THE ARTISTRY AND TRADITION OF
TENNYSON’S BATTLE POETRY
MAJOR LITERARY A UTHORS
V OLUME 28
STUDIES IN MAJOR
LITERARY AUTHORS
OUTSTANDING DISSERTATIONS
VOLUME 28
Edited by
William Cain
Professor of English
Wellesley College
A ROUTLEDGE SERIES
STUDIES IN MAJOR LITERARY AUTHORS
William E.cain, General Editor
1. THE WAYWARD NUN OF AMHERST
Emily Dickinson in the Medieval Women’s Visionary
Tradition
Angela Conrad
2. PHILIP ROTH CONSIDERED
The Concentrationary Universe of the American
Writer
Steven Milowitz
3.THE PUSHER AND THE SUFFERER
An Unsentimental Reading of Moby Dick
Suzanne Stein
4. HENRY JAMES AS A BIOGRAPHER
A Self among Others
Cathy Moses
5. JOYCEAN FRAMES
Film and the Fiction of James Joyce
Thomas Burkdall
6. JOSEPH CONRAD AND THE ART OF
SACRIFICE
The Evolution of the Scapegoat Theme in Joseph Conrad’s
Fiction
Andrew Mozina
7.TECHNIQUE AND SENSIBILITY IN THE
FICTION
AND POETRY OF RAYMOND CARVER
Arthur F.Bethea
8. SHELLEY’S TEXTUAL SEDUCTIONS
Plotting Utopia in the Erotic and Political Works
Samuel Lyndon Gladden
9.“ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE”
Dramatic Sensibility in Mary Shelley’s Novels
Charlene E.Bunnell
10.“THOUGHTS PAINFULLY INTENSE”
Hawthorne and the Invalid Author
James N.Mancall
11. SEX THEORIES AND THE SHAPING OF Two
MODERNS
Hemingway and H.D.
Deirdre Anne (McVicker) Pettipiece
12. WORD SIGHTINGS
Visual Apparatus and Verbal Reality in Stevens,
Bishop and O’Hara
Sarah Riggs
13. DELICATE PURSUIT
Discretion in Henry James and Edith Wharton
Jessica Levine
14. GERTRUDE STEIN AND WALLACE STEVENS
The Performance of Modern Consciousness
Sara J.Ford
15. LOST CITY
Fitzgerald’s NewYork
Lauraleigh O’Meara
16. SOCIAL DREAMING
Dickens and the Fairy Tale
Elaine Ostry
17. PATRIARCHY AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Sexual Politics in Selected Novels and Stories of Thomas Hardy
Joanna Devereux
18. A NEW MATRIX FOR MODERNISM
A Study of the Lives and Poetry of Charlotte Mew
and Anna Wickham
Nelljean McConeghey Rice
19. WHO READS ULYSSES?
The Rhetoric of the Joyce Wars and the Common Reader
Julie Sloan Brannon
20. NAKED LIBERTY AND THE WORLD
OF DESIRE
Elements of Anarchism in the Work of D.H. Lawrence
Simon Casey
21. THE MACHINE THAT SINGS
Modernism, Hart Crane, and the Culture of the Body
Gordon Tapper
22. T.S. ELIOT’S CIVILIZED SAVAGE
Religious Eroticism and Poetics
Laurie J.MacDiarmid
23. THE CARVER CHRONOTOPE
Inside the Life-World of Raymond Carver’s Fiction
G.P.Lainsbury
24. THIS COMPOSITE VOICE
The Role of W.B.Yeats in James Merrill’s Poetry
Mark Bauer
25. PROGRESS AND IDENTITY IN THE PLAYS OF
W.B.YEATS
Barbara A.Suess
26. CONRAD’S NARRATIVES OF DIFFERENCE
Not Exactly Tales for Boys
Lissa Schneider
27. GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND VICTORIAN
CATHOLICISM
Jill Muller
THE ARTISTRY AND TRADITION
TENNYSON’S BATTLE POETRY
J.Timothy Lovelace
Routledge
New York & London
OF
Published in 2003 by
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Published in Great Britain by
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Copyright © 2003 by J.Timothy Lovelace
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lovelace, John Timothy.
The artistry and tradition of Tennyson’s battle poetry/by J.Timothy Lovelace.
p. cm.—(Studies in major literary authors; v. 28)
Includes bibliographical references and index
ISBN 0-415-96763-5 (alk. paper)
1. Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809–1892—Knowledge—Military art and science.
2. Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809–1892. Idylls of the king. 3. Tennyson, Alfred
Tennyson, Baron, 1809–1892. Maud. 4. Classicism—England—History—19th century.
5. Military art and science in literature. 6. English poetry—Greek influence. 7. Battles in literature.
8. Homer—Influence. I. Title: Artistry and tradition of Tennyson’s battle poetry. II. Title.
III. Series.
PR5592.M55L688 2003
821'.8–dc21
2003001483
ISBN 0-203-49079-7 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-57882-1 (Adobe eReader Format)
To my parents
Oscar N.Lovelace
and
Peggy H.Lovelace
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
Tennyson and the Heroic Tradition
3
CHAPTER TWO
The Early War Poetry
21
CHAPTER THREE
Historical and Legendary Battles
51
CHAPTER FOUR
Contemporary Conflicts
85
CHAPTER FIVE
Maud
119
CHAPTER SIX
Idylls of the King
137
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
167
181
ix
It still were right to crown with song
The warrior’s noble deed—
A crown the Singer hopes may last,
For so the deed endures….
Epilogue to “The Charge
of the Heavy Brigade,”
35–38
2
Chapter One
Tennyson and the Heroic Tradition
T
HE DIVERSITY OF THE TENNYSONIAN CANON HAS ELICITED
A DIVERSI rly opinion as to Tennyson’s most characteristic themes. The
editors of the Norton Anthology of English Literature describe Tennyson as
“essentially a poet of the countryside” and declare that “the past became his great
theme” (Abrams 1056). To Harold Bloom, Tennyson is “one of the three most
authentically erotic poets in the language” (“Tennyson: In the Shadow of Keats” 29).
“For me,” writes Harold Nicolson, “the essential Tennyson is a morbid and unhappy
mystic” (27). “Most characteristic of Tennyson,” states Robert Langbaum, “is a certain
life-weariness, a longing for rest through oblivion” (89). George Barker observes
that “the Tennysonian characteristic is ambivalence” (v). “The Tennysonian theme is
frustration,” Arthur J. Carr remarks (606), while Roger Ebbatson recognizes numerous
themes: “longing and frustration; the mask of age; sceptical doubt; the role of the
artist in society; the evolutionary principle; the clash between social order and inner
disorder” (37).
Most assessments of Tennyson fail to take into account the fact that he wrote
no fewer than fifty-four battle poems. Many of Tennyson’s admirers have been
discomfited by these works, and most scholars tend to regard them as aberrant
in spite of their profusion. “Tennyson scholars give little weight to the poet’s
sentiments on war, seeing them as shallow or alien to the main body of his
thought,” observes Michael C.C.Adams (405). In turning a disdainful ear to
Tennyson’s trumpet tones, his critics have distorted the image of the poet Carlyle
called a “Life Guardsman” (Martin 303) and Kipling characterized as “the
commander in chief” (Martin 577).
This book argues that Tennyson’s battle poetry is an important part of his oeuvre by virtue of its sophistication both artistic and philosophical.Tennyson’s songs
3
4
The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
of the sword reflect the dominant image patterns of the Iliad and the Aeneid by
way of adumbrating the heroic ethos that informs these and other ancient texts.
Theodore Redpath, Douglas Bush, Wilfred Mustard, Robert Pattison, and A.A.
Markley have all documented the influence of the classics on Tennyson, focusing
on his choice of mythological subjects, mood, style, allusions, and versification.
This book provides something of an extension of these previous studies, as it
postulates that Tennyson absorbed and made current the Homeric, heroic ideology
of the ancient literature in which he was so deeply immersed. One of Tennyson’s
great themes is the theme of Homer and Virgil: the wrath or furor of heroes.
Other themes Tennyson inherited from the heroic tradition include chivalry, the
immortality of honor, and the importance of the bard. His repeated development
of these and related topics through patterns of Homeric imagery reveals his fealty
to the ancient bards and his own bardic expertise. The readings in this study focus
on Tennyson’s “faint Homeric echoes” to shed new light on the shorter,
shortchanged battle pieces and to develop in the process an alternative, heroic
approach to Maud and the Idylls of the King. The attempt to make this study a
bringer of new things extends to a consideration of the recordings Tennyson made
for Thomas Edison.Tennyson reads battle poetry on the extant cylinder recordings
of his voice, and his recitations have largely been ignored as an aid to understanding
the poems. My occasional use of Tennyson’s readings to complement my own is
hopefully as appropriate as it is unusual.
The explications of the shorter battle pieces are intended primarily to
demonstrate their artistry, and the choice of which poems to examine is based on
the degree to which they exemplify that artistry and on their consequent
importance to the Tennyson canon. Even for his earliest and his most obscure
battle poems, Tennyson’s artistic arsenal is stocked with epic imagery. Fire and
light, wild animals, forces of nature, and shouting are all prominent, just as they are
in the works of Homer, Virgil, and other ancient bards. A striking device in the
early battle pieces is Tennyson’s use of epigraphs, usually quotations from a classical
source.These epigraphs are always ingeniously pertinent to the poem they precede,
and a demonstration of this pertinence is a staple of the readings in the second
chapter.
Fundamental to the explications of Maud and the Idylls of the King is the placing
of both works within the context of the heroic tradition. Ever since the publication
of Maud in 1855, the “war-mongering” tones of Part III have sparked critical
controversy. There seems no end to the debate over the degree to which Tennyson
identifies with the speaker and the degree to which the speaker has regained his
“sanity” by the end, but some of the controversy may be dispensed with if Maud is
considered as a product of Tennyson’s Homeric muse. The hero’s “madness” is the
madness of heroic wrath, of titanic passions that find no appropriate outlet in the
under-hand war of commerce. Like Achilles sulking in his tent, the hero buries
Tennyson and the Heroic Tradition
5
himself in himself until, after the supposed death of his beloved, he is finally stirred
to action in the battle of life by a cause worthy of his heroic ardor.
The Iliad shows us that when Achilles returns to the battle his wrath rages
uncontrollably, and we turn from Maud to the Idylls of the King for Tennyson’s
epic treatment of rampaging frenzy. This dissertation emphasizes the Homeric
qualities of the Idylls, its similarity to the Iliad and the Aeneid in its imagery and
in its account of an ultimately failed attempt at harnessing the ferocious power
of passion.
Maud and the Idylls of the King contain, as The Canterbury Tales did for Dryden,
“God’s plenty,” and have thus inspired a plethora of scholarship, though most of it
disregards the heroic aspects of the works. In contrast, the shorter battle poems are
usually neglected entirely by the critics, or taken up briefly only to be tossed down
again with a few dismissive or even contemptuous comments. Since the World Wars
and the advent of technological warfare, Tennyson’s bellicosity has been seen as an
embarrassment. The MLA International Bibliography lists only five articles in the last
twenty years on any of his martial works other than Maud and the Idylls.The belittling
of these poems is not just a recent development, however; while many of the battle
pieces were enthusiastically received during the poet’s lifetime, others were lambasted.
A small percentage of the critical commentary on these works is insightfully
appreciative, but most of it fails to recognize the full extent of Tennyson’s bardic
genius.
Much of Tennyson’s earliest poetry is decidedly martial in character.While many
critics readily recognize his budding greatness in “The Devil and the Lady,” they
tend to regard his subsequent juvenilia about battles and heroism as a temporary
lapse—little more than training exercises for the real works of genius to come.
Typical is Clyde de L.Ryals: of several early poems, including “The Old Sword” and
“The Vale of Bones,” the extent of his analysis is the observation that “The imagery
of these poems is extremely interesting, for it suggests the phantasmagoria which
haunted the young poet’s mind” (Theme and Symbol 23). “In brief,” he writes, “the
majority of Tennyson’s very early poetry is not very good…. [A]s poetry most are
not of much value” (Theme and Symbol 35–36). Robert Bernard Martin feels that
the Poems by Two Brothers “are finally not very good poetry” (46). One superior
observation regarding these poems is made by Henry Kozicki, who comments that
the young Tennyson’s heroes “are attended too closely with transcendent omens for
their ruthlessness to be condemned summarily. Finally, a sense of heroic tragedy
attends historical protagonists as they carry out their national destinies.Thus, although
their conduct is fearsome, it is also ambiguously ‘admirable’” (Tennyson and Clio 8).
Kozicki derives from Tennyson’s early efforts a sense of the close connection between
glory and tragedy that is integral to the heroic tradition.
In The Poetry of Tennyson, Henry Van Dyke distinguishes himself by noticing the
excellence of “Persia.” He quotes from the last thirty-nine lines of the poem,
6
The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
omitting twenty of them without indicating that he has done so, and then
comments:
This is not perfect poetry; but it is certainly strong verse. It is glorified nomenclature.
Milton himself need not have blushed to acknowledge it. The boy who could write
like this before he was eighteen years old knew something, at least, of the music and
magic of names. If we may read our history, like our Hebrew, backward, we can detect
the promise of a great poet in the swing and sweep of these lines, and recognize the
wing-trial of genius, in Tennyson’s first flight. (17)
Though Van Dyke fails to explicate the poem, this is perfectly in keeping with his
other criticism, which is of the descriptive and laudatory variety.
“The Ballad of Oriana” has inspired more scholarly comment than all the rest of
Tennyson’s martial juvenilia put together, perhaps because it was one of the few
selections from the 1830 volume of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical that Tennyson continued
to reprint throughout his life.Tennyson’s high regard for the poem has not swayed its
many detractors, many of whom mock the refrain, which Leigh Hunt refers to as a
“parrot cry” (Jump 128). Other commentators, such as A.H.Hallam, Harold Nicolson,
and John Wilson, are lavish in their praise of the reverberative ballad, although none
submits it to the kind of analysis that it merits.
The mature Tennyson’s poems on historical and legendary battle action have all
drawn at least some amount of critical attention.The quality assessments are varied;
these poems are examined more thoroughly than the juvenilia, but their depths
remain unplumbed. Michael Alexander and Christopher Ricks admire Tennyson’s
translation of “The Battle of Brunanburh,” though neither gives Tennyson enough
credit for the original work of art he has created. Ricks also speaks well of Tennyson’s
“Specimen of a Translation of the Iliad in Blank Verse,” as does Theodore Redpath,
who calls Tennyson’s two published translations from Homer “admirable” (107).
The few critics who have examined Tennyson’s translations from Homer have
focused exclusively on the technical merits of the translations without considering
Tennyson’s affinity for the heroic ideology of the original passages. “Boädicea” is
also a translation of sorts—a translation of a classical meter into English verse. As in
the case of the Homer translations, the critics have focused primarily on the
technical aspect of “Boädicea.” In view of F.B.Pinion’s comment that “Only the
metrician or historian can find sustained interest in the experimental verse of
‘Boädicea’” (218), perhaps this focus has curtailed the amount of critical study the
poem has inspired. As they have with “Boädicea,” the critics have oversimplified
and even misapprehended Tennyson’s meaning in “Sir Galahad” and in “The
Captain.” “The Revenge,” on the other hand, is a poem which has been much
admired and which has received a thorough and quite impressive treatment by
Robert M.Estrich and Hans Sperber in Three Keys to Language. In their chapter
Tennyson and the Heroic Tradition
7
entitled “Personal Style and Period Style: A Victorian Poet,” Estrich and Sperber
discuss the poem’s historical background and also offer a vigorous technical analysis.
The thoroughness of Estrich and Sperber’s treatment of “The Revenge” helps to
redress the cursoriness of other critics such as Harold Nicolson, Paull F.Baum, and
Alastair W.Thomson, whose commendations of the poem are unsupported by any
exegeses. James R.Kincaid’s is the most extensive examination of “The Revenge”
since Estrich and Sperber’s, but Kincaid is misguided in his allegation that Tennyson’s
depiction of heroism is laced with irony.
Tennyson’s poetic treatment of contemporary conflicts includes the most
contemptuously depreciated poems of his career, the incendiary pieces of 1852.
These vociferous newspaper poems may have prompted more scorn than anything
ever written by any great poet. No critic has ever found them worthy of any serious
consideration, and the authors of most comprehensive studies of Tennyson, having
been beaten to the roundhouse punch by earlier commentators, can only express
their contempt for the pieces by ignoring them altogether. A.C.Swinburne, ever the
iconoclast, injects one dulcet note into the cacophony of invective against the infamous
verses:
Besides the two fine sonnets of his youth and his age on Poland and Montenegro, he
has uttered little if anything on public matters that I can remember as worth
remembering except the two spirited and stalwart songs of “Hands all round!” and
“Britons, guard your own,” which rang out a manful response of disgust and horror at
the news of a crime unequalled in the cowardly vileness of its complicated atrocity
since the model massacre of St. Bartholomew. (Jump 344)
“The Defence of Lucknow,” in spite of its substantial length and its artistic richness,
which is enhanced by its accompanying dedicatory poem, has inexplicably been
ignored as a subject of scholarly explication.The “Ode on the Death of the Duke
of Wellington” has elicited a wide range of critical responses, with censure tipping
the scales. Most modern critics find its tone too rhetorical and its repetitions
hollow.Valerie Pitt is an excellent spokesperson for the few scholarly admirers of
the “Wellington Ode.” In Tennyson Laureate she calls it “magnificent” (154). “The
mere technical achievement of…the ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’
is considerable enough,” she asserts. “What is perhaps more important is Tennyson’s
capacity for discovering under the individual personality, or the single event, with
all its extraneous and irrelevant detail, the shape of a legend or a public symbol”
(14). “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” as one of Tennyson’s most famous and
most widely anthologized works, has inspired more commentary than most of his
battle-specific poems, though most critiques are superficial and stereotypical.
Christopher Ricks, in Tennyson, and Jerome J.McGann, in “Tennyson and the History
of Criticism,” stand alone in discerning any artistic seriousness in the piece, and
8
The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
their readings are far from exhaustive. “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade at
Balaclava,” though its prologue and epilogue make it a more sophisticated subject
of study, lags far behind “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in both its scholarly
and popular appeal. Robert Bernard Martin notes a certain level of artistry: “The
‘Prologue to General Hamley’ is more memorable than the poem to which it
forms a preface, although both bear witness to Tennyson’s admiration of military
heroism. It consists of one long sentence (a favourite device of Tennyson’s in his
epistolary poems) of thirty-two lines” (532).
The banner of battle unrolled in Part III of Maud has long been shredded by
critical salvos. Edgar F.Shannon reviews the first round of hostile fire in “The Critical
Reception of Maud,” while both Michael C.C.Adams and James R. Bennett highlight
the perennial potshots. Over the years, the greatness of the poem but also the
distastefulness of the conclusions warlike stance have become more widely
acknowledged. The modern position is well epitomized by Roger Ebbatson, who
feels that “The use of the Crimean War as a solution to the hero’s and the nation’s
problems is always likely to prove a stumbling block to the reader who has lived in
the century of ‘total war’” (119).
Robert James Mann, John Killham, Robert Pattison, Christopher Ricks, Michael
C.C.Adams, and James Norman O’Neill listen approvingly to Maud’s battle cry.The
ideas of two other defenders of Maud, Paul Turner and James R. Kincaid, are the
most pertinent to this study. The following comment by Turner is exceptionally
insightful: “Tennyson means that the ‘madness’ of passion, though potentially
destructive, is a valuable part of human nature, which must not be denied” (148).
This statement applies equally well to the Idylls of the King and to the shorter battle
poems. As for Kincaid, in the following passages he recognizes to an extraordinary
degree the heroic import of Maud:
This frightening, disunified world, the poem insists, is all there is. It cannot be transcended
by fleeing into mystic states of purity, but must be accepted…. The extremely
sophisticated conclusion finds its source in a rugged humanistic tradition that runs
from Chaucer to Camus…. Maud’s battle-song, in section 5, is her most important
utterance, even though it is not, as the narrator repeatedly says, so much Maud that he
hears, as a ‘Voice.’ It is a voice ‘singing an air that is known to me’ (I, 164)—really a song
that is within him, arising from the deep and unconscious sense that only in full
acceptance of all life can he live. (113–14, 120)
Kincaid’s fault lies in not extending the “rugged humanistic tradition” back to its
real beginning, and to the ultimate source of the conclusion to Maud: Homer and
his call to heroism.
Richard Jenkyns, in the following comment from The Victorians and Ancient Greece,
comes closest to anticipating my approach to the Idylls of the King.
Tennyson and the Heroic Tradition
9
The Iliad is the poem not just of Achilles, but of Achilles’ wrath; ‘wrath’ is its very first
word. Tennyson intended to create an equivalent of this wrath; just as the anger of
Achilles undermines the Greeks, bringing the Greek army to the brink of defeat and
Achilles himself to the verge of moral disaster, so the cancer of adulterous passion
spreads through Camelot, degrading its inhabitants and eventually bringing its society
to collapse. (35)
Besides Jenkyns’s passage, which he never elaborates, only Ann Colley’s Tennyson and
Madness and Henry Kozicki’s Tennyson and Clio: History in the Major Poems have any
noteworthy coincidence with this book, which sees “adulterous passion” as an alternate
mode of martial passion. In the Idylls both sexual lust and blood lust prove
uncontrollable and incompatible with the maintenance of Arthur’s realm.
An overview of the scholarship on Tennyson’s battle poetry is inevitably cursory
because of the dearth of serious attention these poems have received. It would be
pointless to indict the numerous critics who have neglected the war poetry, or to
review the many dismissive, superficial, and contemptuous reactions these works
have elicited. There need be no reluctance to acknowledge the preponderance of
this kind of response, however, as it indicates the need for a counterbalancing approach.
The slighting of Tennyson’s war poetry is difficult to justify in view of the abundant
evidence that these works were very important to Tennyson. Aside from the longest
and most important poems, the Idylls of the King, Maud, and The Princess. fifty-four
battle pieces, martial action features prominently in three of his four As an adult,
Tennyson made three translations, and all of them are English versions of ancient
battle poetry: “The Battle of Brunanburh” and two selections from the Iliad (two
additional Iliad fragments, printed by Christopher Ricks in The Poetry of Tennyson,
are examined in this study). In addition,Aidan Day presents from Tennyson’s marginalia
a fragment of a translation of Euripides’s Phoenissae. The first four lines read:
Refulgent Lord of Battle tell me why
Thy joy is in the tumult & the strife
And the purple tide of life
From gored bosoms freely flowing. (“Notable Acquisitions” 206)
After Tennyson’s first child, a boy, was stillborn, he responded with the poem “Little
bosom not yet cold,” in which he describes his son as a “little warrior” (7) who had
“done battle to be born” (5). According to Hallam Tennyson’s Memoir, it was
“Montenegro,” Tennyson’s tribute to the bravery in battle of the Montenegrins
against the Turks, that “he always put first among his sonnets” (2.217). James R.
Kincaid speaks of “The ‘core of toughness’ always discernible in Tennyson’s best
poetry” (13).
Of the two selections that Tennyson read for the cylinder recordings made by
Charles Steytler, one was “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (Maxwell 150), and
10
The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
among a handful of poems that he recorded for Thomas Edison, Tennyson included
the “Wellington Ode,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” “The Charge of the
Heavy Brigade,” and “Boädicea” (Charles Tennyson, Stars and Markets 169). It may
be argued that he chose these poems to read aloud only because of the sonority of
their emphatic rhythm, but metrical virtuosity and remarkable sound effects
distinguish much of Tennyson’s best poetry, and there are other poems he eschewed
on this occasion, poems not about war, such as “Locksley Hall,” “What Thor Said to
the Bard,” and “Harp, Harp, the Voice of Cymry,” which lend themselves as well or
better to the kind of stentorian reading required by the recording situation. Moreover,
Tennyson chose his battle poems to read aloud at numerous other times when he
was not declaiming into a megaphone. Maud was his favorite recitation piece, and
Robert Bernard Martin relates one occasion when the poet inflicted three consecutive
readings of it on Jane Carlyle (396–97).The “Wellington Ode” was apparently another
favorite. Charles Tennyson recounts three different instances of the poet’s reading to
groups of friends and guests his tribute to “one of his greatest heroes” (Martin 368).
Harold Nicolson describes Tennyson’s poetry readings at Farringford, and four of
the five poems he mentions concern battle: “He would sometimes read the Idylls;
more often he would choose the Ode to the Duke of Wellington…. Sometimes, and
quite incomprehensibly, he would embark upon The Northern Farmer, and at other
times he would startle his audience with a very metrical rendering of The Battle of
Brunanburh…. But it was Maud that was his favorite” (172). According to the
Memoir, Tennyson once recited part of “Hands All Round” to Sir Alfred Lyall
during a walk (2.264).
Tennyson’s early immersion in classical literature undoubtedly imbued his
developing system of values with a strong sense of the heroic ethos. His early and
extensive training in the classics has been well documented by Hallam Tennyson and
later biographers. Robert Bernard Martin writes:
On the flyleaf of the first volume of C.G.Heyne’s edition of the Iliad Tennyson wrote
as a grown man: “My father who taught us Greek made us—me & my brother Charles—
write the substance of Heyne’s notes in the margin to show that we had read them, &
we followed the same command of his, writing in our Horace’s,Virgils & Juvenals & c
& c the criticisms of their several commentators.” Dr.Tennyson did not consider him
ready to go to Louth until he was able to repeat from memory on four successive
mornings the Odes of Horace. (29)
Many boys play at being warriors and heroes, but the young Tennyson seems to have
been preoccupied to an unusual degree with the romantic glories of combat and
derring-do he found in the classics and in the other heroic tales he read as a boy.
“The Tennyson’s had their imaginative games; they were knights and jousted in
mock tournaments, or they were ‘champions and warriors, defending a field, or a
Tennyson and the Heroic Tradition
11
stone-heap, or again they would set up opposing camps with a king in the midst of
each …’” (Memoir 1.4). Hallam Tennyson recounts how little Alfred would fascinate
his brothers and sisters by telling “legends of knights and heroes among untravelled
forests rescuing distressed damsels, or on gigantic mountains fighting with dragons
…” (Memoir 1. 5). Robert Bernard Martin cites two lines from a fragment entitled
“Mablethorpe,” in which Tennyson reflects on the activity of his boyhood imagination:
“Here stood the infant Ilion of my mind,/And here the Grecian ships did seem to
be” (23). Martin recounts an early incident of actual violence at the Louth school:
“The other boys were cruel, and once when Alfred was sitting on the school steps
weeping and ill, a larger boy hit him in the wind with the words ‘I’ll teach you to
cry’” (30). It is easy to imagine the bullying he received at Louth creating in the
young Tennyson a need for some sort of aggressive outlet, a need he seems to have
filled with his heroically-oriented imagination.
Almost all of Tennyson’s earliest poetic activity reflects his rigorous training in
the literature of the heroic age. Martin relates that as a boy, Alfred and his brother
Charles “went for rambles…making up lines and shouting them to each other. One
that Alfred remembered was ‘With slaughterous sons of thunder rolled the flood’”
(21).According to Hallam Tennyson, the fledgling bard’s initial efforts at composition
included stories and verse on the deeds of Wellington and Napoleon, a poem at
Louth of which the only recallable line was “While bleeding heroes lie along the
shore,” hundreds of lines in imitation of Pope’s Iliad, and “an epic of six thousand
lines à la Walter Scott—full of battles…” (Memoir 1. 5, 7, 11, 12). Of this epic,Tennyson
“said afterwards that he had never felt himself more truly inspired, as he rushed
about the fields with a stick for a sword, fancying himself a conqueror advancing
upon an enemy’s country” (Martin 36). W.D.Paden reports that in 1823, when
Tennyson was thirteen or fourteen, he wrote a brief tale entitled Mungo the American
(73). Paden describes the tale as an account of a hero’s loss and recovery of his sword.
He finds his lost sword in a solitary’s hut, obtains an unsatisfactory answer about how
the solitary came by it, snatches the sword and slays the solitary with it (73). This
story, which anticipates the antipathy towards asceticism of the Idylls of the King,
indicates an early beginning for Tennyson’s idealizing of assertive action as preferable
to contemplation. Hallam Tennyson refers to “Armageddon,” the early version of
“Timbuctoo,” as “The Battle of Armageddon” (Memoir 1.46), and the poem does
feature a battle scene similar to the one in “The Passing of Arthur.” “Armageddon”
shows that at the age of fifteen Tennyson was already associating battle with a mystical,
visionary version of the transcendent furor found in the classics.
The influence on Tennyson of the ancient heroic writers, particularly Homer
and Virgil, cannot be overestimated. Robert Pattison sees the ancient Greek form of
the idyll as Tennyson’s “building block” (128), the foundation of his poetic career. In
Classical Echoes in Tennyson, Wilfred P.Mustard takes nineteen pages to list Tennyson’s
allusions to Homer and fifteen to compile the Virgilian allusions, and his catalogue is
12
The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
far from exhaustive. Charles Tennyson remembers of the poet that “it had been one
of his chief pleasures to try and light within [his sons] the first sparks of a love of
literature—particularly of the great writers of Greece and Rome, with Homer and
Virgil (‘the glories of the world,’ he called them) in the forefront” (Alfred Tennyson
356). W.W.Robson compares Tennyson to Homer and Virgil in his use of echoic
verse (58).
Some commentators see Tennyson as primarily Virgilian, while others find him
Virgilian primarily in his fealty to Homer. Robert Pattison speaks of “the venerable
comparison between Virgil and Tennyson,” and cites Sir Thomas Herbert, G.K.
Chesterton, Douglas Bush, and Owen Chadwick as having emphasized the
similarities between the two (2). R.D.B.Rawnsley sees as common between Virgil
and Tennyson “their joy in the pomp and circumstance of war” (qtd. in Nitchie
224–25). “Tennyson,” states Douglas Bush, “though not a world poet, is in so many
ways akin to Virgil that one cannot, in some of his best writing, mark where
Virgilian inspiration leaves off and Tennyson begins” (227). “Surely Virgil finds his
true interpreter in Tennyson,” asserts Elizabeth Nitchie. “On the whole the
investigation of the classical reminiscences in Tennyson has led to the conclusion
that he is more indebted to Virgil than to anyone else, with the possible exception
of Homer and Horace” (227, 232). Charles Tennyson attests to the poet’s devotion
to Homer when he recalls an occasion on which “He began immediately to talk
of Homer with [classical scholar Walter] Leaf, speaking of Homeric song as ‘the
grandest sounds of the human voice,’ and reciting long passages in the original
Greek with a strong deep voice” (Alfred Tennyson 532). Hallam Tennyson recalls
the same occasion, and how Tennyson “enlarged for some time upon the greatness
of Homer, quoting many lines from both the Iliad and the Odyssey” (Memoir 2.419).
“Yet I seem to remember that he had his favourite Classics,” writes Benjamin
Jowett, “such as Homer, Pindar, and Theocritus” (Memoir 2.463). Photo XXIII in
Martin’s biography is a portrait of Tennyson with a volume of Homer across his
lap. A.A.Markley finds that Tennyson’s library included six editions of the Iliad in
Greek and five translations, with one Greek text and three English translations of
the Odyssey. “Among the best represented authors in Tennyson’s classical library is,
not surprisingly, Homer,” Markley concludes (11). It is also not surprising that the
contents of Tennyson’s Homer collection seem to indicate a strong preference on
Tennyson’s part for the epic on warfare.
Tennyson, whose nickname among his friends was “The Bard,” is still occasionally
seen aright as a Homeric figure himself. According to Paul Turner, the Harvard
Notebook shows “Tennyson trying on, as it were, the singing-robes of the Homeric
bard” (164).Turner claims that Tennyson anticipated later scholars in understanding
the principle of Homeric formulas and their purpose, and “to have cast himself in
the role of an oral poet, holding a live audience enthralled by his extempore storytelling…. The conception appears in the Idylls in such phrases as ‘he that tells the
Tennyson and the Heroic Tradition
13
tale’ (GE 161), and in the recurrent use of quasi-Homeric repeated lines and
phrases” (164). A.Dwight Culler sees Tennyson’s repetitions as inducing in the
reader the same state of transcendence that Tennyson himself experienced in his
vatic aspect (5).
His forty years of intimate and uninterrupted friendship with Thomas Carlyle
(Sharma 43), who praises “true battle” as “the first, indispensable thing” (On Heroes
108), and writes that a poet “could not sing the Heroic warrior, unless he himself
were at least a Heroic warrior too” (On Heroes 79), could only have encouraged
similar sentiments in Tennyson.Valerie Pitt notes that “the influence of Carlyle…is
deeply absorbed into [Tennyson’s] thinking” (177). “We have it on excellent authority,”
writes Clyde de L.Ryals, “that Tennyson was disposed to agree with Carlyle on the
subject of heroes and hero-worship” (From the Great Deep 103).
Tennyson very well could have inspired Carlyle’s comment, “Let Nature send a
Hero-soul; in no age is it other than possible that he may be shaped into a poet”
(On Heroes 78). Responding to Tennyson’s 1842 volume, Carlyle writes, “Truly it
is long since in any English Book, Poetry or Prose, I have felt the pulse of a real
man’s heart as I do in this same. A right valiant, true fighting, victorious heart;
strong as a lion’s …” (Memoir 1.213). Benjamin Jowett attributes to Tennyson “the
strength of a giant, or of a God” (Memoir 2.465). C.M.Bowra’s observation, “In the
absence of enemies or dangerous quests heroes are not content to be idle” (Heroic
Poetry 50), is pertinent to Tennyson’s career. According to Jerome H.Buckley, “it
never occurred to [Tennyson] that he might rest for any great length of time from
the labors of composition. Rest soon brought only restlessness” (151). He seems to
have followed his own advice to a young university aspirant: “[A man] should
embark on his career in the spirit of selfless and adventurous heroism” (Memoir
1.317).Although Tennyson pleaded in the “Epilogue” to “The Charge of the Heavy
Brigade” that “The song that nerves a nation’s heart,/Is in itself a deed” (79–80),
Christopher Ricks feels that Tennyson never resolved the conflict between his
own calling and the Homeric idealization of action. “Tennyson was a poet haunted
by the uneasy feeling that it was the soldier who epitomised action, duty, manliness,
and courage” (Tennyson 53). Of “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Ricks muses
that “the force of the poem is in its own envious yearning, its knowledge that it
was ‘theirs,’ but not Tennyson’s, ‘not to make reply,’ and ‘not to reason why,’ and ‘but
to do and die.’ For Tennyson such an assured simplicity is to be envied” (Tennyson
231). Hallam Tennyson remembers that the poet loved the sea “for its own sake
and also because English heroism has ever been conspicuous on ship-board: he felt
in himself the spirit of the old Norsemen” (Memoir 2.7). In 1887 Tennyson lamented
the decline of “chivalrous feeling” in the world, but then conceded that “I am old
and I may be wrong, for this generation has assuredly some spirit of chivalry. We
see it in acts of heroism by land and sea, in fights against the slave trade, in our
Arctic voyages, in philanthropy, etc.” (Memoir 2.337). Upon the poet’s believing
14
The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
that he was financially ruined for the second time, Charles Tennyson writes, “That
evening he made [Emily] play and sing to him the famous old Welsh air ‘Come to
Battle’ to give her courage” (Alfred Tennyson 301). Charles Tennyson observes also
that in his last year, “Tennyson’s fighting spirit would not give way” (Alfred Tennyson
533). Hallam Tennyson called his father “a soldier at heart” (Memoir 2.298).
Although severe myopia barred Tennyson from regular military service, in 1830
he undertook with Arthur Hallam a secret mission to aid Torrijos’s Spanish
revolutionaries. This expedition, according to Robert Bernard Martin, “was to be
the trip that meant most to Tennyson in all his life, one that he tried again and again
to repeat” (116). Martin describes the mission as follows:
Alfred and Hallam were committed to taking money and coded dispatches in invisible
ink to the revolutionaries, who were gathering in the Pyrenees. It is tempting to say
that it was literally a cloak-and-dagger affair, for it seems to have been at this time
that Tennyson began wearing a Spanish-style cloak and the “sombrero” that were to
distinguish his appearance for the rest of his life; probably he first wore them in
emulation of the exiles and then continued with them in memory of the summers
trip. (117)
Tennyson both looked and acted the heroic part. In his demeanor and in his
powerful, athletic body he represented the antithesis of the Shelleyan type of
delicate, effeminate poet. “In physique and character Tennyson was remarkably
tough,” attests Paul Turner (33). “He stood well over six feet,” writes Martin, “with
a singularly broad chest and heavy legs with which he walked long distances very
quickly in spite of his appearing to shuffle because he scarcely lifted his feet from
the ground” (53). “A hero,” writes C.M.Bowra, “differs from other men by his
peculiar force and energy” (Heroic Poetry 97). Martin’s biography recounts a great
many of Tennyson’s exploits which demonstrated “the ruggedness of his body”
(53) and the heroic extremity of his vigor. In his youth “He would proudly walk
the twenty miles of wolds between Somersby and Tealby to take news of his father
to his grandfather” (Martin 42). For exercise at Cambridge, “he rowed, fenced, or
took the long walks that were habitual since boyhood” (Martin 55). During the
expedition to the Valley of Cauteretz, Tennyson caught a fever, but nevertheless
“they all climbed mountains, swam in the high lakes, and walked endlessly” (Martin
119).To enter-tain party guests Tennyson once picked up a small pony and carried
it around the lawn in his arms. “[William] Brookfield looked in amused envy at
the breadth of his chest, then felt his sinews. ‘Come now,’ he said, you mustn’t be
wanting me to believe that you are both Hercules and Apollo in one” (Martin
148). Martin records several impressive hikes, including an occasion in 1844 when
in the midst of his breakdown and “water-cure” treatment he went to Wales and
“went up Snowdon three times” (280). On his last visit to Cauteretz in 1874, “At
Tennyson and the Heroic Tradition
15
the end of a long day that had begun with sunrise they returned to Cauteretz after
walking nineteen miles” (Martin 503). At seventy, the poet was still capable of
running up-hill and dancing, and was walking two or three hours every day as late
as 1885 (Martin 528, 555). “In spite of recurrent bad health, Tennyson had always
been so proud of his body that it was hard for him to admit that it was deteriorating,
and when there were visitors he would walk further than usual and occasionally
break into a shambling run to demonstrate his fitness” (Martin 555). Carlyle’s
dictum that “The poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose stanzas,
would never make a stanza worth much” (On Heroes 78–79), was given special
significance by Tennyson. As Paul Turner relates, “The year before he died he
was…defying his friends to imitate him in getting up quickly twenty times from
a low chair, without touching it with his hands” (32).
In view of Tennyson’s heroic qualities and values, it should not be surprising that
much of his poetry has a heroic cast. There was inarguably a fire-eating aspect to
Tennyson, but, as Michael C.C.Adams points out, this was not an unusual trait in
Tennyson’s era.Adams compares Tennyson’s war poetry of the 1850’s with American
writings in the period from 1830 to 1865 “in order to suggest that the idea of war as
a rejuvenating force for prosperous commercial-industrial nations was widely held
among introspective men…. [J]udged by the highest intellectual standards of his
own day, the poets views were quite legitimate” (406–407). Tennyson lived before
the advent of “total war,” and there is reason to believe that had he witnessed the
mass destruction of World War I, he would have sympathized with Owen, Sassoon,
and the other disillusioned war poets. In 1890 Tennyson witnessed a torpedo
demonstration. “He afterwards kept dwelling on what he had seen and several times
recurred to the idea which had impressed itself on his imagination, that this engine
of destruction, elaborated by nineteenth-century science, reminded him of the
primitive conception of a malignant evil spirit” (qtd. in Lang and Shannon 3. 418).
Then again,Tennyson may well have agreed with Yeats in judging Owen “unworthy
of the poets’ corner of a country newspaper” because “he is all blood, dirt, & sucked
sugar stick” (qtd. in Bloom, Yeats, 438).The subject of Tennyson’s battle poetry is not
warfare per se, but heroism. Tennyson writes in the tradition of the ancient bards,
who in spite of their graphic depictions of violence were primarily concerned with
the passions that move the greatest men and their ideals of valor and honor.
C.M.Bowra asserts that “Fighting is the favourite topic of heroic poetry” (56), and
he explains why:
If [heroic poetry] has a central principle it is that the great man must pass through an
ordeal to prove his worth and this is almost necessarily some kind of violent action,
which not only demands courage, endurance, and enterprise, but, since it involves the
risk of life, makes him show to what lengths he is prepared to go in pursuit of honour.
For this reason heroic poetry may be con-cerned with any action in which a man
16
The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
stakes his life on his ideal of what he ought to be. The most obvious field for such
action is battle, and with battle much heroic poetry deals. (48)
In an inspired passage from Tennyson Laureate,Valerie Pitt aligns the values of Tennyson’s
poetry with the heroic tradition and gives his jingoism a symbolic purport:
What is celebrated is not the military success but the military operation that was
very nearly a failure, the charge of the Light Brigade, the battle of “The Revenge,”
and the defence of Lucknow. These incidents were not, in the ordinary sense of the
word, triumphs; what Tennyson celebrates in them is the capacity of the human
spirit to stand out against odds…. Courage is really the major theme of the mature
Tennyson…. It is this courage which Tennyson offers as a hope to what he saw as a
self-destroying society. The Imperial Dream is, in a way, the outward symbol of
courage against odds. (166)
Pitt’s assessment is supported by Charles Tennyson and Robert Bernard Martin.
“Tennyson was always impressed by the courage of the individual soldier,” writes
Charles Tennyson (“Tennyson’s Philosophy” 153), while Martin, commenting on
the sonnet “Poland,” observes that “Tennyson was not a political animal, but his
imagination was stirred by heroism, and it shows” (164). In Domestic and Heroic in
Tennyson’s Poetry, Donald S. Hair finds a significant element of the heroic even in
Tennyson’s most “domestic” poems, such as the English Idyls, and believes that in
placing an element of the domestic in his heroic works Tennyson was catering to the
softer ideals of the Victorian age.
“Tennyson,” Roger Ebbatson remarks, “lived uncomfortably in an unheroic age”
(11). If Tennyson’s battle poetry is read uncomfortably in our own age, it may be
because of our failure to acknowledge its heroic background.Without a full awareness
of Tennyson’s adherence to the traditions of heroic literature, the reader of Tennyson’s
martial pieces will remain oblivious to many of the ramifications that make the
pieces so rich. The primary theme of the ancient bards is also the primary theme of
Tennyson’s bardic voice, and the recognition of Tennyson’s artistry in handling that
theme requires a full appreciation of its treatment in ages past.
When Milton claims that his argument in Paradise Lost (PL) is “Not less but more
Heroic than the wrath/Of stern Achilles…;/…or rage/Of Turnus” (9. 14–17), he
implies that the battle fury of warriors, though it does not represent for him the
ultimate epic subject, is traditionally the quintessential subject matter of heroic verse.
The wrath or furor of heroic warriors is, as Milton acknowledges, the salient theme
of both the Iliad (“Wrath,” as Richard Jenkyns notes above, is the poem’s first word)
and the Aeneid, and it also features prominently in the Odyssey.The phenomenon is
exemplified as well by the Celtic hero Cuchullain and by the berserks of Old Norse
literature. John Lash, in The Hero: Manhood and Power, writes that “the hero is marked
Tennyson and the Heroic Tradition
17
by the excess of vital force he raises and manages—or not” (21; original emphasis).
H.R.Ellis Davidson, discussing the literary accounts of ancient European heroes,
writes, “Their achievements were like those of gods or giants, and such descriptions,
partly humorous, seem to be attempts to express the wild fury and abnormal strength
and heat of a warrior in the frenzy of battle” (Myths and Symbols 85). Georges
Dumézil offers the following quotation from M.L. Sjoestedt as a summary of her
findings on the subject: “Le héros est le furieux, possédé de sa propre énergie
tumultueuse et brûlante” (Horace 21). In Horace et les Curiaces, Dumézil devotes an
entire chapter to the phenomenon of battle fury in ancient heroic literature. He
concludes that the Germanic “Wut” the Nordic “berserk,” the Celtic “ferg” the
Greek “menos,” and the Roman “furor” all designate the same sublime battle ecstasy
that renders the hero invincible (19–23).
The furor of the greatest heroes is not simply conspicuous; it is transcendent. It
exceeds the limits of the human and partakes of the powers of nature and of gods.
“[I]n all countries,” writes C.M.Bowra, [the hero] has an abundant, overflowing,
assertive force, which expresses itself in action, especially in violent action, and enables
him to do what is beyond ordinary mortals” (Heroic Poetry 97). Seth L. Schein writes
of Achilles that “The force and intensity of his anger are more than human, and his
daemonic power sets him apart from all other mortals” (91).
Sometimes the hero’s furor is depicted as a natural force, as when Achilles “is like
some irresistible power of nature, compared in turn to a river in spate, a flaming star,
a vulture swooping on its prey, a fire burning a wood or a city, an eagle dropping to
seize a lamb or a kid” (Bowra, Heroic Poetry 97). In the Aeneid, both Aeneas and
Turnus are compared to forest fires and mountain rivers (Gransden 136–37), and
Turnus is likened to a lion, a bull, a wolf, an eagle, a tiger, a war-horse, the north
wind, fire and torrent, and a landslide (Williams 120). When Turnus is described as
leonine in Book 12, William S.Anderson recognizes that “The same Latin phrase
occurs here to describe the lion, roaring from its bloody mouth, as earlier has been
assigned to the very incarnation of disorder, Furor impius, raging to be released” (92).
As for Homer, Anderson remarks, “Homer knew that warfare can turn a man into a
beast” (8). Homer’s similes comparing frenzied heroes to wild animals are related to
the mythic depictions of shape-shifting common to the Nordic sagas. “The basis of
such tales,” writes H.R.Ellis Davidson, “may lie in the fierce frenzy, like that of a
wild beast, which overcame the berserks in battle” (Gods and Myths 68). Another
related motif is the use of storm imagery to symbolize the forces of battle. Cedric
H.Whitman notes that in the Iliad, “Interwoven with the other nature imagery,
especially in the Great Battle, is the image of wind. It is joined often by clouds, dust,
rain, snow, or sea, and in general blows harder and harder as Hector’s attack nears its
climax” (Homer and the Heroic Tradition 147). In the Aeneid, according to William
S.Anderson, “the storm suggests war in general” (25).The power of Odin, the god of
the berserks, also suggests the force of the storm. “The root of the name,” writes
18
The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
Francis Huxley, “may also mean ‘wind,’ and ‘storm,’ and, because gods of storm are
commonly those of war, it is no surprise to find that Odin is also a war-god” (241).
The battlefield paroxysm is most often symbolized by the images of fire and light.
Fire is the predominant image scheme in both the Iliad and the Aeneid. In Homer and
the Heroic Tradition, Cedric H.Whitman devotes almost an entire chapter to the fire
symbolism of the Iliad. “In one form or another,” he writes, “fire occurs about two
hundred times in the Iliad, and of these only ten can really be said to be casual uses,
unconnected with the main scheme. For the rest, fire itself, or comparisons of things to
fire, forms a remarkable pattern of associations, all centering around the theme of
heroic passion and death” (129). When Hector threatens to reach the Greek ships,
“War itself is fire, yet here the real fire which threatens is the blaze of the tragic wrath”
(135).Whitman attests that the image of fire “connects the wrath of Achilles with the
plan of Zeus, and Achilles himself with the gods. Wherever it occurs in connection
with heroes, it emphasizes their inspired energy and stress” (145). The image of light
has a similar symbolic function: “Athena makes a light go before a hero destined for
victory” (122).The imagery of the Aeneid is almost as incandescent as that of the Iliad.
In Forms of Glory: Structure and Sense in Virgil’s Aeneid, J.J.William Hunt observes:
The grip of madness on queen [Dido] and prince [Turnus] alike is stressed repeatedly
in both books [4 and 12] by the same epithet, demens or amens, “frenzy” or “helpless
bewilderment”; and their parallel mood is chiefly expressed in metaphors and similes
of fire, an encompassing fire framing the epic at both ends in the opening and closing
panels, and in the mind of Aeneas an irremov-able fire from which the light of his final
triumph can never be dissociated. (89)
According to H.R.Ellis Davidson, “It was said that ‘the hero’s light’ rose from
[Cuchullain’s] forehead” during his battle frenzy (Myths and Symbols 84).The name
of Cuchullain’s father, Lug, whom Davidson calls the nearest parallel to Odin in
Irish tradition, meant “The Shining One” (Myths and Symbols 90).The warrior band
led by the ancient Irish warrior Finn, whom Davidson compares to the berserks,
were called the Fionn, a word that means “light” (Myths and Symbols 81).
Sometimes the battle-frenzy is ascribed a divine origin, as when the Olympians
intervene in the Iliad (and, less frequently, in the Aeneid) and inspire selected warriors
to a streak of surpassing brilliance. As Carlyle writes, however, “The essence of
…all Pagan Mythologies, we found to be recognition of the divineness of Nature”
(On Heroes 30). Pagan thought was pantheistic and made no fundamental distinction
between the extremes of nature and the power of the divine. Classical scholars
recog-nize that Homer andVirgil use the pantheon to represent a divine immanence
in the world.Walter Kaufmann notes that “Homer’s gods are not supernatural but
part of nature” (151), and Thomas Greene recognizes that “Virgil’s gods…embody
abstract principles or forces” (44). For the ancient Greco-Romans and Norsemen,
Tennyson and the Heroic Tradition
19
the power of Athena or Mars or Odin was transcendent in the sense that it
transcended the normal limits of the human, as do the forces of nature.The berserks,
for example, attributed their battle furor to Odin, and they worshipped the god
accordingly, but Odin was simply the furor itself—his name meant “furor” (Davidson,
Gods and Myths 70).
The surpassing nature of the hero’s battle transport is both his glory and his
tragedy. Dumézil comments at some length on the invincibility of the frenzied warrior
(Horace 17–20). “Voilà le germe précieux des grandes victoires,” he proclaims (Horace
23). Walter Scott, in whom Tennyson was well versed, calls this ecstatic frenzy “The
bold Berserkar’s rage divine,/Through whose inspiring, deeds are wrought/Past human
strength and human thought” (Harold the Dauntless 3.8).The hero’s furor allows him to
perform feats of legend, but an inability to harness this sublime power may prove
disastrous. John Lash writes, “The mission of the hero in all his variants consists not
merely in the management of force, but in the mastery of an excess of force. His challenge
is to face forces gone out of control, exceeding their proper limits, and he himself
embodies the dangerous superfluity of such forces” (6, original emphasis). “Force, for
Homer,” explains Rachel Bespaleff, “is divine insofar as it represents a superabundance
of life that flashes out in the contempt of death…it is detestable insofar as it contains…a
blind drive that is always pushing it on to the very end of its course, on to its own
abolition and the obliteration of the very values it engendered” (qtd. in Schein 84).
R.D.Williams writes, “O cohibete iras (‘control your fury’) says Aeneas to his men when
the truce is broken (12.314); this is what Homer’s Achilles had failed to do, with
disastrous consequences, and it is whatVirgil’s Aeneas, for all his efforts, also on occasion
fails to do” (84). Horace, whom Elizabeth Nitchie ranks alongside Homer and Virgil
in his influence on Tennyson, writes in Ode 1.16:
They say Prometheus, shaping mankind from clay
And forced to borrow random component parts
From other creatures, put the lion’s
Frenzy of temper inside our bosoms.
From wrath Thyestes’ ghastly undoing came,
And in the final count it was wrath by which
Great cities suffered total wreck and
Over their ruins of walls and towers
The hateful plow of insolent foes was drawn.
Subdue your anger! (13–21, Charles Passage trans.)
The Book of Leinster has an account of the initiatory combat exploit of the young
Cuchullain. Dumézil writes, “The condition that the exploit has effected in
Cuchullain, this transfiguring rage, is in itself a good thing…. But this ferg is as
20
The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
troublesome as it is precious: the child is not its master; on the contrary, it possesses
him” (Destiny 135).
The Odyssey climaxes with the venting of Odysseus’s rage in a vengeful bloodbath; the Iliad depicts Achilles’s inability to channel and control his transcendent
wrath; in the Aeneid we are left with a final, indelible image of Aeneas’s succumbing
to the irresistible power of furor as he kills Turnus. Maud and the Idylls of the King can
be grouped with these classical epics in their treatment of a common theme. The
wrath of heroes, and more particularly the double-edged nature of battle fury—its
intoxicating, supreme efficacy coupled with its tendency to run riot in rampant
destruction—is the argument which Tennyson, in the tradition of the ancient bards,
most frequently sings in his battle poetry, beginning with his earliest efforts and
culminating in two of his greatest masterpieces.
Some of Tennyson’s earliest efforts are examined in the next chapter, which covers
“The Old Sword,” “TheVale of Bones,” “Persia,” “The Druid’s Prophecies,” “The
Expedition of Nadir Shah into Hindostan,” “God’s Denunciations against PharoahHophra,” “The Old Chieftain,” “Oh!Ye wild winds that roar and rave,” “Babylon,”
and “The Ballad of Oriana.”
Chapter three is a study of the mature Tennyson’s bardic treatment of historical
and legendary battles, in “The Captain,” “Sir Galahad,” “The Tourney,” “Boädicea,”
“Specimen of a Translation of the Iliad,” “Achilles over the Trench,” “Battle of
Brunanburh,” “The Revenge,” and also in the two other Iliad translations from the
Pierpont Morgan manuscript.
The fourth chapter treats Tennyson’s similarly bardic approach towards
contemporary conflicts, including the incendiary poems that made him vulnerable
to charges of “war-mongering.” The selections covered here are “Exhortation to the
Greeks,” “Written during the Convulsions in Spain,” “Britons, Guard Your Own,”
“The Third of February, 1852,” “Hands All Round,” “Suggested by Reading an
Article in a Newspaper,” the “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington,” “The
Charge of the Light Brigade,” “The Defence of Lucknow,” with the “Dedicatory
Poem to the Princess Alice,” and “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava,”
with the “Prologue to General Hamley” and the “Epilogue.”
Maud is the subject of the fifth chapter, and the sixth is devoted to the Idylls of
the King.
Chapter Two
The Early War Poetry
T
HE POEMS STUDIED IN THIS CHAPTER, EXCEPT FOR “THE
BALLAD OF ORIANA,” are attributed to Tennyson as part of his
contribution to the Poems by Two Brothers volume of 1827. Tennyson wrote
forty-nine pieces for this collection, including four which Hallam Tennyson said
were omitted from the 1827 volume “for some forgotten reason” (Ricks, The Poems
of Tennyson 1.xxi). Of these forty-nine, sixteen are about battle, while several others,
especially “Time: An Ode,” and “Mithridates Presenting Berenice with the Cup of
Poison,” are heroic in tone and theme.The most recognized of Tennyson’s perennial
themes, the elegiac and the erotic, are represented here as well, with nine poems on
loss and five on love. Interestingly, many of the battle poems have a strong element of
the elegiac, but the themes of love and war, which Tennyson interweaves to great effect
in Maud and the Idylls of the King, are treated discretely in the Poems by Two Brothers
collection, with war as the preponderant subject matter. Robert Bernard Martin writes
of these early efforts, “Their most noticeable aspect is that the majority derive directly
from his reading” (45).The relatively high incidence in these poems of heroic themes
reflects Tennyson’s high degree of exposure to such themes throughout his formative
years.The Homeric influence of Tennyson’s early reading became one of the permanent
features of his genius, and the artistry with which the mature Tennyson handled martial
material is foreshadowed by this group of early poems.
“The Old Sword” is the first battle poem in the Tennyson canon, and the first to
adumbrate the venerable theme of the sublime but dangerous wrath of heroes. In
Tennyson in Egypt, W.D.Paden builds an elaborate argument on the dubious observation that “In Alfred’s early verses aggression is almost always connected, not with
triumph, but with suffering, despairing revolt, or certain death” (74). Henry Kozicki,
in arguing that this fundamental tenet of Paden’s oft-referenced work is inaccurate,
21
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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
cites “The Old Sword”: “In ‘The Old Sword,’ the poet evokes associations that are
hardly remorseful” (Tennyson and Clio 10).Though Kozicki offers no analysis of the
poem, in his comment he touches upon an important crux. An exegetical fulcrum
of “The Old Sword” is the speaker’s attitude towards the sword: does he tell it to
“Lie there, in slow and still decay” (37) because of his horror at “The purpling tide
of death” (12), which he wishes to be stanched forever, or does he express admiration
for an ancient “relic” (39) which he feels is too sacred to be disturbed? There is no
unequivocal answer, and the ambiguity helps to convey the sense that battle fury is
a mixed blessing.
The phenomenon of battle frenzy is explicit in lines 21–24 of “The Old Sword”:
And who hath cloven his foes in wrath
With thy puissant fire,
And scattered in his perilous path
The victims of his ire?
By traditional means, Tennyson gives the theme even more emphasis. The warriors
in heroic literature often manifest their battle wrath by shouting, and we find this
element in the first stanza of “The Old Sword”: “Yet once around thee swelled the
cry/Of triumph’s fierce delight,/The shoutings of the victory,…” (5–7).When Achilles
demonstrates his supernal force in Book 18 of the Iliad (in a passage which Tennyson
himself translated—see Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 2. 655), he gives three great
cries which drive the Trojans back. Seth Schein comments, “The aegis, the supernatural
fire, and the divinely enhanced shout are miraculous, sublime emblems of Achilles’s
transcendent power and personality” (138). In Book 10 of the Aeneid, Mezentius
calls out three times in a great voice as he prepares to engage Aeneas in combat, and
there are numerous other occasions in both works when shouting accompanies the
fiercest fighting or expresses the joy of triumph, as when Patroclus charges the
Trojans in Book 16 or when Aeneas overthrows Mezentius at the end of Book 10.
