The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson's Battle Poetry (Studies in Major Literary Authors, 28)

THE ARTISTRY AND TRADITION OF TENNYSON’S BATTLE POETRY

MAJOR LITERARY A UTHORS V OLUME 28

STUDIES IN MAJOR LITERARY AUTHORS OUTSTANDING DISSERTATIONS VOLUME 28

Edited by William Cain Professor of English Wellesley College

A ROUTLEDGE SERIES

STUDIES IN MAJOR LITERARY AUTHORS William E.cain, General Editor 1. THE WAYWARD NUN OF AMHERST Emily Dickinson in the Medieval Women’s Visionary Tradition Angela Conrad 2. PHILIP ROTH CONSIDERED The Concentrationary Universe of the American Writer Steven Milowitz 3.THE PUSHER AND THE SUFFERER An Unsentimental Reading of Moby Dick Suzanne Stein 4. HENRY JAMES AS A BIOGRAPHER A Self among Others Cathy Moses 5. JOYCEAN FRAMES Film and the Fiction of James Joyce Thomas Burkdall 6. JOSEPH CONRAD AND THE ART OF SACRIFICE The Evolution of the Scapegoat Theme in Joseph Conrad’s Fiction Andrew Mozina 7.TECHNIQUE AND SENSIBILITY IN THE FICTION AND POETRY OF RAYMOND CARVER Arthur F.Bethea 8. SHELLEY’S TEXTUAL SEDUCTIONS Plotting Utopia in the Erotic and Political Works Samuel Lyndon Gladden 9.“ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE” Dramatic Sensibility in Mary Shelley’s Novels Charlene E.Bunnell 10.“THOUGHTS PAINFULLY INTENSE” Hawthorne and the Invalid Author James N.Mancall 11. SEX THEORIES AND THE SHAPING OF Two MODERNS Hemingway and H.D. Deirdre Anne (McVicker) Pettipiece 12. WORD SIGHTINGS Visual Apparatus and Verbal Reality in Stevens, Bishop and O’Hara Sarah Riggs 13. DELICATE PURSUIT Discretion in Henry James and Edith Wharton Jessica Levine 14. GERTRUDE STEIN AND WALLACE STEVENS The Performance of Modern Consciousness Sara J.Ford

15. LOST CITY Fitzgerald’s NewYork Lauraleigh O’Meara 16. SOCIAL DREAMING Dickens and the Fairy Tale Elaine Ostry 17. PATRIARCHY AND ITS DISCONTENTS Sexual Politics in Selected Novels and Stories of Thomas Hardy Joanna Devereux 18. A NEW MATRIX FOR MODERNISM A Study of the Lives and Poetry of Charlotte Mew and Anna Wickham Nelljean McConeghey Rice 19. WHO READS ULYSSES? The Rhetoric of the Joyce Wars and the Common Reader Julie Sloan Brannon 20. NAKED LIBERTY AND THE WORLD OF DESIRE Elements of Anarchism in the Work of D.H. Lawrence Simon Casey 21. THE MACHINE THAT SINGS Modernism, Hart Crane, and the Culture of the Body Gordon Tapper 22. T.S. ELIOT’S CIVILIZED SAVAGE Religious Eroticism and Poetics Laurie J.MacDiarmid 23. THE CARVER CHRONOTOPE Inside the Life-World of Raymond Carver’s Fiction G.P.Lainsbury 24. THIS COMPOSITE VOICE The Role of W.B.Yeats in James Merrill’s Poetry Mark Bauer 25. PROGRESS AND IDENTITY IN THE PLAYS OF W.B.YEATS Barbara A.Suess 26. CONRAD’S NARRATIVES OF DIFFERENCE Not Exactly Tales for Boys Lissa Schneider 27. GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND VICTORIAN CATHOLICISM Jill Muller

THE ARTISTRY AND TRADITION TENNYSON’S BATTLE POETRY

J.Timothy Lovelace

Routledge New York & London

OF

Published in 2003 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE www.routledge.co.uk Copyright © 2003 by J.Timothy Lovelace Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retr ieval system, without per mission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lovelace, John Timothy. The artistry and tradition of Tennyson’s battle poetry/by J.Timothy Lovelace. p. cm.—(Studies in major literary authors; v. 28) Includes bibliographical references and index ISBN 0-415-96763-5 (alk. paper) 1. Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809–1892—Knowledge—Military art and science. 2. Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809–1892. Idylls of the king. 3. Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809–1892. Maud. 4. Classicism—England—History—19th century. 5. Military art and science in literature. 6. English poetry—Greek influence. 7. Battles in literature. 8. Homer—Influence. I. Title: Artistry and tradition of Tennyson’s battle poetry. II. Title. III. Series. PR5592.M55L688 2003 821'.8–dc21 2003001483 ISBN 0-203-49079-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-57882-1 (Adobe eReader Format)

To my parents Oscar N.Lovelace and Peggy H.Lovelace

Contents

CHAPTER ONE Tennyson and the Heroic Tradition

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CHAPTER TWO The Early War Poetry

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CHAPTER THREE Historical and Legendary Battles

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CHAPTER FOUR Contemporary Conflicts

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CHAPTER FIVE Maud

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CHAPTER SIX Idylls of the King

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BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

167 181

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It still were right to crown with song The warrior’s noble deed— A crown the Singer hopes may last, For so the deed endures…. Epilogue to “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade,” 35–38

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Chapter One

Tennyson and the Heroic Tradition

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HE DIVERSITY OF THE TENNYSONIAN CANON HAS ELICITED A DIVERSI rly opinion as to Tennyson’s most characteristic themes. The editors of the Norton Anthology of English Literature describe Tennyson as “essentially a poet of the countryside” and declare that “the past became his great theme” (Abrams 1056). To Harold Bloom, Tennyson is “one of the three most authentically erotic poets in the language” (“Tennyson: In the Shadow of Keats” 29). “For me,” writes Harold Nicolson, “the essential Tennyson is a morbid and unhappy mystic” (27). “Most characteristic of Tennyson,” states Robert Langbaum, “is a certain life-weariness, a longing for rest through oblivion” (89). George Barker observes that “the Tennysonian characteristic is ambivalence” (v). “The Tennysonian theme is frustration,” Arthur J. Carr remarks (606), while Roger Ebbatson recognizes numerous themes: “longing and frustration; the mask of age; sceptical doubt; the role of the artist in society; the evolutionary principle; the clash between social order and inner disorder” (37). Most assessments of Tennyson fail to take into account the fact that he wrote no fewer than fifty-four battle poems. Many of Tennyson’s admirers have been discomfited by these works, and most scholars tend to regard them as aberrant in spite of their profusion. “Tennyson scholars give little weight to the poet’s sentiments on war, seeing them as shallow or alien to the main body of his thought,” observes Michael C.C.Adams (405). In turning a disdainful ear to Tennyson’s trumpet tones, his critics have distorted the image of the poet Carlyle called a “Life Guardsman” (Martin 303) and Kipling characterized as “the commander in chief” (Martin 577). This book argues that Tennyson’s battle poetry is an important part of his oeuvre by virtue of its sophistication both artistic and philosophical.Tennyson’s songs

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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry

of the sword reflect the dominant image patterns of the Iliad and the Aeneid by way of adumbrating the heroic ethos that informs these and other ancient texts. Theodore Redpath, Douglas Bush, Wilfred Mustard, Robert Pattison, and A.A. Markley have all documented the influence of the classics on Tennyson, focusing on his choice of mythological subjects, mood, style, allusions, and versification. This book provides something of an extension of these previous studies, as it postulates that Tennyson absorbed and made current the Homeric, heroic ideology of the ancient literature in which he was so deeply immersed. One of Tennyson’s great themes is the theme of Homer and Virgil: the wrath or furor of heroes. Other themes Tennyson inherited from the heroic tradition include chivalry, the immortality of honor, and the importance of the bard. His repeated development of these and related topics through patterns of Homeric imagery reveals his fealty to the ancient bards and his own bardic expertise. The readings in this study focus on Tennyson’s “faint Homeric echoes” to shed new light on the shorter, shortchanged battle pieces and to develop in the process an alternative, heroic approach to Maud and the Idylls of the King. The attempt to make this study a bringer of new things extends to a consideration of the recordings Tennyson made for Thomas Edison.Tennyson reads battle poetry on the extant cylinder recordings of his voice, and his recitations have largely been ignored as an aid to understanding the poems. My occasional use of Tennyson’s readings to complement my own is hopefully as appropriate as it is unusual. The explications of the shorter battle pieces are intended primarily to demonstrate their artistry, and the choice of which poems to examine is based on the degree to which they exemplify that artistry and on their consequent importance to the Tennyson canon. Even for his earliest and his most obscure battle poems, Tennyson’s artistic arsenal is stocked with epic imagery. Fire and light, wild animals, forces of nature, and shouting are all prominent, just as they are in the works of Homer, Virgil, and other ancient bards. A striking device in the early battle pieces is Tennyson’s use of epigraphs, usually quotations from a classical source.These epigraphs are always ingeniously pertinent to the poem they precede, and a demonstration of this pertinence is a staple of the readings in the second chapter. Fundamental to the explications of Maud and the Idylls of the King is the placing of both works within the context of the heroic tradition. Ever since the publication of Maud in 1855, the “war-mongering” tones of Part III have sparked critical controversy. There seems no end to the debate over the degree to which Tennyson identifies with the speaker and the degree to which the speaker has regained his “sanity” by the end, but some of the controversy may be dispensed with if Maud is considered as a product of Tennyson’s Homeric muse. The hero’s “madness” is the madness of heroic wrath, of titanic passions that find no appropriate outlet in the under-hand war of commerce. Like Achilles sulking in his tent, the hero buries

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himself in himself until, after the supposed death of his beloved, he is finally stirred to action in the battle of life by a cause worthy of his heroic ardor. The Iliad shows us that when Achilles returns to the battle his wrath rages uncontrollably, and we turn from Maud to the Idylls of the King for Tennyson’s epic treatment of rampaging frenzy. This dissertation emphasizes the Homeric qualities of the Idylls, its similarity to the Iliad and the Aeneid in its imagery and in its account of an ultimately failed attempt at harnessing the ferocious power of passion. Maud and the Idylls of the King contain, as The Canterbury Tales did for Dryden, “God’s plenty,” and have thus inspired a plethora of scholarship, though most of it disregards the heroic aspects of the works. In contrast, the shorter battle poems are usually neglected entirely by the critics, or taken up briefly only to be tossed down again with a few dismissive or even contemptuous comments. Since the World Wars and the advent of technological warfare, Tennyson’s bellicosity has been seen as an embarrassment. The MLA International Bibliography lists only five articles in the last twenty years on any of his martial works other than Maud and the Idylls.The belittling of these poems is not just a recent development, however; while many of the battle pieces were enthusiastically received during the poet’s lifetime, others were lambasted. A small percentage of the critical commentary on these works is insightfully appreciative, but most of it fails to recognize the full extent of Tennyson’s bardic genius. Much of Tennyson’s earliest poetry is decidedly martial in character.While many critics readily recognize his budding greatness in “The Devil and the Lady,” they tend to regard his subsequent juvenilia about battles and heroism as a temporary lapse—little more than training exercises for the real works of genius to come. Typical is Clyde de L.Ryals: of several early poems, including “The Old Sword” and “The Vale of Bones,” the extent of his analysis is the observation that “The imagery of these poems is extremely interesting, for it suggests the phantasmagoria which haunted the young poet’s mind” (Theme and Symbol 23). “In brief,” he writes, “the majority of Tennyson’s very early poetry is not very good…. [A]s poetry most are not of much value” (Theme and Symbol 35–36). Robert Bernard Martin feels that the Poems by Two Brothers “are finally not very good poetry” (46). One superior observation regarding these poems is made by Henry Kozicki, who comments that the young Tennyson’s heroes “are attended too closely with transcendent omens for their ruthlessness to be condemned summarily. Finally, a sense of heroic tragedy attends historical protagonists as they carry out their national destinies.Thus, although their conduct is fearsome, it is also ambiguously ‘admirable’” (Tennyson and Clio 8). Kozicki derives from Tennyson’s early efforts a sense of the close connection between glory and tragedy that is integral to the heroic tradition. In The Poetry of Tennyson, Henry Van Dyke distinguishes himself by noticing the excellence of “Persia.” He quotes from the last thirty-nine lines of the poem,

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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry

omitting twenty of them without indicating that he has done so, and then comments: This is not perfect poetry; but it is certainly strong verse. It is glorified nomenclature. Milton himself need not have blushed to acknowledge it. The boy who could write like this before he was eighteen years old knew something, at least, of the music and magic of names. If we may read our history, like our Hebrew, backward, we can detect the promise of a great poet in the swing and sweep of these lines, and recognize the wing-trial of genius, in Tennyson’s first flight. (17)

Though Van Dyke fails to explicate the poem, this is perfectly in keeping with his other criticism, which is of the descriptive and laudatory variety. “The Ballad of Oriana” has inspired more scholarly comment than all the rest of Tennyson’s martial juvenilia put together, perhaps because it was one of the few selections from the 1830 volume of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical that Tennyson continued to reprint throughout his life.Tennyson’s high regard for the poem has not swayed its many detractors, many of whom mock the refrain, which Leigh Hunt refers to as a “parrot cry” (Jump 128). Other commentators, such as A.H.Hallam, Harold Nicolson, and John Wilson, are lavish in their praise of the reverberative ballad, although none submits it to the kind of analysis that it merits. The mature Tennyson’s poems on historical and legendary battle action have all drawn at least some amount of critical attention.The quality assessments are varied; these poems are examined more thoroughly than the juvenilia, but their depths remain unplumbed. Michael Alexander and Christopher Ricks admire Tennyson’s translation of “The Battle of Brunanburh,” though neither gives Tennyson enough credit for the original work of art he has created. Ricks also speaks well of Tennyson’s “Specimen of a Translation of the Iliad in Blank Verse,” as does Theodore Redpath, who calls Tennyson’s two published translations from Homer “admirable” (107). The few critics who have examined Tennyson’s translations from Homer have focused exclusively on the technical merits of the translations without considering Tennyson’s affinity for the heroic ideology of the original passages. “Boädicea” is also a translation of sorts—a translation of a classical meter into English verse. As in the case of the Homer translations, the critics have focused primarily on the technical aspect of “Boädicea.” In view of F.B.Pinion’s comment that “Only the metrician or historian can find sustained interest in the experimental verse of ‘Boädicea’” (218), perhaps this focus has curtailed the amount of critical study the poem has inspired. As they have with “Boädicea,” the critics have oversimplified and even misapprehended Tennyson’s meaning in “Sir Galahad” and in “The Captain.” “The Revenge,” on the other hand, is a poem which has been much admired and which has received a thorough and quite impressive treatment by Robert M.Estrich and Hans Sperber in Three Keys to Language. In their chapter

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entitled “Personal Style and Period Style: A Victorian Poet,” Estrich and Sperber discuss the poem’s historical background and also offer a vigorous technical analysis. The thoroughness of Estrich and Sperber’s treatment of “The Revenge” helps to redress the cursoriness of other critics such as Harold Nicolson, Paull F.Baum, and Alastair W.Thomson, whose commendations of the poem are unsupported by any exegeses. James R.Kincaid’s is the most extensive examination of “The Revenge” since Estrich and Sperber’s, but Kincaid is misguided in his allegation that Tennyson’s depiction of heroism is laced with irony. Tennyson’s poetic treatment of contemporary conflicts includes the most contemptuously depreciated poems of his career, the incendiary pieces of 1852. These vociferous newspaper poems may have prompted more scorn than anything ever written by any great poet. No critic has ever found them worthy of any serious consideration, and the authors of most comprehensive studies of Tennyson, having been beaten to the roundhouse punch by earlier commentators, can only express their contempt for the pieces by ignoring them altogether. A.C.Swinburne, ever the iconoclast, injects one dulcet note into the cacophony of invective against the infamous verses: Besides the two fine sonnets of his youth and his age on Poland and Montenegro, he has uttered little if anything on public matters that I can remember as worth remembering except the two spirited and stalwart songs of “Hands all round!” and “Britons, guard your own,” which rang out a manful response of disgust and horror at the news of a crime unequalled in the cowardly vileness of its complicated atrocity since the model massacre of St. Bartholomew. (Jump 344)

“The Defence of Lucknow,” in spite of its substantial length and its artistic richness, which is enhanced by its accompanying dedicatory poem, has inexplicably been ignored as a subject of scholarly explication.The “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” has elicited a wide range of critical responses, with censure tipping the scales. Most modern critics find its tone too rhetorical and its repetitions hollow.Valerie Pitt is an excellent spokesperson for the few scholarly admirers of the “Wellington Ode.” In Tennyson Laureate she calls it “magnificent” (154). “The mere technical achievement of…the ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’ is considerable enough,” she asserts. “What is perhaps more important is Tennyson’s capacity for discovering under the individual personality, or the single event, with all its extraneous and irrelevant detail, the shape of a legend or a public symbol” (14). “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” as one of Tennyson’s most famous and most widely anthologized works, has inspired more commentary than most of his battle-specific poems, though most critiques are superficial and stereotypical. Christopher Ricks, in Tennyson, and Jerome J.McGann, in “Tennyson and the History of Criticism,” stand alone in discerning any artistic seriousness in the piece, and

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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry

their readings are far from exhaustive. “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava,” though its prologue and epilogue make it a more sophisticated subject of study, lags far behind “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in both its scholarly and popular appeal. Robert Bernard Martin notes a certain level of artistry: “The ‘Prologue to General Hamley’ is more memorable than the poem to which it forms a preface, although both bear witness to Tennyson’s admiration of military heroism. It consists of one long sentence (a favourite device of Tennyson’s in his epistolary poems) of thirty-two lines” (532). The banner of battle unrolled in Part III of Maud has long been shredded by critical salvos. Edgar F.Shannon reviews the first round of hostile fire in “The Critical Reception of Maud,” while both Michael C.C.Adams and James R. Bennett highlight the perennial potshots. Over the years, the greatness of the poem but also the distastefulness of the conclusions warlike stance have become more widely acknowledged. The modern position is well epitomized by Roger Ebbatson, who feels that “The use of the Crimean War as a solution to the hero’s and the nation’s problems is always likely to prove a stumbling block to the reader who has lived in the century of ‘total war’” (119). Robert James Mann, John Killham, Robert Pattison, Christopher Ricks, Michael C.C.Adams, and James Norman O’Neill listen approvingly to Maud’s battle cry.The ideas of two other defenders of Maud, Paul Turner and James R. Kincaid, are the most pertinent to this study. The following comment by Turner is exceptionally insightful: “Tennyson means that the ‘madness’ of passion, though potentially destructive, is a valuable part of human nature, which must not be denied” (148). This statement applies equally well to the Idylls of the King and to the shorter battle poems. As for Kincaid, in the following passages he recognizes to an extraordinary degree the heroic import of Maud: This frightening, disunified world, the poem insists, is all there is. It cannot be transcended by fleeing into mystic states of purity, but must be accepted…. The extremely sophisticated conclusion finds its source in a rugged humanistic tradition that runs from Chaucer to Camus…. Maud’s battle-song, in section 5, is her most important utterance, even though it is not, as the narrator repeatedly says, so much Maud that he hears, as a ‘Voice.’ It is a voice ‘singing an air that is known to me’ (I, 164)—really a song that is within him, arising from the deep and unconscious sense that only in full acceptance of all life can he live. (113–14, 120)

Kincaid’s fault lies in not extending the “rugged humanistic tradition” back to its real beginning, and to the ultimate source of the conclusion to Maud: Homer and his call to heroism. Richard Jenkyns, in the following comment from The Victorians and Ancient Greece, comes closest to anticipating my approach to the Idylls of the King.

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The Iliad is the poem not just of Achilles, but of Achilles’ wrath; ‘wrath’ is its very first word. Tennyson intended to create an equivalent of this wrath; just as the anger of Achilles undermines the Greeks, bringing the Greek army to the brink of defeat and Achilles himself to the verge of moral disaster, so the cancer of adulterous passion spreads through Camelot, degrading its inhabitants and eventually bringing its society to collapse. (35)

Besides Jenkyns’s passage, which he never elaborates, only Ann Colley’s Tennyson and Madness and Henry Kozicki’s Tennyson and Clio: History in the Major Poems have any noteworthy coincidence with this book, which sees “adulterous passion” as an alternate mode of martial passion. In the Idylls both sexual lust and blood lust prove uncontrollable and incompatible with the maintenance of Arthur’s realm. An overview of the scholarship on Tennyson’s battle poetry is inevitably cursory because of the dearth of serious attention these poems have received. It would be pointless to indict the numerous critics who have neglected the war poetry, or to review the many dismissive, superficial, and contemptuous reactions these works have elicited. There need be no reluctance to acknowledge the preponderance of this kind of response, however, as it indicates the need for a counterbalancing approach. The slighting of Tennyson’s war poetry is difficult to justify in view of the abundant evidence that these works were very important to Tennyson. Aside from the longest and most important poems, the Idylls of the King, Maud, and The Princess. fifty-four battle pieces, martial action features prominently in three of his four As an adult, Tennyson made three translations, and all of them are English versions of ancient battle poetry: “The Battle of Brunanburh” and two selections from the Iliad (two additional Iliad fragments, printed by Christopher Ricks in The Poetry of Tennyson, are examined in this study). In addition,Aidan Day presents from Tennyson’s marginalia a fragment of a translation of Euripides’s Phoenissae. The first four lines read: Refulgent Lord of Battle tell me why Thy joy is in the tumult & the strife And the purple tide of life From gored bosoms freely flowing. (“Notable Acquisitions” 206)

After Tennyson’s first child, a boy, was stillborn, he responded with the poem “Little bosom not yet cold,” in which he describes his son as a “little warrior” (7) who had “done battle to be born” (5). According to Hallam Tennyson’s Memoir, it was “Montenegro,” Tennyson’s tribute to the bravery in battle of the Montenegrins against the Turks, that “he always put first among his sonnets” (2.217). James R. Kincaid speaks of “The ‘core of toughness’ always discernible in Tennyson’s best poetry” (13). Of the two selections that Tennyson read for the cylinder recordings made by Charles Steytler, one was “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (Maxwell 150), and

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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry

among a handful of poems that he recorded for Thomas Edison, Tennyson included the “Wellington Ode,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade,” and “Boädicea” (Charles Tennyson, Stars and Markets 169). It may be argued that he chose these poems to read aloud only because of the sonority of their emphatic rhythm, but metrical virtuosity and remarkable sound effects distinguish much of Tennyson’s best poetry, and there are other poems he eschewed on this occasion, poems not about war, such as “Locksley Hall,” “What Thor Said to the Bard,” and “Harp, Harp, the Voice of Cymry,” which lend themselves as well or better to the kind of stentorian reading required by the recording situation. Moreover, Tennyson chose his battle poems to read aloud at numerous other times when he was not declaiming into a megaphone. Maud was his favorite recitation piece, and Robert Bernard Martin relates one occasion when the poet inflicted three consecutive readings of it on Jane Carlyle (396–97).The “Wellington Ode” was apparently another favorite. Charles Tennyson recounts three different instances of the poet’s reading to groups of friends and guests his tribute to “one of his greatest heroes” (Martin 368). Harold Nicolson describes Tennyson’s poetry readings at Farringford, and four of the five poems he mentions concern battle: “He would sometimes read the Idylls; more often he would choose the Ode to the Duke of Wellington…. Sometimes, and quite incomprehensibly, he would embark upon The Northern Farmer, and at other times he would startle his audience with a very metrical rendering of The Battle of Brunanburh…. But it was Maud that was his favorite” (172). According to the Memoir, Tennyson once recited part of “Hands All Round” to Sir Alfred Lyall during a walk (2.264). Tennyson’s early immersion in classical literature undoubtedly imbued his developing system of values with a strong sense of the heroic ethos. His early and extensive training in the classics has been well documented by Hallam Tennyson and later biographers. Robert Bernard Martin writes: On the flyleaf of the first volume of C.G.Heyne’s edition of the Iliad Tennyson wrote as a grown man: “My father who taught us Greek made us—me & my brother Charles— write the substance of Heyne’s notes in the margin to show that we had read them, & we followed the same command of his, writing in our Horace’s,Virgils & Juvenals & c & c the criticisms of their several commentators.” Dr.Tennyson did not consider him ready to go to Louth until he was able to repeat from memory on four successive mornings the Odes of Horace. (29)

Many boys play at being warriors and heroes, but the young Tennyson seems to have been preoccupied to an unusual degree with the romantic glories of combat and derring-do he found in the classics and in the other heroic tales he read as a boy. “The Tennyson’s had their imaginative games; they were knights and jousted in mock tournaments, or they were ‘champions and warriors, defending a field, or a

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stone-heap, or again they would set up opposing camps with a king in the midst of each …’” (Memoir 1.4). Hallam Tennyson recounts how little Alfred would fascinate his brothers and sisters by telling “legends of knights and heroes among untravelled forests rescuing distressed damsels, or on gigantic mountains fighting with dragons …” (Memoir 1. 5). Robert Bernard Martin cites two lines from a fragment entitled “Mablethorpe,” in which Tennyson reflects on the activity of his boyhood imagination: “Here stood the infant Ilion of my mind,/And here the Grecian ships did seem to be” (23). Martin recounts an early incident of actual violence at the Louth school: “The other boys were cruel, and once when Alfred was sitting on the school steps weeping and ill, a larger boy hit him in the wind with the words ‘I’ll teach you to cry’” (30). It is easy to imagine the bullying he received at Louth creating in the young Tennyson a need for some sort of aggressive outlet, a need he seems to have filled with his heroically-oriented imagination. Almost all of Tennyson’s earliest poetic activity reflects his rigorous training in the literature of the heroic age. Martin relates that as a boy, Alfred and his brother Charles “went for rambles…making up lines and shouting them to each other. One that Alfred remembered was ‘With slaughterous sons of thunder rolled the flood’” (21).According to Hallam Tennyson, the fledgling bard’s initial efforts at composition included stories and verse on the deeds of Wellington and Napoleon, a poem at Louth of which the only recallable line was “While bleeding heroes lie along the shore,” hundreds of lines in imitation of Pope’s Iliad, and “an epic of six thousand lines à la Walter Scott—full of battles…” (Memoir 1. 5, 7, 11, 12). Of this epic,Tennyson “said afterwards that he had never felt himself more truly inspired, as he rushed about the fields with a stick for a sword, fancying himself a conqueror advancing upon an enemy’s country” (Martin 36). W.D.Paden reports that in 1823, when Tennyson was thirteen or fourteen, he wrote a brief tale entitled Mungo the American (73). Paden describes the tale as an account of a hero’s loss and recovery of his sword. He finds his lost sword in a solitary’s hut, obtains an unsatisfactory answer about how the solitary came by it, snatches the sword and slays the solitary with it (73). This story, which anticipates the antipathy towards asceticism of the Idylls of the King, indicates an early beginning for Tennyson’s idealizing of assertive action as preferable to contemplation. Hallam Tennyson refers to “Armageddon,” the early version of “Timbuctoo,” as “The Battle of Armageddon” (Memoir 1.46), and the poem does feature a battle scene similar to the one in “The Passing of Arthur.” “Armageddon” shows that at the age of fifteen Tennyson was already associating battle with a mystical, visionary version of the transcendent furor found in the classics. The influence on Tennyson of the ancient heroic writers, particularly Homer and Virgil, cannot be overestimated. Robert Pattison sees the ancient Greek form of the idyll as Tennyson’s “building block” (128), the foundation of his poetic career. In Classical Echoes in Tennyson, Wilfred P.Mustard takes nineteen pages to list Tennyson’s allusions to Homer and fifteen to compile the Virgilian allusions, and his catalogue is

