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‘The Exile's Harp’: Tennyson's Lost World of Music

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2011

John Hughes
John Hughes
Affiliation:
University of Gloucestershire
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Extract

From the earliest reviews, the trope of music has shaped the image of Tennyson for critics and readers. Tennyson's talent is one that joins voice and ear:

Nature […] has taught Mr. Tennyson to sing as a poet should sing, – she has taught him to throw his whole soul into his harmonies.

He has a fine ear for melody and harmony too – and rare and rich glimpses of imagination. He has – genius.

Type
Articles
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , November 2006 , pp. 113 - 135
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2006

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References

1 From a review of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, in New Monthly Magazine, xxx (Mar. 1831): 111–12Google Scholar.

2 North, Christopher (John Wilson), ‘Noctes Amrosianae’, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (Feb. 1832)Google Scholar . Cited by Shannon, Edgar Finley, Tennyson and the Reviewers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952): 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

3 ‘a poet of fancy, feeling, and imagination; gifted with a deep sense of the beautiful’, from review of Poems, Athenaeum (1 Dec. 1832): 772Google Scholar .

4 W. J. Fox, Review of James White's The Village Poor-House. Cited by Shannon, , Tennyson and the Reviewers: 9Google Scholar .

5 Fox, W. J., Review of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical and Poems (Jan. 1833). Cited byGoogle ScholarShannon, , Tennyson and the Reviewers: 17–18Google Scholar .

6 Shannon, , Tennyson and the Reviewers: 6Google Scholar.

7 Athenaeum (6 Apr. 1844): 318. Many of these reviewers clearly anticipate themes in Isobel Armstrong's influential conception of Tennyson's revisions too, in citing how Tennyson's sought to overcome what were perceived as his languorous tendencies to song, introspection and ‘memories of the past’, and his need to show how poetry might engage with the world, and ‘social injustice’ in a phrase from a review in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, cited by Shannon, , Tennyson and the Reviewers: 88Google Scholar .

8 SeeGoogle ScholarShannon, , Tennyson and the Reviewers: 39–59Google Scholar .

9 Ricks, Christopher, Tennyson (London: Palgrave, 1989): 231CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

10 Rawnsley, W. F., ‘Personal Recollections of Tennyson’, in Page, Norman, ed., Tennyson: Interviews and Recollections (London: Macmillan, 1983): 2Google Scholar .

11 Peter Levi's briskly dismissive remarks reflect what seems a prevalent lack of enthusiasm: ‘I have not attempted to trace all the musical settings of his verse: I know the few that are famous, and have heard some of Lear's, though they do not encourage one to probe any further. Hallam Tennyson's friend Stanford is an improvement, but I have never heard for example the lute music Elgar wrote for Tennyson's play Queen Mary’ ( Levi, Peter, Tennyson (London: Macmillan, 1993): 6Google Scholar ). Tennyson himself too, in Robert Martin's phrase, ‘hated having his poems set to music’ ( Martin, Robert, Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (London: Oxford University Press, 1980): 397Google Scholar ) as is well known, and the waltz arrangement of ‘Come into the Garden, Maud’ is probably the most notorious case. Again, he was embarrassed by the song-cycle, The Window or The Song of the Wrens, on which he had collaborated. Interestingly enough, Leonee Ormond points out that Beethoven's song-cycle, An die ferne Geliebte, was one inspiration for The Window (see her Alfred Tennyson: A Literary Life (London: Macmillan, 1993): 172Google Scholar ). In Levi's words, ‘he writhed and wriggled over some pretty but alas silly light verses he had written being set to music by Sullivan, and then made public’ ( Levi, , Tennyson: 259Google Scholar ).