In addition, H.R.Ellis Davidson recounts that “The berserks howled when going
into battle, and Cuchulainn was said to scream hideously when he put on his helmet
and prepared to go out to kill his enemies.” The screaming was an indication of the
onset of battle wrath (Myths and Symbols 84).
In the phrase “fierce delight” of line 6, Tennyson expresses the paradox of battle
frenzy, which is experienced as both ferocity and joy. The Greek word “kharme” is
rendered eighteen times as “joy of battle” or “joy of combat” in Robert Fitzgerald’s
translation of the Iliad. “Said to be derived from the idea of ‘zest,’” A.T.Hatto observes
of the Greek term, “its main use apart from ‘battle’ is in phrases of remembering or
not forgetting one’s battle-ardour” (qtd. in Hainsworth 2. 225). It is presumably
Homer’s “kharme” that Tennyson refers to as “delight of battle” in line 16 of “Ulysses.”
Cedric Whitman writes of the Iliad that “The emphasis is on the joy of battle, with
The Early War Poetry
23
its romantic high-heartedness” (Homer and the Heroic Tradition 168). In Homo Ludens,
Johan Huizinga demonstrates emphatically that in heroic societies, “Play is battle
and battle is play.” He speaks of “the indivisibility of play and battle in the archaic
mind,” and emphasizes that “play may be deadly and yet still remain play” (41).The
heroic concept of the joy of battle carried through into medieval,Arthurian literature
and into Renaissance epic, and it continued to flourish in Tennyson’s day. William
Ernest Henley was one of the final torchbearers of the ideal, in poems such as “The
Song of the Sword.”
In line 8 of “The Old Sword,” the speaker’s reference to the “thunders of the fight”
evokes the traditional association between the powers of the storm and the ferocity of
battle.This is also the case with line 12, “The purpling tide of death,” which specifically
brings to mind the River Xanthos episode in Book 21 of the Iliad.
The speaker’s descriptions of the sword’s “sheeny blade,” “glittering edge,”
“gleaming brand,” and “puissant fire” (2, 3, 18, 22) employ the traditional fire/light
image to establish the sword as an icon for the destructive power of battle wrath.The
rust that hides the blade’s former shine is an appropriate symbol for the antiquity
and obsoleteness of battle savagery.When the speaker says that he “would not burnish/
Thy venerable rust” (33–34), it is easy to interpret his refusal as expressing a wish
that the dangerous power of battle fury never again be unleashed. This wish, in
conjunction with the admiring tone of the four previous stanzas (the warriors are
“lordly forms” [19], and they fight “fearlessly, with open hearts” [29]), perfectly
captures the ambivalence of the ancients towards this sublime and powerful but
dangerous and destructive force.
In composing “The Old Sword,” Tennyson may have remembered a passage from
Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. In Canto 3, stanza 44, a passage replete with
traditionally heroic imagery, Byron’s speaker describes “the madmen who have made
men mad,” whom he equates with “all unquiet things/Which stir too strongly the
soul’s secret springs” (3.43. 1, 4–5):
Their breath is agitation, and their life
A storm whereon they ride, to sink at last,
And yet so nursed and bigoted to strife,
That should their days, surviving perils past,
Melt to calm twilight, they feel overcast
With sorrow and supineness, and so die;
Even as a flame unfed, which runs to waste
With its own flickering, or a sword laid by,
Which eats into itself, and rusts ingloriously.
The simile of the rusting sword is perfectly compatible with the significance of the
sword in Tennyson’s poem, and Byron’s use of the “flame unfed” in a related analogy is consistent with the fire and light imagery in “The Old Sword.” We may think
24
The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
of Tennyson’s rusting sword as eating into itself, thereby representing the selfdestructive potential of the fire of battle wrath, the tendency of furor to push on “to
the very end of its course, on to its own abolition and the obliteration of the very
values it engendered” (Bespaleff, qtd. in Schein 84).When the inner fires of naturally
combative men find no outlet in warfare, they may burst out in acts of criminal
violence, or in self-destructive behavior of various kinds. The rusting sword may
represent this tendency, a tendency the poems speaker presumably regrets (in view
of his admiration for the feats of the sword’s former owner) but still finds preferable
to the horrors of warfare.
The speaker’s reluctance to disturb the antique sword may be attributed to his
reverence for it as a heroic artifact.As Henry Kozicki (Tennyson and Clio 10) recognizes,
the narrator does speak admiringly of the derring-do in which the sword was involved.
The speaker takes a heroic stance in his esteem for valor as a moral virtue: it is the
“dastards” cheek that grew pale in the fight (14), while the dark-eyed warriors who
closed fearlessly are described as “heroes” (31, 29, 28). In On Heroes, Hero-Worship,
and the Heroic in History, Carlyle emphasizes that “It is an everlasting duty, valid in our
day as in that [of the old Norsemen], the duty of being brave. Valour is still value” (31–
32, original emphasis). We may choose to see the romantic tone of the battle
descriptions in the first four stanzas as continuing into the fifth, in which case the
speaker’s wish that the sword “Lie there, in slow and still decay” (37) is attributable
to his feeling that the battle brand should not be removed from the scene of its
glorious exploits (this interpretation presupposes that the sword is lying on the site
of an ancient battlefield). The speaker’s acquiescence in the sword’s fate of being
“Unfamed in olden rhyme” (38) could well be a touch of irony: though the sword is
“unfamed” in olden rhyme, it is “famed” in nineteenth-century rhyme, thanks to
Tennyson’s poem. Even if we feel the tone of the fifth stanza to be consistent with
the admiring stance of the preceding four, however, there is no escaping the tragic
contrast between the fire and light of the sword’s days of action and its current state
of “darkness and of dust” (36).
If we read the fifth stanza as a recoil from the horrors of violence evoked by the
sword, we find that the poem expresses ambivalence about the destructiveness of
battle fury. If we feel that the speaker’s attitude is consistent throughout, we find the
tragic undertones of what he says undermining our empathy with his admiration. If
we are uncertain whether the fifth stanza expresses veneration or aversion, we find
in the poem an inherent ambiguity about the wrath of heroes. In any case, the great
heroic theme is wrapped in an equivocality that is perfectly appropriate, considering
the ancient emphasis on the double-edged nature of “puissant fire.”
An alternative way of reading the poem is to see the sword as approximating
Thor’s hammer. In Gods and Myths of Northern Europe, H.R.Ellis Davidson
discusses the close connections between the cross (which often is iconographically
twinned with the sword), the swastika, and the hammer of Thor as religious
The Early War Poetry
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sym-bols (80–84). Though this may be an instance of the young Tennyson’s
writing more allusively than he knew, the images of the “thunders of the fight”
and of “thy puissant fire” are capable of calling to mind the Norse god, of
whom Davidson writes, “The famous weapon of Thor was…the symbol of the
destructive power of the storm, and of fire from heaven” (Gods and Myths 84).
“TheVale of Bones” is another early poem in which a souvenir moves the speaker
to consider both the glory and the horror of warfare. In this case, it is the bleached
bones of dead warriors that elicit the meditation.As in “The Old Sword,” the speakers
response to the remains of battle has undertones of ambivalence. Here, Tennyson
uses traditional imagery to draw subtle parallels between the inexorable and enduring
powers of the natural world and the fleeting ferocity of charging warriors.
Kenneth M.McKay, in Many Glancing Colours, pays a commendable amount of
attention to “TheVale of Bones,” and he makes several good observations; for example,
“The stanzas vary in length…reflecting, with a terminal refrain composed of variations
on ‘this Vale of Bones,’ the narrator’s deepening consciousness” (21). He recognizes
“the coherence, clarity, and power of [Tennyson’s] expression” in the poem (23).
Though McKay’s treatment of “The Vale of Bones” is uniquely thoughtful and
thorough, it nonetheless neglects much of the poems artistry and fails to appreciate
its heroic ideals. He says that “the full horror and futility of the glory emerges only
at the end,” and that “the theme of ‘The Vale of Bones’ is, in effect, the illusions of
youth” (20). McKay notices a “general parallel in structure between ‘The Vale of
Bones’ and ‘Tintern Abbey,’ in so far as both turn on a disparity between past and
present within a constant nature, though Wordsworth realizes a continuity where
the narrator of Tennyson’s poem realizes the full horror of disparity” (21). “In a
brilliant variation of the refrain,” McKay continues, “in which he ironically echoes
the earlier ‘I deemed, when gazing proudly there…,’ the narrator comments: ‘I
dreamed not on this Vale of Bones!’ (97–104). Judgment relates to the proud glory
and the dream to the bones, but the disparity is characterized by horror” (22). McKay
fails to acknowledge that the resolution of the speakers transient horror is a large
part of the poem’s fascination. “Time past and present are both real,” McKay says,
“but the narrator of The Vale of Bones,’ unlike Wordsworth in ‘Tintern Abbey,’ has
no theory or myth of continuity by which to see them meaningfully united” (23).
The narrator does in fact have a myth of continuity, and it is the same one found in
“Tintern Abbey”: memory and the unity of nature.
Christopher Ricks cites John Leyden’s “Ode on Visiting Flodden” and Scott’s
The Lady of the Lake as influences on the “The Vale of Bones” (The Poems of Tennyson
1.108), but a more likely source is Ezekiel, considering what happens to the bones
there: “The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the
Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones,…” The
Lord commands Ezekiel to “Prophesy upon these bones” (37.1, 4), whereupon the
bones rise up, regain their missing flesh and come to life again. In a sense, the speaker
26
The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
of “The Vale of Bones” also performs a resurrection, bringing the ossified remains of
the warriors back to life as he recalls their splendor. “The eyeless socket, dark and
dull,/The hideous grinning of the skull,/Are sights which Memory disowns,” the
poem declares (109–111). Memory, in particular the commemoration of the warriors
in Tennyson’s poem, can sustain the glory of the battle in spite of time’s dissolution.
Memory triumphs over time and keeps the full splendor of the warriors alive.
One of the most characteristic themes of heroic literature is the desire to win
lasting honor by having one’s deeds immortalized in bardic song. In his chapter on
Homer in The Greeks, H.D.F.Kitto remarks, “The only real hope of immortality was
that one’s fame might live on in song” (60). Walter Kaufmann, writing on “Homer
and the Birth of Tragedy” in his book Tragedy and Philosophy, agrees that “[t]here is no
immortality and no reward for heroism, except the glory of being remembered in
some great poem…. [T]he best a man can hope for is to be remembered evermore
in poetry” (161–62). According to H.R.Ellis Davidson, the same ideal prevailed in
Old Norse thought: “The emphasis in the myths is the same as that in the heroic
poetry, on the importance not of holding on to life at any cost, but of acting in a way
which will be long remembered when life is over” (215–16). When Tennyson’s
narrator exclaims that Memory disowns the ghastly emblems of Stern Dissolution,
he is asserting the immortality of the gallant band of heroes he once knew. Walter
Kaufmann’s comment on the Iliad is pertinent to “The Vale of Bones”: “And while
the atmosphere of the Iliad is drenched with death, the first great tragic poem of
world literature is also a song of triumph because it grants the dead their wish for
immortal glory in song” (162).
It is possible to read the phrase “Memory disowns” as indicating the speaker’s
obliviousness to, or his willful denial of, the grisly side of war, a mistake which
Tennyson never, or at most rarely, made. His broodings on the subject in “The Old
Sword” and “The Vale of Bones” are enough to undermine Christopher Ricks’s
claim that “Tennyson is always imaginatively sensitive to splintering weapons, but
seldom to splintering skulls” (Tennyson 248n.). If we interpret the final lines of “The
Vale of Bones” as an attempt by Tennyson’s narrator to ignore the macabre result of
the battle, the poem’s earlier, lingering description of it absolves Tennyson himself
from charges of a similar insensitivity. In this interpretation Tennyson’s use of a
speaker who is self-deluded about the grim realities of warfare would help to belie
Ricks’s specious allegation while enhancing the artistry of the poem.
By means of parallel imagery, Tennyson makes significant connections between
his descriptions of the natural scene and of the battle scene. In line 11, the gale is
described as “dull;” the same adjective characterizes the skulls’ eye sockets in line
109.The “cries” and the “thrilling groans” (67) of the battle recall the “shrill owlet’s
desolate wail” (17), the “moans” of the wind (9), the “wild goat’s cry” (71), and the
“screaming of the startled hern” (74). The “brows” of the warriors (45, 88) are
mirrored in the “brow” of the mountain (22).The mountains are “rioting” (33), as if
The Early War Poetry
27
taking part in the battle themselves, and are “sternly piled” (33), suggesting their
susceptibility to, or implication in, the “Stern Dissolution” (108) which wastes the
“piled” (87) bodies of the warriors.The “torrent’s echoing thunder” (24) is echoed
by the “thunder of the combat” (93), and the fountain, like the “rioting” mountains,
is described as if active in the battle. It is “brawling” (29).The Vale’s “midnight dew”
(36) becomes the “red dew” of blood from the battle (77). Tennyson’s strategy in
drawing these parallels would seem to be dictated by the heroic tradition, in which
battle action is likened to the forces of nature.
His description of the charge is paradigmatic in its display of Homeric motifs.
The fire/light image is salient: the warriors’ eyes “flash,” (50), their swords “blazed”
(52), the forces collide in a “fiery shock” (63). The reference to the “wild winds
blowing” (58) exemplifies the Homeric device of using storm imagery in the
description of battle.The adjective “wild” relates to the difficulty of controlling the
rampaging natural power of battle fury.Tennyson’s artistry is evident in his use of the
“wild winds blowing” during the battle as a counterpoint to the “dreary nightbreeze” (9) which prevails as the speaker contemplates the battle’s aftermath. The
“thunder of the combat” (93) contributes to the storm imagery, as does the
“tumultuous crash” (49) of the fighting.The “yell of triumphs voice” (83–84) recalls
the shouting in the Iliad and the Aeneid, and the metaphor of lines 85–86, “When
battle’s brazen throat no more/Raised its annihilating roar,” is possibly a deliberate
echo of Aeneid 1.293–96, in which Furor is symbolized by a roaring lion.The raven
in line 38, in addition to its appropriateness here as the traditional prophet of doom,
has ties to the Anglo-Saxon heroic tradition. H.R.Ellis Davidson writes, “The raven,
together with the wolf, is mentioned in practically all the descriptions of a battle in
Old English poetry, and both were regarded as the creatures of the war god, Odin”
(Gods and Myths 65).
Tennyson emphasizes the pride of the warriors, mentioning it in lines 48, 57, 94,
and 98. Pride was a characteristic virtue of the heroic age. “For Aristotle and the
tragic poets,” writes Walter Kaufmann, “pride was no sin but an essential ingredient
of heroism” (63). “All the heroes in the Iliad are proud,” Kaufmann observes, “and
frequently state expressly how they are better than this man or that; and Achilles
does not mind saying that he is the best of all, which he is according to Homer, and
there is no harm in his saying it” (142, original emphasis).
Tennyson’s mention of the “maddening strife” in line 64 makes a clear connection
between the image patterns of the heroic tradition and their traditional referent,
battle wrath.The real artistry of the poem lies in the way it suggests the para-doxical
nature of the wrath.As we have seen,Tennyson goes to some lengths to draw parallels
between the warriors and the natural setting of the battle. This connection is
manifested when the forces of nature figuratively lend their power to the warriors
in the form of glorious battle fury. On the other hand, the poem graphically
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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
demonstrates the disastrous potential of furor when it shows us how these same
powers of nature have had their ghastly way with the soldiers’ remains.
The interaction of man and nature is suggested also by the whimsy of lines 20
and 88. In line 20, “I dimly pace theVale of Bones,” the narrators pacing is described
curiously. Exactly what it means to pace “dimly” is unclear; evidently the narrator’s
pacing has acquired the dimness of the vale. Nature’s influence on man is apparently
reciprocated in line 88, where the warriors’ brows are “with noble dust defiled.” It is
unclear how dust can be noble, unless it has acquired the nobility of the warriors’
brows.
We can find the dangerously attractive nature of battle wrath characterized in
greater detail if we read the first ten lines of the poem symbolically. In line 2, the
moon is “riding,” like the mounted warriors, and it is “dark-red,” which suggests
blood. If we take the moon for a symbol of the bloodied soldiers, the other elements
of the poem’s first section work together with it to form a small allegory that signifies
the speakers conflict.The moonbeams are the varying effect of the warriors’ bat-tle
action. Lines 3–4 represent the joy and sublimity of battle at times, while 5–6 represent
the ghastly destructiveness of battle which is more evident at other times (the castle
wall is “ruined,” and its whiteness evokes the bones).The “partial splendour” of line
7 suggests the equivocalness of glory and the fury it inspires. The power and the
glory are only partially splendid when viewed through the intervening years that
have altered the scene. The pines are a symbol of time: the “blackening fir” (12)
uprears its “form of many years” (16, my emphasis).The moans of the “dreary nightbreeze” (9) represent the deaths of the warriors killed in the battle. The narrator
“hears” the moans through the pines or the intervening years.
Lines 97–104 recall Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I, 5.4.89ff., where Prince Hal,
perfunctorily elegizing Percy Hotspur, testifies that
When that this body did contain a spirit,
A kingdom for it was too small a bound;
But now two paces of the vilest earth
Is room enough. (89–92)
Tennyson evokes Hal’s elegy, but slightly alters its emphasis:
I deemed, when gazing proudly there
Upon the fixed and haughty air
That marked each warrior’s bloodless face,
Ye would not change the narrow space
Which each cold form of breathless clay
Then covered, as on earth ye lay,
For realms, for sceptres or for thrones—(97–103)
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Hotspur’s two paces of earth may be enough to hold him, but we know that he
would exchange it if he could, whereas the warriors in Tennyson’s poem are deemed
content in their narrow space because they are covered in glory. The dissolution of
time, however, which turns a heroic tableau horrific, threatens the narrator’s idealistic
view: “I dreamed not on this Vale of Bones!” (104). Now that “years have thrown
their veil between” (105), the grotesquerie of the “vale” has become a “veil” which
can obscure the unbloodied face of battlefield glory, but through which the memory
of the speaker can penetrate.
In “The Vale of Bones” Tennyson is very much aware, as were the ancient bards
that preceded him, of the grim destructiveness of war, but he immortalizes in song
the glory of the warriors and the poem ends on a defiant note.The power of nature
may have rendered the battle site ghastly over time, but natures power once manifested
itself there as a fiery clash of intrepid warriors, and the memory of their glory
transcends the pile of bones. “What lapse of time shall sweep away/The memory of
that gallant day…?” (55–56).The poem’s description of the battle is in the past tense,
but it is the most vivid and vital passage. Though ghastliness is an inescapable factor
in warfare, it is the glory that Memory keeps alive. “The Vale of Bones” accords with
the Homeric tradition in its ambivalence towards the destructive power of wrath
and also in its memorializing of battlefield heroics.
As does “The Vale of Bones,” “Persia” features a pattern of subtle connections
between a natural setting and the fieriness of conflict. For its full impact the poem
depends on the readers recognition of traditional battle imagery in Tennyson’s
description of the landscape.
Kenneth M.McKay takes a serious look at “Persia,” the artistry of which he
seriously underestimates. He sees the poem as “a lament for the past” and “also a
celebration of greatness, such that the triumph of Cyrus is echoed in Iran’s
subjugation by Alexander. Greatness is overthrown by greatness, and, if the
lamentation is felt, it is also glorious” (23). Echoes more significant than those
noted by McKay are found in the last part of the poem, where the panorama
echoes the victory of Alexander and adumbrates the impending overthrow of his
Parthian conquerors by the Persians. The panoramic conclusion also recalls the
description of the Parthians in Paradise Regained (PR), thereby hinting at their
eventual defeat. Latent in the land of the Persian Empire and in its people is the
same power which the Greeks and then the Parthians temporarily exert over
them. McKay mentions that Tennyson’s use of the extended sentence is “obviously
reminiscent of Milton” (23), but completely neglects the important epigraph. “In
‘Persia,’” he writes, “the sense of unity is part of the artistic coherence of the
piece; the woe issues from the recognition that it is no more” (24–25). Here
McKay misses the real key to the poem, which is that the woe is only ostensible,
that in its expression a future victory is subtly foreshadowed.
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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
An intimate connection between the Persian people and their land is established
immediately: “Land of bright eye and lofty brow!” (1). Still addressing the land, the
speaker asks,
Oh! lives there yet within thy soul
Ought of the fire of him who led
Thy troops, and bade thy thunder roll
O’er lone Assyria’s crownless head? (13–16)
The land has a soul, and the imagery suggests that it is indeed a fiery, combative one.
The references to “sunny” in line 3, to the “immortal Titan’s beams” in line 56, and
to “hot” in line 65 are all subtly evocative of fire.
From the beginning of the poem the descriptions are somewhat deceptive, just as
the temporary prostration of the Persians is deceptive.The “gale” of “balmy breath” in
line 2 would seem to suggest a mild breeze, but “gale” actually means “a strong current
of air,” or, as Webster specifies, “a wind from 32 to 63 miles per hour.” A gale is the kind
of wind associated with a storm, and as such the gale has a connection with the
“thunder” of Cyrus’s battle power.Tennyson’s assertion that in this land, “every gale is
balmy breath/Of incense from some sunny flower” (2–3) could be taken as a hyperbolic
accolade: the Persians are so heroic that storms (and the battle fury they traditionally
symbolize) are to them as the sweet and soothing scent of blossoms. In any case, the
gale carries the perfume of flowers. The profusion of flower imagery in lines 3–12
would seem to suggest an atmosphere of ease and luxuriance, but behind the flower
imagery, as behind the Persians’ façade of abjectness, is a hint of aggression.The context
of the epigraph gives “flower” a military connotation:
He look’t and saw what numbers numberless
The City gates outpour’d, light armed Troops
In coats of Mail and military pride;
In Mail thir horses clad, yet fleet and strong,
Prancing their riders bore, the flower and choice
Of many Provinces from bound to bound; (PR 3.310–15)
With flowers suggesting military force in Tennyson’s Miltonic source, it is reasonable
to read the phrase in lines 11–12 of Tennyson’s poem, “crowns it with a diadem/ Of
blossoms,” as foreshadowing the Persians’ eventual retaking of the crown.
The imagery associated with Alexander partakes of the heroic tradition and clearly
indicates the battle wrath of the Greeks in taking Iran. In line 19 Macedonia is
described as “stormy,” and Alexander’s heroic character is emphasized in line 23,
where we learn that he was “doubly proud.” “In madness” he led his warriors (28),
and Persepolis, which was burned as Homer’s heroes had burned Troy, was
“Encompassed with its frenzied foes” (33).
The Early War Poetry
31
Persia’s star may have set (36), but a star “sets” only to “rise” again, and the last
line of the poem, “Whence cynics railed at human pride” (74), suggests disdain of
the “doubly proud” Alexander. The second half of the poem describes four rivers
of the Persian Empire. Cyrus had once made Persia’s battle thunder “roll” (15),
and Tennyson’s description of the Indus River, which is “rolled” (51), would seem
to hark back to this Thor-like image. Christopher Ricks notes that in the original
draft Tennyson also described the Hyssus River in line 69 as “rolling” (The Poems
of Tennyson 1.116n.). The Indus is a “stream of gold” (52), and the Ganga flows
beneath Hyperion’s “golden orient ray” (58), images which recall the “pomp of
gold” (31) of old Persepolis and the fire of the frenzied foes in which it was
consumed. The “shield-like kuphars” on the Euphrates (46) have a martial
suggestiveness, as do the “kings of chivalry” for which Trebizonde is renowned
(68). The Euxine “whelms/ The mariner in the heaving tide” (71–72), a storm
image which, together with the gale of line 2, surrounds and outweighs the reference
to “stormy Macedonia” in line 19.
The military connotations of the river descriptions are enhanced if read in
conjunction with the passage from Paradise Regained which supplies “Persia” with its
epigraph. Like a river, the Parthians “outpour’d” from the city gates (3.311). Their
war horses are “fleet and strong” (3.313), just as the Euphrates in “Persia” is “swift
and strong” (45). Milton refers to “rivers proud” (334) and mentions the “military
pride” (3.312) of the Parthians. He also uses storm imagery in his depiction of the
onslaught. The Parthians fire a “sleet of arrowy showers” (324). The passage from
Paradise Regained is especially appropriate as a source for a Tennyson battle poem, in
that the passage, according to Merritt Y. Hughes, contains Virgilian and Homeric
echoes. “The entire scene,” Hughes comments, “…resembles Virgil’s picture of the
advancing Trojan forces (Aen. XI, 601–2)” (512).
By first equating the land of the Persian empire with the Persian people, and then
by drawing parallels between this same landscape and the fighting qualities of the
Greeks and the Parthians (as portrayed in Paradise Regained),Tennyson subtly suggests
that the fighting fury of the Persians is equal to that of their empire’s conquerors,
and he thus foreshadows the eventual victory of the Persians over the Parthians, who
had previously conquered the Greeks. Alexander may have been “doubly proud,”
but the Persians would double their glory in defeating the conquerors of those who
had conquered themselves. In his panoramic description of the Persian lands,Tennyson
uses imagery that hints at the inner fires required for such a doubly glorious overthrow.
The reader who is alert to this imagery will find in Tennyson’s panorama an affirmative
answer to the apparently rhetorical and despairing question of lines 13–16, and in so
doing will enjoy an aesthetic experience com-parable to the reading of “The Lotos
Eaters,” where the eventual departure of Odysseus’s crew is subtly foreshadowed in
their declaration to remain.
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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
The volatility of battle furor is attributable in part to its being a force of nature,
and nature is cyclical. Like “Persia,” “The Druid’s Prophecies” concerns the temporary
victory and foreseeable defeat of a conquering nation, in this case Rome. In “The
Druid’s Prophecies” the conqueror’s forces are associated with nature by means of
traditional battle imagery, but the Roman hegemony is foreseen as only temporary
because it will conform to nature’s patterns of alternation by rising and falling.
Tennyson likens the Romans’ battle furor to a force of nature by means of the
most conspicuous image pattern of the heroic tradition, fire and light. For example,
in the first line we find “flame,” in the third swords are “gleaming,” in the sixth
helmets are “bright,” in the fifteenth Rome’s “sun of conquest blazes.” The reference
in line 8 to the “maddening fight” makes the traditional tenor of the symbolism
explicit. Animal imagery also figures in the description of battle. The trumpets are
“braying,” (8), an expression Christopher Ricks compares to the braying of the
clashing arms and armor in Paradise Lost 6.209–10 (The Poems of Tennyson 1.117n.),
but which more obviously evokes a donkey. Rome’s “haughty” (and therefore typically
heroic) power is represented by the “eagles” of its standards (14).The eagle imagery
extends to line 22, where the prophet refers to the “wings” of Nero’s palace, and to
line 57, where its connotation of pride is mitigated as the Romans are foreseen
“flying” before Fingal’s men (57).
Tennyson’s references to the “sun of conquest” (15) and to the “Five brilliant
stars” (44) are particularly apt, because the contending powers in the poem, like the
heavenly bodies, rise and fall intermittently. Ricks notes that “The Druid’s Prophecies,”
along with Tennyson’s other “prophetic denunciations,” derives from Gray’s “The
Bard” (The Poems of Tennyson 1.117). In the last stanza of “The Bard,” a Celtic prophet
likens the rise and fall of nations to solar vicissitudes:
Fond impious man, think’st thou yon sanguine cloud,
Raised by thy breath, has quenched the orb of day?
To-morrow he repairs the golden flood,
And warms the nations with redoubled ray. (135–38)
Tennyson’s Druid prophet does much the same thing, using imagery that implicitly
compares the vacillating fortunes of Mona and Rome to the rising and setting of the
sun. With the onset of battle the prophet refers to Mona’s “sacred oaks…reared on
high” (2), then he implores her to enjoy a brief moment of glory in opposing the
Romans. Though Mona’s “day is brief” (10), she should “exalt” her torches and
“raise” her voices (9). After Mona’s subjugation, she “bends” in grief (12) while
Rome “raises” her eagle standards (13). Though temporarily on the “pinnacle of
splendour” (29), Nero “shall fall” (31). A naked sword is suspended high above
him (37–38), presaging his replacement by “the five good emperors” (Tennyson’s
note, Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 1.117), whose stars “shall brightly rise” (44).
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The dastardly Commodus makes his victims “bow” (46), but he himself shall be
laid “low” (48), as will Pertinax and Didius Julian (50). Severus is “glorious to his
country’s fall!” (56). Rome’s monarchs will fall like the winter leaves (65–66—
representing another kind of natural cycle) and she will “bend” beneath the power
of the conquering Norsemen (72).Though “She rears her domes of high renown”
(74), the “fiery Goths shall fiercely trample/The grandeur of her temples down!”
(75–76). Rome “sinks to dust” (77) and “bows to earth!” (84).
When Rome’s “sun of conquest” sinks, her empire will naturally grow dark:
“Yet soon shall come her darkening hour!” (16).This image is reinforced in line 78,
where the prophet mentions her “dark despair.” The darkness of the empire’s setting
is an appropriate counterpoint to the abundance of light imagery associated with
her zenith; for example: “glory” (17), “glare of gold” (24), “pinnacle of splendour”
(29), “dazzling” (43), “brilliant stars” (44), “brightly rise” (44).
“The Druid’s Prophecies” is remarkable not only for exhibiting Tennyson’s
masterful employment of Homeric imagery, but also for introducing into his battle
canon one of its most important and personal heroic themes: the power of the bard.
The bard’s importance as a memorialist of heroic deeds is discussed above, but in
heroic societies the bard was considered more than just an historian. He was placed
on a par with the heroic warrior; he was believed to be inspired by the same divine
frenzy, and his achievements were deemed equal to those of the warrior. “Odin…
was the god of poets and warriors alike,” writes Francis Huxley (245). H.R.Ellis
Davidson elaborates:
The Old Norse adjective óðr, from which Oðinn, the later form of his name in
Scandinavia, must be derived, bears a similar meaning: ‘raging, furious, intoxicated’,
and can be used to signify poetic genius and inspiration. Such meanings are most
appropriate for the name of a god who not only inspired the battle fury of the
berserks, but also obtained the mead of inspiration for the Aesir, and is associated
with the ecstatic trance of the seer. (Gods and Myths 147)
In the Icelandic sagas, heroes often celebrate their valorous feats by reciting their
own verses, sometimes interrupting the combat scenes to do so. Nietzsche martializes
the ancient poets in his claim that the Greek writers were as combative as the
warriors they celebrated. In “Homer’s Contest,” he declares that “the Greek knows
the artist only as engaged in a personal fight” (original emphasis), and in Human, AllToo-Human, he states that “The Greek artists…wrote in order to triumph” (Portable
37, 53). The Greeks rewarded the Olympic champions in poetry with the same
laurel wreathes worn by champions in boxing and wrestling. Carlyle’s On Heroes,
Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History features chapters on “The Hero as Poet” and
on “The Hero as Man of Letters,” and he refers to poetry as “the Heroic of Speech”
(90), sung by “the Heroic of Speakers” (91).Virgil, in Book 6 of the Aeneid, refers to
34
The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
the poet Musaeus as “the hero” (Mandelbaum 154). In Traditions of Heroic and Epic
Poetry, J.B.Hainsworth states, “In the tenser heroic societies, words have the status of
deeds” (224).
Unlike Nero, who “Can…not see the poignard gory,/with his best heart’s-blood
deeply dyed” (19–20), the Druid prophet has an inspired vision of the eventual
repulse of Rome. Just as Tennyson’s speaker “resurrects” the dead warriors in “The
Vale of Bones,” the Druid’s prophecy creates the situation he desires as he foretells
justice for Mona. Appropriately, the speaker frequently uses the present tense to
describe these forthcoming events.The prophet’s frenzied inspiration eternalizes the
overthrow of the Romans, giving the action substance before it occurs by embodying
it in words. The timelessness is patent to the reader, for whom the prophecy of the
future has become a commemoration of the past. It is in this aspect of the poem that
“The Druid’s Prophecies” reveals its close kinship with Gray’s “The Bard.” In “The
Bard,” the speaker and his fellow bards (who are all dead except for him) are “Avengers
of their native land” (46). By foreseeing England’s travails, they inscribe them in the
web of England’s destiny.Their vision literally determines the fate of their enemies.
Significantly for Tennyson’s poem, in “The Bard” nature is involved in Cambria’s
revenge:
“Hark, how each giant oak and desert cave
Sighs to the torrent’s awful voice beneath!
O’er thee, O King! their hundred arms they wave,
Revenge on thee in hoarser murmurs breathe; (23–26)
Another connection between the two poems is Tennyson’s use of “braying” in line 8,
which recalls the “battle bray” (83) of “The Bard.”
In composing “The Druid’s Prophecies,” Tennyson apparently owed his own
inspired frenzy to the Homeric muses, whose mother was Mnemosyne, the goddess
of memory. In the Druid’s catalogue of future events,Tennyson recalls his reading in
the classics. Much of the prophecy follows the account of Suetonius in his Lives of
the Caesars. It testifies to the richness of Tennyson’s own vision that he bases a Druid’s
prophecy of the future defeat of Rome on the retrospect of a Roman historian.
Battle furor is once again Tennyson’s subject in “The Expedition of Nadir Shah
into Hindostan.” The Shah’s “expedition” is in fact portrayed as a battle rampage, and
Tennyson’s depiction is replete with the traditional battle imagery of fire and light
and other forces of nature. The potential drawbacks of heroic wrath are implicit in
the historical subtext of the poem.
The emphasis in “The Expedition of Nadir Shah” is on the turmoil of battle as a
natural force. Nadir’s troops are likened to a swarm of locusts (1), to a forest fire (2),
and to “a thousand dark streams” rushing down a mountain (17). In the last stanza,
the cries of the Indians blend with the wind (21–22). Hindostan’s glory is a star, and
The Early War Poetry
35
its fame a flower (23–24). As we might expect, the description of furor involves the
symbols of fire and light: “flames” (2), “glare” (3), “sparkle” (4), “glory” (13), “splendour”
(13), “star” (23). In the first three stanzas the descriptions of Nadir’s men are evocative
of birds.Their standards and sabers are sparkling “in air” (4), the vulture is “behind”
them (6), as though they were all flying in formation, and the earth trembles “beneath”
them (9). Even their accompanying “spirits” and “demons” (7) have wings. In contrast,
the Indians are “bowed to the dust of the plain” (11). Tennyson depicts the Persian
advance with images that evoke three of the plagues in Exodus.The “host of locusts”
(1) recalls the plague of those same creatures, the “gloom of the wings” (8)
approximates the plague of darkness, and “all Delhi runs red with the blood of her
slain” (12) suggests the plague of blood. In keeping with the heroic belief in battle
ecstasy as a divine force, Tennyson here aligns the natural powers of battle with the
God of the Old Testament. Tennyson undoubtedly had the Old Testament in mind,
because in his own note to the poem (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 1.122) he cites an
allusion to Joel 2.3 in lines 19–20: “The land like an Eden before them is fair,/But
behind them a wilderness dreary and bare.” These lines show that the power of
Nadir’s men is like nature’s own power to destroy the landscape.
The volatile, self-destructive potential of battle wrath is reflected in the historical
aftermath of Nadir Shah’s victory. Just as Shakespeare’s Henry V has poignant
undertones for the viewer who weighs the glorious victories of Henry against the
ensuing reversals which the play does not depict, “The Expedition of Nadir Shah”
has poignant, or perhaps only paradoxical, undertones for the reader who realizes
that Nadir Shah was not ultimately a victor in life. His battle wrath was doubleedged; the savage qualities that made him a conqueror eventually drove his own
men to assassinate him. As Christopher Ricks notes, Nadir was the last of the great
Mohammedan conquerors of India (The Poems of Tennyson 1.120).
Tennyson’s artistry in this relatively short poem goes well beyond his handling of
Homeric themes. His use of assonance (for example, “host” and “locusts” in line 1,
and “destruction” and “rush” in line 5) and alliteration (“the flames of the forest” in
line 2, and “standard and sabre that sparkle” in line 4) combine with vigorous rhythms
to enhance the poem’s rousing tone. Line 5 ends with an onomatopoeic flourish,
while line 17 is appropriately mellifluous. Its “th” and “s” sounds make it “flow” like
the streams it describes, an effect counterpointed by the line that follows it. “With
the fife and the horn and the war-beating gong” (18) is remarkably staccato, echoing
the sense of its content.
Where Tennyson’s master touch is most evident is in his selection of the poem’s
two epigraphs. The first quotation, the opening passage from Racine’s Alexandre le
Grand, claims that Alexander’s power seems to force the sky to champion his defense,
a conceit appropriate to Tennyson’s theme of battle frenzy as a force of nature. In
Alexandre le Grand Alexander conquers India, making Racine’s play espe-cially
pertinent to “The Expedition of Nadir Shah.” Line 6 of the play reads, “Voyez de
36
The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
toutes parts les trônes mis en cendre,” an image that fits well with line 2 of “The
Expedition of Nadir Shah.”
The second epigraph also relates to the connection between natural forces and
battle. It is taken from Claudian’s account in In Eutropium of the destruction of the
landscape when Eutropius repulsed the Huns from Rome.The word “Squallent” in
the second epigraph has an ambiguous meaning. According to Alfred Carleton
Andrews, the word (which he renders “squalent”) means that “the fields either ‘were
left stubble’ from wholesale burning and cutting of the grain by the barbarians or
‘were left uncared for’ because the farmers were frightened away” (51n.). The
possibility that the fields were burned is especially relevant to Tennyson’s poem,
considering the flames of line 2.
The passage from In Eutropium that Tennyson cites contains certain paradoxes
which are heightened when considered in conjunction with “The Expedition of
Nadir Shah.” Claudian, his account colored by his hatred of Eutropius, describes the
resounding victory of Eutropius over the Huns as if it were a defeat. Tennyson
recounts a victory that would soon turn to a defeat because of the very savagery
depicted in the poem. Claudian repeatedly derides Eutropius for being the effeminate
eunuch that he was.The issue of effeminacy provides a connection with Tennyson’s
poem, where the feminine image of a cup is associated with the Indians (14), while
the Shah’s forces are heralded by the phallic images of fife and horn and war-beating
gong (18). In Claudian, the effeminate eunuch is, ironically, the conquering hero,
while the overly masculine qualities of Tennyson’s conquering hero would eventually
cause his defeat.
Christopher Ricks (The Poems of Tennyson 1.122) compares line 23, “For the star
of thy glory is blasted and wan,” to Paradise Lost 10. 412, “the blasted Starrs lookt
wan” (it would also seem valid to compare line 6 with PL 10. 273ff).The context of
line 412 in Book 10 of Paradise Lost is exquisitely appropriate for “The Expedition
of Nadir Shah.” Beginning at line 410, Satan’s offspring, Sin and Death, descend to
earth, on a mission from Satan to rule there. By inducing Man to fall, an event which
occurs immediately prior to this scene, Satan’s forces experience a temporary victory
but an ultimate defeat, just as Nadir’s forces gain only a temporary victory over India
in Tennyson’s poem.The “spirits of death, and the demons of wrath” (7) of Tennyson’s
poem are reminiscent of Satan’s offspring, and the Shah’s destruction of a land “like
an Eden” (19–20) recalls Satan’s temporarily successful expedition.
“The Expedition of Nadir Shah” demands of its readers a broad contextual
awareness, but it amply rewards those who acknowledge its exacting artistry.Tennyson’s
use of Homeric imagery combines with his skillful interweaving of epi-graph and
allusion in a poem that is vigorous and rousing but also monitory with regard to the
pitfalls of warlike wrath.
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37
“Gods Denunciations against Pharaoh-Hophra, or Apries” has a biblical source,
Ezekiel 29–30 (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 1.135), and, significantly enough, the
biblical God that inspires Tennyson is the angry, warlike Jehovah of the Old Testament.
Tennyson lends a heroic dimension to the biblical “wrath of God.” The emphasis in
“Gods Denunciations,” from a Homeric standpoint, is on battle wrath as a
manifestation of divinity.The poem is an admonition to recognize the transcendent,
supra-personal nature of the warrior’s volatile power.We learn immediately that this
is what Pharaoh has failed to do, and that this failure will prove his undoing.
The River Xanthos episode in Book 21 of the Iliad associates a raging river with
the rampant force of battle wrath. Tennyson’s source passage in Ezekiel makes a
similarly metaphorical use of the Nile.Tennyson’s “beast” (1) is in Ezekiel a crocodile,
“the great dragon that lieth in the midst of his rivers” (29.3). Tennyson follows
Ezekiel in likening the Pharaoh to a “beast of the flood” (1) who believes that his
power, symbolized by the river, is self-sustaining. Heroic literature recognizes that
the sublime ferocity of the berserk is not his own to command. As “The Druid’s
Prophecies” emphasizes, this feral power is like the cycles of nature in its propensity
to come and go at its own behest. In the first stanza of “God’s Denunciations,” God,
using nature imagery, ominously reminds Pharaoh that real power is not self-sufficient
but self-transcendent and transient. Also in the first stanza we find the first instance
of the familiar fire/light symbol in the “sun’s burning ray” (4).
The remainder of “God’s Denunciations” describes in typically heroic imagery
the impending advance of Nebuchadrezzar’s divinely inspired fighting forces. Line
7 is distinctly heroic in its treatment of the pagan ideals of pride and fame, from
which Tennyson makes metaphors that lend them substance. In the third stanza we
find storm (9), lightning (11), and more animal imagery (12). In the fourth stanza the
river, the symbol of battle wrath, rages rampantly. Like the River Xanthos in the
Iliad, the Nile runs red with the blood of the slain. The “war-cry” of line 17 recalls
the great shout of Achilles. Line 18, “And the child shall be tossed on the murderer’s
spear,” is possibly an allusion to Henry V, 3.3.38: “Your naked infants spitted upon
pikes.” Henry’s acknowledgment that “God fought for us” (4.8.119) is certainly
analogous to the theme of “God’s Denunciations.”
The concluding line is a triple allusion which evinces Tennyson’s genius.
Christopher Ricks (The Poems of Tennyson 1.135) recognizes the whirlwind and the
fire as coming from Ezekiel 1. The first chapter of Ezekiel, because it powerfully
describes a mystical, numinous experience, is relevant to Tennyson’s account of the
numinous power of battle furor. The allusion to Ezekiel also connects “God’s
Denunciations” with Paradise Lost. Ricks acknowledges that Milton based his
description of the Messiahs chariot in Paradise Lost 6 (749–51) on the first chapter
of Ezekiel, and that Tennyson would have borne this in mind (The Poems of Tennyson
1. 135–36). Book 6 of Paradise Lost, which describes the war in heaven, makes a perfect analogue to Tennyson’s account of divine battle in “Gods Denunciations.” The
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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
concluding phrase of Tennyson’s poem, “chariots of fire,” is more relevant to II
Kings than to Ezekiel. In II Kings 2.9ff., the scene of Elijah’s translation to heaven,
the vision of “chariots of fire” heralds the transfer of transcendent power from
Elijah to Elisha, the same sort of spiritual power to which Nebuchadrezzar gains
access in “God’s Denunciations.” In II Kings 6.14ff., chariots of fire are involved in
the overcoming of overwhelming odds in a confrontation by means of spiritual
vision and power, a scenario which is perfectly pertinent to Tennyson’s poem.
In “Gods Denunciations,” the “ire” (19) of Nebuchadrezzar is tantamount to the
battle wrath of God himself. Pharaoh becomes the victim of divine wrath by believing
his own power to be independent of it. Tennyson uses a Hebrew source to offer a
Homeric warning against the presumption that battle wrath is a self-regulated faculty.
If the warrior does not acknowledge the dangerously transcendent nature of this
spiritual fire, it can turn against him, as it does in the case of Pharaoh.
Though the Old Testament is full of divinely inspired prophets, when Tennyson
next treats the theme of bardic power, in “The Old Chieftain,” he turns for his
setting, as he did in “The Druid’s Prophecies,” to an ancient culture much closer to
home. Using Ossian for his source,Tennyson presents a Celtic hero who is bard and
warrior in one. “The Old Chieftain” is another one of the early battle poems in
which Tennyson skillfully interweaves epigraph and allusion to enrich the texture of
his art.
The “song of the hundred shells” (1) is a drinking song, and Tennyson’s poem,
with its abundance of aspirates and forceful consonant sounds, approximates in its
meter a rousing, rowdy, mead-hall chorus. By using the word “shells” in the first line,
Tennyson immediately evokes Ossian, who repeatedly refers to the custom of the
ancient Scots to drink from shells; for example, “They rejoiced in the shell,” “Crothar’s
hall of shells,” “Cormac the giver of shells” (116, 188, 281). Another of Tennyson’s
early poems, “Oh! ye wild winds, that roar and rave” (which is discussed below),
inarguably derives from “The Song of the Five Bards” in Ossian, and so, apparently,
does “The Old Chieftain.” Macpherson’s note on “The Song of the Five Bards”
introduces the matter of the Ossianic poem: “Five bards, passing the night in the
house of a chief, who was a poet himself, went severally to make their observa-tions
on, and returned with an extempore description of, night” (189). After the five bards
render their various descriptions of the darkness and the ghosts and the storms of
the night, the chief concludes with his own meditation in which he claims that
“night is alike to me, blue, stormy, or gloomy the sky. Night flies before the beam,
when it is poured on the hill.The young day returns from his clouds, but we return
no more” (191). He woefully elaborates the “ubi sunt” theme for another paragraph:
“Where are our chiefs of old? Where our kings of mighty name? The fields of their
battles are silent. Scarce their mossy tombs remain” (192). At the beginning of his
concluding paragraph he abruptly changes tone, rousing himself from his previous
brooding: “Raise the song, and strike the harp; send round the shells of joy. Suspend
The Early War Poetry
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a hundred tapers on high” (192).The first line of “The Old Chieftain” is apparently
a reworking of these two sentences from Ossian. Ossian’s chief wards off melancholy
in the same way that Tennyson’s old chieftain does; he celebrates, by his own enduring
song, the commemoration of glorious deeds in enduring song: “Let some gray bard
be near me to tell the deeds of other times; of kings renowned in our land, of chiefs
we behold no more” (192).
The heroic theme of “The Old Chieftain” is the immortality of noble deeds and
of noble song, with an emphasis on “the united powers/Of battle and music” (13–
14). The chieftain recalls his days of glory in strategically ambiguous lines that
sometimes fail to distinguish clearly between the activities of fighting and reciting.
As a chieftain, the speaker is presumably a warrior first and foremost, but he places
greater emphasis on his role as bard. In Stanza 3 he relishes not the memory of his
own fighting feats, but his ability as a bard to inspire his men. The second stanza
seems to set up a distinction between the chieftains high voice that could loudly
raise the sounding song and his strong arm that could make his foe bow beneath his
sword stroke, but it is possible to read “stroke” in line 6 as referring to the playing of
the lyre, in view of the fact that “each word that I spake was the death of a foe,/ And
each note of my harp was his knell” (19–20). On a literal level lines 19–20 remove
all distinction between bardic song and fighting.Tennyson’s equation of fighting and
song is, as we have seen with regard to “The Druid’s Prophecies,” consistent with the
heroic attitude. H.R.Ellis Davidson discusses the standpoint of the Vikings towards a
man of the old chieftain’s caliber: “A quick-witted poet could win his way in their
world as well as a brilliant swordsman, and the man who was both at the same time,
like Egill Skallagrimsson the Icelander, or Earl Ragnald of Orkney, had the world at
his feet” (Gods and Myths 13).
The ancient bards covered themselves in the glory of the heroes they perpetuated.
Tennyson’s fighting poet is not unrealistic as such (Aeschylus, to cite one example
even more renowned than Egil Skallagrimsson, fought at the battle of Marathon),
but he also makes a perfect symbol for the symbiotic relationship between bard and
warrior. At the heart of this relationship was the desire to be remembered through
the ages, and at the end of the first and the last stanzas the chieftain emphasizes
memory: “Yet in my bosom proudly dwells/The memory of the days of old.”
One of the enjoyable aspects of “The Old Chieftain” is Tennyson’s use of “height”
and “lowness” imagery to represent life and death and to suggest the triumph of
memory over death. When the chieftain was at his peak, his voice was “high” (5),
and his enemies would “bow” in death (6).The invincibly inspired chieftains stood
on “heaven-kissing” towers (15), while their vanquished enemies “sunk” (17) like
snow which “falls” down a stream (18).The chieftain, as we learn immediately from
the title, is old, and his acknowledgment in the first and the last stan-zas that his
limbs are “cold” connects him with the snow to which his dying enemies are compared
in line 17. This connection implies that he is soon to die himself, but his reiterated
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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
injunction to “Raise, raise” the battle song symbolically ascribes life to the song.
Though the high-living chieftains will join their low-lying enemies in death, the
memory of the chieftains’ glory is raised to immortality.
The epigraph from Walter Scott and the allusion to Hamlet in line 15 augment
both the artistry and the thematic ramifications of “The Old Chieftain.” The epigraph
is taken from, appropriately enough, The Lay of the Last Minstrel. The minstrel of
Scott’s title is the last of his kind because his master, something of a warrior-poet
himself, has slain the Bard of Reull over a point of bardic honor. “On Teviot’s side, in
fight they stood,/And tuneful hands were stain’d with blood” (4.34. 19–20). As a
result of this confrontation the minstrel’s master has been executed and his followers
have all fled and died except for the titular hero, who embodies Nietzsche’s description
of the Greek spirit of rivalry in the arts:
And I, alas! survive alone,
To muse o’er rivalries of yore,
And grieve that I shall hear no more
The strains, with envy heard before;
For, with my minstrel brethren fled,
My jealousy of song is dead. (4.35. 9–14)
In a later account of a contest between some bards of the new generation, the
minstrel describes the Earl of Surrey as a warrior-poet reminiscent of Tennyson’s old
chieftain: “His was the hero’s soul of fire,/And his the bard’s immortal name” (6. 13.
9–10).The epigraph itself (3.1.1) appears in a passage about love.The minstrel’s idea
on this subject is susceptible of a heroic interpretation. He claims that “In peace,
Love tunes the shepherd’s reed;/In war, he mounts the warrior’s steed” (3.2. 1–2).
The personified Love takes part in battle—an apt symbol, from the heroic standpoint,
of the “joy of battle” ideal, which Tennyson’s old chieftain exemplifies. His love of
battle is evident in the pride with which he recounts his former glories.
As Christopher Ricks notes (The Poems of Tennyson 1.140), the phrase “heavenkissing” in line 15 of “The Old Chieftain” is an allusion to Hamlet 3.4.60 (Ricks
erroneously cites line 59). Hamlet uses the phrase in comparing the portraits of his
father and his uncle:
See what a grace was seated on this brow;
Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself,
An eye like to Mars, to threaten and command,
A station like the herald Mercury
New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill—
A combination and a form indeed
Where every god did seem to set his seal
To give the world assurance of a man. (3.4.56–63)
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41
The implication of this passage for “The Old Chieftain” is that “the united powers/
Of battle and music” make for a complete and even a godlike man. Tennyson’s
allusion relates the Celtic chieftains to Mercury, who in Book 4 of the Aeneid tells
Aeneas to leave Carthage and Dido to seek his and his people’s destiny. Aeneas gives
his heroic destiny priority over love, just as the only love the old chieftain remembers
and celebrates is the love of heroic song and battle.The “words as weapons” motif in
Hamlet—“I will speak daggers to her, but use none” (3.2.359)—adds to the
appropriateness of the play as a resource for “The Old Chieftain,” in which “each
word that I spake was the death of a foe” (19).
The potent effect of the old chieftain’s words undoubtedly had a personal meaning
for Tennyson, given his own fighting spirit and his high esteem of manliness and
courage. The old chieftain’s “bold song of death” (9) has already served its heroic
purpose and does not appear in Tennyson’s poem.Tennyson’s own song focuses on
the ability of poetry to inspire heroic deeds. “The Old Chieftain” is not itself a song
of death; it is a song of poetic fury, potent with the same inspirational power it
describes.
“Oh! ye wild winds, that roar and rave” is even more indebted to Ossian than is
“The Old Chieftain.” Like “The Old Chieftain,” “Oh! ye wild winds” is a meditation
on fame and the immortality of heroic deeds. Using Homeric imagery, Tennyson
recasts the descriptions of the stormy night in Ossian’s “The Song of the Five Bards”
into a representation of the battle sublime.
In the Ossianic passage that supplied Tennyson’s epigraph, there is no indication
that the “army” of the dead is a literal army; the word just as likely means “multitude.”
The “barred helm” (32) and “swords” (40) of Tennyson’s poem do indicate an actual
army, albeit a ghostly one, and the spirits of this army live on in the turbulent forces
of nature which the warriors once manifested in their battle wrath. They “war
again” (44) as part of the furious storm.Tennyson’s emphasis on the Homeric battle
image of the storm begins in the epigraph, where he changes Ossian’s “from the air”
to “on the northern blast.” Storm imagery dominates the rest of the poem, which
also includes the heroic motif of the battle cry (the “awful yells” of line 33) and the
fire/light image (“Your swords the meteors of the sky” [40]). Tennyson’s verse
commendably captures the sounds of the raging storm. The phrase, “hum/Of the
innumerable host” (25–26) is evidently an early version of the onomatopoeic line
from “Come down, O maid” in The Princess: “And murmuring of innumerable bees”
(7.207). Other examples of onomatopoeia in “Oh! ye wild winds” are found in lines
8, 12, 25, and 26.
The scenario depicted by Tennyson is inspired by a Celtic source but informed
by Scandinavian myth. According to H.R.Ellis Davidson, “In later folk-beliefs Odin
was associated with the ‘wild hunt,’ the terrifying concourse of lost souls riding
through the air led by a demonic leader on his great horse, which could be heard
passing in the storm” (Gods and Myths 148). In changing the activity of the ghosts
42
The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
from hunting to warfare,Tennyson conflates the lore of the “wild hunt” with that of
Valhalla, where Norse warriors continued fighting after their deaths.
The element of ambiguity with which Tennyson sometimes suggests the volatile,
double-edged nature of battle fury is present in the last stanza of “Oh! ye wild
winds.” The concluding lines (“And would ye break the sleep of death,/That ye
might live to war again?”) may be taken in several different ways. The speaker may
be expressing ambivalence about the possible recurrence of battle furor, but his
question seems more relevant to the issue of heroic death and fame. Christopher
Ricks (The Poems of Tennyson 1.155) cites Grays “Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard” as a source for “the narrow cell” in line 37. Gray’s “Elegy,” like Ossian’s
“Song of the Five Bards,” explores the merits of fame and of poetry as bulwarks
against death.
The speaker may be deluded about the presence of the ghosts, or actively
imagining them. He does, in fact, say “Methinks, upon your moaning course/I
hear the army of the dead” (9–10, emphasis added). If the speaker is simply
superstitious and mistaken about the reality of the phantoms, his question is
dramatically ironic. In spite of what the narrator thinks, the old warriors have
not, and cannot, “break the sleep of death.” If the narrator is creatively imagining
the battling specters, he is presumably someone so steeped in heroic literature
that a sublime night reminds him primarily of battle descriptions. In this case
the narrator’s voice may not be far removed from Tennyson’s own. If we decide
that the poem calls for a suspension of disbelief in the ghostly presence, we may
choose to interpret the concluding question as either critical or admiring in
tone. Tennyson’s speaker either impugns the heroism of the ghosts or ascribes a
surpassing purity to their heroic ideals.
In line 42 the narrator attests that “Your fame is in the minds of men.” The ghosts
have already achieved the honor that is the goal of the heroic warrior. The speaker
may be questioning these warriors’ dissatisfaction with their fame, or their willingness
to risk it in order to “war again.” His question can be compared to Emerson’s in
“Heroism”: “In the gloom of our ignorance of what shall be, in the hour when we
are deaf to the higher voices, who does not envy those who have seen safely to an
end their manful endeavor?” (381).When Odysseus is close to drowning in Book 5
of the Odyssey, he wishes that he had died in the battle of Troy; such a death would
have gained him immortal renown (Achilles is involved in an almost identical scenario
in Iliad 21).The last sentence in Ossian’s “Croma,” to which “The Song of the Five
Bards” serves as an appendix, is “Happy are they who die in youth, when their
renown is around them!” (189).The ghosts’ desire to return to earth may be read as
a betrayal of the heroic ethic, which values not length of life but noble deeds and a
noble death. “Are we really sorry for Roland or for Lazar or the heroes of Maldon in
their last great fights?” asks C.M.Bowra. “Do we not rather feel that it is all somehow
splendid and magnificent and what they themselves would have wished for, ‘a good
The Early War Poetry
43
end to the long cloudy day’?” (Heroic Poetry 76). The riders on the storm may be
culpable for renouncing their good end.
