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The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson cover

The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson

Chapter 29: Love and Death
By Baron Alfred Tennyson Tennyson
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British LiteraturePoetry

About This Book

A scholarly edition assembles the poet's early lyrical, narrative, and occasional pieces alongside juvenilia and poems later suppressed, presenting a critical introduction, commentary, and extensive notes. The editor compares editions, records textual variants, and provides a transcript of poems omitted or revised, plus a full bibliography. Organized both chronologically and thematically, the volume traces the emergence of recurring motifs—memory, loss, love, art and myth—and illuminates the poet's evolving technique through careful collation and explanatory annotation.

Love and Death

First printed in 1830.

What time the mighty moon was gathering light[1]
Love paced the thymy plots of Paradise,
And all about him roll’d his lustrous eyes;
When, turning round a cassia, full in view
Death, walking all alone beneath a yew,
And talking to himself, first met his sight:
“You must begone,” said Death, “these walks are mine”.
Love wept and spread his sheeny vans[2] for flight;
Yet ere he parted said, “This hour is thine;
Thou art the shadow of life, and as the tree
Stands in the sun and shadows all beneath,
So in the light of great eternity
Life eminent creates the shade of death;
The shadow passeth when the tree shall fall,
But I shall reign for ever over all”.[3]

[1] The expression is Virgil’s, Georg., i., 427: “Luna revertentes cum primum colligit ignes”.

[2] Vans used also for “wings” by Milton, Paradise Lost, ii., 927-8:—
        His sail-broad vans
        He spreads for flight.

So also Tasso, Ger. Lib., ix., 60: “Indi spiega al gran volo i vanni aurati”.

[3] Cf. Lockley Hall Sixty Years After: “Love will conquer at the last”.