As when a man, that sails in a balloon,
Downlooking sees the solid shining ground
Stream from beneath him in the broad blue noon,
Tilth, hamlet, mead and mound:
And takes his flags and waves them to the mob
That shout below, all faces turned to where
Glows rubylike the far-up crimson globe,
Filled with a finer air:
So, lifted high, the poet at his will
Lets the great world flit from him, seeing all,
Higher thro' secret splendours mounting still,
Self-poised, nor fears to fall.
Hearing apart the echoes of his fame.
While I spoke thus, the seedsman, Memory,
Sowed my deep-furrowed thought with many a name
Whose glory will not die.

Miscellaneous Poems and Contributions to Periodicals
1833-1868

XL

Cambridge

[This poem is written in pencil on the fly-leaf of a copy of Poems 1833 in the Dyce Collection in South Kensington Museum. Reprinted with many alterations in Life, vol. I, p. 67.]

Therefore your halls, your ancient colleges,
Your portals statued with old kings and queens,
Your bridges and your busted libraries,
Wax-lighted chapels and rich carved screens,
Your doctors and your proctors and your deans
Shall not avail you when the day-beam sports
New-risen o'er awakened Albion—No,
Nor yet your solemn organ-pipes that blow
Melodious thunders through your vacant courts
At morn and even; for your manner sorts
Not with this age, nor with the thoughts that roll,
Because the words of little children preach
Against you,—ye that did profess to teach
And have taught nothing, feeding on the soul.

XLI

The Germ of 'Maud'

[There was published in 1837 in The Tribute, (a collection of original poems by various authors, edited by Lord Northampton), a contribution by Tennyson entitled 'Stanzas,' consisting of xvi stanzas of varying lengths (110 lines in all). In 1855 the first xii stanzas were published as the fourth section of the second part of 'Maud.' Some verbal changes and transpositions of lines were made; a new stanza (the present sixth) and several new lines were introduced, and the xth stanza of 1837 became the xiiith of 1855. But stanzas xiii-xvi of 1837 have never been reprinted in any edition of Tennyson's works, though quoted in whole or part in various critical studies of the poet. Swinburne refers to this poem as 'the poem of deepest charm and fullest delight of pathos and melody ever written, even by Mr Tennyson.' This poem in The Tribute gained Tennyson his first notice in the Edinburgh Review, which had till then ignored him.]

XIII
But she tarries in her place
And I paint the beauteous face
Of the maiden, that I lost,
In my inner eyes again,
Lest my heart be overborne,
By the thing I hold in scorn,
By a dull mechanic ghost
And a juggle of the brain.
XIV
I can shadow forth my bride
As I knew her fair and kind
r for my wife;
She is lovely by my side
In the silence of my life—
'Tis a phantom of the mind.
XV
'Tis a phantom fair and good
I can call it to my side,
So to guard my life from ill,
Tho' its ghastly sister glide
And be moved around me still
With the moving of the blood
That is moved not of the will.
XVI
Let it pass, the dreary brow,
Let the dismal face go by,
Will it lead me to the grave?
Then I lose it: it will fly:
Can it overlast the nerves?
Can it overlive the eye?
But the other, like a star,
Thro' the channel windeth far
Till it fade and fail and die,
To its Archetype that waits
Clad in light by golden gates,
Clad in light the Spirit waits
To embrace me in the sky.

XLII

[On the fly-leaf of a book illustrated by Bewick, in the library of the late Lord Ravensworth, the following lines in Tennyson's autograph were discovered in 1903.]

A gate and a field half ploughed,
A solitary cow,
A child with a broken slate,
And a titmarsh in the bough.
But where, alack, is Bewick
To tell the meaning now?

XLIII

The Skipping-Rope

[This poem, published in the second volume of Poems by Alfred Tennyson (in two volumes, London, Edward Moxon, MDCCCXLII), was reprinted in every edition until 1851, when it was suppressed.]

Sure never yet was Antelope
Could skip so lightly by.
Stand off, or else my skipping-rope
Will hit you in the eye.
How lightly whirls the skipping-rope!
How fairy-like you fly!
Go, get you gone, you muse and mope—
I hate that silly sigh.
Nay, dearest, teach me how to hope,
Or tell me how to die.
There, take it, take my skipping-rope
And hang yourself thereby.