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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry

far from exhaustive. Charles Tennyson remembers of the poet that “it had been one of his chief pleasures to try and light within [his sons] the first sparks of a love of literature—particularly of the great writers of Greece and Rome, with Homer and Virgil (‘the glories of the world,’ he called them) in the forefront” (Alfred Tennyson 356). W.W.Robson compares Tennyson to Homer and Virgil in his use of echoic verse (58). Some commentators see Tennyson as primarily Virgilian, while others find him Virgilian primarily in his fealty to Homer. Robert Pattison speaks of “the venerable comparison between Virgil and Tennyson,” and cites Sir Thomas Herbert, G.K. Chesterton, Douglas Bush, and Owen Chadwick as having emphasized the similarities between the two (2). R.D.B.Rawnsley sees as common between Virgil and Tennyson “their joy in the pomp and circumstance of war” (qtd. in Nitchie 224–25). “Tennyson,” states Douglas Bush, “though not a world poet, is in so many ways akin to Virgil that one cannot, in some of his best writing, mark where Virgilian inspiration leaves off and Tennyson begins” (227). “Surely Virgil finds his true interpreter in Tennyson,” asserts Elizabeth Nitchie. “On the whole the investigation of the classical reminiscences in Tennyson has led to the conclusion that he is more indebted to Virgil than to anyone else, with the possible exception of Homer and Horace” (227, 232). Charles Tennyson attests to the poet’s devotion to Homer when he recalls an occasion on which “He began immediately to talk of Homer with [classical scholar Walter] Leaf, speaking of Homeric song as ‘the grandest sounds of the human voice,’ and reciting long passages in the original Greek with a strong deep voice” (Alfred Tennyson 532). Hallam Tennyson recalls the same occasion, and how Tennyson “enlarged for some time upon the greatness of Homer, quoting many lines from both the Iliad and the Odyssey” (Memoir 2.419). “Yet I seem to remember that he had his favourite Classics,” writes Benjamin Jowett, “such as Homer, Pindar, and Theocritus” (Memoir 2.463). Photo XXIII in Martin’s biography is a portrait of Tennyson with a volume of Homer across his lap. A.A.Markley finds that Tennyson’s library included six editions of the Iliad in Greek and five translations, with one Greek text and three English translations of the Odyssey. “Among the best represented authors in Tennyson’s classical library is, not surprisingly, Homer,” Markley concludes (11). It is also not surprising that the contents of Tennyson’s Homer collection seem to indicate a strong preference on Tennyson’s part for the epic on warfare. Tennyson, whose nickname among his friends was “The Bard,” is still occasionally seen aright as a Homeric figure himself. According to Paul Turner, the Harvard Notebook shows “Tennyson trying on, as it were, the singing-robes of the Homeric bard” (164).Turner claims that Tennyson anticipated later scholars in understanding the principle of Homeric formulas and their purpose, and “to have cast himself in the role of an oral poet, holding a live audience enthralled by his extempore storytelling…. The conception appears in the Idylls in such phrases as ‘he that tells the

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tale’ (GE 161), and in the recurrent use of quasi-Homeric repeated lines and phrases” (164). A.Dwight Culler sees Tennyson’s repetitions as inducing in the reader the same state of transcendence that Tennyson himself experienced in his vatic aspect (5). His forty years of intimate and uninterrupted friendship with Thomas Carlyle (Sharma 43), who praises “true battle” as “the first, indispensable thing” (On Heroes 108), and writes that a poet “could not sing the Heroic warrior, unless he himself were at least a Heroic warrior too” (On Heroes 79), could only have encouraged similar sentiments in Tennyson.Valerie Pitt notes that “the influence of Carlyle…is deeply absorbed into [Tennyson’s] thinking” (177). “We have it on excellent authority,” writes Clyde de L.Ryals, “that Tennyson was disposed to agree with Carlyle on the subject of heroes and hero-worship” (From the Great Deep 103). Tennyson very well could have inspired Carlyle’s comment, “Let Nature send a Hero-soul; in no age is it other than possible that he may be shaped into a poet” (On Heroes 78). Responding to Tennyson’s 1842 volume, Carlyle writes, “Truly it is long since in any English Book, Poetry or Prose, I have felt the pulse of a real man’s heart as I do in this same. A right valiant, true fighting, victorious heart; strong as a lion’s …” (Memoir 1.213). Benjamin Jowett attributes to Tennyson “the strength of a giant, or of a God” (Memoir 2.465). C.M.Bowra’s observation, “In the absence of enemies or dangerous quests heroes are not content to be idle” (Heroic Poetry 50), is pertinent to Tennyson’s career. According to Jerome H.Buckley, “it never occurred to [Tennyson] that he might rest for any great length of time from the labors of composition. Rest soon brought only restlessness” (151). He seems to have followed his own advice to a young university aspirant: “[A man] should embark on his career in the spirit of selfless and adventurous heroism” (Memoir 1.317).Although Tennyson pleaded in the “Epilogue” to “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade” that “The song that nerves a nation’s heart,/Is in itself a deed” (79–80), Christopher Ricks feels that Tennyson never resolved the conflict between his own calling and the Homeric idealization of action. “Tennyson was a poet haunted by the uneasy feeling that it was the soldier who epitomised action, duty, manliness, and courage” (Tennyson 53). Of “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Ricks muses that “the force of the poem is in its own envious yearning, its knowledge that it was ‘theirs,’ but not Tennyson’s, ‘not to make reply,’ and ‘not to reason why,’ and ‘but to do and die.’ For Tennyson such an assured simplicity is to be envied” (Tennyson 231). Hallam Tennyson remembers that the poet loved the sea “for its own sake and also because English heroism has ever been conspicuous on ship-board: he felt in himself the spirit of the old Norsemen” (Memoir 2.7). In 1887 Tennyson lamented the decline of “chivalrous feeling” in the world, but then conceded that “I am old and I may be wrong, for this generation has assuredly some spirit of chivalry. We see it in acts of heroism by land and sea, in fights against the slave trade, in our Arctic voyages, in philanthropy, etc.” (Memoir 2.337). Upon the poet’s believing

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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry

that he was financially ruined for the second time, Charles Tennyson writes, “That evening he made [Emily] play and sing to him the famous old Welsh air ‘Come to Battle’ to give her courage” (Alfred Tennyson 301). Charles Tennyson observes also that in his last year, “Tennyson’s fighting spirit would not give way” (Alfred Tennyson 533). Hallam Tennyson called his father “a soldier at heart” (Memoir 2.298). Although severe myopia barred Tennyson from regular military service, in 1830 he undertook with Arthur Hallam a secret mission to aid Torrijos’s Spanish revolutionaries. This expedition, according to Robert Bernard Martin, “was to be the trip that meant most to Tennyson in all his life, one that he tried again and again to repeat” (116). Martin describes the mission as follows: Alfred and Hallam were committed to taking money and coded dispatches in invisible ink to the revolutionaries, who were gathering in the Pyrenees. It is tempting to say that it was literally a cloak-and-dagger affair, for it seems to have been at this time that Tennyson began wearing a Spanish-style cloak and the “sombrero” that were to distinguish his appearance for the rest of his life; probably he first wore them in emulation of the exiles and then continued with them in memory of the summers trip. (117)

Tennyson both looked and acted the heroic part. In his demeanor and in his powerful, athletic body he represented the antithesis of the Shelleyan type of delicate, effeminate poet. “In physique and character Tennyson was remarkably tough,” attests Paul Turner (33). “He stood well over six feet,” writes Martin, “with a singularly broad chest and heavy legs with which he walked long distances very quickly in spite of his appearing to shuffle because he scarcely lifted his feet from the ground” (53). “A hero,” writes C.M.Bowra, “differs from other men by his peculiar force and energy” (Heroic Poetry 97). Martin’s biography recounts a great many of Tennyson’s exploits which demonstrated “the ruggedness of his body” (53) and the heroic extremity of his vigor. In his youth “He would proudly walk the twenty miles of wolds between Somersby and Tealby to take news of his father to his grandfather” (Martin 42). For exercise at Cambridge, “he rowed, fenced, or took the long walks that were habitual since boyhood” (Martin 55). During the expedition to the Valley of Cauteretz, Tennyson caught a fever, but nevertheless “they all climbed mountains, swam in the high lakes, and walked endlessly” (Martin 119).To enter-tain party guests Tennyson once picked up a small pony and carried it around the lawn in his arms. “[William] Brookfield looked in amused envy at the breadth of his chest, then felt his sinews. ‘Come now,’ he said, you mustn’t be wanting me to believe that you are both Hercules and Apollo in one” (Martin 148). Martin records several impressive hikes, including an occasion in 1844 when in the midst of his breakdown and “water-cure” treatment he went to Wales and “went up Snowdon three times” (280). On his last visit to Cauteretz in 1874, “At

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the end of a long day that had begun with sunrise they returned to Cauteretz after walking nineteen miles” (Martin 503). At seventy, the poet was still capable of running up-hill and dancing, and was walking two or three hours every day as late as 1885 (Martin 528, 555). “In spite of recurrent bad health, Tennyson had always been so proud of his body that it was hard for him to admit that it was deteriorating, and when there were visitors he would walk further than usual and occasionally break into a shambling run to demonstrate his fitness” (Martin 555). Carlyle’s dictum that “The poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose stanzas, would never make a stanza worth much” (On Heroes 78–79), was given special significance by Tennyson. As Paul Turner relates, “The year before he died he was…defying his friends to imitate him in getting up quickly twenty times from a low chair, without touching it with his hands” (32). In view of Tennyson’s heroic qualities and values, it should not be surprising that much of his poetry has a heroic cast. There was inarguably a fire-eating aspect to Tennyson, but, as Michael C.C.Adams points out, this was not an unusual trait in Tennyson’s era.Adams compares Tennyson’s war poetry of the 1850’s with American writings in the period from 1830 to 1865 “in order to suggest that the idea of war as a rejuvenating force for prosperous commercial-industrial nations was widely held among introspective men…. [J]udged by the highest intellectual standards of his own day, the poets views were quite legitimate” (406–407). Tennyson lived before the advent of “total war,” and there is reason to believe that had he witnessed the mass destruction of World War I, he would have sympathized with Owen, Sassoon, and the other disillusioned war poets. In 1890 Tennyson witnessed a torpedo demonstration. “He afterwards kept dwelling on what he had seen and several times recurred to the idea which had impressed itself on his imagination, that this engine of destruction, elaborated by nineteenth-century science, reminded him of the primitive conception of a malignant evil spirit” (qtd. in Lang and Shannon 3. 418). Then again,Tennyson may well have agreed with Yeats in judging Owen “unworthy of the poets’ corner of a country newspaper” because “he is all blood, dirt, & sucked sugar stick” (qtd. in Bloom, Yeats, 438).The subject of Tennyson’s battle poetry is not warfare per se, but heroism. Tennyson writes in the tradition of the ancient bards, who in spite of their graphic depictions of violence were primarily concerned with the passions that move the greatest men and their ideals of valor and honor. C.M.Bowra asserts that “Fighting is the favourite topic of heroic poetry” (56), and he explains why: If [heroic poetry] has a central principle it is that the great man must pass through an ordeal to prove his worth and this is almost necessarily some kind of violent action, which not only demands courage, endurance, and enterprise, but, since it involves the risk of life, makes him show to what lengths he is prepared to go in pursuit of honour. For this reason heroic poetry may be con-cerned with any action in which a man

16

The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry stakes his life on his ideal of what he ought to be. The most obvious field for such action is battle, and with battle much heroic poetry deals. (48)

In an inspired passage from Tennyson Laureate,Valerie Pitt aligns the values of Tennyson’s poetry with the heroic tradition and gives his jingoism a symbolic purport: What is celebrated is not the military success but the military operation that was very nearly a failure, the charge of the Light Brigade, the battle of “The Revenge,” and the defence of Lucknow. These incidents were not, in the ordinary sense of the word, triumphs; what Tennyson celebrates in them is the capacity of the human spirit to stand out against odds…. Courage is really the major theme of the mature Tennyson…. It is this courage which Tennyson offers as a hope to what he saw as a self-destroying society. The Imperial Dream is, in a way, the outward symbol of courage against odds. (166)

Pitt’s assessment is supported by Charles Tennyson and Robert Bernard Martin. “Tennyson was always impressed by the courage of the individual soldier,” writes Charles Tennyson (“Tennyson’s Philosophy” 153), while Martin, commenting on the sonnet “Poland,” observes that “Tennyson was not a political animal, but his imagination was stirred by heroism, and it shows” (164). In Domestic and Heroic in Tennyson’s Poetry, Donald S. Hair finds a significant element of the heroic even in Tennyson’s most “domestic” poems, such as the English Idyls, and believes that in placing an element of the domestic in his heroic works Tennyson was catering to the softer ideals of the Victorian age. “Tennyson,” Roger Ebbatson remarks, “lived uncomfortably in an unheroic age” (11). If Tennyson’s battle poetry is read uncomfortably in our own age, it may be because of our failure to acknowledge its heroic background.Without a full awareness of Tennyson’s adherence to the traditions of heroic literature, the reader of Tennyson’s martial pieces will remain oblivious to many of the ramifications that make the pieces so rich. The primary theme of the ancient bards is also the primary theme of Tennyson’s bardic voice, and the recognition of Tennyson’s artistry in handling that theme requires a full appreciation of its treatment in ages past. When Milton claims that his argument in Paradise Lost (PL) is “Not less but more Heroic than the wrath/Of stern Achilles…;/…or rage/Of Turnus” (9. 14–17), he implies that the battle fury of warriors, though it does not represent for him the ultimate epic subject, is traditionally the quintessential subject matter of heroic verse. The wrath or furor of heroic warriors is, as Milton acknowledges, the salient theme of both the Iliad (“Wrath,” as Richard Jenkyns notes above, is the poem’s first word) and the Aeneid, and it also features prominently in the Odyssey.The phenomenon is exemplified as well by the Celtic hero Cuchullain and by the berserks of Old Norse literature. John Lash, in The Hero: Manhood and Power, writes that “the hero is marked

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by the excess of vital force he raises and manages—or not” (21; original emphasis). H.R.Ellis Davidson, discussing the literary accounts of ancient European heroes, writes, “Their achievements were like those of gods or giants, and such descriptions, partly humorous, seem to be attempts to express the wild fury and abnormal strength and heat of a warrior in the frenzy of battle” (Myths and Symbols 85). Georges Dumézil offers the following quotation from M.L. Sjoestedt as a summary of her findings on the subject: “Le héros est le furieux, possédé de sa propre énergie tumultueuse et brûlante” (Horace 21). In Horace et les Curiaces, Dumézil devotes an entire chapter to the phenomenon of battle fury in ancient heroic literature. He concludes that the Germanic “Wut” the Nordic “berserk,” the Celtic “ferg” the Greek “menos,” and the Roman “furor” all designate the same sublime battle ecstasy that renders the hero invincible (19–23). The furor of the greatest heroes is not simply conspicuous; it is transcendent. It exceeds the limits of the human and partakes of the powers of nature and of gods. “[I]n all countries,” writes C.M.Bowra, [the hero] has an abundant, overflowing, assertive force, which expresses itself in action, especially in violent action, and enables him to do what is beyond ordinary mortals” (Heroic Poetry 97). Seth L. Schein writes of Achilles that “The force and intensity of his anger are more than human, and his daemonic power sets him apart from all other mortals” (91). Sometimes the hero’s furor is depicted as a natural force, as when Achilles “is like some irresistible power of nature, compared in turn to a river in spate, a flaming star, a vulture swooping on its prey, a fire burning a wood or a city, an eagle dropping to seize a lamb or a kid” (Bowra, Heroic Poetry 97). In the Aeneid, both Aeneas and Turnus are compared to forest fires and mountain rivers (Gransden 136–37), and Turnus is likened to a lion, a bull, a wolf, an eagle, a tiger, a war-horse, the north wind, fire and torrent, and a landslide (Williams 120). When Turnus is described as leonine in Book 12, William S.Anderson recognizes that “The same Latin phrase occurs here to describe the lion, roaring from its bloody mouth, as earlier has been assigned to the very incarnation of disorder, Furor impius, raging to be released” (92). As for Homer, Anderson remarks, “Homer knew that warfare can turn a man into a beast” (8). Homer’s similes comparing frenzied heroes to wild animals are related to the mythic depictions of shape-shifting common to the Nordic sagas. “The basis of such tales,” writes H.R.Ellis Davidson, “may lie in the fierce frenzy, like that of a wild beast, which overcame the berserks in battle” (Gods and Myths 68). Another related motif is the use of storm imagery to symbolize the forces of battle. Cedric H.Whitman notes that in the Iliad, “Interwoven with the other nature imagery, especially in the Great Battle, is the image of wind. It is joined often by clouds, dust, rain, snow, or sea, and in general blows harder and harder as Hector’s attack nears its climax” (Homer and the Heroic Tradition 147). In the Aeneid, according to William S.Anderson, “the storm suggests war in general” (25).The power of Odin, the god of the berserks, also suggests the force of the storm. “The root of the name,” writes

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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry

Francis Huxley, “may also mean ‘wind,’ and ‘storm,’ and, because gods of storm are commonly those of war, it is no surprise to find that Odin is also a war-god” (241). The battlefield paroxysm is most often symbolized by the images of fire and light. Fire is the predominant image scheme in both the Iliad and the Aeneid. In Homer and the Heroic Tradition, Cedric H.Whitman devotes almost an entire chapter to the fire symbolism of the Iliad. “In one form or another,” he writes, “fire occurs about two hundred times in the Iliad, and of these only ten can really be said to be casual uses, unconnected with the main scheme. For the rest, fire itself, or comparisons of things to fire, forms a remarkable pattern of associations, all centering around the theme of heroic passion and death” (129). When Hector threatens to reach the Greek ships, “War itself is fire, yet here the real fire which threatens is the blaze of the tragic wrath” (135).Whitman attests that the image of fire “connects the wrath of Achilles with the plan of Zeus, and Achilles himself with the gods. Wherever it occurs in connection with heroes, it emphasizes their inspired energy and stress” (145). The image of light has a similar symbolic function: “Athena makes a light go before a hero destined for victory” (122).The imagery of the Aeneid is almost as incandescent as that of the Iliad. In Forms of Glory: Structure and Sense in Virgil’s Aeneid, J.J.William Hunt observes: The grip of madness on queen [Dido] and prince [Turnus] alike is stressed repeatedly in both books [4 and 12] by the same epithet, demens or amens, “frenzy” or “helpless bewilderment”; and their parallel mood is chiefly expressed in metaphors and similes of fire, an encompassing fire framing the epic at both ends in the opening and closing panels, and in the mind of Aeneas an irremov-able fire from which the light of his final triumph can never be dissociated. (89)

According to H.R.Ellis Davidson, “It was said that ‘the hero’s light’ rose from [Cuchullain’s] forehead” during his battle frenzy (Myths and Symbols 84).The name of Cuchullain’s father, Lug, whom Davidson calls the nearest parallel to Odin in Irish tradition, meant “The Shining One” (Myths and Symbols 90).The warrior band led by the ancient Irish warrior Finn, whom Davidson compares to the berserks, were called the Fionn, a word that means “light” (Myths and Symbols 81). Sometimes the battle-frenzy is ascribed a divine origin, as when the Olympians intervene in the Iliad (and, less frequently, in the Aeneid) and inspire selected warriors to a streak of surpassing brilliance. As Carlyle writes, however, “The essence of …all Pagan Mythologies, we found to be recognition of the divineness of Nature” (On Heroes 30). Pagan thought was pantheistic and made no fundamental distinction between the extremes of nature and the power of the divine. Classical scholars recog-nize that Homer andVirgil use the pantheon to represent a divine immanence in the world.Walter Kaufmann notes that “Homer’s gods are not supernatural but part of nature” (151), and Thomas Greene recognizes that “Virgil’s gods…embody abstract principles or forces” (44). For the ancient Greco-Romans and Norsemen,

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the power of Athena or Mars or Odin was transcendent in the sense that it transcended the normal limits of the human, as do the forces of nature.The berserks, for example, attributed their battle furor to Odin, and they worshipped the god accordingly, but Odin was simply the furor itself—his name meant “furor” (Davidson, Gods and Myths 70). The surpassing nature of the hero’s battle transport is both his glory and his tragedy. Dumézil comments at some length on the invincibility of the frenzied warrior (Horace 17–20). “Voilà le germe précieux des grandes victoires,” he proclaims (Horace 23). Walter Scott, in whom Tennyson was well versed, calls this ecstatic frenzy “The bold Berserkar’s rage divine,/Through whose inspiring, deeds are wrought/Past human strength and human thought” (Harold the Dauntless 3.8).The hero’s furor allows him to perform feats of legend, but an inability to harness this sublime power may prove disastrous. John Lash writes, “The mission of the hero in all his variants consists not merely in the management of force, but in the mastery of an excess of force. His challenge is to face forces gone out of control, exceeding their proper limits, and he himself embodies the dangerous superfluity of such forces” (6, original emphasis). “Force, for Homer,” explains Rachel Bespaleff, “is divine insofar as it represents a superabundance of life that flashes out in the contempt of death…it is detestable insofar as it contains…a blind drive that is always pushing it on to the very end of its course, on to its own abolition and the obliteration of the very values it engendered” (qtd. in Schein 84). R.D.Williams writes, “O cohibete iras (‘control your fury’) says Aeneas to his men when the truce is broken (12.314); this is what Homer’s Achilles had failed to do, with disastrous consequences, and it is whatVirgil’s Aeneas, for all his efforts, also on occasion fails to do” (84). Horace, whom Elizabeth Nitchie ranks alongside Homer and Virgil in his influence on Tennyson, writes in Ode 1.16: They say Prometheus, shaping mankind from clay And forced to borrow random component parts From other creatures, put the lion’s Frenzy of temper inside our bosoms. From wrath Thyestes’ ghastly undoing came, And in the final count it was wrath by which Great cities suffered total wreck and Over their ruins of walls and towers The hateful plow of insolent foes was drawn. Subdue your anger! (13–21, Charles Passage trans.)

The Book of Leinster has an account of the initiatory combat exploit of the young Cuchullain. Dumézil writes, “The condition that the exploit has effected in Cuchullain, this transfiguring rage, is in itself a good thing…. But this ferg is as

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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry

troublesome as it is precious: the child is not its master; on the contrary, it possesses him” (Destiny 135). The Odyssey climaxes with the venting of Odysseus’s rage in a vengeful bloodbath; the Iliad depicts Achilles’s inability to channel and control his transcendent wrath; in the Aeneid we are left with a final, indelible image of Aeneas’s succumbing to the irresistible power of furor as he kills Turnus. Maud and the Idylls of the King can be grouped with these classical epics in their treatment of a common theme. The wrath of heroes, and more particularly the double-edged nature of battle fury—its intoxicating, supreme efficacy coupled with its tendency to run riot in rampant destruction—is the argument which Tennyson, in the tradition of the ancient bards, most frequently sings in his battle poetry, beginning with his earliest efforts and culminating in two of his greatest masterpieces. Some of Tennyson’s earliest efforts are examined in the next chapter, which covers “The Old Sword,” “TheVale of Bones,” “Persia,” “The Druid’s Prophecies,” “The Expedition of Nadir Shah into Hindostan,” “God’s Denunciations against PharoahHophra,” “The Old Chieftain,” “Oh!Ye wild winds that roar and rave,” “Babylon,” and “The Ballad of Oriana.” Chapter three is a study of the mature Tennyson’s bardic treatment of historical and legendary battles, in “The Captain,” “Sir Galahad,” “The Tourney,” “Boädicea,” “Specimen of a Translation of the Iliad,” “Achilles over the Trench,” “Battle of Brunanburh,” “The Revenge,” and also in the two other Iliad translations from the Pierpont Morgan manuscript. The fourth chapter treats Tennyson’s similarly bardic approach towards contemporary conflicts, including the incendiary poems that made him vulnerable to charges of “war-mongering.” The selections covered here are “Exhortation to the Greeks,” “Written during the Convulsions in Spain,” “Britons, Guard Your Own,” “The Third of February, 1852,” “Hands All Round,” “Suggested by Reading an Article in a Newspaper,” the “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” “The Defence of Lucknow,” with the “Dedicatory Poem to the Princess Alice,” and “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava,” with the “Prologue to General Hamley” and the “Epilogue.” Maud is the subject of the fifth chapter, and the sixth is devoted to the Idylls of the King.

