas the first scene – dealing with elements taken out of Great Nature, can be
seen as some kind of macro-projection of the speaker’s state of mind, the third scene
– involving the priestess – is rather its opposite – a micro-projection so to speak,
mirroring the persona’s mental condition in a distanced and condensed way.
Like the speaker, we encounter the priestess as she finds herself alone,
during the night, at the island’s point nearest to heaven: a mountain (“the lone
Acropolis”). The difference is, however, that this mountain soon will be no more, as it
will have sunken, together with the rest of “Divinest Atlantis,” to the depths of the sea.
Nevertheless, if we look beyond the dreadful humane implications this catastrophe
brings along with it and focus on Tennyson’s personal symbolism, we know that, no
matter how contrasting the height of the mountain and the depth of the sea appear to
be, in fact they represent the two equally indispensable poles of one Tennysonian
dualism: Paradise and the Underworld. Consequently, as the priestess is spiritually
elevated above man and therefore already dwelling in Paradise, the prospect of a
sojourn in the Underworld is not very frightening.
Apart from the Paradise-Underworld-dualism, there is another highly
interesting aspect of this third scene which needs to be looked at, as it is an
implication of the importance which Tennyson ascribes to the image of water. As I
have just explained, the priestess, at the moment of catastrophe, is in some kind of
trance, which will be her salvation during the island’s descent into the Deep.
However, what we have not yet considered is what made it possible for her to get into
that state. The answer is: water, this time in the shape of tears.
Just like Atlantis, the statue which the priestess worships is a depiction of
something which never really existed, yet it has the power to uplift those who believe
in it and give them hope. The priestess, at the moment of action, is trying to find
some kind of access into her adored god, “ever clasp[ing] the marble knees” so that
he may give her the strength to go on. However, it is not until she breaks out in tears
and lets them flow upon the “cold hand,” that something happens to make her feel
linked to the artefact: she looks into its eyes and actually reads something in them. It
so happens that the touch of her tears on the marble statue’s hand momentarily
created a connection between the two. The priestess, by spilling her tears, has given
some of her life force to the adored statue. However, it would be wrong to say that it
is the actual block of marble which comes to life. Rather, it seems that the statue –
23
or: the Aesthetic – functions as some kind of uncanny catalyst, unleashing divine
inspiration which is and always was part of the priestess, yet never would have been
able to rise to the surface without her gaze on – and belief in – the statue. This
faithful gaze, then, would never have been perceived without the priestess’ tears
connecting her to her marble god. And, finally, switching back to the main storyline,
the poem’s protagonist never would have received his mystical visions had not the
sea acted as their catalyst by calling forth the “glory-circled memory” of “Divinest
Atalantis.”
e. Scene 4: lines 60-86
In the following scene, the speaker pulls his gaze out of the deep, again searching
the ocean and the shores for a sign of the old myths and legends which, like Atlantis,
all appear to be lost. In a monologue directed to the landscapes around him, asking
them where they have hidden the paradises from before, he suddenly leaves his
generalizing mode of speech behind, addressing a certain “Seraphtrod” (who seems
to be some kind of angel of a general concept of Tennysonian paradise) and asking
him what has happened to his “great Elysian solitudes.”
Symbolically speaking, the fourth scene is nothing more than an evocation of
Tennyson’s melancholy mind, listing more or less all its typical aspects. These are
some of the indicators of Tennysonian longing for the past and the “far, far away,”
mentioned in scene four: the West, the sea, islands, moonlight, palaces, glooms, hills
gold-sanded bays, odorous winds, and so on. All the same, it is striking to see that,
again, the union through distinction of Paradise and the Underworld is underscored.
This time, Tennyson does so by implicitly mingling descriptions suitable for the one
with those fitted for the other. The “great Elysian solitudes,” for example, have some
noteworthy “lowest depths,” which, at their turn, are filled with “Divine effulgence.”
Also, the use of the word “abyss” in a description of Paradise and the presence of
emerald (a precious stone linked to Hermes, who “was said to escort the souls of the
dead to the underworld” (“Hermes”) and in folklore emerald is seen as “an underworld
stone, fallen from the crown of Lucifer” (“Emerald”)) are almost bound to raise the
attentive reader’s suspicion.
24
f. Scene 5 (lines 87-93) and scene 6 (lines 94-163)
After scene four’s reflective soliloquy, Tennyson’s protagonist again snaps out of his
dreamy state and is confronted once more with his actual surroundings. This time, he
rests his eyes on the coast of Africa, and as a last resort he cries out to it, filled with
doubt and despair, asking whether it is true that the continent hides a place called
Timbuctoo, or whether that, too, is “[a] dream as frail as those of ancient Time.”
Then, at the height of his despair, the speaker goes into some kind of trance
which is beyond the daydreams he had until now experienced, and is visited by “a
young Seraph” (probably a personification of the afore-mentioned “Seraphtrod”). After
having received a thorough description, which focuses especially on his eyes
(“unutterable, shining orbs,” too bright to be looked at directly), the luminous angel
speaks to the persona, explaining to him that it is because he – the speaker –
believes to be bound by human limits that he can only “muse […] on the dreams of
old [my italics].” However, this need not necessarily be the case, or, as the angel puts
it: “Thy sense is clogg’d with dull mortality; / Thy spirit fetter’d with the bond of clay: /
Open thine eyes and see.”
As soon as the Seraph utters these words, the persona is changed: he feels
his “soul grow mighty” and his “mental eye [grow] large,” and, with this, all his senses
are sharpened to such an extent that he can clearly see “[t]he indistinctest atom” of
earth, air, moon, Galaxy, planets, their suns and moons, and, finally, of the entire
universe. Once he has experienced all this, and has seen the unlimited harmony
which keeps everything going, the speaker realizes that, knowing what he now
knows, he will never again be able to validate “the hum of men” and “busy life” like he
did before. Now, on the other hand, these trivialities (again, using water to clarify the
point) “[b]eat like a far wave on [his] anxious ear.”
Since scene five in the context of this study does not have very much to offer, I will
skip it and immediately go to the next scene, in which the speaker is visited by the
young Seraph and is made to see, consequently experiencing a life-changing insight
into the wonders of the universe. From this scene I shall lift out two small fragments
which fit into this discussion: lines 140-150 and lines 158-163 (see: Appendix 1:
“Timbuctoo”).
25
The first fragment fits into the speaker’s sensuous trip through the universe
during which Tennyson pays notably more attention to the description of the moon
than to that of the other heavenly bodies. As is well-known, the moon is inextricably
linked to the element of water: as it has an “influence on the tides,” it is an “ancient
regulator of […] the waters” (“Moon”). Not only is the moon linked to water, Tennyson
yet again (as he already did with the sea) connects this nocturnal source of light to
the uncanny notions of Paradise and Underworld; of glaring brightness and the
darkness of the abyss. In the text this is portrayed as such: on the one hand, there
are the moon’s paradisiacal aspects, such as its “white cities” (mirroring the crystal
city of Timbuctoo and therefore underlining its sublime nature), its “glowing lakes”
and its “silver / heights” (both lake and mountain being entries to Paradise and
Underworld) – their brightness not hindered by the “dew of vagrant cloud.” On the
other hand, however, the moon also displays a whole realm of these “vagrant
cloud[s],” as it reveals “black hollows” of “unsounded, undescended depth” as well12.
Taking the foregoing into consideration, it seems reasonable to argue that the moon,
with its inherent affiliations to all that is bright and dark, like water, is an image of
Tennyson’s conflicting sense of melancholy towards the Aesthetic and “legends
quaint and old.” As such, it, too, can be considered to be a (macro-)reflection of the
speaker’s situation.
The next fragment which shall be considered, concerns the very last lines of
the sixth scene, in which Tennyson uses a water-simile to illustrate his newly
developed feelings towards humanity and daily life:
[…] Nay – the hum
of men,
Or other things talking in unknown
tongues,
And notes of busy life in distant worlds
Beat like a far wave on my anxious ear.
[my italics]
This “mystic measure of simultaneous intimacy and enormous distance” (Tucker 13)
is a typically Tennysonian feature which reappears in many of the early poems – in
12
After all, the moon is nothing but a passive, dark body which is luminous only because it reflects the
light of the sun. In a way, this makes it comparable to the passive statue which, for the priestess,
served as a catalyst for her own spiritual awakening.
26
“The Lotos-Eaters” we even encounter almost the exact same water-comparison
(“the gushing of the wave / Far far away did seem to mourn and rave / On alien
shores” (lines 47-48)). Robert Preyer explains the Tennysonian distancing as such:
[T]he condition of success [of a visionary trance-state] depends on a radical
distancing and obliquity in the references to human actualities, an intense
preoccupation with the sensuous qualities of images, an elaborate and
sounding verse texture. Indeed, it is the heightened vividness and
elaboration of technical skills which make us uneasily aware that these
poems drive toward the magical subjection of difficulties rather than their
rational confrontation. (245)
The last words of Preyer’s statement go to show that he, too, is aware of the
worrying, even frightening element which radiates from Tennyson’s aesthetic and
amoral ideal. As water appears to be something which tends to arouse this “divorc[e]
[…] from the social order” (Riede 673), it becomes clear that the extremes of
Paradise and Underworld which it calls to the surface are not entirely positive. In the
end, the closed realm of the deep is too secluded to be healthy.
g. Scene 7: lines 164-190
As in scene three, where he dives back to Atlantis to explain his melancholy
thoughts, the speaker in the seventh scene also uses powerful water imagery to
elucidate what he went through, this time during his visionary trance. The image he
uses here, is that of a lake of which the surface initially looks very calm, yet below the
lake, in the deepest crags of the world, something stirs: there is a shift in the earth’s
crust, and, slowly but steadily, “the level calm / Is ridg’d with restless and increasing /
spheres / Which break upon each other,” continuing to do so until the man standing
on shore is completely entranced by the magnitude and volume of what he is
seeing.13
Dealing with the rippling lake from scene seven, we should again be aware of the
unwholesome impression which the Tennysonian mystical experience leaves behind.
13
“Though Tennyson more often is inspired by the recorded past of humankind, he is the first major
writer to express this awareness of the vast extent of geological time that has haunted human
consciousness since Victorian scientists exposed the history of the earth’s crust.” (Christ 1112)
27
When one reads this particular scene, one can almost literally feel the adrenaline
pumping through its lines – the “piercing, trackless, thrilling / thoughts” and
“palpitating / sense” nearly irrefutably implying some kind of druglike rush. Matthew
Rowlinson, too, suggests that there is a narcotic feel to these lines when he says that
“[a]t the center of [this passage] […] is the eye’s enrapture by an object that produces
a rift in it, in a moment that also appears as one of rapid dilation [my italics]” (32).
The sense of drug-abuse in scene seven implies that the speaker might end
up more negatively than the poem’s ecstatic surface admits. This may mean that
“Timbuctoo” finds itself a step closer than one would initially think to later poems with
unhappy endings for their visionary artist-protagonists, such as “The Lady of Shalott,”
“The Palace of Art,” and “The Lotos-Eaters” (the last two of which will be extensively
dealt with in the second part of this dissertation). That is to say: all that we get to see
in “Timbuctoo” is a first experience with a state of rapture. However, it is not hard to
imagine that such a rush of feelings could be highly addictive, in the end leaving
someone behind who thinks he or she is perfectly happy in his or her sheltered
dream world, yet is in fact an antisocial and lonely wreck – just like actual drugs
would do.
What is more, the irony and warning towards a state of ecstasy which lies
buried in “Timbuctoo’s” seventh scene also implies a similar sense of irony and
warning towards the magical and uncanny realm of the Underworld (and, of course,
towards its lofty twin). That is to say: the “puzzle” of “intersecting systems of waves
on the surface of [the] lake” (Rowlinson 32) which hypnotizes the persona, is initially
caused by movements from the deep, from the abysses of the world. So, ultimately, it
is the abyss which lures the protagonist into addiction. If this is true, then it has some
implications for our understanding of Atlantis and its downfall as well. It is namely
again the activity in the depths of the ocean which brought about the destruction of
this glorious and supernatural city. Consequently, it seems that, after some time has
passed, ecstasy – be it super- or subterrestrial – cannot be sustained, and that, in the
end, the two poles of the bright-dark dualism are bound to cancel each other out.
h. Scene 8: lines 191-207
In scene eight, the speaker, who now appears to be somewhat removed in time from
the visionary events, starts to become aware of the uncanny fleetingness of his
28
visions. Consequently, he begins to feel the need to account for the fact that it is
normal that he cannot recall the exact form and content of his experiences anymore –
he begins to feel the need to justify that it was real. Putting this into practice,
Tennyson yet again displays just how important the symbol of water is to him,
because this time (after the deep sea of Atlantis and the vision’s abysmal lake), he
makes his point through the image of a swift, “arrowy stream” which the speaker was,
so to speak, forced to sail on in a sloop, the current so strong that it would have been
impossible not to go with it, let alone to “link his shallop to the fleeting edge, / And
muse midway with philosophic calm / Upon the wondrous laws, which regulate / The
fierceness of the bounding Element.”
Scene eight provides us with two water-comparisons, which both again underscore
how the element of water is linked to Tennyson’s understanding of what it is like to be
in a state of divine inspiration, and, consequently, how important water is in his
poetics. Both of these images are rather violent and both have a dangerous streak to
them.
The first image which we shall be taking a closer look at, is “the torrent of quick
thought [which] / Absorbed me from the nature of itself / With its own fleetness.” This
deluge at first sight appears to be relatively straightforward, yet in fact, the three lines
in which it is described contain some symbolism worthwhile to be looked at. First of
all, the image of rain is “[a] vital symbol of fecundity, often linked in primitive
agricultural societies with divine semen, as in the Greek myth in which the god Zeus
impregnated Danaë, the mother of Perseus, in the form of a golden shower” (“Rain”).
Likewise, the imaginary torrent which Tennyson unleashes over his protagonist may
be said to act as some kind of “divine semen,” bearing him the equally divine
offspring of inspiration.