XLIV

The New Timon and the Poets

[From Punch, February 28, 1846. Bulwer Lytton published in 1845 his satirical poem 'New Timon: a Romance of London,' in which he bitterly attacked Tennyson for the civil list pension granted the previous year, particularly referring to the poem 'O Darling Room' in the 1833 volume. Tennyson replied in the following vigorous verses, which made the literary sensation of the year. Tennyson afterwards declared: 'I never sent my lines to Punch. John Forster did. They were too bitter. I do not think that I should ever have published them.'—Life, vol. I, p. 245.]

We know him, out of Shakespeare's art,
And those fine curses which he spoke;
The old Timon, with his noble heart,
That, strongly loathing, greatly broke.
So died the Old: here comes the New:
Regard him: a familiar face:
I thought we knew him: What, it's you
The padded man—that wears the stays—
Who killed the girls and thrill'd the boys
With dandy pathos when you wrote,
A Lion, you, that made a noise,
And shook a mane en papillotes.
And once you tried the Muses too:
You fail'd, Sir: therefore now you turn,
You fall on those who are to you
As captain is to subaltern.
But men of long enduring hopes,
And careless what this hour may bring,
Can pardon little would-be Popes
And Brummels, when they try to sting.
An artist, Sir, should rest in art,
And wave a little of his claim;
To have the deep poetic heart
Is more than all poetic fame.
But you, Sir, you are hard to please;
You never look but half content:
Nor like a gentleman at ease
With moral breadth of temperament.
And what with spites and what with fears,
You cannot let a body be:
It's always ringing in your ears,
'They call this man as good as me.'
What profits now to understand
The merits of a spotless shirt—
A dapper boot—a little hand—
If half the little soul is dirt?
You talk of tinsel! why we see
The old mark of rouge upon your cheeks.
You prate of nature! you are he
That spilt his life about the cliques.
A Timon you! Nay, nay, for shame:
It looks too arrogant a jest—
The fierce old man—to take his name
You bandbox. Off, and let him rest.

XLV

Mablethorpe

[Published in Manchester Athænaum Album, 1850. Written, 1837. Republished, altered, in Life, vol. I, p. 161.]

How often, when a child I lay reclined,
I took delight in this locality!
Here stood the infant Ilion of the mind,
And here the Grecian ships did seem to be.
And here again I come and only find
The drain-cut levels of the marshy lea,—
Gray sand banks and pale sunsets—dreary wind,
Dim shores, dense rains, and heavy clouded sea.

XLVI

[Published in The Keepsake for 1851: an illustrated annual, edited by Miss Power. London: David Bogue. To this issue of the Keepsake Tennyson also contributed 'Come not when I am dead' now included in the collected Works.]

What time I wasted youthful hours
One of the shining wingèd powers,
Show'd me vast cliffs with crown of towers,
As towards the gracious light I bow'd,
They seem'd high palaces and proud,
Hid now and then with sliding cloud.
He said, 'The labour is not small;
Yet winds the pathway free to all:—
Take care thou dost not fear to fall!'

XLVII

Britons, Guard your Own

[Published in The Examiner, January 31, 1852. Verses 1 (considerably altered), 7, 8 and 10, are reprinted in Life, vol. I, p. 344.]