Chapter Two

The Early War Poetry

T

HE POEMS STUDIED IN THIS CHAPTER, EXCEPT FOR “THE BALLAD OF ORIANA,” are attributed to Tennyson as part of his contribution to the Poems by Two Brothers volume of 1827. Tennyson wrote forty-nine pieces for this collection, including four which Hallam Tennyson said were omitted from the 1827 volume “for some forgotten reason” (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 1.xxi). Of these forty-nine, sixteen are about battle, while several others, especially “Time: An Ode,” and “Mithridates Presenting Berenice with the Cup of Poison,” are heroic in tone and theme.The most recognized of Tennyson’s perennial themes, the elegiac and the erotic, are represented here as well, with nine poems on loss and five on love. Interestingly, many of the battle poems have a strong element of the elegiac, but the themes of love and war, which Tennyson interweaves to great effect in Maud and the Idylls of the King, are treated discretely in the Poems by Two Brothers collection, with war as the preponderant subject matter. Robert Bernard Martin writes of these early efforts, “Their most noticeable aspect is that the majority derive directly from his reading” (45).The relatively high incidence in these poems of heroic themes reflects Tennyson’s high degree of exposure to such themes throughout his formative years.The Homeric influence of Tennyson’s early reading became one of the permanent features of his genius, and the artistry with which the mature Tennyson handled martial material is foreshadowed by this group of early poems. “The Old Sword” is the first battle poem in the Tennyson canon, and the first to adumbrate the venerable theme of the sublime but dangerous wrath of heroes. In Tennyson in Egypt, W.D.Paden builds an elaborate argument on the dubious observation that “In Alfred’s early verses aggression is almost always connected, not with triumph, but with suffering, despairing revolt, or certain death” (74). Henry Kozicki, in arguing that this fundamental tenet of Paden’s oft-referenced work is inaccurate,

21

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cites “The Old Sword”: “In ‘The Old Sword,’ the poet evokes associations that are hardly remorseful” (Tennyson and Clio 10).Though Kozicki offers no analysis of the poem, in his comment he touches upon an important crux. An exegetical fulcrum of “The Old Sword” is the speaker’s attitude towards the sword: does he tell it to “Lie there, in slow and still decay” (37) because of his horror at “The purpling tide of death” (12), which he wishes to be stanched forever, or does he express admiration for an ancient “relic” (39) which he feels is too sacred to be disturbed? There is no unequivocal answer, and the ambiguity helps to convey the sense that battle fury is a mixed blessing. The phenomenon of battle frenzy is explicit in lines 21–24 of “The Old Sword”: And who hath cloven his foes in wrath With thy puissant fire, And scattered in his perilous path The victims of his ire?

By traditional means, Tennyson gives the theme even more emphasis. The warriors in heroic literature often manifest their battle wrath by shouting, and we find this element in the first stanza of “The Old Sword”: “Yet once around thee swelled the cry/Of triumph’s fierce delight,/The shoutings of the victory,…” (5–7).When Achilles demonstrates his supernal force in Book 18 of the Iliad (in a passage which Tennyson himself translated—see Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 2. 655), he gives three great cries which drive the Trojans back. Seth Schein comments, “The aegis, the supernatural fire, and the divinely enhanced shout are miraculous, sublime emblems of Achilles’s transcendent power and personality” (138). In Book 10 of the Aeneid, Mezentius calls out three times in a great voice as he prepares to engage Aeneas in combat, and there are numerous other occasions in both works when shouting accompanies the fiercest fighting or expresses the joy of triumph, as when Patroclus charges the Trojans in Book 16 or when Aeneas overthrows Mezentius at the end of Book 10. In addition, H.R.Ellis Davidson recounts that “The berserks howled when going into battle, and Cuchulainn was said to scream hideously when he put on his helmet and prepared to go out to kill his enemies.” The screaming was an indication of the onset of battle wrath (Myths and Symbols 84). In the phrase “fierce delight” of line 6, Tennyson expresses the paradox of battle frenzy, which is experienced as both ferocity and joy. The Greek word “kharme” is rendered eighteen times as “joy of battle” or “joy of combat” in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of the Iliad. “Said to be derived from the idea of ‘zest,’” A.T.Hatto observes of the Greek term, “its main use apart from ‘battle’ is in phrases of remembering or not forgetting one’s battle-ardour” (qtd. in Hainsworth 2. 225). It is presumably Homer’s “kharme” that Tennyson refers to as “delight of battle” in line 16 of “Ulysses.” Cedric Whitman writes of the Iliad that “The emphasis is on the joy of battle, with

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its romantic high-heartedness” (Homer and the Heroic Tradition 168). In Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga demonstrates emphatically that in heroic societies, “Play is battle and battle is play.” He speaks of “the indivisibility of play and battle in the archaic mind,” and emphasizes that “play may be deadly and yet still remain play” (41).The heroic concept of the joy of battle carried through into medieval,Arthurian literature and into Renaissance epic, and it continued to flourish in Tennyson’s day. William Ernest Henley was one of the final torchbearers of the ideal, in poems such as “The Song of the Sword.” In line 8 of “The Old Sword,” the speaker’s reference to the “thunders of the fight” evokes the traditional association between the powers of the storm and the ferocity of battle.This is also the case with line 12, “The purpling tide of death,” which specifically brings to mind the River Xanthos episode in Book 21 of the Iliad. The speaker’s descriptions of the sword’s “sheeny blade,” “glittering edge,” “gleaming brand,” and “puissant fire” (2, 3, 18, 22) employ the traditional fire/light image to establish the sword as an icon for the destructive power of battle wrath.The rust that hides the blade’s former shine is an appropriate symbol for the antiquity and obsoleteness of battle savagery.When the speaker says that he “would not burnish/ Thy venerable rust” (33–34), it is easy to interpret his refusal as expressing a wish that the dangerous power of battle fury never again be unleashed. This wish, in conjunction with the admiring tone of the four previous stanzas (the warriors are “lordly forms” [19], and they fight “fearlessly, with open hearts” [29]), perfectly captures the ambivalence of the ancients towards this sublime and powerful but dangerous and destructive force. In composing “The Old Sword,” Tennyson may have remembered a passage from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. In Canto 3, stanza 44, a passage replete with traditionally heroic imagery, Byron’s speaker describes “the madmen who have made men mad,” whom he equates with “all unquiet things/Which stir too strongly the soul’s secret springs” (3.43. 1, 4–5): Their breath is agitation, and their life A storm whereon they ride, to sink at last, And yet so nursed and bigoted to strife, That should their days, surviving perils past, Melt to calm twilight, they feel overcast With sorrow and supineness, and so die; Even as a flame unfed, which runs to waste With its own flickering, or a sword laid by, Which eats into itself, and rusts ingloriously.

The simile of the rusting sword is perfectly compatible with the significance of the sword in Tennyson’s poem, and Byron’s use of the “flame unfed” in a related analogy is consistent with the fire and light imagery in “The Old Sword.” We may think

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of Tennyson’s rusting sword as eating into itself, thereby representing the selfdestructive potential of the fire of battle wrath, the tendency of furor to push on “to the very end of its course, on to its own abolition and the obliteration of the very values it engendered” (Bespaleff, qtd. in Schein 84).When the inner fires of naturally combative men find no outlet in warfare, they may burst out in acts of criminal violence, or in self-destructive behavior of various kinds. The rusting sword may represent this tendency, a tendency the poems speaker presumably regrets (in view of his admiration for the feats of the sword’s former owner) but still finds preferable to the horrors of warfare. The speaker’s reluctance to disturb the antique sword may be attributed to his reverence for it as a heroic artifact.As Henry Kozicki (Tennyson and Clio 10) recognizes, the narrator does speak admiringly of the derring-do in which the sword was involved. The speaker takes a heroic stance in his esteem for valor as a moral virtue: it is the “dastards” cheek that grew pale in the fight (14), while the dark-eyed warriors who closed fearlessly are described as “heroes” (31, 29, 28). In On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, Carlyle emphasizes that “It is an everlasting duty, valid in our day as in that [of the old Norsemen], the duty of being brave. Valour is still value” (31– 32, original emphasis). We may choose to see the romantic tone of the battle descriptions in the first four stanzas as continuing into the fifth, in which case the speaker’s wish that the sword “Lie there, in slow and still decay” (37) is attributable to his feeling that the battle brand should not be removed from the scene of its glorious exploits (this interpretation presupposes that the sword is lying on the site of an ancient battlefield). The speaker’s acquiescence in the sword’s fate of being “Unfamed in olden rhyme” (38) could well be a touch of irony: though the sword is “unfamed” in olden rhyme, it is “famed” in nineteenth-century rhyme, thanks to Tennyson’s poem. Even if we feel the tone of the fifth stanza to be consistent with the admiring stance of the preceding four, however, there is no escaping the tragic contrast between the fire and light of the sword’s days of action and its current state of “darkness and of dust” (36). If we read the fifth stanza as a recoil from the horrors of violence evoked by the sword, we find that the poem expresses ambivalence about the destructiveness of battle fury. If we feel that the speaker’s attitude is consistent throughout, we find the tragic undertones of what he says undermining our empathy with his admiration. If we are uncertain whether the fifth stanza expresses veneration or aversion, we find in the poem an inherent ambiguity about the wrath of heroes. In any case, the great heroic theme is wrapped in an equivocality that is perfectly appropriate, considering the ancient emphasis on the double-edged nature of “puissant fire.” An alternative way of reading the poem is to see the sword as approximating Thor’s hammer. In Gods and Myths of Northern Europe, H.R.Ellis Davidson discusses the close connections between the cross (which often is iconographically twinned with the sword), the swastika, and the hammer of Thor as religious

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sym-bols (80–84). Though this may be an instance of the young Tennyson’s writing more allusively than he knew, the images of the “thunders of the fight” and of “thy puissant fire” are capable of calling to mind the Norse god, of whom Davidson writes, “The famous weapon of Thor was…the symbol of the destructive power of the storm, and of fire from heaven” (Gods and Myths 84). “TheVale of Bones” is another early poem in which a souvenir moves the speaker to consider both the glory and the horror of warfare. In this case, it is the bleached bones of dead warriors that elicit the meditation.As in “The Old Sword,” the speakers response to the remains of battle has undertones of ambivalence. Here, Tennyson uses traditional imagery to draw subtle parallels between the inexorable and enduring powers of the natural world and the fleeting ferocity of charging warriors. Kenneth M.McKay, in Many Glancing Colours, pays a commendable amount of attention to “TheVale of Bones,” and he makes several good observations; for example, “The stanzas vary in length…reflecting, with a terminal refrain composed of variations on ‘this Vale of Bones,’ the narrator’s deepening consciousness” (21). He recognizes “the coherence, clarity, and power of [Tennyson’s] expression” in the poem (23). Though McKay’s treatment of “The Vale of Bones” is uniquely thoughtful and thorough, it nonetheless neglects much of the poems artistry and fails to appreciate its heroic ideals. He says that “the full horror and futility of the glory emerges only at the end,” and that “the theme of ‘The Vale of Bones’ is, in effect, the illusions of youth” (20). McKay notices a “general parallel in structure between ‘The Vale of Bones’ and ‘Tintern Abbey,’ in so far as both turn on a disparity between past and present within a constant nature, though Wordsworth realizes a continuity where the narrator of Tennyson’s poem realizes the full horror of disparity” (21). “In a brilliant variation of the refrain,” McKay continues, “in which he ironically echoes the earlier ‘I deemed, when gazing proudly there…,’ the narrator comments: ‘I dreamed not on this Vale of Bones!’ (97–104). Judgment relates to the proud glory and the dream to the bones, but the disparity is characterized by horror” (22). McKay fails to acknowledge that the resolution of the speakers transient horror is a large part of the poem’s fascination. “Time past and present are both real,” McKay says, “but the narrator of The Vale of Bones,’ unlike Wordsworth in ‘Tintern Abbey,’ has no theory or myth of continuity by which to see them meaningfully united” (23). The narrator does in fact have a myth of continuity, and it is the same one found in “Tintern Abbey”: memory and the unity of nature. Christopher Ricks cites John Leyden’s “Ode on Visiting Flodden” and Scott’s The Lady of the Lake as influences on the “The Vale of Bones” (The Poems of Tennyson 1.108), but a more likely source is Ezekiel, considering what happens to the bones there: “The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones,…” The Lord commands Ezekiel to “Prophesy upon these bones” (37.1, 4), whereupon the bones rise up, regain their missing flesh and come to life again. In a sense, the speaker

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of “The Vale of Bones” also performs a resurrection, bringing the ossified remains of the warriors back to life as he recalls their splendor. “The eyeless socket, dark and dull,/The hideous grinning of the skull,/Are sights which Memory disowns,” the poem declares (109–111). Memory, in particular the commemoration of the warriors in Tennyson’s poem, can sustain the glory of the battle in spite of time’s dissolution. Memory triumphs over time and keeps the full splendor of the warriors alive. One of the most characteristic themes of heroic literature is the desire to win lasting honor by having one’s deeds immortalized in bardic song. In his chapter on Homer in The Greeks, H.D.F.Kitto remarks, “The only real hope of immortality was that one’s fame might live on in song” (60). Walter Kaufmann, writing on “Homer and the Birth of Tragedy” in his book Tragedy and Philosophy, agrees that “[t]here is no immortality and no reward for heroism, except the glory of being remembered in some great poem…. [T]he best a man can hope for is to be remembered evermore in poetry” (161–62). According to H.R.Ellis Davidson, the same ideal prevailed in Old Norse thought: “The emphasis in the myths is the same as that in the heroic poetry, on the importance not of holding on to life at any cost, but of acting in a way which will be long remembered when life is over” (215–16). When Tennyson’s narrator exclaims that Memory disowns the ghastly emblems of Stern Dissolution, he is asserting the immortality of the gallant band of heroes he once knew. Walter Kaufmann’s comment on the Iliad is pertinent to “The Vale of Bones”: “And while the atmosphere of the Iliad is drenched with death, the first great tragic poem of world literature is also a song of triumph because it grants the dead their wish for immortal glory in song” (162). It is possible to read the phrase “Memory disowns” as indicating the speaker’s obliviousness to, or his willful denial of, the grisly side of war, a mistake which Tennyson never, or at most rarely, made. His broodings on the subject in “The Old Sword” and “The Vale of Bones” are enough to undermine Christopher Ricks’s claim that “Tennyson is always imaginatively sensitive to splintering weapons, but seldom to splintering skulls” (Tennyson 248n.). If we interpret the final lines of “The Vale of Bones” as an attempt by Tennyson’s narrator to ignore the macabre result of the battle, the poem’s earlier, lingering description of it absolves Tennyson himself from charges of a similar insensitivity. In this interpretation Tennyson’s use of a speaker who is self-deluded about the grim realities of warfare would help to belie Ricks’s specious allegation while enhancing the artistry of the poem. By means of parallel imagery, Tennyson makes significant connections between his descriptions of the natural scene and of the battle scene. In line 11, the gale is described as “dull;” the same adjective characterizes the skulls’ eye sockets in line 109.The “cries” and the “thrilling groans” (67) of the battle recall the “shrill owlet’s desolate wail” (17), the “moans” of the wind (9), the “wild goat’s cry” (71), and the “screaming of the startled hern” (74). The “brows” of the warriors (45, 88) are mirrored in the “brow” of the mountain (22).The mountains are “rioting” (33), as if

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taking part in the battle themselves, and are “sternly piled” (33), suggesting their susceptibility to, or implication in, the “Stern Dissolution” (108) which wastes the “piled” (87) bodies of the warriors.The “torrent’s echoing thunder” (24) is echoed by the “thunder of the combat” (93), and the fountain, like the “rioting” mountains, is described as if active in the battle. It is “brawling” (29).The Vale’s “midnight dew” (36) becomes the “red dew” of blood from the battle (77). Tennyson’s strategy in drawing these parallels would seem to be dictated by the heroic tradition, in which battle action is likened to the forces of nature. His description of the charge is paradigmatic in its display of Homeric motifs. The fire/light image is salient: the warriors’ eyes “flash,” (50), their swords “blazed” (52), the forces collide in a “fiery shock” (63). The reference to the “wild winds blowing” (58) exemplifies the Homeric device of using storm imagery in the description of battle.The adjective “wild” relates to the difficulty of controlling the rampaging natural power of battle fury.Tennyson’s artistry is evident in his use of the “wild winds blowing” during the battle as a counterpoint to the “dreary nightbreeze” (9) which prevails as the speaker contemplates the battle’s aftermath. The “thunder of the combat” (93) contributes to the storm imagery, as does the “tumultuous crash” (49) of the fighting.The “yell of triumphs voice” (83–84) recalls the shouting in the Iliad and the Aeneid, and the metaphor of lines 85–86, “When battle’s brazen throat no more/Raised its annihilating roar,” is possibly a deliberate echo of Aeneid 1.293–96, in which Furor is symbolized by a roaring lion.The raven in line 38, in addition to its appropriateness here as the traditional prophet of doom, has ties to the Anglo-Saxon heroic tradition. H.R.Ellis Davidson writes, “The raven, together with the wolf, is mentioned in practically all the descriptions of a battle in Old English poetry, and both were regarded as the creatures of the war god, Odin” (Gods and Myths 65). Tennyson emphasizes the pride of the warriors, mentioning it in lines 48, 57, 94, and 98. Pride was a characteristic virtue of the heroic age. “For Aristotle and the tragic poets,” writes Walter Kaufmann, “pride was no sin but an essential ingredient of heroism” (63). “All the heroes in the Iliad are proud,” Kaufmann observes, “and frequently state expressly how they are better than this man or that; and Achilles does not mind saying that he is the best of all, which he is according to Homer, and there is no harm in his saying it” (142, original emphasis). Tennyson’s mention of the “maddening strife” in line 64 makes a clear connection between the image patterns of the heroic tradition and their traditional referent, battle wrath.The real artistry of the poem lies in the way it suggests the para-doxical nature of the wrath.As we have seen,Tennyson goes to some lengths to draw parallels between the warriors and the natural setting of the battle. This connection is manifested when the forces of nature figuratively lend their power to the warriors in the form of glorious battle fury. On the other hand, the poem graphically

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demonstrates the disastrous potential of furor when it shows us how these same powers of nature have had their ghastly way with the soldiers’ remains. The interaction of man and nature is suggested also by the whimsy of lines 20 and 88. In line 20, “I dimly pace theVale of Bones,” the narrators pacing is described curiously. Exactly what it means to pace “dimly” is unclear; evidently the narrator’s pacing has acquired the dimness of the vale. Nature’s influence on man is apparently reciprocated in line 88, where the warriors’ brows are “with noble dust defiled.” It is unclear how dust can be noble, unless it has acquired the nobility of the warriors’ brows. We can find the dangerously attractive nature of battle wrath characterized in greater detail if we read the first ten lines of the poem symbolically. In line 2, the moon is “riding,” like the mounted warriors, and it is “dark-red,” which suggests blood. If we take the moon for a symbol of the bloodied soldiers, the other elements of the poem’s first section work together with it to form a small allegory that signifies the speakers conflict.The moonbeams are the varying effect of the warriors’ bat-tle action. Lines 3–4 represent the joy and sublimity of battle at times, while 5–6 represent the ghastly destructiveness of battle which is more evident at other times (the castle wall is “ruined,” and its whiteness evokes the bones).The “partial splendour” of line 7 suggests the equivocalness of glory and the fury it inspires. The power and the glory are only partially splendid when viewed through the intervening years that have altered the scene. The pines are a symbol of time: the “blackening fir” (12) uprears its “form of many years” (16, my emphasis).The moans of the “dreary nightbreeze” (9) represent the deaths of the warriors killed in the battle. The narrator “hears” the moans through the pines or the intervening years. Lines 97–104 recall Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I, 5.4.89ff., where Prince Hal, perfunctorily elegizing Percy Hotspur, testifies that When that this body did contain a spirit, A kingdom for it was too small a bound; But now two paces of the vilest earth Is room enough. (89–92)

Tennyson evokes Hal’s elegy, but slightly alters its emphasis: I deemed, when gazing proudly there Upon the fixed and haughty air That marked each warrior’s bloodless face, Ye would not change the narrow space Which each cold form of breathless clay Then covered, as on earth ye lay, For realms, for sceptres or for thrones—(97–103)

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Hotspur’s two paces of earth may be enough to hold him, but we know that he would exchange it if he could, whereas the warriors in Tennyson’s poem are deemed content in their narrow space because they are covered in glory. The dissolution of time, however, which turns a heroic tableau horrific, threatens the narrator’s idealistic view: “I dreamed not on this Vale of Bones!” (104). Now that “years have thrown their veil between” (105), the grotesquerie of the “vale” has become a “veil” which can obscure the unbloodied face of battlefield glory, but through which the memory of the speaker can penetrate. In “The Vale of Bones” Tennyson is very much aware, as were the ancient bards that preceded him, of the grim destructiveness of war, but he immortalizes in song the glory of the warriors and the poem ends on a defiant note.The power of nature may have rendered the battle site ghastly over time, but natures power once manifested itself there as a fiery clash of intrepid warriors, and the memory of their glory transcends the pile of bones. “What lapse of time shall sweep away/The memory of that gallant day…?” (55–56).The poem’s description of the battle is in the past tense, but it is the most vivid and vital passage. Though ghastliness is an inescapable factor in warfare, it is the glory that Memory keeps alive. “The Vale of Bones” accords with the Homeric tradition in its ambivalence towards the destructive power of wrath and also in its memorializing of battlefield heroics. As does “The Vale of Bones,” “Persia” features a pattern of subtle connections between a natural setting and the fieriness of conflict. For its full impact the poem depends on the readers recognition of traditional battle imagery in Tennyson’s description of the landscape. Kenneth M.McKay takes a serious look at “Persia,” the artistry of which he seriously underestimates. He sees the poem as “a lament for the past” and “also a celebration of greatness, such that the triumph of Cyrus is echoed in Iran’s subjugation by Alexander. Greatness is overthrown by greatness, and, if the lamentation is felt, it is also glorious” (23). Echoes more significant than those noted by McKay are found in the last part of the poem, where the panorama echoes the victory of Alexander and adumbrates the impending overthrow of his Parthian conquerors by the Persians. The panoramic conclusion also recalls the description of the Parthians in Paradise Regained (PR), thereby hinting at their eventual defeat. Latent in the land of the Persian Empire and in its people is the same power which the Greeks and then the Parthians temporarily exert over them. McKay mentions that Tennyson’s use of the extended sentence is “obviously reminiscent of Milton” (23), but completely neglects the important epigraph. “In ‘Persia,’” he writes, “the sense of unity is part of the artistic coherence of the piece; the woe issues from the recognition that it is no more” (24–25). Here McKay misses the real key to the poem, which is that the woe is only ostensible, that in its expression a future victory is subtly foreshadowed.

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An intimate connection between the Persian people and their land is established immediately: “Land of bright eye and lofty brow!” (1). Still addressing the land, the speaker asks, Oh! lives there yet within thy soul Ought of the fire of him who led Thy troops, and bade thy thunder roll O’er lone Assyria’s crownless head? (13–16)

The land has a soul, and the imagery suggests that it is indeed a fiery, combative one. The references to “sunny” in line 3, to the “immortal Titan’s beams” in line 56, and to “hot” in line 65 are all subtly evocative of fire. From the beginning of the poem the descriptions are somewhat deceptive, just as the temporary prostration of the Persians is deceptive.The “gale” of “balmy breath” in line 2 would seem to suggest a mild breeze, but “gale” actually means “a strong current of air,” or, as Webster specifies, “a wind from 32 to 63 miles per hour.” A gale is the kind of wind associated with a storm, and as such the gale has a connection with the “thunder” of Cyrus’s battle power.Tennyson’s assertion that in this land, “every gale is balmy breath/Of incense from some sunny flower” (2–3) could be taken as a hyperbolic accolade: the Persians are so heroic that storms (and the battle fury they traditionally symbolize) are to them as the sweet and soothing scent of blossoms. In any case, the gale carries the perfume of flowers. The profusion of flower imagery in lines 3–12 would seem to suggest an atmosphere of ease and luxuriance, but behind the flower imagery, as behind the Persians’ façade of abjectness, is a hint of aggression.The context of the epigraph gives “flower” a military connotation: He look’t and saw what numbers numberless The City gates outpour’d, light armed Troops In coats of Mail and military pride; In Mail thir horses clad, yet fleet and strong, Prancing their riders bore, the flower and choice Of many Provinces from bound to bound; (PR 3.310–15)

With flowers suggesting military force in Tennyson’s Miltonic source, it is reasonable to read the phrase in lines 11–12 of Tennyson’s poem, “crowns it with a diadem/ Of blossoms,” as foreshadowing the Persians’ eventual retaking of the crown. The imagery associated with Alexander partakes of the heroic tradition and clearly indicates the battle wrath of the Greeks in taking Iran. In line 19 Macedonia is described as “stormy,” and Alexander’s heroic character is emphasized in line 23, where we learn that he was “doubly proud.” “In madness” he led his warriors (28), and Persepolis, which was burned as Homer’s heroes had burned Troy, was “Encompassed with its frenzied foes” (33).

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Persia’s star may have set (36), but a star “sets” only to “rise” again, and the last line of the poem, “Whence cynics railed at human pride” (74), suggests disdain of the “doubly proud” Alexander. The second half of the poem describes four rivers of the Persian Empire. Cyrus had once made Persia’s battle thunder “roll” (15), and Tennyson’s description of the Indus River, which is “rolled” (51), would seem to hark back to this Thor-like image. Christopher Ricks notes that in the original draft Tennyson also described the Hyssus River in line 69 as “rolling” (The Poems of Tennyson 1.116n.). The Indus is a “stream of gold” (52), and the Ganga flows beneath Hyperion’s “golden orient ray” (58), images which recall the “pomp of gold” (31) of old Persepolis and the fire of the frenzied foes in which it was consumed. The “shield-like kuphars” on the Euphrates (46) have a martial suggestiveness, as do the “kings of chivalry” for which Trebizonde is renowned (68). The Euxine “whelms/ The mariner in the heaving tide” (71–72), a storm image which, together with the gale of line 2, surrounds and outweighs the reference to “stormy Macedonia” in line 19. The military connotations of the river descriptions are enhanced if read in conjunction with the passage from Paradise Regained which supplies “Persia” with its epigraph. Like a river, the Parthians “outpour’d” from the city gates (3.311). Their war horses are “fleet and strong” (3.313), just as the Euphrates in “Persia” is “swift and strong” (45). Milton refers to “rivers proud” (334) and mentions the “military pride” (3.312) of the Parthians. He also uses storm imagery in his depiction of the onslaught. The Parthians fire a “sleet of arrowy showers” (324). The passage from Paradise Regained is especially appropriate as a source for a Tennyson battle poem, in that the passage, according to Merritt Y. Hughes, contains Virgilian and Homeric echoes. “The entire scene,” Hughes comments, “…resembles Virgil’s picture of the advancing Trojan forces (Aen. XI, 601–2)” (512). By first equating the land of the Persian empire with the Persian people, and then by drawing parallels between this same landscape and the fighting qualities of the Greeks and the Parthians (as portrayed in Paradise Regained),Tennyson subtly suggests that the fighting fury of the Persians is equal to that of their empire’s conquerors, and he thus foreshadows the eventual victory of the Persians over the Parthians, who had previously conquered the Greeks. Alexander may have been “doubly proud,” but the Persians would double their glory in defeating the conquerors of those who had conquered themselves. In his panoramic description of the Persian lands,Tennyson uses imagery that hints at the inner fires required for such a doubly glorious overthrow. The reader who is alert to this imagery will find in Tennyson’s panorama an affirmative answer to the apparently rhetorical and despairing question of lines 13–16, and in so doing will enjoy an aesthetic experience com-parable to the reading of “The Lotos Eaters,” where the eventual departure of Odysseus’s crew is subtly foreshadowed in their declaration to remain.