A second interesting feature of these three lines of verse, is the fact that the
rainstorm of divine inspiration in which the speaker finds himself, is so powerful and
so much larger than life that it actually has the strength to transcend the laws of
nature: instead of being absorbed, this supernatural water is so baffling that it, for a
moment, absorbs whom it touches. The speaker is almost literally sucked up into the
realm of the uncanny, or, in other words: into the Underworld. It is clear that there is a
touch of evil contained in this image: nobody can sail the Styx without paying Charon
a coin.
29
The next water-image which scene eight has to offer, then, is one which we
have already more or less looked at: it is the imaginary trip “[a]down the sloping of an
arrowy stream.” Whether one considers the stream’s unstoppability as a bad omen,
as characteristic of a drug rush, or simply sees it as harmlessly inherent to a mystical
rapture – there is one thing about the inspirational trance of the secluded artist which
is beyond dispute: in the end, when the persona’s shallop has reached more tranquil
waters, all that will be left of the momentary splendour is an uncanny, unspeakable
memory “[l]ess vivid than a half-forgotten dream.”
A final element which indicates how Tennyson places water on a pedestal, is
the fact that, in scene eight’s closing words, he calls it the “bounding Element.” First
of all, this statement implies that the poet did not only see water as an element which
triggers spells of divine insight and inspiration, yet also as the element which would
be responsible for the harmony which the protagonist, during his trance, perceives in
the universe. A second interesting aspect of the wording of “bounding Element,” is
Tennyson’s choice for the word “Element,” with a capital letter. This way of
expression suggests a link to “the Elements” (water, fire, earth and air), which, before
true scientific knowledge came along, “were viewed as the basis of cosmic order and
harmony” (“Elements, the”). By doing this, Tennyson is able to implicitly strengthen
the poem’s longing for a return to the (imaginary) past, again by referring to water.
i. Scene 9: lines 208-224
The slightly pedantic tone which the persona adopted near the end of the previous
scene, becomes now, in scene nine, a more clear-cut presence, as the speaker
distinguishes himself from his old state of mind (and therefore, from common
humanity) and speaks condescendingly of it. It will not come as a surprise that the
imagery used to clarify this, once more, contains elements of water: the persona’s
thoughts, “which had long grovell’d / in the slime / Of this dull world,” are “like dusky
worms which / house / Beneath unshaken waters.” After the speaker’s awakening,
however, the seasons change and, during a spring night, the worms turn into
butterflies, fluttering towards the stars and beyond.
In scene nine’s haughty lines, we encounter one of water’s dualisms which we had
not come across yet: that of still water versus moving water. The first, in the text, is
30
clearly presented as the way waters – and, by extension: the human mind – should
not be: it is the flat consciousness of those who do not know what they are missing
out on. The latter, by contrast, is the water of the wide ocean, of scene three’s
rippling lake, of scene eight’s “arrowy stream” – the water of the mind enraptured by
greatness.
The fact that this dualism is accompanied by a second pair of “opposites” –
namely: the worm and the butterfly – only makes the image they together produce
stronger, since both creatures have distinct symbolical meanings. The worm, for
instance, is “[a] symbol of dissolution and mortality” (“Worm”). When we combine this
image with the poem’s ideas of a stagnant pool in which there is also an abundance
of viscous slime14, it becomes quite clear just how much the poem’s protagonist
abhors the human condition. The image of the writhing worms in a filthy, slimy pool is
the shameless opposite of the artist’s ancient goal of immortality reached by a
transcendence of the common self. This ideal picture, then, is what we get when we
look at the butterfly – “[a]n ancient symbol of immortality” (“Butterfly”) – which breaks
open the pupal case to which the unevolved worm was condemned, and is free to
flutter “upward through the track- / less fields of / Undefin’d existence far and free.”
j. Scene 10 (lines 225-257) and scene 11 (lines 258-313)
After the last few scenes of contemplation, the speaker becomes again aware that he
is standing on a cliff, by twilight, overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar. Now, however,
there is a change. Whereas before he could only “muse […] on the dreams of old,” he
has now “[o]pen[ed] [his] eyes and see[s],” quite literally, because this time he can
suddenly see, standing out in the darkness, a glorious Oriental city, bathing in
“diamond light,” where, before, there was only a plain of nothingness. As soon as the
speaker has noticed this presumed Timbuctoo, our gaze is made to sweep across
the water, entering the distant city and cruising through it, until, after this Thousand
and One Night-journey, the persona “lands” in front of a magnificent palace, its gates,
“[t]wo doors of blinding brilliance,” invitingly opened, waiting for him to go in. Entering,
the speaker’s mystical experience reaches its climax as he perceives “[p]art of a
throne of fiery flame, wherefrom / The snowy skirting of a garment hung.” In complete
14
Which is about the least attractive manifestation of water imaginable.
31
admiration, he does not succeed in lifting his eyes any higher than the hem of the
ruler’s attire, because his “human / brain / Stagger’d beneath the vision, and thick
night / Came down upon my eyelids, and I fell.”
The ruler of Timbuctoo appears to be entirely benevolent, as he heartily picks
up the protagonist and begins to speak to him, the “majestic melody” of his voice
sounding “[l]ike a swoln river’s gushings in still night / Mingled with floating music [my
italics].” In his speech, the divine monarch of the mythical Timbuctoo lets the persona
in on the secrets of the semi-conscious visitations of the Aesthetic which everyone
from time to time receives through nature, but which no one, other than the speaker –
the chosen one – is aware of. Man, the Oriental ruler says, should learn “to attain / By
shadowing forth the Unattainable; / And step by step to scale that mighty stair /
Whose landing-place is wrapt about with / clouds / Of glory, of Heaven.” The reward
for this, will be that he will have the ability to close his eyes for reality and, instead,
hang on to the ancient hopes and fears from the pre-scientific days in a land of
“complicated glooms, / And cool impleachèd twilights15.”
As scenes ten and eleven do not contain a whole lot of water imagery, We shall
examine them together. The first interesting aspect in this context which we can
detect in scene ten, appears at its very end, when the speaker has already passed
through the crystal city and has just entered the palace of Timbuctoo. There, he
perceives “[p]art of a throne of fiery flame, wherefrom / The snowy skirting of a
garment hung.” What is remarkable about this portrayal of the ruler and his
surroundings, is how it fuses together such naturally hostile elements like snow and
fire. Obviously, this supernatural confluence underlines again (like scene eight’s
absorbing torrent) the extent to which the realm of the Aesthetic exceeds that of
limited earth. However, one can discern a second reference in this combination of
frozen water and fire – one which deepens Tennyson’s Underworld symbolism while
at the same time placing him firmly into the literary tradition: it is strongly reminiscent
of Dante’s Inferno, which, too, incorporates blazing fire in its higher regions, and a
frozen lake in its depths, in which Lucifer is imprisoned. We shall not go so far as to
claim that Timbuctoo’s ruler is in fact some kind of Lucifer, yet it is advisable to
observe that its connection to Dante’s Inferno endorses the idea that the oriental city
15
One could hardly think of an image more foretelling of “The Lotos-Eaters” than this one.
32
may be seen as a representation of the uncanny and unconscious Underworld which
we have been discussing.
At the beginning of scene eleven, then, the lord of the “Underworld” makes his
voice heard “[i]n accents of majestic melody, / Like a swoll’n river’s gushings in still
night / Mingled with floating music [my italics].” After discussing scene eight’s water
symbolism, we know that, for Tennyson, moving waters (and their sounds) have very
positive connotations and are linked to supernatural mental activity. Nevertheless,
one must not lose track of another consideration which we have made; namely that
these moving waters might prove to be too powerful for a man of flesh and blood to
deal with, and, in the end, they may gobble him down.
k. Scene 12: lines 313-349
In the poem’s mysterious twelfth and final scene, immediately after the “Spirit […] [o]f
the great vine of Fable” has delivered his – perhaps rather worrisome – Glad Tidings
of an escape in “complicated glooms, / And cool impleachèd twilights,” he goes on to
draw the persona’s attention to the enigmatic river which runs through the centre of
mythical Timbuctoo. This particular stream – other than the previous waters which
make their appearances throughout “Timbuctoo” – derives its intriguing qualities from
the fact that it does not serve to clarify a previous statement. The translucent and
reflective river, which flows through a city of light and is born from and dies in
darkness remains unaccounted for. It appears to be undeniable that the combination
of such vagueness with an abundance of Tennysonian elements16 elevates this
passage above the other water scenes in the poem. Yet let us return to “Timbuctoo’s”
last lines. After the Spirit has explained how the river, just outside of Timbuctoo,
buries itself again in the earth “as not en- / during / To carry through the world those
waves, / which bore / The reflex of my City in their depths,” he breaks into an elegy
for his magical realm, as he is sure that, soon, Modernity (“keen Discovery”
personified by a female enchantress) will have caught up with it, and when it does, it
will reduce his mythical and prosperous City to a barren “waste of dreary sand”
covered with “Barbarian settle- / ments.” With these bleak words, the Spirit-ruler
takes off “Heaven-ward on the wing,” prophesying the disappearance of the crystal
16
Myths and legends, the “far, far away,” water symbolism, a paradise-like city in combination with an
Underworld-like abyss, mirroring-effects, etc.
33
city of Timbuctoo by taking the silver moon with him into the night. The persona
remains alone, back at (or: still at) the place where it all began, only now twilight has
passed and “all [is] dark.”
Finally we have arrived at the crucial scene about the mysterious river which flows
through Timbuctoo, emerging from and disappearing in darkness. After going through
the previous chapters, one will not be overly surprised when we depict this river as a
representation of the stream of the Underworld: the Styx. Matthew Rowlinson seems
to agree on the link which we have made between the joint realm of Paradise and the
Underworld, and that of lost myths and legends, as, for him, the river is
an elaborated figure for the temporal status of myth, one of the main
concerns of Tennyson’s poem as a whole. Like myth, the river rises from the
darkness (I. 226), from an unknown origin, passes current in the world for a
while as a medium of representation, but ultimately survives only as
something buried, or under erasure. (48)
The image of the river of myth which can only stay above ground as long as people
actively believe in it, evidently is reminiscent of Atlantis. This mythical island, too,
could only exist above the surface as long as its inhabitants believed in its power. As
soon as they lost their faith, the island mercilessly disappeared back into the abyss
where it came from.
Let us now have a look at a fascinating characteristic of water, namely its
ability to act as a mirror. Indeed, during his description of the stream and the city,
Timbuctoo’s ruler allows us to peek at the city’s reflection, yet never at its original.
Now, as the poem generally breathes an atmosphere of mystery and vagueness, the
fact that we never actually get to “see” the city inevitably raises some questions.
Perhaps the “real” city is not nearly as glorious as it appears to be in its “soft
inversion.” If this would be so, “Timbuctoo’s” speaker can be considered to be an
early version of his fellow-artist Lady of Shalott, who only perceives the true world
through her magic mirror which provides her with an idealized conception of reality,
consequently fatally disappointing her when she discovers the prosaic truth.
However, there is also a second option concerning the city’s reflection in the river:
perhaps the city does not exist at all. Perhaps, as its “tremulous” reflection suggest,
the city of Timbuctoo is nothing but a fata morgana – the underworldly river not
34
passively reflecting it, but actively projecting it, thus creating an illusionary oasis in
the desert.
Whichever option it may be, it is certain that, as soon as “keen Discovery”
creeps into people’s minds, the city disappears and the river again penetrates into
the abyss – the city’s “reflection somehow recorded in [its] depths” (Rowlinson 51)17.
All that is left, then, is a desert – synonymous to the absence of water. Man will be
forced to roam in this spiritually and physically barren landscape until someday,
perhaps, he again remembers and believes in the sacred waters running underneath
the waste.
Finally, there is still the image of the moon which, together with Timbuctoo’s
ruler, suddenly disappears, abruptly terminating the speaker’s vision of the crystal
city. This picture takes us back to the initial dualism of an elevated and an
subterranean mythical kingdom, both inextricably allied to one another: the return of
Timbuctoo’s ruler to the underworld naturally brings about “[t]he dark of the moon (its
three-day absence) [which] made the moon a symbol of the passage from life to
death as well as from death to life” (“Moon”).
Conclusion
The prime aim of this first part has been to provide the reader with a general
introduction to the materials which this dissertation will further discuss. This will prove
to be quite necessary, because the second part, “Timbuctoo’s Daughters,” will expect
for the reader to understand “the bigger picture,” as it will immediately move on to
very specific analyses of the water imagery in “Timbuctoo’s” metafictional followers.
The elements of this part which should be remembered, then, are: Tennyson’s
inclination towards metafictional poetry, his attraction to the realm of the Uncanny
(which is externalized through a heightened use of the senses), the typically
Tennysonian dualisms (that of the Underworld versus Paradise in particular), the
feelings of ecstasy, yet also of doubt, threat and melancholy, and, finally, how water
17
The setting which Tennyson has chosen for his poem (the Strait of Gibraltar, or: the ancient Pillars
of Hercules) enforces our assumption that Timbuctoo’s river actually is the Styx, as “[a]ccording to
some accounts the Styx was a branch of the great river Ocean which surrounded the earth” (“Styx”).
As mentioned earlier, the sea in which the Pillars of Hercules were located was thought to be this
“great river Ocean,” while distant Africa was believed to be a superhuman continent.
35
is the image which voices all these abstract ideas – as we were made to see through
our reading of “Timbuctoo.”
36
Part Two: Timbuctoo’s Daughters
1. Introduction
This dissertation began with the statement that the long poem “Timbuctoo” can be
considered to be the mother poem of a large share of Tennyson’s early works. Now,
as “Timbuctoo” has been thoroughly looked at in part one, the time has come to
consider its daughters. Naturally (and luckily), the offspring of successive generations
will never be identical to its predecessors. This goes for Tennyson’s 1830 and 1832
artist poems as well.
In the 1829-poem “Timbuctoo,” for example, the protagonist spent his days
dreaming of, and longing for a permanent residence in his ideal Paradise/Underworld
– yet in the end it all remained just a fantasy. In the 1830 and 1832 poems, however,
most characters actually do live in these shadowy realms of “far, far away,” beauty
and sensuousness, excluded from outer reality. Nevertheless, between these two
volumes one can notice a shift of mentality as well. The 1830 poems, which must
have been written around the time when Tennyson composed his “Timbuctoo,” in
general are very positive about their artistic seclusion from common, unworthy reality
– if there was some kind of negativity, it remains well-hidden. In the 1832 poems,
however, the irony and doubt towards isolation for Art's sake (which were already
implicitly present in “Timbuctoo”) tend to rise to the surface with a vengeance.