12 Many have commented that the tender modulations and legato effects of sound in Tennyson's lines make actual music redundant or superfluous, the poetry remaining sealed within its own circumscribed, quasi-musical realm. Charles Villiers Stanford made similar points from a musician's viewpoint: ‘The secret of the harmony of his verse lay in his incomparable ear for the juxtaposition of vowels and the exact suitability of each consonant. This makes it difficult to set his poems adequately to music. The music is so inborn in the poetry itself that it does not ask for notes to make incompleteness complete, and music is set to it rather for additional illustration rather than from inherent necessity’ ( Stanford, Charles Villiers, ‘A Composer Remembers’, in Page, , ed., Tennyson: Interviews and Recollections: 129Google Scholar ). Ironically perhaps, Stanford was one of the few musicians whom Tennyson actually asked to write accompanying music for his work, for Queen Mary in 1876. Tellingly, though, Stanford was a friend of Hallam Tennyson, and it is a similar principle of personal association, rather than musical pleasure in itself, that seemed to have led to Tennyson's sanctioning of the settings by his wife, Emily, and Edward Lear. Martin writes of Lear's visit to Farringford in October 1855, when he would sing ‘in his high untrained voice his own settings of “Mariana”, “The Lotos-Eaters”, and “Oh! that ’twere possible” with an intensity that made his lack of technique unimportant and made even Tennyson approve of the songs’ ( Martin, , Tennyson: 397Google Scholar ). Also, at his funeral, in Leonee Ormond's words, ‘Emily was not present, but the choir sang her setting of “Silent Voices”’ ( Ormond, Leonee, Alfred Tennyson: 199Google Scholar ).

13 Knowles, James, ‘A Personal Reminiscence’, in Page, , ed., Tennyson: Interviews and Recollections: 90Google Scholar

14 Martin, , Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart: 39Google Scholar .

15 Knowles, , ‘A Personal Reminiscence’, in Page, , ed., Tennyson: Interviews and Recollections: 90Google Scholar .

16 Ibid., 90.

17 Lines 228–31, Tennyson, Alfred, The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Ricks, Christopher (London: Longman, 1969): 1602Google Scholar . Hereafter, citations of quotations from this edition will be found in the text in the format (line no(s)./page no(s).

18 Cited in Page, , ed., Tennyson: Interviews and Recollections: ixGoogle Scholar .

19 Carlyle, Thomas, ‘A Bit of Chaos’, in Page, , ed., Tennyson: Interviews and Recollections: 16.Google Scholar

20 Cited by Martin, , Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart: 393Google Scholar .

21 In a similar vein, Palgrave described the distinctive range, and ‘great sostenuo power’ of Tennyson's ‘voice and delivery’, and ‘the portamento so justly dear to Italian vocalists […] the ample resonant utterance’ (cited by Page, , ed., Tennyson: Interviews and Recollections: ixGoogle Scholar ). Lincolnshire friend, W. F. Rawnsley, wrote that the ‘sound of a line of poetry (for poetry to be fully understood, should be read aloud) was very much to him; and he certainly was unmatched in his use of vowels and in the melody of his verse’ (in ‘Personal Recollections of Tennyson’, Page, , ed., Tennyson: Interviews and Recollections: 21Google Scholar ). James Knowles refers to Tennyson's reading as like ‘musical thunder’ ( ‘A Personal Reminiscence’, in Page, , ed., Tennyson: Interviews and Recollections: p93Google Scholar ). As for the recitations themselves, there are numerous anecdotes that indicate their singularity, their gravity, power and flashes of levity, and how crucial metre and phrasing were to the full effect. Leonee Ormond, for example, summatively notes how the adoption of quantitative metre accentuated the ‘sing-song’ nature of these recitations, so that the words would be stressed ‘in terms of time, like music, rather than numerically, by beat’ ( Ormond, Leonee, Alfred Tennyson: 155Google Scholar ).

22 Blanche Warre-Cornish, ‘Memories of Tennyson’, first published in the London Mercury, 1921–22, and reprinted in Page, ed., Tennyson: Interviews and Recollections: 11.

23 Warre-Cornish, , ‘Memories of Tennyson’: 114Google Scholar . One could give many other examples of Tennyson's indifference to music. Warre-Cornish goes on to relate Tennyson's remarks after hearing Joachim (who would often play for the Tennysons) that ‘A great deal of music means nothing to me, but I can feel the poetry of the bowing’ (Ibid., 11 ). In fact, Tennyson's family were musical. Frederick was an accomplished musician, while his father and sister played the harp, and Charles several instruments. This milieu affected Alfred to the degree that he seems to have played the flute in early life, but there is little apparently recorded of this in later life ( Levi, Peter, Tennyson: 21Google Scholar ).

