Part 1 (2/2)

A boy of eight who knew the contemporary poets was more or less precocious Tennyson also knew Pope, and wrote hundreds of lines in Pope's measure At twelve the boy produced an epic, in Scott's manner, of some six thousand lines He ”never felt himself more truly inspired,” for the sense of ”inspiration” (as the late Mr Myers has argued in an essay on the ”Mechanism of Genius”) has little to do with the actual value of the product At fourteen Tennyson wrote a drauesses), a piece from ”an unpublished drama written very early,” is published in the volu heaven, The rapid waste of roving sea, The fountain-pregnant mountains riven To shapes of wildest anarchy, By secret fire and ht storms That wander round their windy cones”

These lines are already Tennysonian There is the classical transcript, ”the varied earth,” daedala tellus There is the geological interest in the forces that shape the hills There is the use of the favourite word ”windy,” and later in the piece -

”The troublous autuinal in his manner

Byron made him blase at fourteen Then Byron died, and Tennyson scratched on a rock ”Byron is dead,” on ”a day when the whole world seemed darkened for me” Later he considered Byron's poetry ”too much akin to rhetoric” ”Byron is not an artist or a thinker, or a creator in the higher sense, but a strong personality; he is endlessly clever, and is now unduly depreciated” He ”did give the world another heart and new pulses, and so we are kept going” But ”he was dominated by Byron till he was seventeen, when he put hiether”

In his boyhood, despite the sufferings which he endured for a while at school at Louth; despite bullying fro boys and masters, Tennyson would ”shout his verses to the skies” ”Well, Arthur, I mean to be famous,” he used to say to one of his brothers He observed nature very closely by the brook and the thundering sea- shores: he was never a sports was in the hter He was seventeen (1826) when Poems by Two Brothers (himself and his brother Frederick) was published with the date 1827 These poe really Tennysonian What he had done in his own ht toopoet had already saving coold are found in the voluraphy The ballad suggested by The Bride of Lammermoor was not unworthy of Beddoes, and that novel, one cannot but think, suggested the opening situation in Maud, where the hero is a modern Master of Ravenswood in his relation to the rich interloping fahter To this point we shall return It does not appear that Tennyson was conscious in Maud of the suggestion from Scott, and the coincidence may be merely accidental

The Lover's Tale, published in 1879, was mainly a work of the poet's nineteenth year A few copies had been printed for friends One of these, with errors of the press, and without the intended alterations, was pirated by an unhappy ht out the work of his boyhood ”It ritten before I had ever seen Shelley, though it is called Shelleyan,” he said; and indeed he believed that his work had never been imitative, after his earliest efforts in the s in The Lover's Tale which would suggest that the poet here followed Shelley are the Italian scene of the story, the character of the versification, and the extraordinary luxuriance and exuberance of the iery {2} As early as 1868 Tennyson heard that written copies of The Lover's Tale were in circulation He then remarked, as to the exuberance of the piece: ”Allowance must be made for abundance of youth It is rich and full, but there arelove”

How truly Tennysonian thelines, full of the original cadences which were to become so familiar:-

”Here far away, seen froloo seas Hung in mid-heaven, and half way down rare sails, White as white clouds, floated from sky to sky”

The narrative in parts one and thich alone ritten in youth) is so choked with ies and descriptions as to be almost obscure It is the story, practically, of a love like that of Paul and Virginia, but the love is not returned by the girl, who prefers the friend of the narrator Like the hero of Maud, the speaker has a period of madness and illusion; while the third part, ”The Golden Supper”--suggested by a story of Boccaccio, and written in maturity-- is put in the mouth of another narrator, and is in a different style

The discarded lover, visiting the vault which contains the body of his lady, finds her alive, and restores her to her husband The whole finished legend is necessarily not a the author's masterpieces But perhaps not even Keats in his earliest work displayed enius Here and there come turns and phrases, ”all the chars later well known in pieces e to e years,”

and -

”Like to a low-hung and a fiery sky Hung round with RAGGED RIMS and burning folds”

And -

”Like sounds without the twilight realm of dreams, Which wander round the bases of the hills”

We also note close observation of nature in the curious phrase -

”Cries of the partridge like a rusty key Turned in a lock”

Of this kind was Tennyson's adolescent vein, when he left

”The poplars four That stood beside his father's door,”