Somehow, by the time he was 23, Tennyson’s way of thinking had changed:
What happened to the poet between 1827 and 1850 [yet was already
noticeable in the short period of 1829-1832] was that he grew up, and
maturation was largely responsible for his change in outlook. Aestheticism
seems to belong largely to youth, and is put by in the process of maturing.
(Ryals 271)
By 1832, Tennyson’s artist-protagonists seem destined to end up in unhappy
isolation within the confinements of their golden cages, as they have become too
estranged from reality to be able to enter it again, whilst at the same time they remain
too human to become gods.
In the second part of this dissertation, then, we shall look for the abovementioned evolution through some poems from the 1830 and 1832 volumes which
37
have inherited their mother’s metafictional genes. This pronounced metafictional side
of Tennyson’s was by no means uncommon: “[l]iving in an age in which there was so
much emphasis on use and purpose, the poets were constantly concerned with the
fundamentals of their vocation, questions as to the role of imagination and the
function of art” (Pollard, 8).
Yet let us not focus on the general, but rather bring into focus those elements
which make Tennyson unique. More specifically, let us examine the water symbolism
in three of the 1830 artist poems – namely: the sonnet “Mine be the strength of spirit,”
the poem “The Poet’s Mind” and “Recollections of the Arabian Nights” – and in two of
the 1832 artist poems – “The Lotos-Eaters” and “The Palace of Art.”
2. 1830
In the 1830 volume, there are a number of artist poems which deal extensively with
the symbol of water – there are even a few (such as “Mine be the strength” and “The
Poet’s Mind”) which are just about entirely based on it. All the same, these 1830
water poems are not quite as interesting to analyse as “Timbuctoo,” or their 1832
successors. The reason for this, on the one hand, is that they do not nearly match up
to “Timbuctoo’s” hypnotizing complexity. On the contrary: even though the 1830
metafictional poems usually do stick to the visionary mental legacy which
“Timbuctoo” has left for them, they radically limit its range by lifting out just one of its
many themes – which they then elaborate on, but do not dig into. The shortcoming of
these 1830 poems as opposed to the 1832 ones, then, is in agreement with the
previous argument: the latter are much more profound. This time, their complexity is
caused by what Ryals has called Tennyson’s “growing up”: the slow deterioration of
his once indestructible belief in the superiority of a life entirely devoted to Art, and the
identity crisis which naturally comes out of it.
The result of this general impoverishment which we find in the 1830 volume,
are very pretty poems, which, unfortunately, lack a bit of depth. Yet perhaps it is
better to end these generalizations here, and have a look at the poems themselves.
38
a. “Mine be the strength”
The image which “Mine be the strength” has lifted out of “Timbuctoo” to expand on
makes it perfect as an introductory poem to this part, dealing with water in the context
of Tennyson’s metafictional work and its typicalities: it is the image of a “broad river
rushing down alone” as an allegory for the poet’s superior and invincible mind, for his
divine inspiration. Unfortunately, a perfect example is all it is, as the poem has been
stripped off of any lavish Tennysonian details, making it very straightforward and not
very subtle.
The sonnet’s principal idea is that the river (like “Timbuctoo’s” waters)
transcends the laws of nature, indicating how strongly the poet’s spirit is in touch with
a higher force. In order to let his reader sensually grasp this abstract thought, he
makes us follow the stream from its source (its “loud fount”), via the inland (where it
grows stronger and stronger as it leaves civilization behind), finally arriving at its
estuary (“the green salt sea” where it “[k]eeps his blue waters fresh for many a mile”).
The first eleven lines of the sonnet have provided us with some rather
uncomplicated imagery, “but in the last three lines the Romantic Tennyson creeps in”:
[H]e is equating ‘power’ with the Gulfstream and his poetry with ‘lavish
growths,’ thereby suggesting that poetry is concerned with the exotic and the
sensual. Furthermore, the Northern Seas are related to the uncongenial
minds, and Southern Mexico with the poet’s mind. (Ryals 71)
At least in the end, then, we can find a hint of the sensuous, layered Tennyson
which a lavish poem like “Timbuctoo” has made us accustomed to. Still, “Mine is the
strength” has not really brought anything new to the table – it has merely dipped its
toe into a lake which had long before been charted.
b. “The Poet’s Mind”
In theory, “The Poet’s Mind” is a poem similar to “Mine is the strength.” However, this
one has infinitely more bite and depth to it. While “Mine be the strength” solely
expresses a positivistic attitude in a world which seems to be free of trouble, “The
Poet's Mind” is a sharp comment and a severe denunciation of those who – to use
the words of “Timbuctoo's” Seraph – have not opened their eyes to see, and
consequently think that they ought to change and shape the poet to their standards.
39
The opening image, again, is reminiscent of “Mine be the strength,” as it
depicts the poet's sublime mind as “clear and bright [...], / Flowing like a crystal river;
/ Bright as light, and clear as wind.” However: this is where the sonnet ends, whereas
the poem only starts its journey here. First of all, the fact that the river is “crystal”
automatically takes us back to the crystal city of Timbuctoo and its reflecting stream.
This connection once more evokes the Tennysonian otherworldly bright-dark dualism
of Paradise and the Underworld: the river of divine inspiration exudes its bright and
lofty force, allowing the poet to take from it whatever he desires, yet one must not
forget that its source and home lies in the deepest abyss one can imagine.
In the poem's second and final part, then, the poet's mind changes form and
now appears as “holy ground.” By using this image of the artistic spirit which dwells in
its private, isolated realm, Tennyson places “The Poet's Mind” into the same line as
other (metafictional) poems, such as “The Palace of Art,” “Timbuctoo” (with divine,
unreachable places such as Atlantis, and Timbuctoo itself), “The Hesperides,” et
cetera. Despite the fact that the poet's Eden is surrounded by “laurel shrubs,” he still
feels that his garden is in need of further protection against the outside world, which
he connects with such negative characteristics as loudness, “death,” and “frost” - all
of which could potentially ruin his moist and warm Paradise. To do so, he pours “holy
water” into the flower cups of the laurel bushes, this way creating an artificial version
of water acting as a boundary, to “divide the worlds [...] of the natural and the
supernatural” (“Water”).
After we have entered the artist's garden, our gaze sweeps to its centre where
we suddenly perceive the powerful image of “a fountain [which leaps] / Like sheet
lightning, / Ever brightening / With a low melodious thunder.” As is to be expected,
the concept of “fountain” has a rich background in the history of myth, art and
literature. The Complete Dictionary of Symbols says: “[i]t can represent a symbol of
the cosmic centre, the divine spirit, purification, inspiration and knowledge.” Also,
“[b]oth Christian and Islamic traditions place a fountain or spring at the centre of
paradise.” Lastly, “Greek Orphic tradition held that bypassing the Fountain of
Forgetfulness and drinking from the Fountain of Memory at the entrance to Hades
would ensure immortality” (“Fountain”). Again it becomes clear how dexterous
Tennyson was at creating a sense of layering and profundity in his poems by making
them work on several dimensions and levels, that way creating some kind of allembracing dissémination: all of the mentioned “meanings” of “Fountain” can be
40
discovered in “The Poet's Mind's” specific fountain, yet none of them quite seems to
embrace the other, or rule the other one out.
Still, it is not just a fountain which Tennyson describes. It is a fountain which
emits “sheet lightning, / Ever brightening” and “a low melodious thunder.” The
association of fountain with storm-imagery still deepens the already extensive range
of meanings attributed to this passage, as it is “a symbol of creative energy and
fecundity” (“Storm”). Also, when we take in the entire picture of the fountain, its
glorious light and the low yet melodious sound it produces, it becomes clear that its
sheer sensuousness has an overwhelming and even hypnotizing effect.
And yet, Tennyson still does not seem to think the image is captivating
enough, for he goes on to locate the divine fountain's source. He follows the stream
up through a mountain (which we know is divine in Tennyson's personal symbolism),
and ultimately finds it in Paradise itself18:
All day and all night it is ever drawn
From the brain of the purple mountain
Which stands in the distance yonder:
It springs on a level of bowery lawn,
And the mountain draws it from Heaven
above
After this discussion, then, it is proven again just how holy Tennyson thinks his
inspirational and poetical realm is, and, considering the imagery he uses to make this
point, how much importance he attaches to the sacred symbol of water. However,
water also is a powerful Element which can drag anyone along at any time. Bearing
this in mind, one might come to see the naive fanaticism with which “The Poet's
Mind's” speaker delivers his speech as a sign on the wall for an inevitable
degradation – just like the possibility of a “drug rush” in “Timbuctoo” already implies
sad consequences. In the 1830 volume one will not find palpable evidence of these
consequences of a life of Art, yet in 1832-figures such as the Lady of Shalott and the
Soul in “The Palace of Art,” they will become painfully clear.
18
If we take Tennyson's dualisms into account, a river which appears from Heaven is the same
thing as a one emerging from the Underworld. Consequently, we can allot the same meaning and
value to the fountain in “The Poet's Mind” as we did to the river in Timbuctoo, which appeared from,
and disappeared in the abyss.
41
c. “Recollections of the Arabian Nights”
Before we move over to the metafictional water poems of Tennyson's second volume
of poetry, we shall leave the allegorical settings of “Mine be the strength” and “The
Poet's Mind” behind and travel through “[t]he first phase of Tennyson’s Orientalism
[which] is illustrated in the 1830 volume by ‘Recollections of the Arabian Nights'”
(Yohannan 83)19.
Being a typical 1830 poem, “’Recollections of the Arabian Nights’ is not the
kind of poetry which asks very much of the reader” (Thomson 26). Indeed, the
images it portrays are mainly just pretty, yet, as Ryals says:
in spite of its failure as a symbolist poem or as an allegory, if indeed it was
designed as such, ‘Recollections of the Arabian Nights’ is still a delightful
poem. Each stanza evokes the charm of a child’s picture book, and each
image seems to flow into the next, as though in dream we were voyaging
with the speaker to a childhood land of fairy tale. (50)
The main image of the poem is a “sea-voyage [or, actually, river-voyage,] as
emblematic of the experiences of the imagination” (Ryals 48). During the “dreaming
passivity” (Thomson 25) of this voyage, the poem's protagonist is immersed in “a
memory of a / youthful retreat to a world of fancy, in which the great Caliph is a kindly
father-figure, and innocence replaces ‘thou shalt not’” (25-26). Or so it seems,
because, as Riede argues, “[t]hough Tennyson’s Orientalist sources are often used to
represent or to displace his poetic anxieties, they also provided him with a means to
explore otherwise forbidden interests in a feminized eroticism” (663). “The eroticism
that was unsuitable in speaking of the chaste English was, of course, perfectly
‘natural’ in descriptions of the Orient or Oriental women” (671). This general comment
on Tennyson seems to be applicable on “Recollections of the Arabian Nights” as well.
Not only does the poem portray its “far, far away” location in utmost clichéd images
bursting with pageant and wealth, there also seems to be a constant sexual tension
and anticipation hovering between the poem’s lines.
Now we shall for a moment set aside any intrigue about lurking imperialism
and concealed eroticism, and turn to what is most essential to us: the water imagery
in “Recollections of the Arabian Nights.” Already in the poem’s first stanza there is a
simile worth looking at, dealing with Tennyson’s “desperate wish to believe that
19
Yet which we have already seen shining through in “Timbuctoo's” tenth scene, in which the
protagonist finally gets to see the exotic crystal city of Timbuctoo.
42
somewhere in his childhood there had been joy” (Ricks, qt. in Hughes 107) and his
great longing for a perfect past which follows out of this. The protagonist of
“Recollections of the Arabian Nights” fits into Tennyson’s ideal: he is a young boy
living in a world where everything still is possible – hence the uncharacteristic “joyful
dawn [my italics]” instead of Tennysonian dusk in the poem’s introductory lines. This
boy has quite a vivid imagination as well, as he, fantasizing about being an
adventurer in exotic places, visualizes time as a river (“[t]he forward-flowing tide of
time”) over which he and his poet heart have a strange power: a power to reverse the
direction of the current, allowing the boy’s “silken sail of infancy” to sail back to a
great, distanced past that never was.
Not only has this first paragraph allowed us to discover that Tennyson
perceives time as a kind of progressing river (which in harsh reality could not have
been reversed), we have also come across one of the Tennysonian manifestations of
water which has become quite familiar by now: that of the unstoppable river of
Inspiration which carries the passive protagonist along with it on a visionary journey.
In “Recollections of the Arabian Nights,” however, the Inspiration is not only
Paradisiacal or Underworldly, as we have been used to until now. This time, it also
carries along sparks of “voyeurism” (Riede 675) towards the ideal exotic society, and,
as mentioned, some dashes of erotic desire.
The fragment dealing with the embowered lake which the protagonist’s sloop
at some point reaches, for instance, is an example of how this new Tennysonian
“dualism” of divine inspiration versus worldly desire can be perceived in a single
situation. Again, as was mentioned before, the pieces of this dualism cannot be
separated, nor can they be united: they are part of the uncanny realm of
dissémination and will therefore always refuse to be pinned down completely.
Let us first consider the lake-scene in terms of its connection to the
Underworldly part of the dualism. First of all, we must realize that the river Tigris,
which leads the protagonist’s shallop through the enchanting Orient, to a very large
extent resembles the magical river of Timbuctoo. If we consider the “Tigris” as a
descendant of Tennyson’s primal river, then, we know we must not restrict ourselves
to thinking of it in terms of its geographical authenticity: it is a stream which has
sprung up from an imaginative, unspeakable realm20, and therefore its name could
20
It is the realm of Tennyson’s “legends quaint and old” (“Timbuctoo”) where magical and impalpable
places such as Atlantis reside.
43
have been anything. Thus, we find our protagonist sailing on an
Underworldly/Paradisiacal Styx, when suddenly
A motion from the river won
Ridged the smooth level, bearing on
My shallop thro’ the star-strown calm,
Until another night in night
I enter’d, from the clearer light […].