Rise, Britons, rise, if manhood be not dead;
The world's last tempest darkens overhead;
The Pope has bless'd him;
The Church caress'd him;
He triumphs; maybe, we shall stand alone:
Britons, guard your own.
His ruthless host is bought with plunder'd gold,
By lying priest's the peasant's votes controlled.
All freedom vanish'd,
The true men banished,
He triumphs; maybe, we shall stand alone.
Britons, guard your own.
Peace-lovers we—sweet Peace we all desire—
Peace-lovers we—but who can trust a liar?—
Peace-lovers, haters
Of shameless traitors,
We hate not France, but this man's heart of stone.
Britons, guard your own.
We hate not France, but France has lost her voice
This man is France, the man they call her choice.
By tricks and spying,
By craft and lying,
And murder was her freedom overthrown.
Britons, guard your own.
'Vive l'Empereur' may follow by and bye;
'God save the Queen' is here a truer cry.
God save the Nation,
The toleration,
And the free speech that makes a Briton known.
Britons, guard your own.
Rome's dearest daughter now is captive France,
The Jesuit laughs, and reckoning on his chance,
Would, unrelenting,
Kill all dissenting,
Till we were left to fight for truth alone.
Britons, guard your own.
Call home your ships across Biscayan tides,
To blow the battle from their oaken sides.
Why waste they yonder
Their idle thunder?
Why stay they there to guard a foreign throne?
Seamen, guard your own.
We were the best of marksmen long ago,
We won old battles with our strength, the bow.
Now practise, yeomen,
Like those bowmen,
Till your balls fly as their true shafts have flown.
Yeomen, guard your own.
His soldier-ridden Highness might incline
To take Sardinia, Belgium, or the Rhine:
Shall we stand idle,
Nor seek to bridle
His vile aggressions, till we stand alone?
Make their cause your own.
Should he land here, and for one hour prevail,
There must no man go back to bear the tale:
No man to bear it—
Swear it! We swear it!
Although we fought the banded world alone,
We swear to guard our own.

XLVIII

Hands all Round

[Published in The Examiner, February 7, 1852. Reprinted, slightly altered, in Life, vol. I, p. 345. Included, almost entirely re-written, in collected Works.]

First drink a health, this solemn night,
A health to England, every guest;
That man's the best cosmopolite
Who loves his native country best.
May Freedom's oak for ever live
With stronger life from day to day;
That man's the best Conservative
Who lops the mouldered branch away.
Hands all round!
God the tyrant's hope confound!
To this great cause of Freedom drink, my friends,
And the great name of England round and round.
A health to Europe's honest men!
Heaven guard them from her tyrants' jails!
From wronged Poerio's noisome den,
From iron limbs and tortured nails!
We curse the crimes of Southern kings,
The Russian whips and Austrian rods—
We likewise have our evil things;
Too much we make our Ledgers, Gods.
Yet hands all round!
God the tyrant's cause confound!
To Europe's better health we drink, my friends,
And the great name of England round and round.
What health to France, if France be she
Whom martial progress only charms?
Yet tell her—better to be free
Than vanquish all the world in arms.
Her frantic city's flashing heats
But fire, to blast the hopes of men.
Why change the titles of your streets?
You fools, you'll want them all again.
Hands all round!
God the tyrant's cause confound!
To France, the wiser France, we drink, my friends,
And the great name of England round and round.
Gigantic daughter of the West,
We drink to thee across the flood,
We know thee most, we love thee best,
For art thou not of British blood?
Should war's mad blast again be blown,
Permit not thou the tyrant powers
To fight thy mother here alone,
But let thy broadsides roar with ours.
Hands all round!
God the tyrant's cause confound!
To our great kinsmen of the West, my friends,
And the great name of England round and round.
O rise, our strong Atlantic sons,
When war against our freedom springs!
O speak to Europe through your guns!
They can be understood by kings.
You must not mix our Queen with those
That wish to keep their people fools;
Our freedom's foemen are her foes,
She comprehends the race she rules.
Hands all round!
God the tyrant's cause confound!
To our dear kinsmen of the West, my friends,
And the great name of England round and round.

XLIX

Suggested by Reading an Article in a Newspaper

[Published in The Examiner, February 14, 1852, and never reprinted nor acknowledged. The proof sheets of the poem, with alterations in Tennyson's autograph, were offered for public sale in 1906.]

To the Editor of The Examiner.

SIR,—I have read with much interest the poems of Merlin. The enclosed is longer than either of those, and certainly not so good: yet as I flatter myself that it has a smack of Merlin's style in it, and as I feel that it expresses forcibly enough some of the feelings of our time, perhaps you may be induced to admit it.

TALIESSEN.

