Poetry notes

Tennyson published the poem in 1832 and revised it in 1842; he became Poet Laureate in 1850, the year of In Memoriam. The story is Homeric: Odysseus’s men taste the lotos and lose the will to sail. The first movement is narrative, in Spenserian stanzas (nine lines, the last an alexandrine). It is not a dramatic monologue. A narrator lands them; then they will sing as “we.”

The island is a downward smoke of streams, slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn (fine cloth, not grass), a slender fall that pauses as it drops. Air swoons. The moon stands full-faced above the valley. They sit on yellow sand between sun and moon and dream of fatherland, child, wife and slave — yet the sea, the oar, the barren foam all seem weary. Someone says they will return no more; they sing that their island home is far beyond the wave. Victorian labour (Unit 1) is already the thing they put down. Imagery is the method: sight, sound, the body’s droop. Personification is light (the air “breathing like one that hath a weary dream”). Hold the climate before the choric argument: always-afternoon, no clock, no voyage.

The second movement is headed CHORIC SONG: eight numbered sections of irregular lyric, not Spenserian stanza. The mariners speak together. Music falls softer than blown-rose petals; the stream is like a downward smoke; the lotos blooms below a barren peak. The question is Victorian even inside Homer: why are we weighed with heaviness while all things else have rest? Death is the end of life — why should we toil? Memory of wedded lives is dear, yet the labour of the oar is dearer to refuse.

They will live like gods who smile on men as men smile on the motes in a sunbeam — without care. The last cadence: slumber is sweeter than toil; the shore than mid-ocean labour; “O rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.” Unit 1’s utilitarianism is the collision: a gospel of useful work, and a lyric that blesses stopping. Do not call this Pre-Raphaelite because fruit is heavy. Do not call it a dramatic monologue: there is no silent envoy, only a chorus. Odysseus himself is almost erased after the first “Courage!” The exam answer names island, choric “we,” rest against labour, and the oath to lie reclined.

In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850) is the long elegy for Arthur Henry Hallam, Tennyson’s friend, dead in 1833. The set page is not the whole poem. Lyric 7 is three enclosed quatrains: iambic tetrameter, rhyme ABBA — the In Memoriam stanza. It is the poet’s own “I,” not a mask. Unit 1: elegiac lyric, not dramatic monologue.

The house is Hallam’s, in a London street. A hand that can be clasped no more. He cannot sleep; like a guilty thing he creeps at earliest morning to the door. “He is not here; but far away / The noise of life begins again.” Through drizzle, on the bald street, the blank day breaks. Grief is urban: bald, unlovely, ghastly rain — Industrial-age town, not a Romantic lake. The guilty creeping is the body still keeping an appointment the dead cannot keep. Three rooms: the dark house and the waiting heart; the creeping at dawn; the street that starts without him. Quote the hand, the unlovely street, and the blank day. Do not retell the whole of In Memoriam (131 numbered lyrics plus prologue and epilogue). The set page is this lyric only.

Lyric 54 is five ABBA tetrameter quatrains of willed faith. It is theodicy: a trust that good is the final goal of ill — of nature’s pangs, sins of will, defects of doubt, and taints of blood. Nothing walks with aimless feet; not one life is rubbish to the void; not a worm is cloven in vain; not a moth is shrivelled in a fruitless fire. Then the check: “Behold, we know not anything.” He can but trust that good shall fall at last to all, and every winter change to spring. “So runs my dream.” What is he? An infant crying in the night, crying for the light, with no language but a cry.

Unit 1’s Darwinism date must stay honest. This lyric is 1850; Origin of Species is 1859. After 1859 Victorian readers reread “pangs of nature” and “taints of blood” beside natural selection. You may say the age paired Tennyson with Darwin. You may not say the lyric quotes the Origin. Beside Lyric 7’s street-grief, 54 is the mind trying to keep Providence. Beside “Dover Beach,” it still trusts; Arnold’s sea has already withdrawn. The infant-cry is the honest last picture: faith without language. In an answer, walk trust → “we know not” → the child in the night. Do not stop at “the poet believes in God.”

Hopkins, Jesuit convert, wrote the lyric in 1880; the poems were not widely printed until 1918. It is the set page for inscape, instress and sprung rhythm (Unit 1). A knowing adult speaks to a child, Margaret, who grieves over Goldengrove unleaving. The address is close to the poet; it is not Browning’s criminal mask.