As this fragment’s parallel with “Timbuctoo’s” “arrowy stream” indicates, this is
the place where the protagonist is guided – “thro’ the star-strown calm21” – into
“another night in night,” a higher level of being22 which brings him closer to the
ultimate domain of the Caliph Haroun Alraschid. Before he reaches the gardens
surrounding the Caliph’s palace, however, he passes through a richly embowered
lake, serving as some kind of rite of passage to the Underworld.
The appearance of the lake and its surroundings, typically, is very
overwhelming and dazing, and appeals to every sense: everywhere one looks there
are small waterfalls “[o]f diamond rillets musical” which cause the lake to sparkle like
a pool of gems, reflecting light from an unknown source. Most alluring, however, is
the presence of a “central fountain” of divine inspiration, which we already
encountered in “The Poet’s Mind.” Consequently, we already know how the symbol
“fountain” is associated with inspiration and Paradise, and how it, in “Greek Orphic
tradition”, is linked to “the entrance to Hades” (“Fountain”). Likewise, rivers (like water
in general) are known often to appear as “boundaries, particularly dividing the worlds
of the living and the dead” (“River, Stream”)23. The lake, then, has similar
connotations as well:
21
In this image we find heaven and abyss united. Perhaps this indicates a connection of the “Tigris” to
Timbuctoo’s river, which can be seen as the active projector of the mythical city on the empty, dry
desert-background. If this is so, the entire fantasy of “Recollections of the Arabian Nights” might be
triggered off by the young protagonist’s vision of time as a river, acting as a catalyst for the mental
creation of “Baghdat” (the river of time projecting it on the blank walls of the protagonist’s
imagination) – just like the sea for “Timbuctoo’s” speaker triggered off his entire hallucinatory chain
of visions
22
“The paradise opens only as the voyager enters ‘another night in night,’ only when he sheds another
layer of the external self and penetrates further into the ego.” (Ryals 49)
23
In this case we must think of this boundary as a case of what Gerhard Joseph describes as
Tennyson’s “vertical distancings” as opposed to the more common horizontal ones (Joseph 1977
421). In “Timbuctoo,” for example, we were confronted with both, the sea each time acting as the
boundary: once between the worldly Europe and the otherworldly Africa, and once between the
worldly surface and the otherworldly depths of the sea.
44
Lakes are linked with rebirth and enchantment through the feminine
symbolism of water, and also with the transition to death and other states.
[…] In Greek myth, the god Dionysos descended to the Underworld through a
lake. […] Lakes may be the entrance to the Celtic Otherworld of enchantment
and bliss […]. [my italics] (“Lake”)
It is clear how the combination of the overwhelming aesthetic beauty of the
embowered lake with its elements’ symbolical meanings is able to constitute a
Tennysonian point of escape towards the hazy region between the real and the
sublime. Having shed the ballast of “the hum of men” (“Timbuctoo”), the protagonist
can freely proceed towards the great Caliph, who seems to have comparable function
to the ruler of Timbuctoo. However, this is exactly the point where “Recollections of
the Arabian Nights” shows its shortcomings as opposed to “Timbuctoo”: the first one
ends where the latter begins – or, in Ryals’ words:
Here the poem ends […]. For thirteen and a half stanzas the stage has been
set for the introduction of the Caliph, and then when in the last four lines he
appears, the poem closes. There is no development of the symbol. The
burden of the poem has been placed on reaching the goal rather than on the
goal itself, and the poem has ended almost where it should have begun. (50)
Now that we have ascertained that the Underworldly side of the dualism
“divine inspiration versus worldly desire” is unquestionably present in “Recollections
of the Arabian Nights,” let us have a quick look at the dualism’s second half and
figure out how “erotic fantasy” makes its appearance in the poem. First of all, there is
the concealed voyeurism of looking into people’s magnificent, dusky houses in this
place of exotic otherness:
By garden porches on the brim,
The costly doors flung open wide,
Gold glittering thro’ lamplight dim,
And broider’d sofas on each side […].
(lines 17-20)
Because Tennyson uses a reversed version of his typical “mask of age24,” this
peeping into the private lives of others is perceived by the reader as rather innocent.
24
As Ryals says, in his very early poetry “to express such disaffection with life Tennyson obviously
could not speak in propria persona, for even he realized that world- and time-weariness would seem
ludicrous coming from the mouth of an eighteen-year-old. He devised, therefore, to speak in the
45
However, as the poem continues, its initial innocence seems to become rather
implausible. The symbols of “lake” and “fountain,” for example, can also be
interpreted in a more erotic way, as the attractive lake is linked to the feminine and
the fountain’s “jetting water has a [male] sexual symbolism” (“Fountain”).
The next stanza (the sixth), then, is even more straightforward in its sexual
allusions, as it is an enumeration of seemingly virtuous objects which one by one
appear to have an erotic ring to them. A shell, for example, is an “[a]uspicious, lunar
and feminine symbol, linked with conception, regeneration, baptism and, in many
traditions, prosperity – probably through fecundity symbolism based on its
association with the vulva” (“Shell”). The “fluted vase, and brazen urn” from the poem
share some of the shell’s characteristics: vases are “[o]ften a feminine symbol”
(“Vase”) and an urn, likewise, is “[a] symbol of the female and fecundity” (“Urn”). Also,
the presence of flowers in this same stanza might not be entirely innocent as “[t]he
receptive cup-like form of the flower is symbolically passive and feminine”
(“Flowers”).
When we take all this into account, it will not come as a surprise that Riede
proposes a sexual rather than a spiritual interpretation of the young protagonist’s
ultimate visit to the Caliph and his harem: “[t]he shallop eventually enters into the
palace and harem of Haroun Alraschid, where still greater riches are exhibited,
climaxing not in sherbet, as was Hallam’s analogy, but in erotic voyeurism” (675):
Then stole I up, and trancedly
Gazed on the Persian girl alone,
Serene with argent-lidded eyes
Amorous, and lashes like to rays
Of darkness, and a brow of pearl
Tressèd with redolent ebony,
In many a dark delicious curl,
Flowing beneath her rose-hued zone.
(lines 133–40)
To this, Riede adds a last interesting observation: “the apparent complicity of the
Caliph, whose eyes laugh ‘[w]ith merriment of kingly pride,’ (line 151) suggests a
willingness to share his harem” (676).
persona of an older man […]. / He assumed, in other words, what W. D. Paden has called the ‘mask of
age’.” (Ryals 18-19)
46
To conclude, we can say that – despite the fact that “Recollections of the
Arabian Nights” in general has more wealth to display in terms of embellishment than
in terms of substance – the poem does have something to bring to the table when it
comes to water symbolism, its different meanings, and what these have to say about
Tennyson. Also, the poem’s sexual innuendo makes clear that water does not
necessarily have to be a symbol underpinning Tennyson’s metafictional strain – it can
also appear in more earthly contexts, which leads us to the second chapter,
concerning the Poems of 1832.
2. 1832
Reviewing Tennyson’s 1830-volume, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, John Wilson had the
following severe words to say about the young artist:
At present he has small power over the common feelings and thoughts of
man. His feebleness is distressing at all times when he makes an appeal to
their ordinary sympathies. And the reason is, that he fears to look such
sympathies in the face. (qt. in Ryals 67)
Whether it was because of censures like this one or not, for his next volume of
poetry Tennyson tackled the problem which Wilson cut into by allowing his internal
struggles with society (which he had always had, yet which he had until then pushed
away) to rise to the surface. Ryals phrases Tennyson’s alleged amelioration as such:
[U]nlike the poems of 1830, those in this volume treat not separately of
individual themes, but rather bring together and interweave the themes and
symbols of the earlier verse. Tennyson’s poetry has become more complex;
but this is not to say that it has become more precisely oriented. On the
contrary, it seems as / though the polarity noted in the Poems, Chiefly Lyrical
has increased its tension to the point where the two-directional pull no longer
remains beneath the surface but becomes open and explicit. (69-70)
With this in the back of our minds, let us have a look at two of these 1832 poems
which may be called metafictional: “The Lotos-Eaters” and “The Palace of Art.”
47
a. “The Lotos-Eaters”
Like “Recollections of the Arabian Nights” (derived from the books of adventure which
Tennyson so liked), “The Lotos-Eaters” is a poem which obviously is set within a
literary context, as the original story of the Lotos-Eaters is told in just twenty-three
lines of Homer’s famous epic Odyssey (part IX). In this short fragment, Homer relates
how Ulysses and his men end up at the island of the Lotos-Eaters, how some of them
(who were sent ahead to explore the island) taste the lotos plant and consequently
do not want to leave anymore, and, finally, how Odysseus forces all of his men back
on their ships to continue their journey. Obviously, this story is only the starting point
of Tennyson’s version of it:
In expanding Homer's twenty-three lines into a poem nearly eight times as
long, Tennyson has made some noteworthy additions. To begin with, he has
created a mood and a landscape. The mood is one of utter languor. The lush
landscape, described in considerable detail, is clearly intended to provide a
background of natural beauty that shall be in harmony with the dreamy inertia
of the Lotos-eaters' life. Tennyson has sought, successfully I believe, to
achieve an exquisite blending of sound with sense. (MacLaren 259)
In his article “Tennyson’s Epicurean Lotos-Eaters,” Malcolm MacLaren
consciously draws the attention to the conflict of mind which so typifies young
Tennyson at the time of his 1832-volume, Poems:
We should realize that the poet was undergoing a conflict in his mind […]. He
felt, on the one hand, a strong desire to withdraw into a private world of
creative imagination and to devote himself to the pursuit of beauty for its own
sake. But he was beginning to wonder whether a poet could be justified in
living such a life of aesthetic exclusiveness. He feared that he might be losing
his power of human sympathy, and he was coming to believe that his poetry
ought to be concerned with the problems of ordinary humanity. This conflict is
reflected in a number of the poems published in 1832. (263)
“The Lotos-Eaters,” in this context, has sparked off quite a lot of discussion in
the scholarly world. The key question in these debates always comes down to the
same thing, namely: what side of the spectre is the poem really trying to defend?
“Traditionally, readers of ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ have responded primarily to the narcotic
qualities of its meter, sound, and sensuous detail” (Grob 118). More recently,
however, this rather simplistic view has been discharged at least in part, and
48
academics tend to agree on the fact that there is also a kind of didactic side to the
poem, trying to tell us something about the ideal artist life. Yet it is here that the
seeds of dissension lie.
Clyde de C. Ryals, for example, is in favour of an aesthetically motivated
interpretation of “The Lotos-Eaters,” as he claims that:
“The Lotus-Eaters” gives less evidence than most of the poems in the 1832
collection of the two-directional pull of Tennyson’s personality. There is here
an acceptance of the desire for escape, and in this respect the poem is an
example of Keats’s negative capability. For the moment the Romantic
Tennyson was in complete control, and for this reason “The Lotus-Eaters” is
probably the least characteristic poem in this volume. (100)
Alan Grob (author of the excellent article “Tennyson’s The Lotos-Eaters: Two
Versions of Art”), similarly, pulls the attention towards the fact that the poem has
known two versions (hence the title of his article): one in the Poems of 1832, which
he believes celebrates the Aesthetic side of the spectre; and one in the revised
Poems of 1842, in which Tennyson would have made several adaptations in order to
underpin his newly acquired inclination towards social engagement:
[I]n a sense, “The Lotos-Eaters” straddles two worlds. Although in its original
form “The Lotos-Eaters” belongs to the highly subjective and symbolically
organized poetry of 1832, it underwent substantial revision before its
reappearance ten years later. And in these additions and deletions of 1842,
Tennyson adopts the public manner of his later poetry and indicates his
increasing alignment with the sensibility of his age. Thus, to understand
Tennyson's evaluation of the aesthetic experience in “The Lotos-Eaters,” we
must disentangle its skeins, examining first the attitudes implied in the less
familiar version of 1832. (118)
The stance that we shall adopt, however, disaffirms Ryals’ plea for an entirely
aesthetic interpretation of “The Lotos-Eaters,” and, likewise, declines the need which
Alan Grob claims there is for separate interpretations of the 1832 and the 1842versions of the poem. Our position, then, will be in the same field as that of
MacLaren, who “understand[s] ‘The Lotos-Eaters,’ like ‘The Palace of Art,’ as a
disavowal of the creed of artistic isolation, and not, like ‘The Hesperides,’ as a
defense of this creed” (264). It is this notion that we shall try to encounter in the
poem’s water imagery.
49
“The Lotos-Eaters” consists of two main parts, the first 66 lines acting as a sort
of introduction, the rest a “Choric Song” sung by the dazed mariners. It is the first part
which will be most interesting to us, because here we can see the mariners as they
are sliding off into the “dreamful ease” caused by the lotus, yet they are not lost yet.
When we reach the “Choric Song,” however, they have already gone down under the
“lyrical affirmation of passivity, of ‘we will not’, and ‘let us alone’” (Thomson 44), and,
therefore, they have become biased.
The first watery image which we perceive in “The Lotos-Eaters,” is that of the
sea. The sea, perhaps, can be observed as the element in which we most clearly get
to see the enormous transformation which has taken place in the time span between
“Timbuctoo” (1829) and the 1832 volume, Poems. In the former, the sea was
predominantly seen as a positive image – home of the poet’s divine, uncanny
inspiration. Although it did contain an unvoiced sense of threat, this threat was
connected directly to its twin, a sense of divinity, therefore only increasing the general
feeling of awe towards the Aesthetic.
In “The Lotos-Eaters,” on the other hand, “Timbuctoo’s” positivism towards the
sea is not as self-evident anymore, as it has received new connotations. In the
opposition which is created between the “land of streams” (line 15) and the turbulent
“mounting wave” (line 3), we can see the doubt and struggle which Tennyson himself
experienced as his conscience forced him to re-evaluate his youthful ideals. This
time, also, the positive or negative perception of the sea is not something purely
spiritual or superhuman, as it was in “Timbuctoo.” Now, the sea is something which
has an emotional, worldly meaning to real men (as opposed to “Timbuctoo’s” rather
artificial speaker), whose background we (through Homer’s epos) know to be one of
toil and hardship on the sea and in Troy. These men, we shall argue, do not choose
to reside in Lotos-land because of the inspirational poetic rush it gives them. Rather,
the “land / In which it seemed always afternoon” (lines 5-6) serves as an addictive
and dangerous refuge in which these traumatized, shell-shocked mariners are free to
go into denial without having to face up to a constant confrontation with reality.