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The volatility of battle furor is attributable in part to its being a force of nature, and nature is cyclical. Like “Persia,” “The Druid’s Prophecies” concerns the temporary victory and foreseeable defeat of a conquering nation, in this case Rome. In “The Druid’s Prophecies” the conqueror’s forces are associated with nature by means of traditional battle imagery, but the Roman hegemony is foreseen as only temporary because it will conform to nature’s patterns of alternation by rising and falling. Tennyson likens the Romans’ battle furor to a force of nature by means of the most conspicuous image pattern of the heroic tradition, fire and light. For example, in the first line we find “flame,” in the third swords are “gleaming,” in the sixth helmets are “bright,” in the fifteenth Rome’s “sun of conquest blazes.” The reference in line 8 to the “maddening fight” makes the traditional tenor of the symbolism explicit. Animal imagery also figures in the description of battle. The trumpets are “braying,” (8), an expression Christopher Ricks compares to the braying of the clashing arms and armor in Paradise Lost 6.209–10 (The Poems of Tennyson 1.117n.), but which more obviously evokes a donkey. Rome’s “haughty” (and therefore typically heroic) power is represented by the “eagles” of its standards (14).The eagle imagery extends to line 22, where the prophet refers to the “wings” of Nero’s palace, and to line 57, where its connotation of pride is mitigated as the Romans are foreseen “flying” before Fingal’s men (57). Tennyson’s references to the “sun of conquest” (15) and to the “Five brilliant stars” (44) are particularly apt, because the contending powers in the poem, like the heavenly bodies, rise and fall intermittently. Ricks notes that “The Druid’s Prophecies,” along with Tennyson’s other “prophetic denunciations,” derives from Gray’s “The Bard” (The Poems of Tennyson 1.117). In the last stanza of “The Bard,” a Celtic prophet likens the rise and fall of nations to solar vicissitudes: Fond impious man, think’st thou yon sanguine cloud, Raised by thy breath, has quenched the orb of day? To-morrow he repairs the golden flood, And warms the nations with redoubled ray. (135–38)

Tennyson’s Druid prophet does much the same thing, using imagery that implicitly compares the vacillating fortunes of Mona and Rome to the rising and setting of the sun. With the onset of battle the prophet refers to Mona’s “sacred oaks…reared on high” (2), then he implores her to enjoy a brief moment of glory in opposing the Romans. Though Mona’s “day is brief” (10), she should “exalt” her torches and “raise” her voices (9). After Mona’s subjugation, she “bends” in grief (12) while Rome “raises” her eagle standards (13). Though temporarily on the “pinnacle of splendour” (29), Nero “shall fall” (31). A naked sword is suspended high above him (37–38), presaging his replacement by “the five good emperors” (Tennyson’s note, Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 1.117), whose stars “shall brightly rise” (44).

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The dastardly Commodus makes his victims “bow” (46), but he himself shall be laid “low” (48), as will Pertinax and Didius Julian (50). Severus is “glorious to his country’s fall!” (56). Rome’s monarchs will fall like the winter leaves (65–66— representing another kind of natural cycle) and she will “bend” beneath the power of the conquering Norsemen (72).Though “She rears her domes of high renown” (74), the “fiery Goths shall fiercely trample/The grandeur of her temples down!” (75–76). Rome “sinks to dust” (77) and “bows to earth!” (84). When Rome’s “sun of conquest” sinks, her empire will naturally grow dark: “Yet soon shall come her darkening hour!” (16).This image is reinforced in line 78, where the prophet mentions her “dark despair.” The darkness of the empire’s setting is an appropriate counterpoint to the abundance of light imagery associated with her zenith; for example: “glory” (17), “glare of gold” (24), “pinnacle of splendour” (29), “dazzling” (43), “brilliant stars” (44), “brightly rise” (44). “The Druid’s Prophecies” is remarkable not only for exhibiting Tennyson’s masterful employment of Homeric imagery, but also for introducing into his battle canon one of its most important and personal heroic themes: the power of the bard. The bard’s importance as a memorialist of heroic deeds is discussed above, but in heroic societies the bard was considered more than just an historian. He was placed on a par with the heroic warrior; he was believed to be inspired by the same divine frenzy, and his achievements were deemed equal to those of the warrior. “Odin… was the god of poets and warriors alike,” writes Francis Huxley (245). H.R.Ellis Davidson elaborates: The Old Norse adjective óðr, from which Oðinn, the later form of his name in Scandinavia, must be derived, bears a similar meaning: ‘raging, furious, intoxicated’, and can be used to signify poetic genius and inspiration. Such meanings are most appropriate for the name of a god who not only inspired the battle fury of the berserks, but also obtained the mead of inspiration for the Aesir, and is associated with the ecstatic trance of the seer. (Gods and Myths 147)

In the Icelandic sagas, heroes often celebrate their valorous feats by reciting their own verses, sometimes interrupting the combat scenes to do so. Nietzsche martializes the ancient poets in his claim that the Greek writers were as combative as the warriors they celebrated. In “Homer’s Contest,” he declares that “the Greek knows the artist only as engaged in a personal fight” (original emphasis), and in Human, AllToo-Human, he states that “The Greek artists…wrote in order to triumph” (Portable 37, 53). The Greeks rewarded the Olympic champions in poetry with the same laurel wreathes worn by champions in boxing and wrestling. Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History features chapters on “The Hero as Poet” and on “The Hero as Man of Letters,” and he refers to poetry as “the Heroic of Speech” (90), sung by “the Heroic of Speakers” (91).Virgil, in Book 6 of the Aeneid, refers to

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the poet Musaeus as “the hero” (Mandelbaum 154). In Traditions of Heroic and Epic Poetry, J.B.Hainsworth states, “In the tenser heroic societies, words have the status of deeds” (224). Unlike Nero, who “Can…not see the poignard gory,/with his best heart’s-blood deeply dyed” (19–20), the Druid prophet has an inspired vision of the eventual repulse of Rome. Just as Tennyson’s speaker “resurrects” the dead warriors in “The Vale of Bones,” the Druid’s prophecy creates the situation he desires as he foretells justice for Mona. Appropriately, the speaker frequently uses the present tense to describe these forthcoming events.The prophet’s frenzied inspiration eternalizes the overthrow of the Romans, giving the action substance before it occurs by embodying it in words. The timelessness is patent to the reader, for whom the prophecy of the future has become a commemoration of the past. It is in this aspect of the poem that “The Druid’s Prophecies” reveals its close kinship with Gray’s “The Bard.” In “The Bard,” the speaker and his fellow bards (who are all dead except for him) are “Avengers of their native land” (46). By foreseeing England’s travails, they inscribe them in the web of England’s destiny.Their vision literally determines the fate of their enemies. Significantly for Tennyson’s poem, in “The Bard” nature is involved in Cambria’s revenge: “Hark, how each giant oak and desert cave Sighs to the torrent’s awful voice beneath! O’er thee, O King! their hundred arms they wave, Revenge on thee in hoarser murmurs breathe; (23–26)

Another connection between the two poems is Tennyson’s use of “braying” in line 8, which recalls the “battle bray” (83) of “The Bard.” In composing “The Druid’s Prophecies,” Tennyson apparently owed his own inspired frenzy to the Homeric muses, whose mother was Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. In the Druid’s catalogue of future events,Tennyson recalls his reading in the classics. Much of the prophecy follows the account of Suetonius in his Lives of the Caesars. It testifies to the richness of Tennyson’s own vision that he bases a Druid’s prophecy of the future defeat of Rome on the retrospect of a Roman historian. Battle furor is once again Tennyson’s subject in “The Expedition of Nadir Shah into Hindostan.” The Shah’s “expedition” is in fact portrayed as a battle rampage, and Tennyson’s depiction is replete with the traditional battle imagery of fire and light and other forces of nature. The potential drawbacks of heroic wrath are implicit in the historical subtext of the poem. The emphasis in “The Expedition of Nadir Shah” is on the turmoil of battle as a natural force. Nadir’s troops are likened to a swarm of locusts (1), to a forest fire (2), and to “a thousand dark streams” rushing down a mountain (17). In the last stanza, the cries of the Indians blend with the wind (21–22). Hindostan’s glory is a star, and

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its fame a flower (23–24). As we might expect, the description of furor involves the symbols of fire and light: “flames” (2), “glare” (3), “sparkle” (4), “glory” (13), “splendour” (13), “star” (23). In the first three stanzas the descriptions of Nadir’s men are evocative of birds.Their standards and sabers are sparkling “in air” (4), the vulture is “behind” them (6), as though they were all flying in formation, and the earth trembles “beneath” them (9). Even their accompanying “spirits” and “demons” (7) have wings. In contrast, the Indians are “bowed to the dust of the plain” (11). Tennyson depicts the Persian advance with images that evoke three of the plagues in Exodus.The “host of locusts” (1) recalls the plague of those same creatures, the “gloom of the wings” (8) approximates the plague of darkness, and “all Delhi runs red with the blood of her slain” (12) suggests the plague of blood. In keeping with the heroic belief in battle ecstasy as a divine force, Tennyson here aligns the natural powers of battle with the God of the Old Testament. Tennyson undoubtedly had the Old Testament in mind, because in his own note to the poem (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 1.122) he cites an allusion to Joel 2.3 in lines 19–20: “The land like an Eden before them is fair,/But behind them a wilderness dreary and bare.” These lines show that the power of Nadir’s men is like nature’s own power to destroy the landscape. The volatile, self-destructive potential of battle wrath is reflected in the historical aftermath of Nadir Shah’s victory. Just as Shakespeare’s Henry V has poignant undertones for the viewer who weighs the glorious victories of Henry against the ensuing reversals which the play does not depict, “The Expedition of Nadir Shah” has poignant, or perhaps only paradoxical, undertones for the reader who realizes that Nadir Shah was not ultimately a victor in life. His battle wrath was doubleedged; the savage qualities that made him a conqueror eventually drove his own men to assassinate him. As Christopher Ricks notes, Nadir was the last of the great Mohammedan conquerors of India (The Poems of Tennyson 1.120). Tennyson’s artistry in this relatively short poem goes well beyond his handling of Homeric themes. His use of assonance (for example, “host” and “locusts” in line 1, and “destruction” and “rush” in line 5) and alliteration (“the flames of the forest” in line 2, and “standard and sabre that sparkle” in line 4) combine with vigorous rhythms to enhance the poem’s rousing tone. Line 5 ends with an onomatopoeic flourish, while line 17 is appropriately mellifluous. Its “th” and “s” sounds make it “flow” like the streams it describes, an effect counterpointed by the line that follows it. “With the fife and the horn and the war-beating gong” (18) is remarkably staccato, echoing the sense of its content. Where Tennyson’s master touch is most evident is in his selection of the poem’s two epigraphs. The first quotation, the opening passage from Racine’s Alexandre le Grand, claims that Alexander’s power seems to force the sky to champion his defense, a conceit appropriate to Tennyson’s theme of battle frenzy as a force of nature. In Alexandre le Grand Alexander conquers India, making Racine’s play espe-cially pertinent to “The Expedition of Nadir Shah.” Line 6 of the play reads, “Voyez de

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toutes parts les trônes mis en cendre,” an image that fits well with line 2 of “The Expedition of Nadir Shah.” The second epigraph also relates to the connection between natural forces and battle. It is taken from Claudian’s account in In Eutropium of the destruction of the landscape when Eutropius repulsed the Huns from Rome.The word “Squallent” in the second epigraph has an ambiguous meaning. According to Alfred Carleton Andrews, the word (which he renders “squalent”) means that “the fields either ‘were left stubble’ from wholesale burning and cutting of the grain by the barbarians or ‘were left uncared for’ because the farmers were frightened away” (51n.). The possibility that the fields were burned is especially relevant to Tennyson’s poem, considering the flames of line 2. The passage from In Eutropium that Tennyson cites contains certain paradoxes which are heightened when considered in conjunction with “The Expedition of Nadir Shah.” Claudian, his account colored by his hatred of Eutropius, describes the resounding victory of Eutropius over the Huns as if it were a defeat. Tennyson recounts a victory that would soon turn to a defeat because of the very savagery depicted in the poem. Claudian repeatedly derides Eutropius for being the effeminate eunuch that he was.The issue of effeminacy provides a connection with Tennyson’s poem, where the feminine image of a cup is associated with the Indians (14), while the Shah’s forces are heralded by the phallic images of fife and horn and war-beating gong (18). In Claudian, the effeminate eunuch is, ironically, the conquering hero, while the overly masculine qualities of Tennyson’s conquering hero would eventually cause his defeat. Christopher Ricks (The Poems of Tennyson 1.122) compares line 23, “For the star of thy glory is blasted and wan,” to Paradise Lost 10. 412, “the blasted Starrs lookt wan” (it would also seem valid to compare line 6 with PL 10. 273ff).The context of line 412 in Book 10 of Paradise Lost is exquisitely appropriate for “The Expedition of Nadir Shah.” Beginning at line 410, Satan’s offspring, Sin and Death, descend to earth, on a mission from Satan to rule there. By inducing Man to fall, an event which occurs immediately prior to this scene, Satan’s forces experience a temporary victory but an ultimate defeat, just as Nadir’s forces gain only a temporary victory over India in Tennyson’s poem.The “spirits of death, and the demons of wrath” (7) of Tennyson’s poem are reminiscent of Satan’s offspring, and the Shah’s destruction of a land “like an Eden” (19–20) recalls Satan’s temporarily successful expedition. “The Expedition of Nadir Shah” demands of its readers a broad contextual awareness, but it amply rewards those who acknowledge its exacting artistry.Tennyson’s use of Homeric imagery combines with his skillful interweaving of epi-graph and allusion in a poem that is vigorous and rousing but also monitory with regard to the pitfalls of warlike wrath.

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“Gods Denunciations against Pharaoh-Hophra, or Apries” has a biblical source, Ezekiel 29–30 (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 1.135), and, significantly enough, the biblical God that inspires Tennyson is the angry, warlike Jehovah of the Old Testament. Tennyson lends a heroic dimension to the biblical “wrath of God.” The emphasis in “Gods Denunciations,” from a Homeric standpoint, is on battle wrath as a manifestation of divinity.The poem is an admonition to recognize the transcendent, supra-personal nature of the warrior’s volatile power.We learn immediately that this is what Pharaoh has failed to do, and that this failure will prove his undoing. The River Xanthos episode in Book 21 of the Iliad associates a raging river with the rampant force of battle wrath. Tennyson’s source passage in Ezekiel makes a similarly metaphorical use of the Nile.Tennyson’s “beast” (1) is in Ezekiel a crocodile, “the great dragon that lieth in the midst of his rivers” (29.3). Tennyson follows Ezekiel in likening the Pharaoh to a “beast of the flood” (1) who believes that his power, symbolized by the river, is self-sustaining. Heroic literature recognizes that the sublime ferocity of the berserk is not his own to command. As “The Druid’s Prophecies” emphasizes, this feral power is like the cycles of nature in its propensity to come and go at its own behest. In the first stanza of “God’s Denunciations,” God, using nature imagery, ominously reminds Pharaoh that real power is not self-sufficient but self-transcendent and transient. Also in the first stanza we find the first instance of the familiar fire/light symbol in the “sun’s burning ray” (4). The remainder of “God’s Denunciations” describes in typically heroic imagery the impending advance of Nebuchadrezzar’s divinely inspired fighting forces. Line 7 is distinctly heroic in its treatment of the pagan ideals of pride and fame, from which Tennyson makes metaphors that lend them substance. In the third stanza we find storm (9), lightning (11), and more animal imagery (12). In the fourth stanza the river, the symbol of battle wrath, rages rampantly. Like the River Xanthos in the Iliad, the Nile runs red with the blood of the slain. The “war-cry” of line 17 recalls the great shout of Achilles. Line 18, “And the child shall be tossed on the murderer’s spear,” is possibly an allusion to Henry V, 3.3.38: “Your naked infants spitted upon pikes.” Henry’s acknowledgment that “God fought for us” (4.8.119) is certainly analogous to the theme of “God’s Denunciations.” The concluding line is a triple allusion which evinces Tennyson’s genius. Christopher Ricks (The Poems of Tennyson 1.135) recognizes the whirlwind and the fire as coming from Ezekiel 1. The first chapter of Ezekiel, because it powerfully describes a mystical, numinous experience, is relevant to Tennyson’s account of the numinous power of battle furor. The allusion to Ezekiel also connects “God’s Denunciations” with Paradise Lost. Ricks acknowledges that Milton based his description of the Messiahs chariot in Paradise Lost 6 (749–51) on the first chapter of Ezekiel, and that Tennyson would have borne this in mind (The Poems of Tennyson 1. 135–36). Book 6 of Paradise Lost, which describes the war in heaven, makes a perfect analogue to Tennyson’s account of divine battle in “Gods Denunciations.” The

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concluding phrase of Tennyson’s poem, “chariots of fire,” is more relevant to II Kings than to Ezekiel. In II Kings 2.9ff., the scene of Elijah’s translation to heaven, the vision of “chariots of fire” heralds the transfer of transcendent power from Elijah to Elisha, the same sort of spiritual power to which Nebuchadrezzar gains access in “God’s Denunciations.” In II Kings 6.14ff., chariots of fire are involved in the overcoming of overwhelming odds in a confrontation by means of spiritual vision and power, a scenario which is perfectly pertinent to Tennyson’s poem. In “Gods Denunciations,” the “ire” (19) of Nebuchadrezzar is tantamount to the battle wrath of God himself. Pharaoh becomes the victim of divine wrath by believing his own power to be independent of it. Tennyson uses a Hebrew source to offer a Homeric warning against the presumption that battle wrath is a self-regulated faculty. If the warrior does not acknowledge the dangerously transcendent nature of this spiritual fire, it can turn against him, as it does in the case of Pharaoh. Though the Old Testament is full of divinely inspired prophets, when Tennyson next treats the theme of bardic power, in “The Old Chieftain,” he turns for his setting, as he did in “The Druid’s Prophecies,” to an ancient culture much closer to home. Using Ossian for his source,Tennyson presents a Celtic hero who is bard and warrior in one. “The Old Chieftain” is another one of the early battle poems in which Tennyson skillfully interweaves epigraph and allusion to enrich the texture of his art. The “song of the hundred shells” (1) is a drinking song, and Tennyson’s poem, with its abundance of aspirates and forceful consonant sounds, approximates in its meter a rousing, rowdy, mead-hall chorus. By using the word “shells” in the first line, Tennyson immediately evokes Ossian, who repeatedly refers to the custom of the ancient Scots to drink from shells; for example, “They rejoiced in the shell,” “Crothar’s hall of shells,” “Cormac the giver of shells” (116, 188, 281). Another of Tennyson’s early poems, “Oh! ye wild winds, that roar and rave” (which is discussed below), inarguably derives from “The Song of the Five Bards” in Ossian, and so, apparently, does “The Old Chieftain.” Macpherson’s note on “The Song of the Five Bards” introduces the matter of the Ossianic poem: “Five bards, passing the night in the house of a chief, who was a poet himself, went severally to make their observa-tions on, and returned with an extempore description of, night” (189). After the five bards render their various descriptions of the darkness and the ghosts and the storms of the night, the chief concludes with his own meditation in which he claims that “night is alike to me, blue, stormy, or gloomy the sky. Night flies before the beam, when it is poured on the hill.The young day returns from his clouds, but we return no more” (191). He woefully elaborates the “ubi sunt” theme for another paragraph: “Where are our chiefs of old? Where our kings of mighty name? The fields of their battles are silent. Scarce their mossy tombs remain” (192). At the beginning of his concluding paragraph he abruptly changes tone, rousing himself from his previous brooding: “Raise the song, and strike the harp; send round the shells of joy. Suspend

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a hundred tapers on high” (192).The first line of “The Old Chieftain” is apparently a reworking of these two sentences from Ossian. Ossian’s chief wards off melancholy in the same way that Tennyson’s old chieftain does; he celebrates, by his own enduring song, the commemoration of glorious deeds in enduring song: “Let some gray bard be near me to tell the deeds of other times; of kings renowned in our land, of chiefs we behold no more” (192). The heroic theme of “The Old Chieftain” is the immortality of noble deeds and of noble song, with an emphasis on “the united powers/Of battle and music” (13– 14). The chieftain recalls his days of glory in strategically ambiguous lines that sometimes fail to distinguish clearly between the activities of fighting and reciting. As a chieftain, the speaker is presumably a warrior first and foremost, but he places greater emphasis on his role as bard. In Stanza 3 he relishes not the memory of his own fighting feats, but his ability as a bard to inspire his men. The second stanza seems to set up a distinction between the chieftains high voice that could loudly raise the sounding song and his strong arm that could make his foe bow beneath his sword stroke, but it is possible to read “stroke” in line 6 as referring to the playing of the lyre, in view of the fact that “each word that I spake was the death of a foe,/ And each note of my harp was his knell” (19–20). On a literal level lines 19–20 remove all distinction between bardic song and fighting.Tennyson’s equation of fighting and song is, as we have seen with regard to “The Druid’s Prophecies,” consistent with the heroic attitude. H.R.Ellis Davidson discusses the standpoint of the Vikings towards a man of the old chieftain’s caliber: “A quick-witted poet could win his way in their world as well as a brilliant swordsman, and the man who was both at the same time, like Egill Skallagrimsson the Icelander, or Earl Ragnald of Orkney, had the world at his feet” (Gods and Myths 13). The ancient bards covered themselves in the glory of the heroes they perpetuated. Tennyson’s fighting poet is not unrealistic as such (Aeschylus, to cite one example even more renowned than Egil Skallagrimsson, fought at the battle of Marathon), but he also makes a perfect symbol for the symbiotic relationship between bard and warrior. At the heart of this relationship was the desire to be remembered through the ages, and at the end of the first and the last stanzas the chieftain emphasizes memory: “Yet in my bosom proudly dwells/The memory of the days of old.” One of the enjoyable aspects of “The Old Chieftain” is Tennyson’s use of “height” and “lowness” imagery to represent life and death and to suggest the triumph of memory over death. When the chieftain was at his peak, his voice was “high” (5), and his enemies would “bow” in death (6).The invincibly inspired chieftains stood on “heaven-kissing” towers (15), while their vanquished enemies “sunk” (17) like snow which “falls” down a stream (18).The chieftain, as we learn immediately from the title, is old, and his acknowledgment in the first and the last stan-zas that his limbs are “cold” connects him with the snow to which his dying enemies are compared in line 17. This connection implies that he is soon to die himself, but his reiterated

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injunction to “Raise, raise” the battle song symbolically ascribes life to the song. Though the high-living chieftains will join their low-lying enemies in death, the memory of the chieftains’ glory is raised to immortality. The epigraph from Walter Scott and the allusion to Hamlet in line 15 augment both the artistry and the thematic ramifications of “The Old Chieftain.” The epigraph is taken from, appropriately enough, The Lay of the Last Minstrel. The minstrel of Scott’s title is the last of his kind because his master, something of a warrior-poet himself, has slain the Bard of Reull over a point of bardic honor. “On Teviot’s side, in fight they stood,/And tuneful hands were stain’d with blood” (4.34. 19–20). As a result of this confrontation the minstrel’s master has been executed and his followers have all fled and died except for the titular hero, who embodies Nietzsche’s description of the Greek spirit of rivalry in the arts: And I, alas! survive alone, To muse o’er rivalries of yore, And grieve that I shall hear no more The strains, with envy heard before; For, with my minstrel brethren fled, My jealousy of song is dead. (4.35. 9–14)

In a later account of a contest between some bards of the new generation, the minstrel describes the Earl of Surrey as a warrior-poet reminiscent of Tennyson’s old chieftain: “His was the hero’s soul of fire,/And his the bard’s immortal name” (6. 13. 9–10).The epigraph itself (3.1.1) appears in a passage about love.The minstrel’s idea on this subject is susceptible of a heroic interpretation. He claims that “In peace, Love tunes the shepherd’s reed;/In war, he mounts the warrior’s steed” (3.2. 1–2). The personified Love takes part in battle—an apt symbol, from the heroic standpoint, of the “joy of battle” ideal, which Tennyson’s old chieftain exemplifies. His love of battle is evident in the pride with which he recounts his former glories. As Christopher Ricks notes (The Poems of Tennyson 1.140), the phrase “heavenkissing” in line 15 of “The Old Chieftain” is an allusion to Hamlet 3.4.60 (Ricks erroneously cites line 59). Hamlet uses the phrase in comparing the portraits of his father and his uncle: See what a grace was seated on this brow; Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself, An eye like to Mars, to threaten and command, A station like the herald Mercury New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill— A combination and a form indeed Where every god did seem to set his seal To give the world assurance of a man. (3.4.56–63)

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The implication of this passage for “The Old Chieftain” is that “the united powers/ Of battle and music” make for a complete and even a godlike man. Tennyson’s allusion relates the Celtic chieftains to Mercury, who in Book 4 of the Aeneid tells Aeneas to leave Carthage and Dido to seek his and his people’s destiny. Aeneas gives his heroic destiny priority over love, just as the only love the old chieftain remembers and celebrates is the love of heroic song and battle.The “words as weapons” motif in Hamlet—“I will speak daggers to her, but use none” (3.2.359)—adds to the appropriateness of the play as a resource for “The Old Chieftain,” in which “each word that I spake was the death of a foe” (19). The potent effect of the old chieftain’s words undoubtedly had a personal meaning for Tennyson, given his own fighting spirit and his high esteem of manliness and courage. The old chieftain’s “bold song of death” (9) has already served its heroic purpose and does not appear in Tennyson’s poem.Tennyson’s own song focuses on the ability of poetry to inspire heroic deeds. “The Old Chieftain” is not itself a song of death; it is a song of poetic fury, potent with the same inspirational power it describes. “Oh! ye wild winds, that roar and rave” is even more indebted to Ossian than is “The Old Chieftain.” Like “The Old Chieftain,” “Oh! ye wild winds” is a meditation on fame and the immortality of heroic deeds. Using Homeric imagery, Tennyson recasts the descriptions of the stormy night in Ossian’s “The Song of the Five Bards” into a representation of the battle sublime. In the Ossianic passage that supplied Tennyson’s epigraph, there is no indication that the “army” of the dead is a literal army; the word just as likely means “multitude.” The “barred helm” (32) and “swords” (40) of Tennyson’s poem do indicate an actual army, albeit a ghostly one, and the spirits of this army live on in the turbulent forces of nature which the warriors once manifested in their battle wrath. They “war again” (44) as part of the furious storm.Tennyson’s emphasis on the Homeric battle image of the storm begins in the epigraph, where he changes Ossian’s “from the air” to “on the northern blast.” Storm imagery dominates the rest of the poem, which also includes the heroic motif of the battle cry (the “awful yells” of line 33) and the fire/light image (“Your swords the meteors of the sky” [40]). Tennyson’s verse commendably captures the sounds of the raging storm. The phrase, “hum/Of the innumerable host” (25–26) is evidently an early version of the onomatopoeic line from “Come down, O maid” in The Princess: “And murmuring of innumerable bees” (7.207). Other examples of onomatopoeia in “Oh! ye wild winds” are found in lines 8, 12, 25, and 26. The scenario depicted by Tennyson is inspired by a Celtic source but informed by Scandinavian myth. According to H.R.Ellis Davidson, “In later folk-beliefs Odin was associated with the ‘wild hunt,’ the terrifying concourse of lost souls riding through the air led by a demonic leader on his great horse, which could be heard passing in the storm” (Gods and Myths 148). In changing the activity of the ghosts