On the other hand, the joy of battle is also a great heroic ideal.The old Norsemen
loved fighting enough to make it the primary activity of the warrior’s paradise, but
in Valhalla fighting yields at sunset to refreshments: “The warriors fight all day long,
and are restored to life in the evening so that they can feast with Odin and next
morning fight anew” (Davidson, Gods and Myths 152). The warriors in Tennyson’s
poem, however, fight even at night, or perhaps only at night, as stormy nights are the
settings most congenial to their ferocity. In the conclusion of “Oh! ye wild winds”
the speaker may be marveling that the ghostly warriors love fighting enough to
return from the dead to pursue it. His admiration may only be increased by the
warriors’ disregard of their fame in their willingness to indulge their love of combat
once again. At the end of Book 17 of the Iliad, the charge of Hector and Aeneas
makes many of the Greeks turn and run. Homer notes that in doing this they are
forgetting their joy of battle. The riders on the storm may be so heroic that even
death itself cannot make them forget their joy of battle.
In “The Song of the Five Bards,” the chief dismisses the five descriptions of the
spectral night as irrelevant to the more profound issue of death, on which subject he
proceeds to muse. In “Oh! ye wild winds,” Tennyson is not attempting to impersonate
either Ossian’s bards or their philosophical chief. Four of the five bards are personally
rather craven in their refrain of “receive me, my friends, from night,” and they find
no kinship, as Tennyson’s narrator does, between the powerful sublimity of the night
and the sublime power of the fight.The meditation of Ossian’s chief is not nearly as
multifarious in its philosophical ramifications as Tennyson’s final stanza.As if furthering
the heroic tradition of artistic rivalry,Tennyson emulates only to surpass not only the
artistry and heroism of Ossian’s quintet, but also the seriousness and profundity of
his chief’s meditation.
In “Babylon,” Tennyson reemphasizes his most basic heroic theme. Using Isaiah
as his source, he presents a Zeus-like Jehovah whose own battle wrath is
indistinguishable from that of the warriors he inspires. In accord with the pantheism
of the heroic tradition, the battle forces of Cyrus, while presented as agents of God’s
power, are depicted using images of nature’s fury.
The biblical and historical knowledge Tennyson displays in “Babylon” is as
impressive as his virtuosity. Christopher Ricks, who mistakenly cites Isaiah 17.1
instead of Isaiah 47.1 as providing the epigraph, follows W.D.Paden in tracing
Tennyson’s “eight biblical references” to Charles Rollin’s Ancient History (The Poems
ofTennyson 1.155).The young Tennyson’s familiarity with the Old Testament apparently
superseded the need to consult a secondary source; “Babylon” contains at least twelve
biblical references. Beyond the allusions cited in Tennyson’s own notes to the poem,
we can compare line 5 with Isaiah 13.6; line 10 with Isaiah 40. 6–7; lines 29–30 with
Isaiah 40.12; and line 38 with Isaiah 41. 15–16. Line 7 is an allu-sion to Isaiah 63.3,
44
The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
a passage which is particularly appropriate to Tennyson’s poem: “I have trodden the
winepress alone; and of the people there was none with me: for I will tread them in
mine anger, and trample them in my fury; and their blood shall be sprinkled upon
my garments, and I will stain all my raiment.” In keeping with this allusion, Isaiah
63.6 seems more appropriate as a source for line 25 than the line from Jeremiah that
Tennyson cites. Perhaps he wanted to suggest that he had more than the book of
Isaiah at his fingertips.Tennyson’s historical knowledge is evinced most strikingly by
line 15, which is presumably a reference to the legend that Cyrus gained entry to
the city by diverting the Euphrates, and by line 40. For the reader who is aware that
the Euphrates has changed its course since the time of ancient Babylon, line 40 has
a literal as well as a figurative significance.
It is in the discrepancy between the biblical and the historical accounts of the fall of
Babylon that the seed of a heroic interpretation may grow. In Isaiah 13 the prophet
foresees the defeat of Babylon and its destruction as one event. In reality the Persians
did not destroy Babylon in conquering it, but occupied the city for almost sixty years
and made it into what Herodotus called the world’s most splendid city.The buildings
were not destroyed until 482 B.C.E. during a revolt against Xerxes I.We might say that
the destruction of Babylon, being the result of a revolt, was caused by the same Persian
furor that had previously won them the city. It is plausible that “Babylon” echoes Isaiah
in depicting the Persian victory and their self-destructive revolt as one event, not
because Tennyson believed the biblical version to be factual, but because the prophet’s
account unifies two events into an effective symbol of the double-edged frenzy that
actuated them. “Babylon” represents the potential for both glorious victory and
untrammeled destructiveness in the one spiritual fire of battle wrath.
The “Homeric” imagery and emotion of Tennyson’s Hebrew source are
conceivably what attracted him to Isaiah. It would be hard to find anywhere a more
heroic verse than Isaiah 63.5: “And I looked, and there was none to help; and I
wondered that there was none to uphold: therefore mine own arm brought salvation
unto me; and my fury, it upheld me.” Nevertheless Tennyson enhances the Homeric
qualities of his own version of the prophecy. The images of storm and “blast” (4)
along with “the rushing of waves” (23), the “shouts of the foe” (12), the fiery image
of the “bright sun of conquest” that shall “blaze o’er his head” (24), and the double
reference to “wrath” (7, 32) are all from the artistic arsenal of the heroic tradition.
In Isaiah a wrathful Jehovah manipulates Cyrus as his instrument, but in
“Babylon” Tennyson conflates the wrath of Cyrus with the wrath of God, in conformity with the heroic mythology of divine inspiration on the battlefield. It is
“they” who come (4), but “I” will trample Babylon down (7). Babylon shall crouch
at the roll of “his” wheels (28), but it is “my presence” (31) and “my wrath” (32)
that power them. The Babylonians will bleed “By the barbarous hands of the
murdering Mede” (36), but according to the next line it is “I” who will “sweep
[them] away in destruction and death.”
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45
“Odin,” writes Francis Huxley, “was the god of poets and warriors alike. The
same is true of the Tupi tribes, of whom only the shamans and warriors went to
heaven after their deaths, because only these two kinds of men truly make themselves
one with the spirit that animates their lives” (245). Just as Cyrus becomes one
with the divine wrath, Tennyson’s speaker becomes one with the divine power
that inspires him to express the wrath. Tennyson presents his rendition of Isaiah’s
prophecy as a more direct communication of God than Isaiah’s own version.
Whereas Isaiah qualifies his pronouncements with remarks on the order of “God
said this to me,” or “I beheld this vision,” Tennyson’s speaker assumes divinity unto
himself by saying without qualification “I am the Lord” (29). His speech is
tantamount to the speech of God, just as the battle furor of Cyrus is tantamount to
God’s wrath.
Tennyson’s youthful speech attains probably its most empyreal achievement in
“The Ballad of Oriana.” It is the one poem from among the martial juvenilia to have
attracted an appreciable amount of critical response; however, much of the response
is derogatory and even derisive. To Jerome H. Buckley the poem seems “to have
been written solely for the purpose of sonorous declamation” (36). F.E.L.Priestley
discusses “Oriana” as “an experiment which does not succeed” (32). He sees a conflict
between the poem’s structure and its content:
The verses create a fine mood of melancholy, of the elegiac…. [T]he daring
young poet then proceeds to force the static stanza form into motion, and we
realize that he is…trying to present a ballad narrative, full of action, even swift
action, through the medium of a form essentially static…. Tennyson is very soon
in difficulties…. By the fifth stanza, the technical problems become overwhelming.
(Language 30–31)
Priestley ignores the possibility that Tennyson intended the discrepancy between
form and action to reflect the contrast between the violent activity of the tale
and the desuetude of the teller. For him the poems repetitions “give…an
impression of rather lame padding” (Language 32). R.H.Hutton includes “Oriana”
in a “pre-poetic period in [Tennyson’s] art…a period in which the poem on
‘Recollections of the Arabian Nights’ seems to me the only one of real interest”
(Jump 352–53). Leigh Hunt exclaims, “…four ‘Oriana’s’ to every stanza, in the
ballad of that name, amounting to forty-four in all, burlesque all music and
feeling, and become a par-rot-cry instead of a melody. This, too, in a poem full
of beauty!” (Jump 128). F.B. Pinion claims that “in narration its historic story
displays balladic virtues which never falter, but the cumulative effect of the
‘Oriana’ refrain, following four out of five lines in every stanza, is to carry the
poem dangerously near the brink of self-par-ody” (77). “Whatever the
experiment,” says Alastair W.Thomson, “it can hardly be said to succeed. ‘I was
46
The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
down upon my face’ may have received more than its share of mockery, but ‘I to
thee my troth did plight’ and ‘Oh! deathful stabs were dealt apace’ are Wardour
Street” (23). Thomson astutely notices “the despairing repetition of the name as
refrain,” and “a rhyme scheme which transforms active repetition into haunted
recollection” (23), although to him these are aspects of the poem which have
“drowned” the “action of ballad” (22).
There is a sense in which the intolerance of the critics demonstrates the
effectiveness of “Oriana.” Tennyson knew better than anyone that a single-word
refrain repeated forty-four times becomes, if not exactly a “parrot cry,” a distracting
and even a vexatious element in a poem. He was too great a poet, even at the age of
twenty-one, not to realize that his maddening “refrain” would affect the reader in
much the same way that the haunting memory of Oriana’s death affects the speaker.
In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain dwells at such length on Tom’s fantastic
escape plots that the story bogs down and the reader experiences the same frustration
as do Huck and Jim over Tom’s immature and irrelevant games.Tennyson undoubtedly
employs much the same authorial strategy with his refrain in “Oriana,” and the
frustration of the critics confirms his success in reproducing in the reader the feelings
of his poems hero.
In this way, even the poem’s most vehement detractors can be seen as evincing
the effectiveness of “Oriana,” but other commentators testify less indirectly to the
greatness of the piece. Harold Nicolson says that “Oriana” and “Mariana” “are not
excelled by any of the later poems” (98–99). A.H.Hallam’s evaluation of “Oriana” is
of course rhapsodic:
[T]he strong musical delight prevails over every painful feeling, and mingles them all in
its deep swell, until they attain a composure of exalted sorrow….The last line, with its
dreary wildness, reveals the design of the whole…. [T]he upon us in a few little words
a world of meaning, and to consecrate the passion merit lies in the abrupt application
of it to the leading sentiment, so as to flash that was beyond cure or hope, by resigning
it to the accordance of inanimate Nature, who, like man, has her tempests, and occasions
of horror, but august in their largeness of operation, awful by their dependence on a
fixed and perpetual necessity. (Jump 46)
“Perhaps the most beautiful of all Alfred Tennyson’s compositions, is the ‘Ballad of
Oriana,’” writes John Wilson as “Christopher North,” who apparently feels that
the poem can speak adequately for itself, since he proceeds to quote it in its
entirety without any subsequent comment (Jump 62). Charles Tennyson calls the
poem “a remarkable tour de force” (Alfred Tennyson 88), and comments that
“FitzGerald, who knew him very little at Cambridge, remembered all his life the
terrific rendering of ‘Oriana’ which Alfred used to give at Trinity dinner tables”
(Alfred Tennyson 86).
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47
James R.Kincaid briefly and noncommittally discusses “Oriana,” noting that the
ballad “combines a rather bald ironic narrative with a more sophisticated ironic
characterization” (18). W.D.Paden’s interpretation of “Oriana” is skewed to fit his
thesis that aggression in Tennyson’s early poetry is almost always connected with
suffering and remorse. He speaks of how “the pursuit of love ends in failure; it
generates an intolerable sense of guilt; it is punished by vast fears and fantasies that
craze the mind.The punishment includes the death of the beloved” (91). In fact the
hero does not pursue love in the poem, and it is of course for the “death of the
beloved” that the hero is “punished by vast fears and fantasies that craze the mind.”
Christopher Ricks mentions Amadis de Gaula, Scott’s Marmion, and Fletcher’s
plays as possible sources for the name “Oriana” (The Poems of Tennyson 1.271).Another
possibility is that Tennyson intended the name “Oriana” to represent an antidote to
Spenser’s “Gloriana” and to the entire chivalric tradition of fighting for a ladylove.
“Oriana” prefigures both Maud and the Idylls of the King in its treatment of the
complications involved when a love affair mixes with warfare. Oriana’s despondent
and feckless knight falls easily into the same Tennysonian category as Mariana, Elaine,
Pelleas, and Merlin, whose erotic passions negate their fitness for “life and use and
name and fame.” Edward FitzGerald mentions in his marginalia that “Oriana” was
“in some measure inspired” by the seventeenth-century ballad of Helen of
Kirkconnell, which Tennyson knew by heart from Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish
Border (Ricks, Poems of Tennyson 1.270).Tennyson’s version of the “Fair Helen” story
indicates that in an equal measure he may have been inspired by Homer and Virgil.
In the Homeric tradition, women were a distraction from the heroic business
of fighting. The scene in the Iliad of Hector’s parting from his wife and child is
poignant and affecting, and it serves as a counterweight to the martial ethos of the
poem, but there is never any doubt that the battle must take priority for Hector,
and that the domestic and the martial spheres do not interface. The same holds
true of the Dido episode in the Aeneid. For Aeneas, Dido is a temporary deterrent
from, not an inspiration for, his heroic calling. Calypso might interrupt the quest
of Odysseus, but the ancient heroes know that for them women are a temptation,
an alluring respite from the heroic action that wins them their identity. In the
heroic epics the idea of love as an inspiration for feats of derring-do is irrelevant.
The last thing the warrior needed was additional motivation; he needed his unruly
battle frenzy to be controlled. The volatile passion of love was subject to the same
potential excesses, as Dido’s fate demonstrates. For the hero of “Oriana,” however,
the problem is not an excess of vital force, but a deficit. After the death of Oriana,
he dares neither fight again like Aeneas nor kill himself in his misery like Dido.
His situation exposes the relative feebleness and fragility of the courtly love tradition
as a stimulus to glorious deeds.
48
The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
In the real incident upon which “Fair Helen of Kirkconnell” was based
(notwithstanding the presence in Ossian of more than one anecdote similar to the
ballad—see Ossian 13, 70), one of Helen’s two suitors fires a rifle at his rival, Fleming,
who is trysting with Helen. Helen throws herself in front of Fleming and is killed by
the bullet. Fleming then cuts his rival to pieces in a sword fight (Scott, Minstrelsy
114–15). In “The Ballad of Oriana” Tennyson makes two key changes as regards his
source: Oriana dies not by a rival suitor but by her lover’s own hand as an accidental
result of battle, and instead of furiously avenging her (there’s no one to take vengeance
on, except himself), her lover flings himself down and wishes to die.
The outrageous improbability of the accidental killing of Oriana would seem to
suggest that in devising this incident Tennyson intended a figurative meaning. The
death of Oriana is drastic enough to be representative of the disastrous potential
inherent in the mingling of romantic love and war. Unlike Aeneas, who is undeterred
from his heroic destiny by the death of Dido, the hero of “Oriana” exemplifies the
troubadours’ ideal of love. His passion for Oriana compromises his vitality as a warrior
from the beginning, and after her death his inglorious dependence on her becomes
obvious by his reaction to her loss.
We can infer from the hero’s narration that he has failed to win honor and a
name.Though we read Oriana’s name forty-four times, we never know the identity
of the speaker, because his reputation as a warrior is submerged in his love for
Oriana. In the first line he says, “My heart is wasted with my woe,” and “wasted”
seems to mean “unused” as much as it does “withered.” He wanders around and
around, like the “Norland whirlwinds” (6) that accompany him, without any
motivation and without achieving any meaningful deeds. The “wolds…ribbed
with snow” (5) and the knights comment that “Alone I wander to and fro” (8)
evoke Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” whose “knight at arms,/Alone and
palely loitering…On the cold hill’s side” (1–2, 36) is an analogous figure to Oriana’s
bereaved knight. We learn that before the knight plighted his troth to Oriana, “At
midnight the cock was crowing” (12). The biblical token of betrayal heralds here,
we might say, the betrayal of both the warrior and Oriana by the chivalric love
tradition.
The description of battle involves the traditional storm imagery of heroic literature. “Winds were blowing, waters flowing” (14), and the speaker also heard “the
hollow bugle blowing” (17). The knight’s description of the bugle, the call to
battle, as “hollow” betrays his lack of responsiveness to the occasion for valor.
Now, after Oriana’s death, in contrast to the waters of line 14 it is “silence” that
“seems to flow /Beside [him] in [his] utter woe” (86–87). The speakers
preoccupation with Oriana during the skirmish is evident from his comment,
“She saw me fight, she heard me call,/When forth there stepped a foeman tall”
(32–33). It is difficult to imagine Achilles, Ajax, Aeneas, or even Hector, who
fights in similar proximity to his beloved wife, exhibiting a comparable lack of
The Early War Poetry
49
focus on the contest at hand. Oriana’s knight is a courtly lover and not a true
warrior. After her death, he says, “I cry aloud: none hear my cries,/Oriana./Thou
comest atween me and the skies” (73–75).As the threatening foe had come between
him and Oriana (35), now the memory of Oriana comes between him and the
potential for renewal from “on high.” The implicit parallel between Oriana and
the enemy is appropriate: the knight’s love affair with Oriana has proven to be the
enemy of his knightly exploits. The death of his derring-do is marked by the
graveyard overtones of the “narrow, narrow… space” (cf. “The Vale of Bones” 100)
where he “was down upon [his] face” (46, 53). The poem concludes, “I hear the
roaring of the sea,/Oriana” (98–99). The roaring sea rounds out the “flowing
waters” motif that previously appeared in conjunction with the onset of battle.
Linda Hughes points out the internal rhyme and assonance of “roaring” and
“Oriana” (54). The verbal echoes emphasize the relation between Oriana and the
powers of nature, the traditional symbol of battle power. Oriana has usurped the
role of nature’s fury as a symbol of the knight’s passion. The knight is bereft of his
proper valor and prowess because he has dissipated his natural power of battle fury
in his passion for a woman. Line 91, “When Norland winds pipe down the sea,”
evokes the bugle of the battle, but now the speaker avoids the challenge of life
altogether.Twice in the final stanza he says, “I dare not” (93, 96), an admission that
stands as a final testimony to his character.
A pattern of sexual symbolism implies that the courtly love tradition has unmanned
the hero. The phrase “Thy heart, my life” (44) suggests the equivalence of Oriana’s
love with the narrator’s manly vitality. “Within thy heart my arrow lies” (80), he says
after her death. The arrow, with its phallic connotations, makes an effective symbol
of his manhood. It also figures as a synecdoche for his weaponry, his means of doing
heroic deeds. Line 80 symbolizes the enervation of his virility and the sheathing of
his knightly arms as a result of his erotic thralldom. The lines, “They should have
stabbed me where I lay,/Oriana!/How could I rise?” (55–57), are loaded with
Freudian implications of sexual role reversal and impotence.
For love to motivate the warriors of heroic epic on the battlefield, it must
prompt the desire for revenge.Turnus’s outrage over his loss of Lavinia to Aeneas
fuels his battle fires, and it is of course the love of Achilles for Patroclus that
unleashes his titanic battle wrath. By varying from his source to deny the speaker
of “Oriana” the heroic outlet of revenge (except upon himself),Tennyson exposes
the potential of the courtly love tradition for stultifying and emasculating its
knightly adherents. Because the narrator has killed Oriana himself, the memory
of his dead love can only torment him (a scenario that to a certain degree
anticipates Maud), and he wanders in abject melancholy like a lovelorn Lancelot.
The adulteration of battle wrath by love proves no less tragic than its augmentation
by hate.
50
The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
“The Ballad of Oriana” was first printed in 1830; the rest of the battle poems
reviewed in this chapter were published for the last time in 1827. The fact that
Tennyson chose not to reprint these early efforts does not automatically devalue
them.Tennyson’s suppression of a set of demonstrably significant poems simply raises
the standard of excellence for his subsequent work. Robert Bernard Martin writes
that Tennyson “used to refer to this first volume [Poems by Two Brothers] as ‘early rot’”
(46), but this depreciatory stance may have become habitual with Tennyson from
the time of the publication of the volume, which appeared with an epigraph from
Martial: “We know these efforts of ours are nothing worth” (Ricks, The Poems of
Tennyson xxiv).As Martin relates, when the older Tennyson reread the early work, he
“admitted with grudging pride” that “‘Some of it is better than I thought it was!’”
(46). An audience responsive to the Homeric echoes of Tennyson’s early war poetry
may repeat Tennyson’s own admission. By reviving these echoes, the commentaries
in this chapter invite such reassessments, while also portending the greatness of the
later battle pieces, in which Tennyson orchestrates the heroic note with the full skill
of his mature genius.
Chapter Three
Historical and Legendary Battles
T
HIS CHAPTER IS A SURVEY OF THE MATURE TENNYSON’S
TREATMENT OF historical and legendary battles. These poems were
written throughout a forty-three-year span in the prime of Tennyson’s career.
In 1834, at the age of twenty-five, he wrote the original version of “The Captain”
(Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 2. 27), the first selection covered here, and in 1877, at
age sixty-seven, he wrote “The Revenge” (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 3.25), the
last selection.With the battle poems covered in this chapter Tennyson reconfirms his
penchant for Homeric themes and imagery, while making an advance in the artistry
with which he handles the heroic material. In many cases Tennyson plays variations
on the heroic themes, utilizing them to suggest profound philosophical issues.
The profundity of this group of works is well exemplified by “The Captain: A
Legend of the Navy,” a poem whose multivalence is sometimes taken for inscrutability.
Such criticism of “The Captain” as exists, is disparaging and entirely undeserved.
Both J.M.Robertson and James R.Kincaid underestimate the piece. In “The Art of
Tennyson,” Robertson writes:
[“The Captain”] is a performance at best melodramatic in conception, and quite
third-rate in execution—a rhymed story which, save for a few phrases, might have
been by an average workman like Whittier. But one line, the last, is admirably perfect;
and it can hardly be doubted that the poet has allowed the piece to stand mainly for
the sake of that. [Quotes the last four lines] If we needs must read a rhymed moral
tale—including such a line as “Years have wander’d by”—to light on such a masterly
touch as that, we can afford the sacrifice. The presence of the weak elements must, of
course, be put to the poet’s debit, with a due protest against what one feels, in his case,
to be a falling short of attainable perfection. (Jump 433)
51
52
The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
In Tennyson’s Major Poems:The Comic and Ironic Patterns, Kincaid is just as derogatory
and even more reluctant to acknowledge any merit in “The Captain”:
The poem pretends to supply a moral to the effect that severity is an ineffective tactic
for leaders to adopt (11.1–2), but such cautions are absurdly inadequate, failing to
explain the central action.The grotesque juxtaposition of such gory results with motives
that are in every way childish defies any explanation. The poem emphasizes this
pointlessness by picturing at its close both the ironic fellowship of the crew and captain
“side by side beneath the water” (67) and their final triviality: [quotes lines 69–72].
The poem has a dark power, but its strate-gies are fairly simple. (136–37)
Kincaid’s assessment of the moral to “The Captain” is valid.The lesson formulated
in the first two lines is indeed “absurdly inadequate” to explain the central action.
The inadequacy of the moral constitutes one of several parallels between “The
Captain” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” in which the Mariner’s maxim,
“He prayeth best, who loveth best/All things both great and small” (614–15), is also
absurdly inadequate to comprehend the Mariner’s experience. Both poems present
a lurid tale of disaster at sea in which a crew dies and a ship founders as a result of
one man’s malignity. In both poems, the crewmen look on their offender with scorn
as they drop dead. In addition, the seabird at the end of “The Captain” recalls the
albatross of Coleridge’s masterpiece.
A possible explanation for the seeming inadequacy of the moral is that the moral
pertains not so much to the poems events as to their symbolic import. None of the
seamen, including the Captain himself, is named; nor is the ship named. “Captain” is
always spelled with a capital “C.” The suicidal mutiny is patently fabulous, and its
outcome confirms this quality: no one could know what occurred on a sunken ship
that had no survivors.These factors conspire to suggest the viability of an allegorical
reading. In the following fragment, written by Tennyson and inscribed “To Gladstone”
by Hallam Tennyson in the manuscript (Ricks The Poems of Tennyson 3.639),Tennyson
portrays the Prime Minister as the captain of a vessel:
There be rocks old and new!
There a haven full in view!
Art thou wise? Art thou true?
Then, in change of wind and tide,
List no longer to the crew!
Captain, guide!
(Memoir 2.339–40)
In the period during which Tennyson wrote “The Captain,” he also wrote numerous
political poems, including “Of old sat Freedom,” “Love thou thy land,” “I lov-ing
Freedom for herself,” and “Hail Briton!” During this same period (1832–36), he
Historical and Legendary Battles
53
composed “The Voyage,” which is a nautical poem and an obvious allegory. It
therefore seems legitimate to read “The Captain” as an allegorical version of the
political warnings Tennyson was offering at this time, a time when “babbling voices
vex the days/We live in, teaching hate of laws,” and “Great spirits grow akin to
base” (“Hail Briton” 45–46, 96).The Captains “oppression” (9) of his crew figures
the social conditions decried by Dickens and Carlyle, and by Tennyson himself in
Maud, where “the poor are hovelled and hustled together, each sex, like swine,/
When only the ledger lives…” (1.34–35).When faced with a national crisis, “The
Captain” seems to suggest, the heart of an oppressed people may indeed “beat
with one desire” (Maud 3.49), but that desire may be for internecine revenge.
Carlyle, in Past and Present, provides an excellent commentary on the political
implications of “The Captain”:
The Leaders of Industry, if Industry is ever to be led, are virtually the Captains of the
World; if there be no nobleness in them, there will never be an Aristocracy more….
Your gallant battle-hosts and work-hosts…will need to be made loyally yours; they
must and will be regulated, methodically secured in their just share of conquest under
you;—joined with you in veritable brotherhood, sonhood, by quite other and deeper
ties than those of temporary day’s wages! How would mere redcoated regiments, to
say nothing of chivalries, fight for you, if you could discharge them on the evening of
the battle, on payment of the stipulated shillings,—and they discharge you on the
morning of it! (260, 262–63)
The observation that “He that only rules by terror/Doeth grievous wrong” (“The
Captain” 1–2) may indeed fail to explain the “central action” of “The Captain,” but
the apothegm does not seem so “absurdly inadequate” as a synopsis of the poem’s
allegorical purport.
In the political poems of 1832–34 cited above, and in the infamous incendiary
pieces of 1852,Tennyson equates civil disharmony with military weakness, an equation
he allegorizes in “The Captain.” As an allegory the poem demonstrates Tennyson’s
martial turn of mind; his affinity for warfare as a frame of reference. Another way of
interpreting the piece symbolically is to see its antagonists as personifying the two
“deadly sins” of the heroic worldview. The Captain illustrates one errant extreme,
his crew, the opposite.
The Captains self-seeking pursuit of a “noble name” (58) is typical of the behavior
that prevailed in heroic cultures and in the literature they produced. H.D. F.Kitto
writes:
The Greek…was zealous, and was expected to be zealous, in claiming what was due to
him….This runs right through Greek life and history, from the singular touchiness of
the Homeric hero about his “prize.”… We have noticed how anxious the Greek was
54
The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
to have his…due meed of praise. He was—and is—essentially emulous, ambitious,
anxious to play his own hand. (245)
The heroic desire for glory was something akin to the passion of battle wrath: it was
often difficult to control. The adherents of the ancient heroic ethos sometimes found
themselves, like the Captain, sinking under the weight of their distended ambition.
“With all this goes personal ambition,” writes Kitto, “which the Greek of superior talent
often found it impossible to control” (248). “The dangers of [the heroic] view of the
world,” writes H.R.Ellis Davidson, “lay in a tendency towards lack of compassion for the
weak, an over-emphasis on material success, and arrogant self-confidence: indeed the
heroic literature contains frank warning against such errors” (Gods and Myths 219).The
character and fate of the Captain exemplify such a warning. In his treatment of his crew
he loses control of his ambition and abandons compassion in his arrogant drive for
success.The Captain “hoped to purchase glory,/Hoped to make the name/Of his vessel
great in story” (17–19), but instead of purchasing glory he is “Sold…unto shame” (60).
The Captains naval career is indeed memorialized in story, but hardly in the way he
wished. While neither the Captain nor his vessel is named in Tennyson’s poem, the
Captain’s cruelty and brutality live on.The Captain’s zealousness for fame is legitimate
from a heroic standpoint, but in brutalizing his crew he defeats his own purpose. His
error, like his destination at the bottom of the ocean, is “Deep as Hell” (3), because he
antagonizes those “in whom he had reliance/For his noble name” (57–58).What James
R. Kincaid calls “the ironic fellowship of the crew and captain” lying together beneath
the sea, is a symbol of their dependence upon each other for the attainment of glory.
Whereas the Captain carries his ambition for honor to baleful extremes, the
crew eschews the heroic desire for name and fame and willingly sinks into anonymity
if not ignominy. By standing mute with folded arms in willful abstention from the
battle, the crewmen present an appropriate emblem of the “heroic perverse.” The
ideal of the heroic warrior was to die in battle. Carlyle, writing of the ancient
Norsemen, notes that “they thought it a shame and misery not to die in battle; and
if natural death seemed to be coming on, they would cut wounds in their flesh, that
Odin might receive them as warriors slain” (On Heroes 32).The Captains crewmen,
on the other hand, die refusing to fight.Their passivity is antithetical to the cornerstone
of the heroic ethos: action. “But of course it is not enough for a man to possess
superior qualities;” writes C.M.Bowra in Heroic Poetry, “he must realize them in
action…. It is not even necessary that he should be rewarded by success: the hero
who dies in battle after doing his utmost is in some ways more admirable than he
who lives” (4). The crew’s final gesture constitutes an anti-deed that signifies their
utter rejection of heroic values. They do not die battling; they do not even die in a
battle. Their refusal to fight turns the potential battle into a slaughter.
In its portrayal of disastrous extremes, “The Captain” relates to the great hero-ic
theme of uncontrolled battle wrath. Therefore it is appropriate that the speaker of
Historical and Legendary Battles
55
the poem in effect assumes bardic status unto himself by referring to his account as
“my song” (4). He merits the Homeric singing-robes by conforming his “Legend of
the Navy” to the traditions of heroic literature, and by virtue of his skillful use of
allusive language. The poem makes a significant distinction between the Captain
and the crew by calling the Captain “Brave” (5) and the crew “gallant” (6), a word
the speaker emphasizes by repeating it in line 7. “Brave” comes from the Latin word
for “mad” or “fierce” (OED 2.497), while “gallant” derives from the Old French
verb galer, “to make merry” (OED 6.325).The Captain manifests his fierceness in his
treatment of his crew, but the only suggestion of “merriment” in the crew is their
“smile of still defiance” (59). “Secret wrath like smothered fuel/Burnt in each man’s
blood” (55–56). Wrath is in their blood, and it is “In their blood, as they lay dying”
(55), that they “smile on him” (56). One might gather from these lines that the
crew’s smile of defiance is their one outlet for their smothered joy of battle. When
the French ship is sighted, “a cloudy gladness lightened/In the eyes of each” (31–
32).Their potential for Homeric kharme has been clouded by the Captain’s oppression,
so that now they find their joy in anticipating his overthrow. Tennyson’s revisions
helped to suggest a “happy warrior” quality latent in the crew. He eliminated his
original reference, at line 37, to the crew’s many sorrows, and he also decided against
a description at line 48 of the crew standing “with lips comprest” (Ricks, The Poems of
Tennyson 2.29), an image that would have undercut their smile of defiance. Tennyson
also solidified his poem’s affiliation with the heroic tradition by deleting a final line of
Christian wistfulness: “May they wake in peace!” (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 2.30).
The descriptions of the “foeman’s thunder” (41) and of the bullets falling “like
rain” (46) are instances of the Homeric battle-storm topos. Lines 44–45, “Crashing
went the boom,/Spars were splintered, decks were shattered,” are onomatopoeic.
The sound echoes the sense again in lines 51–52, where the readers natural pause
between the two lines encapsulates the silence the lines describe.
The final two lines, “And the lonely seabird crosses/With one waft of the wing”
(71–72), are not only haunting; they are fascinatingly suggestive. The final line is
strikingly onomatopoeic, evoking in its alliterating aspirates the flapping of wings.
Prior to the destruction of the Captain’s vessel, “the ship flew forward” (33). Now,
after the encounter that resulted from this “flight,” a seabird flies over the sunken
ship and its moldering crew.
It is the word “crosses” in line 71 that is most arresting. The Captain and crew
have no crosses over their watery graves; instead, a seabird “crosses” them. (The bird,
with its outstretched wings, is itself cruciform. Donne marks the similitude between
cross and bird in “The Crosse,” while in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the
Albatross is hung about the mariner’s neck “Instead of the cross” [141–42].) In the
final tableau of “The Captain” the dead sailors’ place of rest is marked not by an
object, but by an action, which is ironic considering that the crew is remembered
only through its defiant refusal to act. By means of their defiance (with which the
56
The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
Captains men “cross” his authority), the crewmen “cross out” the Captain’s name
from the scrolls of history. In addition to its resemblance to a cross, the seabird could
be considered as forming an “X,” the first letter of the Greek word for Christ, but
also the signature of the illiterate. The “cross” over the graves of the Captain and
crew is no engraved memorial but a wordless token of illiterate nature.The Captain
and his deliberately silent crew are nevertheless remembered in words: the words of
Tennyson’s poem. “The Captain” supplants the role of a Christian gravestone by
memorializing the Captain and crew in song. It is therefore perhaps more than a
flight of fancy to suggest that the poem itself can be shown to form a cross when
considered once again in conjunction with “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” As
the simplistic “moral” at the beginning of “The Captain” evokes the similarly simplistic
“moral” at the end of Coleridge’s poem, so the seabird at the end of “The Captain”
recalls the live albatross in the first part of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
When the two poems are considered together, the placement of the moral and the
seabird in “The Captain,” in relation to the position of the same elements in “The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” constitutes an intertextual chiasmus.
The Ancient Mariner, while beholding the water snakes, has a revelatory
experience that leads him to a higher ethical ground. He is unable to articulate the
implications of his epiphany, however, and so must continue to tell his story with its
simplistic moral. The speaker of “The Captain,” as evinced by the simplistic moral
that begins Tennyson’s poem, is likewise unable to articulate the full ideological
import of his tale. In both cases, of course, the poem itself is the irreducible articulation
of its meaning. J.M.Robertson, in spite of the negative connotation he intends, is
quite accurate in describing “The Captain” as “a rhymed moral tale.” It is not the
initiatory “moral,” but the tale itself, because of its relevance to the Homeric ethos
and the artistry with which it is told, that opens vistas of moral meanings.
In “Sir Galahad,” Tennyson presents a warrior who, instead of self-destructively
defying the conventions of heroic behavior, redefines them. “Sir Galahad” anticipates
“The Holy Grail” in its subject matter and in its ideological centering on the conflict
between action and contemplation.Within a context of Christian mysticism,Tennyson
evokes the heroic convention of divinely inspired battle ecstasy by drawing subtle
parallels between Galahad’s tournament experiences and his numinous experiences.
The correspondences between the initial stanza on battle action and the subsequent
stanzas on mysticism are too numerous to be unintentional or insignificant. In the
tournament, a trumpet “shrilleth” (5), and in the secret shrine of stanza three, a“shrill
bell rings” (35). Galahad says that the swords “shiver” against the combatants’ armor
(6) in the tournament. In the secret shrine, the altar-cloth is “snowy” (33), and in
stanza five, prior to Galahad’s account of his perceiving blessed forms (59), the streets
on Christmas eve are “dumb with snow” (52). During the tourna-ment the splintering
lances “crack” (7), and on Christmas Eve a tempest “crackles” on the reins (53).The
“clanging” of the lists (9), is echoed by the ringing of the shrill bell in the secret
Historical and Legendary Battles
57
shrine (35) and by the “ringing” (54) of the tempest on Christmas Eve. In the
clanging lists, the horse and rider “roll” (9), an image that anticipates the “rolling” of
the mystical organ tones of line 75. Galahad describes the battle action of the
tournament as the “tide” of combat (10), an image that recurs in the fourth stanza,
where Galahad has a vision of the Holy Grail.The glory descends down “dark tides”
(47). Ladies shower the knights of the tournament with “perfume and flowers” (11),
and in the sixth stanza Galahad muses on “Pure lilies of eternal peace /Whose
odours haunt my dreams” (68). Galahad’s use of the words “showers” (11) and “rain”
(12) in the first stanza corresponds to his mention of “tempest” (53), “hail” (56), and
“storms” (59) in the fifth (in addition, the moon is described as “stormy” in line 25).
At line 69 Galahad makes a deliberate analogy between battle action and the
numinous:
And, stricken by an angel’s hand,
This mortal armor that I wear,
This weight and size, this heart and eyes,
Are touched, are turned to finest air. (69–72)
This metaphor indicates that Galahad is aware of a connection between his roles as
knight and mystic, and it helps to validate the parallels in imagery noted above.
By associating the same set of images, which includes the storm imagery so
common to heroic literature, with both Galahad’s tourney participation and his
episodes of spiritual transcendence, Tennyson hints that Galahad’s mystical faculty
derives from the same source as his battle strength. Whether it is better to use this
divine power on the battlefield or to exercise it in pious solitude as Galahad prefers
is an issue “Sir Galahad” does not directly address. Galahad himself is the speaker,
and his narration does not definitively reveal Tennyson’s own attitude the way St.
Simeon Stylites’s does.This measure of ambiguity has prompted critical commentary
that is often rather tentative and vague. David Staines calls “Sir Galahad” “a
comparatively light and energetic monologue; avoiding a confrontation with the
meaning and the significance of the Grail, the poem is a study of the committed
nature of Galahad but avoids being a study of the nature of his particular commitment”
(Tragedy of Percivale 745). “‘Sir Galahad,’” writes F.B. Pinion, “intended as ‘something
of a male counterpart’ [to “St. Agnes’ Eve”], has less unity, and is marred by didactic
self-righteousness…. It hardly reaches a climactic ending, but soars midway with the
vision of the Holy Grail” (94). Tika Ram Sharma includes “Sir Galahad” as one of
Tennyson’s protests against asceticism and “cloistered virtue” (91). Clyde de L.Ryals
contradicts Sharma when he writes of “St. Simeon Stylites” that “Possibly Simeon’s
is Tennyson’s own conviction that evil lies in matter and that good lies in the
subjugation of this matter, an idea suggested in ‘Love and Duty’ and in ‘Sir Galahad,’
wherein the hero attains his vision only by his total indifference to sensual appetite”
58
The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
(Theme and Symbol 143). Valerie Pitt also compares “St. Simeon Stylites” and “Sir
Galahad”: “The theme of ‘St. Simeon Stylites’ is the corruption of self-cultivation….
The theme of ‘St. Agnes’ and of ‘Sir Galahad’ is like that of ‘St. Simeon Stylites’: they
are also about solitude and salvation but treat these things rather differently” (122).
She says of “St.Agnes”—and her comment applies equally well to that poem’s “male
counterpart”—“Tennyson could not really eradicate from his imagination the quick
sensitiveness to solitude, nor the sense of those values which, in “St. Simeon Stylites,”
he attempts to deny” (123–24).Tennyson’s ambivalence about the monastic impulse
finds its way into the Idylls of the King, where the value of Galahad’s form of asceticism
is a point of contention between Arthur and the Grail knights. In the Idylls, as in “Sir
Galahad,” a common pattern of imagery refers to both visions and victory.
In “The Holy Grail,” King Arthur, whom the “fire of God” fills on the battlefield (CA 127, LE 314), condemns the Grail quest as a “wandering fire” of ineffectual
mysticism that leaves “human wrongs to right themselves” (894):
“[H]ow often, O my knights,
Your places being vacant at my side,
This chance of noble deeds will come and go
Unchallenged, while ye follow wandering fires
Lost in the quagmire!” (HG 316–20)
In his speech that concludes “The Holy Grail,” Arthur explains that mystical visions
must be subordinated to a man’s proper work, a precept that is reemphasized in
“The Passing of Arthur,” where Bedivere has a vision of the “mystic” arm clothed in
white samite only after he has done the deed that Arthur commands three times for
him to do. Though “Sir Galahad” predates “The Holy Grail” by thirty-four years,
their common subject matter makes it tempting to read “Sir Galahad” as an adjunct
to the Grail saga in the Idylls.When “Sir Galahad” is considered in this context, the
common imagery in the accounts of Galahad’s martial and mystical experiences
may seem to suggest that Galahad’s mystical powers are a misdirected version of his
battlefield strength, which is “as the strength of ten” (3) and should be used in the
field of action. However, in “The Holy Grail” Arthur excepts one knight from his
criticism of the Grail quest, and that is Galahad. “‘Ah, Galahad, Galahad,’ said the
King, ‘for such/As thou art is the vision, not for these…”’ (HG 293–94). According
to Charles Tennyson, Galahad, by means of his vision in “The Holy Grail,” becomes
Arthur’s equal, as indicated by his calling the king “Sir Arthur” in line 290 (Ricks,
The Poems of Tennyson 3.473).Tennyson’s own comment on Arthur’s reaction to the
Grail quest in “The Holy Grail” is that “The king thought that most men ought to
do the duty that lies closest to them, and that to few only is given the true spiritual
enthusiasm” (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 3.473). For Galahad alone among the
knights, the mystical path is the proper one. If ‘The Holy Grail” is any indication, the
Historical and Legendary Battles
59
parallels in imagery between the first and the succeeding stanzas of “Sir Galahad”
should be seen as signifying that the Grail quest is, for its most worthy devotee, the
best “chance of noble deeds.”
A rejected stanza from the 1834 version (the final version was published in 1842)
of “Sir Galahad,” along with Tennyson’s comment on it, may also have relevance to
the poem’s meaning. In a letter to James Spedding written in 1834,Tennyson concedes,
“I dare say you are right about the stanza in ‘Sir Galahad,’ who was intended for
something of a male counterpart to St. Agnes” (Memoir 1. 142). The implication of
this comment (which is usually cited only in pieces—see F.B. Pinion’s statement
above, and pages 33 and 35 in Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson, vol. 2) is that the stanza
was rejected because it compromised Galahad’s role as a male counterpart to the
heroine of Tennyson’s “St.Agnes’ Eve.” The omitted (originally the sixth) stanza is as
follows:
Oh power outsoaring human ken!
Oh knighthood chaste and true!
With God, with Angels, and with men
What is it I may not do?
Not only in the tourney-field
The unpure are beaten from the fray,
Not only evil customs yield,
The very stars give way.
Lo! those bright stars which thou hast made,
They tremble fanned on by thy breath:
Yea Lord! they shine, those lamps of thine
In Heaven and in the gulphs of Death. (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 2.34–35)
It is easy to see why Spedding objected to the stanza and why Tennyson chose to
omit it. Its first eight lines make Galahad too heroic to serve as a counterpart to a
nun. The emphasis is on action rather than contemplation, and Galahad’s hubris
equals that of a Homeric hero: “What is it I may not do?… The very stars give
way.” Although Galahad’s purity gives him the strength of ten men, it also draws
his heart above, away from the kind of conventional heroism the rejected stanza
exemplifies. The omitted stanza reveals the essentially heroic nature Tennyson
conceived for his spiritual champion, but the stanza is inappropriate for the final
version of “Sir Galahad” because of the poem’s emphasis on Galahad’s individual
adaptation of the heroic norm.
The key to Tennyson’s attitude towards his hero in “Sir Galahad” may perhaps be
found in Paul Turner’s claim that “No doubt the theme of [“Sir Galahad” and “St.
Agnes’ Eve] expresses Tennyson’s sense of dedication to poetry” (95).Tennyson’s use
in the first line of the word “carves,” which comes from the Greek word for “write,”
supports Turner’s claim. Tennyson, in Christopher Ricks’s view (Tennyson 53), was
60
The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
plagued by feelings of inferiority when comparing his own works with military
heroics. In order to come to grips with his calling,Tennyson needed to believe that
“‘The song that nerves a nations heart,/Is in itself a deed’” (“Epilogue” to “The
Charge of the Heavy Brigade” 79–80). As “The Old Chieftain” evinces, there was a
connection in the young Tennyson’s mind between verse and violence, and as early
as 1830 Tennyson was writing about poetry as an alternative form of warfare (note
the use of the Homeric “wrath”):
No sword
Of wrath her right arm whirled,
But one poor poet’s scroll, and with his word
She shook the world. (“The Poet” 53–56, original emphasis)
Sir Galahad’s contemplative rather than active use of his spiritual power is analogous
to Tennyson’s own path. As a mystic himself,Tennyson undoubtedly identified with
the “mightier transports” that “move and thrill” (22) Galahad, and by 1830 Tennyson
was writing about poetry in religious as well as martial terminology: “Dark-browed
sophist, come not anear;/All the place is holy ground;… So keep where you are:
you are foul with sin” (“The Poet’s Mind” 8–9, 36). For himself, as a gifted poet
(“Vex not thou the poet’s mind; /For thou canst not fathom it” [“The Poet’s Mind”
3–4].), and for Galahad, as a spiritually gifted saint, the road that veers away from
conventional heroic behavior towards the place where song and contemplation are
in themselves deeds, is the proper one to take.
The first word of the poem’s title, “Sir,” is also Galahad’s title, and calls immediate
attention to his status as a knight; and it is in the first stanza that we read of his
prowess in the lists. Galahad is a knight first and foremost, but he finds no glory in
tournaments, which divert him from the “mental fight” of spiritual warfare. The
word “glory” is used twice in the descriptions of Galahad’s mystical transports (47,
55), but not at all in the tourney account. In the tournament he battles for ladies, and
their sweet looks threaten to mitigate the pure power of his “virgin heart” (24).The
martial and the sexual spheres are linked in the poem, not only by the presence of
the ladies at the tournament, but also by the Freudian suggestiveness of line 2, “My
tough lance thrusteth sure.” Galahad’s true fight is in the lists of God, not for ladies’
favors but for a holy challenge-cup: “‘O just and faithful knight of God!/ Ride on!
the prize is near’” (79–80).
In this respect Galahad may be compared to Achilles, who in Iliad 9.608 rejects
the prize of eight women in favor of a higher sense of honor, “in Zeus’ ordinance”
(Lattimore 214). Cedric Whitman sees Achilles himself as something of a nonconformist to the heroic status quo. In Book 9, Achilles’s rejection of Agamemnon’s
offer “is based not upon mere sulky passion, but upon the same half-realized, inward
conception of honor which moved him originally to vow his abstinence from the
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61
war” (Homer and the Heroic Tradition 190).Whitman claims that Achilles, in abstaining
from the battle of Troy,
…no longer is concerned with the rule book of heroic behavior, the transparent unrealism
of overblown egos asserting themselves through various forms of violence. He reacts
from the mere acceptance of a creed, and places himself on higher ground. He will not
seek honor as others seek it. He will have “honor from Zeus,” by which he means he will
risk all in the belief that nobility is not a mutual exchange of vain compliments among
men whose lives are evanescent as leaves, but an organic and inevitable part of the
universe, independent of social contract. (Homer and the Heroic Tradition 183)
Tennyson’s Galahad, in both “Sir Galahad” and “The Holy Grail,” resembles the hero
of the Iliad in his rejection of the “rule book of heroic behavior” and in his seeking
honor not as others seek it but from God. Though Galahad’s Christian and mystical
concept of divine honor inevitably differs from that of Achilles, both the greatest
Arthurian and the greatest Achaian pursue their prize on the highest ground they
know, and eventually both men are utterly caught up in the passion of their pursuit.
The similarities between Galahad and Achilles may have helped Tennyson to reconcile
his own inward path as a poet and mystic with the Homeric values he often celebrated.
The hero of “The Tourney” is something of a counterpoint to Sir Galahad. Sir
Ralph fights primarily for a woman, and his only transcendent state in the poem is
the battle fury the woman inspires. “The Tourney” stands as a counterpoint also to
“The Ballad of Oriana.” Whereas “Oriana” exposes the flaws of the chivalric tradition,
in “The Tourney” Ralph fights for his ladylove with full-blown power and glory
(there are, however, hints in “The Tourney” that Ralph’s ladylove has the potential to
overturn the courtly love conventions).Tennyson’s concern with the subject matter
of “The Tourney” is reflected in the fact that he composed four different, complete
versions of “Thy voice is heard through rolling drums,” the song which replaced
“The Tourney” in The Princess (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 3. 590–91).
“The Tourney” is a playful piece that nonetheless stakes a serious claim to a high
level of craftsmanship. Its traditional artistry belies its failure to qualify for The Princess
and makes it worthy of standing as an independent poem. Ralph’s presence in the
lists is “like a fire” (3), and here once again Tennyson uses the Homeric and Virgilian
fire image in the same way his bardic predecessors did: to symbolize the intensity
and the devastating power of battle wrath. Fueled by his love-inspired “berserk,”
Ralph’s tourney prowess is astounding. He “Rolled them over and over” (5). The
word “Rolled” is doubly appropriate. It evokes the rolling of waves (in “Sir Galahad”
Tennyson makes the connection between “roll” and “title” explicit in lines 9–10),
which is one of the natural forces often associated with battle fury by the old heroic
writers. “Rolled” also relates back to the poem’s title. A tourney is an appropriate
place to make people roll, because “tourney” is etymologically related to “turn.” In
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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
response to Ralph’s initial incursion, the king calls him “Gallant” (6), and the root
of the word “gallant,” as we have seen, means “to make merry.” As it does in “The
Captain,” this ulterior meaning insinuates the euphoric emotion of the warrior
possessed by battle frenzy.
In the second stanza, the sound echoes the sense emphatically. Tennyson
approximates the tournament acoustics with a combination of assonance (as in
“Casques” and “cracked” in line 7, or “Lances” and “snapt” in line 8), alliteration (as
in “hauberks hacked,” and “snapt in sunder,” in lines 7 and 8), and internal rhyme
(“cracked” and “hacked,” in line 7, and “Rang” and “sprang,” in line 9).The “thunder”
in line 11 is onomatopoeic, and it evokes the heroic battle-storm convention. The
bell-like ringing of the sword stroke in line 9 recalls the “united powers/Of battle
and music” in “The Old Chieftain” (13–14).Trumpets, bagpipes, and other musical
instruments are traditional accompaniments of battle, and their inspirational effect
has become proverbial. In The Princess, we find the Prince saying,
And I that prated peace, when first I heard
War-music, felt the blind wildbeast of force,
Whose home is in the sinews of a man,
Stir in me as to strike:…(5.255–58)
The titular first line of “Thy voice is heard through rolling drums,” and also that
lyrics fifth line, “A moment, while the trumpets blow,” indicate that the warrior is
inspired not solely by thoughts of family but also by the stirring sounds of drum and
trumpet. In “The Tourney,” the source of the inspirational “music” is the battle
action itself. Edmund Burke, in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of
the Sublime and Beautiful, explains the sublime effect of the kind of sounds exemplified
by the ringing of swords in Tennyson’s poem:
If the stroke be strong, the organ of hearing suffers a considerable degree of tension.
If the stroke be repeated pretty soon after, the repetition causes the expectation of
another stroke…. The tension of the part thus increasing at every blow, by the
united forces of the stroke itself, the expectation, and the surprise, it is worked up to
such a pitch as to be capable of the sublime. (126–27)
In Tennyson’s battle poetry, Homeric kharme meets the romantic sublime. Yeats, in
finding “the sweetest of all music to be the stroke of the sword” (243), represents the
romantic inclination to hear a sublime symphony in the tumult of conflict. “I made
a certain girl see a vision of the Garden of Eden,” he writes. “She heard ‘the music of
Paradise coming from the Tree of Life,’ and, when I told her to put her ear against
the bark, that she might hear the better, found that it was made by the continuous
clashing of swords” (306).
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63
In the third stanza, Ralph’s thunderous display renders Edith thunderstruck.The
speaker mentions twice, in lines 13 and 15, that she bows her head. Her response is
appropriate to one who has beheld such an overwhelming manifestation of power.
Burke discusses “reverence” (53), “astonishment” (54), “awe” (64), and “solemnity”
(64) as normal effects of the sublime. In between the two lines that mention Edith’s
bowing her head, the speaker uses a word that subtly points to another possible
reason for her reaction.The Latin root of “confounded” (14) means “to pour together,”
a denotation that calls to mind the grisly aftermath of Ralph’s swordplay, when
“sprang the blood” (9).
Edith’s gesture, along with the king’s command to ‘“Take her Sir Ralph’” (18),
may seem to evince submissiveness on her part, but there are indications that she has
the potential to transcend her passive role as Ralph’s courtly ladylove. In the Prologue
to The Princess, a “chronicle” (27, 49) tells of a woman warrior who, “her arm lifted,
eyes on fire—/Brake with a blast of trumpets from the gate,/And, falling on them
like a thunderbolt” (41–43), proceeded to dispatch her enemies in much the manner
of Sir Ralph. Paul Turner (102) cites Chapter 80 of Froissart’s Chronicles as a source
for this passage in The Princess. Froissart tells of a countess who is besieged in
Hennebont by Sir Charles de Blois in 1342: “This lady did there an hardy enterprise….
She issued out and her company, and dashed into the French lodgings and cut down
tents and set fire in their lodgings…” (52). This woman warrior is the Countess of
Montfort. In view of the relationship between “The Tourney” and The Princess, it
seems likely that Ralph’s Edith Montfort is named for the combative countess in
Froissart. After seeing Ralph’s exploits, Edith flushes “as red/As poppies” (16–17).
She is red like the fire used in the description of Ralph’s fury (and like the fires set
by the countess), and the reference to poppies evokes intoxication and death.
Tennyson’s artistry suggests that Edith is susceptible to the same intoxication of
battle wrath that she inspires in Ralph.The third stanza of “The Tourney” hints that
Ralph’s ladylove may be capable of doing her own thwacking and riving, likeVirgil’s
Camilla, whose wild and fiery rampage inspires other Latin women to take up arms
at the end of Book XI in the Aeneid.
“Boädicea” portrays an actual woman warrior, one who instigates a rampage so
wild and fiery that it exemplifies the rampant destructiveness of untrammeled battle
wrath. Boädicea, who is “standing loftily charioted” (3, 70), exhibits such inexorable
fury that she calls to mind the insatiable wrath of the “charioted” Achilles. The
poem, with its striking meter, treats the theme of the “united powers of battle and
music” in a powerful and provocative way.
Most commentators on “Boädicea” acknowledge the power of its verse, but remain
aloof from the poems thematic concerns. Harold Nicolson speaks of “the frenzied
sweep of ‘Boädicea,’ the rattling galliambics of which,…have all the fire of Borodine’s
‘Igor’” (284). Paull F.Baum calls “Boädicea” “an experimental poem of some power”
(56). Jerome H.Buckley’s only comment on the poem is that it “sounds strangely
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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
dissonant to the untutored English ear; and the excited declamation of the ancient
queen seems accordingly more factitious than dramatic” (154). Henry Kozicki offers
only the idea that “the poem is a metaphor for contemporary times” (Tennyson and
Clio 151).The observations of both Paul Turner and Linda K. Hughes are remarkably
simplistic.Turner writes, “Though ‘Boädicea was always a heroine of his’ (Materials,
vol.2, p.303), the poem…seems designed to convey the ugliness of revenge” (171).
Hughes finds the first half of line 83, “Out of evil evil flourishes,” to be the poems
“moral” (208). Christopher Ricks takes notice of “Boädicea” only in a footnote. His
comment is incisive but inexplicably succinct given his lofty assessment of the piece:
“‘Boädicea’ is [Tennyson’s] best poem about war, because it is also about the indurating
effects of battle-fervour” (Tennyson 248n.).
The poets of the heroic age cautioned against the indurating effects of battlefervor, but they gloried in depicting the fervor’s sublime effects, and it is the
transcendent and divine nature of Boädicea’s “madness” that Tennyson emphasizes.
In the first verse paragraph we find several of the traditional indicators of ecstatic
furor. The Homeric fire image is introduced in line 2, and line 4 tells us that the
Druid queen is “Mad and maddening all that heard her.” Her madness is that of the
berserks, of whom H.R.Ellis Davidson writes, “The ecstasy of battle, which inspired
the berserks and filled them with such madness that they knew neither fear nor
pain, was naturally viewed as a gift of [Odin]” (Gods and Myths 70). Boädicea’s
“fierce volubility” (4), her yelling and shrieking (6), evokes the shouting of Achilles,
Cuchullain, and other ancient heroes in the throes of battle wrath. The role of
Boädicea’s screams in “maddening all that heard her” is explained by Edmund Burke:
“Such sounds as imitate the natural inarticulate voices of men, or any animals in pain
or danger, are capable of conveying great ideas;… The angry tones of wild beasts are
equally capable of causing a great and aweful sensation” (77). The reference to
Boädicea’s shrieking and to her confederacy as “wild” (6) relates them to the wild
animals so common to the traditional depictions of frenzied warriors.
Early in her harangue Boädicea emphasizes the animalistic nature of the furor
she is arousing: “Bark an answer, Britain’s raven! bark and blacken innumerable,/
Blacken round the Roman carrion, make the carcase a skeleton,/Kite and kestrel,
wolf and wolfkin, from the wilderness, wallow in it” (13–15). (In contrast to this
ferocious and grisly wallowing, the Romans, as Boädicea sneers in line 62, have
been “Rolling on their purple couches in their tender effeminacy.”) She immediately
testifies to the sacred aspect of such savagery: “Till the face of Bel be brightened,
Taranis be propitiated” (16). Ricks (The Poems of Tennyson 2.614) notes that the
name of the Celtic god Belinus means “shining,” a designation that relates to the
name of the Celtic hero Cuchullain’s s father, Lug, which meant “The Shining One”
(Davidson, Myths and Symbols 90), and to the name of the ancient Irish warrior
Finn’s band of heroes, the Fionn, a word that meant “light” (Davidson, Myths and
Symbols 81).Taranis, as is also noted by Ricks (The Poems of Tennyson 2.614), was the
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65
Apollo and the Thunderer of the Druid’s. Apollo was of course also a god of light, so
we see that both gods mentioned by Boädicea are associated with the fire/ light
imagery of battle wrath. In contrast to the incandescent gods of the Britons, the
deity of the Romans is “an emperor-idiot” (19).
