The poet W. H. Auden once said of our poet today, Alfred Tennyson, that he was “all ear.” Auden actually held Tennyson’s poetry in high regard, but the backhanded compliment has stuck. Sometimes someone is so good at a special thing he does, people neglect to notice that he does a lot of other things too. John Wayne was so good at playing the man’s man in many a western and war movie, people began to take him for granted, and did not regard how much he could say by crinkling his eye, or cocking his head just a bit with the slightest wry grin. Watch his eyes and his hands in Rio Grande, when he and his estranged wife Kathleen, played by his frequent co-star and always dear friend Maureen O’Hara, stand at attention while his troops, on their own initiative, serenade them by singing “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.” Such people can become victims of their own success. That I think is the case with Tennyson.
Auden was right in this way. You could make a strong case that Tennyson, of all English poets, was best at the sound of his verse, best with lines that with their music would catch the reader’s ear and remain in the memory. But if we mean that the sound was just like honey dribbled over a slice of ordinary toast, we mistake the matter entirely. It was Tennyson’s gift to marry sound and sense so closely that we never feel that he is straining the strings of his instrument to do it, or that he is showing off, or that the music is distracting or overdone. So it is in the poem I’ve taken these excerpts from — his masterpiece “In Memoriam A. H. H.,” written to express his grief at the sudden death, abroad, of his dear friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who was engaged to marry the poet’s sister Emily, so that the young friends were destined to be brothers-in-law and family. The stanzas are all short, and so are the lines; four lines in a stanza, in iambic tetrameter. That’s a common meter for English songs, rhyming on lines two and four, ABCB, or rhyming on alternate lines, ABAB. But the last thing Tennyson wanted for his poem of grief was to sound easy and predictable. So he decided instead to rhyme ABBA — with a subtle effect of rounding off, returning to the beginning, but with a delay of those two interior lines in between. That, along with his habit of not ending a thought or a grammatical phrase at the end of a line, lends to the poem a meditative air; it slows us down a little; we’re led, often, by the slight surprise of that final line, to re-read the stanza, whose very form, though apparently simple, is not so familiar. Maestro!
In the first selection, the poet is standing on the shore, watching, as the ship comes into harbor, carrying the body of his deceased friend. He compares his tears to those of a widower who dreams of his beloved, and half asleep vaguely reaches for her familiar form, but she is not there. And yet, when the ship approaches, so strange it all seems to him, that he cannot half believe it; he can almost imagine that the ship is just bringing merchants’ goods, nothing more. Now then, is such a poet “all ear”? We might rather call him all heart, and a heart for a deeply honest and considerate mind. And lest we doubt his feelings, we should keep in mind that in the time before the brain-distractions of mass media, friendship could be most powerful indeed, and in Tennyson’s case, his friendship with Arthur Hallam was made more profound in that the two were going to become brothers, bound by their love for Emily, Tennyson with his brother-love for a younger sister, and Arthur with his love for a beautiful, intelligent, and gentle woman, the sister of his friend.
In the second selection, Tennyson notices the difference between two expressions of grief, two kinds of tears. The first kind can be expressed in words. They are like the servants in a household where the master, who has just died, lies in state. They loved him, no doubt of that. But they sum up their sorrow by saying that it will be hard to get another situation as good as the one they have just lost. But the grief that cannot be expressed? They are like the children who sit in stunned silence.
And here I had better let the poet’s words speak for themselves.
XIII Tears of the widower, when he sees A late-lost form that sleep reveals, And moves his doubtful arms, and feels Her place is empty, fall like these; Which weep a loss forever new, A void where heart on heart reposed, And, where warm hearts have pressed and closed, Silence, till I be silent too. Which weep the comrade of my choice, An awful thought, a life removed, The human-hearted man I loved, A spirit, not a breathing voice. Come Time, and teach me many years I do not suffer in a dream; For now so strange do these things seem, Mine eyes have leisure for their tears; My fancies time to rise on wing, And glance about the approaching sails, As though they brought but merchants' bales, And not the burthen that they bring. XX The lesser griefs that may be said, That breathe a thousand tender woes, Are but as servants in a house Where lies the master newly dead; Who speak their feeling as it is, And weep the fullness from the mind: "It will be hard," they say, "to find Another service such as this." My lighter moods are like to these, That out of words a comfort win; But there are other griefs within, And tears that at their fountain freeze; For by the hearth the children sit Cold in that atmosphere of Death, And scarce endure to draw the breath, Or like to noiseless phantoms flit: But open converse is there none, So much the vital spirits sink To see the vacant chair, and think, "How good! how kind! and he is gone."
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