24 The Athenaeum reviewer who referred, on 6 April 18, to the lack in Tennyson of ‘the manly courage, the cheerful faith and hope’ was rehearsing an already well-worn position about the parlous masculinity, and the feminine tendencies, of the poet's work. These were recurrent strains in the earliest reviews, most notoriously in the journalism of Edward Bulwer ( ‘The Faults of Recent Poets’, New Monthly Magazine, 37 (Jan. 1833): 69–7)Google Scholar , Wilson, John or ‘Christopher North’ (Review of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 31 (May 1832): 721– 1Google Scholar ), and Croker, J. W. (Review of Poems in the Quarterly Review (April 1833)Google Scholar . These articles are reprinted in Tennyson: The Critical Heritage, ed. John Jump: 66–83. These topics continued to attract comment amongst celebrated Victorians such as Hopkins, Manley (Review of Poems, 1842 and The Princess, The Times (12 Oct. 1848): 3Google Scholar ), and Kingsley, Charles (Review of Poems, 1842 and The Princess, in Fraser's Magazine, 42 [Sep. 1850]: 245–55Google Scholar ). More recently, of course, these issues have attracted a widening range of critical discussions, from the Jungian reading of Stevenson, Lionel (‘The “High-Born Maiden” Symbol in Tennyson’, in Critical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson, ed. Killham, John (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960): 126–36Google Scholar ) to the notable feminist readings of Millett, Kate (Sexual Politics, London: Abacus, 1971Google Scholar ), Christ, Carol (‘Victorian Masculinity and the Angel in the House’, in Vincinus, Martha, ed. The Widening Sphere (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1977): 146–62Google Scholar ), and ‘The Feminine Subject in Victorian Poetry’, English Literary History 54/2 (1987): 385–401CrossRefGoogle Scholar ), and Stone, Marjorie (‘Genre Subversion and Gender Inversion: The Princess and Aurora Leigh’, Victorian Poetry, 25/2 (1987): 101–27Google Scholar . Issues of homosexuality and cross-gender identification have also been variously interrogated or sounded by Ricks, Christopher (Tennyson (London: Palgrave, 1989CrossRefGoogle Scholar )), Sinfield, Alan (Alfred Tennyson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986Google Scholar )), and Craft, Christopher (‘“Descend and Touch and Enter”: Tennyson's Strange Manner of Address’, Genders, 1 (spring 1988): p83–101Google Scholar ). Finally, Cronin, Richard (Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824–1840, London: Palgrave (2002CrossRefGoogle Scholar )) has speculated on the relation between the female personae of Tennyson's earliest work and the feminized poetics that characterized the literary culture of the 1830s. This was a point made famously by Alfred Austin in 1869, and discussed by Christ in ‘The Feminine Subject in Victorian Poetry’: 386. At this point it is worth acknowledging too, the new impetus that has been given to these discussions by the work of critics such as Weliver, Phyllis (Woman Musicians in Victorian Fiction (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000Google Scholar )) and Gillett, Phyllis (Musical Women in England, 1879–1914 (London: Macmillan, 2000CrossRefGoogle Scholar )). These critics have studied the sharp divisions and inflections of gender that marked music-making and musical expression in Victorian society, and have in different ways identified these as being, in important ways, predominantly female pursuits.

25 Ironically enough, an anonymous essayist, bewailing the absence of contemporaneous poets, wrote in 1826, ‘We have lived in an age of poetry, probably survived it. Of the men, some indeed remain, but the poets, where are they? Some are dead and some are gone into captivity, – “they have hanged their harps upon the willows”’. ‘An Essay on the Poetic Character of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and on the Probable Tendency of His Writings’, Metropolitan Quarterly Review, 2 (1826): 191Google Scholar .

26 Saintsbury, George, A History of English Prosody, vol. III (London: Macmillan, 1923): 192Google Scholar . Compare here too Arthur Henry Hallam's description of Tennyson's capacity to match ‘lyrical measures and exquisite modulation of harmonious words and cadences to the swell and fall of the feelings expressed’ (Unsigned review, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical in Englishman's Magazine (Aug. 1831). Reprinted in Jump, ed., Tennyson: The Critical Heritage: 42).

27 Prins, Yopie, ‘Victorian Meters’ in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Bristow, Joseph (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 98Google Scholar .

28 Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's brilliant discussion of Tennysonian sympathy proceeds in ways that complement these emphases ( Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002Google Scholar )). He explores the ways in which Tennyson's poems both do and don’t end (as in ‘The Exile's Harp’ with its final word that nonetheless resounds). In dedicating themselves to ‘incomplete achievement and achieved incompleteness’ ( Douglas-Fairhurst, , Victorian Afterlives, 182Google Scholar ), they express an interiority that returns upon itself (to paraphrase Hallam) in endless self-visiting and acts of revision, and whose echoic features create ‘a set of echo-chambers for his readers to listen in on themselves’ and wherein they find their own subjectivities reflected and sounded (and, as it were, already remembered) by the words of the poem ( Douglas-Fairhurst, , Victorian Afterlives, 217Google Scholar ).