In the beginning of the third verse paragraph Boädicea implores her gods to take
note of the outrage her people have suffered. Already, however, “the Gods have
answered” (22), and their answering recalls the “answer” of “Britain’s raven” in line
13. The savage fury that Boädicea invokes in lines 11–16 is a quality of the Britons’
gods: “[The Gods] have told us all their anger” (23). The tokens of the divine anger
include “Thunder” and “a flying fire in heaven” (24), both of which images are
traditional symbols of fighting frenzy. In addition, the augury of the bloody Tamesa
River’s “rolling phantom bodies of horses and men” (27) evokes the River Xanthos
episode in the Iliad.
The fourth paragraph describes the singing of the “terrible prophetesses” (37) at
“the mystical ceremony” (36). In a passage reminiscent of the landscape survey in
“Persia,” the prophetesses humanize the British land: “Fear not, isle of blowing
woodland” (38). Their hymn to the natural setting seems meant to convey nature’s
power, the same natural/divine power that approximates the wrath of heroes in the
ancient portrayals.The references to Britain’s “blowing woodland” (38) and “manyblossoming Paradises” (43), and, a bit later, to her “flourishing territory” (54), are all
echoed in line 83, where we learn the result of battle wrath: “Out of evil evil
flourishes, out of tyranny tyranny buds.” It is appropriate that Boädicea is the one to
hear and relate the mystical prophecies, because her savage frenzy is another mode
of the prophetesses’ transcendent state, and her tirade another form of their chanting.H.
R.Ellis Davidson discusses the connection between barbarity and mystical wisdom:
“Battle, moreover, is associated with inspiration and wisdom, and the pursuit of the
heads of slaughtered men was not simply an expression of destructive ferocity but a
means of attaining supernatural wisdom and knowledge of what was hidden from
men” (Myths and Symbols 101).The “flying raiment” (37) of the prophetesses recalls
the “flying fire” (24) of the gods’ own prophetic manifestation, and the prophetesses’
reference to the “myriad-rolling ocean” (42) echoes the divine augury of the “Tamesa
rolling” (27).With the resounding conclusion of their chant, “thine the battle-thunder
of God” (44), the prophetesses confirm both the martial and the divine aspects of
the thunder image in line 24, and they remind us that their god Taranis was a god of
thunder. On the heels of her recitation of the oracle Boädicea ecstatically proclaims,
“there cometh a victory now” (46). Boädicea’s inspired vision of victory stands in
contrast to the Romans’ “statue of Victory” (30), an idol whose fall constitutes one
of the omens of the poem’s third section.
In the fifth section, Boädicea links her battle wrath to the anger of the gods
by means of Homeric imagery. “Wherefore in me burns an anger, not by blood
to be satiated” (52), she says. Boädicea’s anger is shared by the gods themselves,
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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
as line 23 makes plain: “These have told us all their anger in miraculous
utterances.” The fact that Boädicea’s anger “burns” is a reflection of the “flying
fire in heaven” (24) that demonstrates the gods’ own anger. Unlike Boädicea’s
anger, however, the anger of the gods is capable of being satiated, as line 16
indicates. Boädicea’s inexorability recalls that of Achilles, whose insatiable fury
eventually offends the gods themselves. In the Iliad, the divine disapproval of
such riotous excess helps to convey the need for control incumbent upon the
transcendent hero. By yielding themselves to the sublime power rather than
using it, Boädicea and her people perpetrate “multitudinous agonies” (26, 84).
The extremity of Boädicea’s abandonment of herself to the “unexhausted,
inexorable” battle-axe (56) of rage is reflected in her unsexing of herself to
become a manlike warrior and by her desire to perform a literal version of the
same process on her enemies: “Chop the breasts from off the mother” (68).
Ricks (The Poems of Tennyson 2.617) compares her in this aspect to Lady Macbeth,
who also yields herself unstintingly to overpowering spiritual forces.
As in the heroic epics, the transcendent power of battle wrath is described as a
force of nature. In the fifth paragraph Boädicea commands the British tribes to
shout, “Till the victim hear within and yearn to hurry precipitously/Like the leaf in
a roaring whirlwind, like the smoke in a hurricane whirled” (58–59). In the sixth
section we learn that the maddened Britons “Made the noise of frosty woodlands,
when they shiver in January,/Roared as when the roaring breakers boom and blanch
on the precipices,/Yelled as when the winds of winter tear an oak on a promontory”
(75–77).The term “roaring” is most appropriate to Boädicea herself, who is “lionesslike” (71). As we have seen in the first two chapters, Furor itself is depicted as a
roaring lion in the first book of the Aeneid. Boädicea’s “rolling” (71) glances recall
the oracular rolling of the Tamesa in line 27.The dashing and clashing of the “darts”
(74, 79) recalls the lightning and thunder of the gods in line 24 and thus can be seen
as representing the transcendent power the Britons wield. In brandishing “darts”
with which they make a thunderous noise, the Britons figure their god Taranis, the
Thor of the Druid’s. Like Hector when faced with Achilles at the height of his battle
rage, the Romans quail before the unbridled, tumultuous storm of furious Britons.
Rome is likened to an eagle in lines 11–12, and a hint of that same imagery occurs
in the description of her defeat: “[S]he felt the heart within her fall and flutter
tremulously” (81).
The Druid queen successfully infects her people with her frenzy, and she does so
by means of her speech, a speech Tennyson recreates (minus the yelling and shrieking)
in an echo of the classical galliambic meter. C.J.Fordyce, commenting on the use of
this meter by Catullus, writes that “the distinctive character of the metre gives the
effect of tumultuous and breathless speed” (qtd. in Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson
2.613). This characteristic helps the poem to convey the passion of Boädicea’s
exhortations. “Boädicea” not only recounts the effect on her people of the queen’s
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67
harangue, it in some measure reproduces a sense of that effect in the reader of the
poem.
The importance of the role of speech in the transmission of Boädicea’s battle
wrath is underscored by the iteration of the words “hear,” “hearing,” and “heard”
fourteen times in the poem.The unwillingness to listen receptively is what separates
the victims of furor from those who victoriously wield its power. The Romans
refuse to listen to Boädicea: “Did they hear me, would they listen, did they pity me
supplicating?” (8). Boädicea, on the other hand, hears the words of the terrible
prophetesses: “There I heard them in the darkness” (36). She, in turn, emphatically
makes herself heard by her people, whose eventual shouting signifies their assumption
of her frenzy.The Romans are then forced to hear the terrible tumult of the Britons,
and the fierce volubility of the British tribes decides the battle: “Then her [Rome’s]
pulses at the clamouring of her enemy fainted away” (82).
In Cowper’s “Boädicea, An Ode,” which Ricks cites as the literary source of
Tennyson’s poem (The Poems of Tennyson 2.613), the victorious power of words is
similarly emphasized. Boädicea listens to “Ev’ry burning word” (7) of a Druid sage,
who foretells a day when “Sounds, not arms, shall win the prize,/Harmony the path
to fame” (23–24). In the conclusion, words are a weapon of divine fury:
Such the bard’s prophetic words,
Pregnant with celestial fire,
Bending as he swept the chords
Of his sweet but awful lyre.
She with all a monarch’s pride,
Felt them in her bosom glow,
Rush’d to battle, fought and died,
Dying, hurl’d them at the foe. (33–40)
The trochees of Cowper’s s poem are unremarkable, but the “tumultuous and breathless speed” of Tennyson’s meter helps to convey some of the sublime effect of
Boädicea’s clamorous raving. Amittai Aviram writes, “The metaphors [of a poem]
are either direct or (more usually) indirect representations of the engaging power of
the physical rhythm of the poem itself. This engaging power is nonverbal and not
rational; a power beyond words, it is sublime” (228). Aviram addresses the process by
which Tennyson mediates Boädicea’s frenzy: “The rhythms of poetry and music are
instances of the manifestation of sublime reality, but unlike the mystical sublime
available through meditation, rhythms are shared communally as they engage the
bodies of their common audiences” (238–39). Through the rhythm of the poem
Tennyson enables his readers to form a community with the Druid queen’s audience
and to taste the sublimity of Boädicea’s diatribe.
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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
Boädicea’s words are related to us by a narrator, who, after introducing the scene
and then quoting Boädicea’s monologue, concludes by noting the destructive results
of the Britons’ belligerent passions.The narrators dispassionate comments surround
the tirade of Boädicea, “containing” it in more than one sense.This narrative frame,
as it denounces the evil and the tyranny of both the Romans and the Britons, speaks
for the necessity of controlling battle fury. The sober conclusion has a tempering
effect on the reader’s vicarious participation in the Britons’ incitement. It might be
noted that this “dispassionate” narration is presented in the same meter as Boädicea’s
pyrotechnics. Keeping the meter consistent is one way of demonstrating the close
connection between the sublimity of battle frenzy and the “multitudinous agonies”
the narrator laments. The consistency of the meter could also serve to suggest the
necessity of a restraining force as powerful as the fury it is summoned to control. In
the “Dedication” to the Idylls of the King, Tennyson commends Prince Albert for his
“sublime repression of himself” (18).The meter used to recreate Boädicea’s sublime
tirade is appropriately used to “contain” that tirade in a monitory frame of sublime
repression.
As a surrounding and containing frame, the monitory narration stands on the
“exterior” of the poem, while the passage recounting the chanting of the prophetesses
is located at the poem’s center.This structuring reflects the common spatial metaphors
for the different “levels” of consciousness.The mystical transport of the prophetesses,
like the transcendent fury of the “mad” Boädicea, originates in the deep heart’s core,
“beneath” the level of our controlling self-awareness. Boädicea’s raving becomes
even more “mad and maddening” when she begins to recount the mystical chanting
of the prophetesses in lines 38–44.As Aviram writes, “Many of these mystical practices
are rhythmic and musical, such as the dancing of the Sufis, the chanting of Tibetan
monks, and the rhythmic chanting and dancing of many Native American nations.
The reality which they aim to disclose is reality as the sublime” (238–39). The
rhythm and music of Tennyson’s verse heightens the sublimity of the oracular song,
which becomes a mesmerizing drumbeat through the repetition of words (“isle,”
“though,” “thee,” “thou,” and especially “thine,” which is repeated eight times in
lines 41–44) and of alliterative sounds. By suddenly breaking into a direct quotation
of the prophecy (the phrase “sang the terrible prophetesses” in line 37 seems less an
introduction to the quoted prophecy than a conclusion to Boädicea’s account of her
encounter with the prophetesses), Boädicea provides an example of narrative
technique that Longinus associates with a heightened sense of the sublime (33–34).
In “Boädicea,” Tennyson deals with the same heroic themes that he features in
much of his previous war poetry, but his recreation of the queens spellbinding rant
demonstrates his bardic power in an unprecedented way, allowing his readers to feel
the dangerous excitement of “the united powers of battle and music.” Tennyson
repeatedly expressed concern that his readers would miss the full effect of the poems
Historical and Legendary Battles
69
meter (see Memoir 1.436, 459, and 477).An account by James Knowles of Tennyson’s
own reading of “Boädicea” indicates how powerful that effect could be:
The first thing I ever heard him read was his “Boädicea,” for I said “I never can tell
how to scan it.” “Read it like prose,” he said, “just as it is written, and it will come all
right” And then, as if to confute himself, he began it, and in his weird and deep
intoning, which was as unlike ordinary prose as possible, sang the terrible war song,
until the little attic at Farringford melted out of sight and one saw the far-off fields
of early Britain, thronged with the maddened warriors of the maddened queen, and
heard the clashing of the brands upon the shields, and the cries which
Roar’d as when the rolling breakers boom and blanch on the precipices.
The image of some ancient bard rose up before one as he might have sung the story by
the watch-fires of an army the day before a battle. It was perhaps from some such
association of ideas that his name among his intimates became “The Bard”—a way of
recognising in one word and in ordinary talk his mingled characters of Singer, Poet,
and Prophet. (“A Personal Reminiscence” 580–81, original emphasis)
Anyone who has heard the “weird and deep intoning” (Knowles 580) of Tennyson’s
bardic recitations on the Edison cylinder recordings can relate to Knowles’s comments.
Knowles’s account provides an excellent commentary on what Tennyson hoped to
achieve in his guise as a Homeric war poet.
There are several instances of Tennyson’s assuming the role of an English Homer
in a literal way. In 1863 he wrote and published his own rendering of Iliad 8. 542–61
as “Specimen of a Translation of the Iliad in BlankVerse.” His English version of Iliad
18.202–31, “Achilles Over the Trench,” was written around the same time, and
published in 1877.The Pierpont Morgan manuscript of “Achilles Over the Trench”
also contains several fragmentary translations of Homer. The two most complete
passages, both of which come from the Iliad, are presented by Christopher Ricks in
Appendix A of The Poems of Tennyson (3.603–604). Tennyson’s limited output as a
translator was of course imposed by his extensive output as an original poet of
genius, and the dearth of translations in the Tennyson canon has resulted in a dearth
of scholarly attention to the poet’s efforts in that direction. It is plausible, however,
that in this case scarcity is tantamount to significance, that Tennyson’s extreme
selectivity as a translator was dictated by the reverence he felt towards the undertaking.
His renderings of Homer into English were, in a sense, renderings of himself as “The
Bard” in full panoply. By translating the actual words of Homeric song, Tennyson
was aligning himself more closely with the ancient bard he so admired; he was
translating himself, as it were, into a more liter-al version of the bardic persona he
attempted to cultivate. The importance to him of this process is evinced by the
painstaking craftsmanship he lavished on his lines and by the thematic material
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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
shared by all four translations, which pertains to a heroic concept close to Tennyson’s
heart: the equal footing, in heroic societies, of the bard and the warrior.
His decision to translate the ending of Book 8 reflects not so much the heroic
quality of the passage as Tennyson’s own heroic quality.The conclusion to Book 8 is
one of the most celebrated parts of the Iliad. “Every one,” writes Matthew Arnold,
“knows the passage at the end of the eighth book of the Iliad, where the fires of the
Trojan encampment are likened to the stars” (257). In “Lecture I” of “On Translating
Homer,” Arnold offers his own prose rendering of the lines and also quotes Pope’s
version, which he characterizes as “singularly and notoriously unfortunate” (257).
The passage is something of a touchstone for translations of the Iliad. For example,
Brian Spiller, editor of Cowper: Poetry and Prose, selects only the concluding lines of
Book 8 to represent Cowper’s translation of the entire Iliad (Cowper 176).Tennyson,
by offering his version of the conclusion, was entering the fray where the fighting
was thickest.
He was also engaging Arnold in single combat. In “Lecture III” of “On Translating
Homer,” written in 1861, Arnold states, “If blank verse is used in translating Homer,
it must be a blank verse of which English poetry, naturally swayed much by Milton’s
treatment of this metre, offers at present hardly any examples…. It must not be Mr.
Tennyson’s blank verse” (293). He then cites lines 19–21 of “Ulysses,” which inspire
his immortal comment that “these three lines by themselves take up nearly as much
time as a whole book of the Iliad” (293). Arnold proceeds to present his own version
of the last six lines of Book 8, in English hexameters.Tennyson’s response is described
by Peter Levi: “Tennyson,” writes Levi, “made in the end the only effective reply
that could be made: he produced 22 lines and later another 31 of the Iliad in his own
iambics, and they annihilate every other translation ever made of these lines” (235).
Theodore Redpath writes, “The two specimens make it a matter for regret that
Tennyson did not do much more. Arnold was certainly wrong when he said that
Tennyson’s blank verse would not be suitable for translating Homer” (107). After
quoting the entire “Specimen of a Translation,” Redpath comments, “Tennyson’s
rendering of the long final simile has been much admired, and it is certainly far
superior to the halting hexameters which Arnold himself produced as a version”
(108). Levi’s exoneration of Arnold is memorable: “We should be grateful to him
that he drew from the laureate these verses, which burn like the clear fires they
describe” (236).
Redpath examines in detail the first ten lines, up to the beginning of the
simi-le, of the “Specimen of a Translation.” He notes Tennyson’s use of alliterated
“h’s” and “b’s” in lines 5–6 as skillful. In lines 7–8, “Again the sound is magnificent;
the alliteration ‘rolled…rich’ and the semi-alliteration ‘vapour…far’ make for a
strong line, and perhaps it is not too fanciful to suggest that the ‘f’s’ and ‘p’s’ give
a sense of the puffing of the rich smoke” (109). His conclusion regarding
Tennyson’s choices as a translator is that “The defects or sacrifices of accuracy or
Historical and Legendary Battles
71
clear sense, such as they are (and they are not many) are for the sake of, or at least
compensated by, the sound….The…force and spirit and most of the concreteness
of the original remain” (110).
As for the simile which concludes Tennyson’s “Specimen,” Christopher Ricks
observes that “the last fourteen lines form a single sentence, culminating in a fateful
pause and poise” (Tennyson 112). Preparatory to the pause and poise of the ending is
the rapidity of lines 11–16, with their numerous unstressed syllables, including the
repetition of the elidible “and.” The speed of the lines induces the same breathlessness
in the reader as might be experienced by an observer of the beautiful scene the
passage describes. Rapidity is one of the primary characteristics of Homer emphasized
by Arnold (see 250–53, Lecture I). The quickly moving lines of the simile are
succeeded by six lines which retard the rush and gradually settle into the “fateful
pause and poise” of the conclusion to Book 8. One reason for the superiority of
Tennyson’s translation of these lines is that the fateful poise of the finale is a tone that
Tennyson excels in creating. The mood established by the poignant beauty of the
“Specimen” is comparable to the effect of the conclusions to “Tithonus,” “Tiresias,”
“Love and Duty,” and “Audley Court.”
Christopher Ricks (The Poems of Tennyson 2.139) compares the imagery of moon
and stars in the “Specimen,” along with its sixteenth line, “…the Shepherd gladdens
in his heart,” to the conclusion of “Audley Court”:
but ere the night we rose
And sauntered home beneath a moon…
…the harbour-buoy,
Sole star of phosphorescence in the calm,
With one green sparkle ever and anon
Dipt by itself, and we were glad at heart. (78–79, 85–88)
Earlier in “Audley Court,” the speaker sings of his wish to be “The pilot of the
darkness and the dream” (71). The “Sole star of phosphorescence,” the buoy light,
which in Ricks’s comparison is analogous to the stars in the Iliad passage, is that
pilot. The speaker of “Audley Court” wishes, in effect, to be one with the “star” of
the poem, just as the warriors in the Iliad wish their fighting power to be one with
the cosmic forces of the gods, a wish that is often granted them.The correspondences
between the conclusions of “Audley Court” and Book 8 of the Iliad suggest that
Tennyson saw the possibility of a symbolic meaning in Homer’s s simile. The
comparison of human fires to celestial fires glances at the divine power of battle
“fire” that visits the frenzied warriors of heroic epic. By choosing to translate a
passage that features Homer’s symbol of the divine power that drives both the warrior
and the bard, Tennyson intimated that his own intellectual warfare against Arnold
was fueled by that same fiery force.
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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
The blazing beauty of the “Specimen of a Translation” has gained it more
recognition than Tennyson’s other published translation of Homer has received,
but “Achilles Over the Trench” (Iliad 18, 202–31) is also an impressive piece of art.
Curiously, George Steiner comments in Homer in English that “‘Achilles Over the
Trench’ seems to be Tennyson’s only stab at a direct translation” (133). His remark
is especially strange considering that the general editor of the “Penguin Poets in
Translation” series, of which Homer in English forms a part, is Christopher Ricks.
Regardless of Steiner’s reason for reprinting it singly, “Achilles Over the Trench” is
not unworthy to stand alone in representing Tennyson’s skill as a translator of
Homer.
Tennyson uses alliteration and assonance to great effect throughout the passage,
beginning in the lines preceding the simile. His reprise of Homer’s use of quadruple
sibilants in the first line is repeated by Richmond Lattimore, whose Iliad is “hailed
as exemplary” (Steiner xvii) amongst modern translations. Tennyson may have
considered the “s’s” as echoing the sound of the wind on which Iris runs. In the
third line, the alliteration of “puissant” with “Pallas” connects the power of Achilles
with its divine enhancement by Athena. The fifth line’s three hard “g’s” give it an
impetus appropriate to its description of one of the “miraculous, sublime emblems
of Achilles’s transcendent power and personality” (Schein 138).The “f’s” of “from”
and “flame” at the beginning and end of line 6 evoke the sound of the igniting fire
while fortifying the line. Every line through line 8, in fact, is made more forceful
and vigorous by alliteration. Line 2 has “rose” and “round;” line 4 has “Her” and
“head,” as well as “aegis” and “around;” line 7 has “smoke” and “city;” line 8 is
framed by “Far” and “foes.”
Assonance and alliteration combine to enhance the conclusion, especially in the
most powerful lines of the translation, 29–31. Line 29 is impressively strong, with its
“Burned—burn” bookends and its assonant epithet “bright-eyed” in the middle.
The “t” in “bright” and the succession of “d’s” in the words “eyed,” “goddess,” and
“made” create a drum roll leading up to the second “burn.” In line 30, the three
shouts are reflected in the triple assonance of “Thrice,” “dyke,” and “mighty.” The
same sounds encompass line 31, in the words “Thrice” and “allies.” The repetition of
“Thrice” is tremendously emphatic, evocative of the scream itself. In line 32, the
“Th” sound of “Thrice” becomes appropriately less shrill after the shout (in “there
and then”). In the final line the sound appears only once, in “their,” as both the
sound of the yell and twelve of the Trojans die out. The potency of the Britons’
“fierce volubility” in “Boädicea” may owe something to the effect of Achilles’s shout
in the Iliad.
The middle of the passage is translated with meticulous accuracy. Tennyson’s
scrupulous version of the simile in lines 7–14 may not have quite the clarity of
Robert Fitzgerald’s looser rendering, but Tennyson’s continued fidelity to Homer in
the succeeding lines has the effect of enhancing the simile’s pertinence to the rest of
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73
the passage. As a predecessor of Milman Parry, Tennyson probably attached more
meaning and intention to Homer’s placement of formulas and epithets than modern
Homerists do. Tennyson follows Homer exactly in referring to Achilles twice as
“Æakides” (21, 22) and once as “the great Peleion” (28), terms which connect Achilles
to his lineage. In the wake of the simile about fires as a distress signal from a beleaguered
city, these formulas do seem appropriate, as they help to characterize Achilles as the
savior of his people. George Chapman takes the liberty, in line 180 of his translation
(Vol. 2, page 125), of making the connection explicit between the scenario of the
simile and Achilles’s crown of fire: “So (to shew such aid) from his head a light rose,
scaling heaven.” It is not perfectly clear whether Chapman intends “aid” to refer to
Athena’s aid of Achilles or Achilles’s aid of the Achaeans, but his omission of the
epithets “Æakides” and “Peleion” would perhaps tend to indicate the former.
Here again, the divine fire that inspires the invincible hero in battle is a prominent
theme.Achilles’s wrath is indicated by the standard fire symbol and by his formidable
shout. Achilles, who is both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds (Iliad 9.443),
unites these two activities as his voice becomes a powerful weapon. The effective
power of the hero’s voice carries implications of the parity of bard and warrior, thus
making the passage especially attractive, we might guess, to Tennyson. The likening
of Achilles’s voice to a trumpet (19ff.) helps to make his divinely enhanced but
inarticulate shout a fit representation of “the united powers of battle and music.”
Though he has high praise for the “Specimen of a Translation” and “Achilles
Over the Trench,” Theodore Redpath writes of the two unpublished translations,
“There are also two less successful pieces, from Books IV and VI, which Tennyson
wisely left unpublished…. Neither of these unpublished versions is really satisfactory”
(107). It is difficult to see what is unsatisfactory about these pieces, aside from their
lamentable fragmentariness.
One of these fragments is a translation of Iliad 4.446–56, which describes the
resumption of the battle after the duel between Paris and Menelaus:
And when they came together in one place,
Then shocked the spears and bucklers and the strength
Of armèd warriors; then the bossy shields
Ground each on each, and huge uproar arose;
And then were heard the vaunts and groans of men
Slaying and being slain, and the earth ran blood.
As winter torrents rolling from the hill
And flinging their fierce waters through the clefts
From mighty fountains downward to the gulf
Wherein they dash together; and far away
The shepherd on the mountain hears the sound,
Such the drear roar of battle when they mixt.
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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
In his rendering Tennyson employs sound effects admirably well. In line 2,
Tennyson’s use of “shocked” and “bucklers” (Lattimore has “dashed” and “shields”)
makes the description onomatopoeic, while the alliterating “s’s” add impetus. In
line 4, the symmetry of the phrase “each on each” creates the effect of a clash
between two like objects. The fourth line’s concluding phrase, “uproar arose,”
combines alliteration and assonance to simulate the sound it describes. Here
Tennyson’s version is superior to Lattimore’s, which has “the sound grew huge of
the fighting.” Line 8 uses alliterating “f’s” to imitate the sound of the flying water,
a sound pattern that carries over into the “fountains” of line 9. As the simile
proceeds, the verse gathers momentum like the falling waters it portrays. From
“downward” in line 9 to the ono-matopoeic “dash” in line 10, only the word
“gulf” carries any significant stress.The rush of unstressed syllables corresponds to
the final rush of the water to its destination. The semicolon in line 10 signals the
terminus of the water’s descent. Tennyson’s use of “drear roar” makes his version
of line 456 superior to Lattimore’s (“such, from the coming together of men, was
the shock and the shouting.”) and to Fitzgerald’s (“So when these armies closed/
there came a toiling clamor.”).The consonant “r’s” in “drear roar” give the phrase
its acoustic power. As the second “r” of “drear” is pronounced, the voice falls, but
the necessity of starting the next word with the same letter makes the reader
reaccelerate the falling “r,” creating a crescendo effect that echoes the roaring
sound of the battle. A comparable effect is achieved by the phrase “uproar arose”
in line 4, and, incidentally, by the triple “r’s” in the last line of “The Kraken,”
which according to Robert Bernard Martin conveys “cataclysmic energy” and
“explosive force” (107). This Iliad passage forgoes fire imagery in favor of a
description of “mighty fountains” (9), which are of course a traditional symbol of
poetic inspiration. By means of its simile, the passage symbolically links the “fierce
waters” (8) of a battle poet’s afflatus with the sublime ferocity of a frenzied melee.
Another of the fragments is a rendering of Iliad 6.503–14, which describes the
equine exuberance and energy of Paris:
Nor lingered Paris in the lofty house,
But armed himself and all in varied brass
Rushed through the city, glorying in his speed:
As when a horse at manger breaks his band
And riotously rushing down the plain—
Wont in the running river to wash himself
And riot, rears his head and all his mane
Flies back behind him glorying in himself
And galloping to the meadows of the mares—
So ran the son of Priam from the height
Of Ilion, Paris, sunlike all in arms
Glittering
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This excerpt is also exemplary in its artistry.The metrical shift to a strongly accented
first syllable in line 3 enhances the sense of a speedy takeoff, and the weakly stressed
syllables (three in a row before “speed”) in the rest of the line give the effect of
swiftness.The fourth line slows dramatically in order to describe the horse “at manger,”
but at the end of this line the horse breaks loose, and the meter does too. The
rushing rhythms of Tennyson’s rendering of the simile combine with his use of
multiple “r’s” to convey “cataclysmic energy” and “explosive force” here as well. In
each of three straight lines describing the horses charge we find a pairing of “r”
words: “riotously rushing” (5), “running river” (6), and “riot, rears” (7).Tennyson’s
inclusion of “Glittering” (the one word in his translation’s twelfth line) in his
description of Paris helps to relate him to the horse, which is described by the
similar-sounding adjectives “glorying” (3, 8) and “galloping” (9).This fragment, with
its conjunction of a running river and a riotous surfeit of wartime energy, features
symbolism similar to that of Iliad 4.446–56, discussed above.
Each of these four passages translated by Tennyson features an extended simile.
“Simile in Homer is not decoration;” declares Richmond Lattimore, “it is dynamic
invention, and because of this no successor has been able to swing it in the same
grand manner” (44–45). It is a possible reflection of Tennyson’s high esteem for
Homer’s genius that he translated excerpts which demonstrate the “dynamic
invention” of the ancient bard. By selecting passages that also showcase the
Homeric theme of divine inspiration, Tennyson presented a heroic context for
the consideration of his own genius.Tennyson’s selections as a translator of Homer
were to some extent a selection of self, an intimation of his own parity with
both the singers and the subjects of heroic song. The ideology of the excerpts
adumbrates the claim Tennyson would later make explicit in the “Epilogue” to
the “Charge of the Heavy Brigade,” that “The song that nerves a nation’s heart,/
Is in itself a deed” (79–80). By virtue of the brilliant metrical effects of the
translated lines, Tennyson validates their thematic significance and justifies his
nickname as “The Bard.”
Tennyson’s own artistry brings out three additional heroic themes in his other
major translation, the “Battle of Brunanburh.” His version of the poem contains
numerous departures from the Old English original which point up the topics of
warfare as a double-edged sword, the joy of battle, and chivalry. Tennyson relied
on several different sources in recreating the ancient battle account. He made
extensive use of Edwin Guests A History of English Rhythms (356–65), which presents
the original Anglo-Saxon poem along with Guest’s poetic, alliterative translation,
and of Hallam Tennyson’s prose translation based on Guest (reprinted in Alexander,
153–54). Jerome C.Hixson and Patrick Scott (197) note that Tennyson also owned
a copy of Joseph Bosworth’s Anglo-Saxon dictionary, which was published in
1838. In addition to these references he may have consulted one of several LatinAnglo-Saxon dictionaries current at the time. Some of Tennyson’s theme-enhancing
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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
alter-ations conform to one or more of his sources; some of them apparently
originated with Tennyson himself.
Christopher Ricks hails Tennyson’s effort as “among the best verse-translations
of any Anglo-Saxon poetry” (Tennyson 275–76). Michael Alexander, in “Tennyson’s
‘Battle of Brunanburh,’” admires the technical merits of Tennyson’s verses: “…the
master so manages his harmonics that Constantine creeps back to the north in the
mouselike strophe IX; the persistent enjambement of XI suggests a rout; and the
four regular dactylic tetrameters of XIV provide a platform for its grotesque garbaging climax” (159). Aside from these harmonical considerations, however, Alexander
recognizes few of Tennyson’s innovations as contributing to the autonomous artistry
of the translation.
The first such significant innovation occurs in line 20, where Tennyson renders
“Hettend,” “enemy, adversary,” as “spoiler,” a word he found in both Guest’s and
Hallam Tennyson’s versions.A “spoiler” is of course a “pillager,” but the verb “spoil”
has two alternate meanings of thematic importance to the poem. One of these
meanings is “to have an eager desire,” and its most common usage in this sense is in
the phrase cited by Webster, “spoiling for a fight” (an expression which, according to
the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition [16.296], was recognized in England as
early as 1865). The other meaning is “to decay.” A warrior primed for battle is
“spoiling for a fight,” and his battle fury may well result in decaying carnage, as
portrayed in Stanza XIV. By using a word with both of these connotations,Tennyson
touches on the theme of battle furor as a sublime power that is often horrific in its
results.
A word choice with a similar suggestiveness is found in line 23, where Tennyson
follows his son’s variation in translating “fæge feollan,” “fated to fall,” as “Doomed to
the death.” Tennyson repeats the same formula in line 51, in place of the original
“fæege to gefeohte,” “fated to the fight” (28). “Doom” has an Anglo-Saxon root,
“dom,” which meant “glory.” By twice using a word with a root meaning of “glory”
and a modern sense of fatality and ruin,Tennyson again alludes to the dual nature of
battle, its glory and its tragedy.
Another way Tennyson calls attention to the contrasting aspects of war is by
giving the phrases “Weary of war” (36) and “Glad of the war” (104) each a separate
line at the end of a stanza, making them more prominent in his version. It was
perhaps to facilitate this kind of artistry that Tennyson decided to divide his translation
into fifteen stanzas.
Tennyson ignores Guest, Bosworth, and Hallam Tennyson in translating the Old
English adjective “æþele” as “glorious” in his line 29, and this decision conforms to
a pattern of emphasizing the glory of the victorious warriors. He takes the liber-ty
of repeating the word “Lord” (27–28) in his rendering of the description of that
“glorious creature” the sun, an independently conceived modification which helps
to signal a connection between the glory of the sun and Athelstan, who is “Lord
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77
among Earls” (2) and who, like the sun, retires to the west at the end of the day
(103).Tennyson adds his own reference to glory in line 102 of his version.Where the
original has, as Christopher Ricks (The Poems ofTennyson 3.22) notices, “both together,”
Tennyson writes “Each in his glory.”
Tennyson also diverges from the original in order to emphasize the grisly carnage
resulting from the battle. As Ricks notes once again (The Poems of Tennyson 3. 22),
Tennyson, following his son in this case, slightly revises the epithets for the carrion
birds, “dun-coated one” and “dark-coated one,” and applies them instead to the
corpses as “Many a livid one, many a sallow-skin” (106). His description (following
Guest and Hallam Tennyson) of Anlaf’s s retreat on the “fallow flood” (61) makes a
tenuous connection between Anlaf’s loss of glory and the “sallow-skins” of his dead
warriors.The carrion-birds of Stanza XIV are obliquely foreshadowed in Tennyson’s
use (taking his cue again from Guest and Hallam Tennyson) of the word “flyers” (42)
for “herefleman” (23).Tennyson’s line 73, “Lost in the carnage,” is his own addition.
In the next line, he again diverges from his known sources in translating “fergrunden,”
as “Mangled to morsels” (74), a phrase Michael Alexander calls “a lurid exaggeration”
(159). In using the word “morsels” (Bosworth defines the verb “for-grindan” as “to
grind up”), Tennyson was no doubt looking ahead to Stanza XIV.
After adding emphasis to both the glory and the horror of the battle throughout
his translation,Tennyson makes a final innovation that brings these elements together.
As Ricks (The Poems of Tennyson 3.22) notes, in lines 123–24 Tennyson changes the
original “eorlas arhwate,” “glorious Earls,” to “Earls that were lured by the/Hunger
of glory….” The preceding passage on the horrific hunger of the scavengers lends
an ugly connotation to the “hunger of glory.” To satisfy the hunger for glory in
battle is also to provide sustenance for the garbaging war-hawk. Tennyson’s
conclusion points to the quintessentially heroic theme of the tragic shadow cast
by those who bathe in glory.
In spite of the gruesome and deadly nature of their activity, warriors in heroic
literature experience the joy of battle which Homer calls “kharme” and which the
Old English bards express in kennings such as “wigplega,” “battle-play” (“The Battle
of Maldon” 268, 316), and “hondplega,” “hand-play” (“The Battle of Brunanburh”
25). Tennyson emphasizes the heroic theme of the joy of battle by enhancing the
“play” aspect of his translation. In Tennyson’s line 91, “The play that they played…,”
he takes the single reference to play in the original (51–52) and in the translations of
Guest and Hallam Tennyson, and reiterates it. In line 92 he translates “afaran,” which
Guest and Hallam Tennyson render “sons,” as “children,” which helps to characterize
the Saxons as players. He renders the “hondplegan” of the orig-inal (25) literally, as
“hand-play” in line 44. Unlike Guest and Hallam Tennyson,Tennyson uses the word
“javelin” three times in his translation, in lines 32, 88, and 96, for the Anglo-Saxon
words “gar” and “darað” (Bosworth offers “javelin” as one of several alternatives for
both words). Only in line 96 does “javelin” figure in the pattern of alliteration. The
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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
word does constitute a dactylic foot and therefore fits well with Tennyson’s meter,
but “javelin” also brings a connotation of play to the battle descriptions.The throwing
of javelins as an athletic contest dates to the original Olympic games in ancient
Greece.
Michael Alexander claims that Tennyson’s motive in doing his own version of
the poem was to offer “a patriotic celebration of Brunanburh as a crucial English
triumph, the high point of the dominance of the West-Saxon dynasty in Britain”
(151). Even so, Tennyson the artist prevails over Tennyson the patriot in at least
one respect: his versions portrayal of the Saxons’ enemies remains faithful to the
traditional heroic ideals of humanity and chivalry. “In general,” writes C.M.Bowra,
“however bloodthirsty and fierce war may be, and whatever fury may possess its
exponents, [warriors] are still bound by a certain code which insists that a hero’s
opponents are ultimately of the same breed as himself and that he should treat as
he would wish to be treated himself” (Heroic Poetry 70). Achilles, attests Richmond
Lattimore, “is not only a great fighter but a great gentleman, and if he lacks the
chivalry of Roland, Lancelot, or Beowulf, that is because theirs is a chivalry coloured
with Christian humility which has no certain place in the gallery of Homeric
virtues” (48). “Homer, and all his great successors,” writes H.D.E Kitto, “have
another quality which we have not yet spoken of,…That is…humanity” (55).
Walter Kaufmann concurs: “There is…a quality of the Iliad that left a decisive
mark on Greek tragedy: a profound humanity that experiences suffering as suffering
and death as death, even if they strike the enemy” (138, original emphasis).
Kaufmann calls the world of the Iliad “the world of chivalry” (171). In accord
with this heroic ideal, Tennyson’s heightening of the horror in Stanza XIV tends
to make the reader pity the slaughtered Scotsmen and Norsemen. Unheeding of
his sources he adds similar, complimentary adjectives, “mighty” (43), and “strong”
(53), to the descriptions of both the Mercian allies and the enemy earls of Anlaf.
He calls Constantine a “hero” in line 65, whereas the original has “hilde-rinc”
(39), which Bosworth, Guest, and Hallam Tennyson translate as either “soldier” or
“warrior.” He calls the Saxons’ enemies “heroes” once again in line 112, taking
liberties with the original “folces” (67), which Guest and Hallam Tennyson render
as “men” and Bosworth as “people.” Alliteration was undoubtedly a concern in
these last two examples, but Tennyson’s intent to be fair is evident nonetheless.
Alexander calls the Ur-Brunanburh “a tribute to heroism, including enemy heroism:
the death of so many men who happened to be opponents is not an occasion
merely for crowing; nor is the death of Constantine’s son” (158). Tennyson takes
his ideological cue from the original and from the venerable heroic tradition
behind it. As a patriotic Englishman rendering his account of a national triumph,
Tennyson was faced with a chance to act upon a heroic ideal himself, and he
responded by augmenting the chivalrous restraint and balance of the Old English
version.
Historical and Legendary Battles
79
Tennyson’s decision to translate “The Battle of Brunanburh” in addition to the
several passages from the Iliad indicates the poets high degree of interest not only in
ancient languages but also in the traditions of ancient battle literature. Theodore
Redpath and Michael Alexander both point out instances in Tennyson’s translations
where he sacrifices fidelity to the original, usually for the sake of sound.Tennyson’s
“Battle of Brunanburh” may be more characteristic of Tennysonian verse than of
Anglo-Saxon, but his rendering subtly promotes the ancient poem’s ideological
content.While enhancing the sound of his own version, his alterations also enhance
the prominence of the original heroic themes.
In “The Revenge:A Ballad of the Fleet,” Tennyson uses the conventions of heroic
literature to depict an incident from England’s sixteenth century naval war against
the Spanish Armada. He calls on the standard imagery of storms and of animals, and
his artistic strategy once again seems guided by the ideal of chivalry. The use of the
same image patterns to refer to both the English and the Spanish helps to balance
Tennyson’s portrayal of the opposing factions.
Charles Tennyson recounts that “The Revenge” “achieved immediately a welldeserved popularity. Alfred himself loved to read it aloud and Sidney Colum used to
say that he once heard him do so in the impressive chaunt which was so characteristic
of him” (Alfred Tennyson 442).The poem has drawn a considerable amount of critical
attention. Harold Nicolson, Paull F.Baum, Alastair W.Thomson, and Valerie Pitt are
all complimentary but brief in their remarks. More thorough is James R.Kincaid,
who alleges in Tennyson’s Major Poems:The Comic and Ironic Patterns that the heroism
depicted in “The Revenge” is laced with irony:
[Tennyson] catches, therefore, both great determination and also mania, the sense that
heroism itself is fascinating but unnatural….
The poem even hints at a suicidal quality in the hero, a perverse delight in selfdestruction, presented in such a way as sometimes to seem slightly callous, even absurd….
The heroism contains a touch of vulgarity, a crude and narrow irrationality at odds
with the expansive serenity common to the heroic tone. (135)
The “mania” of the frenzied hero was apparently not considered “unnatural” by the
ancient bards, who depicted this mania as a force of nature, a practice followed once
again by Tennyson in “The Revenge.” Richard Grenville is not “suicidal,” nor does
he have a “perverse delight in self-destruction;” he exemplifies the heroic willingness
to die for a glorious ideal. Cedric Whitman’s description of Achilles applies equally
well to Grenville: “He is sacrificing himself to the idea of himself, to the idea of his
own heroism” (The Heroic Paradox 27). When Kincaid characterizes Grenville’s
question in lines 86–88 as “a trifle wild” (135) and implies that Grenville’s crewmen
demonstrate admirable sanity in refusing his offer of a heroic death, he is flying in
the face of the heroic tradition underlying Tennyson’s poem. Grenville’s question is
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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
perfectly in accord with the choices of Achilles and Cuchullain, who both preferred
a short but glorious life to a long but undistinguished one.As for Kincaid’s reference
to the “expansive serenity common to the heroic tone,” he neglects to consider that
the heroes of the great epics are renowned not for their serenity but for their often
ungovernable intensity.
One of the most thorough and impressive studies of any of Tennyson’s battle
pieces is the chapter on “The Revenge” in Three Keys to Language by Robert M.
Estrich and Hans Sperber. Estrich and Sperber’s technical analysis of the poem is
astute.They notice that the “Revenge” “sinks with the solemnity of perfect anapests
in the final line” (262). They note Tennyson’s use of archaisms in lines 4, 8, 29, 93,
106, and 114, commenting that they “add dignity” and enhance the poem’s
believability, “for we have always found it easier to believe in the authenticity of
romantic heroism in the past or far away” (263).They also remark Tennyson’s use of
omniscient point of view until the central sections (VI to XI), where he emphasizes
the unity of the British by using “we,” “us,” and “our” repeatedly (264). They
comment that Tennyson calls the poem a ballad, but that he “has only suggested
the traditional ballad stanza and rhythm” (265). His use of caesuras and internal
rhyme heightens the ballad effect, they suggest, observing also that “It is easy to
understand why Tennyson, seeking to invoke the help of tradition as well as to
preserve freedom for a variety of dramatic and descriptive effects, wrote a ballad,
but wrote it in this form, suggestive rather than closely imitative of the traditional
type” (265–66).They elucidate the artistry of Tennyson’s use of repetition, contrast,
and parallelism (269). The repetitions “frame the structural climax of the poem”
(270), which is, of course, the battle.
Though Estrich and Sperber’s demonstration of Tennyson’s skill is creditable,
their attitude towards the aesthetic of “The Revenge” is rather dubious. They
discuss Tennyson’s “tendency to shape his facts into something more noble than
reality” (256), noting his omission of the severity and the fierceness towards his
own men that Jan Huygen van Linschoten ascribes to Grenville and of the gory
details in Sir Walter Raleigh’s account of the battle. “This is the event and these are
the characters not as they were,” write Estrich and Sperber, “not even as they were
supposed to be by a favorable propagandist, but as they ought to have been to
provide a perfect epic episode” (255).They find that in this respect “The Revenge”
exemplifies one of Tennyson’s “negative traits”—“his bias towards softening the
brutal and getting away from the ugly” (271–72).This accusation contrasts markedly
with Christopher Ricks’s criticism that “Tennyson is always imaginatively sensitive
to splintering weapons, but seldom to splintering skulls” (Tennyson 248n.). We
have seen that Tennyson is very far from softening the brutal or getting away from
the ugly in poems such as “The Vale of Bones,” “Gods Denunciations Against
Pharoah-Hophra,” “Boädicea,” and “Battle of Brunanburh,” and Stanzas X and XI
of “The Revenge” provide a sobering counterpoise to the poems “exaltation of
Historical and Legendary Battles
81
romantic heroism” (Estrich 264). Tennyson emulates the ancient bards in
acknowledging the gruesome aspect of warfare while yet celebrating the glory of
heroic ideals. In Hallam Tennyson’s Memoir (2.337), Tennyson indirectly addresses
Estrich and Sperber’s charge: “I agree with Wordsworth that Art is selection. Look
at Zola for instance: he shows the evils of the world without the ideal. His Art
becomes monstrous therefore, because he does not practice selection. In the noblest
genius there is need of self-restraint.” Estrich and Sperber quote Carlyle on “The
Revenge”: “I knew that Alfred would treat that episode in a masterful manner, and
he’d not allude to Elizabeth’s starving the poor sailors” (Estrich 272). Tennyson’s
practice of “selection” was to Carlyle the “masterful” way of handling the story.
Judging from the following remarks of H.D.E Kitto, it was also the Homeric way.
In The Greeks, Kitto comments on the Iliad:
The Iliad does not describe an episode in the war, colouring the description with
passing reflections about this or that aspect of life; rather, the poet has taken his “subject,”
this phase of the war, as so much raw material, to be built into an entirely new structure
of his own devising. He is not going to write about the war, not even about part of it,
but about the theme which he states so clearly in the first five verses. (47)
Kitto also speaks of Homer’s “discipline” and “control” (46) as an artist, to which we
might compare Tennyson’s reference to “self-restraint.”
The Homeric desideratum of preserving the glory of heroes is in evidence in
the very title of “The Revenge.” Tennyson abstains from naming the ship in “The
Captain,” because the hope of the ignoble and anonymous Captain “to make the
name/Of his vessel great in story” (“The Captain” 18–19) is tantamount to the
desire to perpetuate his own name. The names of a great ship and of its captain
become indissolubly linked. In “The Revenge,” the names “Sir Richard Grenville”
and “Lord Howard” are used as metonyms for their vessels in lines 1 and 13, and
the battleships are repeatedly personified—see lines 38, 42, 50, 51, 52, 60, 61, and
111.These strategies render the title virtually synonymous with Grenville’s name.
Christopher Ricks notes that in writing “The Revenge” Tennyson “was possibly
influenced by Browning’s “Herve Riel” (The Poems of Tennyson 3.25). “Herve Riel”
concludes with the lines, “In my verse, Herve Riel, do thou once more/Save the
squadron, honour France, love thy wife the Belle Aurore!” In Tennyson’s verse
Grenville once more holds the Spanish squadron at bay. The reenactment of
Grenville’s heroics gives the title another connotation: “The Revenge” constitutes
a form of revenge over time and death.
Grenville is figuratively apotheosized by sinking into the ocean, which acquires a
symbolic equivalence to the great deep of “The Passing of Arthur,” “De Profundis,”
and “Crossing the Bar.” In line 14 the sea is analogous to the “silent summer heaven,”
and in line 90 Grenville equates sinking with falling “into the hands of God.” The
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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
buffeting of the Armada by the storm (a traditional battle image) has overtones of
divine retribution: “Till it smote on their hulls and their sails and their masts and
their flags,/And the whole sea plunged and fell on the shot-shattered navy of Spain”
(117). The God specified in “The Revenge” is the “God of battles” (62), and the
concluding reference to the sea contains an allusion to his power. The last word of
the poem, “main,” comes from “maegen,” the Old English word for “might,” and
“main” still retains its sense of “strength” or “force.” Grenville is denied his wish to
“fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of Spain,” but because of the chivalry
of the Spanish he is sunk “with honour down into the deep” (109), where he
symbolically becomes one with the “main” of the God of battles.
The pummeling of both the Revenge (which, like Grenville, is “lost evermore in
the main” [119]) and the Armada by the tempest is only one example of the symmetry
with which Tennyson depicts Grenville and his Spanish antagonists. The chivalry of
the warriors is an ideal Tennyson apparently follows himself in his arrangement of
the poem’s pattern of imagery. Estrich and Sperber notice the use of “dog” to describe
both factions (12, 30, 54), and in this context they comment that “heroic poetry has
allowed courtesy between great-hearted foes ever since the time when Achilles
entertained Priam in his tent” (259).Tennyson handles several other motifs with the
same impartiality. In line 12 Grenville speaks of “the devildoms of Spain.” He refers
to the Spanish as “the children of the devil,” and states that he never turned his back
“upon Don or devil yet” (30–31).Towards the end of the poem the narrator uses the
“devil” image to refer to Grenville: “Was he devil or man? He was devil for aught
they knew” (108). In line 14 Grenville’s compatriot Thomas Howard “melted like a
cloud.” The same image describes the Spanish ship “San Philip,” which “hung above
us like a cloud” (43). In line 68 Grenville is wounded “in the side.” Three lines later
the speaker refers to the Spanish fleet “with broken sides” (71). In line 34 the Spanish
fleet is split: “For half of their fleet to the right and half to the left were seen.” When
Grenville calls on his gunner to sink the “Revenge,” he says “split her in twain!” (89).
Estrich and Sperber call attention to the pathos-evoking details and the “flamboyant,
anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic motive” (249) of the third stanza.The hardened warrior,
they observe, becomes almost tender as he “bore in hand” his sick men and “laid
them on the ballast” (15, 18).What Estrich and Sperber neglect to mention is that in
Stanza XIII some of the same pathos-evoking phrases describe the Spanish solicitude
for Grenville. “And the stately Spanish men to their flagship bore him then,/Where
they laid him by the mast” (97–98). They also “praised him to his face with their
courtly foreign grace” (90).
Other elements that help to align “The Revenge” with the heroic tradition include
the likening of the cannon fire to a “thunderbolt” (44), to “battle-thunder” (49), and
to “battle-thunder and flame” (59). The “Revenge” reflects the battle furor of its
captain when it is described as “mad” (38). Grenville exhibits heroic qualities in his
“pride” (82), in his defiant laughter (32), and in the “joyful spirit” with which he
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83
meets his foes and dies (103).The phrase “roared a hurrah” in line 32 comprises the
traditional motifs of shouting and animality, and in line 96 Grenville is called a
“lion.” The English fleet is also depicted using bird imagery.The reconnaissance boat
in line 2 “came flying,” like a “fluttered bird.” This instance is succeeded by references
to flying in lines 6, 9, and 25.These references give added weight to the word “Fleet”
in the poem’s subtitle.As a verb, “fleet” can mean “to fly swiftly.” It can also mean “to
fade away,” or “vanish,” which is what Thomas Howard does in Stanza III as he flies
the scene of the battle.
“The Revenge” adheres firmly to the heroic tradition but not quite so firmly to
the sixteenth century chronicles of the battle the poem depicts. By coloring history
with heroic idealism,Tennyson brings into question the proper relationship between
the artist and the annalist. In other poems of this chapter we have seen Tennyson
utilize his Homeric legacy to broach issues such as the true nature of glory, the value
of unconventional forms of heroism, and the suitability of women for aggressive
pursuits. Tennyson’s ability to make the heroic tradition relevant to topical issues
contributed to his preparedness to sing the battles of his own day in his role as
national bard.
Chapter Four
Contemporary Conflicts
T
ENNYSON’S POEMS ON CONTEMPORARY CONFLICTS SPAN
AN EXTENSIVE chronological range, beginning with the “Exhortation
to the Greeks,” published in 1827. Composed during the same period but
not published until 1893 was “Written during the Convulsions in Spain.” In 1852
Tennyson turned to exhorting his own people and elicited critical convulsions in
England with his controversial incendiary pieces. His two martial poems as laureate,
the “Wellington Ode” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” appeared in 1852
and 1854 respectively, “The Defence of Lucknow,” with its “Dedicatory Poem to
the Princess Alice,” in 1879, and “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade,” with its prologue
and epilogue, in 1885. In this chapter the two “Charge” poems, because they both
celebrate the Battle of Balaclava, are discussed consecutively.
One thing that unifies all these poems in spite of their chronological variety is
that in authoring them Tennyson fully realized the bardic ideal. He inspired real
warriors and commemorated the exploits of his own national military heroes. In
some cases his countrymen verified his claim that the song that nerves a nation’s
heart is in itself a deed. “The Charge of the Light Brigade” was a favorite among the
British soldiers in the Crimea, and “had a most heart-stirring effect on all” (Charles
Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson 288). Upon one bedridden soldiers hearing the piece,
“the sick man’s eye lit up and he began a spirited description of the Charge. Before
many hours had passed he was completely restored to health” (Charles Tennyson,
Alfred Tennyson 289). Tennyson had 2,000 copies of the poem sent to the British
chaplain at the front, who wrote him that “The poet can now make heroes, just as in
days of yore, if he will” (Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson 288). “The Charge of the
Light Brigade,” asValerie Pitt recounts, “had its effect in the abolition of the purchase
system in the staffing of the army” (206). Patrick Waddington observes that the
poem “was treated as a kind of appendage of the actual charge, influencing other
85
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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
poets and building up for itself an overwhelming preponderance in the popular
imagination” (77). During Tennyson’s funeral in Westminster Abbey, “the aisle was
lined by survivors of Balaclava” (Levi 221). Even the fulminating poems of 1852 had
a tangible impact. “TheVolunteers that Tennyson had been lustily yelling for,” writes
Peter Levi, “…were formed in 1859, and in 1860 the rifle clubs met on Wimbledon
Common: the Queen fired the first shot” (220).
The first shot fired by Tennyson in his campaign to influence contemporary
military action was his “Exhortation to the Greeks,” a poem with which the
teenage Tennyson chastises the venerable country of Homer while tugging at
the mantle of the ancient bard. His youthful audacity culminates with the
concluding lines, “And there is not a voice to a nation so dear,/As the war-song
of freedom that calls on the brave” (25–26), which seem self-referential. The
two lines preceding these, “For there is not ought that a freeman can fear,/As
the fetters of insult, the name of a slave” (23–24), emphasize the importance of
words in sustaining honor and reputation. The four concluding lines establish an
antithesis between “the fetters of insult” and “the war-song of freedom” with
which a poet both rouses a nation to action and celebrates its honor. In lines 7–
10, “For know, that the former bright page of thy story/Proclaims but thy bondage
and tells but thy shame:/Proclaims from how high thou art fallen…” the speaker
presents a bard’s-eye view of history as a story, a heroic story for which honor
demands a noble ending.
Tennyson’s casting of himself in the role of a successor to Homer is consistent
with his strategy of establishing a sense of continuity between the ancient and modern
Greeks. He repeatedly calls upon Greece to remember its former days of glory. He
complements this strategy by alluding to Paradise Lost, a work whose ancient biblical
source only enhanced its modern relevance in the eyes of most Europeans of the
time. Christopher Ricks (The Poems of Tennyson 1.160) cites “embodied” in line 14
as deriving from Paradise Lost 1.574, “such imbodied force.” The “imbodied force” is
Satan’s battalion of devils in Hell.Tennyson’s reference to the Greek “phalanx,” also
in line 14, presumably derives from the same Miltonic passage: in Paradise Lost 1.550,
Milton notes that the devils “move/In perfect Phalanx….” These allusions help to
draw a parallel between the Greeks and Milton’s devil brigade.The Greeks, like the
devils, were once “high,” but have “fallen” (9).The Greeks’ “fallen” state, in conjunction
with the thrice-repeated injunction to “Arouse thee, O Greece!” (1, 3, 11) and to
“arise from thy sleep!” (12), recalls Satan’s demand that his troops “Awake, arise, or
be for ever fall’n” (PL 1.330). In this context Tennyson’s use of the Homeric fire/
light image (4–7), especially in his seventh line’s reference to blazing, evokes the
Miltonic fires of Hell.
The epigraph to “Exhortation to the Greeks” coordinates well with the poems
allusions to Paradise Lost In The Poems of Tennyson (1.159), Christopher Ricks
translates the epigraph, “Lo, here, here is the freedom for which you have often
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87
longed.” Sallust’s The Conspiracy of Catiline, 20.14, provides the quotation, which
is spoken by Catiline in a rousing oration to his fellow conspirators prior to their
unsuccessful revolt. Just as Satan’s magnificent exhortations, culminating in the
command to “Awake, arise, or be for ever fall’n,” prove ultimately futile, Catiline’s
speech was unavailing. Interestingly enough, immediately preceding the words in
Tennyson’s epigraph, Catiline cries, “Awake, then!” (190). Satan’s advice that “our
better part remains/To work in close design, by fraud or guile/What force effected
not” (PL 1.645–47), is paralleled by Catiline’s initial attempt to achieve his ends
politically rather than violently, and also by Sallust’s discussion of the superiority
of brains over brawn in the prefaces to both The Conspiracy of Catiline and The
Jugurthine War.
Tennyson implicitly compares the Greeks to Milton’s defeated devils, and he
selects his epigraph from a speech preceding a revolution that would end in defeat.
Perhaps in doing so he is invoking the heroic ideal of unremitting courage in the
face of insurmountable odds.Tennyson’s boyhood reading in Shelley and Byron may
have determined his view of Milton’s Satan as heroically defiant. In line 2 Tennyson
refers to the wars between Ancient Greece and Persia, which gave rise to the Battle
of Thermopylae, an archetypal example of a hopeless but heroic final stand (see
Tennyson’s use of Thermopylae in the concluding lines of “The Third of February,
1852”). The reference in line 20 is to the Battle of Salamis, an encounter which
demonstrated that a hopeless mismatch can occasionally result in the most glorious
of victories. In 480 B.C.E., in the waters around the island of Salamis, 360 Greek
ships routed a Persian fleet of 1200.