How much I love this writer's manly style!
By such men led, our press had ever been
The public conscience of our noble isle,
Severe and quick to feel a civic sin,
To raise the people and chastise the times
With such a heat as lives in great creative rhymes.
O you, the Press! what good from you might spring!
What power is yours to blast a cause or bless!
I fear for you, as for some youthful king,
Lest you go wrong from power in excess.
Take heed of your wide privileges! we
The thinking men of England, loathe a tyranny.
A freeman is, I doubt not, freest here;
The single voice may speak his mind aloud;
An honest isolation need not fear
The Court, the Church, the Parliament, the crowd.
No, nor the Press! and look you well to that—
We must not dread in you the nameless autocrat.
And you, dark Senate of the public pen,
You may not, like yon tyrant, deal in spies.
Yours are the public acts of public men,
But yours are not their household privacies.
I grant you one of the great Powers on earth,
But be not you the blatant traitors of the hearth.
You hide the hand that writes: it must be so,
For better so you fight for public ends;
But some you strike can scarce return the blow;
You should be all the nobler, O my friends.
Be noble, you! nor work with faction's tools
To charm a lower sphere of fulminating fools.
But knowing all your power to heat or cool,
To soothe a civic wound or keep it raw,
Be loyal, if you wish for wholesome rule:
Our ancient boast is this—we reverence law.
We still were loyal in our wildest fights,
Or loyally disloyal battled for our rights.
O Grief and Shame if while I preach of laws
Whereby to guard our Freedom from offence—
And trust an ancient manhood and the cause
Of England and her health of commonsense—
There hang within the heavens a dark disgrace,
Some vast Assyrian doom to burst upon our race.
I feel the thousand cankers of our State,
I fain would shake their triple-folded ease,
The hogs who can believe in nothing great,
Sneering bedridden in the down of Peace
Over their scrips and shares, their meats and wine,
With stony smirks at all things human and divine!
I honour much, I say, this man's appeal.
We drag so deep in our commercial mire,
We move so far from greatness, that I feel
Exception to be character'd in fire.
Who looks for Godlike greatness here shall see
The British Goddess, sleek Respectability.
Alas for her and all her small delights!
She feels not how the social frame is rack'd.
She loves a little scandal which excites;
A little feeling is a want of tact.
For her there lie in wait millions of foes,
And yet the 'not too much' is all the rule she knows.
Poor soul! behold her: what decorous calm!
She, with her week-day worldliness sufficed,
Stands in her pew and hums her decent psalm
With decent dippings at the name of Christ!
And she has mov'd in that smooth way so long,
She hardly can believe that she shall suffer wrong.
Alas, our Church! alas, her growing ills,
And those who tolerate not her tolerance,
But needs must sell the burthen of their wills
To that half-pagan harlot kept by France!
Free subjects of the kindliest of all thrones,
Headlong they plunge their doubts among old rags and bones.
Alas, Church writers, altercating tribes—
The vessel and your Church may sink in storms.
Christ cried: Woe, woe, to Pharisees and Scribes!
Like them, you bicker less for truth than forms.
I sorrow when I read the things you write,
What unheroic pertness! what un-Christian spite!
Alas, our youth, so clever yet so small,
Thin dilletanti deep in nature's plan,
Who make the emphatic One, by whom is all,
An essence less concentred than a man!
Better wild Mahmoud's war-cry once again!
O fools, we want a manlike God and Godlike men!
Go, frightful omens. Yet once more I turn
To you that mould men's thoughts; I call on you
To make opinion warlike, lest we learn
A sharper lesson than we ever knew.
I hear a thunder though the skies are fair,
But shrill you, loud and long, the warning-note:
Prepare!

L

[Lord Tennyson wrote, by Royal request, two stanzas which were sung as part of God Save the Queen at a State concert in connection with the Princess Royal's marriage: these were printed in the Times of January 26, 1858.]

God bless our Prince and Bride!
God keep their lands allied,
God save the Queen!
Clothe them with righteousness,
Crown them with happiness,
Them with all blessings bless,
God save the Queen.
Fair fall this hallow'd hour,
Farewell our England's flower,
God save the Queen!
Farewell, fair rose of May!
Let both the peoples say,
God bless thy marriage-day,
God bless the Queen.

LI

The Ringlet

[Published in Enoch Arden volume (London: E. Moxon & Co, 1864) and never reprinted.]