Leaves are like the things of man: she cares with fresh thoughts. As the heart grows older it will come to such sights colder; worlds of wanwood may lie leafmeal, and she will not spare a sigh — and yet she will weep and know why. Now the name of the sorrow does not matter: “Sorrow’s springs are the same.” Neither mouth nor mind has expressed what heart heard and ghost guessed. Last couplet: it is the blight man was born for; it is Margaret you mourn for. Inscape: the grove’s distinctive pattern is mortality in falling gold. Instress: that pattern strikes the child before she has the word death. Sprung rhythm: counted stresses, packed slack, the name Márgarét itself sprung; “It ís the blight” forces a lift on is. Do not call Arnold’s irregular beach-lines sprung. Do not call the grove a Darwin lesson: Hopkins still reads a meaningful thisness, not blind selection.

Arnold published the poem in 1867 (New Poems); he wrote as a schools inspector and as the critic of “culture” against machinery. The lyric is irregular in line-length, rhymed in patches, not sprung. A speaker at a window on the Dover strait addresses a beloved. The sea is calm; the moon lies fair; the night-air is sweet. Then the grating roar of pebbles which the waves draw back and fling: an eternal note of sadness.

Sophocles heard the same ebb on the Aegean as human misery. Arnold hears the withdrawal of Faith — Houghton’s Victorian doubt after science and the machine age. The world that seems a land of dreams has neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain. Last picture:

The one human stay is “Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!” It is lyric address, not a Duke’s bargain with an envoy. Post-Origin (1867) it is the set spiritual-crisis poem; Tennyson 54 still trusts a spring. Yeats’s later centre that cannot hold is a harsher night still. Quote the Sea of Faith, the girdle, and the ignorant armies. Do not call it a nature ode because there is a moon.

Browning printed the poem in Dramatic Lyrics (1842). Fifty-six lines of iambic pentameter couplets, so enjambed that the rhyme is half-hidden — talk, not snap. This is Unit 1’s dramatic monologue: one speaker who is not the poet; a silent auditor (the Count’s envoy); a revealing moment; a character who gives himself away. The Duke of Ferrara shows a portrait by Frà Pandolf. The duchess looks as if she were alive. A spot of joy; a heart too soon made glad; she ranked the Duke’s nine-hundred-years-old name with a sunset, a bough of cherries, a white mule. He would not stoop to explain. “I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together.” He now treats of the next marriage and of the dowry, as if still talking of art. Last gesture: Neptune taming a sea-horse, bronze by Claus of Innsbruck — another owned rarity, like the painted wife.

Irony: we hear courtesy, taste, connoisseurship; we infer murder and collection. Stoop is the Duke’s keyword: he would not stoop to instruct her; he will not stoop now. The envoy’s silence is the point — the next bride’s family is being shown the rule. Do not retell a detective plot beyond the commands. Do not call Tennyson’s mariners this form. In an answer: speaker, listener, stoop, commands, Neptune. That is the whole machine.

Yeats wrote the lyric in 1919, after the First World War and during the Irish troubles; it appeared in 1920. It is prescribed on this nineteenth-century paper as the last poet of Unit 2. It is not Victorian reassurance. Two verse paragraphs, largely loose pentameter. A gyre is Yeats’s image of history as a widening spiral (two cones turning against each other in his system). The falcon circles so far out that it cannot hear the falconer: civilisation has flown beyond the centre that once steered it. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed; the blood-dimmed tide is loosed; the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction; the worst are full of passionate intensity.

The second movement turns from the present break to a vision drawn from Spiritus Mundi — Yeats’s name for the store of images in the world’s soul, from which a seer pulls a picture he did not invent. He sees a desert shape: lion body, head of a man, slow thighs, while indignant desert birds reel. Twenty centuries of stony sleep (the Christian age after the Bethlehem cradle) were vexed to nightmare. The “Second Coming” is not a gentle Christ; it is a rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. Beside Arnold, the armies are no longer only ignorant; the centre itself fails. Beside Tennyson 54, there is no infant crying for light — there is a beast being born. Use Yeats when the question is this poem, or “poetry on this paper” as a late contrast. Do not swallow 1919 into 1837–1901. Do not call it a dramatic monologue: no auditor in a room, only a vision. Name gyre, falcon, Spiritus Mundi, and the beast.