Perhaps Tennyson’s intention in linking the Greeks with defeated devils and
Romans was to offer a subtle hint that the Greek cause would have been lost if not
for the British aid Greece received in its war against Turkey. In 1827, the same year
“Exhortation to the Greeks” was published, Greece accepted military support from
Great Britain, Russia, and France in its fight against Turkish efforts to regain control
of the country after Greece had declared its independence in 1822. In 1824, Byron,
whom the young Tennyson had idolized, had died in Greece while working for
Greek independence. W.D.Paden (127) compares “Exhortation to the Greeks” to
Byron’s Childe Harold 2.73–76, which also attempts to shame the modern Greeks
into action by comparing them unfavorably to their glorious forbears, and which
repeatedly sounds the note of freedom versus slavery with which Tennyson concludes
his poem. In its tone and in its anapestic meter, the “Exhortation to the Greeks”
resembles several of Byron’s trumpet-blowing pieces from the Hebrew Melodies of
1815, such as “Jephtha’s Daughter,” “Song of Saul Before His Last Battle,” or “The
Destruction of Sennacherib.”
Like “Exhortation to the Greeks,” “Written During the Convulsions in Spain” is
an early piece whose epigraph carries a lot of its artistic weight. The epigraph,
which Christopher Ricks translates, “to the Cantabrians not yet schooled to bear
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our yoke” (The Poems of Tennyson 1.168), comes from Horace’s Ode 2.6 (2–3). In
the Ode, the Cantabrians of northwest Spain are specifically associated with Gadès,
or Cadiz, the place where the revolt against Ferdinand VII, which Tennyson’s poem
champions, began. The speaker of the Horatian Ode has been asked by his friend
Septimius to accompany him to Spain, “where Cantabrians have not learned our/
Rule” (this and the subsequent quotations from the Ode are taken from the Charles
E. Passage translation, pages 187–88).The speaker declines, saying, “I have had enough
of the sea, and roads, and/Service with armies” (7–8). He prefers the alternative of a
pleasant, pastoral life at Tibur (6—cf. Ode 1.7. 1–14) or in the “lovely Galaesus
valley” (10), a place that “loves a fruitful/Bacchus” (18–19). Horace’s carpe diem
philosophy is hedonistic rather than heroic, and his speaker’s reaction to the knowledge
of impending death (in line 23 he speaks of his “yet-warm funeral ashes”) is
comparable to the stance condemned by Isaiah: “let us eat and drink; for to morrow
we shall die” (Isaiah 22.13).
“Written During the Convulsions in Spain” calls attention to Horace’s Ode 2. 6
only to undercut the hedonistic orientation of the Ode. In Tennyson’s poem, it is
battle, and not just battle, but death in battle, that will bring the pleasant, pastoral
springtime Horace’s speaker desires as a refuge from warfare:
Fresh be their tombs who fall,
Green be they one and all,
There may the red rose and wild laurel wave!
There may the sunbeams glance,
There may the maidens dance,
There may the olive bend over their grave! (7–12)
Tennyson, perhaps mindful that Arcadia was in fact a harsh, mountainous land inhabited
by a warlike people, makes death on the battlefield the mother of pastoral beauty.
In his gloss on line 10 of Horace’s ode, Charles E.Passage describes “the lovely
Galaesus valley” for which the speaker longs as the channel of the ancient Galaesus
River, which is now called the Sinni (188). Weapons flow like water in “Written
During the Convulsions in Spain”: “Streams o’er thy campaign the far-flashing glaive”
(3). The bucolic meets the bellicose also in the battle cries of Tennyson’s poem, in
which tones of music are discernible: “Hark to the battle-cries,/Pealing sonorous
along thy blue sky!” (29–30).
In his mingling of pastoral with heroic conventions Tennyson implicates a heroic
response to the Sybaritic attitude of Horace’s Ode 2.6, a response comparable to
that of Samuel Daniel’s Ulysses in his argument with the Siren:
But natures of the noblest frame
These toils and dangers please;
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89
And they take comfort in the same
As much as you in ease; (“Ulysses and the Siren” 41–44)
In his allusions to the escapism of Horace,Tennyson may also have been attempting
to emphasize the heroism of the Spanish revolutionaries by setting up an implicit
contrast between their attitude and that of Horace’s speaker. In 1820 the Spanish
troops of Ferdinand VII, like the speaker of Horace’s Ode, refused to leave home to
wage war in foreign lands. Instead of favoring Horace’s hedonistic alternative, however,
the Spaniards started a revolution at home.
The vehemence of Tennyson’s support for the revolutionaries is reflected in the
vigor of his dactylic verse. F.B.Pinion comments on “Written During the Convulsions
in Spain,” “…the measure gives to some extent a foretaste of ‘The Charge of the
Light Brigade,’ and has a rousing appeal” (68). The poem also features profuse
alliteration and assonance, as the first stanza exemplifies. Every line of the first stanza
contains at least “s” so und, a nd the “sp” of “spirit” in line 1 is echoed almost
immediately by the “Sp” of “Spain” in line 2. The “far-flashing” glaive of line 3
alliterates with “Freedom” (4) and “future” (5). “Roused,” the first word of the
poem, is assonant with “now” (1) and “brow” (2). “Spain” (2), “campaign” (3), “glaive”
(3), “rays” (4), “days” (5), and “brave” (6) are assonant as well, as are “Streams” (3) and
“Sweetly” (4). This same density of alliteration and assonance strengthens the
succeeding stanzas as well. Tennyson complements the heroic vigor of the lines by
evoking the heroic topoi of light (“Bright be their bays who live,/ Bright as all
Earth can give,” “Brilliant their glory’s star” [13–14, 17]) and of shouting (“Arm
them for combat and shout, ‘To the fight!’” [33]).
The critical neglect of “Exhortation to the Greeks” and “Written During the
Convulsions in Spain” is benign compared to the treatment received by the following
group of infamous incitive poems from 1852. Critics of these four (selected here
from a total of seven) hawkish pieces seem to have been unduly influenced by
Charles Tennyson’s observation that his grandfather “wrote all these poems in a
white heat of emotion; ‘Hands All Round’ in particular he composed with the tears
streaming down his cheeks” (Alfred Tennyson 266). In the belief that Tennyson let slip
these dogs of war from his pen with little thought or care, commentators have called
the pieces everything from a “chronic hysterical war-whoop of the muse” (Jump
415) to “emotional doodles” (Kincaid 220). Robert Bernard Martin’s is a typical
assessment:
Alfred wrote a series of seven poems in January and February 1852 that any admirer
would wish had never seen light. A few of their over-punctuated titles tell the story:
“Rifle Clubs!!!” “Britons, Guard Your Own,” “Hands All Round!” In them Tennyson
slips across the narrow line dividing ardent patriotism from hysteria, proclaiming his
dislike of the French, shrilly urging England to “Arm, arm, arm!” and succeeding only
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in manifesting the hollow belligerence of the unmartial man caught up in blind
chauvinism. (365)
Many commentators, in their hysterical and belligerent condemnation of the
inflammatory verses, are guilty of the sin they condemn. Although much of the
criticism is justifiable, it is also justifiable to break new critical ground and say
something constructive about the poems. Their ties to the heroic tradition make
them worthy of being considered alongside Tennyson’s other battle pieces as legitimate
works of art in the Homeric line.
In lines 43–44 of “Britons, Guard Your Own,” the speaker hearkens back to old
times: “We were the best of marksmen long ago,/we won old battles with our
strength, the bow.” In adverting to the past these lines epitomize the strategy of a
poem in which Tennyson’s call for undaunted resistance to the French evokes the
ancient heroic ideal of his nation. “Britons, Guard Your Own” posits a situation in
which Great Britain stands alone in defiance of Louis Napoleon: “He triumphs;
maybe we shall stand alone” (5, 11). England may face insurmountable odds, but she
must make a final stand undismayed:
Should he land here, and for one hour prevail,
There must no man go back to bear the tale:
No man to bear it—
Swear it! we swear it!
Although we fight the banded world alone,
We swear to guard our own. (55–60)
Belief in the value of standing alone and defiant against an overwhelming force was
the characteristic trait of the ancient Norse and Anglo-Saxon brand of heroism.
Edith Hamilton writes of Norse mythology: “The heroes and heroines of the early
stories face disaster.They know that they cannot save themselves, not by any courage
or endurance or great deed. Even so, they do not yield.They die resisting” (Mythology
300). J.R.R Tolkien notes the “fundamentally similar heroic temper of ancient England
and Scandinavia” (25), and speaks of the Anglo-Saxons’ “exaltation of undefeated
will, which receives doctrinal expression in the words of Byrhtwold at the battle of
Maldon” (23). Byrhtwold’s rallying cry (“Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre,/
mod sceal þe mare þe ure mægan lytlað” [“The Battle of Maldon” 312–13]) was,
according to Tolkien, “made for a man’s last and hopeless day” (23n.). Such is the
stage Tennyson sets in line 2, where the speaker’s warning suggests the
Götterdämerung: “The world’s last tempest darkens overhead.”
By supplementing the metaphor of the “tempest” with that of the battleships’
“thunder” in line 40,Tennyson evokes a Homeric trope for battle wrath. In lines 52–
53, “Nor seek to bridle/His rude aggressions…,” where “rude” means “sav-age,”
Tennyson again touches on the Homeric theme of rampant fury. The use of the
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word “bridle” likens Napoleon’s aggressions to the wild charging of a horse, a
traditional symbol of furor, as in Virgil’s description of Turnus in Aeneid 11 (which
adapts Iliad 6. 503–14, one of the passages Tennyson translated).
The traditional importance of the bard’s s role is another Homeric element
adumbrated in “Britons, Guard Your Own.” The poem emphasizes the necessity of
words in establishing honor and freedom. Napoleon is unreliable because he does
not keep his word: “Peace lovers we—but who can trust a liar?—” (14). The
animadversion on lying anticipates Maud, where “God’s just wrath shall be wreaked
on a giant liar” (3.45), and the Idylls of the King, where “Man’s word is God in man”
(CA 132). The hatred of falsehood is Homeric. In the Iliad, Achilles says, “For as I
detest the doorways of Death, I detest that man, who/hides one thing in the depths
of his heart, and speaks forth another” (9.312–13, Lattimore 206).
Words relate to the Napoleonic threat in another way: the French people can no
longer speak for themselves. “We hate not France, but France has lost her voice”
(19).The British people, on the other hand, are free to cry out their allegiance to the
queen (26), and it is “free speech that makes a Briton known” (29). As in the heroic
tradition, words promulgate renown.Tennyson’s poem, which is itself an exercise of
free speech, celebrates the renown not of individual heroes but of his country. The
refrain, “Britons, guard your own,” implies a sense of separation between the speaker
and his countrymen. In the last line of the poem, the refrain changes to “We swear
to guard our own,” which conveys a sense of national unity that includes the speaker.
At the conclusion Tennyson steps into the role of national bard by assuming that his
words have achieved their end of uniting his countrymen behind him. In the Memoir
(1.344), Hallam Tennyson includes a shortened version of “Britons, Guard Your
Own” under the heading, “National Songs.” The poem was set to Emily’s music.
“The Third of February, 1852,” which was also set to music, is similar in its
artistic devices to “Britons, Guard Your Own.” According to Hallam Tennyson,
“The Third of February, 1852” was written in response to the occasion “when the
House of Lords seemed to condone Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état in Dec. 1851,
and rejected the Bill for the organization of the Militia when he was expected to
attack England” (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 2.473). “On 3 Feb.,” writes
Christopher Ricks, “Derby in the House of Lords was applauded after his attack
on the British press for antagonizing Napoleon while lamenting our weak army”
(The Poems of Tennyson 2.473). In support of the press “The Third of February,
1852” stresses the importance of unflinching speech, and it does so in part by
equating words with deeds according to the heroic tradition. The poem begins,
“My Lords, we heard you speak: you told us all/That England’s honest censure
went too far;/That our free press should cease to brawl” (1–3).The press is brawling:
the “mental fight” of the wordsmiths is described as if it were a literal, physical
conflict. In contrast to the manly brawling of the press is the childish bawling of
the “niggard throats of Manchester” (43), who require peace for the furtherance
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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
of their fortunes. Valerie Pitt finds in lines 43–45 “a useless cacophony of vowel
sounds, ‘man, may, bawl, all,’ of which Tennyson at his best was incapable” (203).
The cacophony of vowel sounds is not useless: it echoes the “bawling” of the
Mancunians. Tennyson uses another martial metaphor in lines 5–6, “It was our
ancient privilege, my Lords,/To fling whate’er we felt, not fearing, into words,”
where the act of writing is described in terms that evoke the throwing of a spear.
“Odin,” writes H.R.Ellis Davidson, “possessed the great spear Gungnir, and this
was evidently used to stir up warfare in the world” (Gods and Myths 53).Tennyson’s
words are intended to have the same effect, while constituting a form of warfare
themselves. In the third stanza the speaker exercises his right of free speech in
demanding the same.The stanza concludes with an interesting twist on the tradition
of the bard as the recorder of heroic deeds: “… we must speak;/That if tonight our
greatness were struck dead,/There might be left some record of the things we
said” (16–18).The ancient hero’s hope for his actions, that they might be perpetuated
in writing, is here the narrator’s hope for the speech of the British. The Achillean
contempt for lying is found in line 10, “We dare not even by silence sanction lies.”
The traditional heroic trope of animalism is in evidence, beginning in the fourth
line, “Not sting the fiery Frenchman into war.” In contrast to the words of the
brawling press, which in this fourth line are likened to a bee’s aggression, the “honeyed
whispers” of the barons (36) relate to the too-sweet product of the bee.The association
of the barons with production rather than with aggression is perfectly appropriate,
considering that they side with the “cotton-spinners” (45) whose self-serving antipathy
to national conflict has ironically left the country with “naked coasts” (40). Christopher
Ricks (The Poems of Tennyson 2.474) notices the allusion to Endymion 1.955–56
(“send honey-whispers/Round every leaf, that all those gentle lispers…”) in lines
35–36, “O fallen nobility, that, overawed,/Would lisp in honeyed whispers of this
monstrous fraud!” This allusion is perfectly apropos of the poem’s theme. The lines
cited by Ricks are spoken by Endymion, who is accused by his sister Peona of
sullying “the entrusted gem/Of high and noble life,…highfronted honour” (757–
59). Almost immediately after uttering lines 955–56, Endymion says that he “Stood
stupefied with [his] own empty folly” (961). This context compounds Tennyson’s
censure of the barons.
The animal imagery continues in the fifth stanza, where the British people are
likened to a bucking bronco: “Pricked by the Papal spur, we reared,/We flung the
burthen of the second James” (27–28). Stanza 6 also suggests animal images: “muse”
(31) derives from the Middle French word for “mouth of an animal,” while the
words “breed” (32) and “sires” (33) extend the equine connotations of the previous
stanza. The first half of stanza 6, which refers to the barons’ courageous ancestors,
contains allusions to an animal, the horse, which the ancients associated with martial vigor. In the second half of the stanza, which describes the “fallen nobility”
(35) of the Victorian barons, the animal imagery degenerates into that of a bee’s
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by-product and finally of a monster (“this monstrous fraud!” [36]). Tennyson’s
references in the middle of the stanza to the battles of Lewes and Runnymeade
are well chosen, as both battles resulted in victories for the medieval English
barons over the monarchy.
The epithet “Wild War” in line 8 cements the connection between war as an
outburst of wild energies and the wild, animalistic courage of the British people.
War is a “French God” (7) that “breaks the converse of the wise” (8), but in times
past Tennyson’s countrymen overthrew the God of Papism and “broke” (30) their
French antagonists. In line 14, “Though all the storm of Europe on us break,”
Tennyson further develops the motif of “breaking” while adding the Homeric
storm image as a symbol of military threat. “The Third of February, 1852” concludes
with an affirmation that the British people, unlike their dishonorable Lords, possess
the defiant courage of the ancient Spartans at Thermopylae. As he does in “Britons,
Guard Your Own,” Tennyson appeals to the British legacy of venerating a valorous
last stand.
“Hands All Round!” gave Tennyson another opportunity to sing, quite literally,
of arms and men. “[T]he old version of ‘Hands all round,’ written in 1852,” Hallam
Tennyson writes, “was recast [in 1882] by request of Sir FredericYoung into a patriotic
song for the Empire. The reprint was published with my mother’s setting …and
sung all over Great Britain and the Colonies on the Queen’s birthday” (Memoir
2.264). Walter Savage Landor called “Hands All Round!” “incomparably the best
(convivial) lyric in the language” (Memoir 1.345n.).
Through its use of words with multiple meanings, the poem demonstrates the
power of the weapons wielded by the bard. The word “Hands” in the title and the
refrain means primarily “pledges,” but at the same time it refers to the assistance
from America called for in the last two stanzas. “Hands” also connotes the idea of
gaining the upper hand over tyrants, and even of hand-to-hand fighting. The word
“confound,” in lines 10, 22, 34, 46, and 58, means “refute,” or “destroy,” but it can
also mean “confuse,” a sense that contrasts with line 56, “She comprehends the race
she rules,” and with line 52, “They can be understood by kings.” Line 51 plays a
variation on the bardic “words as weapons” metaphor: “O speak to Europe through
your guns!” Here, weapons are figurative words, which can be “understood” even as
they “confound” the tyrant’s cause. The trope of line 51 helps to bring out the
punning sense of “broadsides” in line 44: “But let thy broadsides roar with ours.”
Broadsides, besides being the guns on the side of a ship, are verbal attacks and printed
sheets of paper.
Tennyson evokes a traditional symbol of furor with the “flashing heats” of line
29 and the “fire” of line 30.The word “blast” in line 30, when considered in conjunction with the broadsides of line 44, connotes the blasting of cannons. The
“mad blast” of war in line 41 carries the same connotation, while also exemplifying
the heroic battle/storm metaphor. In addition, the word “mad” suggests the frenzy
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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
of battle wrath. Other Homeric elements include the description of the broadsides
as roaring (44), which recalls the tradition of symbolizing furor as a lion, and the
emphasis on the “great name” of England, which appeals to the heroic ideal of
reputation and honor. Four times (12, 24, 36, 48) Tennyson’s speaker declaims,
“And the great name of England round and round.” In the last line of the poem,
this refrain changes to, “And the great cause of freedom round and round.” The
substitution of “cause of freedom” for “name of England” would seem to imply
that the two things are interchangeable, that the name of England is synonymous
with the cause of freedom.
Tennyson followed up “The Third of February, 1852” and “Hands All Round!”
both of which were published in The Examiner on February 7, with the last of the
instigative poems of 1852, “Suggested by Reading an Article in a Newspaper,” which
was also published in The Examiner, on February 14.The “article” of the title refers to
the two slightly earlier newspaper pieces. Of the two, “The Third of February, 1852,”
which emphasizes the power of the press, was apparently foremost in Tennyson’s
mind while composing “Suggested by Reading an Article,” which vehemently exhorts
the fourth estate. Like the other poems of early 1852, “Suggested by Reading an
Article” insists on the power of language, by discussing writing in tropes traditionally
indicative of heroically inspired action.
Tennyson begins the poem by critiquing his own previous work: “How much
I love this writers manly style!” (1). By the time he wrote this line, the “white heat
of emotion” in which he had written “Hands All Round!” and “The Third of
February, 1852” had presumably worn off. Tennyson had seen these poems in
print and was sufficiently detached from the tumultuous creative state that produced
them in order to offer a considered opinion of their quality. Significantly, the
speaker of “Suggested by Reading an Article” loves the style of the preceding
poems for its manliness.The attribution of manliness to his own work would seem
to represent another attempt on Tennyson’s part to resolve what Christopher Ricks
calls his “uneasy feeling that it was the soldier who epitomised action, duty,
manliness, and courage” (Tennyson 53).
Through the imagery of “Suggested by Reading an Article,” Tennyson reiterates
his theme of the bard as a warrior in his own right. He uses the Homeric fire image
in reference to writing, speaking of the “heat” of his own poetry (6) and of the press
(31), and describing his own newspaper verse as “charactered in fire” (52). This
characterization of the bard as inspired, like the warrior on the battlefield, by fire, is
rem-iniscent of Ossian’s “Croma,” to which “The Song of the Five Bards,” Tennyson’s
source for “The Old Chieftain” and “Oh! ye wild winds, that roar and rave,” is
appended. In “Croma,” “Ten harps are strung; five bards advance, and sing, by turns,
the praise of Ossian; they poured forth their burning souls” (189). Lightning, another
traditional symbol for the transcendent wrath of battle, is associated with both words
and war.The press can “blast a cause” (8), and it must keep above the “lower sphere
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of fulminating fools” (30). “Fulminate” comes from a Latin word meaning “to flash
or strike with lightning.” The threat of invasion by Napoleon III is characterized as
“Some vast Assyrian doom to burst upon our race” from the heavens (41–42). The
speaker alludes to this threat again at the end of the poem: “I hear a thunder though
the skies are fair” (88).The “storms” of line 74 represent a related Homeric image. In
conjunction with the references to lightning and thunder, the description of the
press as “one of the Great Powers on earth” (23) anticipates “The Coming of Arthur,”
where during the battle of Mt. Badon “the Powers who walk the world/Made
lightnings and great thunders over him” (106–107).
The press is not just a Power but a “Great” Power. In line 6,Tennyson implies that
his own newspaper verses are great. He implies as much again in lines 51–52, “We
move so far from greatness, that I feel/Exception to be charactered in fire.” In the
following line he idealizes “Godlike Greatness” (53). The poem’s high regard for
greatness is consistent with the ancient heroic attitude. Aristotle’s discourse on the
Great Man in the Ethics is an outgrowth of the earlier, Homeric ideal of aretê (see
Kitto, The Greeks, 171ff.), which represented outstanding excellence or greatness. In
line 84, the speaker calls for a specific kind of greatness: “O fools, we want a manlike
God and Godlike men.” Edith Hamilton considers this ideal to be typically Greek
and also Homeric. “[Homer] was quintessentially Greek,” she writes. “The stamp of
the Greek genius is everywhere on his two epics…in the conviction that gods were
like men and men able to be godlike” (The Greek Way 212).
In stanza 6 Tennyson extols another heroic ideal, loyalty, a quality that was
especially prized by the Anglo-Saxons in the comitatus relationship.The word “loyal”
comes from the Latin “legalis,” and Tennyson’s lines signal the etymological
connection: “Be loyal, if you wish for wholesome rule:/Our ancient boast is this—
we reverence law” (33–34).
The speaker claims that in spite of the British reverence for law, “wild Mahmoud’s
s war-cry” (83) would be preferable to the “unheroic” (78) conditions of British
society. In describing Mahmoud’s war cry as “wild,” Tennyson echoes the reference
to England’s “wildest fights” (35) of the past. The adjective “wild” pertains to the
heroic tradition of describing battles as manifestations of nature’s meteorological
and animalistic fury. England’s mundane milieu is characterized as debased: “We
drag so deep in our commercial mire” (50). The use of “deep” with reference to
dragging through the mud lends a disparaging connotation to line 80, which
sarcastically describes youthful philosophers as being “deep in natures plan.” As for
the Church, its vessel may “sink” (74). It is the duty of men of letters to “raise the
peo-ple” (5) from their “lower sphere” (30) up towards the heroic heights of the
Parnassian mount.The poem concludes by likening the words of poet and press to a
trumpet blast (“But shrill you, loud and long, the warning note” [89]) that should
“make opinion warlike” (87).
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Tennyson’s passion for the poems of early 1852 is evident from the emotional
intensity he demonstrated while composing them, and his high esteem for them
even in retrospect is manifested by his comments in “Suggested by Reading an
Article.” He submitted “Hands All Round!” and “The Third of February, 1852” to
The Examiner under the name “Merlin”; “Taliessin” was his pseudonym when
submitting “Suggested by Reading an Article.” As Edward FitzGerald explains, the
pseudonyms were prompted not by any wish on Tennyson’s part to disown the
poems, but by political necessity: “The Authorship was kept secret, because of the
Poet being Laureate to the Queen, then being, and wishing to be, on good Terms
with Napoleon” (qtd. in Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 2.473). Tennyson’s choice of
“Merlin” and “Taliessin” as noms de guerre suggests that he felt these poems to be
worthy of acquiring Arthurian connotations. In their exclusively inflammatory tenor,
the pieces conflict with the emphasis in the Homeric tradition on the need for
balance and control, but Tennyson obviously felt that his contemporary countrymen
suffered from a lamentable lack of any of the wrathful emotion that calls for
moderation.The British nonchalance in the face of the French threat was antithetical
to the Greek tradition. In The Greek Experience, C.M.Bowra writes, “Just as the hero
differs from the common run of men in the unusual degree of his dynamis, or innate
power, so a city displays its vitality by exerting the same force over other cities” (34).
In his attempts to sting and rouse his apathetic compatriots Tennyson recalls the
youthful “iambics” (polemics) of Horace. In Ode 1.16, Horace writes, “Back in my
tender youth / My heart endured its fevers also,/Rushing in fury to write iambics”
(22–24).Tennyson’s belief in the power of language to regulate emotions and drives
would find fuller expression in the Idylls of the King.
With the “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” Tennyson’s more typically
Homeric objective is not to instigate but to commemorate, and in this mode his
manner is appropriately more subdued. “[Tennyson’s] sense of Wellington as a great
refrainer,” observes Christopher Ricks, “asked a comparable reverent bridling of
himself” (Tennyson 308). Like a pastoral elegy, the “Wellington Ode” begins with a
mournful recognition of death (“The great World-victor’s victor will be seen no
more” [42]) and moves towards the recognition of a form of immortality (“And
Victor he must ever be” [258]). Interwoven with the poem’s transcendentalist
conception of immortality is the heroic conception of deathless honor. Tennyson’s
artistry in adumbrating this heroic conception contributes to the depth and the
greatness of the piece.
The greatness of the “Wellington Ode” has been questioned by many of its
appraisers.Although Charles Tennyson calls it “perhaps [Tennyson’s] greatest poem,”
he recounts that upon its publication it “completely missed fire with the critics.
Hardly a voice was raised in its defence, and so eminent a writer as G.H.Lewes
described it in The Leader as ‘an intrinsically poor performance…the primary
conception as insignificant as the execution’” (Alfred Tennyson 272). “For the first
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time speaking publicly as poet laureate, [Tennyson] found his performance almost
universally condemned by the critics,” relates Robert W.Hill, Jr. “Given the fact that
the poem is one of the very few first-rate pieces of occasional verse in the language,
he was understandably depressed” (200n., original emphasis).The modern response
is generally condemnatory as well. Paull F.Baum, Jerome H.Buckley,W.David Shaw,
Robert Bernard Martin, and Alastair W.Thomson all find the “Wellington Ode”
insupportably flawed.
Valerie Pitt is one of the few modern scholars who express unqualified admiration
for the poem. For her, the “magnificent” Ode “displays not merely Tennyson’s sense
of public order, but, like The Charge of the Light Brigade,’ his response to personal
courage” (154–55). Robert Bernard Martin concedes, “In spite of its faults the poem
is one of the most successful he ever wrote with the intention of speaking for a
whole country, and it does achieve the difficult fusion of the personal and the heroic
that makes one man the symbol of a realm” (369). Margery Stricker Durham has a
high regard for the Ode, but she finds no heroic values in it. In “Tennyson’s Wellington
Ode and the Cosmology of Love” she sees Wellington as a Christ figure and his
funeral as a sacred ritual that unites the British people in love. Her reading, though
it coincides with the poem’s Christian overtones, is inimical to the heroic literary
tradition that also informs Tennyson’s eulogy of the deathless Duke.
Tennyson approached his task of immortalizing the Duke with a special intensity,
inspired by his sense of public duty and perhaps also by the similarities in character
between Arthur Wellesley and Arthur Hallam. Cecil Y.Lang claims in “Tennyson’s
Arthurian Psycho-drama” (5) that line 39 of the “Wellington Ode,” “Which stood
four-square to all the winds that blew!” links Wellington with Arthur Hallam, by
way of a cancelled section of In Memoriam (“Young is the grief I entertain,” in Ricks,
The Poems of Tennyson 3.596). Lang sees Arthur Hallam, Arthur Wellesley, and King
Arthur as parts of a tripartite Arthur-hero figure in Tennyson’s work. Tennyson’s
feelings for Arthur Hallam were, incidentally, perfectly consistent with the heroic
tradition. “Because of this [heroic] outlook,” C.M.Bowra writes, “much of the
sentiment which in most countries exists between men and women existed in Greece
between men and men. The Greeks gave to friendship the attachment and the
loyalty which elsewhere accompany the love of women” (The Greek Experience 27).
A tendency to see something of Arthur Hallam in Arthur Wellesley may have motivated
Tennyson’s penchant for polishing the original version of his tribute. As Lang notes,
Tennyson worked on refining the Ode for twenty years (3).
Tennyson consigns Wellington to the same transcendental realm he postulates for
Arthur Hallam. The Duke’s “other nobler work to do/Than when he fought at
Waterloo” (256–57), is obviously analogous to Hallam’s posthumous activity in In
Memoriam: “A life that bears immortal fruit/In those great offices that suit/The fullgrown energies of heaven” (40. 18–20). The “Wellington Ode” ends where In
Memoriam begins—with an invocation of Christ. The transcendentalist/Christian
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strain in the Ode is accompanied, however, by inklings of a metaphysic more
appropriate to the military theme of the poem. References to the Duke’s battles are
linked, through a series of common images, with references to his commemoration.
This artistic strategy insinuates the idea that Wellington’s deeds and his eternal glory
are one and the same. “Not once or twice in our fair island-story/The path of duty
was the way to glory” (209–10).Wellington’s journey, like that of Tennyson’s Ulysses,
is his destination.Arthur Wellesley represents the chivalric ideal of Tennyson’s Arthurian
knights, who do their deeds for the deeds’ sake and not to be noised of (“Gareth and
Lynette” 558, 811). Achilles observes this standard in seeking honor only “in Zeus’
ordinance” (Iliad 9.608). In Book 9 of the Aeneid, Aletes, speaking to Nisus and
Euryalus, invokes the same concept:
“Young men, what prize is possible for you,
what can match worth with such a daring deed?
Your first and fairest prize will come from gods
and out of your own conduct…” (Mandelbaum 223)
The use of traditional battle imagery in depicting both Wellington’s deeds and their
commemoration helps to convey the sense that the Duke’s own conduct is his first
and fairest prize.
The first section of the “Wellington Ode” introduces the “noise” of the nation’s
mourning (4), which consists of “a peoples voice,” to which the speaker refers four times
(142, 144, 146, 151) in nine lines, and martial music.The repeated reference to Wellington’s
own voice (36, 176ff.) helps to connect his life with its commemoration by the people’s
voice, but the description of the “voices,” the “deep voices,” of the cannons of battle (63–
69) makes a more important connection. “For many a time in many a clime/His captain’sear has heard them boom/Bellowing victory, bellowing doom” (64–66). War and
remembrance become one when the cannons bellow the Duke’s honor: “And the volleying
cannon thunder his loss” (62). The thundering of the cannons typifies the Homeric
storm image (cf. the “tempests” that may “thunder” in lines 175–77).
The music that commemorates the Duke is likewise connected with battle:
“And let the mournful martial music blow” (17). Trumpeting sounds the Duke’s
honor just as it once accompanied his honorable feats. Tennyson’s description of
the war in Spain mentions the “blare of bugle” (115), and his recollection of the
Battle of Waterloo culminates when “Last, the Prussian trumpet blew” (127). The
“blowing” of trumpets links battle and commemorative music with the “blowing”
of storms, a Homeric symbol found in lines 39 and 155.Tennyson gives the trumpet
image added resonance in line 197, “And affluent Fortune emptied all her horn.”
The people’s voice is blended with martial music in the singing of “the sorrowing anthem,” which is “rolled” (60). In death Wellington approaches Nelson “to the
roll of muffled drums” (87), which presumably accompanied the Duke’s battles as
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well. The speaker mentions that the “roll of cannon” (116) was present on the
battlefields of Spain.The rolling song, which elegizes the roll of Wellington’s cannon,
is “ever-echoing” (79), just as the feet of the people will “Echo round his bones for
evermore” (12).The voice and the drumming steps of the people will roll on forever,
the “proof and echo of all human fame” (145), and in that rolling the “deep voices“of
Wellington’s victories resound. In line 9,Tennyson calls the echoing sound of those
the Duke fought for a “roar,” a word that relates to the thundering and bellowing of
the cannon. The rolling of song, drums and cannon evokes, as we have seen in “Sir
Galahad” and “The Tourney,” the rolling of the tides, another traditional symbol of
battle power (this evocation is made explicit in line 251).
The rolling echoes of Wellington’s glory are reflected in the many repetitions of
the poem. The most reverberative line, “With honour, honour, honour, honour to
him,” is itself reiterated (149, 230). W.David Shaw, Robert Bernard Martin, and
Alastair W.Thomson all rebuke the Ode’s redundancies. Martin, for example, claims
that “It is when he has to shift to more abstract matters that Tennyson comes unstuck,
as in the celebration of Wellington’s place in history. Repetition is nearly always for
him a sign of lack of certainty” (369). In fact it is easy enough to believe that
Tennyson used reiteration in the “Wellington Ode,” as he did in “The Ballad of
Oriana,” with a considered purpose. Tennyson’s poem forms part of the people’s
voice, and with repetition he foreshadows the rolling echoes of that voice as it
honors the Duke through the ages.
The roar mentioned in line 9 emanates from the central London surroundings
of the Duke’s final resting place in St. Paul’s Cathedral, an area Tennyson describes
in the same line as “streaming.” “Streaming” forms part of the description of the
people who will keep Wellington’s name alive, and it also anticipates the battle
descriptions, where England is “pouring on her foes” (117). In this same vein, the
Battle of Waterloo is “A day of onsets of despair!/Dashed on every rocky square/
Their surging charges foamed themselves away” (124–26). The aquatic imagery
concludes with lines 251–52, “The tides of Music’s golden sea/Setting toward
eternity…” The streaming of the people who honor the Duke, the pouring and
surging tides of battle, and the rolling tides of musical tribute all recall the ancient
association of surging water with the turmoil of battle, as in the Xanthos River
episode of the Iliad.
Another stormy element prevalent in the Iliad and the Aeneid is wind, which
Tennyson, following the example of Homer and Virgil, uses here to represent the
forces of war: “O fallen at length that tower of strength/Which stood four-square to
all the winds that blew!” (38–39).Though the Duke’s tower has fallen, line 55 hints
that he has not utterly perished. His hearse, which, significantly for the heroic aspect
of the poem, is blazoned with Wellington’s deeds (56), is “towering” (55). Though
the Duke “will be seen no more” (42), his deeds tower on. Just as the four-square
Duke once “stood” (39) against the winds of war, now his great example will “stand”
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(220).The word “stand” is etymologically related to the word “state,” a connection
that lends heroic implications to lines 274–75: “…we believe him/ Something far
advanced in State.” The Duke’s new “State” is, in a sense, an extension of the “state”
(200) his heroism served. As he once stood for the British “state” as an unflinching,
towering presence on the battlefield, he stands in his new “State” as a towering
example for future generations.
The passage on the “Giant Ages” beginning at line 259, in spite of its redolence
of the In Memoriam sections influenced by Charles Lyell, is amenable to a heroic
construction.The speaker’s astronomical/metaphysical disquisition makes a suitable
metaphor for the durability of Wellington’s honor.The invulnerability and significance
of the human spirit in the face of destructive eons and myriad alien worlds is
Wellington’s situation in macrocosm:
For though the Giant Ages heave the hill
And break the shore, and evermore
Make and break, and work their will;
Though world on world in myriad myriads roll
Round us, each with different powers,
And other forms of life than ours,
What know we greater than the soul?
On God and Godlike men we build our trust. (259–66)
Though time has leveled Wellington’s tower, his example still stands “Colossal” (221),
a match for the “Giant” ages.The “myriad myriads” of worlds (262) echo the “myriads
of Assaye” (99) that Wellington defeated.The myriad worlds “roll” (262), a function
that connects them with the rolling cannon of Wellington’s victorious battles (116)
and with the rolling drums that honor him as victor (87). Just as the “soul” (265)
survives the “Giant Ages” (259) and stands significant amidst “world on world” (262),
Wellington’s “Eternal honour” (150, 231) will survive “many and many an age”
(226) and his example will be “seen of every land” (221).
Christopher Ricks (The Poems of Tennyson 2.491) suggests a source for the “Giant
Ages” passage in Wordsworth’s “To Enterprise” 114–16: “An Army now, and now a
living hill,/That a brief while heaves with convulsive throes—/Then all is still.”
Wordsworth’s own source, according to his 1822 note, was Erasmus Darwin’s The
Botanic Garden 1.2.497–98: “Awhile the living hill/Heaved with convulsive throes,
and all was still” (Wordsworth 703). Darwin’s lines describe the destruction of the
army of Cambyses in a sandstorm, and line 113 of Wordsworth’s poem makes it clear
that he had the same event in mind: “Or caught amid a whirl of desert sands….”
Wordsworth’s and Darwin’s lines, as analogues and possible sources of Tennyson’s
meditation on the “Giant Ages,” augment the military associations of the passage
and thus enhance its relevance to the Duke of Wellington’s military career.
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Another possible Wordsworthian source for the “Wellington Ode” is line 182
of “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” Wordsworth’s resolute affirmation of “the
primal sympathy/Which having been must ever be” (181–82) may have influenced
Tennyson’s similarly resolute declaration, “And Victor he must ever be” (258), a
line that relates to the Homeric conception of an “unperishing order of being”
(Bowra, Homer 164). Christopher Ricks makes a misleading comment about this
conception:
What an honest poet cannot imagine, he had better not write of; his honesty will let
him down. The same goes for everything that the “Ode” says about Wellington’s
“eternal honour,” his “ever-echoing avenues” of fame. For Tennyson did not, as he
perhaps once had, really believe in the eternity of such honour. Fame, he had come
to realise, is lost and emptied in the great vistas of geological and astronomical time.
(Tennyson 226)
Ricks’s remarks are misleading because they imply that Tennyson was oblivious to
the heroic distinction between fame and honor. C.M.Bowra, discussing the heroic
outlook in The Greek Experience, observes that “Fame is the reward of honour” (21).
The ancient heroes and the bards who immortalized them knew that fame may
indeed be “lost and emptied in the great vistas of geological and astronomical time,”
but they also believed that true honor stood apart as something eternal and
unchanging. Bowra explains the distinction:
…a man who had done something really worth doing passes outside time into a
timeless condition, in which his aretê is fixed and permanent….The man so remembered
[in song] was the true man, the essential self, who by his exertions had found his full
range and passed outside the changing pattern of his development into his ultimate
reality. Celebration in visible memorials or in song gave an appropriate crown to a
man’s career, but they were worth nothing if he had not won them by his deserts.What
mattered was that he should fulfill his human aretê and attain his own kind of perfection
in being truly himself. (The Greek Experience 200–201)
The commemoration of heroic deeds in song immortalized the deeds not
necessarily because the song would last forever, but because the song crystallized
the timeless aretê, or honorable excellence, of the hero. Heroic songs “recall a
man as he was at his triumphant best and enshrine him…against the enmity of
time” (Bowra, The Greek Experience 200). The speakers realization that “Victor
he must ever be” (258) implies not only the deathlessness of Wellington’s soul,
but also the fixed and permanent reality of his heroic actions. From a heroic
perspective line 258 represents the fulfillment of what Cedric Whitman calls
the heroic “intuition of a potential permanence, an absolute selfhood” (The
Heroic Paradox 47), and as such it also epit-omizes the significance of the image
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pattern equating the remembrance of Wellington’s deeds with the deeds
themselves.
“What could more manifest [Wellington’s] intense enduring presence, even in
death,” asks Christopher Ricks, “than the fact that we are unremittingly conscious
of him even while never having to name him?” (Tennyson 317). In reading the
“Wellington Ode,” we are aware of the Duke’s enduring presence not because Christ
has received his soul, but because Wellington’s patriotic victories define his essential
nature. As Cedric Whitman writes of Ajax, “Physis, essential nature, seeks a positive
act in which to vindicate itself permanently and undeniably as being” (The Heroic
Paradox 52). By affording a glimpse of what Whitman calls “the heroic vision of
glory and permanent value” (Homer and the Heroic Tradition 238), Tennyson
counterbalances the transcendentalism of the “Wellington Ode” and enhances the
poem’s complexity. The resulting masterpiece well exemplifies the traditional
reciprocity between warrior and bard. In epitomizing the timeless greatness of
Wellington, Tennyson also epitomizes his own greatness as poet and preserves a
broad approach of fame for his own ever-echoing song.
By means of Tennyson’s most famous battle song, “The Charge of the Light
Brigade,” a terrible beauty was born from the massacre of a British cavalry unit in
the Crimean War. Not only Tennyson’s poem itself but also its historical background
suggests an analogy between the bard’s power of language and the warrior’s power.
The “blunder” that resulted in the charge’s taking place and to which Tennyson
refers in line 12 was a failure of language. During the Battle of Balaclava, Lord
Lucan, because of his misinterpretation of written orders from Lord Raglan, had
failed to follow up the advantage gained by the charge of the Heavy Brigade.When
Lord Raglan dispatched Captain Louis Edward Nolan with a subsequent written
order to Lord Lucan to prevent the Russians from capturing British guns on the
Causeway Heights overlooking the “valley of Death,” Lord Lucan was once again
unsure of the message’s import. The fiery Captain Nolan, who had been seething
with impatience and resentment over Lucan’s restraint of the Light Brigade, responded
to Lucan’s confusion by impetuously indicating the Russian cannons in the valley as
the British objective (see the accounts in Selby, 145–62, WoodhamSmith, 222–49,
and Adkin, 115–37).Tennyson’s own previous contempt for the restraint of Parliament
and the press in face of the French threat, and his impetuous instigation of his
countrymen, may have given him a sense of identity with Nolan, whom he mentions
by name in the 1854 version of the poem. Although the written words of Lord
Raglan contributed to the futile doom of the Light Brigade, the words of Tennyson’s
poem help to define and immortalize the brigadiers’ defiant heroism.
Many critics of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” have misread Tennyson’s
poem as grievously as Lord Lucan and Captain Nolan misread Lord Raglan’s orders.
Charles Tennyson recounts that even upon its publication the piece was in some
quarters “violently criticized.” “Charles d’Eyncourt down at Bayons was particularly
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incensed with it. ‘Horrid rubbish’ he called it. ‘What an age this must appear,’ he
reflected, ‘when such trash can be tolerated and not only tolerated but enthusiastically
admired’” (Alfred Tennyson 283). Though Charles Tennyson d’Eyncourt was not an
impartial or even a qualified critic, recent scholars have corroborated his assessment.
In “Tennyson and the History of Criticism,” Jerome J.McGann discusses the modern
status of the piece as follows:
We survey the reception history of this poem to find that it has not merely fallen out
of favor…but that it has come to seem mildly ludicrous, slightly contemptible….The
only reader who has anything good to say about the poem is Christopher Ricks, and
he confines his remarks to stylistic matters. Like everyone else, Ricks goes out of his
way to avoid discussing the poem’s subject matter—both the historical events and
their ideological significance. The Crimean War, the famous charge at Balaclava, and
Tennyson’s own attitudes toward these matters are universally recognized by the critics,
but only because they are universally regarded as embarrassments, both in themselves
and to the poem. (239)
For McGann, the poem has value primarily, if not solely, as a guinea pig for his
demonstration of the necessity of historical criticism. He describes his article about
“The Charge” as a “historical reading,” but aside from his recognition of the double
meaning of “Light,” he presents not a reading of the poem at all but merely an
account of the historical background of its composition.
Though McGann is for the most part correct in characterizing Ricks as unreceptive
to the heroic ethos of “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Ricks is uniquely astute
in his appreciation of Tennyson’s technical achievement in the piece. In an article
written with Edgar F.Shannon (and reprinted as Appendix B in Ricks’s Tennyson),
‘“The Charge of the Light Brigade’: The Creation of a Poem,” he recounts the
genesis of the poem and its development through its many versions, demonstrating
in the process how “analysis of the surviving documents provides extensive testimony
to [Tennyson’s] painstaking artistry” (Tennyson 362).Among Ricks’s more penetrating
observations is his comment that “…‘half a league’ is more than a poetical (albeit
accurate) way of saying ‘more than a mile,’ since it allows the poem to set before us
from the very start the sense of ‘Half,’ just as the charge forward was only half the
story” (Tennyson 346). Also noteworthy is Ricks’s analysis of the conclusion, which,
he allows, conveys a sense of “exultation” (Tennyson 353): “The conclusiveness of the
poem’s final stanza gains much of its force from every line’s being so strongly terminally
punctuated, just as the courageous impetuosity of the engaged battle stanza (IV) is
marked by the fact that six of its twelve lines do not have terminal punctuation”
(Tennyson 357). Ricks’s greatest contribution towards the restoration of the poems
reputation may lie in his rescu-ing the piece from the stigma of Tennyson’s own
comment. Tennyson’s admission that “The Charge” was “not a poem on which I
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pique myself” has sometimes been cited as evidence against the excellence of the
piece (see Buckley, 134, for an example). Even Ricks himself, in The Poems of Tennyson,
cites the comment without explanation (2.511). In Tennyson, however, he points out
that Tennyson’s remark occurred in a letter to Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, after
Tuckerman had received a copy of the “spoiled” 1855 version of the poem, in
which “not only was the final stanza rewritten, but the eight lines which included
the repeated ‘Some one had blunder’d’ were gone’” (331).
Ricks concedes that “The Charge of the Light Brigade” is “an undying utterance
of the English tongue” (Tennyson 362), an appraisal that recognizes the popular acclaim
the poem enjoyed for decades. Patrick Waddington discusses the work’s popular
appeal:
Tennyson’s “Charge”…became one of the most famous pieces in the English language
and, as such, was incorporated in anthologies for general readers and for schools…. It
was set to music numerous times right through into the 20th century, and most of the
many pictorial representations of the charge were based upon it, rather than upon
historical records. Elizabeth Southerdon Thompson (afterwards Lady Butler) used for
the central figure of her painting Balaclava the survivor W.H.Pennington, who in his
acting career recited “The Charge” in many theatres and on numerous occasions. (77)
“Tennyson wrote a poem,” observes Peter Levi, “that was stirring for a hundred
years” (221).To George Orwell “The Charge” was “The most stirring battle poem
in English” (qtd. in Waddington 1).
The ability of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” to stir a popular audience
may be attributed in large part to its dactylic meter, which perfectly reflects the
rhythm of the galloping horses. Tennyson sacrificed historical accuracy on the
altar of versification. His “Noble six hundred” were in reality some seven hundred
men, but the report on the charge in The Times, upon which Tennyson based his
account, mentioned only 607 (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 2.510). When
Tennyson learned of the discrepancy, he wrote to John Forster, “Six is much
better than seven hundred (as I think) metrically so keep it” (Lang 2.101). Hallam
Tennyson cites as the origin of the poem’s meter the phrase “some one had
blundered” in the account of the charge in The Times (Memoir 1.381).The actual
words of The Times dispatch were, “The British soldier will do his duty, even to
certain death, and is not paralyzed by feeling that he is the victim of some
hideous blunder” (qtd. in Ricks, Tennyson 324). Christopher Ricks explains,
“Those last three words moved Tennyson by their substance and their cadence
to create the line which his son came to believe had actually figured in The
Times” (Tennyson 324). Commenting on possible sources, Ricks notes that
“Drayton’s Ballad of Agincourt was suggested at least as early as 1872; T. said it
‘was not in my mind; my poem is dactyllic.’ Chatterton’s Song to Ælla is similar
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in rhythm, form, and theme…T. may have remembered it unconsciously” (The
Poems of Tennyson 2.511). Peter Levi also mentions Drayton (the charge of the
Light Brigade took place on the same date, October 25, as the Battle of Agincourt)
and Chatterton as possible influences, but his suggestion that “the dactyls may in
this case derive from Virgil’s cavalry verses” (221) seems more valid in view of
the classical influence on Tennyson’s battle poems. A Roman influence is also
manifest in Tennyson’s numbering of the stanzas in Roman numerals (the six
stanzas correspond to the six hundred brigadiers in the poem), a practice
Christopher Ricks considers “appropriate because of their traditional (and
military) dignity” (Tennyson 355).
It may be that the emphatic and evocative meter of “The Charge of the Light
Brigade” has made the poem vulnerable to parody and to disrepute as a serious
work of art.The editors of the Norton Anthology of English Literature comment on the
“simplicity” of the poem (Abrams 1055). Even Tennyson’s friend, Richard Monckton
Milnes, called it “a real gallop in verse and only good as such” (qtd. in Ricks, Tennyson
355).Valerie Pitt, on the other hand, finds in the blatancy of Tennyson’s versification
a reflection of the poem’s ideology: “The strength of movement in ‘The Charge of
the Light Brigade’…springs from [Tennyson’s] response to genuine courage” (205).
Christopher Ricks’s comment on the poem’s final stanza is a perfect response to the
accusation of “simplicity” brought by the Norton editors: “in its simplicity sublime”
(Tennyson 352).
An examination of the poem’s title is sufficient to demonstrate a level of artistic
sophistication exceeding that of an ordinary “gallop in verse.” Tennyson’s intention
in this work is to recount an act of transcendent courage and to call for the
commemoration of that courage, a call that answers itself as the poem embodies
the commemoration it enjoins. Both of the poem’s objectives are reflected in the
multi-ple meanings of the words “Charge” and “Light” in the title. Besides its
obvious meaning here, “charge” can mean “to impose a task or responsibility on.”
The poem imposes a task or responsibility on the reader by its injunction to
“Honour the charge they made!/Honour the Light Brigade” (53–54). “Charge”
can also mean “to assume as a heraldic bearing,” or “to place a heraldic bearing
on,” both of which definitions relate to the ideals of honor and remembrance.The
word “Charge,” therefore, defines the two functions of the poem: in its most obvious
sense it denotes the military attack the poem recounts, and it also relates to the
commemoration of glory the poem imposes on its readers.The fact that one word
can refer to both the attack and the remembrance of glory carries implications of
the heroic ideal integral to the “Wellington Ode”: the ideal of deed and honor as
one and the same. As for the word “Light,” its primary meaning here is “lightly
armed or equipped,” but its alternate meaning of “brightness” fits with the image
of the flashing sabers in the description of the attack and also with the literal
meaning of “glory.” As does “Charge,” “Light” encompasses within one word
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connections to both the battle and its resultant honor. Jerome J.McGann also sees
more than one connotation in “Light.” “Tennyson manages to suggest,” he writes,
“that the name of the ‘Light Brigade’ carries a meaning which transcends its
technical military significance. The pun on the word Light points to the quasireligious identity and mission of this small brigade of cavalry” (249).
The “quasi-religious” import of “Light” derives from the ancient epics of men
that strove with gods. The word “Light,” along with the word “Flashed” in lines
27–28 and the reference to “glory” in line 50, typifies Tennyson’s adoption of the
Homeric fire/light symbol. As it sometimes does in Homer and Virgil, the fire/
light image contributes to a pattern of imagery likening the explosiveness of the
battle to the force of a storm. The flashing of the sabers, occurring as it does while
the cannons “thundered” and “stormed” (21, 22, 41, 42), evokes the flashing of
lightning and thus a comparison between the fury of the charge and the wrath of
nature. The speaker calls the charge “wild” (51). The actual charge was a rare
example, temporarily at least, of battle wrath perfectly disciplined. Lord Cardigan,
the leader of the attack, was “transported with fury,” but he “tightly restrained the
pace of the Light Brigade: the line was to advance with parade-ground perfection”
(Woodham-Smith 236, 237). Cecil Woodham-Smith describes the Light Brigade’s
progress through the valley:
Orderly, as if on the parade ground, the Light Brigade rode on, but its numbers grew
every moment smaller and smaller as they moved down the valley. Those on the
heights who could understand what that regular mechanical movement meant in
terms of discipline and courage were intolerably moved, and one old soldier burst
into tears. (238)
Once in range of the enemy, however, the Light Brigade demonstrated the truth
of the lesson taught by Homer and Virgil. The cavalrymen’s battle wrath became
impossible to control: “The men, no longer to be restrained, began to shoot forward
in front of their officers, and Lord Cardigan was forced to increase his pace or be
overwhelmed. The gallop became headlong, the troopers cheering and yelling;
their blood was up, and they were on fire to get at the enemy” (Woodham-Smith
240). The rousing rhythm of the verses, the emphatic repetitions, and the use of
exclamation points help to convey a sense of the men’s ecstatic fury, while a different
kind of ecstasy is intimated by the poems Freudian overtones. The description of
the charge is analogous to a sexual encounter: flashing their phallic sabers “bare”
(27), the men penetrate a “valley” where most of them “die;” then they withdraw
from the valley.
The Light Brigade’s frenzied charge was so remarkable a departure from normal
British military procedure that “[a]ll the world wondered” (31, 52) at it. In view
of Cecil Woodham-Smith’s account of the intensely emotional reaction by the
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spectators on the Causeway Heights, Tennyson’s use of the word “wondered” is
perhaps a bit restrained. Tennyson ascribes a wondering response not just to the
British forces and their French allies on the heights, however, but to “[a]ll the
world.” Lines 30–31, “Charging an army, while/All the world wondered,” indicate
simultaneity between the Light Brigade’s heroics and the worlds wonder
(Christopher Ricks notes “the superb breath-catching suspension of ‘while,’”
which, he says, “makes one feel the world holding its breath in awe” [Tennyson
351, 357].). While the actual charge was underway, however, the world could not
have known what was happening. Not in response to the actual charge, but to the
written accounts of it, including Tennyson’s poetic rendering, did all the world
wonder. Christopher Ricks’s comment on the phrase “[a]ll the world” suggests its
relevance not just to Tennyson’s contemporaries but to ourselves as well. He speaks
of “the feeling of indeflectible courage, of which we the onlookers (distant in
place but not in spirit) can be proud but which is not ours” (Tennyson 344). Ricks’s
admission goes far towards explaining the modern devaluation of the poem.
Indeflectible courage was a British military ideal, and, immediately prior to the
charge by the Light Brigade, the Heavy Brigade had demonstrated its courage by
prevailing against superior numbers in hand-to-hand fighting. The Light Brigade
demonstrated even greater courage in facing down a cannon bombardment, but it
nevertheless failed disastrously.The ability of technological weaponry to negate such
a splendid display of valor was undoubtedly a lamentable development to Tennyson,
given his perception of a “malignant evil spirit” in the torpedo demonstration he
witnessed later in the century (qtd. in Langand Shannon 3.418). His poem, one
might say, is an attempt to negate the negation of that splendid valor. Tennyson’s
eulogistic attitude towards the charge at Balaclava may indeed be embarrassing, as
Jerome J.McGann claims above, to many modern critics who associate the futile
sally with the wholesale, mechanical slaughters of feckless and helpless troops in the
World Wars to come. Tennyson, however, innocently attempts to contextualize the
charge within the tradition of heroic literature, where what matters is not
technological force but “the heroic force, the assertive spirit which inspires a man to
take prodigious risks and enables him to surmount them successfully or at least to
fail with glorious distinction” (Bowra, Heroic Poetry 97).Tennyson’s injunction to the
reader to recognize the glorious distinction of the Light Brigade represents to some
extent a romantic protest against the scientific weapons of destruction that victimized
the gallant cavalrymen.Tennyson’s description of the artillery entrenchments as “the
mouth of hell” (25, 47) is in much the same vein as Don Quixote’s denunciation of
“the dread fury of those devilish engines of artillery” (DQ 303). In a sense, “The
Charge of the Light Brigade” elegizes not only the Brigadiers but also their chivalrous
and athletic brand of warfare, which was already being superseded in Tennyson’s day.
The victory of the cannons over the Light Brigade represents the supplantation of
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hand-to-hand battle-play by the technology of mass destruction, and it harbingers
the advent of “total war.”
Jerome J.McGann finds both heroic and tragic elements in Tennyson’s slaughterous
subject, and he tentatively reaches towards a connection between them: “Some of
Tennyson’s contemporaries, and a large part of Tennyson himself, saw the charge at
Balaclava as a kind of heroic tragedy…. The Light Brigade achieved, in its famous
assault, an immortality, a final spiritual triumph. In the event it suffered as well, in the
words of The Times, a human ‘catastrophe,’ an ‘annihilation’” (250). J.William Hunt’s
use of a classical example gives him greater assurance in aligning heroism with
tragedy. “Turnus’ conduct,” Hunt writes, “demonstrates clearly that the heroic and
the tragic are by their very nature interdependent—only in the special tragic conflict
can the heroic choice prove itself, and only the rare capacity for heroic commitment
makes tragedy possible” (59). “[I]t is time,” announces Walter Kaufmann, “that we
noted the birth of tragedy from the spirit of Homer” (141, original emphasis).Tennyson’s
reading of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” on the Edison cylinder recording
emphasizes the tragic aspect of his own Homeric song.Tennyson recites most of the
poem in a markedly plaintive tone. His reading of line 48, “All that was left of them,”
is especially despairing; his mode of expression might well serve for a performance
of Macduff’s despondent reaction to the murder of his family in Act IV of Macbeth.
The poet reads even the final line, “Noble six hundred!” in a woeful manner. His
emphasis on the word “Rode” in the final line of each of the first three stanzas has an
ominous ring, as though the past tense reminds him that most of the cavalrymen
would never ride again.