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from hunting to warfare,Tennyson conflates the lore of the “wild hunt” with that of Valhalla, where Norse warriors continued fighting after their deaths. The element of ambiguity with which Tennyson sometimes suggests the volatile, double-edged nature of battle fury is present in the last stanza of “Oh! ye wild winds.” The concluding lines (“And would ye break the sleep of death,/That ye might live to war again?”) may be taken in several different ways. The speaker may be expressing ambivalence about the possible recurrence of battle furor, but his question seems more relevant to the issue of heroic death and fame. Christopher Ricks (The Poems of Tennyson 1.155) cites Grays “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” as a source for “the narrow cell” in line 37. Gray’s “Elegy,” like Ossian’s “Song of the Five Bards,” explores the merits of fame and of poetry as bulwarks against death. The speaker may be deluded about the presence of the ghosts, or actively imagining them. He does, in fact, say “Methinks, upon your moaning course/I hear the army of the dead” (9–10, emphasis added). If the speaker is simply superstitious and mistaken about the reality of the phantoms, his question is dramatically ironic. In spite of what the narrator thinks, the old warriors have not, and cannot, “break the sleep of death.” If the narrator is creatively imagining the battling specters, he is presumably someone so steeped in heroic literature that a sublime night reminds him primarily of battle descriptions. In this case the narrator’s voice may not be far removed from Tennyson’s own. If we decide that the poem calls for a suspension of disbelief in the ghostly presence, we may choose to interpret the concluding question as either critical or admiring in tone. Tennyson’s speaker either impugns the heroism of the ghosts or ascribes a surpassing purity to their heroic ideals. In line 42 the narrator attests that “Your fame is in the minds of men.” The ghosts have already achieved the honor that is the goal of the heroic warrior. The speaker may be questioning these warriors’ dissatisfaction with their fame, or their willingness to risk it in order to “war again.” His question can be compared to Emerson’s in “Heroism”: “In the gloom of our ignorance of what shall be, in the hour when we are deaf to the higher voices, who does not envy those who have seen safely to an end their manful endeavor?” (381).When Odysseus is close to drowning in Book 5 of the Odyssey, he wishes that he had died in the battle of Troy; such a death would have gained him immortal renown (Achilles is involved in an almost identical scenario in Iliad 21).The last sentence in Ossian’s “Croma,” to which “The Song of the Five Bards” serves as an appendix, is “Happy are they who die in youth, when their renown is around them!” (189).The ghosts’ desire to return to earth may be read as a betrayal of the heroic ethic, which values not length of life but noble deeds and a noble death. “Are we really sorry for Roland or for Lazar or the heroes of Maldon in their last great fights?” asks C.M.Bowra. “Do we not rather feel that it is all somehow splendid and magnificent and what they themselves would have wished for, ‘a good

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end to the long cloudy day’?” (Heroic Poetry 76). The riders on the storm may be culpable for renouncing their good end. On the other hand, the joy of battle is also a great heroic ideal.The old Norsemen loved fighting enough to make it the primary activity of the warrior’s paradise, but in Valhalla fighting yields at sunset to refreshments: “The warriors fight all day long, and are restored to life in the evening so that they can feast with Odin and next morning fight anew” (Davidson, Gods and Myths 152). The warriors in Tennyson’s poem, however, fight even at night, or perhaps only at night, as stormy nights are the settings most congenial to their ferocity. In the conclusion of “Oh! ye wild winds” the speaker may be marveling that the ghostly warriors love fighting enough to return from the dead to pursue it. His admiration may only be increased by the warriors’ disregard of their fame in their willingness to indulge their love of combat once again. At the end of Book 17 of the Iliad, the charge of Hector and Aeneas makes many of the Greeks turn and run. Homer notes that in doing this they are forgetting their joy of battle. The riders on the storm may be so heroic that even death itself cannot make them forget their joy of battle. In “The Song of the Five Bards,” the chief dismisses the five descriptions of the spectral night as irrelevant to the more profound issue of death, on which subject he proceeds to muse. In “Oh! ye wild winds,” Tennyson is not attempting to impersonate either Ossian’s bards or their philosophical chief. Four of the five bards are personally rather craven in their refrain of “receive me, my friends, from night,” and they find no kinship, as Tennyson’s narrator does, between the powerful sublimity of the night and the sublime power of the fight.The meditation of Ossian’s chief is not nearly as multifarious in its philosophical ramifications as Tennyson’s final stanza.As if furthering the heroic tradition of artistic rivalry,Tennyson emulates only to surpass not only the artistry and heroism of Ossian’s quintet, but also the seriousness and profundity of his chief’s meditation. In “Babylon,” Tennyson reemphasizes his most basic heroic theme. Using Isaiah as his source, he presents a Zeus-like Jehovah whose own battle wrath is indistinguishable from that of the warriors he inspires. In accord with the pantheism of the heroic tradition, the battle forces of Cyrus, while presented as agents of God’s power, are depicted using images of nature’s fury. The biblical and historical knowledge Tennyson displays in “Babylon” is as impressive as his virtuosity. Christopher Ricks, who mistakenly cites Isaiah 17.1 instead of Isaiah 47.1 as providing the epigraph, follows W.D.Paden in tracing Tennyson’s “eight biblical references” to Charles Rollin’s Ancient History (The Poems ofTennyson 1.155).The young Tennyson’s familiarity with the Old Testament apparently superseded the need to consult a secondary source; “Babylon” contains at least twelve biblical references. Beyond the allusions cited in Tennyson’s own notes to the poem, we can compare line 5 with Isaiah 13.6; line 10 with Isaiah 40. 6–7; lines 29–30 with Isaiah 40.12; and line 38 with Isaiah 41. 15–16. Line 7 is an allu-sion to Isaiah 63.3,

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a passage which is particularly appropriate to Tennyson’s poem: “I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the people there was none with me: for I will tread them in mine anger, and trample them in my fury; and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment.” In keeping with this allusion, Isaiah 63.6 seems more appropriate as a source for line 25 than the line from Jeremiah that Tennyson cites. Perhaps he wanted to suggest that he had more than the book of Isaiah at his fingertips.Tennyson’s historical knowledge is evinced most strikingly by line 15, which is presumably a reference to the legend that Cyrus gained entry to the city by diverting the Euphrates, and by line 40. For the reader who is aware that the Euphrates has changed its course since the time of ancient Babylon, line 40 has a literal as well as a figurative significance. It is in the discrepancy between the biblical and the historical accounts of the fall of Babylon that the seed of a heroic interpretation may grow. In Isaiah 13 the prophet foresees the defeat of Babylon and its destruction as one event. In reality the Persians did not destroy Babylon in conquering it, but occupied the city for almost sixty years and made it into what Herodotus called the world’s most splendid city.The buildings were not destroyed until 482 B.C.E. during a revolt against Xerxes I.We might say that the destruction of Babylon, being the result of a revolt, was caused by the same Persian furor that had previously won them the city. It is plausible that “Babylon” echoes Isaiah in depicting the Persian victory and their self-destructive revolt as one event, not because Tennyson believed the biblical version to be factual, but because the prophet’s account unifies two events into an effective symbol of the double-edged frenzy that actuated them. “Babylon” represents the potential for both glorious victory and untrammeled destructiveness in the one spiritual fire of battle wrath. The “Homeric” imagery and emotion of Tennyson’s Hebrew source are conceivably what attracted him to Isaiah. It would be hard to find anywhere a more heroic verse than Isaiah 63.5: “And I looked, and there was none to help; and I wondered that there was none to uphold: therefore mine own arm brought salvation unto me; and my fury, it upheld me.” Nevertheless Tennyson enhances the Homeric qualities of his own version of the prophecy. The images of storm and “blast” (4) along with “the rushing of waves” (23), the “shouts of the foe” (12), the fiery image of the “bright sun of conquest” that shall “blaze o’er his head” (24), and the double reference to “wrath” (7, 32) are all from the artistic arsenal of the heroic tradition. In Isaiah a wrathful Jehovah manipulates Cyrus as his instrument, but in “Babylon” Tennyson conflates the wrath of Cyrus with the wrath of God, in conformity with the heroic mythology of divine inspiration on the battlefield. It is “they” who come (4), but “I” will trample Babylon down (7). Babylon shall crouch at the roll of “his” wheels (28), but it is “my presence” (31) and “my wrath” (32) that power them. The Babylonians will bleed “By the barbarous hands of the murdering Mede” (36), but according to the next line it is “I” who will “sweep [them] away in destruction and death.”

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“Odin,” writes Francis Huxley, “was the god of poets and warriors alike. The same is true of the Tupi tribes, of whom only the shamans and warriors went to heaven after their deaths, because only these two kinds of men truly make themselves one with the spirit that animates their lives” (245). Just as Cyrus becomes one with the divine wrath, Tennyson’s speaker becomes one with the divine power that inspires him to express the wrath. Tennyson presents his rendition of Isaiah’s prophecy as a more direct communication of God than Isaiah’s own version. Whereas Isaiah qualifies his pronouncements with remarks on the order of “God said this to me,” or “I beheld this vision,” Tennyson’s speaker assumes divinity unto himself by saying without qualification “I am the Lord” (29). His speech is tantamount to the speech of God, just as the battle furor of Cyrus is tantamount to God’s wrath. Tennyson’s youthful speech attains probably its most empyreal achievement in “The Ballad of Oriana.” It is the one poem from among the martial juvenilia to have attracted an appreciable amount of critical response; however, much of the response is derogatory and even derisive. To Jerome H. Buckley the poem seems “to have been written solely for the purpose of sonorous declamation” (36). F.E.L.Priestley discusses “Oriana” as “an experiment which does not succeed” (32). He sees a conflict between the poem’s structure and its content: The verses create a fine mood of melancholy, of the elegiac…. [T]he daring young poet then proceeds to force the static stanza form into motion, and we realize that he is…trying to present a ballad narrative, full of action, even swift action, through the medium of a form essentially static…. Tennyson is very soon in difficulties…. By the fifth stanza, the technical problems become overwhelming. (Language 30–31)

Priestley ignores the possibility that Tennyson intended the discrepancy between form and action to reflect the contrast between the violent activity of the tale and the desuetude of the teller. For him the poems repetitions “give…an impression of rather lame padding” (Language 32). R.H.Hutton includes “Oriana” in a “pre-poetic period in [Tennyson’s] art…a period in which the poem on ‘Recollections of the Arabian Nights’ seems to me the only one of real interest” (Jump 352–53). Leigh Hunt exclaims, “…four ‘Oriana’s’ to every stanza, in the ballad of that name, amounting to forty-four in all, burlesque all music and feeling, and become a par-rot-cry instead of a melody. This, too, in a poem full of beauty!” (Jump 128). F.B. Pinion claims that “in narration its historic story displays balladic virtues which never falter, but the cumulative effect of the ‘Oriana’ refrain, following four out of five lines in every stanza, is to carry the poem dangerously near the brink of self-par-ody” (77). “Whatever the experiment,” says Alastair W.Thomson, “it can hardly be said to succeed. ‘I was

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down upon my face’ may have received more than its share of mockery, but ‘I to thee my troth did plight’ and ‘Oh! deathful stabs were dealt apace’ are Wardour Street” (23). Thomson astutely notices “the despairing repetition of the name as refrain,” and “a rhyme scheme which transforms active repetition into haunted recollection” (23), although to him these are aspects of the poem which have “drowned” the “action of ballad” (22). There is a sense in which the intolerance of the critics demonstrates the effectiveness of “Oriana.” Tennyson knew better than anyone that a single-word refrain repeated forty-four times becomes, if not exactly a “parrot cry,” a distracting and even a vexatious element in a poem. He was too great a poet, even at the age of twenty-one, not to realize that his maddening “refrain” would affect the reader in much the same way that the haunting memory of Oriana’s death affects the speaker. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain dwells at such length on Tom’s fantastic escape plots that the story bogs down and the reader experiences the same frustration as do Huck and Jim over Tom’s immature and irrelevant games.Tennyson undoubtedly employs much the same authorial strategy with his refrain in “Oriana,” and the frustration of the critics confirms his success in reproducing in the reader the feelings of his poems hero. In this way, even the poem’s most vehement detractors can be seen as evincing the effectiveness of “Oriana,” but other commentators testify less indirectly to the greatness of the piece. Harold Nicolson says that “Oriana” and “Mariana” “are not excelled by any of the later poems” (98–99). A.H.Hallam’s evaluation of “Oriana” is of course rhapsodic: [T]he strong musical delight prevails over every painful feeling, and mingles them all in its deep swell, until they attain a composure of exalted sorrow….The last line, with its dreary wildness, reveals the design of the whole…. [T]he upon us in a few little words a world of meaning, and to consecrate the passion merit lies in the abrupt application of it to the leading sentiment, so as to flash that was beyond cure or hope, by resigning it to the accordance of inanimate Nature, who, like man, has her tempests, and occasions of horror, but august in their largeness of operation, awful by their dependence on a fixed and perpetual necessity. (Jump 46)

“Perhaps the most beautiful of all Alfred Tennyson’s compositions, is the ‘Ballad of Oriana,’” writes John Wilson as “Christopher North,” who apparently feels that the poem can speak adequately for itself, since he proceeds to quote it in its entirety without any subsequent comment (Jump 62). Charles Tennyson calls the poem “a remarkable tour de force” (Alfred Tennyson 88), and comments that “FitzGerald, who knew him very little at Cambridge, remembered all his life the terrific rendering of ‘Oriana’ which Alfred used to give at Trinity dinner tables” (Alfred Tennyson 86).

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James R.Kincaid briefly and noncommittally discusses “Oriana,” noting that the ballad “combines a rather bald ironic narrative with a more sophisticated ironic characterization” (18). W.D.Paden’s interpretation of “Oriana” is skewed to fit his thesis that aggression in Tennyson’s early poetry is almost always connected with suffering and remorse. He speaks of how “the pursuit of love ends in failure; it generates an intolerable sense of guilt; it is punished by vast fears and fantasies that craze the mind.The punishment includes the death of the beloved” (91). In fact the hero does not pursue love in the poem, and it is of course for the “death of the beloved” that the hero is “punished by vast fears and fantasies that craze the mind.” Christopher Ricks mentions Amadis de Gaula, Scott’s Marmion, and Fletcher’s plays as possible sources for the name “Oriana” (The Poems of Tennyson 1.271).Another possibility is that Tennyson intended the name “Oriana” to represent an antidote to Spenser’s “Gloriana” and to the entire chivalric tradition of fighting for a ladylove. “Oriana” prefigures both Maud and the Idylls of the King in its treatment of the complications involved when a love affair mixes with warfare. Oriana’s despondent and feckless knight falls easily into the same Tennysonian category as Mariana, Elaine, Pelleas, and Merlin, whose erotic passions negate their fitness for “life and use and name and fame.” Edward FitzGerald mentions in his marginalia that “Oriana” was “in some measure inspired” by the seventeenth-century ballad of Helen of Kirkconnell, which Tennyson knew by heart from Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (Ricks, Poems of Tennyson 1.270).Tennyson’s version of the “Fair Helen” story indicates that in an equal measure he may have been inspired by Homer and Virgil. In the Homeric tradition, women were a distraction from the heroic business of fighting. The scene in the Iliad of Hector’s parting from his wife and child is poignant and affecting, and it serves as a counterweight to the martial ethos of the poem, but there is never any doubt that the battle must take priority for Hector, and that the domestic and the martial spheres do not interface. The same holds true of the Dido episode in the Aeneid. For Aeneas, Dido is a temporary deterrent from, not an inspiration for, his heroic calling. Calypso might interrupt the quest of Odysseus, but the ancient heroes know that for them women are a temptation, an alluring respite from the heroic action that wins them their identity. In the heroic epics the idea of love as an inspiration for feats of derring-do is irrelevant. The last thing the warrior needed was additional motivation; he needed his unruly battle frenzy to be controlled. The volatile passion of love was subject to the same potential excesses, as Dido’s fate demonstrates. For the hero of “Oriana,” however, the problem is not an excess of vital force, but a deficit. After the death of Oriana, he dares neither fight again like Aeneas nor kill himself in his misery like Dido. His situation exposes the relative feebleness and fragility of the courtly love tradition as a stimulus to glorious deeds.

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In the real incident upon which “Fair Helen of Kirkconnell” was based (notwithstanding the presence in Ossian of more than one anecdote similar to the ballad—see Ossian 13, 70), one of Helen’s two suitors fires a rifle at his rival, Fleming, who is trysting with Helen. Helen throws herself in front of Fleming and is killed by the bullet. Fleming then cuts his rival to pieces in a sword fight (Scott, Minstrelsy 114–15). In “The Ballad of Oriana” Tennyson makes two key changes as regards his source: Oriana dies not by a rival suitor but by her lover’s own hand as an accidental result of battle, and instead of furiously avenging her (there’s no one to take vengeance on, except himself), her lover flings himself down and wishes to die. The outrageous improbability of the accidental killing of Oriana would seem to suggest that in devising this incident Tennyson intended a figurative meaning. The death of Oriana is drastic enough to be representative of the disastrous potential inherent in the mingling of romantic love and war. Unlike Aeneas, who is undeterred from his heroic destiny by the death of Dido, the hero of “Oriana” exemplifies the troubadours’ ideal of love. His passion for Oriana compromises his vitality as a warrior from the beginning, and after her death his inglorious dependence on her becomes obvious by his reaction to her loss. We can infer from the hero’s narration that he has failed to win honor and a name.Though we read Oriana’s name forty-four times, we never know the identity of the speaker, because his reputation as a warrior is submerged in his love for Oriana. In the first line he says, “My heart is wasted with my woe,” and “wasted” seems to mean “unused” as much as it does “withered.” He wanders around and around, like the “Norland whirlwinds” (6) that accompany him, without any motivation and without achieving any meaningful deeds. The “wolds…ribbed with snow” (5) and the knights comment that “Alone I wander to and fro” (8) evoke Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” whose “knight at arms,/Alone and palely loitering…On the cold hill’s side” (1–2, 36) is an analogous figure to Oriana’s bereaved knight. We learn that before the knight plighted his troth to Oriana, “At midnight the cock was crowing” (12). The biblical token of betrayal heralds here, we might say, the betrayal of both the warrior and Oriana by the chivalric love tradition. The description of battle involves the traditional storm imagery of heroic literature. “Winds were blowing, waters flowing” (14), and the speaker also heard “the hollow bugle blowing” (17). The knight’s description of the bugle, the call to battle, as “hollow” betrays his lack of responsiveness to the occasion for valor. Now, after Oriana’s death, in contrast to the waters of line 14 it is “silence” that “seems to flow /Beside [him] in [his] utter woe” (86–87). The speakers preoccupation with Oriana during the skirmish is evident from his comment, “She saw me fight, she heard me call,/When forth there stepped a foeman tall” (32–33). It is difficult to imagine Achilles, Ajax, Aeneas, or even Hector, who fights in similar proximity to his beloved wife, exhibiting a comparable lack of

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focus on the contest at hand. Oriana’s knight is a courtly lover and not a true warrior. After her death, he says, “I cry aloud: none hear my cries,/Oriana./Thou comest atween me and the skies” (73–75).As the threatening foe had come between him and Oriana (35), now the memory of Oriana comes between him and the potential for renewal from “on high.” The implicit parallel between Oriana and the enemy is appropriate: the knight’s love affair with Oriana has proven to be the enemy of his knightly exploits. The death of his derring-do is marked by the graveyard overtones of the “narrow, narrow… space” (cf. “The Vale of Bones” 100) where he “was down upon [his] face” (46, 53). The poem concludes, “I hear the roaring of the sea,/Oriana” (98–99). The roaring sea rounds out the “flowing waters” motif that previously appeared in conjunction with the onset of battle. Linda Hughes points out the internal rhyme and assonance of “roaring” and “Oriana” (54). The verbal echoes emphasize the relation between Oriana and the powers of nature, the traditional symbol of battle power. Oriana has usurped the role of nature’s fury as a symbol of the knight’s passion. The knight is bereft of his proper valor and prowess because he has dissipated his natural power of battle fury in his passion for a woman. Line 91, “When Norland winds pipe down the sea,” evokes the bugle of the battle, but now the speaker avoids the challenge of life altogether.Twice in the final stanza he says, “I dare not” (93, 96), an admission that stands as a final testimony to his character. A pattern of sexual symbolism implies that the courtly love tradition has unmanned the hero. The phrase “Thy heart, my life” (44) suggests the equivalence of Oriana’s love with the narrator’s manly vitality. “Within thy heart my arrow lies” (80), he says after her death. The arrow, with its phallic connotations, makes an effective symbol of his manhood. It also figures as a synecdoche for his weaponry, his means of doing heroic deeds. Line 80 symbolizes the enervation of his virility and the sheathing of his knightly arms as a result of his erotic thralldom. The lines, “They should have stabbed me where I lay,/Oriana!/How could I rise?” (55–57), are loaded with Freudian implications of sexual role reversal and impotence. For love to motivate the warriors of heroic epic on the battlefield, it must prompt the desire for revenge.Turnus’s outrage over his loss of Lavinia to Aeneas fuels his battle fires, and it is of course the love of Achilles for Patroclus that unleashes his titanic battle wrath. By varying from his source to deny the speaker of “Oriana” the heroic outlet of revenge (except upon himself),Tennyson exposes the potential of the courtly love tradition for stultifying and emasculating its knightly adherents. Because the narrator has killed Oriana himself, the memory of his dead love can only torment him (a scenario that to a certain degree anticipates Maud), and he wanders in abject melancholy like a lovelorn Lancelot. The adulteration of battle wrath by love proves no less tragic than its augmentation by hate.

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“The Ballad of Oriana” was first printed in 1830; the rest of the battle poems reviewed in this chapter were published for the last time in 1827. The fact that Tennyson chose not to reprint these early efforts does not automatically devalue them.Tennyson’s suppression of a set of demonstrably significant poems simply raises the standard of excellence for his subsequent work. Robert Bernard Martin writes that Tennyson “used to refer to this first volume [Poems by Two Brothers] as ‘early rot’” (46), but this depreciatory stance may have become habitual with Tennyson from the time of the publication of the volume, which appeared with an epigraph from Martial: “We know these efforts of ours are nothing worth” (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson xxiv).As Martin relates, when the older Tennyson reread the early work, he “admitted with grudging pride” that “‘Some of it is better than I thought it was!’” (46). An audience responsive to the Homeric echoes of Tennyson’s early war poetry may repeat Tennyson’s own admission. By reviving these echoes, the commentaries in this chapter invite such reassessments, while also portending the greatness of the later battle pieces, in which Tennyson orchestrates the heroic note with the full skill of his mature genius.