'Your ringlets, your ringlets,
That look so golden-gay,
If you will give me one, but one,
To kiss it night and day,
Then never chilling touch of Time
Will turn it silver-gray;
And then shall I know it is all true gold
To flame and sparkle and stream as of old,
Till all the comets in heaven are cold,
And all her stars decay.'
'Then take it, love, and put it by;
This cannot change, nor yet can I.'
'My ringlet, my ringlet,
That art so golden-gay,
Now never chilling touch of Time
Can turn thee silver-gray;
And a lad may wink, and a girl may hint,
And a fool may say his say;
For my doubts and fears were all amiss,
And I swear henceforth by this and this,
That a doubt will only come for a kiss,
And a fear to be kissed away.'
'Then kiss it, love, and put it by:
If this can change, why so can I.'
O Ringlet, O Ringlet,
I kiss'd you night and day,
And Ringlet, O Ringlet,
You still are golden-gay,
But Ringlet, O Ringlet,
You should be silver-gray:
For what is this which now I'm told,
I that took you for true gold,
She that gave you's bought and sold,
Sold, sold.
O Ringlet, O Ringlet,
She blush'd a rosy red,
When Ringlet, O Ringlet,
She clipt you from her head,
And Ringlet, O Ringlet,
She gave you me, and said,
'Come, kiss it, love, and put it by:
If this can change, why so can I.'
O fie, you golden nothing, fie
You golden lie.
O Ringlet, O Ringlet,
I count you much to blame,
For Ringlet, O Ringlet,
You put me much to shame,
So Ringlet, O Ringlet,
I doom you to the flame.
For what is this which now I learn,
Has given all my faith a turn?
Burn, you glossy heretic, burn,
Burn, burn.

LII

Song

[This first form of the Song in The Princess ('Home they brought her warrior dead') was published only in Selections from Tennyson. London: E. Moxon & Co, 1864.]

Home they brought him slain with spears.
They brought him home at even-fall:
All alone she sits and hears
Echoes in his empty hall,
Sounding on the morrow.
The Sun peeped in from open field,
The boy began to leap and prance,
Rode upon his father's lance,
Beat upon his father's shield—
'Oh hush, my joy, my sorrow.'

LIII

1865-1866

[Published in Good Words for March 1, 1868 as a decorative page, with an accompanying full page plate by T. Dalziel. The lines were never reprinted.]

I stood on a tower in the wet,
And New Year and Old Year met,
And winds were roaring and blowing;
And I said, 'O years that meet in tears,
Have ye aught that is worth the knowing?
'Science enough and exploring
Wanderers coming and going
Matter enough for deploring
But aught that is worth the knowing?'
Seas at my feet were flowing
Waves on the shingle pouring,
Old Year roaring and blowing
And New Year blowing and roaring.

The Lover's Tale
1833

[It was originally intended by Tennyson that this poem should form part of his 1833 volume. It was put in type and, according to custom, copies were distributed among his friends, when, on the eve of publication, he decided to omit it. Again, in 1869, it was sent to press with a new third part added, and was again withdrawn, the third part only—'The Golden Supper,' founded on a story in Boccaccio's Decameron—being published in the volume, 'The Holy Grail.' In 1866, 1870 and 1875, attempts had been made by Mr Herne Shepherd to publish editions of 'The Lover's Tale,' reprinted from stray proof copies of the 1833 printing. Each of these attempts was repressed by Tennyson, and at last in 1879 the complete poem, as now included in the collected Works, was issued, with an apologetic reference to the necessity of reprinting the poem to prevent its circulation in an unauthorised form. But the 1879 issue is considerably altered from the original issue of 1833, as written by Tennyson in his nineteenth year. Since only as a product of Tennyson's youth does the poem merit any attention, it has seemed good to reprint it here as originally written.]


A FRAGMENT

The Poem of the Lover's Tale (the lover is supposed to be himself a poet) was written in my nineteenth year, and consequently contains nearly as many faults as words. That I deemed it not wholly unoriginal is my only apology for its publication—an apology lame and poor, and somewhat impertinent to boot: so that if its infirmities meet with more laughter than charity in the world, I shall not raise my voice in its defence. I am aware how deficient the Poem is in point of art, and it is not without considerable misgivings that I have ventured to publish even this fragment of it. 'Enough,' says the old proverb, 'is as good as a feast.'—(Tennyson's original introductory note.)