One of the most interesting things about the reading on the Edison cylinder is
Tennyson’s resounding emphasis on the word “knew” at line 11. “Tennyson’s voice
swoops upon ‘knew,’” comments Christopher Ricks, “with an emphasis at once
awed, exasperated, and half-incredulous at the immediately culpable folly of ‘some
one’ (the effect in the recording is riveting)” (Tennyson 231).This emphasis highlights
the hopelessness of the exploit by making it clear that the soldiers had no illusions
about the possibility of success. They were positive that the charge was a blunder,
and yet the knowledge did not dismay them, a fact that makes their actions all the
more heroic.The Light Brigade’s willingness to “do and die” (“…we are ready to go
again,” said one survivor immediately after the charge [Woodham-Smith 249])
partakes of the ancient Norse and Anglo-Saxon brand of heroism that inspires Edith
Hamilton to comment, “heroism depends on lost causes” (Mythology 300). The
ideology of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” harks back to the old Norse “faith in
the value of doomed resistance,” and to the ancient, heroic literature in which “[t]he
worth of defeated valour in this world is deeply felt” (Tolkien 27).
The word “knew” finds no end rhyme in the poem, but it does rhyme with “do,”
which appears in the middle of the fifteenth line.This rhyme helps to high-light the
connection between knowledge and action, a connection Tennyson makes elsewhere,
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as when the hero of “Havelock” “Wrought with his hand and his head” (10), and
when Ulysses makes his goal, which is “To follow knowledge like a sinking star,”
equivalent to “Some work of noble note” (“Ulysses” 31, 52).The soldiers’ knowledge
of the blunder makes their action all the more heroic, and their heroic action will
result in knowledge: the charge will be known to others.The word “Noble” in the
final line of the poem is very appropriate. It comes from the Latin nobilis, which
means “knowable, well known.” “Noble” describes the heroic character of the six
hundred and also suggests the honor and fame their character has won.
In his essay, “The Case for Mortality,” Leon Kass discusses the necessity of mortality
as a condition for nobility:
To be mortal means that it is possible to give one’s life, not only in one moment, say, on
the field of battle—though that excellence is nowadays improperly despised—but also
in the many other ways in which we are able in action to rise above attachment to
survival. Through moral courage, endurance, greatness of soul, generosity, devotion to
justice—in acts great and small—we rise above our mere creatureliness for the sake of
the noble and the good…. [Y]et for this nobility, vulnerability and mortality are the
necessary conditions. The immortals cannot be noble. (184)
The knowledge of impending death incites the heroes of the Light Brigade to noble
action, just as it does with Homer’s heroes. Richmond Lattimore translates the words
of Sarpedon to Glaukos from Book 12 of the Iliad:
Man, supposing you and I, escaping this battle,
would be able to live on forever, ageless, immortal,
so neither would I myself go on fighting in the foremost
nor would I urge you into the fighting where men win glory.
But now, seeing that the spirits of death stand close about us
in their thousands, no man can turn aside nor escape them,
let us go on and win glory for ourselves, or yield it to others. (322–28)
By trailing clouds of tragic glory in its daring charge, the Light Brigade fulfills
the aspiration of Sarpedon, and also that of Hector, who wishes not to die
“ingloriously,” but “in some action/memorable to men in days to come” (Iliad
22.305, Fitzgerald 525).
While the charge of the Light Brigade was a disaster mitigated only by the
defiant bravery of the brigadiers, the charge of the Heavy Brigade resulted in the
successful routing of a superior Russian force.Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Heavy
Brigade at Balaclava” combines aspects of the “Ode on the Death of the Duke of
Wellington” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” “The Charge of the Heavy
Brigade,” like “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” describes a single encounter
during the Battle of Balaclava, and, like the “Wellington Ode,” it celebrates the
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achieve-ment of victory.With its epilogue, “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade” evokes
the same heroic conception of substantive action that figures in the “Wellington Ode.”
Though its reputation is obscured by that of “The Charge of the Light Brigade,”
“The Charge of the Heavy Brigade” is more artistically sophisticated, due in large
part to its “frame.” The “Prologue to General Hamley” and the “Epilogue” contain
echoes and parallels of each other and of the poem they surround. In all three
parts of the work, patriotism and heroic deeds are threatened—in passages that
feature similar vocabularies—with permanent disappearance.The prologue opens
with a part of England (“Green Sussex”) “fading into blue/With one gray glimpse
of sea” (7–8), while the general and the speaker are “gazing” at it and speaking of
things “Most marvelous in the wars” (9, 11). In the poem, another colorful part of
England, her “own good redcoats,” disappears in a “dark-gray sea” (42–43) of
Russians, while the other brigadiers are “standing at gaze” and are “all in amaze”
(37, 35). In the epilogue, the character of the poet at first fears that his own heroic
work as an Englishman, his “song that nerves a nations heart” (79), will “vanish in
the vast” (39); that the stars, which “amaze/Our brief humanities” (55–56), will
outlast it. He laments that the “falling drop” will make even Homer’s fame as
mortal as his own (57–60).
However, the disappearance of patriotic heroism, whether caused by a “sea” or
a“drop,” is only temporary. In each of the three parts of the work, a sort of resurrection
occurs, and these “resurrection” scenarios are also described in mutually evocative
ways. The speaker of the prologue expresses a wish to meet General Hamley again
(21–22) and follows this with his assertion that Hamley’s “glory grew” (32) even
though his deeds occurred in “the vanished year” (26). In the poem, the speaker’s
group of soldiers fears that Scarlett’s brigade has vanished, “‘Lost one and all’” (46),
but Scarlett’s men and their fellow brigadiers meet again in victory, resulting in
“Glory to each and to all” (65).Though Scarlett’s brigade disappears “Like drops of
blood in a dark-gray sea” (44), it reemerges and stands “like a rock” (56), and in the
epilogue, the “stone” of Homer’s fame will not disappear under the “falling drop”
(58–59) after all. The poet of the epilogue rallies and decides that the “vanished
year” is really a “cycle year” in which the glory of great deeds has a permanent place.
Man’s deeds will prevail even after “Earth passes, all is lost” (“Epilogue” 62), just as
Scarlett’s brigade is “Lost one and all” (“The Charge” 46) in the battle, only to
emerge alive and victorious. In lines 13ff., the prologue establishes an analogy between
itself, as dedicated to General Hamley, and a picture of a warrior outside an inn,
while the inn is analogous to the poem. The “cheer” mentioned in line 16 of the
prologue is thus analogous to the “cheer” in line 61 of the poem, and to the cheering
or nerving of a nation’s heart which Tennyson claims for his work in the conclusion
to the epilogue (79). The prologue’s “True cheer with hon-est wine” can also be
seen as prefiguring the intoxicating joy of battle experienced by the brigadiers.The
poem refers to Scarlett’s brigade as “gallant” four times.The word “gallant” derives
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from the Old French galer, which, as we have seen in connection with “The Captain,”
meant “to make merry” (OED 6.325).The speakers comparison of the poem to an
“old-world” inn (“Prologue” 13) may owe something to the poem’s conformity to
the traditions of “old-world” heroic literature.
In keeping with those traditions, the poem symbolizes the Heavy Brigade’s
ferocity by a combination of storm and fire/light imagery: the brigade “Burst like
a thunderbolt,/Crashed like a hurricane” (27–28), and “Rode flashing blow upon
blow” (32), whereupon the “Russian crowd/Folded its wings…/And rolled them
around like a cloud” (38–40).After sinking into the “dark-gray sea” (43) of Russians,
Scarlett’s brigade “Ranged like a storm or stood like a rock/In the wave of a
stormy day” (56–57). In line 21 the speaker refers to the charge as “their fiery
course.”
The battle account also includes numerous images of circling: ‘“Left wheel into
line’ and they wheeled and obeyed” (6); “And he turned half round” (8); “Whirling
their sabres in circles of light” (34—a line that includes another instance of the fire
/light symbol); “And rolled them around” (40); “and reeled/Up the hill” (62–63).
The image appears in the epilogue in the reference to “all the peoples, great and
small,/That wheel between the poles” (19–20). In addition, the word “Involving” in
line 25 of the epilogue is etymologically related to “turning.”
By associating the battle with the phenomenon of circling, Tennyson lays the
groundwork for the conclusion to the epilogue, where the character of the poet
asserts the invulnerability of brave deeds throughout the “cycle-year” of the cosmos:
The man remains, and whatso’er
He wrought of good or brave
Will mould him through the cycle-year
That dawns behind the grave. (73–76)
The Aeneid provides a precedent for Tennyson’s “cycle-year.” Aeneas’s father,Anchises,
in his underworld lecture in the last part of Book 6, associates the fire image prevalent
in the battle scenes of the epic with “time’s circle” and the “cycle of the ages”
(Mandelbaum 156–57).
As early as 1823 Tennyson concerned himself with the problem of impermanence
in a universe of entropy. In the Memoir (1.23–25), Hallam Tennyson prints a fragment
of a play, written by Tennyson at age fourteen, which includes the lines:
I and my son’s sons and our offspring, all
Shall perish, and their monuments, with forms
Of the unfading marble carved upon them,
Which speak of us to other centuries,
Shall perish also…(21–25)
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Tennyson compiled one of his greatest works, In Memoriam, by offering all his hourly
varied anodynes for the problem. In the epilogue to “The Charge of the Heavy
Brigade” he once again takes up the issue, and in this case the resolution has heroic
overtones appropriate to the poem’s military context.Tennyson’s poet acknowledges
that even if Homer’s fame were to last as long as the earth itself, “Earth passes, all is
lost… And deed and song alike are swept/Away…” (62, 65–66).All is in vain “except/
The man himself remain” (67–68), and the poet is not of those who cry that “man
can have no after-morn” (71). Something of the mature Tennyson’s metaphysic is
discernible in these lines, but the ostensible distinction between Tennyson and the
poet (“Epilogue” 77–80), along with the connections between the heroic poem and
its frame, would seem to justify a heroic reading of the passage. “The man remains”
(73), in the sense that “a man who had done something really worth doing passes
outside time into a timeless condition, in which his aretê is fixed and permanent”
(Bowra, The Greek Experience 200). Whatever a man has “wrought of good or
brave/Will mould him through the cycle-year/That dawns behind the grave”
(74–76). In other words, a man’s honorable deeds will continue forever to determine
his permanent, eternal reality, regardless of the death and destruction wrought by
the processes of the cosmos. In lines 45–50 the epilogue discusses Horace’s claim
in his first Ode that he will “strike…/The stars with head sublime” (46). Horace,
in another of his Odes, epitomizes the ancient concept of substantive action that is
discernible in the epilogue. As Edith Hamilton translates lines 45–49 of Ode 3.29,
“Not Jove himself can blot out one single deed that lies behind, nor can he ever
bring to naught or make undone what once the flying hour has borne away” (The
Roman Way 114).
Tennyson’s own voice concludes the epilogue:
And here the Singer for his Art
Not all in vain may plead
“The song that nerves a nations heart,
Is in itself a deed.” (77–80)
This claim is perfectly in keeping with the equal standing of hero and bard in the
heroic view. If poetry is itself a deed, then the transcendent permanence the poet of
the epilogue conceives for heroic acts appertains to poetry as well.Though the songs
themselves may be swept away, nothing can blot out the great deed of having written
them. In this sense, the glory of Horace’s greatness, along with Tennyson’s own, will
not only strike the stars, it will outlast them; just as, in the “Prologue to General
Hamley,” the “rampart-fire” in the glorious battle of Tel-el-Kabir makes the stars
pale, “and the glory grew” (27ff.).
In the epilogue, Tennyson, in the guise of the “POET,” confers eternal glory
upon Homer and Horace and also basks in its undying rays himself. In doing so he
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provides yet another parallel with the poem proper, where, in its final two lines, one
brigadier confers glory upon “all the Brigade” (66) and incidentally upon himself.
The speaker of the poem, a member of one of four squadrons that followed up the
attack of Scarlett’s “three hundred,” presumably belongs to the 4th Dragoon Guards.
When “some of us…were held back a while from the fight” (35–36), the speaker
says, “O mad for the charge and the battle were we” (41). According to Cecil
Woodham-Smith, during Scarlett’s charge the 4th Dragoon Guards “had been held
back almost dying of impatience” (223). In creating a first-person account of the
fight,Tennyson perhaps assuaged the old uneasy feelings of inadequacy he felt when
comparing his calling to the active, courageous life of the soldier.
Tennyson’s reading on the Edison recording of “The Charge of the Heavy
Brigade,” from its beginning through line 47, evinces a degree of empathy consistent
with a first-person account.The “envious yearning” Ricks (Tennyson 231) perceives
in Tennyson’s attitude towards the Crimean War is perceptible especially in his
recitation of line 41, “O mad for the charge and the battle were we,” a line that
conveys Tennyson’s own yearning for battle. His reading of the line is impassioned,
expressive of the suppressed eagerness of the second wave of brigadiers, who by
the time they attacked were “[w]ild with the rage of battle, yelling madly”
(Woodham-Smith 222). Tennyson’s sensitivity to the emotions of the warriors is
palpable also in line 45, where he subdues his voice in harmony with their dismayed
whispering. At line 47 he lengthens out the word “dismay” in an appropriately
distressed tone of voice.
Throughout the surviving 47 lines on the recording, Tennyson’s reading is
sufficiently dramatic to suggest his close involvement with the vicissitudes of the
battle. His pause at the end of line 3 reflects the pause in the action. His rendition of
the reiteration in line 11, “…up the hill, up the hill, up the hill,” is quick but restrained,
and also monotonous, with an equal emphasis on the word “up” in each repetition.
In The Charge, Mark Adkin describes the attack of the Heavy Brigade not as a rush
forward but as a struggle uphill over ground full of holes and littered with tangled
roots and briars (108–109).Tennyson’s reading of line 11 reflects the steady, laborious
clambering of the brigade; his repeated emphasis on “up” signals the riders’ undaunted
effort to surmount the hill. Tennyson’s rendition of line 12, “Followed the Heavy
Brigade,” accentuates the stressed syllables in the two complete dactyls before ending
with a final and culminating emphasis on the second syllable in “Brigade.” His
intonation reflects the increased effort of horse and rider on the upper slopes of the
hill and their climactic coup of attaining the top.The resounding weight with which
Tennyson pronounces “Heavy Brigade” also reflects both the “heaviness” of the
brigade itself and the permanent and fixed solidity of its glorious feat. In reciting
line 16, he pronounces “who” with an ominous solemnity, sugges-tive of his
appreciation of the danger faced by the brigade. In a similar manner he lends dramatic
emphasis to the first half of line 23, “Fought for their lives….” He reads the first part
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of section 3 with a breathless rapidity that simulates the rapid action he describes
and that also evinces his vicarious participation in it.
The ability to empathize not just with compatriots but also with men of rival
nations was required by the heroic ideal of chivalry, an ideal relevant to the character
of the poet in the epilogue:
Slav, Teuton, Kelt, I count them all
My friends and brother souls,
With all the peoples, great and small,
That wheel between the poles. (“Epilogue” 17–20)
Though Tennyson’s artistic method was on occasion subtly “chivalrous” towards British
enemies, as in the “Battle of Brunanburh” and “The Revenge,” his work was more
often overtly and vehemently nationalistic, as with the 1852 newspaper poems. The
gap between Tennyson and the speaker widens in lines 17–20, but it narrows when
Tennyson uses his character of the poet to defend his own ardor for military heroics:
And who loves War for War’s own sake
Is fool, or crazed, or worse;
But let the patriot-soldier take
His meed of fame in verse; (“Epilogue” 29–32)
Here Tennyson argues that war is justifiable if it is fought for patriotic reasons—
“though that realm were in the wrong/For which her warriors bleed” (33–34).
Lines 33–34, Tennyson no doubt would have argued, were addressed to the Slav,
Teuton, and Kelt and not to his own countrymen.Tennyson’s normally chauvinistic
support of England, his England, was one more way he aligned his thinking with the
heroic traditions of ancient Greece and Rome, where chivalry was circumscribed
by strong national loyalty. C.M.Bowra comments on the ancient Greeks:
This sense that a man owes a supreme sacrifice to his own people was deeply
ingrained in the Greek character, and is a triumphant example of its adaptation of
heroic ideals to a civic frame. Because he lives among other men and is bound by
ties he cannot explain or assess, his first concern is their protection and their safety.
(The Greek Experience 38)
Edith Hamilton observes of the ancient Romans, “High honor and love of country
that made nothing of torture and death was what the Romans set first as the greatest
thing of all” (The Roman Way 134).
“The Defence of Lucknow” can be seen as constituting a “Defence” of British
imperialism, but Valerie Pitt’s claim that in Tennyson’s battle poetry, “The Imperial
Dream is, in a way, the outward symbol of courage against odds” (166), is a viable
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justification of Tennyson’s ostensible jingoism in the poem. “The Defence of
Lucknow” is similar to “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade” in its first-person point
of view, in the unwarranted dearth of critical attention it has received, and also in
the method of its artistry. Tennyson weaves parallels between “The Defence of
Lucknow” and its “Dedicatory Poem to the Princess Alice” as he does between the
three parts of “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade.”
Princess Alice’s selflessness and patriotism are made analogous to the heroism and
glory of the British soldiers at Lucknow. Alice kissed her ill child (“the fatal kiss”
[“Dedicatory Poem” 2]) and consequently died; the soldiers at Lucknow kiss the
dead Henry Lawrence and consequently live more fully as inspired heroes. The
symmetry between the scenarios—dying from kissing the living, and living more
fully from kissing the dead—enhances the connection between Alice and the soldiers.
The reaction to the end of the siege provides another link to Alice’s kiss: “women
and children come out,/…/Kissing the war-hardened hand of the Highlander …”
(100, 102). The “murmur of the people’s praise” in the “Dedicatory Poem” (7)
anticipates the “jubilant shout” and the “conquering cheers” of the “sick from the
hospital” and the Highlanders in victory (98–100). It is a tribute to Alice’s sickbed
variation of heroism that hospital patients can “echo” (100) the shouting of warriors,
which is a traditional indicator of the fiery joy of battle.
The most important elements connecting Alice with the Battle of Lucknow are
the flag on Alice’s coffin and the blowing banner in the refrain of the poem. The
Union Jack is here a symbol of eternal glory, which ever hovers over heroic deeds, as
in “The Passing of Arthur”: “…thy name and glory cling/To all high places like a
golden cloud/For ever….” (53–55). Tennyson associates the banner with glory in
line 3 of “The Defence”: “Never with mightier glory than when we had reared thee
on high….” The flag, like the glory of heroes, cannot be kept down; it is invincible
and invulnerable: “Shot through the staff or the halyard, but ever we raised thee
anew,/And ever upon the topmost roof our banner of England blew” (5–6). In
contrast to the underworld hell of the mines in sections 2 and 3, the banner blows
forever in “heaven.” The dead Alice is literally covered with the glory of this same
banner of England. Symbolically, she too has been “raised anew.” The murmur of the
peoples praise “[a]scends” to her (“Dedicatory Poem” 10). Her own glory, like that
of the heroes of Lucknow, is perennial. Her compatriots dress her coffin in the flag,
just as “Love and Longing dress [her] deeds in light” (“Dedicatory Poem” 9). The
flag, as a symbol of glory, is part of the “broken gleam from our poor earth” that
“May touch thee” (18–19): the banner is literally touching her coffin.
These parallels contribute to Tennyson’s strategy of heroizing the princess. Also
towards this end he mentions the “Valour of delicate women who tended the hospital bed” in “The Defence of Lucknow” (87). “The Defence of Lucknow” can be
seen as mingling its own poetic beams of glory with those of the flag:
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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
…where is he can swear
But that some broken gleam from our poor earth
May touch thee, while remembering thee, I lay
At thy pale feet this ballad of the deeds
Of England, and her banner in the East? (“Dedicatory Poem” 17–21)
As a commemoration of the light of noble deeds, Tennyson’s poetry is another part
of the “broken gleam” that may “touch thee.” Tennyson’s “Dedicatory Poem” touches
Alice in the sense that it speaks of her. The broken gleam may touch her “while”
Tennyson, remembering her, lays his ballad at her feet.The use of the word “while”
cements the link between the broken gleam and Tennyson’s poem.
Tennyson’s artistry in “The Defence of Lucknow” involves yet again the use of
imagery traditional to heroic literature. Storm imagery figures in the battle
descriptions: “hailed” (13), “bullets would rain” (21), “that underground thunderclap”
(32), “wild earthquake” (61), “deluge” (81), “Storm at the Water-gate! storm at the
Bailey-Gate! storm, and it ran/Surging and swaying all round us, as ocean on every
side/Plunges and heaves at a bank that is daily devoured by the tide” (37–39). The
speaker calls his antagonists moles (26) and tigers (51), and he refers to the springing
of mines as “Roar upon roar” (54).These symbols of battle power are counterpoised
in the traditional manner by the speaker’s unflinching acknowledgment, particularly
in stanza 6, of warfare’s hellish aspect. The hellishness is objectified by the mines,
which also evoke the epic convention of the underworld voyage.
Other strengths of the poem include the vigor of the long dactylic lines and the
abundant alliteration. Tennyson’s shift from dactylic to iambic meter in the refrain
corresponds to the dramatic shift of feeling expressed in those lines (6, 30, 45, 60, 72,
94, 106). In the middle of the sixth section, which describes the suffering of the
besieged British,Tennyson adds connotations of springtime and renewal to the refrain
with the line, “Thoughts of the breezes of May blowing over an English field” (83).
In the second section, the word “death” occurs eleven times, one short of a full
dozen, the standard number of completion in the great epics.Though the British at
Lucknow are constantly threatened with imminent death, their heroism prevails.
The perennial banner in the sky is a sign of their eternal glory, a warranty that for
such heroes death will never complete its dominion.
Northrop Frye’s commentary on Blake’s conception of “Being” is apropos of this
heroic vision of the permanence of honorable deeds: “…events do not necessarily
cease to exist when we have stopped experiencing them” (247). Blake anticipates
Tennyson with his idea that “the destructive sword” is one of the “portions of eternity
too great for the eye of man,” a Proverb of Hell (27) cognate with Tennyson’s traditional
depictions of both the horror and the timeless sublimity of war. On the highest level
of Tennyson’s art, war stands for what Nietzsche calls “[t]he pain implicit in the very
structure of things…the antagonism in the heart of the world” (The Birth of Tragedy
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32). With his revelation of the glory implicit in the antagonism, Tennyson offers a
vision conducive to the affirmation of life in this tough world. In Maud, the subject
of the next chapter,Tennyson focuses on the struggle to respond with an Everlasting
Yea to the battle of life. The reconciling vision his hero finally attains is consistent
with the heroic tradition.
Chapter Five
Maud
I
N THE ILIAD, HOMER SINGS OF THE DEVASTATING WRATH OF
ACHILLES; IN MAUD, Tennyson sings of the psychic devastation of his own
wrathful hero. The title of Maud gives the first indication of the poems heroic
aspects. The name “Maud,” as Linda K.Hughes notes, “is derived from the same
source as Matilda, the Old German Mahthildis, a compound of mahti, meaning ‘might’
or ‘strength,’ and hildi, ‘battle’ or ‘strife’” (171–72). Chris R.Vanden Bossche also
recognizes the heroic significance of the title character’s name. “Maud,” he writes,
“is the diminutive of ‘Matilda,’ the name of several medieval queens, most notably
Empress Matilda (1102–1167), also known as Maud; true to her name, which means
‘mighty battle-maid,’ she led an invasion of England” (79). Tennyson had a sister
named Matilda, a situation conducive to an awareness on his part of the name’s
etymology.
The poems subtitle, “A Monodrama,” also relates to the heroic tradition.Tennyson
called Maud a “monodrama” because, as he said, “The peculiarity of this poem is that
different phases of passion in one person take the place of different characters”
(Memoir 1.396).The passion of Tennyson’s speaker is comparable to the titanic intensity
exhibited by the mythic heroes of yore. The different phases of his passion may be
likened to the changing stances of Achilles towards the Trojan War, to the different
forms of monomania exemplified by Dido and Turnus, and to the highly variable
influence of Odin on the berserks. In Maud, Tennyson gives an ancient theme a
romantic, psychological treatment. The main region of his song is not an external
but an internal battlefield, where the hero’s great exploit is the recovery of his sanity.
The poem was at first called Maud or the Madness (Memoir 1.402), but its “mad”
hero is in the beginning not so much insane as incensed. Early in the poem we find
him “raging” (1.53), an impotent expression of the fury from which his eventual
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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
derangement derives—and of which it to some degree consists. In her examination
of insanity in Tennyson’s work, Ann C.Colley discusses passion as a precipitant of
madness in such terms that the two conditions are almost indistinguishable (Tennyson
and Madness 77–78). Although Tennyson referred to his hero as a“madman” who is
“constitutionally diseased” (Lang and Shannon 2.137), his madman is not only first,
but also foremost, a man with an “angry spirit” (1.487).
The speaker suffers from the same epic vehemence characteristic of Achilles,
Aeneas,Turnus, and Cuchullain. He suffers because the bursting ardor of his passionate
soul unfits him for a mundane existence in a Mammonite society where “only the
ledger lives” (1.35) and only the “underhand” (1.28) variety of aggression is
encouraged. In this respect the narrator of Maud resembles the character of Willy in
Tennyson’s “Rizpah.” Though he was scrupulously honorable,Willy “was always so
wild,” that “he never could rest” (26–27). His mother proposes, in retrospect, a solution
to Willy’s problems: “The King should have made him a soldier, he would have been
one of his best” (28). In “The Sailor Boy,” Tennyson presents a hero with a similar
nature, but one who finds his proper sphere of activity:
“God help me! save I take my part
Of danger on the roaring sea,
A devil rises in my heart,
Far worse than any death to me.” (21–24)
The speaker of Maud even more closely resembles the speaker of “Locksley Hall,”
who says, “I myself must mix with action, lest I wither by despair./What is that
which I should turn to, lighting upon days like these?/Every door is barred with
gold, and opens but to golden keys” (98–100).The speaker of “Locksley Hall” seeks
a setting where “the passions cramped no longer shall have scope and breathing
space” (167). The terrific passion of Maud’s narrator is ruinous to him, not because
he allows it to run rampant as Achilles and Turnus do, but because his combativeness
is not allowed what Tennyson seems to consider its proper scope. The repressed
hero’s fiery spirit flares once before Part III, in the disastrous confrontation with
Maud’s brother, only to sink into utter stultification in the madhouse, where it
consumes itself in idleness like the corroding brand of Tennyson’s “The Old Sword.”
Several of the speaker’s references to “madness” and “passion” are evocative of the
Homeric phenomenon of battle wrath. In line 37 of Part I, the hero empathizes
with the violence-inducing “vitriol madness” of the ruffian in the filthy by-lane.
Paul Turner finds a source for “vitriol madness” in Kingsley’s Alton Locke, “where gin
is called ‘vitriol’” (142). From a Homeric perspective, the association of madness
with alcohol calls to mind the intoxicating nature of battle fury. In response to the
mes-sage of a pacifist preacher, the hero equates war with “the passions that make
earth Hell!” (1.375).The narrator follows the heroic tradition in implicitly ascribing
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a version of his own internal combustion to poets, who have a “passionate heart” (1.
140). In his account of the angry confrontation preceding the duel with Maud’s
brother, the hero refers to the brother as a “madman” (2.18) for striking him. The
flaring of the hero’s fiery spirit in the duel results in “a passion so intense/One
would think that it well/Might drown all life in the eye” (2.107), but instead his
“sharper sense” (2.111) allows him to notice one of the dead brother’s many rings
(2.116). In the Iliad (5.124ff.), the fury of Diomedes is likewise accompanied by
clarity of perception. “Fury like your fathers/I’ve put into your heart,” says Athena,
who has also, she tells Diomedes, “cleared away the mist that blurred your eyes/a
moment ago, so you may see before you/clearly” (Fitzgerald 113).
Helping to align the turmoil of Maud’s protagonist with the fury of epic heroes is
the frequent occurrence of the words “madness” and “passion” in conjunction with
Homeric indicators of battle wrath such as shouting. The vitriol madness of the
ruffian results in the “yell” of the trampled wife (1.38).The hero’s mother responds
to her husband’s suicide with a “passionate shriek” (1.57); prior to which, the hero’s
father would “rave” (1.60). Maud’s battle song is a “passionate ballad” (1.165), which
is “like a trumpets call” (1.166). She sings it in a “wild voice pealing up to the sunny
sky” (1.174).The “passionate shriek” of the hero’s mother in Part I is echoed by the
“passionate cry” (2.5, 33) of Maud in response to the duel. In Part III, immediately
after exhorting his own “passionate heart” (3.30, 32), the speaker joins in the shouting
of a battle cry (3.35). In contrast to these instances of passionate shouting, the hero
in the beginning damps his fires, seeking a “passionless peace” (1.151) in woodland
ways that are, appropriately, “quiet” (1.150).
In the beginning the hero recalls how his father before him had “muttered and
maddened” (1.10) before turning his fury violently upon himself, an occasion
Tennyson associates with the storm imagery common to the ancient epics: “out he
walked when the wind like a broken worldling wailed” (1.11). In two instances
madness and passion are related to both shouting and storms. While the speaker is
tormented by his initial attraction to Maud, he walks out, “Listening now to the tide
in its broad-flung shipwrecking roar,/Now to the scream of a maddened beach
dragged down by the wave,/…in a wintry wind” (1.98–100). In section IV of Part
II (“O that ‘twere possible”), the speaker is haunted by a recurrence of the “passionate
cry” (2.187), whereupon “a sullen thunder is rolled” (2.189). In addition, storm
imagery appears in the account of the duel (“And thundered up into Heaven the
Christless code” [2.26]) and in connection with the Crimean War (“Let if flame or
fade, and the war roll down like a wind” [3.54]).
The ancient symbol of the lion, which in Maud is also connected with passion,
helps to ascribe warlike savagery to the narrator. On Maud’s garden gate, “A lion
ramps at the top,/He is clasped by a passion-flower” (1.495–96). Earlier in the poem
the protagonist refers to himself as a lion (“To have her lion roll in a silken net /And
fawn at a victor’s feet” [217–18]), and in Part III Virgil’s symbol of Furor indi-cates
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Britain’s involvement in the Crimean War: “…and pointed to Mars/As he glowed
like a ruddy shield on the Lion’s breast” (3.13–14). John Killham notices the abundance
of animal imagery in the poem: “The English are represented in terms of a rat, a
‘little breed,’ ‘long-necked geese,’ and serpents. It is easy to see many other examples.
The bull, the fly, the lean and hungry wolf, the raven, the drone, the venomous
worm, the bird of prey, the titmouse, all represent various men. The speaker sees
himself as ‘a wounded thing with a rancourous cry’” (229). In a description of the
dinosaurs, the speaker uses Homeric imagery: “A monstrous eft was of old the Lord
and Master of Earth,/For him did his high sun flame, and his river billowing ran,/
And he felt himself in his force to be Natures crowning race” (132–34).
Another quality of the protagonist that links him with warriors of the heroic age
is pride. He reveals himself to be inordinately proud by his paranoid ascription of
pride to others. In Part I, 114ff., the hero first demonstrates his own pride, then
projects the same trait onto Maud:
When have I bowed to her father, the wrinkled head of the race?
I met her today with her brother, but not to her brother I bowed: I bowed
to his lady-sister as she rode by on the moor;
But the fire of a foolish pride flashed over her beautiful face.
O child, you wrong your beauty, believe it, in being so proud;
Your father has wealth well-gotten, and I am nameless and poor.
(The narrator’s reference to himself as “poor” leagues him with the army: “Last
week came one to the county town,/To preach our poor little army down” [1.366–
67].) The speaker reveals the prominence of pride in his makeup by his
characterization of mankind: “We are puppets, Man in his pride” (1.126). He fears
becoming the tool of Maud’s family because “often a man’s own angry pride/Is cap
and bells for a fool” (1.250–51). His infatuation with Maud temporarily supersedes
his preoccupation with pride: “‘No surely, now it cannot be pride’” (1.313). “I to cry
out on pride/who have won her favour!” (1.428–29). Her brother, however, pricks
his pride so deeply that blood eventually flows.The speaker’s exclamation about the
brother is self-revealing: “Fool that I am to be vext with his pride!” (1.448). Even in
the madhouse the hero denounces Maud’s father for his being “so full of pride,/ He
linkt a dead man there to a spectral bride” (2.316–17).
The narrators desire for “a calm” (1.77), for a “passionless peace” (1.151), is
reminiscent of the ancient Greek desideratum, the “Golden Mean.” “The attention
which the Greeks paid to the Mean,” writes C.M.Bowra, “suggests not so much that
they observed it as that, in the fullness of their blood, they felt that they needed some
curb for their more violent ambitions and more reckless undertakings” (The Greek
Experience 34). The protagonist’s wish to “keep a temperate brain” (1.141) follows
the same ancient line of thinking, and his subsequent observation is also traceable to
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Greco-Roman ideology: “For not to desire or admire, if a man could learn it, were
more/Than to walk all day like the sultan of old in a garden of spice” (1.142–43). In
connection with this passage Christopher Ricks (The Poems of Tennyson 2.531) cites
Horace’s “Nil admirari” from Epistles 1.6.1, and Aristotle’s description of the Great
Man in the Ethics is also pertinent. As H.D.F.Kitto translates, the great man “will not
be given to admiration, as there is nothing that strikes him as great” (The Greeks
246). The speaker expresses another Horatian idea twice in section XI of Part I:
“Then let come what come may,/What matter if I go mad, /I shall have had my
day”; “Then let come what come may/To a life that has been so sad,/I shall have had
my day” (1.401–403; 1.409–411). Christopher Ricks compares the phrasing of these
passages to Macbeth and King Lear (The Poems of Tennyson 2.544), but the sentiment
recalls Horace’s Ode 3.29.As Edith Hamilton translates, “He is master of himself and
happy who as the day ends can say, I have lived—tomorrow come cloud come
sunshine” (The Roman Way 114).
The hero hates the “Civil war” of peacetime because it is hypocritical, “not
openly bearing the sword” (1.28). He detests this form of dissimulation because, like
Achilles, he detests lying. The heroic contempt for lying as a cowardly and ignoble
practice (“concealment is a sign of fear,” writes H.D.F.Kitto of the ancient Greeks
[244]) is one of the protagonist’s most salient characteristics. In the beginning he
naively admires his fathers “honest fame” (1.18) and wonders who would have faith
in a tradesman’s word (1.26). He lives in a time “when only not all men lie” (1.35).
In line 56 of Part I, the horror of his fathers death is matched by the horror of “a
wretched swindler’s lie” (1.56). Prior to his suicide, the hero’s father would “rave at
the lie and the liar” (1.60). Christopher Ricks cites a cancelled passage immediately
following line 60, which contains the lines, “But over and over again these words
flasht into my head:/The work of the lie—the work of the lie—the work of the lie”
(The Poems of Tennyson 2.524). In the village below the hero’s home, “Jack on his alehouse bench has as many lies as a Czar” (1.110).The speaker longs to remove himself
“Far-off from the clamour of liars belied in the hubbub of lies” (1.151). Maud’s
brother, the speaker believes, campaigns for office on a platform of “brazen lies”
(1.244), while the speaker desires “one/Who can rule and dare not lie” (1.395).The
speakers hatred of the lie is implicated in the brothers provocation of him: “He
fiercely gave me the lie” (2.16).
Maud, after singing her battle song, comes to represent the antithesis of the lie.
The speaker finds that “Maud is as true as Maud is sweet” (1.475), and he trusts that
she cannot “break her word” (1.565). Her martial music inspires him to asso-ciate
truth with fighting: “Not die; but live a life of truest breath,/And teach true life to
fight with mortal wrongs” (1.651–52). Maud is truth itself; in walking with her he
walks “awake with Truth” (687). Though Maud’s brother is “the heir of the liar”
(1.761), Maud is “tender and true” (1.768), and the hero is her “true lover” (1.831–
32). Finally, in Part III, the hero acts on the truth of Maud’s trumpet call, by openly
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bearing the sword against the Russian Czar. Because Nicholas I is “a giant liar” (3.45),
the war against him gives the protagonist a heroic outlet for his heroic hatred of the lie.
The similarities between the narrator of Maud and Achilles extend beyond the
narrators aversion to falsehood. The speakers wrath, as it rages out of control in the
confrontation with Maud’s brother, is Achillean. In Book 9 of the Iliad,Achilles vows
not to join the fighting until it reaches the Greek ships. In Part III of Maud, the
protagonist emerges from his isolation, like Achilles emerging from his tent, to join
in the war effort, a scene that takes place on the deck of a ship: “And I stood on a
giant deck and mixed my breath/With a loyal people shouting a battle cry” (3. 34–
35). Paul Turner recognizes the narrator’s likeness to Achilles:
When the speaker says of Maud’s brother, “This lump of earth has left his estate The
lighter by the loss of his weight” (1.537–38),Tennyson is adapting a Homeric phrase, “a
useless weight on the earth,” applied to himself by Achilles, in remorse at having kept out
of the fighting, and so failed to protect his friend Patroclus. The brother, constantly
denigrated by the speaker, turns out at the end to be the more magnanimous…, and the
Homeric allusion already hints at this truth. It is the speaker himself who is the “useless
weight,” the caricature of Achilles, raging about a private grievance in his tent, and letting
other people do the fighting. The recurrent weight image is used to mark his gradual
movement from the negative to the positive aspect of Achilles. (138)
Turner compares the hero’s development to that of Hamlet as well: “…the hero of
Maud begins like Hamlet the ineffectual recluse, and ends like Hamlet the potential
Fortinbras” (139).
Turner’s evocation of the melancholy Dane is prompted by Tennyson’s reference
to Maud as “a little Hamlet” (Memoir 1.396).As Hamlets perception of the time as out
of joint turns the earth into a sterile promontory for him, the hero of Maud allows
his detestation of “Timour-Mammon” to taint his entire world. His reaction against
the ignoble and cowardly “spirit of murder” (1.40) in commercial enterprise generates
an aversion to the redness of tooth and claw in the natural world, which he describes
as “one with rapine” (1.123). He finds himself in “a world of plunder and prey”
(1.125), where he is a potential quarry: “No, there is fatter game on the moor; she
will let me alone” (1.74). It is in the context of the speaker’s alienation from the
violence of life that his love for Maud is given its fullest meaning. Maud’s martial
song is an overture to the narrator from life itself, with all its antagonism and pain. In
singing of men in battle array that march to the death, Maud brings her own beauty
and innocence into conjunction with the murderous aspect of life. For the speaker
she represents a coniunctio oppositorum uniting rose and lily, blood and purity. In Jungian
terms, she becomes the hero’s anima, “who draws him into life …and not only into
life’s reasonable and useful aspects, but into its frightful para-doxes and ambivalences
where good and evil, success and ruin, hope and despair, counterbalance one another”
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(Jung 13). Maud’s battle song temporarily inoculates the speaker against the psychic
ravages of social Darwinism and its natural paradigm.
By extending his hero’s rejection of the underhand war of commerce to a
temporary rejection of the terms of life itself, Tennyson enhances the universal
relevance of Maud.The poem is comparable in its philosophical expansiveness to the
Iliad, where Homer ascribes the atrocities of war to the purpose of God and the
doom assigned. Explicating the fifth line of the Iliad, which he translates, “the plan of
Zeus was fulfilled,” H.D.F.Kitto writes:
And what does this mean? That all this was specially designed by Zeus for
inscrutable reasons of his own? Rather the opposite, that it is part of a universal
Plan: not an isolated event—something which, as it happened, so fell out on this
occasion—but something that came from the very nature of things: not a particular,
but a universal. (47)
The very nature of things in Homer, according to G.E.Dimock, Jr., is epitomized in
the name of Odysseus, which Dimock translates as “trouble” (411).The universe of
the Odyssey, Dimock writes, “is full of hostility, it includes Poseidon, but it is not
ultimately hostile. Zeus has been showing Odysseus not anger, but a terrible fondness”
(424).Walter Kaufmann, in his comment on Iliad 7.54ff., recognizes the life-affirming
quality of Homer:
In large parts of the Western World today one sees no vultures; and death, disease, and
old age are concealed. In Calcutta, vultures still sit in trees in the city, waiting for death
in the streets; and sickness, suffering, and the disintegration of age assault the senses
everywhere. But it is only in Homer that, while death is ever present to consciousness,
the vultures in the tree are experienced as Athene and Apollo, delighting in the beautiful
sight of a sea of shields, helmets, and spears. In this vision death has not lost its sting;
neither has life lost its beauty. The very vultures are no reproach to the world. (145)
After observing the horrific nature of the “brute facts” the Iliad describes, Gilbert
Murray marvels that “the poet makes of it a tale of chivalry and splendour!” He
remarks that “the contrast provided by the Heroic Ages with their miseries and their
exhilaration as against our own times, with their comparative comfort and depression
of spirits, becomes almost startling” (202). Like Maud, Homer sings of death, but he
also, like Maud, sings a chivalrous battle song, of honor that cannot die.The effect of
Maud’s martial song culminates in Part III, where the narrator rejects what he calls
his “morbid hate and horror…/Of a world in which I have hardly mixt” (1.264–65)
in favor of the affirmative worldview that Kitto, Dimock, Jr., Kaufmann, and Murray
ascribe to Homer.
James R.Kincaid,Valerie Pitt, and John Killham all see Maud’s martial song as a
call to life, and war as representing life’s essential conflict.To Kincaid, Maud’s chivalrous
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battle song is “really a song that is within [the hero], arising from the deep and
unconscious sense that only in full acceptance of all life can he live” (120). “Having
rejected the true, fallen nature of the world and its union of opposites,” Kincaid
writes,“[the hero] must reenter that world through its most elemental and extreme
coalition. He must accept the existence of honor in murder, life in death, purity in
hideous slaughter” (132). Pitt observes that the hero “falls in love, and love restores
relationship, puts a value not only on the thing beloved but on the whole world”
(179). Killham sees as fundamental to Maud the notion that “violence and death
have to be faced as part of [man’s] lot on earth” (224). In the beginning the protagonist
is “cowed by life,” because “life involves an unremitting resort to either violence or
cunning, the struggle inevitably culminating in death” (221). Killham assesses the
speakers final position: “Accepting his weakness, but trusting his strength, he is finally
able to enter a world where violence, rapine and greed exist naturally in the hearts
of men and nations…” (235).
The validity of the hero’s final position is the most controversial issue raised by
the critics of Maud. Many of the poem’s detractors belie their pacifistic stance by
their zeal in taking up arms against the likes of Killham. Some scholars, including
Stopford A.Brook,A.Dwight Culler, and James Norman O’Neill, find the conclusion
of Maud unacceptable because of the devastation incurred by the Crimean War.
Culler writes:
If [Tennyson] had set his poem in the Middle Ages and had his hero go off on the
Crusades, no one would have objected, for it has always been considered legitimate
for a hero to solve his personal problems by giving himself to some larger cause. But
Nolan’s blunder at Balaklava, the state of the hospitals at Scutari, plus modern
pacifism have effectively ruined Tennyson’s symbol, and it is idle to say that anyone
can now read the final scene of Maud and like it. (205)
Other critics, such as Ward Hellstrom and James R.Kincaid, find the historical aspect
of the war irrelevant to its symbolic import. “What the hero does,” Hellstrom believes,
“is enroll himself on the side of the warrior saints, who war in this life for the good”
(84). Another group, which includes Ann C.Colley, James R.Bennett, and Linda
K.Hughes, explains the bellicosity of the ending by ascertaining that the speaker has
emerged from the madhouse still insane. According to Colley, the denouement is
“illusory, still ‘mad,’ and despairing” (85).
Chris R.Vanden Bossche recognizes the standard alternatives available to the
defenders of Part III: “Most critics have apparently felt that they have only two
choices when confronted with Part III: either they must concede that the narrator is
still mad at the end of the narrative, or they must regard the war in purely symbolic
terms, disregarding historical reference in favor of the imaginative construct in the
ical approach, one that endorses the hero’s belief in the Crimean War as preferable
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poem” (73).Vanden Bossche then considers the historical support for another critto a Mammonite peace. “The narrator’s criticisms of society,” he writes, “may be
regarded as symptoms of his misanthropic rage, but they are, nonetheless, consistent
with the depictions of a society at war with itself to be found in the writings of the
prophets and social critics—Carlyle, Ruskin, Kingsley, Maurice, Gaskell, Dickens
that he echoes” (76).Vanden Bossche claims that the narrator’s desire for a declared
war represents a position that was popular in Tennyson’s day:
The belief was widespread that fighting a just war would not only bring about the
liberation of the enslaved peoples of Europe but would also improve the social situation
of England. Fighting for others, it was argued, would rid the nation of the selfishness of
laissez-faire individualism and turn to “higher aims /…a land that has lost for a little
her lust of gold” (3.38–39). (75)
Michael C.C.Adams reviews at some length the historical background of the speaker’s
climactic stance, using a cross-cultural approach “to show that Tennyson was talking
about real war, that he was sincere and was not simply throwing sops to the masses”
(406). Adams’s comparison of Tennyson’s war poetry of the 1850’s with American
writings in the period from 1830 to 1865 supports his claim that “the idea of war as a
rejuvenating force for prosperous commercial-industrial nations was widely held among
introspective men…. [J]udged by the highest intellectual standards of his own day, the
poet’s views were quite legitimate” (406–407).Adams quotes numerous pacifistic critics
who “all refuse to believe that Tennyson sincerely could have regarded the Crimean
War as a rejuvenating force” (406), but in fact, Adams asserts, “Tennyson’s sentiments
about the Light Brigade suggest that at the time he wrote Maud he was optimistic
about war’s curative powers” (418).The testimony of Garnet Wolseley, whom Adams
calls “Britain’s leading soldier in the later Victorian period” (417), provides Adams
with convincing evidence of the realism and legitimacy of Part III. Wolseley says:
I thought then, and I think still, that [the desire for combat] was a manly, elevating aspiration,
for surely war with all its horrors exercises a healthy influence on all classes of society.There
is an epoch in the history of nations when man becomes so absorbed in the pursuit of
wealth and the enjoyment of ease, that the drastic medicine of war alone can revive its
former manliness and restore the virility that has made its sons renowned. (417)
Winston Collins decides that “even though Tennyson attempted to dissociate himself
from his speaker, I think that there is little doubt that on the question of peace and
war they speak as one” (127). Robert James Mann, Henry Van Dyke, Alan Sinfeld,
Valerie Pitt, and Christopher Ricks agree with Collins, and they all defend Tennyson’s
position based on the following premise, as set forth by Pitt: “Tennyson is not glorifying
war quâ war, but war as a remedy for what he thought a worse disease” (180). The
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disease is, in Mann’s words, “the debased condition of simulated peace, where murder
and rapine lurk in disguise” (qtd. in Jump 211).
Though Tennyson, and other writers of the time as well, may have believed that
the evils of commerce could temporarily be superseded by the “drastic medicine of
war,” it is not mandatory to condemn or to defend the conclusion of Maud on that
basis. In Maud the Crimean War represents not necessarily a cure for the covert
operations of capitalism. The war signifies, as James R.Kincaid puts it, the “most
elemental and extreme coalition” (132) of a violent world. Unlike the “Civil war”
(1. 27) of Part I or the “lawless war” (2.332) of Part II, the “blood-red blossom of
war” (3.53) in Part III is neither duplicitous nor illicit. The narrator sees the war as
an acceptable outlet for his heroic drive, which, because it is no longer repressed, no
longer magnifies his hatred of the simulated peace into a distaste for life itself.Tennyson
glorifies neither war quâ war, nor war as a remedy for the debased condition of
simulated peace—he glorifies, if anything, his speakers final, heroic affirmation that
“It is better to fight for the good than to rail at the ill” (3.57).The war does not cure
society, which has lost its lust of gold only “for a little” (3.39), but it does bring the
narrator back to life, back from the madhouse.The hero “finally finds solace,” writes
Robert Pattison, “not in the pastoral, but in the heroic” (131). The war revives the
narrator’s sense of reconciliation with the violent aspect of life, restoring to him the
affirmative outlook Maud had inspired: “I embrace the purpose of God and the
doom assigned” (3.59).
Throughout the poem the imagery helps to equate the hero’s love of Maud with
the affirmation of life. The imagery typically develops through three phases, which
correspond to the hero’s different “phases of passion”: the poem begins with the
speaker’s lurid visions of an oppressively hostile environment; the malignancy of
these images is then softened and beautified by Maud; finally, the renovated imagery
is associated with warfare in Part III. John Killham outlines this process with regard
to the imagery of redness and flowers:
[T]he colour red, powerfully and violently associated with violent death and blood, is
discharged of its baleful associations by being assimilated to the image of the rose, first
mentioned contemptuously in a context (I. iii. x) of poison flowers (source of the cruel
madness of love), but progressively developed until at the end of Part I it represents
sexual passion. Finally, as an indication of his being cured, the colour reverts to a reference
to violence, but with the flower-image now serving along with it: “The blood-red blossom
of war with a heart of fire.” The painful associations of redness revealed at the beginning
of the poem [quotes first four lines] have been neutralized. (230–31)
The world itself has painful associations for the hero. In the very first lines the speaker
associates a natural setting with blood and death. The “dreadful hollow” where his
father killed himself has “lips” that are “dabbled with blood-red heath,/The red-ribbed
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ledges drip with a silent horror of blood” (1.1–3). (The sexual suggestiveness of the
passage anticipates the connection between Maud and the natural world.) The speaker
rails against nature as “a world of plunder and prey” (1.125), and then voices his
skepticism regarding God’s plan. “Do we move ourselves,” he asks, “or are moved by an
unseen hand at a game/That pushes us off from the board, and others ever succeed?”
(1.127–28). “For the drift of the Maker is dark,” he says, “an Isis hid by the veil./Who
knows the ways of the world, how God will bring them about?” (1.144–45). He
washes his hands of such a world: “Shall I weep if a Poland fall? shall I shriek if a
Hungary fail?/Or an infant civilisation be ruled with rod or with knout?/have not
made the world, and He that made it will guide” (1. 147–49). He wonders at his
finding “the world so bitter/When I am but twenty-five” (1.221–22), and acknowledges
his “morbid hate and horros…/Of a world in which I have hardly mixt” (1.264–65).
The speaker describes himself as being “At war with myself and a wretched race,/Sick,
sick to the heart of life, am I” (1. 364–65).
The hero’s love of Maud catalyzes his acceptance of life by transmuting his distorted
perception of the world. After his encounter with Maud, he refers not to the bloody
hollow but to a landscape that reflects his blossoming love: “The silent sapphirespangled marriage ring of the land” (1.107). Maud sweetens his soured view of life:
“Then the world were not so bitter/But a smile could make it sweet” (1. 226–27,
283–84). Her ability to affect the narrator’s perception of his environment is
exemplified by lines 434–35 in Part I, “For her feet have touched the meadows /
And left the daisies rosy.” The personified natural world is no longer threatening or
macabre, but sympathetic to his new mode of passion:
The red rose cries, “She is near, she is near;”
And the white rose weeps, “She is late;”
The larkspur listens, “I hear, I hear;”
And the lily whispers, “I wait.” (1.912–15)
With his passion redirected into a socially acceptable channel, the hero is able to
accept his madness. He immediately strikes a knightly if overly dramatic stance,
declaring that he “would die/To save from some slight shame one simple girl” (1.
642–43). This declaration prompts a justification of death consonant with heroic
ideology: “Would die; for sullen-seeming Death may give/More life to Love than
is or ever was/In our low world, where yet “tis sweet to live” (1.644–46).The idea
that death makes life more dear is integral to Homer, according to Walter Kaufmann:
“In the Iliad the brevity of life is no objection to the world but an incentive to
relish its pleasures, to live with zest, and to die gloriously. The shadow death casts
does not stain the earth with a slanderous gloom; it is an invitation to joy and
nobility” (160). “Beauty has danger and death as its neighbor,” H.D.F.Kitto observes
of the Iliad (62). For Harold Bloom, the “heroic ethic” involves the notion that
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“the natural is beautiful and apocalyptic precisely because it is physical and
ephemeral” (Visionary Company 415).
Because the speaker’s love for Maud changes his feeling about life, he tends to
associate her with life itself. She sings her battle song “in the morning of life” (1.
167). He calls her “Life of my life” (1.657), and “my life, my fate” (1.911). In the
aftermath of the duel, the speaker comments, “And there rises ever a passionate cry
/From underneath in the darkening land” (2.5–6). The “passionate cry” of Maud,
her “cry for a brothers blood” (2.33–34), has been assimilated by the landscape.
After the hero manifests his passionate nature as deadly anger against Maud’s
brother, he becomes even more conflicted.The duel magnifies his feelings of alienation
from a society that places hypocritical strictures on violence. The speaker’s guilty
feelings are intensified by the fact that his victim was the brother of his beloved, and
by the magnanimity the dying brother demonstrated. As a result the speaker rejects
life again, expressing a longing “to creep/Into some still cavern deep” (2.235–36)
where he can weep his soul out to Maud.The protagonist’s desired cavern of solitude
and solace recalls the cave of Calypso in the fifth book of the Odyssey. G.E.Dimock,
Jr. comments on the Calypso episode:
Though she offered immortality, not death—an immortality of security and
satisfaction in a charming cave—it is still an immortality of oblivion, of no kleos
[“recognition”], of nonentity. Leaving Kalypso is very like leaving the perfect security
and satisfaction of the womb; but, as the Cyclops reminds us, the womb is after all a
deadly place. In the womb one has no identity, no existence worthy of a name.
(412–13)
The speaker of Maud does, in effect, creep into a cavern deep—the madhouse—and it
is indeed a deadly place: “For I thought the dead had peace, but it is not so;/To have no
peace in the grave, is that not sad?” (2.253–54). His fellow inmates in the asylum are
there because, like the protagonist, they cannot come to terms with life. Each tries to
“wheedle a world that loves him not” (2.277). Eventually, the hero, like Odysseus,
leaves the oblivion of his “cave” and ships off to win identity: “And many a darkness
into the light shall leap,/And shine in the sudden making of splendid names” (3.46–
47).The hero’s resurrection from the madhouse is heralded by a vision of Maud, who
“seemed to divide in a dream from a band of the blest,/And spoke of a hope for the
world in the coming wars” (3.10–11). Christopher Ricks notes that several cancelled
drafts of the last stanza “show T. attempting to relate the war to the love for Maud”
(The Poems of Tennyson 2.584). As the martial song of Maud remedied the narrator’s
anger and cynicism, Maud’s announcement of a real war, of a national military cause,
counteracts his more serious madness and life-denial.
The effect of Maud on the hero is comparable to the influence of Athena on the
Greeks in the Iliad. Robert Fitzgerald translates Iliad 2.450ff.:
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So down the ranks that dazzling goddess went
to stir the attack, and each man in his heart
grew strong to fight and never quit the mêlée,
for at her passage war itself became
lovelier than return, lovelier than sailing
in the decked ships to their own native land. (50)
Walter Kaufmann sees Athena as the prototype of the ethos formulated by Pericles: “We
prefer to meet danger with a light heart….They are surely to be esteemed the bravest
spirits who, having the clearest sense both of the pains and pleasures of life, do not on that
account shrink from danger” (143). Maud’s martial song, if the narrator’s description of it
is any indication, voices a similar ethos.The mean-spirited strife of Mammonite society,
on the other hand, is evocative of the god of war himself, Ares, whom Athena viciously
reviles twice (Iliad 5.825ff., 21.391ff.) as a “thing of fury, evil wrought” (Lattimore 150),
and to whom even his father, Zeus, says, “To me you are most hateful of all the gods who
hold Olympos./Forever quarrelling is dear to your heart, wars and battles” (5.890–91,
Lattimore 152). Kaufmann sees these passages as expressing the notion that “A life centered
in quarreling and fighting is felt to be odious, though a brave man, when a fight is thrust
upon him, will acquit himself nobly” (143). Both Athena and Zeus call Ares a “doublefaced liar” (Iliad 5.831, 889), an epithet that heightens his relevance to the lying world of
covertly violent commerce the speaker of Maud despises.
In delineating the hero’s progress from his first expression (1.1) of Ares-like rancor,
“I hate” (Erida, the goddess of hate in the Iliad, is the sister and companion of Ares),
to his last verbal phrase, “I embrace” (3.59), the most prominent of Homeric images,
fire and light, are instrumental. These ancient symbols of battle inspiration are the
axis from which a cluster of images radiates. Appropriately, the image of fire is
prominent in the scenes pertaining to violence.The speaker says that when he killed
Maud’s brother, “The fires of Hell brake out of [the] rising sun,/The fires of Hell
and of Hate” (2.9–10). In his account of the preparation for war in Part III, the
speaker notes that “now…/…flames/The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of
fire” (3.51–53). “Let it flame or fade” (3.54), he exclaims.