Still, one must always keep in mind that, despite the fact that Tennyson was
by now inclining towards the more socially responsible side of the spectre, he had not
definitively chosen for it. Therefore, the aesthetic tendency in Tennyson remains a
force to be reckoned with. “The Lotos-Eaters’” setting, for example, has all the
elements which one would expect in Tennyson’s “Romantic,” escapist poems: a
50
remote and mysterious island, perpetual twilight, cliffs, veils of mist, lush foliage, et
cetera. However, what the poetic environment looks like is insignificant: it is what
speaks out of it that truly matters. And this is where Tennyson’s poems, by 1832,
have changed.
Before, as we saw in “Timbuctoo,” there was not much difference to be made
between the several manifestations of water: the sea, the river, the lake and the
torrent were all seen as gateways towards the uncanny, hazy realm which was at the
same time Paradise and Underworld. In “The Lotos-Eaters,” however, we encounter
a new dualism: that of the river (which defines Lotos-land, the “land of streams”)
versus the sea (which is associated with the mariners’ traumatic past). Literally, the
mariners have had too much salt water to gulp down during their travels, which
makes them seek refuge in the sweet, forgetful waters of Lotos-land.
In the poem’s second stanza it becomes clear that the land of the Lotos-Eaters
(who are, actually, not the mariners but the island’s natives) truly is defined by its
sweet waters:
A land of streams! some, like a downward
smoke,
Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did
go;
And some thro’ wavering lights and
shadows broke,
Rolling a slumberous sheet of foam below.
They saw the gleaming river seaward flow
From the inner land: far off, three
mountain-tops,
Three silent pinnacles of aged snow,
Stood sunset-flush’d: and, dew’d with
showery drops […].
(lines 15-27)
Water seems to be omnipresent, and calls upon all the senses: it is in the streams, in
the mists in the air, foaming, flowing, falling… Most important, however, is where the
sweet waters of Lotos-land come from – which is a place we have already
encountered in “The Poet’s Mind”: they are born from the ancient snow covering the
island’s triple (a sacred number) mountains. The snow is put there directly by Heaven
51
(or: Paradise), and it slowly melts, consequently making its divine way into every
aspect of the island – including the lotos flowers and the water the mariners drink.
After the mariners have had plenty of time to take in their enchanting
surroundings, the “mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters” (line 41) appear, offering their
guests baskets full “of that enchanted stem” (line 43). Unsurprisingly, the mariners
have been dazed enough, and they accept the forbidden fruit:
[…] whoso did receive of them,
And taste, to him the gushing of the wave
Far far away did seem to mourn and rave
On alien shores […].
(lines 46-49)
As soon as they have tasted the lotos, there is no way back, and the ultimate state of
detachment begins to manifest itself through spatial and “non-spatial distancing[s]”
(Grob 123), and slowly the island’s high begins to weave itself around the mariners,
wrapping them in a protective cocoon.
The first one of these distancings is notable in the sea, which visually and
auditorially (thus: spatially and non-spatially) draws back25 – its sound being muffled.
Now the mariners perceive the sea as “mourn[ing] and rav[ing] / On alien shores [my
italics]” (lines 48-49). The wording of these verses seems to indicate that, before they
had eaten the lotos, the “mourn[ing] and rav[ing]” of the sea had plagued them,
reminding them of all the difficulties and deaths they have seen while sailing the
seas. Also, some lines later, the sailors claim: “Most weary seem’d the sea, weary
the oar, / Weary the wandering fields of barren foam [my italics]” (lines 60-61). Again,
the way the words in these verses are put appears to imply their opposite: what the
mariners seem to want most of all is for the sea to be calm, yet its gushing and
roaring will always try to remind them of their past. The men’s wish to negate reality
even goes so far as that they reduce the sea – “a maternal image even more primary
than the earth” (“Sea”), and thus an image for the umbilical cord which connects them
to their homes26 – to “wandering fields of barren foam.”
25
Apparently, the island works as a trap, and the familiar “mounting wave” (line 3) which had magically
lead the mariners towards Lotos-land proves to be a one-way ticket.
26
As in “Timbuctoo,” the sea here appears as a boundary between the worlds “of the natural and the
supernatural” (“Water”), yet in the case of “The Lotos-Eaters,” the side which one should aspire after
is the natural one.
52
This general denial indicates the mariners’ shell shock: they will do all it takes
not to be reminded of, or confronted with that which they have pushed away – thus
pushing their traumatic experiences into the realm of the Uncanny. In the final stanza
of the 1832-version of the poem27, there might even be an instance of Freud’s “return
of the repressed” in the guise of fearful images representing the female sea monsters
Scylla and Charybdis28, when the mariners say:
We have had enough of motion,
Weariness and wild alarm,
Tossing on the tossing ocean,
Where the tusked seahorse walloweth
In a stripe of grassgreen calm,
At noon tide beneath the lee;
And the monstrous narwhale swalloweth
His foamfountains in the sea.
Long enough the winedark wave our weary bark did
carry.
The sea is not the only thing which fades away into the intoxicating
forgetfulness which the lotos brings along: it also causes the men to become
alienated from one another and more and more absorbed in their personal realm of
thought:
[…] and if his fellow spake,
His voice was thin, as voices from the
grave;
And deep-asleep he seem’d, yet all awake,
And music in his ears his beating heart did make.
(lines 49-54)
The farther the poem progresses, the clearer it gets that we are here not
dealing with ecstatic artists who can peer through the entire universe, taking in its
larger-than-life sense of harmony in order to incorporate it into their work. Rather, we
27
The final stanza of the 1832-volume was completely rewritten for the version of 1842, yet it appears
that this was mainly for stylistic reasons.
28
“In Greek myth, a pair of female sea monsters […]. Charybdis, the daughter of the god Poseidon
and the goddess Gaia, became a giant whirlpool, which sucked in water three times a day with force
enough to swallow a ship. Scylla was originally a beautiful sea nymph. In one account, Poseidon fell in
love with her, so Amphitrite, his jealous wife, put magic herbs into the pool where she bathed, turning
Scylla into a six-headed monster. Its home was a cave opposite Charybdis. It often snatched sailors
off their ships to eat them.” (“Scylla and Charybdis”)
53
meet intensely unhappy shell shocked sailors who try to find a way out of their trouble
by seeking their salvation in drugs. As we remarked in Part I, the cocoon which the
narcotics wrap around their individual users will seem entirely pleasant at first, as
they make them perceive everything as a detached, beautiful art for art’s sake – even
their heartbeats (the sole companions in their isolation) sound like music to them.
The part which we do not get to see in “The Lotos-Eaters,” however, is that in which
the cocoon becomes suffocating, like a straitjacked, and the persona who sought
refuge from reality in the drug called “High Art” becomes lonely and isolated. This
transgression is shown, however, in characters like the Soul in “The Palace of Art”
and the Lady of Shalott, both of whom we shall meet in the next and final chapters.
So far, our discussion of “The Lotos-Eaters” has only looked at the poem’s first
part, and has withheld the much longer “Choric Song.” We have, however, indicated
why that is: chronologically, the mariners sing their song only after they have been
intoxicated by the lotos flower, and, consequently, their message invariably glorifies
Lotos-land and enumerates excuses for them not to go home again. Let us illustrate
this with the fourth part of the “Choric Song”:
Hateful is the dark-blue sky,
Vaulted o’er the dark-blue sea.
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 the climbing wave?
All things have rest, and ripen toward the
grave
In silence; ripen, fall and cease:
Give us long rest or death, dark death, or
dreamful ease.
(lines 112-128)
54
Despite the fact that the mariners’ message is a very gloomy one (they equate
the sea, for example, with death) somehow, they seem to whine. These ordinary men
of flesh and blood make “blasphemous assertions that they, like the soul in “The
Palace of Art,” are like gods, observing mortal strife, but disengaged from it” (Riede
669), thus dismissing themselves from a lifestyle which they perceive in terms of
Sisyphus’ and Prometheus’ torments: a life of endless and useless struggle. Instead
of this, they opt for a life of blind hedonism. For the mariners (as for the unfortunate
Lady of Shalott), the future only brings two options, ruling out the possibility of once
returning home: “dark death, or / dreamful ease.”
In the end, the above discussion of the so-called artist poem “The LotosEaters,” and especially the way in which it explores the new dualism of sweet rivers
versus salt sea, indicates a drastic shift in Tennyson. In “The Lotos-Eaters,” we
discover far less of the “Romantic” “part of [Tennyson’s] nature which cried out for
sensual indulgende” than we did in the earlier poem “Timbuctoo.” Rather, we find in it
more and more of its “Victorian” “opposing part which demanded social awareness
and involvement” (Ryals 70). As the poet is evolving towards a more responsible and
mature outlook on life, it becomes apparent that, by 1832, the authority of the poet’s
purely metafictional poetry wavers. Consequently, it would not be long until the
attribution of the title “metafictional” or “artist” poetry to Tennyson’s work will have
become untenable.
b. “The Palace of Art”
The next poem in which we will discuss the water imagery in the context of
Tennyson’s artist poems, tells the story of “the Palace of Art, the splendid pleasure
palace that the poet’s soul, a ‘Lord of the senses five,’ has had built for itself.
Eventually, the soul’s haughty insistence upon the solitude transforms the allegorical
dwelling into a garish ‘haunted house’” (Joseph 1973 424). This is the punishment of
“a hard, arrogant egotist who has chosen isolation because she feels superior to her
fellow-beings, and whose eventual misery is due not to the absence of one particular
lover, but to her divorce from all human sympathy” (Stevenson 240). In the end, as
the Soul is “finding her self-sufficiency inadequate for maintaining her happiness”
(240), she has to make a decision: she will either be “chastened or destroyed”
55
(Simpson 345), and, unlike the unhappy Lady of Shalott who does not get to choose,
the Soul picks the first option.
It could hardly be any more obvious how this poem fits into this chapter
discussing the ways in which the 1832-poems reflect “the poet’s divided mind” (Ryals
1964 441). In “The Palace of Art” – more explicit than in “The Lotos-Eaters” –
Tennyson namely clearly indicates that he “could not find poetic authority in the
egotistical sublime” because, by 1832, “he saw too clearly its inherent danger of
solipsistic estrangement from the world” (Riede 665). In other words: “The Palace of
Art” marks again how Tennyson was slowly but surely moving towards the “Victorian”
side of the spectre – how he was beginning to meet the “public's demand for a vates”
(Stange 742). As this is clear, we can now go on to examine the poem’s water
imagery, which again proves its importance by its abundance and its extensive web
of meanings.
For “Timbuctoo’s” speaker, who was doomed only to dream of such mythical
places as Timbuctoo and Atlantis, the life which the Soul leads in the Palace of Art
would have seemed like the ultimate state of bliss: to be all alone, surrounded by,
and living for all imaginable (and unimaginable) beauty, knowledge, greatness and
myth. However, as far as we know, the speaker of “Timbuctoo” never actually
experienced this “dream.” As we can see through the character of the poet’s Soul,
the happiness which this glorious realm provides lasts for only three years. From then
on, one starts to become increasingly aware of the golden cage in which he or she is
locked, and the carefree life of “before” is no longer an option.
Nevertheless, at the beginning of the poem, the sense of threat which we
know is lurking around the corner is nowhere to be seen, as we are introduced to the
“classic” Tennysonian realm of refuge and divine inspiration – including its typical
aqueous attributes. In each garden of the Palace’s “[f]our courts” (line 24), for
example, we encounter a great golden, dragon-shaped fountain, which provides the
grounds with its splashing, inspiring sounds and views. The characteristic bounding
sea, separating the natural from the supernatural, is also present, as it surrounds the
height on which the Palace is located.
Interestingly, “The Palace of Art” also comes up with a few new watery images
which also serve to underscore the divine and isolated status of the Soul’s grounds:
From those four jets four currents in one
swell
56
Across the mountain stream’d below
In misty folds, that floating as they fell
Lit up a torrent-bow.
And high on every peak a statue seem’d
To hang on tiptoe, tossing up
A cloud of incense of all odour steam’d
From out a golden cup.
(lines 39-47)
Both of these new images – that of the rainbow and of steaming incense –
unsurprisingly have a deeper, symbolical meaning. The rainbow, logically, is seen as
“[a] bridging symbol between the supernatural and natural worlds” (“Rainbow”), while
incense “was […] burned by itself as a purely symbolic offering, sharing the
emblematic meaning of smoke as a visible link between earth and sky, humanity and
divinity” (“Incense”). In addition to the sea – which makes up the Palace’s “horizontal
distancing,” the intangible rainbow and hazy incense together form an airborne,
“vertical distancing” (Joseph 1977 421), fully protecting the Soul’s kingdom from any
unwanted meddling from without, and, at the same time, tightly chaining the Palace’s
grounds to Paradise (in the air) and the Underworld (in the sea’s deeps).
Nevertheless, the Palace’s golden lacquer quickly begins to flake off when
(already after about sixty lines) some more ominous imagery makes its appearance,
as the Palace’s “deep-set windows” (line 58) are described as “slow-flaming crimson
fires / From shadow’d grots of arches interlaced, / And tipt with frost-like spires” (lines
60-62). Whereas in “Timbuctoo” this Inferno-imagery could still be looked upon as
positive (bearing in mind its link to the Underworld), for “The Palace of Art” it
announces the start of the Soul’s downward spiral – even if she does not know so
yet.
Immediately after the infernal view of the Palace’s windows, we are
transported into its gloomy corridors “[t]hro’ which the livelong day my soul did / pass,
/ Well pleased, from room to room” (lines 65-67). This contentment, however, seems
to be out of place, as the pictures which the Palace’s rooms hold are anything but
comforting. In the following paragraphs, then, we will have a look at some of these
paintings, as they concern the concept of water.
57
The second painting, for example, is defined by its lack of water, as it depicts a
nightly desert. What is more, the picture which is here described is uncannily and
scarily reminiscent of “Timbuctoo” and its speaker (this time seen from a different
perspective and lacking the vision of a fata morgana), implying the poem’s want of
true inspirational waters and its speaker’s insanity for looking for a sacred, mythical
city which he will never find:
One seem’d all dark and red – a tract of
sand,
And some one pacing there alone,
Who paced for ever in a glimmering land,
Lit with a low large moon.