29 Exile, amid a threatening sense of personal disintegration, was a pattern that his early life particularly seemed to repeat, as in Robert Martin's description of his ‘discontent and restlessness’ from the early 1830s: ‘For the next eighteen years, particularly after Hallam's death, he was to be almost homeless, wandering from friend to friend, settling briefly with his family, then pulling up stakes and going off unexpectedly.’ ( Martin, Robert, Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart: 149Google Scholar .)

30 Here are the lines: ‘the barge with oar and sail/Moved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan/That, fluting a wild carol ere her death,/Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood/With swarthy webs’ (265–9/596–97).

31 Tennyson wrote of the poem that it ‘describes the soul of a youth who has given himself up to pleasure and Epicureanism. He is at length worn out and wrapt in the mists of saiety. Afterwards he grows into a cynical old man afflicted with the “curse of nature”, and joining in the Feast of Death. Then we see the landscape which symbolizes God, Law and the future life.’ ( Ricks, , ed., The Poems of Tennyson: 718Google Scholar ).

32 There are many such trumpets in Tennyson, as in ‘The Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava’, where Scarlett bids his trumpeter ‘sound to the charge’ (8–9/1305) that led to the decimation of the three hundred of the ‘Brave Inniskillens and Greys’ (33/1306). In ‘Epilogue’ the ‘Poet’, in dialogue with the pacific Irene, identifies his own art with the trumpet's call, as he crowns ‘with song/The warrior's noble deed’ (35–6/309), since ‘The song that nerves a nation's heart,/Is in itself a deed’ (79–80/1310).

33 In these ways, then, the muted, singular evocations of musical solace in In Memoriam need to be considered always within the seismic shifts, the evolutionary conflicts and jumps in mood and viewpoint. As such, the representation of music in the poem points to the constitutive experience of self-disjunction within it, and sets it apart from the more determined affirmation of the poem written for the Princess of Wales after the death of her son, the Duke of Clarence, in December 1891 (with its final thumping exclamation, ‘Mourn in hope!’). Once again the vocabularies of light and dark mingle with images of music and death: ‘The face of Death is toward the Sun of Life,/His shadow darkens earth: his truer name/Is ‘Onward,’ no discordance in the roll/And march of that Eternal Harmony/ Whereto the worlds beat time, though faintly heard/Until the great Hereafter. Mourn in Hope!’ (12–17/1 50).

34 Alan Sinfield, Kate Millett and Christopher Craft are perhaps the most notable critics to have followed up these possibilities. For fuller reference, see footnote 24.

35 It is my intention to develop this argument more fully in its own terms, bearing in mind that many critics of course – such as Marion Shaw and Marjorie Stone – have made points that intersect with it. Stone in particular has offered a developed reading of Tennyson that relates to what I argue here though it is probably Christopher Ricks whose account of Tennyson in these areas (though implicit and cryptic in mode) appears closest to the more explicit view developed here.

36 ‘All these ladies […] evolved, like the camel, from my own consciousness’ he wrote suggestively ( Ricks, , ed., The Poems of Tennyson: 181Google Scholar ).

37 See for instance, Chapter 10 of Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Massumi, Brian (London: Athlone 1988Google Scholar ).

38 In ‘The Grasshopper’, the insect's unconscious and spontaneous ‘youth sunny and free’ (29/235) expresses itself in his ability to: ‘Carol clearly, bound along,/Soon the joy is over,/A summer of loud song’ (30–32/235). ‘What hast thou to do with evil/In thine hour of love and revel[…]?’ asks Tennyson (3 –5/235).

39 The erotic association of music and the sea can be seen again in ‘The Sea-Fairies’, who seek to entice the ‘weary mariners’ by their songs (1/255), with their ‘bosoms prest/To little harps of gold’ (3–4/255).The music that they sing is ‘shrill’ (6/255), but they promise the idyllic life of sweet kisses and ravishing natural beauty, as they ‘will sing to you all the day’ (20/256), where the rainbow hangs ‘over the islands free’ (26/256).

40 Ricks, , Tennyson: 180Google Scholar .

41 Ibid.: 183.

42 Ricks, , ed., The Poems of Tennyson: 741Google Scholar .