Maud, as the hero’s Athena-like source of strength and courage, is herself evocative
of brightness and burning. Her residence “glimmers” (1.111), and from outside the
Hall the hero sees her “pass like a light” (1.112). The speaker describes one of his
first encounters with Maud: “But the fire of a foolish pride flashed over her beautiful
face” (1.116). When Maud sings her martial song, her voice rises “up to the sunny
sky” (1.174), and the hero admires “the light of her youth” (1.176). Maud’s room,
the narrator supposes, is a place she “Lights with herself” (1.500). He admires “the
grace that, bright and light as the crest/Of a peacock, sits on her shin-ing head”
(1.552–53). Her beauty is the “one bright thing” that may save him (1. 556). He
imagines the “glory” and the “splendour” of Maud at the political dinner (1.823,
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836). In the section that begins “Come into the garden, Maud,” the speaker mentions
the “glimmer” of Maud’s pearls, and he exhorts Maud: “Shine out, little head, sunning
over with curls,/To the flowers, and be their sun” (1.904, 906–907). In the seminal
lyric, “O that ‘twere possible,” he speaks of her “shining head” (2.185), recalls the
time she “Came glimmering through the laurels” (2.217), and imagines her spirit as
dwelling in the “realms of light and song” (2.222). In Part III, he says that Maud’s
eyes had been his “one thing bright” (17).
The imagery of fire and light complements the characterization of Maud as both
delightful and disturbing. When the narrator first encounters Maud after having
heard her battle song, “the sunset burned/On the blossomed gable ends” (1. 197–
98).The conjunction of fire and blossom in these lines anticipates one of the poem’s
most striking emblems of the dual aspect of violence, the “blood-red blossom of war
with a heart of fire” in Part III (53). The protagonists emotional encounter with
Maud (the morning following this meeting is appropriately “stormy” [1.190]) has
an incandescent effect on him:
And thus a delicate spark
Of glowing and growing light
Through the livelong hours of the dark
Kept itself warm in the heart of my dreams,
Ready to burst in a coloured flame;…(1.204–208)
The spark Maud ignites in the narrator eventually becomes “a spark of will/Not to
be trampled out” (2.104–105), while the “coloured flame” again anticipates the
fiery blossom of war. Maud, as befits her capacity to unite the contraries of life for
the narrator, has a smile that is “sunny” but also “cold” (1.213). Her hand is a “treasured
splendour,” but it also comes “sliding” out of her glove, like a gleaming dagger
(1.273–74). When the narrator sees Maud riding with her brother and her suitor,
who is both a military captain and a captain of industry, “Something flashed in the
sun…Like a sudden spark” (1.323, 326), an incident that foreshadows the flaring of
hostilities between the narrator and the brother.
Maud is frequently compared to things that reflect light, one of which is the moon.
She is “the moon-faced darling of all” (1.72). Her hand is “as white/As ocean-foam in
the moon” (1.505–506).The speaker compares her to “a beam of the seventh Heaven”
(1.509).Twice in the lyric, “Come into the garden, Maud,” the narrator refers to “the
setting moon” (1.867, 872). Before the hero comes under Maud’s influence, he rails
against the crimes that occur, appropriately, on “moonless nights” (1.42).
Another reflector of light to which Maud is compared is a jewel. Maud is “luminous, gemlike” (1.95). Her feet are “like sunny gems” (1.175).The hero calls her “my
jewel” (352), and compares her to a “precious stone” (1.498). At the political dinner
“Maud will wear her jewels” (1.813). Her feet leave a “jewel-print” (1.890) in the
Maud
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meadow. The first occurrences of the “jewel” motif evoke the disturbing aspect of
Maud.The speaker refers twice to Maud’s “cold and clear-cut face” (1.79, 88), which
he finds to be “Faultily faultless, icily regular” (1.82). The hard brilliance of jewels
makes them also an appropriate correlative for Maud’s brother, who is alternately
cold and fiery.The speaker calls him “That jewelled mass of millinery” (1. 231), and
he notes the “barbarous opulence jewel-thick” that “Sunned itself on his breast and
his hands” (1.455–56). The brother has a “glassy smile” (1.238). Immediately after
the duel, the narrator “noticed one of his many rings” (2.116).
The “jewel” image figures in the connection between Maud and the natural
world.The speaker’s love for Maud induces him to see his “jewel” in the landscape:
“A million emeralds break from the ruby-budded lime/In the little grove where I
sit… The silent sapphire-spangled marriage ring of the land” (1.102–103, 107).
Because in Maud the narrator has “found a pearl” (1.640), he also finds that “A livelier emerald twinkles in the grass,/A purer sapphire melts into the sea” (1.649–50).
After the duel the speaker focuses on “a lovely shell,/Small and pure as a pearl” (2.
49–50), which has a “diamond door” (2.64).
Complementing the imagery of precious stones are repeated references to stones
in general, and to the dust that results when stones are crushed. Early in Part I, the
narrator establishes both the stoniness of Mammonite society and the connection
between dust and death. The failure of his father’s business interests occasions a
suicidal plunge in which the father is accompanied by a falling rock (1.8).The hero
says that he may eventually conform to his environment—“May make my heart as a
millstone, set my face as a flint,/Cheat and be cheated and die: who knows? we are
ashes and dust” (1.31–32).The speaker sees Maud’s brother as a representative of the
stony world of commerce: “But then what a flint is he!” (1.740). He says that on one
occasion the brother “Gorgonised me from head to foot/With a stony British stare”
(1.464–65).The narrator marks the process of his own petrifaction, first by referring
to his “heart half-turned to stone” (1.267), and then by asking, “O heart of stone, are
you flesh…?” (1.268). Finally, he twice exhorts his “heart of stone” (2.132, 136). His
utter spiritual death is accompanied by the implied crushing of his stony heart into
dust. As his father before him had been “crushed” (1.7) in his suicide, the narrator’s
heart becomes “a handful of dust” (2.241). Prior to this, he enhances the deathly
connotation of dust by referring to the “dust of death” (1. 654) and by calling on
God to “Strike dead the whole weak race of venomous worms,/That sting each
other here in the dust;/We are not worthy to live” (2. 46–48). In Part I, while he
maintains his relationship with Maud, he says:
My dust would hear her and beat,
Had I lain for a century dead;
Would start and tremble under her feet,
And blossom in purple and red. (1.920–23)
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This passage, from the last stanza (XI) of “Come into the garden, Maud,” anticipates
the madhouse scene in Part II (section V), where the narrators mental and spiritual
“death” is indicated by his hearts becoming a handful of dust (2.241) and by the
repeated, infernal beating of the horses’ hoofs (2.246ff.). The speaker’s prophecy in
1.920ff. is in a sense fulfilled when his dead and dusty heart responds to the vision of
Maud which heralds “The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire” (3.53).
Tennyson’s reading of the last stanza from “Come into the garden, Maud” on the
Edison recording demonstrates the connection between the speaker’s love for Maud
and his violent temperament. Tennyson recites the first four lines (1.916–19)
breathlessly, without hesitation or pause, thus indicating the barely controlled passion
that the speaker directs towards Maud. Tennyson pauses markedly after line 916, as
though his protagonist were attempting to rein in his charging emotions. In line
922, he speaks the words “start and tremble” portentously and, one might say,
menacingly, suggesting the close relationship between love and violence in the
narrator’s mind.Tennyson’s voice trails off at the conclusion of the recitation, so that
the words “purple and red” in line 923 are barely discernible. By reading the line
this way, Tennyson may have attempted to suggest his speaker’s tendency to reject
the gory aspect of life, a tendency that the dual nature of Maud helps him to overcome.
Tennyson’s rhythmic, heavily accentuated style of recitation is especially appropriate
with respect to this stanza, given its repeated reference to “beating” (1.918, 920).
In the madhouse scene the speaker uses the word “beat” four times in three lines
(2.246–48). “Beating” forms part of a chain of motifs that includes repeated references
to hearts and pulses, to blood and blood-red flowers, and to the redness of the sunset
and of the rose-like Maud. One of the most unlikely and yet one of the most
significant images associated with beating is that of starlight. The “star” motif
contributes to the fire/light imagery and helps to delineate the hero’s conversion
from cynicism and madness to the acceptance of life. The narrator at first sees the
stars as representing the cold indifference of the universe. The insignificance of
earthly life amidst the host of stars contributes to his nihilism: “Our planet is one, the
suns are many, the world is wide” (1.146). He addresses the stars as “Cold fires, yet
with power to burn and brand/His nothingness into man” (1.637–38), and
acknowledges to them that he has been “brought to understand/A sad astrology, the
bound-less plan/That makes you tyrants in your iron skies” (1.633–35).The speaker
also, however, associates Maud with the stars, beginning with his expression of
contempt for her “Passionless, pale, cold face, star-sweet on a gloom profound”
(1.91).After comparing Maud’s movement to that of a light, he exclaims, “But sorrow
seize me if ever that light be my leading star!” (1.113). His eventual love for Maud’s
“starry head” (1.620) changes his sad astrology to glad: “And you fair stars that
crown a happy day/Go in and out as if at merry play” (1.628–29). He exhorts the
stars to “Beat to the noiseless music of the night!” (1.675). “Beat, happy stars,…” he
says, “Beat with my heart more blest than heart can tell” (1.679–80). The narrators
Maud
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“sad astrology” regains the ascendancy after the duel, as indicated by the anguish he
feels when “the broad light glares and beats” (2.229), and by the torturous “beating”
of the horses’ feet (which he perceives as being above him, like the stars). In the end
he perceives the war as an opportunity to fight against his former nihilism.The “iron
tyranny” that “now should bend or cease” (3.20) is an extension of the “tyrants” in
the “iron skies” (1.635) that ruled his despairing view of life.
The speaker’s decision to take up arms is heralded by appropriate astronomical
signs. His mental state changes when “the Charioteer/And starry Gemini hang like
glorious crowns/Over Orion’s grave low down in the west” (3.6–8). The mention
of Orion, the great hunter, implies a reversal of the speaker’s prior anguish over the
natural worlds being “a world of plunder and prey” (1.125). James R.Bennett
comments on the reference to Gemini: “Gemini,…at least in the Greco-Roman
tradition, is identified with a central legend, that of the twins Castor and Pollux,
great, courageous warriors…. Castor was killed in a quarrel and Pollux begged to be
reunited with him, perhaps as the narrator yearns to be with Maud, the ‘nothingness’
of modern astronomy transformed by the grace of Maud” (“Maud, Part III: Maud’s
Battle-Song” 41). As Maud had once revived the speaker with her martial song, in
Part III the speaker is reinvigorated by his vision of Maud pointing to Mars, “As he
glowed like a ruddy shield on the Lion’s breast” (3.14). Tennyson’s use of Mars is
quite fitting here.As Edith Hamilton observes, “The Romans liked Mars better than
the Greeks liked Ares. He never was to them the mean whining deity of the Iliad,
but magnificent in shining armor, redoubtable, invincible” (Mythology 34). Hamilton’s
description of the warriors in the Aeneid is applicable to the speaker in Part III of
Maud: “far from rejoicing to escape from [Mars], [they] rejoice when they see that
they are to fall ‘on Mars’ field of renown.’ They ‘rush on glorious death’ and find it
‘sweet to die in battle’” (Mythology 34).
Though the Romans were passionate about the prospect of glorious death, they
were also one of the earliest exponents of strict military discipline. Georges Dumézil,
in Horace et les Curiaces (23), describes the Romans’ efforts to curb and regiment the
kind of bellicose enthusiasm that the speaker of Maud demonstrates in Part III.
Whereas Roman soldiers, like those of more modern times, were expected to
subordinate their individual motivations to the exigencies of the national interest,
the ancient Greeks, the Anglo-Saxons, the Celts, and the Vikings all emphasized the
glories of individual honor. James R.Bennett sees the narrator as conforming to the
traditional heroic emphasis on personal glory: “For the narrator is not averse to
shining in glory like Ulysses in Tennyson’s poem by that title; indeed, it is one of his
basic needs to achieve glorious heroism, just as it was to triumph over Maud’s insolent
brother and wealthy suitor” (“Maud, Part III: Maud’s Battle-Song” 47).The speakers
reference to “the Charioteer” (3.6) hints at the possible disaster his anachronistic
attitude may cause. It is easy to imagine the fervid speaker roiling the disciplined
ranks of the British army as destructively as Phaëthon drives his father’s car.Though
he feels himself, in his zeal for the British cause, to be one with his kind, the unbridled
frenzy of the speaker may actually render him as ill-suited for “loud war by land and
sea” (1.47) as he was for the “Civil war” (1.27) of domestic life. “The narrator, in
becoming a warrior,” writes Roger S.Platizky, “does seem to have certain needs
gratified that were not fulfilled in his being either a son or a lover…. But Tennyson
leaves the reader to question whether the protagonist of Maud will ever be able to
escape his inherited destiny” (65).
Another element of Part III that leads us to wonder about the ultimate “doom”
(3.59) of the protagonist is his twofold and equivocal vision of Maud. The “ghastly
Wraith” (2.32) that torments the narrator after the duel becomes in Part III, for the
first and only time, a blessed dream as she points to Mars, the war god of the disciplined,
patriotic Romans (3.10–13), and speaks of “a hope for the world in the coming
wars” (3.11). In Part III Maud’s ghastly aspect is represented by the “dreary phantom”
that arises and flies “Far into the North, and battle, and seas of death” (3.36–37). As
the “passionate cry” of Maud had been assimilated by the landscape in 2.33–34, here
her disturbing, violent associations blend with the war itself. In the end the narrator’s
tendency to mingle the erotic with the martial is realized in action through his
passionate espousal of the war effort. Tennyson leaves it to his readers to decide if
this volatile mixture results finally in tragedy or in triumph. In the subject of the
next chapter, the Idylls of the King, the mingling of erotic and mar-tial passion results
unequivocally in tragedy, as Arthur’s attempt to harness the ardor of aggressive men
ultimately fails.
Chapter Six
Idylls of the King
R
OBERT PATTISON, IN DISCUSSING THE TRADITIONAL ASPECT
OF THE Idylls of the King, observes that the Idylls “have continuity with
the rest of Tennyson’s work: he drew on the tradition of his own poetry for
the Idylls as freely as he drew upon the classics” (136). In the Idylls of the King the
classical themes of Tennyson’s battle poems attain their culmination in a work of
epic scope and greatness. Fundamental to the Idylls is the primary theme of the
ancient epics: the difficulty of controlling heroic passion. “The King is the complete
man,” Tennyson commented to William Allingham, “the Knights are the passions”
(Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 3.259). As Achilles, Odysseus, and Aeneas all fail in the
end to restrain the vehemence of their explosive tempers,Tennyson’s Arthur fails in
the concluding books of the Idylls to control the volatile passions of his Knights.
Hallam Tennyson writes that “if Epic unity is looked for in the Idylls, we find it not
in the wrath of an Achilles, nor in the wanderings of an Ulysses, but in the unending
war of humanity in all ages,—the world-wide war of Sense and Soul…” (Memoir
2:130).The theme of “Sense at war with Soul” (“To the Queen” 37) is closer to “the
wrath of an Achilles” than Hallam Tennyson’s comment would seem to indicate.
Achilles’s wrath, both his wrath at Agamemnon that causes him to misuse his power
by abstaining from battle, and his wrath at Hector that rages in uncontrolled violence,
results from the inability of his soul, or reason, to regulate his passion. Arthur, as the
“complete man,” is able, by virtue of his strength of soul, to harness his passions so
that they benefit the kingdom. His subjects, so long as they are indeed subject to his
ideal and example, are able to channel their fervor into chivalrous pursuits, but in
the end their sensual fires run riot and destroy Arthur’s realm.
Tennyson’s preference for referring to the books of his Arthurian epic as “idylls,”
a term often associated with Theocritus, fails to mitigate the thoroughly heroic
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quality of the poem. Tennyson’s piecemeal process of composition precluded the
narrative unity of an Iliad or an Aeneid, but the Idylls of the King attains the epic status
of an “Arthuriad” in most every other respect, and the title of the poem helps to
suggest its conformity to the epic tradition. Tennyson intended the second “l” in
“Idylls” to distinguish his heroic Arthurian material from his own Theocritan, pastoral
“English Idyls.” Paul Turner sees Theocritus as an inspiration for the Idylls of the King
by virtue of the ancient pastoral poet’s epic aspirations: “Of his four works in this
mini-epic genre (Idylls xiii, xxii, xxiv, xxv) three relate to Heracles, and as Andrew
Lang observed (1880), ‘it is not impossible that Theocritus wrote, or contemplated
writing, a Heraclean epic, in a series of idyls.’ This was Tennyson’s final model” (164–
65). Robert Pattison discusses the idylls of the Hellenistic writers as attempts to
reproduce the virtues of Homer while avoiding futile efforts to equal his handling
of the epic form. “From the epic, then,” Pattison writes, “the idyll borrowed the
fundamentals of its mythology, the epic meter, and epic claim to universality” (23–
24).This practice “indicated that the idyll, while it would be different from the epic,
would at least be epic in intent” (22).
J.M.Gray finds a connection with the heroic epic tradition even in the sequence
of Tennyson’s composition process: “There is some evidence to show that the
twelve books of Virgil’s masterpiece, the Aeneid, were composed in a similar order”
(Thro’ the Vision of the Night 4). Robert Pattison discusses Tennyson’s “great pains
to bring the total number of books up to the traditional epic number of twelve”
(140). “Tennyson produced in the Idylls of the King a legitimate epic,” Pattison
declares. “That he intended to produce a poem in the epic tradition, and that his
contemporaries so perceived the Idylls, is clear from Gladstone’s and Mallock’s
comments and from Tennyson’s composition of the poem” (140). Paul Turner,
with great assurance, also categorizes the Idylls as an epic: “Tennyson, of course,
wished to write a classical…epic. The Idylls were to resemble the Iliad in relating
the fall of a great city and civilization, the Aeneid in presenting a hero with a
divine, historic mission threatened by the woman that he loves (Dido, Guinevere),
and Paradise Lost in explaining the loss of ideal happiness through sin and
disobedience” (163).
When Tennyson, through the character of the poet Everard Hall in “The Epic,”
deprecates “‘His epic, his King Arthur’” (28) as ‘“faint Homeric echoes, nothingworth’” (39), his false modesty is obvious.Tennyson borrowed the phrase “nothingworth” from his disingenuous epigraph, taken from Martial, to Poems by Two Brothers:
“We know these efforts of ours are nothing worth” (see Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson
1. xxiv). The Homeric echoes of the Idylls of the King are not so faint that they
have eluded the ears of Tennyson’s critics, several of whom have recognized the
Homeric background of the Arthurian epic.The Idylls are “the omega to Homer’s
s alpha” (302), comments William E.Buckler. “[T]he most imaginative turning
that Tennyson gave his central literary inheritance,” he continues,”…is the return
Idylls of the King
139
at the very deepest level of this post-Theocritan, post-Virgilian literary development
to primary coherence with Homer” (312). “Arthur and Ulysses,” Buckler observes,
“share the ‘Ten thousand perils’ that brought them ‘to the West,’ and Arthur along
with Ulysses—that is, conscientious man in all ages—is being reinvested with a
portion of that Homericism of which Virgil, Dante, and the Middle Ages had
divested him” (316). William R.Brashear comments, “Arthur’s dream-kingdom
can be compared to the Apollonian illusion that Nietzsche sees as triumphant in
the heroic ideals of Homer” (48–49). “The Idylls were composed under the shadow
of Homer,” writes Richard Jenkyns. “Like Virgil, [Tennyson] leaves the reader to
pick up the Homeric parallels for himself” (211). The reader can consult Wilfred
P.Mustard, in “Tennyson and Homer,” and J.M.Gray, in his copious notes to the
Penguin Classics edition of the Idylls of the King, on Tennyson’s myriad borrowings
from Homer.
The Idylls of the King echoes Homer and other ancient bards in its conformity to
many of the conventions of epic poetry. Examples of epic conventions in the Idylls
include the numerous extended formal speeches by the main characters, with set
lines often introducing and closing speeches, the words of one speaker being quoted
by another, the repetition of words and lines, the cataloguing of warriors and armies
(see “The Coming of Arthur” 110ff.), the use of set epithets, the use of flashback
narrative technique (“Gareth and Lynette,” as James R.Kincaid remarks [166], is the
only idyll with a strictly chronological structure), and the frequent employment of
the epic simile (“Certainly Tennyson makes a liberal use of the Homeric simile,”
writes W.P.Ker [26]).
Several commentators have recognized that the Idylls of the King is informed
not only by the Greek heroic tradition, but also by the Roman, the Germanic, and
the Celtic. F.E.L.Priestley sees the Idylls as reflecting the heroic side of Virgil:
“Against the Lucretian spirit Tennyson upholds the Vergilian. The two have been
well characterized by the late Professor C.N.Cochrane: ‘The one holds up an
ideal of repose and refined sensual enjoyment; the other, one of restless effort and
activity…” (Priestley, “Tennyson’s Idylls” 255). J.Philip Eggers claims that the plot
of the Idylls resembles a passage from the Aeneid, spoken by Evander, about the rise
and fall of the Golden Age (16–17), while J.M.Gray finds Arthur’s exemplary
character analogous to that of Aeneas: “Just as Aeneas is pius, Arthur is ‘the blameless
King’” (Gray, Thro the Vision of the Night 61). John Rosenberg compares Bedivere
at the end to “an Anglo-Saxon warrior who outlives his lord and wanders homeless
and liegeless in an alien world” (100). Paul Turner ascertains that the three-line
stanza for many of the Idylls’s songs, as well as Merlin’s “triplets,” are derived from
the ancient Welsh bards (166).
The Idylls of the King moves inexorably to a conspicuously tragic denouement,
and, as we have seen in chapter four with respect to “The Charge of the Light
Brigade,” the tragic and the Homeric traditions are closely related. David Staines, J.
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Philip Eggers,William Brashear, Henry Kozicki,William E.Buckler, and Paul Turner
all describe the Idylls as a tragedy, and Turner goes to some pains to apply Aristotle’s
paradigm for tragedy to Tennyson’s poem. Buckler writes, “From a poet like Tennyson,
stern of mind and learned in the best epic and dramatic traditions, we know that
matters will work themselves through many literary-experiential variations to their
severest tragic conclusion and that only so much of a remnant hope will be saved as
classical tragedy allows” (346). Implicated in Buckler’s linking of the epic traditions
with those of classical tragedy is Walter Kaufmann’s thesis, “the birth of tragedy from
the spirit of Homer” (141). J.William Hunt’s comment on the Aeneid is equally
applicable to the Idylls of the King: “It is clear that tragic and heroic themes are both
inextricably bound together in the fabric of the poem” (13).
The tragedy of Tennyson’s Camelot is the inability of its denizens to maintain
their fires of passion at the equable midrange the ancient Greeks called the Mean. In
the Iliad, Achilles demonstrates the two extremes to which the heroic temperament
is prone. At first, sulking in his tent over his treatment by Agamemnon, Achilles
wastes his fiery force by abstaining from the battle. In the end, of course, Achilles
goes to the opposite extreme, allowing his tempestuous wrath to rage savagely and
horribly against the noble Hector.Arthur’s heroic subjects, like the speaker of Maud,
are susceptible to these same extremes of behavior.
The heroic disposition is liable to tragic excesses of love as well as of hatred, and
in the great heroic epics these two channels of frenzy converge. Odysseus’s climactic
rampage is motivated partly by marital jealousy. Dido, as Virgil describes her in
Aeneid 4.697, is “set aflame by a sudden madness.” Michael C.J.Putnam comments
on this passage, “As in the case of the earlier allusions to [Dido’s] furiae/furor, we are
reminded of how closelyVirgil’s words anticipate Aeneas, furiis accensus. Each is driven
by inner furies to maddened action” (186). Citing Horace’s Epistle 1.2, Putnam
describes the Iliad as “the story of the interaction of lust and anger” (181). As Paris’s
overwhelming desire for Helen initiates the Trojan War in the background to Homer’s
poem, it is Lancelot’s uncontrollable passion for Guinevere that sparks the final
battle in the west that destroys Camelot. Through his depiction in the Idylls of the
calamitous mingling of sexual lust with battle lust,Tennyson elaborates his strictures
on the courtly love tradition, which he introduced in “The Ballad of Oriana.” The
lapses of Arthur’s people into disastrous extremes of amatory as well as aggressive
fervor reflect the tendency in the heroic tradition to characterize love affairs not as
an inspiration but as a temptation.
The titanic fervor of the heroic temperament, whether it is used appropriately
(by Arthur, and, temporarily at least, by most of his knights), unprofitably restrained,
or unleashed in disastrous paroxysms martial or erotic, is represented in the Idylls of
the King by three symbols from the heroic tradition, symbols which are prominent
in almost all of Tennyson’s battle poetry: beasts, rushing water, and fire. We have
already encountered animal symbolism in “The Vale of Bones,” “The Druid’s
Idylls of the King
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Prophecies,” “The Expedition of Nadir Shah,” “God’s Denunciations against
Pharoah-Hophra,” “Boädicea,” “The Revenge,” “Britons, GuardYour Own,” “The
Third of February, 1852,” “Hands All Round!” “The Defence of Lucknow,” and
Maud. In the Idylls, the “beast” image is most salient in “The Coming of Arthur”
(CA), where Arthur’s founding of a civilized realm involves the slaying of “wolf and
boar and bear” (all of which animals signify battle frenzy in Homer,Virgil, and the
Scandinavian sagas), and also the subduing of “wolf-like men, / Worse than the
wolves” (CA 23, 32–33). Sir Bedivere says that Arthur’s savage predecessors “‘Have
foughten like wild beasts’” (CA 225). In keeping with the tradition of the shapeshifting berserks, these ferocious warriors are described as wild beasts themselves:
“‘the lords/Of that fierce day were as the lords of this, / Wild beasts’” (CA 214–16).
Another striking animal image in “The Coming of Arthur” is Gawain’s coltish
cantering: “And Gawain went, and breaking into song / Sprang out, and followed
by his flying hair/Ran like a colt, and leapt at all he saw” (CA 319–21).These lines,
as Wilfed Mustard notes (“Tennyson and Homer” 151), were no doubt modeled on
Homer’s description of Paris in Book 6 of the Iliad (503-l4), a passage which, as we
have seen in chapter three,Tennyson translated.Tennyson was preceded by Virgil in
adapting the Homeric description: in Book 11 of the Aeneid Virgil depicts Turnus in
a remarkably similar manner. In “Balin and Balan” (BB), Balin is killed when his
horse, “Rolling back upon Balin, crushed the man/ Inward” (BB 553–54), an incident
that prompts J.M.Gray to comment,”… Tennyson has shown the knight ironically
destroyed, as it were, bestially and from within, a fitting end for one who from the
first was unable to govern his urges” (“Tennyson’s Doppelgänger” 9).The image of
the beast eventually comes full circle in the Idylls of the King: when savage battle
frenzy once again prevails over Arthur’s civilizing influence in “The Passing of Arthur”
(PA), the King laments that “all my realm/Reels back into the beast, and is no
more” (PA 25–26).
The beast is associated with the unreserved yielding of the self to primal force,
but the force itself, through its entire range of manifestations, is symbolized most
often in the Idylls by the familiar Homeric images of fire and of turbulent water.
Arthur, who taps the power of the berserk in order to subdue the rampant, destructive exercise of the same power by the “heathen,” is himself closely aligned with
these two traditional symbols.The divine nature of the warrior’s transcendent power
is reflected in one of the more striking passages of “The Coming of Arthur.” After
the Battle of Mt. Badon, Lancelot exclaims to Arthur, “‘Sir and my liege…the fire of
God/Descends upon thee in the battle-field:/I know thee for my King!’” (CA 127–
29). Lancelot alludes to this same incident again, in “Lancelot and Elaine” (LE): “‘Yet
in this heathen war the fire of God/Fills him: I never saw his like: there lives/No
greater leader’” (LE 314–16). Once his realm is established, Arthur indulges himself
in an exercise of this sublime power again when he effortlessly strikes down Balin
and Balan, an incident that occurs in the presence of flowing water: “So coming to
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the fountain-side beheld/Balin and Balan sitting statuelike” (BB 21–22). Clyde de
L.Ryals recognizes that “Like Carlyle’s heroes Arthur is king by right of power, not
by right of birth. It was to make this very point that Tennyson arranges, in the first
idyll, to becloud the legitimacy of Arthur’s claim to the throne” (From the Great Deep
104). Arthur, as the supreme wielder of sublime power, is presented as originating
from, and returning to, the power source: ‘“From the great deep to the great deep he
goes’” (CA 410, PA 445). We have seen a similar trope in “The Revenge,” where
Richard Grenville sinks at last into the main. In her account of Arthur’s origin,
Bellicent mixes the imagery of fire with that of a crashing wave:
“Wave after wave, each mightier than the last,
Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep
And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged
Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame:
And down the wave and in the flame was borne
A naked babe, and rode to Merlin’s feet,
Who stoopt and caught the babe, and cried ‘The King!’” (CA 378–84)
The combination of the two Homeric symbols indicates Arthur’s superior degree of
passion and power. Tennyson’s battle poems, as we have seen throughout this study,
are suffused with fire imagery. The image of the wave, which recurs in the battle
context of “Lancelot and Elaine” (480), also appears in “Babylon,” “The Ballad of
Oriana,” “Sir Galahad,” the “Wellington Ode,” “The Revenge,” and “The Defence
of Lucknow,” and it is suggested in “The Tourney.” Tennyson’s use of waves and tides,
and of rolling rivers in “God’s Denunciations against Pharaoh-Hophra” and
“Boädicea,” harks back to the River Xanthos episode in Book 21 of the Iliad.
The “voices” in the fiery wave that bears the infant Arthur are highly significant, for
they represent the control integral to the efficacy of Arthur’s fighting force.The spoken
word, as an exemplar of the power of reason, is the means by which Arthur maintains
the “sublime repression of himself” (“Dedication” 18) needed for victory over the
bestial, irrational forces he subdues.This relationship between the word and the passions
finds a precedent in heroic epic. Richard Jenkyns comments on the Aeneid: “Turnus at
the end becomes the earlier Aeneas, helpless before Juno’s savagery. But the hero is
saved by the intervention of Neptune whose statesmanship is metaphorized as soothing
words” (214). In the final episode of the Aeneid,Turnus’s words allay the rage of Aeneas
until the sight of Pallas’s belt reignites the flaming furor of the epic’s hero.
John D.Rosenberg finds the Christian element central to the Idylls, but Clyde de
L.Ryals subordinates the Christian to the heroic: “With Carlyle [Tennyson] evidently
agreed that Christianity is ‘the highest instance of Hero-worship’…. [I]n almost
every reference to Him, we see only the poet’s belief in Jesus as the great, perhaps
perfect, man” (From the Great Deep 103–104). The most prominent connec-tion to
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Christianity in the Idylls is the primacy the poem gives to the Logos. “The power of
the word is central in the Idylls,” A.Dwight Culler writes (236). For Arthur, in the
beginning is the word of control over fighting frenzy.The King’s first spoken words
in the poem are words of restraint on the battlefield:
Then, before a voice
As dreadful as the shout of one who sees
To one who sins, and deems himself alone
And all the world asleep, they swerved and brake
Flying, and Arthur called to stay the brands
That hacked among the fliers, “Ho! they yield!” (CA 115–20)
Arthur’s dreadful voice heralds the sublime power of the word to moderate “the fire
of God.” As was suggested by the framing device in “Boädicea,” the wielding of
transcendent power necessitates transcendent control.Tennyson’s account of the battle
of Mt.Badon concludes with an homage to the supremacy of the controlling force:
“‘Man’s word is God in man’” (CA 132). Man’s word is also a pledge of truthfulness,
and we have seen the Achillean contempt for lying in “The Third of February,
1852,” Maud, and “Britons, GuardYour Own.” The sacredness of the word is implicated
in the vows that Arthur’s knights take at his coronation:
“Then the King in low deep tones,
And simple words of great authority,
Bound them by so straight vows to his own self,
That when they rose, knighted from kneeling, some
Were pale as at the passing of a ghost,
Some flushed, and others dazed, as one who wakes
Half-blinded at the coming of a light.” (CA 259–65)
The vows produce in the knights “‘A momentary likeness of the King’” (CA 270):
temporarily, they order their lives to Arthur’s ideal of passionate power harnessed by
the rational faculty for “‘use and name and fame’” (“Merlin andVivien” 302). Henry
Kozicki emphasizes the “military orientation” (Tennyson and Clio 119) of the vows:
“Arthur as universal soul asks for absolute obedience not in order to cloister the
virtues but to make them active in military and political affairs” (Tennyson and Clio
120). “The vows that bind the knights to Arthur,” Kozicki writes, “…too often are
seen as a version of the Ten Commandments instead of as the working rules for great
slaughters and, therefore, historical supremacy” (Tennyson and Clio 119). At the
coronation the Lady of the Lake also signifies the advent of control by the word of
reason over the turbulent waters of passion:
“But there was heard among the holy hymns
A voice as of the waters, for she dwells
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Down in a deep; calm, whatsoever storms
May shake the world, and when the surface rolls,
Hath power to walk the waters like our Lord.” (CA 289–93)
Kozicki comments that Arthur’s vows are “…symbolized by the Lady of the Lake
walking on and ‘controlling’ the water…” (Tennyson and Clio 139).
Arthur’s control of the rolling waters of passion by means of the word extends to
the sexual sphere.At his wedding with Guinevere, again “there past along the hymns/
A voice as of the waters” (CA 463–64), and he later avows to her, “‘For I was ever
virgin save for thee’” (“Guinevere” 554). Arthur’s wedding vow, “‘Let chance what
will, I love thee to the death!’” (CA 467), echoes his battlefield vow to Lancelot:
‘“Let chance what will, I trust thee to the death’” (CA 133). Similarly, Arthur’s first
encounter with Guinevere has overtones of violence: “But Arthur, looking downward
as he past,/Felt the light of her eyes into his life/Smite on the sudden” (CA 55–57).
This passage foreshadows the final battle, where “Modred smote his liege/Hard on
that helm which many a heathen sword/Had beaten thin” (PA 165–67). Smiting also
occurs in association with mystical vision. At Arthur’s coronation, ‘“Down from the
casement over Arthur, smote/Flame-colour, vert and azure, in three rays’” (CA 273–
74). In “The Holy Grail,” “‘there smote along the hall/A beam of light seven times
more clear than day’” (186–87), and Galahad sees “‘the fiery face as of a child/That
smote itself into the bread’” (466–67).The motif of smiting makes a connection between
the passions of love, battle, and mysticism, the three roads of excess in the Idylls.
The power of the word to harness the potency of passion relates the Idylls to one
of the most prominent traditional themes of Tennyson’s battle poetry, the equality of
the bard with the warrior. Accordingly, the “voice” motif recurs in “The Passing of
Arthur,” where we find that the bold warrior, Sir Bedivere, has become a sort of
bard who tells Arthur’s story: “That story which the bold Sir Bedivere,/First made
and latest left of all the knights,/Told, when the man was no more than a voice” (PA
1–3). In making Bedivere “no more than a voice,” Tennyson hints at the ultimate
value of the knight’s second career as a wielder of words. Tennyson’s selection of a
great and noble warrior as the teller of “The Passing of Arthur” links the idyll with
the 1852 incendiary poems, with the epilogue to “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade,”
with “Sir Galahad,” and with any number of other pieces that evince Tennyson’s
desire to reconcile his own calling with his admiration for the courageous deeds of
the soldier. “The poem,” writes John R.Reed of “The Passing of Arthur,” “is
[Tennyson’s] gesture, his deed, and it signifies his faith in the positive though dangerous
value of language” (154).
As Reed recognizes, language, like the fires of passion it is capable of restrain-ing,
is dangerous as well as valuable.As Tennyson illustrates in “Boädicea,” the incendiary
power of words renders speech as susceptible to abusive excess as passion itself.
Arthur’s speech is controlled; when he swears in his knights at his coronation, he
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145
speaks ‘“in low deep tones,/And simple words of great authority’” (CA 259–60).
Arthur’s low, deep tones reflect his command of the power of the great deep, and his
mellow modulation stands in contrast to the shrilling trumpet tones of battle wrath.
The battle of Mt. Badon is accompanied by “trumpet-blast,/And shouts, and clarions
shrilling unto blood” (CA 101–102). In “The Passing of Arthur,” the ghost of the
wild Gawain is likewise described as “shrilling” (PA 33). Tennyson’s usual word for
unrestrained speech is “babble,” as when the people “Began to scoff and jeer and
babble” of Geraint in “The Marriage of Geraint” (58–59). “Babble,” as the stereotypical
word for the sound of a brook, links destructively wayward speech with the dangerous
fighting frenzy symbolized by flowing water. In “Guinevere” (G), the queens little
maid at Almesbury prates of destructive rumors with a “babbling heedlessness” (G
149). The maid, “like many another babbler, hurt/Whom she would soothe, and
harmed where she would heal” (G 352–53). Guinevere asks herself, in response to
the onslaught of words, “‘Will the child kill me with her innocent talk?. …Will the
child kill me with her foolish prate?”’ (G 212, 223). The injurious potential of
language necessitates discipline; the word must be used judiciously if it is to control
rather than inflame the passions.
Arthur’s demand for the balanced use of the rational and the sensual faculties is
reflected in Tennyson’s many references to the “Order” of the Round Table (CA 269
and 473, for example) and to the harmonious music and song that prevail at Camelot,
the city “‘built/To music’” (GL 272–73). (Troy, too, was built to music, to the music
of Apollo, the god of, among other things, the light of reason—Tennyson himself
wrote a poem, “Ilion, Ilion” [Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 1.281] about this tradition.)
In the Idylls the test for the harmonious ordering of Sense and Soul is vision.When
the sensual passions are harnessed by the soul for “use and name and fame,” the result
is not merely victory but clairvoyance as well:
When Arthur reached a field-of-battle bright
With pitched pavilions of his foe, the world
Was all so clear about him, that he saw
The smallest rock far on the faintest hill,
And even in high day the morning star. (CA 95–99)
Arthur’s vision at Mt. Badon, which accompanies his victorious use of “the fire of
God,” is tantamount to a theophany, as evidenced by “The Passing of Arthur,” where
the King says, “‘I found Him in the shining of the stars’” (9). Stanley J. Solomon
comments on Arthur’s “mystical insight into the divinity of the universe” (260), a
pantheistic trait that aligns him with the Homeric tradition. As Carlyle emphasizes
repeatedly in On Heroes, “The essence of all Pagan mythologies, we found to be
recognition of the divineness of Nature” (30).Thomas Greene writes of the Aeneid,
“Aeneas is forever open to a capacity in earthly things for assuming divin-ity” (43).
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The coincidence of Arthur’s clairvoyance with his exercise of “the fire of God” is
reminiscent of the “sharper sense” (2.11) possessed by the narrator of Maud after the
duel. Both episodes evoke Iliad 5.124ff., where the efficacious fury of Diomedes is
ascribed a divine origin and accompanied by clarity of perception. In describing the
battle of Mt. Badon Tennyson also may have remembered Paradise Lost 3.619ff, where
Satan, after landing on Earth, finds that
…the Air,
Nowhere so clear, sharp’n’d his visual ray
To objects distant far, whereby he soon
Saw within ken a glorious Angel stand,…(PL 3. 619–22)
The name of this angel, Uriel, in Hebrew means “the fire of God” (Hughes 274n.).
Milton’s passage, like Tennyson’s in “The Coming of Arthur,” links “the fire of God”
with clear and penetrating vision.
When the fire of God is allowed to flare wantonly, vision is obscured. In contrast
to the battle of Mt. Badon, the melee in “The Passing of Arthur” is characterized not
by the judicious use of the fire of God, but by “shouts of heathen and the traitor
knights,/Oaths, insult, filth, and monstrous blasphemies,/Sweat, writhings, anguish,
labouring of the lungs” (PA 113–15). The reversion to the beast is accompanied by
a “‘blind haze’” (PA 76), a “deathwhite mist” (PA 95). “For friend and foe were
shadows in the mist,/And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew” (PA 100–
102). The fallen knights “Looked up for heaven, and only saw the mist” (PA 112).
The mist is an addition to Malory.Tennyson’s own comment draws attention to the
contrasting degrees of visibility on the two battlefields: “This grim battle in the mist
contrasts with Arthur’s glorious battle in the Coming of Arthur, fought on a bright day
when ‘he saw the smallest rock far on the faintest hill’” (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson
3.552). In Book 17 of the Iliad, when the Achaians fall victim to the slaughterous
frenzy Hector, the scene is also shrouded in mist. Paul Turner notes the relevance of
the Homeric passage to “The Passing of Arthur.” Lines 95–117 of Tennyson’s poem,
Turner remarks, are “primarily modelled on a passage in the Iliad (xvii, 645–7)
which Longinus quoted as an instance of the sublime. There Ajax prays to Zeus to
disperse the mist, and ‘kill us in the light.’ His prayer, unlike those of Arthur’s knights,
is answered” (164). In the Aeneid as well, untrammeled furor is blinding. Michael
C.J.Putnam writes, “For Aeneas, caught up in the passionate swirl of Troy’s final
hours, a black cloud dulls the vision….This blindness we have seen Aeneas himself,
in Book 2, twice associate with fury…a rage against which Virgil counterpoises
Venus’ clear and clarifying vision” (193).The mist enshrouding Arthur’s final battle is
a variation on the Homeric water symbol. Mist, as water in its most diffuse form,
represents the dissolution of the warrior’s effective force in wanton, random mayhem.
In the form of mist, water is not flow-ing; it has no power.
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147
The seeds of the disastrous, final battle of the Idylls are sown in the first book of
the poem, where Arthur “in twelve great battles overcame/The heathen hordes, and
made a realm and reigned” (CA 517–18). At the beginning of the ten books
comprising “The Round Table,” it is, as Donald S. Hair notes, “a time when Arthur’s
chief work is done, a time of relative stability and contentment which gradually
gives way to decline and decay” (Domestic and Heroic 137). Henry Kozicki discusses
the cankers of this peaceful period in a manner that recalls Tennyson’s 1852 newspaper
poems and Maud: “Heroic passions, being immutable,…begin to eat inwardly….
[T]he ideal [of Camelot] is a controlling order for historical purpose that is lost
gradually through the slackening of will that results when external opposition is
eliminated” (Tennyson and Clio 118, 132).
For a space, however, Arthur’s ideal of contained and efficacious passion prevails.
At the conclusion of “The Coming of Arthur” (CA 481–501), the knights sing what
Hallam Tennyson referred to as a “Viking song” (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 3.280).
The song is an inflammatory war cry, but every stanza ends with the words, “‘Let the
King reign.’” The knights’ temporary submission to Arthur’s ideal results in the noble
deeds he ordained as the proper function of his Order.
“Gareth and Lynette” (GL) opens with a Homeric symbol of battle frenzy as
Gareth “Stared at the spate” (3). He identifies with this powerful force of nature as it
uproots a pine, but he recognizes the force as a “‘senseless cataract’” (GL 7), whereas he himself has both “‘strength and wit’” (GL 12). For Gareth, the power of reason,
of the word, is equal to the power of the natural forces. He immediately demonstrates
his facility with language by inventing a word, “‘ever-highering’” (GL 21).Though
he has “kindling eyes” (GL 41, 61, 631), he is “‘rather tame than wild’” (GL 38). His
controlled ferocity allows him, though a novice, to hold his own in a tilt with the
wild Gawain, while the “‘mute’” and “‘sullen’” (GL 31–32) Modred watches.
Appropriately, the evil Modred, who instigates the destruction of Arthur’s Order,
never speaks, never modulates his burning malevolence, before he finally, in
“Guinevere,” gives vent to his internal combustion by shouting (105), an Achillean
outlet for fury and a motif that also appears in “The Old Sword,” “Oh, ye wild
winds,” “Babylon,” “Boädicea,” “Written During the Convulsions in Spain,” “The
Defence of Lucknow,” Maud, and, of course, “Achilles Over the Trench.”
Gareth is heroic in his “princely-proud” (GL 158) bearing and in his desire for
“‘Fame’” (GL 113) and “glory” (GL 156, 468). Gareth’s request of Arthur to ‘“Let be
my name until I make my name!’” (GL 562) is the desire of a heroic warrior. “In
heroic societies,” J.B.Hainsworth notes, “there was a convention that a young man
could acquire a real and lasting name only when he had achieved an exploit” (229;
original emphasis). For Gareth, as for the Duke of Wellington and for the Light and
Heavy Brigades, action is substantive: “‘My deeds will speak,”’ he says. ‘“[F]or the
deeds sake have I done the deed’” (GL 563, 811). His identity, his ego, depends upon
noble action; the primacy he assigns to deeds is reflected in the inverted syn-tax of
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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
his claim to Arthur: “‘…joust can I’” (GL 533). “Successful deeds bring glory,”
writes Paul Edmund Thomas, “and upon that glory hangs reputation, not just the
meaning of a warriors life, but his very soul” (xl).
Gareth’s exploit is to use both his fighting skill and his chivalrous nature to aid
and to soften Lynette, a strident woman whose name makes a punning connection
to the linnet of the animal kingdom and thus to the imagery of uncontrolled passion.
She is presented as “shrilling” at Gareth (GL 732). “Shrilling” is the same word
Tennyson uses to describe the frenzied tones of battle trumpets (CA 102) and of the
mocking ghost of Gawain (PA 33).When Gareth is assigned the quest of aiding her,
Lynette evinces her “wrath” (GL 641). Gareth’s influence, through his disciplined
and controlled prowess in five hostile encounters, mollifies Lynette, who eventually
conforms to his avoidance of “‘foolish heat’” (1149). Gareth’s victories both result
from and symbolize the subjugation of wild passions. His first three encounters with
the brethren of Day and Night take place either over a river or in the river itself.The
river, the Homeric symbol of rampant battle wrath, represents the lawlessness and
the untrammeled passions, both sexual and militant, of the four brothers, who are
attempting to have their way with Lady Lyonors. The second brother, the Sun, is
carried away by the river, while the third, the Star of Evening, is hurled into it. The
defeat of the brothers, who are ruled, to their discredit, by the passion the river
symbolizes, is marked by their immersion in the river.The second brother emits an
inarticulate, animalistic grunt (GL 1012), while the fourth brother, Death, is
conspicuously silent: their wildness coincides with a failure of language.The chivalrous
Gareth, on the other hand, derives efficacious and controlled inspiration from the
speech of Lynette. He says that her words of abuse “‘send/That strength of anger
through mine arms, I know/That I shall overthrow him’” (GL 925–27). When she
encourages his efforts, “Gareth hearing ever stronglier smote” (GL 1113). “‘[T]hy
foul sayings fought for me,”’ Gareth says. ‘“And seeing now thy words are fair,
methinks/There rides no knight, not Lancelot, his great self,/Hath force to quell
me’” (GL 1151–54). Gareth demonstrates his chivalry by his courtesy towards Lynette
and also by his reaction to his encounter with Lancelot. His laughter upon being
overthrown is consistent with the joy of battle in the heroic tradition (and in the
tradition of Tennyson’s battle poems—see “The Old Sword,” “The Old Chieftain,”
“Oh! ye wild winds,” “The Tourney,” “Battle of Brunanburh,” and “The Charge of
the Heavy Brigade”), as is Lancelot’s description of his own charger: “‘Not to be
spurred, loving the battle as well/As he that rides him’” (GL 1269–70).
The kind of influence that Gareth exerts over Lynette is mutual in “The Marriage
of Geraint” (MG) and “Geraint and Enid” (GE). In these poems we see Geraint and
Enid balancing each other’s extremes, helping each other to attain the Mean between
excessive and overly suppressed passion. Tennyson’s description of Geraint’s
uxoriousness gives a sense of the knight’s inordinate passion:
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149
Forgetful of his promise to the King,
Forgetful of the falcon and the hunt,
Forgetful of the tilt and tournament,
Forgetful of his glory and his name,
Forgetful of his princedom and its cares. (MG 50–54)
The repetition (which Tennyson uses to the same end in “The Ballad of Oriana,” a
poem about another uxorious knight) reflects Geraint’s obsessiveness, while the
primary word that is repeated, “Forgetful,” suggests the mindlessness of his condition:
the regimental faculty of reason is in abeyance. Tennyson’s description of Geraint’s
“heroic” (MG 75) physique adapts a Theocritan simile to the Homeric symbol
scheme of the Idylls of the King.Tennyson, in depicting Geraint’s “arms on which the
standing muscle sloped/As slopes a wild brook o’er a little stone,/Running too
vehemently to break upon it” (MG 76–78), alters Theocritus’s comparison, in Idyll
22.48ff., of muscular arms to the stones in a brook (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson
3.326–27). Tennyson’s version of the simile helps to characterize Geraint as the
possessor of heroically vehement passion that needs proper balance.
In the flashback scenes of “The Marriage of Geraint,” Geraint demonstrates his
fidelity to the Arthurian ideal, using his own fiery temperament to subdue a wild
and ferocious opponent. Geraint shows his own “fire of God” when he “flashe[s]
into sudden spleen” (MG 273) in contempt of Edyrn, whose bestial sobriquet, “the
sparrow hawk,” befits his feral nature. Edyrn’s tempestuous pride and passion are
described using fire imagery. Before the encounter with Geraint, Edyrn’s “face/
Glowed like the heart of a great fire at Yule,/So burnt he was with passion” (MG
558–60). Edyrn later calls his “‘prideful sparkle in the blood’” a “‘furious flame’”
(GE 826–27). During the clash,Yniol’s battle cry fortifies Geraint (MG 571)—the
incendiary capacity of the word on this occasion fanning a needful fire—and Geraint
achieves an Arthur-like victory over a representative of the beast. As Arthur had
called out, “‘They are broken, they are broken!’” (LE 309) after his victory over the
bestial forces at Mt. Badon, Edyrn admits, “‘My pride is broken’” (MG 578) after
Geraint prevails.Tennyson makes a similar use of the “breaking” motif in “The Third
of February, 1852.”
Geraint’s solicitation of Edyrn’s name after the fight is a heroic convention.Warriors
were expected to reveal their identity only after a battle was over. In a note to
Ossian’s “Carthon,” James Macpherson explains:
To tell one’s name to an enemy was reckoned, in those days of heroism, a manifest
evasion of fighting him; for, if it was once known, that friendship subsisted, of old,
between the ancestors of the combatants, the battle immediately ceased; and the ancient
amity of their forefathers was renewed. A man who tells his name to his enemy, was of old
an ignominious term for a coward. (Ossian 447, n.36)
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Gareth’s mother, Bellicent, insists that he withhold his name in Camelot, an
appropriate policy considering the bestial imagery associated with Kay, Gareth’s
overseer in the kitchen and the‘“most ungentle knight in Arthur’s hall’” (GL 738).
Kay’s residual baseness stands in enmity to the lofty ideals of Arthur’s realm. As for
Edyrn, after the fight with Geraint he learns to harness his fiery spirit for noble
deeds and eventually dies a good death, fighting for Arthur in the last battle.
Enid’s father,Yniol, veers from the Mean like Edyrn, but in the opposite direction.
Yniol’s problem is not an excess of passion and pride but an excess of restraint.
“‘…I myself sometimes despise myself;’” he admits to Geraint, “‘For I have let
men be, and have their way;/Am much too gentle, have not used my power’”
(MG 465–67). Enid’s song about Fortunes wheel reflects her father’s dispassion.
According to William E.Buckler, the fault of the song lies in its “self-congratulatory
inducement to moral, aesthetic, spiritual inertia. It is recessive rather than active,
stoical rather than contestant” (85).
Enid’s test in “Geraint and Enid” is to balance her familial tendency towards
shrinking resignation by virtue of her passion for Geraint.The equivalence between
word and deed in heroic societies is realized in Enid: to speak is for her a daring
act. She repeatedly dares to defy Geraint’s orders by speaking to him, warning him
of imminent danger. In doing so she is at least partly motivated by a typically
heroic consideration, the concern for name and fame: “‘For, be he wroth even to
slaying me,/Far liefer by his dear hand had I die,/Than that my lord should
suffer loss or shame’” (GE 67–69). Her “low firm voice” (GE 194) recalls the
‘“low deep tones’” (CA 259) with which Arthur governs his knights, and by
daring to speak she saves Geraint from the dangers of his own unbalanced passion.
“The bandits that Geraint first encounters,” observes John R.Reed, “are
comparable to uncontrolled passions” (63).
In “Geraint and Enid” Geraint’s state of passionate jealousy and neglected fighting
spirit is accompanied by his abstention from speech:
…he fain had spoken to her,
And loosed in words of sudden fire the wrath
And smouldered wrong that burnt him all within;
But evermore it seemed an easier thing
At once without remorse to strike her dead,
Than to cry ‘Halt,’ and to her own bright face
Accuse her of the least immodesty: (GE 105–111)
Geraint’s unwillingness to cry “Halt” (the first spoken word of Arthur in the Idylls
is “Ho!”) is compounded by his censure of Enid’s words. “Geraint, in his ignorance,
silences the voice that can lead him best to a joyful music,” writes John R.Reed. “In
so doing, he makes language the test of Enid’s obedience, while he, himself, can
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hardly sustain utterance because ‘his passion masters him.’ As with Merlin or Balin,
when self-command wanes, utterance also fails as a worthy adjunct” (166).The two
renegade lords, Limours and Doorm, symbolize the opposite extremes between
which Geraint is unsuccessfully navigating. Limours (cf. “l’amour”) reflects Geraint’s
uxoriousness in “The Marriage of Geraint.” Geraint’s amatory excess sparks rumors
that his “manhood was all gone” (MG 59); Limours is “Femininely fair and dissolutely
pale” (GE 275). Limours’s eroticism is also excessive: he is “wild” (GE 277, 308, 311),
with “‘exceeding passion” (GE 335) for Enid.
The bestial Earl Doorm is the Scylla to Limours’s Charybdis. Doorm and his
retinue exemplify the abasement resulting from an excess of the martial passion. His
men identify so exclusively with fighting that they have become weapons: Doorm
“called for flesh and wine to feed his spears” (GE 600). An abundance of animal
imagery indicates the men’s brutality, as does their lack of speech: “And none spake
word” (GE 603). Tennyson subtly suggests that Doorm’s lack of balance results in a
lack of vision as well. Doorm’s first words, “‘What, is he dead?’” are the same words
spoken by the blinded Gloucester in King Lear 4.6.255. When Geraint regains his
knightly manhood by slaying the brutal earl, his severing of Doorm’s head accords
with Doorm’s relinquishment of the humanizing power of reason.
By the passion he inspires in her, Geraint enables Enid to surmount her passivity,
to complement her “low voice” (GE 639) with the “sharp and bitter cry” (GE 721)
that saves them both from Doorm. By her daring speech, Enid wins Geraint’s trust
and cures his jealous passion so that he can return to knightly deeds. Like Geraint
and Enid, Balin and Balan exemplify inverse character traits; the complementarity of
the two brothers, however, results not in salvation but in tragedy. The tragedy of
“Balin and Balan” is the tragedy of the Idylls as a whole: the impracticability in
civilian life of profitably harnessing the intensely aggressive fervor of the heroic
temperament.The illicit and unwarranted “‘violences’” (BB 186, 429) of Balin, “‘the
Savage’” (BB 51), exemplify the fault common to zealous warriors. Balin’s penchant
for aggressive flare-ups in the innocuous milieu of Camelot (BB 53ff, 214ff) recalls
an incident from Chapter 40 of Egil’s Saga, as recounted by H. R.Ellis Davidson:
Such fits of rage could be inconvenient in private life, and this is illustrated by a
story from the life of a famous poet, Egill Skallagrimsson. His father appears to have
been a berserk in his youth, and when he had married and settled down in Iceland,
he became over-excited one evening in a game of ball with his child. In a mad
frenzy he killed the little boy’s nurse, and came very near to destroying his son Egill
as well. (Gods and Myths 68)
Balin resembles the speaker of Maud, in that the vehement spirit of both men demands
a proper outlet:
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“Well had I foughten—well—
In those fierce wars, struck hard—and had I crowned
With my slain self the heaps of whom I slew—
So—better!” (BB 173–75)
The difficulty for Balin is that Arthur’s fierce wars are over. The problem in “Balin
and Balan,” according to Henry Kozicki, is that “The court is langourous and its
courtesy is becoming precious. No battle alarms ring” (Tennyson and Clio 134).This
period is “less heroic than the time of the twelve great battles,” writes Donald S.
Hair, “for Lancelot refers to the jousts as ‘our mimic wars’” (Domestic and Heroic 136).
Instead of striking hard in battle, Balin “fought/Hard with himself” (BB 233–34) in
an attempt to harness his combative fires for chivalrous peacetime use. After he sees
evidence of the illicit passion between Lancelot and Guinevere, however, he doubts
the efficacy of Arthur’s Order and proves himself “‘Fierier and stormier from
restraining’” (BB 224). In a time when external challenges have been eliminated
and Arthur’s Order has been compromised by the infraction of Lancelot and
Guinevere, the ideal of Camelot is insufficient to regulate the wrath of a warrior of
Balin’s heroic proportions.
It is a critical commonplace to see Balin and Balan as representing the conflicting
but complementary halves of one psyche.The moderate and disciplined Balan, whose
customary function is to pacify the fiendish moods of Balin (BB 137–38), mistakes
his fiery and unruly brother for Garlon, the demon of the woods, and when Balan
attempts to quell the “demonic” Balin, the result is the destruction of both brothers.