(lines 79-83)
The picture which the third room holds, then, portrays the following:
One show’d an iron coast and angry waves.
You seem’d to hear them climb and
fall
And roar rock-thwarted under bellowing
caves,
Beneath the windy wall.
(lines 84-90)
Taking our previous discussions of Tennyson’s artist poems into account, this sea
sight can be interpreted in two ways (one “new” and one “old”), yet the threat which
the image contains remains constant. For the first possible reading of this stanza, we
must return to the imagery of “The Lotos-Eaters” and look at the sea as a symbol for
the so-called artist’s repressed memory of home – its roar a call for lost souls to
come back to their haven. The second interpretation of this angry sea takes us back
a bit farther, to Tennyson’s more Romantic view of the sea (or: the deep) as an
embodiment of the Underworld. The Underworld which we get to see here, however,
is far removed from the inviting and positive version of it which we encountered in
“Timbuctoo.” On the contrary: it is chaotic and fearsome.
The next room, also, contains some images which are of interest for our
discussion. This time, we meet the familiar river and the storm:
And one, a full-fed river winding slow
By herds upon an endless plain,
58
The ragged rims of thunder brooding low,
With shadow-streaks of rain.
(lines 90-93)
The stream which we see here is the same one as those which appeared in other
poems such as “Timbuctoo” and “The Lotos-Eaters”: it is the river of inspiration which
contains the divine mountains’ holy waters. Still, in this picture, something is
changed. For the first time, we come across a stream which does not merrily and
eagerly make its way through its surroundings, quickly winding and tumbling from
great heights only to increase its flow. This river is “slow” and makes its despondent
and inanimate way through “an endless plain.” The storm which overshadows the
scene, like the sea in the previous picture, can be looked at in two ways, both equally
ominous. On the one hand, as we have seen concerning “Timbuctoo’s” torrent,
storms represent “creative energy and fecundity,” yet put next to the gloomy image of
the river, this interpretation has an ironic ring to it. On the other hand, a storm is
“associated with divine anger or punishment” (“Storm”), which would indicate that the
Soul’s blasphemy has gone too far.
When we look at all three of these paintings together, we notice that they
provide us with a rather complete survey of the message which the image of water
has to deliver in all of the poems which we have until now discussed. When we look
at these pictures in the context of “The Palace of Art,” then, it becomes obvious that
all of them threateningly announce that the Soul’s godly isolation will no longer be
tenable.
The path which the Soul should follow, is mysteriously revealed in the
corridor’s seventh and last chamber, of which the painting acts like a beacon,
showing wandering sailors the way home after their exotic journeys:
And one, an English home – gray twilight
pour’d
On dewy pastures, dewy trees,
Softer than sleep – all things in order
stored,
A haunt of ancient Peace.
(lines 104-109)
In this picture, we can see the total reversal of the values which Tennyson used to
preach. This reversal, however, is portrayed by means of the same escapist imagery
59
which he used to apply on his more exotic, Romantic poems (twilight, dew29, rich
foliage, and a general state of harmony which is “[s]ofter than sleep”), yet now it
serves to praise an English cottage. The suggestion, then, is that this is the place
where true inspiration lies – not in the exotic “far, far away”-locations in which the
Soul (and by extension: the very young Tennyson) looks for them. The good old
English society is calling upon the restless Soul, like “[a] haunt of ancient Peace.”
Despite the telling qualities of her surroundings, the Soul, for three years,
succeeds in keeping her eyes closed for them and continues her lone singing on her
throne, vainly listening to the echo of her voice against the empty Palace’s walls. Like
Tennyson’s other Romantic protagonists, the Soul, too, calls upon a catalyst to bring
forth from her lips “[r]ivers of melodies [my italics]” (line 208). For her, the (literal)
sources of her song are the images of some of history’s great thinkers surrounding
her, which are portrayed as “[f]ull-welling fountain-heads of change [my italics]” (line
199).
At first, when the three good years have passed and the four lean ones
commence, the Soul tries to laugh her doubts away, yet the Palace has become a
haunted place, constantly displaying the hubris which underlies the religion of Art.
From this moment on, the poem’s water imagery – which, before, used to be ominous
– changes and takes on a more dismal guise:
A spot of dull stagnation, without light
Or power of movement, seem’d my soul,
‘Mid onward-motions infinite
Making for one sure goal.
A still salt pool, lock’d in with bars of sand,
Left on the shore; that hears all night
The plunging seas draw backward from
the land
Their moon-led waters white.
(lines 296-304)
In this image we can see how the waning river which was portrayed in the third
painting (the second one we discussed), has come to a standstill and is trapped on
29
Dew in general seems to have a very positive connotation for Tennyson, who appears to look at it
as something embracing and comforting.
60
shore between its source (the Aesthetic side) and the sea (society). In addition to the
universally negative Tennysonian image of immobile water (which implies the
vanishing of its inspirational sound as well), the river’s sweet waters have become
salty, turning the former river into a hybrid – neither river nor sea, neither truly sweet
nor truly salt – which is stuck in between two worlds. This, obviously, is a metaphor
for the Soul’s state of being (and for that of all of Tennyson’s artists): she does not
understand the workings of the world (she thinks of them as “the riddle of the painful
earth” (line 256)), yet she is not divine either – all of which makes her into a very
lonely and deplorable person.
After she has fully realized what she has done to herself by living in
pretentious isolation (shrieking “’No voice breaks thro’ the stillness of this / world: /
One deep, deep silence all!’” (lines 312-314)), the Soul’s starts to waste away. This is
literally translated into the poem’s water imagery, as she is described as “mouldering
with the dull earth’s / mouldering sod” (lines 315-316)30: even the miserable pool has
dried up, thus reducing the Soul to one of “Timbuctoo’s” “dusky worms which / house
/ Beneath unshaken waters” (lines 210-212).
All the same, the poet’s Soul proves to be strong and flexible, and after a while
the all-embracing silence lifts and she can again hear the calling sound of the sea
(the inspirational river appears to have been entirely forgotten):
As in strange lands a traveller walking slow,
In doubt and great perplexity,
A little before moon-rise hears the low
Moan of an unknown sea
(lines 332-335)
This time, she is powerful enough to break the dam which separates her from the
waves, and she sets off towards the ideal depicted in the seventh painting: her
“cottage in the vale” (line 347).
Nonetheless, in the poem’s final stanza, the Soul already nuances her drastic
intentions, as she says:
‘Yet pull not down my palace towers, that are
So lightly, beautifully built:
30
This imagery of damp and mouldy isolated gloom is very reminiscent of that in Tennyson’s 1830poem “Mariana.” The difference is, however, that Mariana is a “suffering maiden” who remains
passive, while the poet’s Soul acts is a “femme fatale” who can manage on her own. (Ryals 1959 441)
61
Perchance I may return with others there
When I have purged my guilt.’
(lines 349-352)
Malcolm MacLaren interprets this stanza (and by extension: the entire poem) as
such:
Finally, the soul expresses a hope that after a period of expiation she may
return to the palace, bringing others with her. In this work Tennyson seems to
disavow the life of complete aesthetic detachment and to assert that the
artist, while keeping faith with his aesthetic ideals, must relate his art to
human concerns and must seek to share his insights with others; this
apparently is implied by the palace's continued existence, and by the soul's
hope for a return to the palace in the company of others. (263)
What we have done in this chapter, then, is elucidate this interpretation by means of
the poem’s extremely rich supply of watery images.
In the end, “The Palace of Art” is a hopeful poem, proposing a new, more
realistic way of life for the poet which, or so it seems, ultimately will be successful.
Yet this does not necessarily have to be the case. The ill-fated Lady of Shalott, for
example, is not so lucky. Her story (which we will not discuss, as its wealth in water
symbolism is not great enough, although it does draw on an interesting comparison
between her river and the Styx, Camelot and the Underworld) indicates how
Tennyson would always struggle with his artistic and human sides, always fearing
that to obtain the one, is to lose the other, or, even worse: both.
3. Conclusion
In Part Two: Timbuctoo’s Daughters, we have taken the baggage which we had
gathered in Part One: “Timbuctoo,” and applied it to some of the artist poems which
we find in Tennyson’s two earliest works: the 1830 Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, and the
1832 Poems. Moreover, we have demonstrated how the three “generations” of artist
poems continue to build on the spectrum of watery symbols which had been
established in “Timbuctoo,” yet they all manage, at the same time, to slightly change
these images’ meanings in order to fit their own personal message. As concerns the
“messages” contained in “Timbuctoo” and the 1832 poems, we noticed that they are
62
beginning to diverge quite a lot from one another – thus reflecting Tennyson’s
personal evolution, as he was starting to grow up and, simultaneously, leave the
purely Aesthetical behind.
63
Conclusion
Finally, after about sixty pages of investigation and analysis, we have reached the
end of this dissertation. Yet what knowledge, exactly, has it imparted to us?
The first thing which has become apparent, is that the symbol of water until
now has been underestimated as a mirror of Tennyson’s poetics and state of mind. In
the poems which we have looked at, it was quite clear that water is the image laying
bare the poet’s dual nature. Certainly in his earliest poetry – like “Timbuctoo” –
Tennyson displays a tendency towards pure Aestheticism. However, the “moral” part
of his soul is always present as well, and below the ecstatic praise of Intellectuality
and Beauty there is at all times a current of threat towards this sublimation of the self
noticeable. We have seen that this duality in Tennyson’s nature is always reflected in
his poems’ tormented, layered and mysterious waters.
The shape which these dual waters take, then, has also been an important
point of investigation. First of all, there is the link of water to the dualism of Paradise
versus the Underworld. In this context, we have seen water emerging as an image for
both the Paradisiacal and the Underworldly – making its appearance as the ominous
Styx or the Deep (which holds Atlantis and Timbuctoo), but also as glorious fountains
and sparkling streams of Inspiration.
Later on in Tennyson’s career, however, (as his moral awareness was
growing,) we have witnessed the arrival of yet another dimension to, and
transformation of, the dualism of Paradise and the Underworld – a factor which still
deepens the sense of layering and wealth which was already so present in the poet’s
earlier work. As Tennyson’s ideas about the ideal poet changed, so did his image of
the sea, as we saw in our discussion of “The Lotos-Eaters” and “The Palace of Art.”
Although its meaning of “boundary” is preserved, its positive and negative poles have
switched places: in the 1832 poems, that side of the sea which holds reality (and not
Paradise) has now become the good side, the side to strive for. Together with the
sea’s transformation into a beacon guiding lost souls home, the once so divine and
loved sweet waters of the river have changed as well – now resembling more a
lurking demon, trying to snatch people’s souls, than an inspirational naiad bringing
the gift of Art.
In the end, as concerns Tennyson’s artist poems, glorifying the isolated
existence of the artist and his art, we must admit that only “Timbuctoo” can be
64
considered as “true” in its kind. Never again did Tennyson reach such a degree of
“insight” into the Higher Order of things combined with such purity of thought
(although even here the sense of threat exists), producing such complex poetry.
Quite understandably, Tennyson in his 1830 volume did not dare to re-enter into
such an adventure – he probably would not have succeeded at writing such an
impulsive-seeming masterpiece again anyway – and he consequently engaged
himself in creating rather shallow spin-offs of certain aspects of his award winning
poem. Luckily, the 1832 volume brought along change, rendering the poems much
more interesting again. However, these poems cannot be considered to be purely
metafictional poems anymore, and thus a chapter in Tennyson’s oeuvre is closed.
65
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70
Appendix 1: “Timbuctoo”
I stood upon the Mountain which o'er
looks
The narrow seas, whose rapid interval
Parts Afric from green Europe, when the
Sun
Had fall'n below th' Atlantick, and above
The silent Heavens were blench'd with
faery light,
Uncertain whether faery light or cloud,
Flowing Southward, and the chasms of
deep, deep blue
Slumber'd unfathomable, and the stars
Were flooded over with clear glory and
pale.
I gaz'd upon the sheeny coast beyond,
There where the Giant of old Time infixed
The limits of his prowess, pillars high
Long time eras'd from Earth: even as the
sea
When weary of wild inroad buildeth up
Huge mounds whereby to stay his yeasty
waves.
And much I mus'd on legends quaint and
old
Which whilome won the hearts of all on
Earth
Toward their brightness, ev'n as flame
draws air;
But had their being in the heart of Man
As air is th' life of flame: and thou wert
then
A center'd glory--circled Memory,
Divinest Atalantis, whom the waves
Have buried deep, and thou of later name,
Imperial Eldorado roof'd with gold:
Shadows to which, despite all shocks of
Change,
All on-set of capricious Accident,
Men clung with yearning Hope which
would not die.
As when in some great City where the
walls
Shake, and the streets with ghastly faces
throng'd
Do utter forth a subterranean voice,
Among the inner columns far retir'd
At midnight, in the lone Acropolis.
1
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
71
Before the awful Genius of the place
Kneels the pale Priestess in deep faith, the
while
Above her head the weak lamp dips and
winks
Unto the fearful summoning without:
Nathless she ever clasps the marble knees,
Bathes the cold hand with tears, and gazeth
On
Those eyes which wear no light but that
wherewith
Her phantasy informs them.
Where are ye
Thrones of the Western wave, fair Islands
green?
Where are your moonlight halls, your
cedarn glooms,
The blossoming abysses of your hills?
Your flowering Capes and your goldsanded bays
Blown round with happy airs of odorous
winds?
Where are the infinite ways which, Seraphtrod,
Wound thro' your great Elysian solitudes,
Whose lowest depths were, as with visible
love,
Fill'd with Divine effulgence, circumfus'd,
Flowing between the clear and polish'd
stems,
And ever circling round their emerald
cones
In coronals and glories, such as gird
The unfading foreheads of the Saints in
Heaven?
For nothing visible, they say, had birth
In that blest ground but it was play'd
about
With its peculiar glory. Then I rais'd
My voice and cried "Wide Afric, doth thy
Sun
Lighten, thy hills enfold a City as fair
As those which starr'd the night o' the
Elder World?
Or is the rumour of thy Timbuctoo
A dream as frail as those of ancient Time?"