Chapter Three

Historical and Legendary Battles

T

HIS CHAPTER IS A SURVEY OF THE MATURE TENNYSON’S TREATMENT OF historical and legendary battles. These poems were written throughout a forty-three-year span in the prime of Tennyson’s career. In 1834, at the age of twenty-five, he wrote the original version of “The Captain” (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 2. 27), the first selection covered here, and in 1877, at age sixty-seven, he wrote “The Revenge” (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 3.25), the last selection.With the battle poems covered in this chapter Tennyson reconfirms his penchant for Homeric themes and imagery, while making an advance in the artistry with which he handles the heroic material. In many cases Tennyson plays variations on the heroic themes, utilizing them to suggest profound philosophical issues. The profundity of this group of works is well exemplified by “The Captain: A Legend of the Navy,” a poem whose multivalence is sometimes taken for inscrutability. Such criticism of “The Captain” as exists, is disparaging and entirely undeserved. Both J.M.Robertson and James R.Kincaid underestimate the piece. In “The Art of Tennyson,” Robertson writes: [“The Captain”] is a performance at best melodramatic in conception, and quite third-rate in execution—a rhymed story which, save for a few phrases, might have been by an average workman like Whittier. But one line, the last, is admirably perfect; and it can hardly be doubted that the poet has allowed the piece to stand mainly for the sake of that. [Quotes the last four lines] If we needs must read a rhymed moral tale—including such a line as “Years have wander’d by”—to light on such a masterly touch as that, we can afford the sacrifice. The presence of the weak elements must, of course, be put to the poet’s debit, with a due protest against what one feels, in his case, to be a falling short of attainable perfection. (Jump 433)

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In Tennyson’s Major Poems:The Comic and Ironic Patterns, Kincaid is just as derogatory and even more reluctant to acknowledge any merit in “The Captain”: The poem pretends to supply a moral to the effect that severity is an ineffective tactic for leaders to adopt (11.1–2), but such cautions are absurdly inadequate, failing to explain the central action.The grotesque juxtaposition of such gory results with motives that are in every way childish defies any explanation. The poem emphasizes this pointlessness by picturing at its close both the ironic fellowship of the crew and captain “side by side beneath the water” (67) and their final triviality: [quotes lines 69–72]. The poem has a dark power, but its strate-gies are fairly simple. (136–37)

Kincaid’s assessment of the moral to “The Captain” is valid.The lesson formulated in the first two lines is indeed “absurdly inadequate” to explain the central action. The inadequacy of the moral constitutes one of several parallels between “The Captain” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” in which the Mariner’s maxim, “He prayeth best, who loveth best/All things both great and small” (614–15), is also absurdly inadequate to comprehend the Mariner’s experience. Both poems present a lurid tale of disaster at sea in which a crew dies and a ship founders as a result of one man’s malignity. In both poems, the crewmen look on their offender with scorn as they drop dead. In addition, the seabird at the end of “The Captain” recalls the albatross of Coleridge’s masterpiece. A possible explanation for the seeming inadequacy of the moral is that the moral pertains not so much to the poems events as to their symbolic import. None of the seamen, including the Captain himself, is named; nor is the ship named. “Captain” is always spelled with a capital “C.” The suicidal mutiny is patently fabulous, and its outcome confirms this quality: no one could know what occurred on a sunken ship that had no survivors.These factors conspire to suggest the viability of an allegorical reading. In the following fragment, written by Tennyson and inscribed “To Gladstone” by Hallam Tennyson in the manuscript (Ricks The Poems of Tennyson 3.639),Tennyson portrays the Prime Minister as the captain of a vessel: There be rocks old and new! There a haven full in view! Art thou wise? Art thou true? Then, in change of wind and tide, List no longer to the crew! Captain, guide! (Memoir 2.339–40)

In the period during which Tennyson wrote “The Captain,” he also wrote numerous political poems, including “Of old sat Freedom,” “Love thou thy land,” “I lov-ing Freedom for herself,” and “Hail Briton!” During this same period (1832–36), he

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composed “The Voyage,” which is a nautical poem and an obvious allegory. It therefore seems legitimate to read “The Captain” as an allegorical version of the political warnings Tennyson was offering at this time, a time when “babbling voices vex the days/We live in, teaching hate of laws,” and “Great spirits grow akin to base” (“Hail Briton” 45–46, 96).The Captains “oppression” (9) of his crew figures the social conditions decried by Dickens and Carlyle, and by Tennyson himself in Maud, where “the poor are hovelled and hustled together, each sex, like swine,/ When only the ledger lives…” (1.34–35).When faced with a national crisis, “The Captain” seems to suggest, the heart of an oppressed people may indeed “beat with one desire” (Maud 3.49), but that desire may be for internecine revenge. Carlyle, in Past and Present, provides an excellent commentary on the political implications of “The Captain”: The Leaders of Industry, if Industry is ever to be led, are virtually the Captains of the World; if there be no nobleness in them, there will never be an Aristocracy more…. Your gallant battle-hosts and work-hosts…will need to be made loyally yours; they must and will be regulated, methodically secured in their just share of conquest under you;—joined with you in veritable brotherhood, sonhood, by quite other and deeper ties than those of temporary day’s wages! How would mere redcoated regiments, to say nothing of chivalries, fight for you, if you could discharge them on the evening of the battle, on payment of the stipulated shillings,—and they discharge you on the morning of it! (260, 262–63)

The observation that “He that only rules by terror/Doeth grievous wrong” (“The Captain” 1–2) may indeed fail to explain the “central action” of “The Captain,” but the apothegm does not seem so “absurdly inadequate” as a synopsis of the poem’s allegorical purport. In the political poems of 1832–34 cited above, and in the infamous incendiary pieces of 1852,Tennyson equates civil disharmony with military weakness, an equation he allegorizes in “The Captain.” As an allegory the poem demonstrates Tennyson’s martial turn of mind; his affinity for warfare as a frame of reference. Another way of interpreting the piece symbolically is to see its antagonists as personifying the two “deadly sins” of the heroic worldview. The Captain illustrates one errant extreme, his crew, the opposite. The Captains self-seeking pursuit of a “noble name” (58) is typical of the behavior that prevailed in heroic cultures and in the literature they produced. H.D. F.Kitto writes: The Greek…was zealous, and was expected to be zealous, in claiming what was due to him….This runs right through Greek life and history, from the singular touchiness of the Homeric hero about his “prize.”… We have noticed how anxious the Greek was

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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry to have his…due meed of praise. He was—and is—essentially emulous, ambitious, anxious to play his own hand. (245)

The heroic desire for glory was something akin to the passion of battle wrath: it was often difficult to control. The adherents of the ancient heroic ethos sometimes found themselves, like the Captain, sinking under the weight of their distended ambition. “With all this goes personal ambition,” writes Kitto, “which the Greek of superior talent often found it impossible to control” (248). “The dangers of [the heroic] view of the world,” writes H.R.Ellis Davidson, “lay in a tendency towards lack of compassion for the weak, an over-emphasis on material success, and arrogant self-confidence: indeed the heroic literature contains frank warning against such errors” (Gods and Myths 219).The character and fate of the Captain exemplify such a warning. In his treatment of his crew he loses control of his ambition and abandons compassion in his arrogant drive for success.The Captain “hoped to purchase glory,/Hoped to make the name/Of his vessel great in story” (17–19), but instead of purchasing glory he is “Sold…unto shame” (60). The Captains naval career is indeed memorialized in story, but hardly in the way he wished. While neither the Captain nor his vessel is named in Tennyson’s poem, the Captain’s cruelty and brutality live on.The Captain’s zealousness for fame is legitimate from a heroic standpoint, but in brutalizing his crew he defeats his own purpose. His error, like his destination at the bottom of the ocean, is “Deep as Hell” (3), because he antagonizes those “in whom he had reliance/For his noble name” (57–58).What James R. Kincaid calls “the ironic fellowship of the crew and captain” lying together beneath the sea, is a symbol of their dependence upon each other for the attainment of glory. Whereas the Captain carries his ambition for honor to baleful extremes, the crew eschews the heroic desire for name and fame and willingly sinks into anonymity if not ignominy. By standing mute with folded arms in willful abstention from the battle, the crewmen present an appropriate emblem of the “heroic perverse.” The ideal of the heroic warrior was to die in battle. Carlyle, writing of the ancient Norsemen, notes that “they thought it a shame and misery not to die in battle; and if natural death seemed to be coming on, they would cut wounds in their flesh, that Odin might receive them as warriors slain” (On Heroes 32).The Captains crewmen, on the other hand, die refusing to fight.Their passivity is antithetical to the cornerstone of the heroic ethos: action. “But of course it is not enough for a man to possess superior qualities;” writes C.M.Bowra in Heroic Poetry, “he must realize them in action…. It is not even necessary that he should be rewarded by success: the hero who dies in battle after doing his utmost is in some ways more admirable than he who lives” (4). The crew’s final gesture constitutes an anti-deed that signifies their utter rejection of heroic values. They do not die battling; they do not even die in a battle. Their refusal to fight turns the potential battle into a slaughter. In its portrayal of disastrous extremes, “The Captain” relates to the great hero-ic theme of uncontrolled battle wrath. Therefore it is appropriate that the speaker of

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the poem in effect assumes bardic status unto himself by referring to his account as “my song” (4). He merits the Homeric singing-robes by conforming his “Legend of the Navy” to the traditions of heroic literature, and by virtue of his skillful use of allusive language. The poem makes a significant distinction between the Captain and the crew by calling the Captain “Brave” (5) and the crew “gallant” (6), a word the speaker emphasizes by repeating it in line 7. “Brave” comes from the Latin word for “mad” or “fierce” (OED 2.497), while “gallant” derives from the Old French verb galer, “to make merry” (OED 6.325).The Captain manifests his fierceness in his treatment of his crew, but the only suggestion of “merriment” in the crew is their “smile of still defiance” (59). “Secret wrath like smothered fuel/Burnt in each man’s blood” (55–56). Wrath is in their blood, and it is “In their blood, as they lay dying” (55), that they “smile on him” (56). One might gather from these lines that the crew’s smile of defiance is their one outlet for their smothered joy of battle. When the French ship is sighted, “a cloudy gladness lightened/In the eyes of each” (31– 32).Their potential for Homeric kharme has been clouded by the Captain’s oppression, so that now they find their joy in anticipating his overthrow. Tennyson’s revisions helped to suggest a “happy warrior” quality latent in the crew. He eliminated his original reference, at line 37, to the crew’s many sorrows, and he also decided against a description at line 48 of the crew standing “with lips comprest” (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 2.29), an image that would have undercut their smile of defiance. Tennyson also solidified his poem’s affiliation with the heroic tradition by deleting a final line of Christian wistfulness: “May they wake in peace!” (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 2.30). The descriptions of the “foeman’s thunder” (41) and of the bullets falling “like rain” (46) are instances of the Homeric battle-storm topos. Lines 44–45, “Crashing went the boom,/Spars were splintered, decks were shattered,” are onomatopoeic. The sound echoes the sense again in lines 51–52, where the readers natural pause between the two lines encapsulates the silence the lines describe. The final two lines, “And the lonely seabird crosses/With one waft of the wing” (71–72), are not only haunting; they are fascinatingly suggestive. The final line is strikingly onomatopoeic, evoking in its alliterating aspirates the flapping of wings. Prior to the destruction of the Captain’s vessel, “the ship flew forward” (33). Now, after the encounter that resulted from this “flight,” a seabird flies over the sunken ship and its moldering crew. It is the word “crosses” in line 71 that is most arresting. The Captain and crew have no crosses over their watery graves; instead, a seabird “crosses” them. (The bird, with its outstretched wings, is itself cruciform. Donne marks the similitude between cross and bird in “The Crosse,” while in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the Albatross is hung about the mariner’s neck “Instead of the cross” [141–42].) In the final tableau of “The Captain” the dead sailors’ place of rest is marked not by an object, but by an action, which is ironic considering that the crew is remembered only through its defiant refusal to act. By means of their defiance (with which the

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Captains men “cross” his authority), the crewmen “cross out” the Captain’s name from the scrolls of history. In addition to its resemblance to a cross, the seabird could be considered as forming an “X,” the first letter of the Greek word for Christ, but also the signature of the illiterate. The “cross” over the graves of the Captain and crew is no engraved memorial but a wordless token of illiterate nature.The Captain and his deliberately silent crew are nevertheless remembered in words: the words of Tennyson’s poem. “The Captain” supplants the role of a Christian gravestone by memorializing the Captain and crew in song. It is therefore perhaps more than a flight of fancy to suggest that the poem itself can be shown to form a cross when considered once again in conjunction with “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” As the simplistic “moral” at the beginning of “The Captain” evokes the similarly simplistic “moral” at the end of Coleridge’s poem, so the seabird at the end of “The Captain” recalls the live albatross in the first part of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” When the two poems are considered together, the placement of the moral and the seabird in “The Captain,” in relation to the position of the same elements in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” constitutes an intertextual chiasmus. The Ancient Mariner, while beholding the water snakes, has a revelatory experience that leads him to a higher ethical ground. He is unable to articulate the implications of his epiphany, however, and so must continue to tell his story with its simplistic moral. The speaker of “The Captain,” as evinced by the simplistic moral that begins Tennyson’s poem, is likewise unable to articulate the full ideological import of his tale. In both cases, of course, the poem itself is the irreducible articulation of its meaning. J.M.Robertson, in spite of the negative connotation he intends, is quite accurate in describing “The Captain” as “a rhymed moral tale.” It is not the initiatory “moral,” but the tale itself, because of its relevance to the Homeric ethos and the artistry with which it is told, that opens vistas of moral meanings. In “Sir Galahad,” Tennyson presents a warrior who, instead of self-destructively defying the conventions of heroic behavior, redefines them. “Sir Galahad” anticipates “The Holy Grail” in its subject matter and in its ideological centering on the conflict between action and contemplation.Within a context of Christian mysticism,Tennyson evokes the heroic convention of divinely inspired battle ecstasy by drawing subtle parallels between Galahad’s tournament experiences and his numinous experiences. The correspondences between the initial stanza on battle action and the subsequent stanzas on mysticism are too numerous to be unintentional or insignificant. In the tournament, a trumpet “shrilleth” (5), and in the secret shrine of stanza three, a“shrill bell rings” (35). Galahad says that the swords “shiver” against the combatants’ armor (6) in the tournament. In the secret shrine, the altar-cloth is “snowy” (33), and in stanza five, prior to Galahad’s account of his perceiving blessed forms (59), the streets on Christmas eve are “dumb with snow” (52). During the tourna-ment the splintering lances “crack” (7), and on Christmas Eve a tempest “crackles” on the reins (53).The “clanging” of the lists (9), is echoed by the ringing of the shrill bell in the secret

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shrine (35) and by the “ringing” (54) of the tempest on Christmas Eve. In the clanging lists, the horse and rider “roll” (9), an image that anticipates the “rolling” of the mystical organ tones of line 75. Galahad describes the battle action of the tournament as the “tide” of combat (10), an image that recurs in the fourth stanza, where Galahad has a vision of the Holy Grail.The glory descends down “dark tides” (47). Ladies shower the knights of the tournament with “perfume and flowers” (11), and in the sixth stanza Galahad muses on “Pure lilies of eternal peace /Whose odours haunt my dreams” (68). Galahad’s use of the words “showers” (11) and “rain” (12) in the first stanza corresponds to his mention of “tempest” (53), “hail” (56), and “storms” (59) in the fifth (in addition, the moon is described as “stormy” in line 25). At line 69 Galahad makes a deliberate analogy between battle action and the numinous: And, stricken by an angel’s hand, This mortal armor that I wear, This weight and size, this heart and eyes, Are touched, are turned to finest air. (69–72)

This metaphor indicates that Galahad is aware of a connection between his roles as knight and mystic, and it helps to validate the parallels in imagery noted above. By associating the same set of images, which includes the storm imagery so common to heroic literature, with both Galahad’s tourney participation and his episodes of spiritual transcendence, Tennyson hints that Galahad’s mystical faculty derives from the same source as his battle strength. Whether it is better to use this divine power on the battlefield or to exercise it in pious solitude as Galahad prefers is an issue “Sir Galahad” does not directly address. Galahad himself is the speaker, and his narration does not definitively reveal Tennyson’s own attitude the way St. Simeon Stylites’s does.This measure of ambiguity has prompted critical commentary that is often rather tentative and vague. David Staines calls “Sir Galahad” “a comparatively light and energetic monologue; avoiding a confrontation with the meaning and the significance of the Grail, the poem is a study of the committed nature of Galahad but avoids being a study of the nature of his particular commitment” (Tragedy of Percivale 745). “‘Sir Galahad,’” writes F.B. Pinion, “intended as ‘something of a male counterpart’ [to “St. Agnes’ Eve”], has less unity, and is marred by didactic self-righteousness…. It hardly reaches a climactic ending, but soars midway with the vision of the Holy Grail” (94). Tika Ram Sharma includes “Sir Galahad” as one of Tennyson’s protests against asceticism and “cloistered virtue” (91). Clyde de L.Ryals contradicts Sharma when he writes of “St. Simeon Stylites” that “Possibly Simeon’s is Tennyson’s own conviction that evil lies in matter and that good lies in the subjugation of this matter, an idea suggested in ‘Love and Duty’ and in ‘Sir Galahad,’ wherein the hero attains his vision only by his total indifference to sensual appetite”

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(Theme and Symbol 143). Valerie Pitt also compares “St. Simeon Stylites” and “Sir Galahad”: “The theme of ‘St. Simeon Stylites’ is the corruption of self-cultivation…. The theme of ‘St. Agnes’ and of ‘Sir Galahad’ is like that of ‘St. Simeon Stylites’: they are also about solitude and salvation but treat these things rather differently” (122). She says of “St.Agnes”—and her comment applies equally well to that poem’s “male counterpart”—“Tennyson could not really eradicate from his imagination the quick sensitiveness to solitude, nor the sense of those values which, in “St. Simeon Stylites,” he attempts to deny” (123–24).Tennyson’s ambivalence about the monastic impulse finds its way into the Idylls of the King, where the value of Galahad’s form of asceticism is a point of contention between Arthur and the Grail knights. In the Idylls, as in “Sir Galahad,” a common pattern of imagery refers to both visions and victory. In “The Holy Grail,” King Arthur, whom the “fire of God” fills on the battlefield (CA 127, LE 314), condemns the Grail quest as a “wandering fire” of ineffectual mysticism that leaves “human wrongs to right themselves” (894): “[H]ow often, O my knights, Your places being vacant at my side, This chance of noble deeds will come and go Unchallenged, while ye follow wandering fires Lost in the quagmire!” (HG 316–20)

In his speech that concludes “The Holy Grail,” Arthur explains that mystical visions must be subordinated to a man’s proper work, a precept that is reemphasized in “The Passing of Arthur,” where Bedivere has a vision of the “mystic” arm clothed in white samite only after he has done the deed that Arthur commands three times for him to do. Though “Sir Galahad” predates “The Holy Grail” by thirty-four years, their common subject matter makes it tempting to read “Sir Galahad” as an adjunct to the Grail saga in the Idylls.When “Sir Galahad” is considered in this context, the common imagery in the accounts of Galahad’s martial and mystical experiences may seem to suggest that Galahad’s mystical powers are a misdirected version of his battlefield strength, which is “as the strength of ten” (3) and should be used in the field of action. However, in “The Holy Grail” Arthur excepts one knight from his criticism of the Grail quest, and that is Galahad. “‘Ah, Galahad, Galahad,’ said the King, ‘for such/As thou art is the vision, not for these…”’ (HG 293–94). According to Charles Tennyson, Galahad, by means of his vision in “The Holy Grail,” becomes Arthur’s equal, as indicated by his calling the king “Sir Arthur” in line 290 (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 3.473).Tennyson’s own comment on Arthur’s reaction to the Grail quest in “The Holy Grail” is that “The king thought that most men ought to do the duty that lies closest to them, and that to few only is given the true spiritual enthusiasm” (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 3.473). For Galahad alone among the knights, the mystical path is the proper one. If ‘The Holy Grail” is any indication, the

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parallels in imagery between the first and the succeeding stanzas of “Sir Galahad” should be seen as signifying that the Grail quest is, for its most worthy devotee, the best “chance of noble deeds.” A rejected stanza from the 1834 version (the final version was published in 1842) of “Sir Galahad,” along with Tennyson’s comment on it, may also have relevance to the poem’s meaning. In a letter to James Spedding written in 1834,Tennyson concedes, “I dare say you are right about the stanza in ‘Sir Galahad,’ who was intended for something of a male counterpart to St. Agnes” (Memoir 1. 142). The implication of this comment (which is usually cited only in pieces—see F.B. Pinion’s statement above, and pages 33 and 35 in Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson, vol. 2) is that the stanza was rejected because it compromised Galahad’s role as a male counterpart to the heroine of Tennyson’s “St.Agnes’ Eve.” The omitted (originally the sixth) stanza is as follows: Oh power outsoaring human ken! Oh knighthood chaste and true! With God, with Angels, and with men What is it I may not do? Not only in the tourney-field The unpure are beaten from the fray, Not only evil customs yield, The very stars give way. Lo! those bright stars which thou hast made, They tremble fanned on by thy breath: Yea Lord! they shine, those lamps of thine In Heaven and in the gulphs of Death. (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 2.34–35)

It is easy to see why Spedding objected to the stanza and why Tennyson chose to omit it. Its first eight lines make Galahad too heroic to serve as a counterpart to a nun. The emphasis is on action rather than contemplation, and Galahad’s hubris equals that of a Homeric hero: “What is it I may not do?… The very stars give way.” Although Galahad’s purity gives him the strength of ten men, it also draws his heart above, away from the kind of conventional heroism the rejected stanza exemplifies. The omitted stanza reveals the essentially heroic nature Tennyson conceived for his spiritual champion, but the stanza is inappropriate for the final version of “Sir Galahad” because of the poem’s emphasis on Galahad’s individual adaptation of the heroic norm. The key to Tennyson’s attitude towards his hero in “Sir Galahad” may perhaps be found in Paul Turner’s claim that “No doubt the theme of [“Sir Galahad” and “St. Agnes’ Eve] expresses Tennyson’s sense of dedication to poetry” (95).Tennyson’s use in the first line of the word “carves,” which comes from the Greek word for “write,” supports Turner’s claim. Tennyson, in Christopher Ricks’s view (Tennyson 53), was

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plagued by feelings of inferiority when comparing his own works with military heroics. In order to come to grips with his calling,Tennyson needed to believe that “‘The song that nerves a nations heart,/Is in itself a deed’” (“Epilogue” to “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade” 79–80). As “The Old Chieftain” evinces, there was a connection in the young Tennyson’s mind between verse and violence, and as early as 1830 Tennyson was writing about poetry as an alternative form of warfare (note the use of the Homeric “wrath”): No sword Of wrath her right arm whirled, But one poor poet’s scroll, and with his word She shook the world. (“The Poet” 53–56, original emphasis)

Sir Galahad’s contemplative rather than active use of his spiritual power is analogous to Tennyson’s own path. As a mystic himself,Tennyson undoubtedly identified with the “mightier transports” that “move and thrill” (22) Galahad, and by 1830 Tennyson was writing about poetry in religious as well as martial terminology: “Dark-browed sophist, come not anear;/All the place is holy ground;… So keep where you are: you are foul with sin” (“The Poet’s Mind” 8–9, 36). For himself, as a gifted poet (“Vex not thou the poet’s mind; /For thou canst not fathom it” [“The Poet’s Mind” 3–4].), and for Galahad, as a spiritually gifted saint, the road that veers away from conventional heroic behavior towards the place where song and contemplation are in themselves deeds, is the proper one to take. The first word of the poem’s title, “Sir,” is also Galahad’s title, and calls immediate attention to his status as a knight; and it is in the first stanza that we read of his prowess in the lists. Galahad is a knight first and foremost, but he finds no glory in tournaments, which divert him from the “mental fight” of spiritual warfare. The word “glory” is used twice in the descriptions of Galahad’s mystical transports (47, 55), but not at all in the tourney account. In the tournament he battles for ladies, and their sweet looks threaten to mitigate the pure power of his “virgin heart” (24).The martial and the sexual spheres are linked in the poem, not only by the presence of the ladies at the tournament, but also by the Freudian suggestiveness of line 2, “My tough lance thrusteth sure.” Galahad’s true fight is in the lists of God, not for ladies’ favors but for a holy challenge-cup: “‘O just and faithful knight of God!/ Ride on! the prize is near’” (79–80). In this respect Galahad may be compared to Achilles, who in Iliad 9.608 rejects the prize of eight women in favor of a higher sense of honor, “in Zeus’ ordinance” (Lattimore 214). Cedric Whitman sees Achilles himself as something of a nonconformist to the heroic status quo. In Book 9, Achilles’s rejection of Agamemnon’s offer “is based not upon mere sulky passion, but upon the same half-realized, inward conception of honor which moved him originally to vow his abstinence from the

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war” (Homer and the Heroic Tradition 190).Whitman claims that Achilles, in abstaining from the battle of Troy, …no longer is concerned with the rule book of heroic behavior, the transparent unrealism of overblown egos asserting themselves through various forms of violence. He reacts from the mere acceptance of a creed, and places himself on higher ground. He will not seek honor as others seek it. He will have “honor from Zeus,” by which he means he will risk all in the belief that nobility is not a mutual exchange of vain compliments among men whose lives are evanescent as leaves, but an organic and inevitable part of the universe, independent of social contract. (Homer and the Heroic Tradition 183)

Tennyson’s Galahad, in both “Sir Galahad” and “The Holy Grail,” resembles the hero of the Iliad in his rejection of the “rule book of heroic behavior” and in his seeking honor not as others seek it but from God. Though Galahad’s Christian and mystical concept of divine honor inevitably differs from that of Achilles, both the greatest Arthurian and the greatest Achaian pursue their prize on the highest ground they know, and eventually both men are utterly caught up in the passion of their pursuit. The similarities between Galahad and Achilles may have helped Tennyson to reconcile his own inward path as a poet and mystic with the Homeric values he often celebrated. The hero of “The Tourney” is something of a counterpoint to Sir Galahad. Sir Ralph fights primarily for a woman, and his only transcendent state in the poem is the battle fury the woman inspires. “The Tourney” stands as a counterpoint also to “The Ballad of Oriana.” Whereas “Oriana” exposes the flaws of the chivalric tradition, in “The Tourney” Ralph fights for his ladylove with full-blown power and glory (there are, however, hints in “The Tourney” that Ralph’s ladylove has the potential to overturn the courtly love conventions).Tennyson’s concern with the subject matter of “The Tourney” is reflected in the fact that he composed four different, complete versions of “Thy voice is heard through rolling drums,” the song which replaced “The Tourney” in The Princess (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 3. 590–91). “The Tourney” is a playful piece that nonetheless stakes a serious claim to a high level of craftsmanship. Its traditional artistry belies its failure to qualify for The Princess and makes it worthy of standing as an independent poem. Ralph’s presence in the lists is “like a fire” (3), and here once again Tennyson uses the Homeric and Virgilian fire image in the same way his bardic predecessors did: to symbolize the intensity and the devastating power of battle wrath. Fueled by his love-inspired “berserk,” Ralph’s tourney prowess is astounding. He “Rolled them over and over” (5). The word “Rolled” is doubly appropriate. It evokes the rolling of waves (in “Sir Galahad” Tennyson makes the connection between “roll” and “title” explicit in lines 9–10), which is one of the natural forces often associated with battle fury by the old heroic writers. “Rolled” also relates back to the poem’s title. A tourney is an appropriate place to make people roll, because “tourney” is etymologically related to “turn.” In

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response to Ralph’s initial incursion, the king calls him “Gallant” (6), and the root of the word “gallant,” as we have seen, means “to make merry.” As it does in “The Captain,” this ulterior meaning insinuates the euphoric emotion of the warrior possessed by battle frenzy. In the second stanza, the sound echoes the sense emphatically. Tennyson approximates the tournament acoustics with a combination of assonance (as in “Casques” and “cracked” in line 7, or “Lances” and “snapt” in line 8), alliteration (as in “hauberks hacked,” and “snapt in sunder,” in lines 7 and 8), and internal rhyme (“cracked” and “hacked,” in line 7, and “Rang” and “sprang,” in line 9).The “thunder” in line 11 is onomatopoeic, and it evokes the heroic battle-storm convention. The bell-like ringing of the sword stroke in line 9 recalls the “united powers/Of battle and music” in “The Old Chieftain” (13–14).Trumpets, bagpipes, and other musical instruments are traditional accompaniments of battle, and their inspirational effect has become proverbial. In The Princess, we find the Prince saying, And I that prated peace, when first I heard War-music, felt the blind wildbeast of force, Whose home is in the sinews of a man, Stir in me as to strike:…(5.255–58)

The titular first line of “Thy voice is heard through rolling drums,” and also that lyrics fifth line, “A moment, while the trumpets blow,” indicate that the warrior is inspired not solely by thoughts of family but also by the stirring sounds of drum and trumpet. In “The Tourney,” the source of the inspirational “music” is the battle action itself. Edmund Burke, in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, explains the sublime effect of the kind of sounds exemplified by the ringing of swords in Tennyson’s poem: If the stroke be strong, the organ of hearing suffers a considerable degree of tension. If the stroke be repeated pretty soon after, the repetition causes the expectation of another stroke…. The tension of the part thus increasing at every blow, by the united forces of the stroke itself, the expectation, and the surprise, it is worked up to such a pitch as to be capable of the sublime. (126–27)

In Tennyson’s battle poetry, Homeric kharme meets the romantic sublime. Yeats, in finding “the sweetest of all music to be the stroke of the sword” (243), represents the romantic inclination to hear a sublime symphony in the tumult of conflict. “I made a certain girl see a vision of the Garden of Eden,” he writes. “She heard ‘the music of Paradise coming from the Tree of Life,’ and, when I told her to put her ear against the bark, that she might hear the better, found that it was made by the continuous clashing of swords” (306).

