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The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson

Chapter 90: To——
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.

To——

after reading a Life and Letters

Originally published in the Examiner for 24th March, 1849; then in the sixth edition of the poems, 1850, with the second part of the title and the alterations noted. When reprinted in 1851 one more slight alteration was made. It has not been altered since. The work referred to was Moncton Milne’s (afterwards Lord Houghton) Letters and Literary Remains of Keats published in 1848, and the person to whom the poem may have been addressed was Tennyson’s brother Charles, afterwards Charles Tennyson Turner, to the facts of whose life and to whose character it would exactly apply. See Napier,Homes and Haunts of Tennyson, 48-50. But Sir Franklin Lushington tells me that it was most probably addressed to some imaginary person, as neither he nor such of Tennyson’s surviving friends as he kindly consulted for me are able to identify the person.

You might have won the Poet’s name
If such be worth the winning now,
And gain’d a laurel for your brow
Of sounder leaf than I can claim;

But you have made the wiser choice,
A life that moves to gracious ends
Thro’ troops of unrecording friends,
A deedful life, a silent voice:

And you have miss’d the irreverent doom
Of those that wear the Poet’s crown:
Hereafter, neither knave nor clown
Shall hold their orgies at your tomb.

For now the Poet cannot die
Nor leave his music as of old,
But round him ere he scarce be cold
Begins the scandal and the cry:

“Proclaim the faults he would not show:
Break lock and seal: betray the trust:
Keep nothing sacred: ’tis but just
The many-headed beast should know”.

Ah, shameless! for he did but sing.
A song that pleased us from its worth;
No public life was his on earth,
No blazon’d statesman he, nor king.

He gave the people of his best:
His worst he kept, his best he gave.
My Shakespeare’s curse on[1] clown and knave
Who will not let his ashes rest!

Who make it seem more sweet[2] to be
The little life of bank and brier,
The bird that pipes his lone desire
And dies unheard within his tree,

Than he that warbles long and loud
And drops at Glory’s temple-gates,
For whom the carrion vulture waits
To tear his heart before the crowd!

[1] In Examiner and in 1850. My curse upon the.

[2] In Examiner. Sweeter seem. For the sentiment cf. Goethe:—

Ich singe, wie der Vogel singt
Der in den Zweigen wohnet;
Das Lied das aus dem Seele dringt
Ist Lohn, der reichlich lohnet.

(Der Sänger.)