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Lord Alfred Tennyson


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Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), English poet often regarded as the chief representative of the Victorian age in poetry. Tennyson succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate in 1850.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson was born on August 5, 1809 in Somersby, Lincolnshire. His father, George Clayton Tennyson, a clergyman and rector, suffered from depression and was notoriously absentminded. Alfred began to write poetry at an early age in the style of Lord Byron. After spending four unhappy years in school he was tutored at home. Tennyson then studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he joined the literary club 'The Apostles' and met Arthur Hallam, who became his closest friend. Tennyson published Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, in 1830, which included the popular "Mariana".

His next book, Poems (1833), received unfavorable reviews, and Tennyson ceased to publish for nearly ten years. Hallam died suddenly on the same year in Vienna. It was a heavy blow to Tennyson. He began to write "In Memoriam", an elegy for his lost friend - the work took seventeen years. "The Lady of Shalott", "The Lotus-eaters" "Morte d'Arthur" and "Ulysses" appeared in 1842 in the two-volume Poems and established his reputation as a writer.

After marrying Emily Sellwood, whom he had already met in 1836, the couple settled in Farringford, a house in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight in 1853. From there the family moved in 1869 to Aldworth, Surrey. During these later years he produced some of his best poems.

Among Tennyson's major poetic achievements is the elegy mourning the death of his friend Arthur Hallam, "In Memoriam" (1850). The patriotic poem "Charge of the Light Brigade", published in Maud (1855), is one of Tennyson's best known works, although at first "Maud" was found obscure or morbid by critics ranging from George Eliot to Gladstone. Enoch Arden (1864) was based on a true story of a sailor thought drowned at sea who returned home after several years to find that his wife had remarried. Idylls Of The King (1859-1885) dealt with the Arthurian theme.

In the 1870s Tennyson wrote several plays, among them the poetic dramas Queen Mary (1875) and Harold (1876). In 1884 he was created a baron.

Tennyson died at Aldwort on October 6, 1892 and was buried in the Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

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Recent Forum Posts on Lord Alfred Tennyson

Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead

I love old stories of knights, and warriors of the day of yore, and I am a huge fan of Arthurian lore, so I just loved this poem, and it really spoke to me. Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead Home they brought her warrior dead: She nor swooned, nor uttered cry: All her maidens, watching, said, 'She must weep or she will die.' Then they praised him, soft and low, Called him worthy to be loved, Truest friend and noblest foe; Yet she neither spoke nor moved. Stole a maiden from her place, Lightly to the warrior stepped, Took the face-cloth from the face; Yet she neither moved nor wept. Rose a nurse of ninety years, Set his child upon her knee-- Like summer tempest came her tears-- 'Sweet my child, I live for the

Posted By Dark Muse at Fri 25 Jul 2008, 11:49 AM in Tennyson, Lord Alfred || 3 Replies

Ulysses

Please explain critically this poem for me. Thanks

Posted By belatrixx at Sun 29 Jun 2008, 4:51 AM in Tennyson, Lord Alfred || 1 Reply

Please Help!! Morte D'arthur

hi ive been given the assignment on Morte d'Arthur and i would be really grateful if anyone could help me out. i have to identify in depth links and interpretations and all ive got so far is links to medievalism and links to Lady of Shallot. i will be happy for any replys, as i am currently stuck thankyou will x x x x

Posted By ionians11 at Sun 24 Feb 2008, 5:35 PM in Tennyson, Lord Alfred || 2 Replies

1882 tennyson's works

I recently was shopping in an arcade in a shopping centre in South Africa and came across this old book store. In it i found several books and works of some famous writers and poets. My grade 7 teacher often quoted from King Arthur but i never ever had the oppotunity to have studies any of Tennyson's works. I saw this leather bound book dated 1882 titled Tennyson's Works and was intrigued by the way it looked and smelled (at first). It was all original and I bought it for what I read made me weep. It was the poem "The Lover's Tale". This valuable book has brought me much joy. Does anyone know if there were any works published after this date that were not included therein?

Posted By nothing knew at Fri 8 Feb 2008, 2:16 PM in Tennyson, Lord Alfred || 0 Replies

Crossing The Bar Information/Meaning

Hello members, I am a new member and am sending this note out in search of anyone that might be able to give more information on the meaning of the poem "Crossing The Bar". I have a dear friend that just passed away the past Monday and her husband found this poem in her belongings with a note on it to read at her funeral. I have been asked to read and it and would really like to find as much information on the poem as possible. Thank you to anyone that can share with me this information. Shoewizard

Posted By shoewizard at Fri 1 Feb 2008, 5:33 PM in Tennyson, Lord Alfred || 3 Replies

Tennyson

Hi, I have to write something on "The Lady of shalott" , "Mariana" or Tennyson on the whole and something related to the psychoanalysis on the basis of freud Ideas, has anybody any Ideas that can help me?