Balin’s mistaken identity is appropriate, for Pellam and Garlon are analogues of
Balan and Balin respectively.The ascetic Pellam, in turning from fighting Arthur and
in taking, “‘as in rival heat, to holy things’” (BB 97), epitomizes the feckless and even
dangerous practice of suppressing the fires of passion. It is Pellam’s “holy spear” (BB
547), a token from his ascetic cloister, that proves fatal to Balan, whose role as the
disciplinarian of his ferocious brother smacks of Pellam’s severity. “In ‘Lucretius,’ in
Maud, in the Idylls” Lawrence Poston writes, “Tennyson repeatedly shows that the
recoil from passion is fully as dangerous as the passion itself; asceticism, as the figure
of Pellam reminds us, is simply the far side of lust” (203–204).Vivien’s song in “Balin
and Balan” indicates Pellam’s situation: “‘Old priest, who mumble worship in your
quire—/Old monk and nun, ye scorn the world’s desire,/Yet in your frosty cells ye
feel the fire!’” (BB 438–40). Vivien, combining the Homeric symbols of fire and
flowing water, celebrates the excessive inten-sity that Pellam attempts to renounce:
“‘The fire of Heaven is lord of all things good, /And starve not thou this fire within
thy blood,/But follow Vivien through the fiery flood!’” (BB 446–48). The fervor
Vivien praises has run riot and exceeded its bounds—it is a “‘flood.’” The savage
Garlon, whom Pellam calls “‘mine heir’” (BB 114), inherits the powerful passions,
“‘Fierier and stormier from restraining’” (BB 224), of Pellam. Garlon, whose name,
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according to J.M.Gray, “may derive from the Welsh term for werewolf” (“Tennyson’s
Doppelgänger” 44), and Balin, the wolves’ “‘brother beast, whose anger was his
lord’” (BB 481), embody the primal force of the shape-shifter that Pellam and Balan
strive to sublimate.
Tennyson’s disapproval of asceticism as a form of sublimation is evinced by Balin’s
use of Pellam’s holy relic to pole-vault and land “on earth” (BB 408). Even though
Balin’s inner fires burn too hotly for his civil environment (he is, appropriately, “blind
in rage” when he comes to Pellam’s chapel [BB 323]), his act of putting “‘heavenly
things’” to “‘earthly uses’” (BB 415–16) aptly symbolizes the Arthurian ideal of “life
and use and name and fame” (“Merlin and Vivien” 212). Pellam’s “ruinous donjon”
(BB 329), on the other hand, is a “home of bats” (BB 331), his “‘rival heat’” (BB 97) an
example of the “‘wandering fires’” Arthur condemns in “The Holy Grail” (319, 887).
Pellam’s cloistering of his fiery fervor is analogous to Achilles’s wasting of his
battle wrath by sulking in his tent. It is the fate of Merlin, as we see in “Merlin and
Vivien” (MV), to exemplify the same errant extreme. A woman, Briseis, was a factor
in Achilles’s abstention from the battle; Vivlen’s seduction of Merlin results in his
permanent abstention from the battle of life. Merlin’s “tent” is a “hollow oak” in
which he “lay as dead,/And lost to life and use and name and fame” (MV 967–68).
We have previously seen the speaker of Maud in an analogous predicament in the
madhouse. Merlin’s encounter with Vivien is a conflict as well as an enticement, and
he yields to an excess of both Eros and anger. “That the climax is symbolically
sexual,” comments William E.Buckler, “is so forcefully insinuated that one hesitates
to detail the tumultuous patterning” (108).A.Dwight Culler emphasizes the element
of opposition between the sage and the seductress: “It is by means of their song
contest that Merlin and Vivien principally contend with one another” (231). Their
contention is described at the end of the poem as if it had been a battle: “For Merlin
…/Had yielded…” (MV 963–64). “‘I have made his glory mine!’” Vivien cries out
in triumph (MV 969). The many references to Merlin’s “charm,” which has the
power to hold a man in thrall, evoke Homer’s many references to the kharme of
battle, the joyous frenzy that can likewise overwhelm a warrior.
Merlin is a seer whose faculty of vision is corrupted by passion. “Merlin tells
[Vivien],” writes J.Philip Eggers, “the story of A maid so smooth, so white, so
wonderful,/They said a light came from her when she moved’ (MV 564–65). Such,
he allows himself to see in Vivien, as she glitters like a serpent in the ‘glare and
gloom’ of the storm (line 967). Merlin’s failure of vision is the turning point of the
Idylls” (189). Merlin is a sage and a bard, who nevertheless diverges tragically from
the Mean because of a failure of reason, of the word: “And the dark wood grew
darker toward the storm/In silence, while his anger slowly died/Within him, till he
let his wisdom go” (MV 888–90). “It is important to note,” argues Donald S.Hair,
“that so long as Merlin speaks…he does not give in to Vivien. At the end, when he
does give in, narrative once again is used; we are told about his fall rather than
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shown it. The failure of the word is thus reflected in the structure of the idyll itself”
(Domestic and Heroic 176). A.Dwight Culler discusses the “‘glorious roundel’” (MV
424) that Merlin describes to Vivien:
With such a “noble song” to offer, why does not Merlin win the song contest? The answer
surely is that he does not sing it. Had he sung it, in all its original fire and glory,Vivien would
have slunk off through the woods and Merlin, reinspired, would have returned straight to
Camelot to reinspirit the king. But only Vivien actually sang her song. (232)
Though Tennyson himself identified the glorious roundel as “The song about the
clang of battle-axes, etc., in the Coming of Arthur” (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 3.
407), Merlin’s description of a “noble song” (MV 431) with “trumpet-blowings in
it“(MV 416) reminds Culler of Tennyson’s incendiary poems of 1852, “Hands All
Round!” “Britons Guard Your Own,” and “Suggested by Reading an Article in a
Newspaper” (233).
The story that Merlin tells about the glorious roundel and the hart with golden
horns may be interpreted as an allegory of the Arthurian ideal.The glorious roundel
is, according to Tennyson’s comment, the song from “The Coming of Arthur” that
celebrates the establishment of Arthur’s Order. In its combination of military
incitement (“‘Blow trumpet!’”) with the recognition that martial fervor needs to be
regulated (“‘Let the King reign’”), the song exemplifies the idea of Camelot: the use
of controlled passion for the accomplishment of noble deeds. A. Dwight Culler sees
the hart with golden horns as an extension of the song: “…one may almost believe
that the hart with golden horns was created by that song” (232). “The flashes of its
golden horns,” Culler continues, “are clearly the ‘gleam’ which, in ‘Merlin and the
Gleam,’ typifies the poetic ideal that Tennyson pursues” (232). The knights follow
the Gleam, the ideal, to “‘the fairy well/That laughs at iron’” (MV 426–27).
Considering the use in the Idylls of rushing water as a symbol of battle fury, the fact
that a well contains water makes it an appropriate symbol of battle fury that is properly
contained or controlled.At the beginning of “Balin and Balan,” the two lusty brothers
station themselves beside a rushing fountain, where they overthrow all challengers.
After Arthur defeats them and contains their furor, the fountain, as J.M.Gray notices
(“Tennyson’s Doppelgänger” 29), is subtly transformed into a well: “‘Tell me your
names; why sat ye by the well?’” (BB 48). As for the well Merlin describes, its
reactions may be likened to those of Arthur himself, as characterized by Lancelot:
“However mild he seems at home, nor cares
For triumph in our mimic wars, the jousts—
For if his own knight cast him down, he laughs
Saying, his knights are better men than he—
Yet in this heathen war the fire of God
Fills him…” (LE310–15)
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The pins and nails at which the well laughs (“‘as our warriors did,’” says Merlin
[MV 427]) are analogous to the mimic wars of the jousts, while the sword corresponds
to the heathen wars. The buzzing of the well, in evoking the sound of a bee, relates
to the animalistic imagery associated with battle frenzy. Arthur’s lawless opponents,
whose rampant battle wrath only Arthur is able to subdue, are elsewhere compared
to bees: in “The Coming of Arthur” they are described as swarming (9), and in “The
Holy Grail” (HG) Arthur goes to “‘smoke the scandalous hive of those wild bees’”
(HG 214). The fairy well, therefore, is an icon of the early days of Arthur’s realm, of
the time before the passions of his knights, in reaction to the absence of battle
alarms, began to erode his ideal.
The loss of Merlin, as it involves elements of both conflict and sexual possessiveness,
is comparable to the temporary loss of Achilles by the Achaians; the loss of Elaine, in
“Lancelot and Elaine,” is attributable to her exceeding passion for the great Lancelot,
and is thus analogous to the Dido episode in the Aeneid. In fact, the action of the
entire idyll bears something of an inverse relationship to the Dido story. In Book 6
of the Aeneid, Aeneas takes a boat from the land of the living to the underworld
home of the dead; in “Lancelot and Elaine,” the dead Elaine travels on a boat from
her deathlike world of seclusion to Camelot, the land of the living.The oarsman on
the Styx is the aged, grim, and appalling Charon (Aeneid 6.298ff.); the “old” and
“myriad-wrinkled” (LE 169) oarsman on the Thames looks the part:
that oarsman’s haggard face,
As hard and still as is the face that men
Shape to their fancy’s eye from broken rocks
On some cliff-side, appalled them,…(LE 1242–45)
In contrast to the vituperative Charon, however, Elaine’s oarsman is dumb (an indicator
of Elaine’s failure to control her passion with language, the tool of reason—in the
presence of Lancelot, she is “without the power to speak” [LE 914]). In one of the
most famous scenes in the Aeneid, the shade of Dido turns away from Aeneas in the
underworld. As Allen Mandelbaum translates Book 6, line 469, “She turned away,
eyes to the ground” (Mandelbaum 148). In “Lancelot and Elaine,” it is Lancelot who,
with eyes averted, ignores Elaine: “…Lancelot knew that she was looking at him./
And yet he glanced not up, nor waved his hand,/Nor bad farewell, but sadly rode
away” (LE 978–80).
“Lancelot and Elaine” inverts the story of Dido to evoke it as a classical precedent
for Elaine’s amorous frenzy. Driven by her wanton desire, Elaine contravenes the
Arthurian ideal that Merlin expresses in the previous idyll: “‘Rather use than fame’”
(MV 478). Like the victimized Merlin, “Closed in the four walls of a hollow tower”
(MV 207), Elaine sits “in her tower alone” (LE 982). “Elaine…is now like all those
before her whose passion has possessed them and trapped them in a hol-low, barren
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world” (Colley 103).When Arthur reads the letter she bears in her funeral barge, she
gains name and fame, but only in death. Prior to her death, she has no life and use,
because her untrammeled passion consigns her to the hollow tower.Arthur’s reading
of the letter, his contribution of the moderating element of speech, comes too late.
Virgil, as we saw in the first chapter, uses the same imagery in his descriptions
of Dido’s love frenzy as he does in depicting Aeneas’s battle furor. Accordingly,
Tennyson refers to Elaine’s overwrought passion using the same traditional battle
imagery he uses in the Idylls to describe the rampant wrath of warriors. At the
tourney, “a fury,…/A fiery family passion for the name/Of Lancelot” (LE 474–
76) seizes Lancelot’s relatives, who, like a “wild wave” (LE 480), overbear their
disguised kin. Similarly, Elaine sings her “Song of Love and Death,” “All in a fiery
dawning wild with wind/That shook her tower” (LE 1013–14), and she, like the
wild knights Gareth defeats, is literally borne away by the water of the river (which
she repeatedly refers to as “‘the flood,’” a term that recalls the “‘fiery flood’” of
Vivien’s song). As Arthur calls out, “‘They are broken, they are broken!’” (LE 309)
at the battle of Mt. Badon, and as the defeated Edyrn admits that “‘My pride is
broken’” (MG 578), Elaine’s family attempts to “break the passion in her” (LE
1072), and urges Lancelot to “‘blunt or break her passion’” (LE 968). Tennyson’s
reading of the final two stanzas from Elaine’s “Song of Love and Death” on the
Edison recording has the effect of further conflating the two modes of passion.
Though he writes of Elaine’s song, “sweetly could she make and sing” (LE 999),
Tennyson’s recitation is far from sweet, and he confounds all expectations of a
melancholy or despairing tone.The impassioned verve of his rendition builds to a
crescendo in the culminating line, “‘Call and I follow, I follow! let me die’” (LE
1011), which is delivered in a rousing manner appropriate to a reading of “The
Charge of the Heavy Brigade” (Tennyson mumbles the final phrase, “‘let me die,’”
as if attempting to shrug off an irrelevancy).
By substituting Elaine’s song for her religious meditation in Malory 18. 19 (Ricks,
The Poems of Tennyson 3.450), Tennyson suggests that Elaine’s self-isolating sexual
passion is interchangeable with cloistered religiosity as a mode of divergence from
the Arthurian standard. In “The Holy Grail,” the disease of religious extremism
spreads from Pellam to the Knights of the Round Table, who waste their heroic fires
in the pursuit of lurid illusions. With “nothing for the knights to do” (Culler 241)
after the twelve great battles, the quest for the Grail amounts to a substitute for the
kind of heroic, military quest that Gareth accomplishes early in the Idylls.
In numerous subtle ways, including the use of traditional battle imagery,Tennyson
characterizes the “‘wandering fires’” (HG 319, 369, 887) of the Grail quest as a
misdirected version of the fire of God that fills Arthur on the battlefield. The cloud
that surrounds the Grail when it appears at Arthur’s hall (HG 189) antic-ipates the
mist that enshrouds the final, savage battle in “The Passing of Arthur,” and the thunder
that heralds the Grail’s arrival is common to the heroic tradition and to Tennyson’s
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battle poems. The beam of light on which the Grail descends is filtered through
images of Arthur’s battles:
“And, brother, had you known our hall within,
.......................................................................................
Where twelve great windows blazon Arthur’s wars,
And all the light that falls upon the board
Streams through the twelve great battles of our King.” (HG 246, 248–50)
The frenzied Galahad announces his vision in a voice that is “‘shrilling’” (HG 289),
like the battle clarions “shrilling unto blood” in “The Coming of Arthur” (CA 102).
Accompanying the Grail in Galahad’s vision at the hermitage is a face that is “‘fiery’”
and that “‘smote itself into the bread’” (HG 466–67).The fieriness and the smiting,
as well as the Grail’s “blood-red” appearance (HG 473–76), are suggestive of battles.
When Galahad crosses the “great black swamp” (HG 499) to reach the “spiritual
city” (HG 526), the vanishing bridges are a point of contrast with the glorious
battles of Gareth, who defeats two of his enemies on bridges.
Sir Bors, though he is characterized by Arthur himself as a “loyal man and true”
(HG 753), wanders from the Arthurian way in prioritizing vision over deeds, and the
epiphany he attains implicitly criticizes the direction of his quest. Bors, overpowered
and imprisoned by a remnant of the conquered pagans, sees the Grail in conjunction
with a sign of the battle fury evinced by the clairvoyant, triumphant king in “The
Coming of Arthur.” Bors sights the Grail “[a]cross the seven clear stars” of the Round
Table (HG 689), a constellation Tennyson identified as “The Great Bear” (Ricks, The
Poems of Tennyson 3. 483). Arthur’s name is believed to derive from the Welsh word for
“bear,” arth, a tradition that links him with the shapeshifting bear-sarks. In “The Last
Tournament” (LT), stars of the Great Bear are mentioned in the context of the savage
battle wrath at Pelleas’s tower (LT 479).The stars Bors sees subtly recall the battlefield
setting of Arthur’s astral vision, a setting which stands in stark and significant contrast
to Bors’s prison cell, which as a symbol relates to the Idylls’s “hollow towers.”
Clyde de L.Ryals brings a telling indictment against another aspiring mystic,
Percivale, describing him as a failed knight who, unable to “distinguish himself in
knightly ‘glory,’…eagerly turns to the Grail quest when the idea presents itself”
(From the Great Deep 154). Percivale’s one moment of glory occurs in the send-off
tourney, when, as he says, “‘a strength/Was in us from the vision’” (HG 333–34). On
this occasion Percivale uses his spiritual strength in the field of action, and in doing
so he stimulates the kind of enhanced vision that Arthur experiences—the true
vision that Percivale eschews in his illusory quest:
“And I was lifted up in heart, and thought
Of all my late-shown prowess in the lists,
How my strong lance had beaten down the knights,
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So many and famous names; and never yet
Had heaven appeared so blue, nor earth so green,
For all my blood danced in me…” (HG 361–66)
When Percivale turns to pursuing revelation as an end in itself, his wasted fighting
power is reflected in the traditional battle imagery used to describe his hallucinations.
His account of his approach to the spiritual city with Galahad (HG 489–539) contains
references to water-courses, storm, lightning, blazing thunder, fire, shouting, roaring,
floods, and a war-horse. Similarly, in Lancelot’s account of his own quest (HG 763–
849) we find swine, stormy winds and turbulent waters, lions, a sword, fire, and five
references to “madness.”
As the Grail knights pursue vision for its own sake and expend their force in
chasing wandering fires, Pelleas, in “Pelleas and Ettare” (PE), pursues love for its own
sake and attains only to the bestial condition of fiery hatred. He tells King Arthur, “‘I
love,’” (PE 8), but just as the wandering fires of the Grail quest “possess no historically
viable form” (Kozicki, Tennyson and Clio 138), Pelleas’s love has no viable object:
“‘Where?/O where? I love thee, though I know thee not’” (PE 40–41).
“Pelleas and Ettare” reverses the action of “Gareth and Lynette.” Whereas Gareth
wins over the initially contemptuous Lynette, Pelleas becomes enthralled by Ettare,
his sexual fanaticism corrupting Arthur’s conception of courtly love as instilling “the
desire of fame” (G 479):
“Behold me, Lady,
A prisoner, and the vassal of thy will;
And if thou keep me in thy donjon here,
Content am I so that I see thy face
But once a day: for I have sworn my vows,
And thou hast given thy promise,…” (PE 232–37)
Pelleas’s “‘donjon’” calls to mind the “ruinous donjon” (BB 329) of Pellam.
Disturbingly, Pelleas is willing to accept a scenario that resembles Merlin’s tragically
enchanted condition, as it is described in “Merlin and Vivien”:
The man so wrought on ever seemed to lie
Closed in the four walls of a hollow tower,
From which was no escape for evermore;
And none could find that man for evermore,
Nor could he see but him who wrought the charm
Coming and going, and he lay as dead…(MV 206–211)
Pelleas resembles Merlin in his failure to use the power of the word to mitigate his
passion. Pelleas’s bankruptcy of speech is conspicuous:
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Again she said, “O wild and of the woods,
Knowest thou not the fashion of our speech?
Or have the heavens but given thee a fair face,
Lacking a tongue?” (PE 95–98)
Pelleas, as he reels back into the beast, acknowledges the waning activity of reason
that his failure of language represents: “‘Fool, beast—he, she, or I? myself most fool;
/Beast too, as lacking human wit—disgraced’” (PE 466–67). Immediately prior to
these lines, he vents his wrath towards Ettare and Gawain in a passage (454–63)
featuring the Homeric motifs of storm, fire, bellowing, screaming, earthquake, wind,
and animals.
The conclusion of “Pelleas and Ettare,” as J.M.Gray notes (Thro’ the Vision of the
Night 46), provides an ironic reversal of the finale of the Aeneid.Whereas the helpless
Turnus pleads for his life, only to be dispatched by Aeneas, the fallen Pelleas urges
Lancelot to kill him, whereupon Lancelot spares his life. In contrast to Gareth, who
demonstrates his chivalrous joy of battle by laughing when unhorsed by Lancelot,
Pelleas’s reaction to the same mishap prompts Guinevere’s inquiry, “‘Hath the great
heart of knighthood in thee failed/So far thou canst not bide, unfrowardly,/A fall
from him?’” (PE 584–86). Pelleas’s blind, uncontrolled passion, which begins as love
frenzy and develops into battle frenzy, results in a loss of name and fame, as indicated
by his response to Lancelot, who asks, “‘What name hast thou/ That ridest here so
blindly and so hard?’” “‘No name, no name,’” Pelleas shouts (PE 551–53).
In “The Last Tournament,” where Pelleas becomes known as the Red Knight, an
epithet indicative of the fiery passion that characterizes him,Arthur cannot remember
his embittered adversary’s former name: “Arthur knew the voice; the face /Wellnigh
was helmet-hidden, and the name/Went wandering somewhere darkling in his mind”
(LT 454–56). Donald S.Hair’s assessment of this incident relates it to the heroic
convention of earning one’s name by an exploit: “In the Idylls,Tennyson’s emphasis
is not so much on the discovery of one’s true identity as it is on the making of it—
as Arthur says, it is the ambition of every young knight ‘To win his honour and to
make his name’ (LE 1351)—but if one’s name can be made, it can also be destroyed”
(Tennyson’s Language 165).
It is when Arthur has taken a company of his young knights to win their names
by the quelling of Pelleas’s forces, that the Last Tournament takes place. As for those
left to the “gracious pastime” (HG 324) of Camelot, their unexercised battle wrath
explodes in lawless frenzy. The wild tournament takes place, predictably, during a
storm (LT 153–55); it occasions roaring (LT 167) and the revelation that Modred
resembles a “vermin” (LT 165). Lancelot, Arthur’s appointed arbiter, allows the riot
to rage wantonly, because he does not speak (LT 161). He gazes on a “faded fire” (LT
157): the final, destructive sputtering of the knights’ fallow fire of God. Tristram
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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
acknowledges the ultimate origin of the savage outbreak: “‘…the heathen wars
were o’er,/The life had. we sware but by the shell’” (LT 269–70).
The weakening of the knights’ vows affects the King himself, who worries about
the erosion of his authority (LT 112–25).When it comes time for him to harness the
passion of his young fighters at the tower of the Red Knight, the dreadful voice of
the conqueror at Mt. Badon is silent. Instead of shouting, “Ho!” when his troops all
yearn to challenge Pelleas, Arthur “waved them back” (LT 436). His gesture recalls
the charm “of waving hands” in “Merlin andVivien”: “Significantly enough,” writes
John R.Reed, “the charm consists of ‘woven paces’ and ‘waving hands,’ but no words”
(51).The lapse of Arthur’s “‘simple words of great authority’” (CA 260) redounds to
a riotous display of fiery, bestial battle frenzy:
…then the knights…roared
And shouted and leapt down upon the fallen;
There trampled out his face from being known,
And sank his head in mire, and slimed themselves:
Nor heard the King for their own cries, but sprang
Through open doors, and swording right and left
Men, women, on their sodden faces, hurled
The tables over and the wines, and slew
Till all the rafters rang with woman-yells,
And all the pavement streamed with massacre:
Then, echoing yell with yell, they fired the tower,…(LT 467–77)
Tennyson uses Ardiur’s reaction to heighten the contrast between this inhumane
slaughter and the chivalrous, controlled aggression of the twelve great battles. After
the battle of Mt. Badon, “in the heart of Arthur joy was lord” (CA 123), but after the
massacre of the Red Knight’s forces, “in the heart of Arthur pain was lord” (LT 485).
The tower of the Red Knight joins the “hollow tower” of Merlin and the cloisters
of Pellam and Elaine as analogues of Achilles’s tent or of Calypso’s cave in Homer. In
“Guinevere,” Tennyson uses the “hollow tower” motif once again as a sign of excessive,
misspent passion (“Excess binds rather than liberates,” writes Ann C.Colley. “It
locks people into hollow towers” [106]), and he alters Malory’s version of the story
in order to do so. In Tennyson’s account of the entrapment of Lancelot and Guinevere,
he “has changed the place of discovery from the queen’s chamber to a tower” (Gray,
Thro’ theVision of the Night 20).The “‘nunnery walls’” (G 225) behind which Guinevere
eventually takes refuge are yet another version of the same motif. Ann C.Colley
compares Guinevere’s doom to that of Merlin: “[Merlin’s] end is prophetic of
Guinevere’s. She too will be locked within the convent’s hollow walls, useless and
barren” (102). The waving of Arthur’s hands over Guinevere’s head (G 580) recalls
the charm that entrances Merlin.
Idylls of the King
161
Guinevere’s retreat to a convent because of her ungovernable sexual passion
demonstrates once again that “the recoil from passion is fully as dangerous as the
passion itself” (Poston 203). In the heroic ethos of the Idylls, ruttishness and religiosity
alike are culpable extremes because they compromise the power to achieve name
and fame. Guinevere’s faithlessness to Arthur is on one level only a symbol of her
failure to be “A woman in her womanhood as great/As he was in his manhood” (G
297–98). Even in the environment of the convent, she regrets not so much her
sinfulness as her “‘name of scorn,’” and the “‘defeat of fame’” (G 622–23). Concomitant
with her ungoverned passion, as with the untrammeled passion of battle wrath in
the misty, final battle, is faulty vision: “‘It would have been my pleasure had I seen./
We needs must love the highest when we see it’” (G 654–55).
Vision is also a prominent element of “The Passing of Arthur.” Arthur trains Bedivere
to become the lone visionary who will carry the Arthurian torch beyond the frenzied
melee in the mist. William E.Buckler comments on Bedivere’s “fortunate fall” of
temporary disobedience: “…the degree to which Bedivere has gained access to the
Arthurian world-apprehension brings him closer to Arthur in the final episode, where
they ‘see’ as one—‘Then saw they how’ (361) and ‘they were ware’ (363)” (42). In
order to chant mystic lays as a bard, Bedivere must master the fire of God that in the
heroic tradition fills both warrior and poet alike. Bedivere sees the vision of the Lady
of the Lake only when he performs an act evocative of the heroic age, an act that also
represents the proper command over the heroic fire of battle.The casting of Excalibur
into the mere partakes of the Germanic heroic tradition, as described by H.R.Ellis
Davidson: “…the panoply of war—swords and mailcoats, shields and spears—must be
offered to the god of war, cast into the swamps or the lakes…” (Gods and Myths 71).
The runes on Excalibur, “‘Take me,’” and “‘Cast me away!’” (CA 302, 304), indicate
the precarious balance maintained by an effective warrior, who must use his destructive
power as needed without losing all detachment from it. In returning Excalibur to the
water (which the Lady of the Lake, who takes the sword, has the power to walk on, or
control), Bedivere ritualizes Arthur’s effective management of the fire of God.
As a combination of weapon and work of art, Excalibur makes an effective symbol
of the equivalent status of bard and warrior in the heroic tradition. In “The Passing
of Arthur” Tennyson uses Excalibur to characterize aestheticism as antithet-ical to
Arthur’s view of art, which is the same as that of Tennyson’s heroic “Old Chieftain,”
who lauds “the united powers/Of battle and music” (13–14). Excalibur’s “Myriads
of topaz-lights, and jacinth-work/Of subtlest jewelry” (PA 225–26) temporarily
bedazzle Bedivere into becoming an effete aesthete. Bedivere, “‘like a girl/Valuing
the giddy pleasure of the eyes’” (PA 296), at first feels that Excalibur should be
“‘kept,/Stored in some treasure-house of mighty kings’” (PA 268–69). Finally, he
closes his eyes to the sword’s ornamentation, “‘lest,’” as he says, “‘the gems/Should
blind my purpose”’ (PA 320–21), and performs his duty to the King. Though he at
first thinks the hilt of the sword a “‘miracle’” (PA 324), when he prioritizes duty
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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
over beauty he beholds the truly miraculous Lady of the Lake. Bedivere’s temporarily
errant approach to art parallels the instances of unheroic abstention from action in
the Idylls. Bedivere resembles the Grail knights in his valuing of “‘the giddy pleasure
of the eyes’” for its own sake, and he evokes the “hollow tower” motif in his wish to
store and hoard Excalibur. Arthur’s scathing censure of Bedivere, which recalls his
criticism of the Grail quest, implicitly defends his own use of the beautiful Excalibur
not to please the eyes of many men but to beat his foemen down.
The final Idyll concludes with a flourish of heroic allusion.The reference to the
“weird” rhyme foretelling Arthur’s fate (“‘From the great deep to the great deep he
goes’” [PA 444–45]) evokes the Anglo-Saxon “wyrd,” or “fate,” a concept which
Bertha Phillpotts characterizes as crucial to the heroic philosophy: “[The philosophy
of the Anglo-Saxons] depends equally on the conception of Fate and on the
conception of Fame. Neither can be taken away without shattering the web of
thought” (6). As J.M.Gray and Christopher Ricks have documented, Tennyson’s
description (PA 427ff.) of Arthur’s destination, Avilion, is densely packed with
borrowings from the Iliad (9.151) and the Odyssey (4.566ff., 6.42, 10.195). “Tennyson’s
Avalon,” observes Gray, “is a subtle blend of many heroic traditions” (Thro’ the Vision
of the Night 166n.45). One allusion to the Aeneid that has been neglected by both
Gray and Ricks, and also by Wilfred Mustard, is found in lines 463–65, “…and saw,/
Straining his eyes beneath an arch of hand,/Or thought he saw, the speck that bare
the King,…” The expression, “saw…or thought he saw,” echoes Virgil’s “Aut videt,
aut vidisse putat” (Aeneid 6. 454), which Allen Mandelbaum translates, “either sees or
thinks he sees” (147). In addition to Tennyson, Milton (PL 1.783–84) and Wordsworth
(The Prelude 8.716–17, 1805; 8.565, 1850) borrow the same Virgilian expression.
Arthur’s disappearance into light (PA 468) is relevant to Homer’s use of light as a
metonym for victory in the Iliad (8.282, 15.741, 16.95, 18.102; see Whitman, Homer
and the Heroic Tradition, 121). In spite of the tragic end of his kingdom,Arthur triumphs
in attaining the honor a traditional warrior seeks. His victories in the twelve great
battles make his “‘name and glory cling / To all high places like a golden cloud/For
ever’” (PA 53–55).This image is comparable to another Tennysonian symbol of the
substantive quality of glorious action, the glorious banner of England streaming
aloft in “The Defence of Lucknow.”
William E.Buckler relates the final tableau of “The Passing of Arthur” to the
Homeric tradition:
[The Idylls’] ultimate image of human conscientiousness is that of Bedivere
standing high and alone, under his “arch of hand” straining his eyes to see and,
because he stares into the sunrise, not being sure that what he sees are not simply
his own eye-specks. This is an image eminently Homeric, perennially Odyssean,
and Tennyson’s myth of the return at the subtlest literary level is played out as a
return to Homer. (313)
Idylls of the King
163
***
This book has attempted to show that at the subtlest literary level almost all of
Tennyson’s poetry dealing with martial subjects, from “The Old Sword” and “TheVale
of Bones” to Maud and the Idylls of the King, is a return to Homer and the heroic
tradition. In “The Passing of Arthur” Tennyson’s myth of the return comprises the
return of Excalibur to the mere, and Excalibur itself marks a return of sorts to Tennyson’s
first extant war poem, “The Old Sword.” The traditional background of Tennyson’s
battle pieces provides, as we have seen in this and in the preceding chapter, a context
for accentuating the heroic element in Maud and in the Idylls of the King.The greater
multivalence of the two copious and comprehensive works, meanwhile, helps to amplify
the meaningfulness of the sparer battle poems. Our ready acceptance of the figurative
quality of Excalibur, for example, can send us back to “The Old Sword” more receptive
to the wider implications of its corroded blade.The rusting brand suggests, as Excalibur
does in the Idylls, the “double-edged” nature of a warrior’s fury.
As an icon of regimented battle wrath, Excalibur represents the ideal realized in
Tennyson’s war poetry by the Duke of Wellington, by Sir Richard Grenville, by Sir
Ralph of “The Tourney,” by the Light and Heavy Brigades, and by the British forces
at Lucknow.Tennyson’s heroes who can “take” but not “cast away” the primal force
include Nadir Shah, the Captain, Boädicea, and the speaker of Maud. As a work of
art suitable for an arsenal, Excalibur helps to relate Tennyson’s great epic to his
least reputable, incendiary battle pieces. With poems such as “Exhortation to the
Greeks,” “Britons, GuardYour Own,” and “The Third of February, 1852,” Tennyson
dramatizes the ability of the artist to inspire the same sort of valiant deeds he
commemorates. The desire of Merlin (Tennyson’s archetype of the poet in the
Idylls and in “Merlin and the Gleam”—and it is appropriate here to recall Tennyson’s
signatures to two of the 1852 newspaper poems) for “‘life and use’” (MV 372) is
Tennyson’s desire for his verse:
And here the Singer for his Art
Not all in vain may plead
“The song that nerves a nation’s heart,
Is in itself a deed.” (“Epilogue” to “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade” 77–80)
John R. Reed recognizes the celebration of poetry’s inspirational power in the
Idylls: “Poetry resembles Arthur’s music, or the song of the hopeful young knight, in
the tale of the hart with the golden horns, that prompted men to action” (183–84).
In general, heroic battle poetry prompts men to action by inspiring in its readers
renewed vigor to attack the difficulties of their own lives. The horrors of warfare
epitomize the worst that life has to offer, and the joy of battle exhibited by the warriors of heroic poetry represents the ability of the human spirit to stand undaunted
164
The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry
in the fell clutch of disastrous, though not necessarily military, circumstance.Tennyson’s
romantic forerunners realized that in their own lives there was “no want /Of
aspirations which have been—of foes/To wrestle with and victory to complete”
(Wordsworth, “Home at Grasmere” 945–47). Blake describes his poetry as “the
march of long resounding strong heroic Verse/Marshalld in order for the day of
Intellectual Battle” (The Four Zoas, 1.2–3). In the dedication to Laon and Cythna,
Shelley writes that he “Wrought linked armour for [his] soul, before/It might walk
forth to war among mankind” (41–42).Though in the Iliad Homer writes in gruesome
detail about a real war, he invites an interpretation of battle as a metaphor for the
inevitable conflicts and struggles of life. Early in Book 14, Odysseus addresses
Agamemnon:
Our lot from youth to age
was given us by Zeus: danger and war
to wind upon the spindle of our years
until we die to the last man. (Fitzgerald 332)
It is easy to read Odysseus’s speech as more than an assessment of a particular situation; it
serves as a philosophical statement of universal applicability. Likewise, Sarpedon’s realization
in Book 12 that “a thousand shapes of death surround us,/ and no man can escape them”
pertains to us all, as does, in a figurative sense, his corollary resolution: “Let us attack”
(Fitzgerald 291). In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus finds relevant examples for modern life
in the torments of the Homeric underworld and in the presumable courage and joy of
the tireless boulder bearer. The battlefield courage and joy in the ancient epics, and in
Tennyson’s poetry as well, are no less applicable to our own “allotted field” (HG 904) of
“fruitful strifes and rivalries of peace” (“Dedication” to the Idylls 37).
Tennyson enhances the relevance of his battle poetry in such a way that he too invites
a metaphorical interpretation of his military accounts. In early works such as “Gods
Denunciations against Pharaoh-Hophra” and “Babylon,” Tennyson draws on the Old
Testament tradition of a sword-wielding Jehovah, a tradition that influenced the martial
metaphors of Christian literature. “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade,” “Boädicea,” the
“Morte d’Arthur,” and even the Idylls of the King itself are all pre-sented inside “frames”
that help to make the poems more relevant to civilian life. In “The Charge of the Light
Brigade,” Tennyson emphasizes the effect of the charge on the civilian world by repeating
the line, “All the world wondered” (31, 52). The hero of “Sir Galahad” stands as an
example for the readers of heroic poetry, by virtue of his adaptation of the heroic norm
to a non-aggressive field of endeavor. The “Wellington Ode” establishes a connection
between the “peoples voice” (142, 144, 146, 151), which will preserve the honor of the
Duke, and the “deep voices” (67, 69) of the cannons, with which Wellington “wrought,/
Guarding realms and kings from shame” (67–68).As the Duke has “other nobler work to
do/Than when he fought at Waterloo” (256–57), the people,Tennyson’s ode suggests,
Idylls of the King
165
should follow Wellington’s “great example” (220) and pursue their own “path of duty”
as the “way to glory” (224). By smoothing Sir Richard Grenville’s rough edges in “The
Revenge,” Tennyson makes him a more appealing hero, with the result that Tennyson’s
account of Grenville’s courage better serves as an inspiration to the readers of the poem.
Part of the problem for the hero of Maud seems to be his life of privilege, in which only
a love affair or warfare relieves the self-absorption of his passionate heart. Most of us,
however, can “fight for the good” (3.57) in our daily lives without enlisting under a literal
“banner of battle unrolled” (3.42), and the speaker’s sense of salvation through the war
effort can inspire us to “embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assigned” (3.59) in
our own lives of ample struggle.
In its potential to inspire a renewed affirmation of life, the Homeric element in
the Tennyson canon resembles the martial song of Maud, but the criticism of
Tennyson’s own martial songs is often reminiscent of the initial reaction to Maud’s
song by her unbalanced lover:
Silence, beautiful voice!
Be still, for you only trouble the mind
With a joy in which I cannot rejoice,
A glory I shall not find. (Maud 1.180–83)
For the critics who see Tennyson’s martial poetry as backwards and barbaric, the
poetic tradition of using battle as a symbol for “mental fight” seems to carry little
exculpatory weight. While the glories of battle often appear on the perimeters of
Tennyson’s pictures, his center of focus is usually rusting swords, vales of bones, or
failing kingdoms; however, his fidelity to the ancient bards in his balanced, cautionary
depictions of warfare is also unavailing with most of his calumniators. It may be that
the objection to Tennyson’s use of war as a subject is really an objection to his ideas
on the proper function of poetry. His belief in poets as the trumpets which sing to
battle, even figurative battle, is uncongenial to the modern disdain of Victorian uplift.
Tennyson, as theVictorian bard who intrudes the heroic tradition into our modern
milieu, resembles his own Sir Bedivere, “‘Among new men, strange faces, other
minds’” (PA 406). Alan Sinfeld recognizes “a speaker very different from ourselves”
(7) in Tennyson’s Crimean War poetry, and Christopher Ricks comments that the
courage of the Light Brigade “is not ours” (Tennyson 344).Whether the antiquation
ofVictorian values reflects well or poorly on the modern world of letters is irrelevant
to Tennyson, who, as Ernest Dowson recognizes, “joins his elders of the lyre and
bay,/Led by the Mantuan” (“The Passing of Tennyson” 15–16).Tennyson’s war poetry,
by virtue of its being in many ways more Virgilian than Victorian, is of the ages.The
“faint Homeric echoes” of Tennyson’s battle songs may win him few fresh laurels,
but his lyre, in the words of his Tiresias, “Is ever sound-ing in heroic ears/Heroic
hymns…” (“Tiresias” 173–74).
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Index
Adams, Michael C.C, 3, 8, 15, 127
Adkin, Mark, 102, 113
Aeschylus, 39
Alexander, Michael, 6, 75–79
Alexander the Great, 29, 30, 31, 35
Allingham, William, 137
Anderson, William S., 17
Andrews, Alfred Carleton, 36
Aristotle, 140
Nichomachean Ethics, 95, 123
Arnold, Matthew, 70, 71
“On Translating Homer,” 70
Aviram, Amittai, 67, 68
Barker, George, 3
“Battle of Brunanburh, The,” 6, 9, 77–79
“Battle of Maldon, The,” 77, 90
Baum, Paull F., 7, 63, 79, 97
Bennett, James R., 8, 126, 135
Bespaleff, Rachel, 19, 23
Blake, William, 116, 164
Four Zoas,The, 164
“Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The,”
116
Bloom, Harold, 3, 129
Book of Leinster, 19
Bosworth, Joseph, 75–78
Bowra, C.M., 13, 14, 15, 17, 42, 54, 78,
96, 97, 101, 107, 112, 114, 122
Brashear, William R., 139, 140
Brook, Stopford A., 126
Brookfield, William, 14
Browning, Robert
“Herve Riel,” 81
Buckler, William E., 138–139, 140, 150,
153, 161, 162
Buckley, Jerome H., 13, 45, 63–64, 97,
104
Burke, Edmund, 63, 64
Philosophical Inquiry, A, 62, 64
Bush, Douglas, 4, 12
Byron, George Gordon, 6th Lord, 23, 87
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 23, 87
“Destruction of Sennacherib, The,” 87
Hebrew Melodies, 87
“Jephtha’s Daughter,” 87
“Song of Saul Before His Last Battle,”
87
Camus, Albert, 8, 164
Myth of Sisyphus,The, 164
Carlyle, Jane, 10
Carlyle, Thomas, 3, 13, 15, 53, 81, 127,
142
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the
Heroic in History, 13, 18, 24, 33,
54, 145
Past and Present, 53
181
182
Carr, Arthur J., 3
Catullus, 66
Cervantes, Miguel de
Don Quixote, 107
Chadwick, Owen, 12
Chapman, George, 73
Chatterton, Thomas, 105
Song to Ælla, 105
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 8
Canterbury Tales,The, 5
Chesterton, G.K., 12
Claudian, 36
In Eutropium, 36
Cochrane, C.N., 139
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 52, 56
“Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The,”
52, 55, 56
Colley, Ann C., 9, 120, 126, 155, 160
Collins, Winston, 127
Cowper, William, 67, 70
“Boädicea, An Ode,” 67
Culler, A.Dwight, 13, 126, 143, 153, 154,
156
Cyrus, 29–31, 44, 45
Daniel, Samuel
“Ulysses and the Siren,” 88–89
Dante, 139
Darwin, Erasmus
Botanic Garden,The, 100
Davidson, H.R.Ellis, 17, 18, 19, 22, 24,
25, 26, 27, 33, 39, 41, 43, 54, 64,
65, 92, 151, 161
Day, Aidan, 9
Dickens, Charles, 53, 127
Dimock, Jr., G.E., 125, 130
Donne, John
“Crosse,The,” 55
Dowson, Ernest, 165
“Passing of Tennyson,The,” 165
Drayton, Michael, 105
Ballad of Agincourt, 104
Dryden, John, 5
Dumézil, Georges, 17, 19, 135
Index
Durham, Margery Stricker, 97
Ebbatson, Roger, 3, 8, 16
Edison, Thomas, 4, 10, 69, 108, 113, 134,
156
Eggers, J.Philip, 139, 140, 153
Egil’s Saga, 151
Elijah, 38
Elisha, 38
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
“Heroism,” 42
Estrich, Robert M., 6, 7, 80–82
Euripides
Phoenissae, 9
Exodus, 35
Ezekiel, 25–26, 37
FitzGerald, Edward, 46, 47, 96
Fitzgerald, Robert, 22, 72, 74, 109, 121,
130, 164
Fletcher, John, 47
Fordyce, C.J., 66
Forster, John, 104
Freud, Sigmund, 49, 60, 106
Froissart, Jean, 63
Chronicles,The, 63
Frye, Northrop, 116
Gaskell, Elizabeth, 127
Gladstone, William E., 138
Gray, J.M., 138, 139, 141, 152, 154, 159,
160, 162
Gray, Thomas
“Bard,The,” 32, 34
“Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard,” 42
Greene, Thomas, 18, 145
Guest, Edwin, 75–78
Hainsworth, J.B., 22, 34, 147
Hair, Donald S., 16, 147, 152, 153, 159
Hallam, A.H., 6, 14, 46, 97
Hamilton, Edith, 90, 95, 108, 112, 114,
123, 135
Index
Hatto, A.T., 22
Hellstrom, Ward, 126
Henley, William Ernest, 23
“Song of the Sword,The,” 23
Herbert, Sir Thomas, 12
Herodotus, 44
Heyne, C.G., 10
Hill, Jr., Robert W., 97
Hixson, Jerome C., 75
Homer, 4, 6, 8, 11, 12, 13, 17, 18, 19, 21,
22, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35,
37, 38, 41, 44, 47, 50, 51, 53, 55,
59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 69, 71, 72,
73, 75, 77, 78, 81, 83, 86, 90, 1,
93, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 101, 102,
106, 108, 109, 110, 112, 119, 120,
122, 124, 125, 129, 131, 138, 139,
140, 141, 142, 145, 146, 147, 148,
149, 152, 153, 159, 160, 163, 164,
165
Iliad, 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 17, 18,
20, 22, 23, 26, 27, 37, 42, 43, 47,
60, 61, 65, 66, 69– 75, 78, 79, 81,
91,98,99, 109, 119, 121, 124,
125, 129, 130, 131, 135, 138, 140,
141, 142, 146, 162, 164
Odyssey, 12, 16, 20, 42, 125, 130, 162
Horace, 10, 12,19,88,89,96,112
Epistles, 123, 140
Odes, 19,88,96, 112, 123
Hughes, Linda K., 49, 64, 119, 126
Hughes, Merritt Y., 31, 146
Huizinga, Johan
Homo Ludens, 23
Hunt, J.William, 18, 108, 140
Hunt, Leigh, 6, 45
Hutton, R.H., 45
Huxley, Francis, 17, 33, 45
183
Jowett, Benjamin, 12, 13
Jung, Carl, 124
Juvenal, 10
Kass, Leon, 109
Kaufmann, Walter, 18, 26, 27, 78, 108,
125, 129, 131, 140
Keats, John
Endymion, 92
“La Belle Dame sans Merci,” 48
Ker, W.P., 139
Killham, John, 8, 122, 125, 126, 128
Kincaid, James R., 7, 8, 9, 47, 51, 52, 54,
79, 80, 89, 125, 126, 128, 139
II Kings, 38
Kingsley, Charles, 127
Alton Locke, 120
Kipling, Rudyard, 3
Kitto, H.D.F., 26, 53, 54, 78, 81, 95,
123, 125, 129
Knowles, James, 69
Kozicki, Henry, 5, 9, 21–22, 23, 64, 140,
143, 144, 147, 152, 158
Landor, Walter Savage, 93
Lang, Andrew, 138
Lang, Cecil Y., 15, 97, 120
Langbaum, Robert, 3
Lash, John, 16, 19
Lattimore, Richmond, 60, 72, 74, 75, 78,
91, 109, 131
Leaf, Walter, 12
Levi, Peter, 70, 85, 104, 105
Lewes, G.H., 96
Leyden, John
“Ode on Visiting Flodden,” 25
Longinus, 68, 146
Lyall, Sir Alfred
Lyell, Charles, 100
Isaiah, 43, 44, 45, 88
Jenkyns, Richard, 8–9, 16, 139, 142
Jeremiah, 44
Joel, 35
Macpherson, James, 38, 149
Malory, Sir Thomas, 146, 156, 160
Mandelbaum, Allen, 33, 98, 111, 155, 162
Mann, Robert James, 8, 127, 128
184
Markley, A.A., 4, 12
Martial, 50, 138
Martin, Robert Bernard, 5, 8, 10, 11, 12,
14, 15, 16, 21, 50, 74, 89–90, 97,
99
Maurice, F.D., 127
McGann, Jerome J., 7, 103, 106, 107, 108
McKay, Kenneth M., 25, 29
Milnes, Richard Monckton, 105
Milton, John, 29, 30, 31, 70, 86, 87, 146,
162
Paradise Lost, 16, 32, 36, 37, 86, 138,
146, 162
Paradise Regained, 29, 30, 31
MLA International Bibliography, 5
Montalvo, Garcia Rodríguez de
Amadis de Gaula, 47
Murray, Gilbert, 125
Mustard, Wilfred P., 4, 11, 139, 141, 162
Napoleon I ,11
Napoleon III, 90, 91, 95
Nebuchadrezzar, 37, 38
Nero, 32, 34
Nicolson, Harold, 3, 6, 7, 10, 46, 63, 79
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 33, 40, 139
Birth of Tragedy,The, 116
“Homer’s Contest,” 33
Human, All-Too-Human, 33
Nitchie, Elizabeth, 12, 19
Norton Anthology of English Literature,The,
3, 105
O’Neill, James Norman, 8, 126
Orwell, George, 104
Ossian, 38, 39, 41, 43, 48
“Carthon,” 149
“Croma,” 42, 94
“Song of the Five Bards,The,” 38, 41,
42, 43, 94
Owen, Wilfred, 15
Paden, W.D., 11, 21, 43, 47, 87
Parry, Milman, 73
Index
Passage, Charles E., 19, 88
Pattison, Robert, 4, 8, 11, 12, 128, 137,
138
Pennington, W.H., 104
Phillpotts, Bertha, 162
Pindar, 12
Pinion, F.B., 6, 45, 57, 59, 89
Pitt,Valerie, 7, 13, 16, 58, 79, 85, 92, 97,
105, 114, 125, 126, 127
Platizky, Roger S., 136
Poston, Lawrence, 152, 161
Pope, Alexander, 11, 70
Priestley, F.E.L., 45, 139
Putnam, Michael C.J., 140, 146
Racine, Jean
Alexandre le Grand, 35
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 80
Rawnsley, R.D.B., 12
Redpath, Theodore, 4, 6, 70, 73, 79
Reed, John R., 144, 150, 160, 163
Ricks, Christopher, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 21, 22,
25, 26, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37, 40, 43,
47, 50, 51, 55, 58, 59, 64, 65, 66,
67, 69, 71, 72, 76, 77, 80, 81, 86,
87, 91, 92, 94, 96, 97, 100, 101,
102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 113,
123, 127, 130, 137, 138, 145, 146,
147, 149, 154, 156, 157, 162, 165
Robson, W.W., 12
Robertson, J.M., 51, 56
Rollins, Charles, 43
Rosenberg, John, 139, 142
Ruskin, John, 127
Ryals, Clyde de L., 5, 13, 57, 142, 157
Sallust
Conspiracy of Catiline,The, 87
Jugurthine War,The, 87
Sassoon, Siegfried, 15
Schein, Seth L., 17, 19, 22, 23, 72
Scott, Patrick, 75
Scott, Sir Walter, 11, 19, 40
Harold the Dauntless, 19
Index
Lady of the Lake,The, 25
Lay of the Last Minstrel,The, 40
Marmion, 47
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 47, 48
Selby, John, 102
Shakespeare, William
Hamlet, 40, 41, 124
Henry IV Part I, 28
Henry V, 35, 37
King Lear, 123, 151
Macbeth, 108, 123
Shannon, Edgar F., 8, 15, 103, 120
Sharma, Tika Ram, 13, 57
Shaw, W.David, 97, 99
Shelley, P.B., 14, 87, 164
Laon and Cythna, 164
Sinfeld, Alan, 127, 165
Sjoestedt, M.L., 17
Skallagrimsson, Egil, 39, 151
Solomon, Stanley J., 145
Spedding, James, 59
Spenser, Edmund, 47
Sperber, Hans, 6, 7, 80–82
Spiller, Brian, 70
Staines, David, 57, 139
Steiner, George, 72
Steytler, Charles, 9
Suetonius
Lives of the Caesars, 34
Swinburne, A.C., 7
Tennyson, Alfred
“Achilles over the Trench,” 20, 69,
72–73, 147
“Armageddon,” 11
“Audley Court,” 71
“Babylon,” 20, 43–45, 142, 147, 164
“Ballad of Oriana,The,” 6, 20, 21,
45–50, 61, 99, 140, 142, 149
“Battle of Brunanburh,” 10, 20, 75–79,
80, 114, 148
“Boädicea,” 6, 10, 20, 63–69, 72, 80,
141, 142, 143, 144, 147, 164
“Britons, GuardYour Own,” 7, 20,
90–91, 93, 141, 143, 154, 163
185
“Captain, The,” 6, 20, 51–56, 62, 81,
111
“Charge of the Heavy Brigade at
Balaclava,The,” 7, 8, 10, 13, 20,
60, 75, 85, 109–113, 115, 148,
156, 163, 164
“Charge of the Light Brigade,The,” 7,
8, 9, 10, 13, 20, 85, 89, 97,
102–110, 139, 164
“Crossing the Bar,” 81
“Dedicatory Poem to the Princess
Alice,” 20, 85, 115–116
“Defence of Lucknow,The,” 7, 20, 85,
114–116, 141, 142, 147, 162
“De Profundis,” 81
“Devil and the Lady, The,” 5
“Druid’s Prophecies,The,” 20, 32–34,
37, 38, 39, 141
“Epic,The,” 138
“Epilogue,” 13, 20, 60, 75, 110–112,
114, 144, 163
“Exhortation to the Greeks,” 20, 85,
86–87, 89, 163
“Expedition of Nadir Shah into
Hindostan,The,” 20, 34–36, 141
“God’s Denunciations against PharoahHophra,” 20, 37–38, 80, 141, 142,
164
“Hail Briton!” 52, 53
“Hands All Round!” 7, 10, 20, 93–94,
96, 141, 154
“Harp, Harp, the Voice of Cymry,” 10
“Havelock,” 109
Idylls of the king, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12,
20, 21, 47, 58, 68, 91, 96, 136,
137–164
“Balin and Balan,” 141, 142,
151–153, 154, 158
”Coming of Arthur,The,” 95,
139, 141–147, 148, 154, 155,
157, 160, 161
“Dedication,” 68, 142, 164
“Garath and Lynette,” 98, 139,
145, 147–148, 150, 158
186
“Geraint and Enid,” 148–151
“Guinevere,” 144, 145, 147,
160–161
“Holy Grail,The,” 56, 58, 59, 61,
144, 153, 155, 156–158, 159,
164
“Lancelot and Elaine,” 141, 142,
149, 154, 155–156
“Last Tournament,The,” 157,
159–160
“Marriage of Geraint,The,” 145,
148–151, 156
“Merlin and Vivien,” 143,
135–155, 160, 163
“Passing of Arthur,The,” 11, 58,
81, 115, 141, 142, 144, 145,
146, 148, 156, 161–162, 163,
165
“Pellaes and Ettare,” 158–159
“To the Queen,” 137
“Ilion, Ilion,” 145
“I loving Freedom for herself,” 52
In Memoriam, 97, 100, 112
“Kraken,The,” 74
“Little bosom not yet cold,” 9
“Locksley Hall,” 10, 120
“Lotus Eaters,The,” 31
“Love and Duty,” 57, 71
“Love thou thy land,” 52
“Lucretius,” 152
“Mariana,” 46
Maud, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 20, 21, 47, 49,
53, 91, 117, 119–136, 140, 141,
143, 146, 147, 151, 152, 153, 163,
165
“Merlin and the Gleam,” 154, 163
“Mithridates Presenting Berenice with
the Cup of Poison,” 21
“Montenegro,” 7, 9
“Morte d’Arthur,” 164
Mungo the American, 11
“Northern Farmer,The,” 10
“Ode on the Death of the Duke of
Wellington,” 7, 10, 20, 85, 96–102,
105, 109, 110, 142, 164
Index
“Of old sat Freedom,” 52
“Oh! Ye wild winds that roar and rave,”
20, 38, 41–43, 94, 147, 148
“Old Chieftain,The,” 20, 38–41, 60,
62, 94, 148, 161
“Old Sword,The,” 5, 20, 21–25, 26,
120, 147, 148, 163
“Persia,” 5–6, 20, 29–32, 65
Poems by Two Brothers, 5, 21, 50, 138
Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, 6
“Poet,The,” 60
“Poet’s Mind,The,” 60
“Poland,” 7, 16
Princess,The, 9, 41, 61, 62, 63
“Prologue to General Hamley,” 8, 20,
110–112
“Recollections of the Arabian Nights,”
45
“Revenge,The,” 6, 7, 20, 51, 79–83,
114, 141, 142, 165
“Rizpah,” 120
“Sailor Boy,The,” 120
“Sir Galahad,” 6, 20, 56–61, 99, 142,
144, 164
“Specimen of a Translation of the
Iliad,” 6, 20, 69–72
“St. Agnes’ Eve,” 57, 58, 59
“St. Simeon Stylites,” 57, 58
“Suggested by Reading an Article in a
Newpaper,” 20, 94–96, 154
“Third of February, 1852,The,” 20,
87, 91–93, 94, 96, 141, 143, 149,
163
“Timbuctoo,” 11
“Time:An Ode,” 21
“Tiresias,” 71, 165
“Tithonus,” 71
“Tourney,The,” 20, 61–63, 99, 142,
148, 163
“Ulysses,” 22, 70, 98, 109, 135
“Vale of Bones,The,” 5, 20, 25–29, 34,
49, 80, 140, 163
“Voyage,The,” 53
“What Thor Said to the Bard,” 10
Index
“Written during the Convulsions in
Spain,” 20, 85, 87–89, 147
Tennyson, Charles (A.T.’s grandson), 10,
12, 14, 16, 46, 58, 79, 85, 89, 96,
102
Tennyson, Hallam, 21, 52, 75–78, 91,
137, 147
Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, 9,
10–11, 12, 13, 14, 52, 59, 69, 81,
91, 93, 104, 111, 124, 137
Tennyson d’Eyncourt, Charles, 103
Theocritus, 12, 137, 138, 139, 149
Idylls, 138, 149
Thomas, Paul Edmund, 148
Thomson, Alastair W., 7, 45, 46, 79, 97,
99
Thompson, Elizabeth Southerdon, 104
Tolkien, J.R.R., 90, 108
Torrijos, José Maria, 14
Tuckerman, Frederick Goddard, 104
Turner, Paul, 8, 12, 14, 15, 59, 63, 64,
120, 124, 138, 139, 140, 146
Twain, Mark
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 46
Vanden Bossche, Chris R., 119, 126
Van Dyke, Henry, 5, 6, 127
Virgil, 4, 10, 11, 12, 18, 19, 31, 47, 61,
63, 91, 99, 106, 121, 138, 139,
187
141, 156, 162, 165
Aeneid, 4, 5, 16, 17, 18, 20, 22, 27, 31,
33, 41, 47, 63, 66, 91, 98, 99, 111,
135, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 145,
146, 155, 159, 162
Waddington, Patrick, 85, 104
Wellington, Duke of, 11, 96–102, 147,
163
Whitman, Cedric H., 17, 18, 22, 60, 61,
79, 101, 102, 162
Whittier, John Greenleaf, 51
Williams, R.D., 17, 19
Wilson, John, 6, 46
Wolseley, Garnet, 127
Woodham-Smith, Cecil, 102, 106, 108,
113
Wordsworth,William, 25, 81, 100, 101,
162
“Home at Grasmere,” 164
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” 101
Prelude,The, 162
“Tintern Abbey,” 25
“To Enterprise,” 100
Yeats, W.B., 15, 62
Explorations 62
Zola, Émile, 81