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Tennyson's Garden of Art: A Study of the Hesperides
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
One of the chief reasons the great Victorian poets are not read with the attention they deserve is that the modern reader is often baffled by the idiom of their more successful poems. We do not know just how to take them, and we find it difficult to do justice to the richness of their language. The case of Tennyson has been particularly unfortunate. In order to discover those poems capable of exciting the contemporary sensibility, one must first discount the adverse critical reaction. Though it may have been historically necessary, it managed to eclipse the Laureate for at least a generation. But having made this effort, one must still penetrate the formidable and misleading mask of household poet which the later Tennyson adopted.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1952
References
1 It was first reprinted by Hallam Tennyson in Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son (London, 1897), I, 61-65. Tennyson's son explained that it was republished “in consequence of a talk I had with my father, in which he regretted that he had done away with it from among his ‘Juvenilia’.” The poem may also be found in J. Churton Collins, ed. Early Poems of Tennyson (London, 1900), and in W. J. Rolfe, ed. The Poetic and Dramatic Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson, Cambridge Ed. (Boston, 1898). My quotations from The Hesperides follow the text of the Memoir (chiefly because I prefer its punctuation) ; other poems of Tennyson, however, are quoted from Rolfe's edition.
2 See The Periplus of H anno, trans. Wilfred H. Schoff (Philadelphia, 1912). The passage which Tennyson seems to have had particularly in mind is para. 14, pp. 4-5.
3 A. S. P. Woodhouse, “The Argument of Milton's Cornus,” UTQ, xi (1941), 66.
4 Theog. 215; 274-275; 518. The reference to Hesiod in Servius on Virgil Aen.iv.484 is also relevant. Somewhat different versions of the myth are given in Diodorus Siculus, iv.27, and in Apollodorus, Lib. ii.v.11. There is an amplification of the legend in Hyginus, Poet. Astron. ii.3. See Hesiod, trans. H. G. Evelyn-White, Loeb Ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), p. 95.
5 See, e.g., The Mystic, The Poet's Mind, and, for a negative statement, A Character.
6 As it is put in the song: “Guard the apple night and day, / Lest one from the East come and take it away” (41-42).
7 Donne's Primrose provides an elegant example of the poetic use of this conception:
Since all
Numbers are odde, or even, and they fall
First into this, five, women may take us all.
In Donne's poem, however, the number is chiefly a representation of the senses, upon which love must be based, and in this respect his treatment offers an interesting gloss on Tennyson's symbolism.
8 From a letter of 1831, quoted in Memoir, i, 501.
9 Tennyson's tree symbol resembles the image in the concluding lines of Yeats's Among School Children: “O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer, / Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?” For Yeats the tree symbolized the state of glory in life and the reconciliation of antinomies—implications that might profitably be brought to bear on The Hesperides.
10 I am quoting the final revision of 1842. In the original version the second line read: “The poet's mind is holy ground” (Rolfe, p. 795).
11 The Origin of Pagan Idolatry (London, 1816), iii, 231. There is no convincing evidence that Tennyson read Faber. The possibility of an influence from this source was first suggested by W. D. Paden in his stimulating essay, Tennyson in Egypt: A Study of the Imagery in His Earlier Work (Lawrence, Kans., 1942).
12 See Edgar F. Shannon, “Tennyson and the Reviewers,” PMLA, lviii (1943), 187.
15 New Monthly Mag., xxxvii (1833), 72; The London Rev., i (1835), 422; The Christian Examiner, xxiii (1838), 325.
14 Hallam's article, “On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson,” originally appeared in Moxon's Englishman's Magazine, Aug. 1831, pp. 616-628. It has most recently been reprinted in The Writings of Arthur Hallam, ed. T. H. Vail Motter (New York: MLA, 1943), pp. 182-198.