Posted By Parnian at Thu 3 Jan 2008, 1:55 PM in Tennyson, Lord Alfred || 1 Reply

IN MEMORIAM: Some Thoughts

Thirty-nine days after Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the poet laureate of England, published his famous poem In Memoriam, the Báb was martyred in the barrack square of Tabriz Persia. In retrospect the poem could be seen as strangely prophetic. Tennyson had been working on the poem for 17 years. It is ostensibly a requiem for his friend Arthur Hallam who died suddenly at the age of 22 in 1833. But the poem is much more. For me, the poem serves as an epic model of the evolution of a poet’s feelings and attitudes over chronological time which flows in tandem with the unfolding of the verse. The feelings and attitudes in the poem In Memoriam are those of Tennyson’s. They shift and develop in relation to human nature, faith, science and eternal life. Given the very close publication date of the poem to the martyrdom of the Báb, 1 June 1850 to 9 July 1850, I have taken this poem of Tennyson’s and given it a personal twist in the direction of my own beliefs and experience. I onlydraw on Tennyson's epic work specifically on very few occasions. It is Tennyson's developmental poetic process that I model this prose-poem of mine–Ron Price with thanks to several internet sites on Tennyson and his poetry, 24 December 2007. Tennyson had a passion for the past, a longing for the days that had gone either the great ages of earlier history or the immediate past of his own life. This poetic nostalgia was at the heart of his poetry, his elegies, in his middle age and as he grew into late adulthood and old age. At the heart of his poetry was what Edmund Gosse said of Tennyson on his 80th birthday in 1889: a constancy, an unwearied and unwearying excellence and a greater variety of melodious language than any other man of his time. When Tennyson died in 1892 an era of poetry also died. I would like to be able to say this about my work but, alas and alack, I can only circle around the great in the hope that something will rub off and, for the most part, the process of rubbing off is mysterious and unquantifiable.-Ron Price with thanks to The Poetry Foundation Online, 23 December 2007. So long ago and when so young there began a sojourn not conceived by my youthful brain that played with sport and childhood gain. It knocked at door with hot soup and rose-hip tea and took me to lounge rooms across the town where life had found all there was back then. My life first heard of birds that flew and died in Akka long ago and men as well who died for youthful cause, a Cause I scarce had dreamed of then. I knew not what the tragic meant as post-war years tried to forget what could not be forgot and underwent a change much more profound in so short a time, shorter I mused than any in history’s long expanse of time. They and I little understood how frail was whatever confidence we had, then. Serious thinking had so many forms and analysis its degrees of force with some convulsive craving to be busy, distracted, then & now, with the triumph of sensation and the inability to sit quietly in one’s room. My life was just beginning its battle of ideas in a personal and public sphere where it was individuals made history modestly: parts in one great play with limits set for all aspirations in a frame; and that plea for moderation in all our efforts for change was finally being learned in one long elaborate pageant with rank on rank, generation on generation, succeeding each other in this contingent and complex world. They knew that they would and could move the world with that instrument, lever, device they had inherited from those two-God-men of recent times and I knew, too, and so filled the great vessel of this story with everything that memory and style could save from wrecks of my age, the destruction and recreation of its hopes for change and its desperation to believe that some fortuitous conjunction of events and plans could and would prevail in our time. I felt my book to be a long symphonic exercise in recollection in a chair placed to the side, but not raised high above the rushing waters in which I tried to knit my world’s multiple threads and history’s plot into a single pattern with its central images of departure and voyage, crisis and shipwreck, grace and unfoldment. Yes, history was being made as decisions piled high with contingencies and vortices of relative truths where dissent was a moral and intellectual contradiction to those who would be unifiers of humankind, all of humankind on this earthly plane. There was a new vitality and originality emerging slowly, providing context for the discussion of fundamental questions, solid thinking, helpful perspectives, a new kind of social criticism based on a refined standard of public discussion, an etiquette of expression and that moderation. No single formula could accurately describe the multiple changes and colours of my thought as it evolved in those towns in southern Ontario, on Baffin Island’s Arctic-white, in Australia’s scrub and semi-desert, vast savanna, mallee and down to old Van Diemen’s Land where it would end, or so it seemed, as I gazed out from my 63 year old eyes. I did indeed hold the truth of Him Who sings with one clear harp in diverse tones that men might rise on stepping stones of their dead selves to higher things. I had come to forecast these years and find in loss a gain to match and reach my hand thro’ time to catch the far-off interest of many tears. Love and grief renewed themselves under these cool metallic stars, sprang up intractably like some pesky weeds which, trampled on, yielded their heads but not their roots which fed insatiably in my heart’s thin soil and made their season in my fevered dreams from which I awoke so often with astute voracious tendrils at my throat and trembling palms gummy with mould and so many bits of knowledge, experience, traces of a traceless past. Love did not die, nor was hope blighted. The frail harvest of my desire did not fail before my mind’s accusing noon-bright