50
55
60
65
70
75
80
85
90
A curve of whitening, flashing, ebbing
light?
72
A rustling of white wings! The bright descent
Of a young Seraph! and he stood beside
me
There on the ridge, and look'd into my face
With his unutterable, shining orbs.
So that with hasty motion I did veil
My vision with both hands, and saw before
me
Such colour'd spots as dance athwart the
Eyes
Of those that gaze upon the noonday Sun.
Girt with a Zone of flashing gold beneath
His breast, and compass'd round about his
brow
With triple arch of everchanging bows,
And circled with the glory of living light
And alternation of all hues, he stood.
"O child of man, why muse you here
alone
Upon the Mountain, on the dreams of old
Which fill'd the Earth with passing lovelyness,
Which flung strange music on the howling
winds,
And odours rapt from remote Paradise?
Thy sense is clogg'd with dull mortality,
Thy spirit fetter'd with the bond of clay:
Open thine eye and see."
I look'd, but not
Upon his face, for it was wonderful
With its exceeding brightness, and the
light
Of the great angel mind which look'd
from out
The starry glowing of his restless eyes.
I felt my soul grow mighty, and my spirit
With supernatural excitation bound
Within me, and my mental eye grew large
With such a vast circumference of thought,
That in my vanity I seem'd to stand
Upon the outward verge and bound alone
Of full beautitude. Each failing sense
As with a momentary flash of light
Grew thrillingly distinct and keen. I saw
The smallest grain that dappled the dark
Earth,
The indistinctest atom in deep air,
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The Moon's white cities, and the opal
Width
Of her small glowing lakes, her silver
heights
Unvisited with dew of vagrant cloud,
And the unsounded, undescended depth
Of her black hollows. The clear Galaxy
Shorn of its hoary lustre, wonderful,
Distinct and vivid with sharp points of
light
Blaze within blaze, an unimagin'd depth
And harmony of planet-girded Suns
And moon-encircled planets, wheel in
wheel,
Arch'd the wan Sapphire. Nay, the hum
of men,
Or other things talking in unknown
tongues,
And notes of busy life in distant worlds
Beat like a far wave on my anxious ear.
A maze of piercing, trackless, thrilling
Thoughts
Involving and embracing each with each
Rapid as fire, inextricably link'd,
Expanding momently with every sight
And sound which struck the palpitating
sense,
The issue of strong impulse, hurried
through
The riv'n rapt brain: as when in some large
lake
From pressure of descendant crags, which
lapse
Disjointed, crumbling from their parent
slope
At slender interval, the level calm
Is ridg'd with restless and increasing
spheres
Which break upon each other, each th'
effect
Of separate impulse, but more fleet and
strong
Than its precursor, till the eye in vain
Amid the wild unrest of swimming shade
Dappled with hollow and alternate rise
Of interpenetrated arc, would scan
Definite round.
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I know not if I shape
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These things with accurate similitude
From visible objects, for but dimly now,
Less vivid than a half-forgotten dream,
The memory of that mental excellence
Comes o'er me, and it may be I entwine
The indecision of my present mind
With its past clearness, yet it seems to me
As even then the torrent of quick thought
Absorbed me from the nature of itself
With its own fleetness. Where is he that
borne
Adown the sloping of an arrowy stream,
Could link his shallop to the fleeting edge,
And muse midway with philosophic calm
Upon the wondrous laws which regulate
The fierceness of the bounding Element?
My thoughts which long had grovell'd
in the slime
Of this dull world, like dusky worms which
house
Beneath unshaken waters, but at once
Upon some earth-awakening day of spring
Do pass from gloom to glory, and aloft
Winnow the purple, bearing on both sides
Double display of starlit wings which
burn
Fanlike and fibred, with intensest bloom:
E'en so my thoughts, ere while so low, now
felt
Unutterable buoyancy and strength
To bear them upward through the trackless fields
Of undefin'd existence far and free.
Then first within the South methought
I saw
A wilderness of spires, and chrystal pile
Of rampart upon rampart, dome on dome,
Illimitable range of battlement
On battlement, and the Imperial height
Of Canopy o'ercanopied.
Behind,
In diamond light, upsprung the dazzlingCones
Of Pyramids, as far surpassing Earth's
As Heaven than Earth is fairer. Each aloft
Upon his narrow'd Eminence bore globes
Of wheeling suns, or stars, or semblances
Of either, showering circular abyss
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Of radiance. But the glory of the place
Stood out a pillar'd front of burnish'd gold
Interminably high, if gold it were
Or metal more ethereal, and beneath
Two doors of blinding brilliance, where no
gaze
Might rest, stood open, and the eye could
scan
Through length of porch and lake and
boundless hall,
Part of a throne of fiery flame, wherefrom
The snowy skirting of a garment hung,
And glimpse of multitudes of multitudes
That minister'd around it--if I saw
These things distinctly, for my human
brain
Stagger'd beneath the vision, and thick night
Came down upon my eyelids, and I fell.
With ministering hand he rais'd me up;
Then with a mournful and ineffable smile,
Which but to look on for a moment fill'd
My eyes with irresistible sweet tears,
In accents of majestic melody,
Like a swol'n river's gushings in still night
Mingled with floating music, thus he
spake:
"There is no mightier Spirit than I to
sway
The heart of man: and teach him to attain
By shadowing forth the Unattainable;
And step by step to scale that mighty stair
Whose landing-place is wrapt about with
clouds
Of glory of Heaven. With earliest Light of
Spring,
And in the glow of sallow Summertide,
And in red Autumn when the winds are
wild
With gambols, and when full-voiced
Winter roofs
The headland with inviolate white snow,
I play about his heart a thousand ways,
Visit his eyes with visions, and his ears
With harmonies of wind and wave and
Wood,
--Of winds which tell of waters, and of
Waters
Betraying the close kisses of the wind--
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And win him unto me: and few there be
So gross of heart who have not felt and
known
A higher than they see: They with dim eyes
Behold me darkling. Lo! I have given thee
To understand my presence, and to feel
My fullness; I have fill'd thy lips with
power.
I have rais'd thee nigher to the Spheres of
Heaven,
Man's first, last home: and thou with
ravish'd sense
Listenest the lordly music flowing from
Th'illimitable years. I am the Spirit,
The permeating life which courseth
through
All th' intricate and labyrinthine veins
Of the great vine of Fable, which, outspread
With growth of shadowing leaf and clusters
rare,
Reacheth to every corner under Heaven,
Deep-rooted in the living soil of truth:
So that men's hopes and fears take refuge in
The fragrance of its complicated glooms
And cool impleached twilights. Child of
Man,
See'st thou yon river, whose translucent
wave,
Forth issuing from darkness, windeth
through
The argent streets o' the City, imaging
The soft inversion of her tremulous Domes.
Her gardens frequent with the stately
Palm,
Her Pagods hung with music of sweet bells.
Her obelisks of ranged Chrysolite,
Minarets and towers? Lo! how he passeth
by,
And gulphs himself in sands, as not enduring
To carry through the world those waves,
which bore
The reflex of my City in their depths.
Oh City! Oh latest Throne! where I was
rais'd
To be a mystery of loveliness
Unto all eyes, the time is well nigh come
When I must render up this glorious home
To keen 'Discovery': soon yon brilliant
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towers
Shall darken with the waving of her wand;
Darken, and shrink and shiver into huts,
Black specks amid a waste of dreary sand,
Low-built, mud-wall'd, Barbarian settlements.
How chang'd from this fair City!"
Thus far the Spirit:
Then parted Heavenward on the wing:
and I
Was left alone on Calpe, and the Moon
Had fallen from the night, and all was dark!
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Appendix 2: “Mine be the strength”
Mine be the strength of spirit, full and free,
Like some broad river rushing down alone,
With the selfsame impulse wherewith he
was thrown
From his loud fount upon the echoing
lea:-Which with increasing might doth forward
flee
By town, and tower, and hill, and cape,
and isle,
And in the middle of the green salt sea
Keeps his blue waters fresh for many a mile.
Mine be the Power which ever to its sway
Will win the wise at once, and by degrees
May into uncongenial spirits flow;
Even as the great gulfstream of Florida
Floats far away into the Northern Seas
The lavish growths of Southern Mexico.
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15
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Appendix 3: “The Poet’s Mind”
1
Vex not thou the poet's mind
With thy shallow wit:
Vex not thou the poet's mind;
For thou canst not fathom it.
Clear and bright it should be ever,
Flowing like a crystal river;
Bright as light, and clear as wind.
2
Dark-brow'd sophist, come not anear;
All the place [1] is holy ground;
Hollow smile and frozen sneer
Come not here.
Holy water will I pour
Into every spicy flower
Of the laurel-shrubs that hedge it around.
The flowers would faint at your cruel
cheer.
In your eye there is death,
There is frost in your breath
Which would blight the plants.
Where you stand you cannot hear
From the groves within
The wild-bird's din.
In the heart of the garden the merry bird
chants,
It would fall to the ground if you came
in.
In the middle leaps a fountain
Like sheet lightning,
Ever brightening
With a low melodious thunder;
All day and all night it is ever drawn
From the brain of the purple mountain
Which stands in the distance yonder:
It springs on a level of bowery lawn,
And the mountain draws it from Heaven
above,
And it sings a song of undying love;
And yet, tho' [2] its voice be so clear and full,
You never would hear it; your ears are so
dull;
So keep where you are: you are foul with
sin;
It would shrink to the earth if you came in.
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40
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Appendix 4: “Recollections of the Arabian Nights”
When the breeze of a joyful dawn blew
free
In the silken sail of infancy,
The tide of time flow'd back with me,
The forward-flowing tide of time;
And many a sheeny summer-morn,
Adown the Tigris I was borne,
By Bagdat's shrines of fretted gold,
High-walled gardens green and old;
True Mussulman was I and sworn,
For it was in the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.
Anight my shallop, rustling thro'
The low and bloomed foliage, drove
The fragrant, glistening deeps, and clove
The citron-shadows in the blue:
By garden porches on the brim,
The costly doors flung open wide,
Gold glittering thro' lamplight dim,
And broider'd sofas on each side:
In sooth it was a goodly time,
For it was in the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.
Often, where clear-stemm'd platans guard
The outlet, did I turn away
The boat-head down a broad canal
From the main river sluiced, where all
The sloping of the moon-lit sward
Was damask-work, and deep inlay
Of braided blooms unmown, which crept
Adown to where the waters slept.
A goodly place, a goodly time,
For it was in the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.
A motion from the river won
Ridged the smooth level, bearing on
My shallop thro' the star-strown calm,
Until another night in night
I enter'd, from the clearer light,
Imbower'd vaults of pillar'd palm,
Imprisoning sweets, which, as they clomb
Heavenward, were stay'd beneath the dome
Of hollow boughs.--A goodly time,
For it was in the golden prime
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Of good Haroun Alraschid.
Still onward; and the clear canal
Is rounded to as clear a lake.
From the green rivage many a fall
Of diamond rillets musical,
Thro' little crystal arches low
Down from the central fountain's flow
Fall'n silver-chiming, seem'd to shake
The sparkling flints beneath the prow.
A goodly place, a goodly time,
For it was in the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.
Above thro' many a bowery turn
A walk with vary-colour'd shells
Wander'd engrain'd. On either side
All round about the fragrant marge
From fluted vase, and brazen urn
In order, eastern flowers large,
Some dropping low their crimson bells
Half-closed, and others studded wide
With disks and tiars, fed the time
With odour in the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.
Far off, and where the lemon-grove
In closest coverture upsprung,
The living airs of middle night
Died round the bulbul as he sung;
Not he: but something which possess'd
The darkness of the world, delight,
Life, anguish, death, immortal love,
Ceasing not, mingled, unrepress'd.
Apart from place, withholding time,
But flattering the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.
Black the garden-bowers and grots
Slumber'd: the solemn palms were ranged
Above, unwoo'd of summer wind:
A sudden splendour from behind
Flush'd all the leaves with rich gold-green,
And, flowing rapidly between
Their interspaces, counterchanged
The level lake with diamond-plots
Of dark and bright. A lovely time,
For it was in the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.
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Dark-blue the deep sphere overhead,
Distinct with vivid stars inlaid,
Grew darker from that under-flame:
So, leaping lightly from the boat,
With silver anchor left afloat,
In marvel whence that glory came
Upon me, as in sleep I sank
In cool soft turf upon the bank,
Entranced with that place and time,
So worthy of the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.
Thence thro' the garden I was drawn-A realm of pleasance, many a mound,
And many a shadow-chequer'd lawn
Full of the city's stilly sound,
And deep myrrh-thickets blowing round
The stately cedar, tamarisks,
Thick rosaries of scented thorn,
Tall orient shrubs, and obelisks
Graven with emblems of the time,
In honour of the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.
With dazed vision unawares
From the long alley's latticed shade
Emerged, I came upon the great
Pavilion of the Caliphat.
Right to the carven cedarn doors,
Flung inward over spangled floors,
Broad-based flights of marble stairs
Ran up with golden balustrade,
After the fashion of the time,
And humour of the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.
The fourscore windows all alight
As with the quintessence of flame,
A million tapers flaring bright
From twisted silvers look'd to shame
The hollow-vaulted dark, and stream'd
Upon the mooned domes aloof
In inmost Bagdat, till there seem'd
Hundreds of crescents on the roof
Of night new-risen, that marvellous time,
To celebrate the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.
Then stole I up, and trancedly
Gazed on the Persian girl alone,
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Serene with argent-lidded eyes
Amorous, and lashes like to rays
Of darkness, and a brow of pearl
Tressed with redolent ebony,
In many a dark delicious curl,
Flowing beneath her rose-hued zone;
The sweetest lady of the time,
Well worthy of the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.
Six columns, three on either side,
Pure silver, underpropt a rich
Throne of the massive ore, from which
Down-droop'd, in many a floating fold,
Engarlanded and diaper'd
With inwrought flowers, a cloth of gold.
Thereon, his deep eye laughter-stirr'd
With merriment of kingly pride,
Sole star of all that place and time,
I saw him--in his golden prime,
THE GOOD HAROUN ALRASCHID!
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Appendix 5: “The Lotos-Eaters”
"Courage!" he said, and pointed toward
the land,
"This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon."
