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The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson cover

The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson

Chapter 53: The Blackbird
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.

The Blackbird

Not in 1833.
This is another poem placed among the poems of 1833, but not printed till 1842.

The espaliers and the standards all
Are thine; the range of lawn and park:
The unnetted black-hearts ripen dark,
All thine, against the garden wall.

Yet, tho’ I spared thee all the spring,[1]
Thy sole delight is, sitting still,
With that gold dagger of thy bill
To fret the summer jenneting.[2]

A golden bill! the silver tongue,
Cold February loved, is dry:
Plenty corrupts the melody
That made thee famous once, when young:

And in the sultry garden-squares,[3]
Now thy flute-notes are changed to coarse,
I hear thee not at all,[4] or hoarse
As when a hawker hawks his wares.

Take warning! he that will not sing
While yon sun prospers in the blue,
Shall sing for want, ere leaves are new,
Caught in the frozen palms of Spring.

[1] 1842. Yet, though I spared thee kith and kin. And so till 1853, when it was altered to the present reading.

[2] 1842 to 1851. Jennetin, altered in 1853 to present reading.

[3] 1842. I better brook the drawling stares. Altered, 1843.

[4] 1842. Not hearing thee at all. Altered, 1843.