stare, nor wither under reason’s chastening ice. Neglect it seemed, surprisingly fostered and dismayed, fertilized its thrusting growth. Yes, it thrived in the desert of my life even where that resolute verbena unarrestably insinuated itself through the socket of despair’s bleached skull and its fierce festoons, with their green and wiley, their richly coloured, succulence--astonished me with its ravishing vines that climbed all over the walls of my mystic Ivy League Life. And new dreams emerged with that symbol quintessential of my Western civilization restored in Greece, but rebuilt with new unprecedented zeal to capture timeless grandeur, meticulous analysis and theory, with vigorous efforts to combine rational clarity, elegance and homage to the divine in a mythic order in marbled-form, a serenity, calm, a magnificent faith, but this time utterly explainable within and without the traditions of academic discourse and a new centre of a perceptual universe, a single symbol of a world culture that has been emerging, some would argue, since homo sapiens sapiens walked around the earth. Yes, the dominant principle of this cycle: the political and religious unification of the planet for the welfare of its billions of citizenry—the world is but one country and humankind its citizens, so goes the litany without which the earth will not survive. For without symbolic norms and without many of the innate mechanisms of inhibitory instinct we would devour and kill each other with greater efficiency than other mammalians----but biology is not our destiny and training and education can transform us into something a little lower than the angels. This idea sensibly and insensibly came to occupy the centre of my ethos in the decades during which I grew from child to manhood, young to middle to late adulthood, decade after decade, epoch after epoch as billions died as millions had done before in wars to end all wars, or so the story went. And still the everyday, quotidian, went on, old orthodoxies played the game as if shibboleths could suffice in this new world for which new vocabularies had found their place—the essential revolution advanced quietly, hurriedly and unhurriedly, noticed by a few but hidden along the edges of society like that great force ofChrist had grown two millennia ago in a world, like ours, where millions had dropped out spiritually from a public sphere they found meaningless. The roots of faith, without which no society can long endure, had been severed-with them a deafening withdrawal, a continuing process of social breakdown, the discordant elements repelling each other into noisy decomposition. I watched all this from my place in classrooms across two continents, in lounge rooms and kitchens where I talked more talk and walked more walk to realize some nucleus, some new pattern, that had been slowly building for a century or more to build a society fit for people to live in—for I knew, as millions were coming to know, that something called humanity was being born and that it was no longer a private preserve for a few, a leisured class. To work, to produce, a world civilization that would in turn react on the character of the individual; to produce a just society whose purpose is unity, a dream we’ve had as far back as Plato’s Republic. Little did I know, then, in those earliest years, that mine was a quest for community and authority--with enough of Aristotle to protect us from Plato's terror. You might even call my search for a peculiar, gentler form of political mysticism or messianism. During all these decades of work, of jobs, marriages, relationships-- it is hard to overlook the fact that State-politics have become suffused by qualities formerly inherent only in the family or the church. Where there is widespread conviction that community has been lost, there will be a conscious quest for community and association that seems to promise the greatest moral refuge, security— and a withdrawal into privacies new community concept. They came to America long ago and regarded their New World as the “City Upon the Hill” –one of the most important themes in American discourse. Centuries later ideologies which gained entry into the academy in my embryonic sixties claimed that the fundamental intellectual principles of Western culture were illegitimate and must be overthrown. Terms like truth, good, evil, and soul could be discarded—so it was said--so it seemed back then. We cannot know where we are, much less where we are going, until we know where we have been. This seemed so very difficult to find out. The inherent and absolute incompatibility between liberty and equality—for equality is a chimera— was also difficult to understand. If all human beings in a population either are declared equal in their native strengths and rights, or else are persuaded to believe this, then the eventual realization of the hard truth of the matter that no amount of redistribution of wealth and status can ever obliterate inequality in one form or another must often take the form of covetousness mixed with resentment: that is envy. The only remedy for the poisons created by egalitarianism in a society is emphatically not ever-greater dosages of political redistribution of wealth and status, for such dosages worsen the disease, producing fevers of avarice and envy. No, the sole remedy for this pathology is the introduction and diffusion of individual liberty as a sovereign value—but with certain limits. The principle beneficiary of the universal, global, state, coming insensibly into existence, was the new universal church—which I, without the least effort had come to believe in as far back as my teens in those halcyon 1950s. This new Cause was prospering, right and left, unobtrusively, obscurely, not as much as its votaries liked during all these years of my life, these epochs: combining the virtues of classical civilization and those of a truly spiritual sensibility. But, let me say no more for this poem’s first phase. I will return to this chronological development. Ron Price 28 December 2007:crash:

Posted By Ron Price at Fri 28 Dec 2007, 5:08 AM in Tennyson, Lord Alfred || 0 Replies

"Nightingales warbled without..."

Do you know Tennyson's poem that starts like that? "Nightingales warbled without, whithin was weeping for thee, Shadows of three dead men walked in the walks with me; Shados of three dead men, and thou wast one of the three." And so on. Well, I would like to ask whether you know to whom he is referring. I believe it should be Hallam, but I have not found an explanation anywhere. And of course there are these two other men, of whom I have no idea. Do you?

Posted By Flambeau at Thu 22 Nov 2007, 5:47 PM in Tennyson, Lord Alfred || 2 Replies

Mariana

This is one of my faveorite works by Tennyson Mariana ‘Mariana in the moated grange.’ Measure for Measure. With blackest moss the flower-plots Were thickly crusted, one and all: The rusted nails fell from the knots That held the pear to the gable-wall. The broken sheds look’d sad and strange: Unlifted was the clinking latch; Weeded and worn the ancient thatch Upon the lonely moated grange. She only said, ‘My life is dreary, He cometh not,’ she said; She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!’ Her tears fell with the dews at even; Her tears fell ere the dews were dried; She could not look on the sweet heaven, Either at morn or eventide. After the flitting of the bats, When thickest dark did trance the sky, She drew her casement-curtain by, And glanced athwart the glooming flats. She only said, ‘The night is dreary, He cometh not,’ she said; She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!’ Upon the middle of the night, Waking she heard the night-fowl crow: The **** sung out an hour ere light: From the dark fen the oxen’s low Came to her: without hope of change, In sleep she seem’d to walk forlorn, Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn About the lonely moated grange. She only said, ‘The day is dreary, He cometh not,’ she said; She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!’ About a stone-cast from the wall A sluice with blacken’d waters slept, And o’er it many, round and small, The cluster’d marish-mosses crept. Hard by a poplar shook alway, All silver-green with gnarled bark: For leagues no other tree did mark The level waste, the rounding gray. She only said, ‘My life is dreary, He cometh not,’ she said; She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!’ And ever when the moon was low, And the shrill winds were up and away, In the white curtain, to and fro, She saw the gusty shadow sway. But when the moon was very low, And wild winds bound within their cell, The shadow of the poplar fell Upon her bed, across her brow. She only said, ‘The night is dreary, He cometh not,’ she said; She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!’ All day within the dreamy house, The doors upon their hinges creak’d; The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek’d, Or from the crevice peer’d about. Old faces glimmer’d thro’ the doors, Old footsteps trod the upper floors, Old voices called her from without. She only said, ‘My life is dreary, He cometh not,’ she said; She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!’ The sparrow’s chirrup on the roof, The slow clock ticking, and the sound Which to the wooing wind aloof The poplar made, did all confound Her sense; but most she loathed the hour When the thick-moted sunbeam lay Athwart the chambers, and the day Was sloping toward his western bower. Then, said she, ‘I am very dreary, He will not come,’ she said; She wept, ‘I am aweary, aweary, Oh God, that I were dead!’

Posted By Dark Muse at Mon 5 Nov 2007, 2:46 AM in Tennyson, Lord Alfred || 0 Replies

PLzzzzz help me wid my project on tithonus by lord tennyson

I am a fifteen year old boy and i urgently need to complete my project i need a detailed critical appreciation on tithonus Plzzz help me!!!!!

Posted By coolnwild_rahul at Fri 2 Nov 2007, 11:08 AM in Tennyson, Lord Alfred || 0 Replies

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