In the afternoon they came unto a land
In which it seemed always afternoon.
All round the coast the languid air did
swoon,
Breathing like one that hath a weary dream.
Full-faced above the valley stood the moon;
And like a downward smoke, the slender
stream
Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall
did seem.
1
A land of streams! some, like a downward
smoke,
Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did
go;
And some thro' wavering lights and shadows
broke,
Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below.
They saw the gleaming river seaward flow
From the inner land: far off, three
mountain-tops,
Three silent pinnacles of aged snow,
Stood sunset-flush'd: and, dew'd with
showery drops,
Up-clomb the shadowy pine above the
woven copse.
15
The charmed sunset linger'd low adown
In the red West: thro' mountain clefts the
dale
Was seen far inland, and the yellow down
Border'd with palm, and many a winding
vale
And meadow, set with slender galingale;
A land where all things always seem'd the
same!
And round about the keel with faces pale,
Dark faces pale against that rosy flame,
The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters
came.
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Branches they bore of that enchanted stem,
Laden with flower and fruit, whereof they
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Gave
To each, but whoso did receive of them,
And taste, to him the gushing of the wave
Far far away did seem to mourn and rave
On alien shores; and if his fellow spake,
His voice was thin, as voices from the
grave;
And deep-asleep he seem'd, yet all awake,
And music in his ears his beating heart did
make.
They sat them down upon the yellow sand,
Between the sun and moon upon the shore;
And sweet it was to dream of Fatherland,
Of child, and wife, and slave; but evermore
Most weary seem'd the sea, weary the oar,
Weary the wandering fields of barren foam.
Then some one said, "We will return no
more";
And all at once they sang, "Our island home
Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer
roam."
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Choric Song
I
There is sweet music here that softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass,
Or night-dews on still waters between walls
Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass;
Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,
Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes;
Music that brings sweet sleep down from
the blissful skies.
Here are cool mosses deep,
And thro' the moss the ivies creep,
And in the stream the long-leaved flowers
weep,
And from the craggy ledge the poppy
hangs in sleep.
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2.
Why are we weigh'd upon with heaviness,
And utterly consumed with sharp distress,
While all things else have rest from
weariness?
All things have rest: why should we toil
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alone,
We only toil, who are the first of things,
And make perpetual moan,
Still from one sorrow to another thrown:
Nor ever fold our wings,
And cease from wanderings,
Nor steep our brows in slumber's holy
balm;
Nor harken what the inner spirit sings,
"There is no joy but calm!"
Why should we only toil, the roof and
crown of things?
3.
Lo! in the middle of the wood,
The folded leaf is woo'd from out the bud
With winds upon the branch, and there
Grows green and broad, and takes no care,
Sun-steep'd at noon, and in the moon
Nightly dew-fed; and turning yellow
Falls, and floats adown the air.
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.
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?
All things have rest, and ripen toward the
Grave
In silence; ripen, fall and cease:
Give us long rest or death, dark death, or
dreamful ease.
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How sweet it were, hearing the downward
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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 old faces of our infancy
Heap'd over with a mound of grass,
Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an
urn of brass!
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?
Let what is broken so remain.
The Gods 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 by many wars
And eyes grown dim with gazing on the
pilot-stars.
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But, propt on beds of amaranth and moly,
How sweet (while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly)
With half-dropt eyelid 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 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:
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 Gods 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,
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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 hell
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 shore
Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind
and wave and oar;
O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not
wander more.
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Appendix 6: “The Palace of Art”
I built my soul a lordly pleasure-house,
Wherein at ease for aye to dwell.
I said, "O Soul, make merry and carouse,
Dear soul, for all is well."
1
A huge crag-platform, smooth as burnish'd
brass
I chose. The ranged ramparts bright
From level meadow-bases of deep grass
Suddenly scaled the light.
5
Thereon I built it firm. Of ledge or shelf
The rock rose clear, or winding stair.
My soul would live alone unto herself
In her high palace there.
10
And "while the world runs round and
round," I said,
"Reign thou apart, a quiet king,
Still as, while Saturn whirls, his steadfast
shade
Sleeps on his luminous ring."
To which my soul made answer readily:
"Trust me, in bliss I shall abide
In this great mansion, that is built for me,
So royal-rich and wide."
Four courts I made, East, West and South
and North,
In each a squared lawn, wherefrom
The golden gorge of dragons spouted forth
A flood of fountain-foam.
And round the cool green courts there ran
a row
Of cloisters, branch'd like mighty woods,
Echoing all night to that sonorous flow
Of spouted fountain-floods.
And round the roofs a gilded gallery
That lent broad verge to distant lands,
Far as the wild swan wings, to where the
sky
Dipt down to sea and sands.
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From those four jets four currents in one
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Swell
Across the mountain stream'd below
In misty folds, that floating as they fell
Lit up a torrent-bow.
And high on every peak a statue seem'd
To hang on tiptoe, tossing up
A cloud of incense of all odour steam'd
From out a golden cup.
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So that she thought, "And who shall gaze
upon
My palace with unblinded eyes,
While this great bow will waver in the sun,
And that sweet incense rise?"
50
For that sweet incense rose and never
fail'd,
And, while day sank or mounted higher,
The light aërial gallery, golden-rail'd,
Burnt like a fringe of fire.
55
Likewise the deep-set windows, stain'd and
traced,
Would seem slow-flaming crimson fires
From shadow'd grots of arches interlaced,
And tipt with frost-like spires.
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Full of long-sounding corridors it was,
That over-vaulted grateful gloom,
Thro' which the livelong day my soul did
pass,
Well-pleased, from room to room.
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Full of great rooms and small the palace
stood,
All various, each a perfect whole
From living Nature, fit for every mood
And change of my still soul.
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For some were hung with arras green and
blue,
Showing a gaudy summer-morn,
Where with puff'd cheek the belted hunter
blew
His wreathed bugle-horn.
One seem'd all dark and red - a tract of
sand,
And some one pacing there alone,
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Who paced for ever in a glimmering land,
Lit with a low large moon.
One show'd an iron coast and angry waves.
You seem'd to hear them climb and
fall
And roar rock-thwarted under bellowing
caves,
Beneath the windy wall.
And one, a full-fed river winding slow
By herds upon an endless plain,
The ragged rims of thunder brooding low,
With shadow-streaks of rain.
And one, the reapers at their sultry toil.
In front they bound the sheaves. Behind
Were realms of upland, prodigal in oil,
And hoary to the wind.
And one a foreground black with stones
and slags,
Beyond, a line of heights, and higher
All barr'd with long white cloud the scornful crags,
And highest, snow and fire.
And one, an English home - grey twilight
pour'd
On dewy pastures, dewy trees,
Softer than sleep - all things in order
stored,
A haunt of ancient Peace.
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Nor these alone, but every landscape fair,
As fit for every mood of mind,
Or gay, or grave, or sweet, or stern, was
there,
Not less than truth design'd.
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Or the maid-mother by a crucifix,
In tracts of pasture sunny-warm,
Beneath branch-work of costly sardonyx
Sat smiling, babe in arm.
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Or in a clear-wall'd city on the sea,
Near gilded organ-pipes, her hair
Wound with white roses, slept St. Cecily;
An angel look'd at her.
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Or thronging all one porch of Paradise
A group of Houris bow'd to see
The dying Islamite, with hands and eyes
That said, We wait for thee.
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Or mythic Uther's deeply-wounded son
In some fair space of sloping greens
Lay, dozing in the vale of Avalon,
And watch'd by weeping queens.
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Or hollowing one hand against his ear,
To list a foot-fall, ere he saw
The wood-nymph, stay'd the Ausonian
king to hear
Of wisdom and of law.
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Or over hills with peaky tops engrail'd,
And many a tract of palm and rice,
The throne of Indian Cama slowly sail'd
A summer fann'd with spice.
Or sweet Europa's mantle blew unclasp'd,
From off her shoulder backward borne:
From one hand droop'd a crocus: one hand
grasp'd
The mild bull's golden horn.
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Or else flush'd Ganymede, his rosy thigh
Half-buried in the Eagle's down,
Sole as a flying star shot thro' the sky
Above the pillar'd town.
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Nor these alone; but every legend fair
Which the supreme Caucasian mind
Carved out of Nature for itself, was there,
Not less than life, design'd.
Then in the towers I placed great bells
that swung,
Moved of themselves, with silver sound;
And with choice paintings of wise men I
hung
The royal dais round.
For there was Milton like a seraph strong,
Beside him Shakespeare bland and mild;
And there the world-worn Dante grasp'd
his song,
And somewhat grimly smiled.
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And there the Ionian father of the rest;
A million wrinkles carved his skin;
A hundred winters snow'd upon his breast,
From cheek and throat and chin.
Above, the fair hall-ceiling stately-set
Many an arch high up did lift,
And angels rising and descending met
With interchange of gift.
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Below was all mosaic choicely plann'd
With cycles of the human tale
Of this wide world, the times of every land
So wrought, they will not fail.
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The people here, a beast of burden slow,
Toil'd onward, prick'd with goads and
stings;
Here play'd, a tiger, rolling to and fro
The heads and crowns of kings;
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Here rose, an athlete, strong to break or
bind
All force in bonds that might endure,
And here once more like some sick man
declined,
And trusted any cure.
But over these she trod: and those great
bells
Began to chime. She took her throne:
She sat betwixt the shining Oriels,
To sing her songs alone.
And thro' the topmost Oriels' coloured
flame
Two godlike faces gazed below;
Plato the wise, and large brow'd Verulam,
The first of those who know.
And all those names, that in their motion
were
Full-welling fountain-heads of change,
Betwixt the slender shafts were blazon'd
fair
In diverse raiment strange:
Thro' which the lights, rose, amber,
emerald, blue,
Flush'd in her temples and her eyes,
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And from her lips, as morn from Memnon,
drew
Rivers of melodies.
No nightingale delighteth to prolong
Her low preamble all alone,
More than my soul to hear her echo'd
song
Throb thro' the ribbed stone;
Singing and murmuring in her feastful
mirth,
Joying to feel herself alive,
Lord over Nature, Lord of the visible
earth,
Lord of the senses five;
Communing with herself: "All these are
mine,
And let the world have peace or wars,
'Tis one to me." She - when young night
divine
Crown'd dying day with stars,
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Making sweet close of his delicious toils Lit light in wreaths and anadems,
And pure quintessences of precious oils
In hollow'd moons of gems,
To mimic heaven; and clapt her hands
and cried,
"I marvel if my still delight
In this great house so royal-rich, and wide,
Be flatter'd to the height.
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"O all things fair to sate my various eyes!
O shapes and hues that please me well!
O silent faces of the Great and Wise,
My Gods, with whom I dwell!
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"O God-like isolation which art mine,
I can but count thee perfect gain,
What time I watch the darkening droves of
swine
That range on yonder plain.
"In filthy sloughs they roll a prurient skin,
They graze and wallow, breed and sleep;
And oft some brainless devil enters in,
And drives them to the deep."
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Then of the moral instinct would she prate
And of the rising from the dead,
As hers by right of full accomplish'd Fate;
And at the last she said:
"I take possession of man's mind and deed.
I care not what the sects may brawl.
I sit as God holding no form of creed,
But contemplating all."
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Full oft the riddle of the painful earth
Flash'd thro' her as she sat alone,
Yet not the less held she her solemn mirth,
And intellectual throne.
And so she throve and prosper'd; so three
years
She prosper'd: on the fourth she fell,
Like Herod, when the shout was in his ears,
Struck thro' with pangs of hell.
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Lest she should fail and perish utterly,
God, before whom ever lie bare
The abysmal deeps of Personality,
Plagued her with sore despair.
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When she would think, where'er she turn'd
her sight
The airy hand confusion wrought,
Wrote, "Mene, mene," and divided quite
The kingdom of her thought.
Deep dread and loathing of her solitude
Fell on her, from which mood was born
Scorn of herself; again, from out that
mood
Laughter at her self-scorn.
"What! is not this my place of strength,"
she said,
"My spacious mansion built for me,
Whereof the strong foundation-stones were
laid
Since my first memory?"
But in dark corners of her palace stood
Uncertain shapes; and unawares
On white-eyed phantasms weeping tears
of blood,
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And horrible nightmares,
And hollow shades enclosing hearts of
flame,
And, with dim fretted foreheads all,
On corpses three-months-old at noon she
came,
That stood against the wall.
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A spot of dull stagnation, without light
Or power of movement, seem'd my soul,
'Mid onward-sloping motions infinite
Making for one sure goal.
A still salt pool, lock'd in with bars of sand,
Left on the shore, that hears all night
The plunging seas draw backward from
the land
Their moon-led waters white.
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A star that with the choral starry dance
Join'd not, but stood, and standing saw
The hollow orb of moving Circumstance
Roll'd round by one fix'd law.
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Back on herself her serpent pride had
curl'd.
"No voice," she shriek'd in that lone hall,
"No voice breaks thro' the stillness of this
world:
One deep, deep silence all!"
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She, mouldering with the dull earth's
mouldering sod,
Inwrapt tenfold in slothful shame,
Lay there exiled from eternal God,
Lost to her place and name;
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And death and life she hated equally,
And nothing saw, for her despair,
But dreadful time, dreadful eternity,
No comfort anywhere;
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Remaining utterly confused with fears,
And ever worse with growing time,
And ever unrelieved by dismal tears,
And all alone in crime:
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Shut up as in a crumbling tomb, girt round
With blackness as a solid wall,
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Far off she seem'd to hear the dully sound
Of human footsteps fall.
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As in strange lands a traveller walking slow,
In doubt and great perplexity,
A little before moon-rise hears the low
Moan of an unknown sea;
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And knows not if it be thunder, or a sound
Of rocks thrown down, or one deep cry
Of great wild beasts; then thinketh, "I have
found
A new land, but I die."
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She howl'd aloud, "I am on fire within.
There comes no murmur of reply.
What is it that will take away my sin,
And save me lest I die?"
So when four years were wholly finished,
She threw her royal robes away.
"Make me a cottage in the vale," she said,
"Where I may mourn and pray.
"Yet pull not down my palace towers, that are
So lightly, beautifully built:
Perchance I may return with others there
When I have purged my guilt."
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