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In the third stanza, Ralph’s thunderous display renders Edith thunderstruck.The speaker mentions twice, in lines 13 and 15, that she bows her head. Her response is appropriate to one who has beheld such an overwhelming manifestation of power. Burke discusses “reverence” (53), “astonishment” (54), “awe” (64), and “solemnity” (64) as normal effects of the sublime. In between the two lines that mention Edith’s bowing her head, the speaker uses a word that subtly points to another possible reason for her reaction.The Latin root of “confounded” (14) means “to pour together,” a denotation that calls to mind the grisly aftermath of Ralph’s swordplay, when “sprang the blood” (9). Edith’s gesture, along with the king’s command to ‘“Take her Sir Ralph’” (18), may seem to evince submissiveness on her part, but there are indications that she has the potential to transcend her passive role as Ralph’s courtly ladylove. In the Prologue to The Princess, a “chronicle” (27, 49) tells of a woman warrior who, “her arm lifted, eyes on fire—/Brake with a blast of trumpets from the gate,/And, falling on them like a thunderbolt” (41–43), proceeded to dispatch her enemies in much the manner of Sir Ralph. Paul Turner (102) cites Chapter 80 of Froissart’s Chronicles as a source for this passage in The Princess. Froissart tells of a countess who is besieged in Hennebont by Sir Charles de Blois in 1342: “This lady did there an hardy enterprise…. She issued out and her company, and dashed into the French lodgings and cut down tents and set fire in their lodgings…” (52). This woman warrior is the Countess of Montfort. In view of the relationship between “The Tourney” and The Princess, it seems likely that Ralph’s Edith Montfort is named for the combative countess in Froissart. After seeing Ralph’s exploits, Edith flushes “as red/As poppies” (16–17). She is red like the fire used in the description of Ralph’s fury (and like the fires set by the countess), and the reference to poppies evokes intoxication and death. Tennyson’s artistry suggests that Edith is susceptible to the same intoxication of battle wrath that she inspires in Ralph.The third stanza of “The Tourney” hints that Ralph’s ladylove may be capable of doing her own thwacking and riving, likeVirgil’s Camilla, whose wild and fiery rampage inspires other Latin women to take up arms at the end of Book XI in the Aeneid. “Boädicea” portrays an actual woman warrior, one who instigates a rampage so wild and fiery that it exemplifies the rampant destructiveness of untrammeled battle wrath. Boädicea, who is “standing loftily charioted” (3, 70), exhibits such inexorable fury that she calls to mind the insatiable wrath of the “charioted” Achilles. The poem, with its striking meter, treats the theme of the “united powers of battle and music” in a powerful and provocative way. Most commentators on “Boädicea” acknowledge the power of its verse, but remain aloof from the poems thematic concerns. Harold Nicolson speaks of “the frenzied sweep of ‘Boädicea,’ the rattling galliambics of which,…have all the fire of Borodine’s ‘Igor’” (284). Paull F.Baum calls “Boädicea” “an experimental poem of some power” (56). Jerome H.Buckley’s only comment on the poem is that it “sounds strangely

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dissonant to the untutored English ear; and the excited declamation of the ancient queen seems accordingly more factitious than dramatic” (154). Henry Kozicki offers only the idea that “the poem is a metaphor for contemporary times” (Tennyson and Clio 151).The observations of both Paul Turner and Linda K. Hughes are remarkably simplistic.Turner writes, “Though ‘Boädicea was always a heroine of his’ (Materials, vol.2, p.303), the poem…seems designed to convey the ugliness of revenge” (171). Hughes finds the first half of line 83, “Out of evil evil flourishes,” to be the poems “moral” (208). Christopher Ricks takes notice of “Boädicea” only in a footnote. His comment is incisive but inexplicably succinct given his lofty assessment of the piece: “‘Boädicea’ is [Tennyson’s] best poem about war, because it is also about the indurating effects of battle-fervour” (Tennyson 248n.). The poets of the heroic age cautioned against the indurating effects of battlefervor, but they gloried in depicting the fervor’s sublime effects, and it is the transcendent and divine nature of Boädicea’s “madness” that Tennyson emphasizes. In the first verse paragraph we find several of the traditional indicators of ecstatic furor. The Homeric fire image is introduced in line 2, and line 4 tells us that the Druid queen is “Mad and maddening all that heard her.” Her madness is that of the berserks, of whom H.R.Ellis Davidson writes, “The ecstasy of battle, which inspired the berserks and filled them with such madness that they knew neither fear nor pain, was naturally viewed as a gift of [Odin]” (Gods and Myths 70). Boädicea’s “fierce volubility” (4), her yelling and shrieking (6), evokes the shouting of Achilles, Cuchullain, and other ancient heroes in the throes of battle wrath. The role of Boädicea’s screams in “maddening all that heard her” is explained by Edmund Burke: “Such sounds as imitate the natural inarticulate voices of men, or any animals in pain or danger, are capable of conveying great ideas;… The angry tones of wild beasts are equally capable of causing a great and aweful sensation” (77). The reference to Boädicea’s shrieking and to her confederacy as “wild” (6) relates them to the wild animals so common to the traditional depictions of frenzied warriors. Early in her harangue Boädicea emphasizes the animalistic nature of the furor she is arousing: “Bark an answer, Britain’s raven! bark and blacken innumerable,/ Blacken round the Roman carrion, make the carcase a skeleton,/Kite and kestrel, wolf and wolfkin, from the wilderness, wallow in it” (13–15). (In contrast to this ferocious and grisly wallowing, the Romans, as Boädicea sneers in line 62, have been “Rolling on their purple couches in their tender effeminacy.”) She immediately testifies to the sacred aspect of such savagery: “Till the face of Bel be brightened, Taranis be propitiated” (16). Ricks (The Poems of Tennyson 2.614) notes that the name of the Celtic god Belinus means “shining,” a designation that relates to the name of the Celtic hero Cuchullain’s s father, Lug, which meant “The Shining One” (Davidson, Myths and Symbols 90), and to the name of the ancient Irish warrior Finn’s band of heroes, the Fionn, a word that meant “light” (Davidson, Myths and Symbols 81).Taranis, as is also noted by Ricks (The Poems of Tennyson 2.614), was the

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Apollo and the Thunderer of the Druid’s. Apollo was of course also a god of light, so we see that both gods mentioned by Boädicea are associated with the fire/ light imagery of battle wrath. In contrast to the incandescent gods of the Britons, the deity of the Romans is “an emperor-idiot” (19). In the beginning of the third verse paragraph Boädicea implores her gods to take note of the outrage her people have suffered. Already, however, “the Gods have answered” (22), and their answering recalls the “answer” of “Britain’s raven” in line 13. The savage fury that Boädicea invokes in lines 11–16 is a quality of the Britons’ gods: “[The Gods] have told us all their anger” (23). The tokens of the divine anger include “Thunder” and “a flying fire in heaven” (24), both of which images are traditional symbols of fighting frenzy. In addition, the augury of the bloody Tamesa River’s “rolling phantom bodies of horses and men” (27) evokes the River Xanthos episode in the Iliad. The fourth paragraph describes the singing of the “terrible prophetesses” (37) at “the mystical ceremony” (36). In a passage reminiscent of the landscape survey in “Persia,” the prophetesses humanize the British land: “Fear not, isle of blowing woodland” (38). Their hymn to the natural setting seems meant to convey nature’s power, the same natural/divine power that approximates the wrath of heroes in the ancient portrayals.The references to Britain’s “blowing woodland” (38) and “manyblossoming Paradises” (43), and, a bit later, to her “flourishing territory” (54), are all echoed in line 83, where we learn the result of battle wrath: “Out of evil evil flourishes, out of tyranny tyranny buds.” It is appropriate that Boädicea is the one to hear and relate the mystical prophecies, because her savage frenzy is another mode of the prophetesses’ transcendent state, and her tirade another form of their chanting.H. R.Ellis Davidson discusses the connection between barbarity and mystical wisdom: “Battle, moreover, is associated with inspiration and wisdom, and the pursuit of the heads of slaughtered men was not simply an expression of destructive ferocity but a means of attaining supernatural wisdom and knowledge of what was hidden from men” (Myths and Symbols 101).The “flying raiment” (37) of the prophetesses recalls the “flying fire” (24) of the gods’ own prophetic manifestation, and the prophetesses’ reference to the “myriad-rolling ocean” (42) echoes the divine augury of the “Tamesa rolling” (27).With the resounding conclusion of their chant, “thine the battle-thunder of God” (44), the prophetesses confirm both the martial and the divine aspects of the thunder image in line 24, and they remind us that their god Taranis was a god of thunder. On the heels of her recitation of the oracle Boädicea ecstatically proclaims, “there cometh a victory now” (46). Boädicea’s inspired vision of victory stands in contrast to the Romans’ “statue of Victory” (30), an idol whose fall constitutes one of the omens of the poem’s third section. In the fifth section, Boädicea links her battle wrath to the anger of the gods by means of Homeric imagery. “Wherefore in me burns an anger, not by blood to be satiated” (52), she says. Boädicea’s anger is shared by the gods themselves,

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as line 23 makes plain: “These have told us all their anger in miraculous utterances.” The fact that Boädicea’s anger “burns” is a reflection of the “flying fire in heaven” (24) that demonstrates the gods’ own anger. Unlike Boädicea’s anger, however, the anger of the gods is capable of being satiated, as line 16 indicates. Boädicea’s inexorability recalls that of Achilles, whose insatiable fury eventually offends the gods themselves. In the Iliad, the divine disapproval of such riotous excess helps to convey the need for control incumbent upon the transcendent hero. By yielding themselves to the sublime power rather than using it, Boädicea and her people perpetrate “multitudinous agonies” (26, 84). The extremity of Boädicea’s abandonment of herself to the “unexhausted, inexorable” battle-axe (56) of rage is reflected in her unsexing of herself to become a manlike warrior and by her desire to perform a literal version of the same process on her enemies: “Chop the breasts from off the mother” (68). Ricks (The Poems of Tennyson 2.617) compares her in this aspect to Lady Macbeth, who also yields herself unstintingly to overpowering spiritual forces. As in the heroic epics, the transcendent power of battle wrath is described as a force of nature. In the fifth paragraph Boädicea commands the British tribes to shout, “Till the victim hear within and yearn to hurry precipitously/Like the leaf in a roaring whirlwind, like the smoke in a hurricane whirled” (58–59). In the sixth section we learn that the maddened Britons “Made the noise of frosty woodlands, when they shiver in January,/Roared as when the roaring breakers boom and blanch on the precipices,/Yelled as when the winds of winter tear an oak on a promontory” (75–77).The term “roaring” is most appropriate to Boädicea herself, who is “lionesslike” (71). As we have seen in the first two chapters, Furor itself is depicted as a roaring lion in the first book of the Aeneid. Boädicea’s “rolling” (71) glances recall the oracular rolling of the Tamesa in line 27.The dashing and clashing of the “darts” (74, 79) recalls the lightning and thunder of the gods in line 24 and thus can be seen as representing the transcendent power the Britons wield. In brandishing “darts” with which they make a thunderous noise, the Britons figure their god Taranis, the Thor of the Druid’s. Like Hector when faced with Achilles at the height of his battle rage, the Romans quail before the unbridled, tumultuous storm of furious Britons. Rome is likened to an eagle in lines 11–12, and a hint of that same imagery occurs in the description of her defeat: “[S]he felt the heart within her fall and flutter tremulously” (81). The Druid queen successfully infects her people with her frenzy, and she does so by means of her speech, a speech Tennyson recreates (minus the yelling and shrieking) in an echo of the classical galliambic meter. C.J.Fordyce, commenting on the use of this meter by Catullus, writes that “the distinctive character of the metre gives the effect of tumultuous and breathless speed” (qtd. in Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 2.613). This characteristic helps the poem to convey the passion of Boädicea’s exhortations. “Boädicea” not only recounts the effect on her people of the queen’s

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harangue, it in some measure reproduces a sense of that effect in the reader of the poem. The importance of the role of speech in the transmission of Boädicea’s battle wrath is underscored by the iteration of the words “hear,” “hearing,” and “heard” fourteen times in the poem.The unwillingness to listen receptively is what separates the victims of furor from those who victoriously wield its power. The Romans refuse to listen to Boädicea: “Did they hear me, would they listen, did they pity me supplicating?” (8). Boädicea, on the other hand, hears the words of the terrible prophetesses: “There I heard them in the darkness” (36). She, in turn, emphatically makes herself heard by her people, whose eventual shouting signifies their assumption of her frenzy.The Romans are then forced to hear the terrible tumult of the Britons, and the fierce volubility of the British tribes decides the battle: “Then her [Rome’s] pulses at the clamouring of her enemy fainted away” (82). In Cowper’s “Boädicea, An Ode,” which Ricks cites as the literary source of Tennyson’s poem (The Poems of Tennyson 2.613), the victorious power of words is similarly emphasized. Boädicea listens to “Ev’ry burning word” (7) of a Druid sage, who foretells a day when “Sounds, not arms, shall win the prize,/Harmony the path to fame” (23–24). In the conclusion, words are a weapon of divine fury: Such the bard’s prophetic words, Pregnant with celestial fire, Bending as he swept the chords Of his sweet but awful lyre. She with all a monarch’s pride, Felt them in her bosom glow, Rush’d to battle, fought and died, Dying, hurl’d them at the foe. (33–40)

The trochees of Cowper’s s poem are unremarkable, but the “tumultuous and breathless speed” of Tennyson’s meter helps to convey some of the sublime effect of Boädicea’s clamorous raving. Amittai Aviram writes, “The metaphors [of a poem] are either direct or (more usually) indirect representations of the engaging power of the physical rhythm of the poem itself. This engaging power is nonverbal and not rational; a power beyond words, it is sublime” (228). Aviram addresses the process by which Tennyson mediates Boädicea’s frenzy: “The rhythms of poetry and music are instances of the manifestation of sublime reality, but unlike the mystical sublime available through meditation, rhythms are shared communally as they engage the bodies of their common audiences” (238–39). Through the rhythm of the poem Tennyson enables his readers to form a community with the Druid queen’s audience and to taste the sublimity of Boädicea’s diatribe.

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Boädicea’s words are related to us by a narrator, who, after introducing the scene and then quoting Boädicea’s monologue, concludes by noting the destructive results of the Britons’ belligerent passions.The narrators dispassionate comments surround the tirade of Boädicea, “containing” it in more than one sense.This narrative frame, as it denounces the evil and the tyranny of both the Romans and the Britons, speaks for the necessity of controlling battle fury. The sober conclusion has a tempering effect on the reader’s vicarious participation in the Britons’ incitement. It might be noted that this “dispassionate” narration is presented in the same meter as Boädicea’s pyrotechnics. Keeping the meter consistent is one way of demonstrating the close connection between the sublimity of battle frenzy and the “multitudinous agonies” the narrator laments. The consistency of the meter could also serve to suggest the necessity of a restraining force as powerful as the fury it is summoned to control. In the “Dedication” to the Idylls of the King, Tennyson commends Prince Albert for his “sublime repression of himself” (18).The meter used to recreate Boädicea’s sublime tirade is appropriately used to “contain” that tirade in a monitory frame of sublime repression. As a surrounding and containing frame, the monitory narration stands on the “exterior” of the poem, while the passage recounting the chanting of the prophetesses is located at the poem’s center.This structuring reflects the common spatial metaphors for the different “levels” of consciousness.The mystical transport of the prophetesses, like the transcendent fury of the “mad” Boädicea, originates in the deep heart’s core, “beneath” the level of our controlling self-awareness. Boädicea’s raving becomes even more “mad and maddening” when she begins to recount the mystical chanting of the prophetesses in lines 38–44.As Aviram writes, “Many of these mystical practices are rhythmic and musical, such as the dancing of the Sufis, the chanting of Tibetan monks, and the rhythmic chanting and dancing of many Native American nations. The reality which they aim to disclose is reality as the sublime” (238–39). The rhythm and music of Tennyson’s verse heightens the sublimity of the oracular song, which becomes a mesmerizing drumbeat through the repetition of words (“isle,” “though,” “thee,” “thou,” and especially “thine,” which is repeated eight times in lines 41–44) and of alliterative sounds. By suddenly breaking into a direct quotation of the prophecy (the phrase “sang the terrible prophetesses” in line 37 seems less an introduction to the quoted prophecy than a conclusion to Boädicea’s account of her encounter with the prophetesses), Boädicea provides an example of narrative technique that Longinus associates with a heightened sense of the sublime (33–34). In “Boädicea,” Tennyson deals with the same heroic themes that he features in much of his previous war poetry, but his recreation of the queens spellbinding rant demonstrates his bardic power in an unprecedented way, allowing his readers to feel the dangerous excitement of “the united powers of battle and music.” Tennyson repeatedly expressed concern that his readers would miss the full effect of the poems

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meter (see Memoir 1.436, 459, and 477).An account by James Knowles of Tennyson’s own reading of “Boädicea” indicates how powerful that effect could be: The first thing I ever heard him read was his “Boädicea,” for I said “I never can tell how to scan it.” “Read it like prose,” he said, “just as it is written, and it will come all right” And then, as if to confute himself, he began it, and in his weird and deep intoning, which was as unlike ordinary prose as possible, sang the terrible war song, until the little attic at Farringford melted out of sight and one saw the far-off fields of early Britain, thronged with the maddened warriors of the maddened queen, and heard the clashing of the brands upon the shields, and the cries which Roar’d as when the rolling breakers boom and blanch on the precipices. The image of some ancient bard rose up before one as he might have sung the story by the watch-fires of an army the day before a battle. It was perhaps from some such association of ideas that his name among his intimates became “The Bard”—a way of recognising in one word and in ordinary talk his mingled characters of Singer, Poet, and Prophet. (“A Personal Reminiscence” 580–81, original emphasis)

Anyone who has heard the “weird and deep intoning” (Knowles 580) of Tennyson’s bardic recitations on the Edison cylinder recordings can relate to Knowles’s comments. Knowles’s account provides an excellent commentary on what Tennyson hoped to achieve in his guise as a Homeric war poet. There are several instances of Tennyson’s assuming the role of an English Homer in a literal way. In 1863 he wrote and published his own rendering of Iliad 8. 542–61 as “Specimen of a Translation of the Iliad in BlankVerse.” His English version of Iliad 18.202–31, “Achilles Over the Trench,” was written around the same time, and published in 1877.The Pierpont Morgan manuscript of “Achilles Over the Trench” also contains several fragmentary translations of Homer. The two most complete passages, both of which come from the Iliad, are presented by Christopher Ricks in Appendix A of The Poems of Tennyson (3.603–604). Tennyson’s limited output as a translator was of course imposed by his extensive output as an original poet of genius, and the dearth of translations in the Tennyson canon has resulted in a dearth of scholarly attention to the poet’s efforts in that direction. It is plausible, however, that in this case scarcity is tantamount to significance, that Tennyson’s extreme selectivity as a translator was dictated by the reverence he felt towards the undertaking. His renderings of Homer into English were, in a sense, renderings of himself as “The Bard” in full panoply. By translating the actual words of Homeric song, Tennyson was aligning himself more closely with the ancient bard he so admired; he was translating himself, as it were, into a more liter-al version of the bardic persona he attempted to cultivate. The importance to him of this process is evinced by the painstaking craftsmanship he lavished on his lines and by the thematic material

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shared by all four translations, which pertains to a heroic concept close to Tennyson’s heart: the equal footing, in heroic societies, of the bard and the warrior. His decision to translate the ending of Book 8 reflects not so much the heroic quality of the passage as Tennyson’s own heroic quality.The conclusion to Book 8 is one of the most celebrated parts of the Iliad. “Every one,” writes Matthew Arnold, “knows the passage at the end of the eighth book of the Iliad, where the fires of the Trojan encampment are likened to the stars” (257). In “Lecture I” of “On Translating Homer,” Arnold offers his own prose rendering of the lines and also quotes Pope’s version, which he characterizes as “singularly and notoriously unfortunate” (257). The passage is something of a touchstone for translations of the Iliad. For example, Brian Spiller, editor of Cowper: Poetry and Prose, selects only the concluding lines of Book 8 to represent Cowper’s translation of the entire Iliad (Cowper 176).Tennyson, by offering his version of the conclusion, was entering the fray where the fighting was thickest. He was also engaging Arnold in single combat. In “Lecture III” of “On Translating Homer,” written in 1861, Arnold states, “If blank verse is used in translating Homer, it must be a blank verse of which English poetry, naturally swayed much by Milton’s treatment of this metre, offers at present hardly any examples…. It must not be Mr. Tennyson’s blank verse” (293). He then cites lines 19–21 of “Ulysses,” which inspire his immortal comment that “these three lines by themselves take up nearly as much time as a whole book of the Iliad” (293). Arnold proceeds to present his own version of the last six lines of Book 8, in English hexameters.Tennyson’s response is described by Peter Levi: “Tennyson,” writes Levi, “made in the end the only effective reply that could be made: he produced 22 lines and later another 31 of the Iliad in his own iambics, and they annihilate every other translation ever made of these lines” (235). Theodore Redpath writes, “The two specimens make it a matter for regret that Tennyson did not do much more. Arnold was certainly wrong when he said that Tennyson’s blank verse would not be suitable for translating Homer” (107). After quoting the entire “Specimen of a Translation,” Redpath comments, “Tennyson’s rendering of the long final simile has been much admired, and it is certainly far superior to the halting hexameters which Arnold himself produced as a version” (108). Levi’s exoneration of Arnold is memorable: “We should be grateful to him that he drew from the laureate these verses, which burn like the clear fires they describe” (236). Redpath examines in detail the first ten lines, up to the beginning of the simi-le, of the “Specimen of a Translation.” He notes Tennyson’s use of alliterated “h’s” and “b’s” in lines 5–6 as skillful. In lines 7–8, “Again the sound is magnificent; the alliteration ‘rolled…rich’ and the semi-alliteration ‘vapour…far’ make for a strong line, and perhaps it is not too fanciful to suggest that the ‘f’s’ and ‘p’s’ give a sense of the puffing of the rich smoke” (109). His conclusion regarding Tennyson’s choices as a translator is that “The defects or sacrifices of accuracy or

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clear sense, such as they are (and they are not many) are for the sake of, or at least compensated by, the sound….The…force and spirit and most of the concreteness of the original remain” (110). As for the simile which concludes Tennyson’s “Specimen,” Christopher Ricks observes that “the last fourteen lines form a single sentence, culminating in a fateful pause and poise” (Tennyson 112). Preparatory to the pause and poise of the ending is the rapidity of lines 11–16, with their numerous unstressed syllables, including the repetition of the elidible “and.” The speed of the lines induces the same breathlessness in the reader as might be experienced by an observer of the beautiful scene the passage describes. Rapidity is one of the primary characteristics of Homer emphasized by Arnold (see 250–53, Lecture I). The quickly moving lines of the simile are succeeded by six lines which retard the rush and gradually settle into the “fateful pause and poise” of the conclusion to Book 8. One reason for the superiority of Tennyson’s translation of these lines is that the fateful poise of the finale is a tone that Tennyson excels in creating. The mood established by the poignant beauty of the “Specimen” is comparable to the effect of the conclusions to “Tithonus,” “Tiresias,” “Love and Duty,” and “Audley Court.” Christopher Ricks (The Poems of Tennyson 2.139) compares the imagery of moon and stars in the “Specimen,” along with its sixteenth line, “…the Shepherd gladdens in his heart,” to the conclusion of “Audley Court”: but ere the night we rose And sauntered home beneath a moon… …the harbour-buoy, Sole star of phosphorescence in the calm, With one green sparkle ever and anon Dipt by itself, and we were glad at heart. (78–79, 85–88)

Earlier in “Audley Court,” the speaker sings of his wish to be “The pilot of the darkness and the dream” (71). The “Sole star of phosphorescence,” the buoy light, which in Ricks’s comparison is analogous to the stars in the Iliad passage, is that pilot. The speaker of “Audley Court” wishes, in effect, to be one with the “star” of the poem, just as the warriors in the Iliad wish their fighting power to be one with the cosmic forces of the gods, a wish that is often granted them.The correspondences between the conclusions of “Audley Court” and Book 8 of the Iliad suggest that Tennyson saw the possibility of a symbolic meaning in Homer’s s simile. The comparison of human fires to celestial fires glances at the divine power of battle “fire” that visits the frenzied warriors of heroic epic. By choosing to translate a passage that features Homer’s symbol of the divine power that drives both the warrior and the bard, Tennyson intimated that his own intellectual warfare against Arnold was fueled by that same fiery force.

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The blazing beauty of the “Specimen of a Translation” has gained it more recognition than Tennyson’s other published translation of Homer has received, but “Achilles Over the Trench” (Iliad 18, 202–31) is also an impressive piece of art. Curiously, George Steiner comments in Homer in English that “‘Achilles Over the Trench’ seems to be Tennyson’s only stab at a direct translation” (133). His remark is especially strange considering that the general editor of the “Penguin Poets in Translation” series, of which Homer in English forms a part, is Christopher Ricks. Regardless of Steiner’s reason for reprinting it singly, “Achilles Over the Trench” is not unworthy to stand alone in representing Tennyson’s skill as a translator of Homer. Tennyson uses alliteration and assonance to great effect throughout the passage, beginning in the lines preceding the simile. His reprise of Homer’s use of quadruple sibilants in the first line is repeated by Richmond Lattimore, whose Iliad is “hailed as exemplary” (Steiner xvii) amongst modern translations. Tennyson may have considered the “s’s” as echoing the sound of the wind on which Iris runs. In the third line, the alliteration of “puissant” with “Pallas” connects the power of Achilles with its divine enhancement by Athena. The fifth line’s three hard “g’s” give it an impetus appropriate to its description of one of the “miraculous, sublime emblems of Achilles’s transcendent power and personality” (Schein 138).The “f’s” of “from” and “flame” at the beginning and end of line 6 evoke the sound of the igniting fire while fortifying the line. Every line through line 8, in fact, is made more forceful and vigorous by alliteration. Line 2 has “rose” and “round;” line 4 has “Her” and “head,” as well as “aegis” and “around;” line 7 has “smoke” and “city;” line 8 is framed by “Far” and “foes.” Assonance and alliteration combine to enhance the conclusion, especially in the most powerful lines of the translation, 29–31. Line 29 is impressively strong, with its “Burned—burn” bookends and its assonant epithet “bright-eyed” in the middle. The “t” in “bright” and the succession of “d’s” in the words “eyed,” “goddess,” and “made” create a drum roll leading up to the second “burn.” In line 30, the three shouts are reflected in the triple assonance of “Thrice,” “dyke,” and “mighty.” The same sounds encompass line 31, in the words “Thrice” and “allies.” The repetition of “Thrice” is tremendously emphatic, evocative of the scream itself. In line 32, the “Th” sound of “Thrice” becomes appropriately less shrill after the shout (in “there and then”). In the final line the sound appears only once, in “their,” as both the sound of the yell and twelve of the Trojans die out. The potency of the Britons’ “fierce volubility” in “Boädicea” may owe something to the effect of Achilles’s shout in the Iliad. The middle of the passage is translated with meticulous accuracy. Tennyson’s scrupulous version of the simile in lines 7–14 may not have quite the clarity of Robert Fitzgerald’s looser rendering, but Tennyson’s continued fidelity to Homer in the succeeding lines has the effect of enhancing the simile’s pertinence to the rest of

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the passage. As a predecessor of Milman Parry, Tennyson probably attached more meaning and intention to Homer’s placement of formulas and epithets than modern Homerists do. Tennyson follows Homer exactly in referring to Achilles twice as “Æakides” (21, 22) and once as “the great Peleion” (28), terms which connect Achilles to his lineage. In the wake of the simile about fires as a distress signal from a beleaguered city, these formulas do seem appropriate, as they help to characterize Achilles as the savior of his people. George Chapman takes the liberty, in line 180 of his translation (Vol. 2, page 125), of making the connection explicit between the scenario of the simile and Achilles’s crown of fire: “So (to shew such aid) from his head a light rose, scaling heaven.” It is not perfectly clear whether Chapman intends “aid” to refer to Athena’s aid of Achilles or Achilles’s aid of the Achaeans, but his omission of the epithets “Æakides” and “Peleion” would perhaps tend to indicate the former. Here again, the divine fire that inspires the invincible hero in battle is a prominent theme.Achilles’s wrath is indicated by the standard fire symbol and by his formidable shout. Achilles, who is both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds (Iliad 9.443), unites these two activities as his voice becomes a powerful weapon. The effective power of the hero’s voice carries implications of the parity of bard and warrior, thus making the passage especially attractive, we might guess, to Tennyson. The likening of Achilles’s voice to a trumpet (19ff.) helps to make his divinely enhanced but inarticulate shout a fit representation of “the united powers of battle and music.” Though he has high praise for the “Specimen of a Translation” and “Achilles Over the Trench,” Theodore Redpath writes of the two unpublished translations, “There are also two less successful pieces, from Books IV and VI, which Tennyson wisely left unpublished…. Neither of these unpublished versions is really satisfactory” (107). It is difficult to see what is unsatisfactory about these pieces, aside from their lamentable fragmentariness. One of these fragments is a translation of Iliad 4.446–56, which describes the resumption of the battle after the duel between Paris and Menelaus: And when they came together in one place, Then shocked the spears and bucklers and the strength Of armèd warriors; then the bossy shields Ground each on each, and huge uproar arose; And then were heard the vaunts and groans of men Slaying and being slain, and the earth ran blood. As winter torrents rolling from the hill And flinging their fierce waters through the clefts From mighty fountains downward to the gulf Wherein they dash together; and far away The shepherd on the mountain hears the sound, Such the drear roar of battle when they mixt.

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In his rendering Tennyson employs sound effects admirably well. In line 2, Tennyson’s use of “shocked” and “bucklers” (Lattimore has “dashed” and “shields”) makes the description onomatopoeic, while the alliterating “s’s” add impetus. In line 4, the symmetry of the phrase “each on each” creates the effect of a clash between two like objects. The fourth line’s concluding phrase, “uproar arose,” combines alliteration and assonance to simulate the sound it describes. Here Tennyson’s version is superior to Lattimore’s, which has “the sound grew huge of the fighting.” Line 8 uses alliterating “f’s” to imitate the sound of the flying water, a sound pattern that carries over into the “fountains” of line 9. As the simile proceeds, the verse gathers momentum like the falling waters it portrays. From “downward” in line 9 to the ono-matopoeic “dash” in line 10, only the word “gulf” carries any significant stress.The rush of unstressed syllables corresponds to the final rush of the water to its destination. The semicolon in line 10 signals the terminus of the water’s descent. Tennyson’s use of “drear roar” makes his version of line 456 superior to Lattimore’s (“such, from the coming together of men, was the shock and the shouting.”) and to Fitzgerald’s (“So when these armies closed/ there came a toiling clamor.”).The consonant “r’s” in “drear roar” give the phrase its acoustic power. As the second “r” of “drear” is pronounced, the voice falls, but the necessity of starting the next word with the same letter makes the reader reaccelerate the falling “r,” creating a crescendo effect that echoes the roaring sound of the battle. A comparable effect is achieved by the phrase “uproar arose” in line 4, and, incidentally, by the triple “r’s” in the last line of “The Kraken,” which according to Robert Bernard Martin conveys “cataclysmic energy” and “explosive force” (107). This Iliad passage forgoes fire imagery in favor of a description of “mighty fountains” (9), which are of course a traditional symbol of poetic inspiration. By means of its simile, the passage symbolically links the “fierce waters” (8) of a battle poet’s afflatus with the sublime ferocity of a frenzied melee. Another of the fragments is a rendering of Iliad 6.503–14, which describes the equine exuberance and energy of Paris: Nor lingered Paris in the lofty house, But armed himself and all in varied brass Rushed through the city, glorying in his speed: As when a horse at manger breaks his band And riotously rushing down the plain— Wont in the running river to wash himself And riot, rears his head and all his mane Flies back behind him glorying in himself And galloping to the meadows of the mares— So ran the son of Priam from the height Of Ilion, Paris, sunlike all in arms Glittering

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This excerpt is also exemplary in its artistry.The metrical shift to a strongly accented first syllable in line 3 enhances the sense of a speedy takeoff, and the weakly stressed syllables (three in a row before “speed”) in the rest of the line give the effect of swiftness.The fourth line slows dramatically in order to describe the horse “at manger,” but at the end of this line the horse breaks loose, and the meter does too. The rushing rhythms of Tennyson’s rendering of the simile combine with his use of multiple “r’s” to convey “cataclysmic energy” and “explosive force” here as well. In each of three straight lines describing the horses charge we find a pairing of “r” words: “riotously rushing” (5), “running river” (6), and “riot, rears” (7).Tennyson’s inclusion of “Glittering” (the one word in his translation’s twelfth line) in his description of Paris helps to relate him to the horse, which is described by the similar-sounding adjectives “glorying” (3, 8) and “galloping” (9).This fragment, with its conjunction of a running river and a riotous surfeit of wartime energy, features symbolism similar to that of Iliad 4.446–56, discussed above. Each of these four passages translated by Tennyson features an extended simile. “Simile in Homer is not decoration;” declares Richmond Lattimore, “it is dynamic invention, and because of this no successor has been able to swing it in the same grand manner” (44–45). It is a possible reflection of Tennyson’s high esteem for Homer’s genius that he translated excerpts which demonstrate the “dynamic invention” of the ancient bard. By selecting passages that also showcase the Homeric theme of divine inspiration, Tennyson presented a heroic context for the consideration of his own genius.Tennyson’s selections as a translator of Homer were to some extent a selection of self, an intimation of his own parity with both the singers and the subjects of heroic song. The ideology of the excerpts adumbrates the claim Tennyson would later make explicit in the “Epilogue” to the “Charge of the Heavy Brigade,” that “The song that nerves a nation’s heart,/ Is in itself a deed” (79–80). By virtue of the brilliant metrical effects of the translated lines, Tennyson validates their thematic significance and justifies his nickname as “The Bard.” Tennyson’s own artistry brings out three additional heroic themes in his other major translation, the “Battle of Brunanburh.” His version of the poem contains numerous departures from the Old English original which point up the topics of warfare as a double-edged sword, the joy of battle, and chivalry. Tennyson relied on several different sources in recreating the ancient battle account. He made extensive use of Edwin Guests A History of English Rhythms (356–65), which presents the original Anglo-Saxon poem along with Guest’s poetic, alliterative translation, and of Hallam Tennyson’s prose translation based on Guest (reprinted in Alexander, 153–54). Jerome C.Hixson and Patrick Scott (197) note that Tennyson also owned a copy of Joseph Bosworth’s Anglo-Saxon dictionary, which was published in 1838. In addition to these references he may have consulted one of several LatinAnglo-Saxon dictionaries current at the time. Some of Tennyson’s theme-enhancing

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alter-ations conform to one or more of his sources; some of them apparently originated with Tennyson himself. Christopher Ricks hails Tennyson’s effort as “among the best verse-translations of any Anglo-Saxon poetry” (Tennyson 275–76). Michael Alexander, in “Tennyson’s ‘Battle of Brunanburh,’” admires the technical merits of Tennyson’s verses: “…the master so manages his harmonics that Constantine creeps back to the north in the mouselike strophe IX; the persistent enjambement of XI suggests a rout; and the four regular dactylic tetrameters of XIV provide a platform for its grotesque garbaging climax” (159). Aside from these harmonical considerations, however, Alexander recognizes few of Tennyson’s innovations as contributing to the autonomous artistry of the translation. The first such significant innovation occurs in line 20, where Tennyson renders “Hettend,” “enemy, adversary,” as “spoiler,” a word he found in both Guest’s and Hallam Tennyson’s versions.A “spoiler” is of course a “pillager,” but the verb “spoil” has two alternate meanings of thematic importance to the poem. One of these meanings is “to have an eager desire,” and its most common usage in this sense is in the phrase cited by Webster, “spoiling for a fight” (an expression which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition [16.296], was recognized in England as early as 1865). The other meaning is “to decay.” A warrior primed for battle is “spoiling for a fight,” and his battle fury may well result in decaying carnage, as portrayed in Stanza XIV. By using a word with both of these connotations,Tennyson touches on the theme of battle furor as a sublime power that is often horrific in its results. A word choice with a similar suggestiveness is found in line 23, where Tennyson follows his son’s variation in translating “fæge feollan,” “fated to fall,” as “Doomed to the death.” Tennyson repeats the same formula in line 51, in place of the original “fæege to gefeohte,” “fated to the fight” (28). “Doom” has an Anglo-Saxon root, “dom,” which meant “glory.” By twice using a word with a root meaning of “glory” and a modern sense of fatality and ruin,Tennyson again alludes to the dual nature of battle, its glory and its tragedy. Another way Tennyson calls attention to the contrasting aspects of war is by giving the phrases “Weary of war” (36) and “Glad of the war” (104) each a separate line at the end of a stanza, making them more prominent in his version. It was perhaps to facilitate this kind of artistry that Tennyson decided to divide his translation into fifteen stanzas. Tennyson ignores Guest, Bosworth, and Hallam Tennyson in translating the Old English adjective “æþele” as “glorious” in his line 29, and this decision conforms to a pattern of emphasizing the glory of the victorious warriors. He takes the liber-ty of repeating the word “Lord” (27–28) in his rendering of the description of that “glorious creature” the sun, an independently conceived modification which helps to signal a connection between the glory of the sun and Athelstan, who is “Lord

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among Earls” (2) and who, like the sun, retires to the west at the end of the day (103).Tennyson adds his own reference to glory in line 102 of his version.Where the original has, as Christopher Ricks (The Poems ofTennyson 3.22) notices, “both together,” Tennyson writes “Each in his glory.” Tennyson also diverges from the original in order to emphasize the grisly carnage resulting from the battle. As Ricks notes once again (The Poems of Tennyson 3. 22), Tennyson, following his son in this case, slightly revises the epithets for the carrion birds, “dun-coated one” and “dark-coated one,” and applies them instead to the corpses as “Many a livid one, many a sallow-skin” (106). His description (following Guest and Hallam Tennyson) of Anlaf’s s retreat on the “fallow flood” (61) makes a tenuous connection between Anlaf’s loss of glory and the “sallow-skins” of his dead warriors.The carrion-birds of Stanza XIV are obliquely foreshadowed in Tennyson’s use (taking his cue again from Guest and Hallam Tennyson) of the word “flyers” (42) for “herefleman” (23).Tennyson’s line 73, “Lost in the carnage,” is his own addition. In the next line, he again diverges from his known sources in translating “fergrunden,” as “Mangled to morsels” (74), a phrase Michael Alexander calls “a lurid exaggeration” (159). In using the word “morsels” (Bosworth defines the verb “for-grindan” as “to grind up”), Tennyson was no doubt looking ahead to Stanza XIV. After adding emphasis to both the glory and the horror of the battle throughout his translation,Tennyson makes a final innovation that brings these elements together. As Ricks (The Poems of Tennyson 3.22) notes, in lines 123–24 Tennyson changes the original “eorlas arhwate,” “glorious Earls,” to “Earls that were lured by the/Hunger of glory….” The preceding passage on the horrific hunger of the scavengers lends an ugly connotation to the “hunger of glory.” To satisfy the hunger for glory in battle is also to provide sustenance for the garbaging war-hawk. Tennyson’s conclusion points to the quintessentially heroic theme of the tragic shadow cast by those who bathe in glory. In spite of the gruesome and deadly nature of their activity, warriors in heroic literature experience the joy of battle which Homer calls “kharme” and which the Old English bards express in kennings such as “wigplega,” “battle-play” (“The Battle of Maldon” 268, 316), and “hondplega,” “hand-play” (“The Battle of Brunanburh” 25). Tennyson emphasizes the heroic theme of the joy of battle by enhancing the “play” aspect of his translation. In Tennyson’s line 91, “The play that they played…,” he takes the single reference to play in the original (51–52) and in the translations of Guest and Hallam Tennyson, and reiterates it. In line 92 he translates “afaran,” which Guest and Hallam Tennyson render “sons,” as “children,” which helps to characterize the Saxons as players. He renders the “hondplegan” of the orig-inal (25) literally, as “hand-play” in line 44. Unlike Guest and Hallam Tennyson,Tennyson uses the word “javelin” three times in his translation, in lines 32, 88, and 96, for the Anglo-Saxon words “gar” and “darað” (Bosworth offers “javelin” as one of several alternatives for both words). Only in line 96 does “javelin” figure in the pattern of alliteration. The

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word does constitute a dactylic foot and therefore fits well with Tennyson’s meter, but “javelin” also brings a connotation of play to the battle descriptions.The throwing of javelins as an athletic contest dates to the original Olympic games in ancient Greece. Michael Alexander claims that Tennyson’s motive in doing his own version of the poem was to offer “a patriotic celebration of Brunanburh as a crucial English triumph, the high point of the dominance of the West-Saxon dynasty in Britain” (151). Even so, Tennyson the artist prevails over Tennyson the patriot in at least one respect: his versions portrayal of the Saxons’ enemies remains faithful to the traditional heroic ideals of humanity and chivalry. “In general,” writes C.M.Bowra, “however bloodthirsty and fierce war may be, and whatever fury may possess its exponents, [warriors] are still bound by a certain code which insists that a hero’s opponents are ultimately of the same breed as himself and that he should treat as he would wish to be treated himself” (Heroic Poetry 70). Achilles, attests Richmond Lattimore, “is not only a great fighter but a great gentleman, and if he lacks the chivalry of Roland, Lancelot, or Beowulf, that is because theirs is a chivalry coloured with Christian humility which has no certain place in the gallery of Homeric virtues” (48). “Homer, and all his great successors,” writes H.D.E Kitto, “have another quality which we have not yet spoken of,…That is…humanity” (55). Walter Kaufmann concurs: “There is…a quality of the Iliad that left a decisive mark on Greek tragedy: a profound humanity that experiences suffering as suffering and death as death, even if they strike the enemy” (138, original emphasis). Kaufmann calls the world of the Iliad “the world of chivalry” (171). In accord with this heroic ideal, Tennyson’s heightening of the horror in Stanza XIV tends to make the reader pity the slaughtered Scotsmen and Norsemen. Unheeding of his sources he adds similar, complimentary adjectives, “mighty” (43), and “strong” (53), to the descriptions of both the Mercian allies and the enemy earls of Anlaf. He calls Constantine a “hero” in line 65, whereas the original has “hilde-rinc” (39), which Bosworth, Guest, and Hallam Tennyson translate as either “soldier” or “warrior.” He calls the Saxons’ enemies “heroes” once again in line 112, taking liberties with the original “folces” (67), which Guest and Hallam Tennyson render as “men” and Bosworth as “people.” Alliteration was undoubtedly a concern in these last two examples, but Tennyson’s intent to be fair is evident nonetheless. Alexander calls the Ur-Brunanburh “a tribute to heroism, including enemy heroism: the death of so many men who happened to be opponents is not an occasion merely for crowing; nor is the death of Constantine’s son” (158). Tennyson takes his ideological cue from the original and from the venerable heroic tradition behind it. As a patriotic Englishman rendering his account of a national triumph, Tennyson was faced with a chance to act upon a heroic ideal himself, and he responded by augmenting the chivalrous restraint and balance of the Old English version.

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Tennyson’s decision to translate “The Battle of Brunanburh” in addition to the several passages from the Iliad indicates the poets high degree of interest not only in ancient languages but also in the traditions of ancient battle literature. Theodore Redpath and Michael Alexander both point out instances in Tennyson’s translations where he sacrifices fidelity to the original, usually for the sake of sound.Tennyson’s “Battle of Brunanburh” may be more characteristic of Tennysonian verse than of Anglo-Saxon, but his rendering subtly promotes the ancient poem’s ideological content.While enhancing the sound of his own version, his alterations also enhance the prominence of the original heroic themes. In “The Revenge:A Ballad of the Fleet,” Tennyson uses the conventions of heroic literature to depict an incident from England’s sixteenth century naval war against the Spanish Armada. He calls on the standard imagery of storms and of animals, and his artistic strategy once again seems guided by the ideal of chivalry. The use of the same image patterns to refer to both the English and the Spanish helps to balance Tennyson’s portrayal of the opposing factions. Charles Tennyson recounts that “The Revenge” “achieved immediately a welldeserved popularity. Alfred himself loved to read it aloud and Sidney Colum used to say that he once heard him do so in the impressive chaunt which was so characteristic of him” (Alfred Tennyson 442).The poem has drawn a considerable amount of critical attention. Harold Nicolson, Paull F.Baum, Alastair W.Thomson, and Valerie Pitt are all complimentary but brief in their remarks. More thorough is James R.Kincaid, who alleges in Tennyson’s Major Poems:The Comic and Ironic Patterns that the heroism depicted in “The Revenge” is laced with irony: [Tennyson] catches, therefore, both great determination and also mania, the sense that heroism itself is fascinating but unnatural…. The poem even hints at a suicidal quality in the hero, a perverse delight in selfdestruction, presented in such a way as sometimes to seem slightly callous, even absurd…. The heroism contains a touch of vulgarity, a crude and narrow irrationality at odds with the expansive serenity common to the heroic tone. (135)

The “mania” of the frenzied hero was apparently not considered “unnatural” by the ancient bards, who depicted this mania as a force of nature, a practice followed once again by Tennyson in “The Revenge.” Richard Grenville is not “suicidal,” nor does he have a “perverse delight in self-destruction;” he exemplifies the heroic willingness to die for a glorious ideal. Cedric Whitman’s description of Achilles applies equally well to Grenville: “He is sacrificing himself to the idea of himself, to the idea of his own heroism” (The Heroic Paradox 27). When Kincaid characterizes Grenville’s question in lines 86–88 as “a trifle wild” (135) and implies that Grenville’s crewmen demonstrate admirable sanity in refusing his offer of a heroic death, he is flying in the face of the heroic tradition underlying Tennyson’s poem. Grenville’s question is

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perfectly in accord with the choices of Achilles and Cuchullain, who both preferred a short but glorious life to a long but undistinguished one.As for Kincaid’s reference to the “expansive serenity common to the heroic tone,” he neglects to consider that the heroes of the great epics are renowned not for their serenity but for their often ungovernable intensity. One of the most thorough and impressive studies of any of Tennyson’s battle pieces is the chapter on “The Revenge” in Three Keys to Language by Robert M. Estrich and Hans Sperber. Estrich and Sperber’s technical analysis of the poem is astute.They notice that the “Revenge” “sinks with the solemnity of perfect anapests in the final line” (262). They note Tennyson’s use of archaisms in lines 4, 8, 29, 93, 106, and 114, commenting that they “add dignity” and enhance the poem’s believability, “for we have always found it easier to believe in the authenticity of romantic heroism in the past or far away” (263).They also remark Tennyson’s use of omniscient point of view until the central sections (VI to XI), where he emphasizes the unity of the British by using “we,” “us,” and “our” repeatedly (264). They comment that Tennyson calls the poem a ballad, but that he “has only suggested the traditional ballad stanza and rhythm” (265). His use of caesuras and internal rhyme heightens the ballad effect, they suggest, observing also that “It is easy to understand why Tennyson, seeking to invoke the help of tradition as well as to preserve freedom for a variety of dramatic and descriptive effects, wrote a ballad, but wrote it in this form, suggestive rather than closely imitative of the traditional type” (265–66).They elucidate the artistry of Tennyson’s use of repetition, contrast, and parallelism (269). The repetitions “frame the structural climax of the poem” (270), which is, of course, the battle. Though Estrich and Sperber’s demonstration of Tennyson’s skill is creditable, their attitude towards the aesthetic of “The Revenge” is rather dubious. They discuss Tennyson’s “tendency to shape his facts into something more noble than reality” (256), noting his omission of the severity and the fierceness towards his own men that Jan Huygen van Linschoten ascribes to Grenville and of the gory details in Sir Walter Raleigh’s account of the battle. “This is the event and these are the characters not as they were,” write Estrich and Sperber, “not even as they were supposed to be by a favorable propagandist, but as they ought to have been to provide a perfect epic episode” (255).They find that in this respect “The Revenge” exemplifies one of Tennyson’s “negative traits”—“his bias towards softening the brutal and getting away from the ugly” (271–72).This accusation contrasts markedly with Christopher Ricks’s criticism that “Tennyson is always imaginatively sensitive to splintering weapons, but seldom to splintering skulls” (Tennyson 248n.). We have seen that Tennyson is very far from softening the brutal or getting away from the ugly in poems such as “The Vale of Bones,” “Gods Denunciations Against Pharoah-Hophra,” “Boädicea,” and “Battle of Brunanburh,” and Stanzas X and XI of “The Revenge” provide a sobering counterpoise to the poems “exaltation of

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romantic heroism” (Estrich 264). Tennyson emulates the ancient bards in acknowledging the gruesome aspect of warfare while yet celebrating the glory of heroic ideals. In Hallam Tennyson’s Memoir (2.337), Tennyson indirectly addresses Estrich and Sperber’s charge: “I agree with Wordsworth that Art is selection. Look at Zola for instance: he shows the evils of the world without the ideal. His Art becomes monstrous therefore, because he does not practice selection. In the noblest genius there is need of self-restraint.” Estrich and Sperber quote Carlyle on “The Revenge”: “I knew that Alfred would treat that episode in a masterful manner, and he’d not allude to Elizabeth’s starving the poor sailors” (Estrich 272). Tennyson’s practice of “selection” was to Carlyle the “masterful” way of handling the story. Judging from the following remarks of H.D.E Kitto, it was also the Homeric way. In The Greeks, Kitto comments on the Iliad: The Iliad does not describe an episode in the war, colouring the description with passing reflections about this or that aspect of life; rather, the poet has taken his “subject,” this phase of the war, as so much raw material, to be built into an entirely new structure of his own devising. He is not going to write about the war, not even about part of it, but about the theme which he states so clearly in the first five verses. (47)

Kitto also speaks of Homer’s “discipline” and “control” (46) as an artist, to which we might compare Tennyson’s reference to “self-restraint.” The Homeric desideratum of preserving the glory of heroes is in evidence in the very title of “The Revenge.” Tennyson abstains from naming the ship in “The Captain,” because the hope of the ignoble and anonymous Captain “to make the name/Of his vessel great in story” (“The Captain” 18–19) is tantamount to the desire to perpetuate his own name. The names of a great ship and of its captain become indissolubly linked. In “The Revenge,” the names “Sir Richard Grenville” and “Lord Howard” are used as metonyms for their vessels in lines 1 and 13, and the battleships are repeatedly personified—see lines 38, 42, 50, 51, 52, 60, 61, and 111.These strategies render the title virtually synonymous with Grenville’s name. Christopher Ricks notes that in writing “The Revenge” Tennyson “was possibly influenced by Browning’s “Herve Riel” (The Poems of Tennyson 3.25). “Herve Riel” concludes with the lines, “In my verse, Herve Riel, do thou once more/Save the squadron, honour France, love thy wife the Belle Aurore!” In Tennyson’s verse Grenville once more holds the Spanish squadron at bay. The reenactment of Grenville’s heroics gives the title another connotation: “The Revenge” constitutes a form of revenge over time and death. Grenville is figuratively apotheosized by sinking into the ocean, which acquires a symbolic equivalence to the great deep of “The Passing of Arthur,” “De Profundis,” and “Crossing the Bar.” In line 14 the sea is analogous to the “silent summer heaven,” and in line 90 Grenville equates sinking with falling “into the hands of God.” The

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buffeting of the Armada by the storm (a traditional battle image) has overtones of divine retribution: “Till it smote on their hulls and their sails and their masts and their flags,/And the whole sea plunged and fell on the shot-shattered navy of Spain” (117). The God specified in “The Revenge” is the “God of battles” (62), and the concluding reference to the sea contains an allusion to his power. The last word of the poem, “main,” comes from “maegen,” the Old English word for “might,” and “main” still retains its sense of “strength” or “force.” Grenville is denied his wish to “fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of Spain,” but because of the chivalry of the Spanish he is sunk “with honour down into the deep” (109), where he symbolically becomes one with the “main” of the God of battles. The pummeling of both the Revenge (which, like Grenville, is “lost evermore in the main” [119]) and the Armada by the tempest is only one example of the symmetry with which Tennyson depicts Grenville and his Spanish antagonists. The chivalry of the warriors is an ideal Tennyson apparently follows himself in his arrangement of the poem’s pattern of imagery. Estrich and Sperber notice the use of “dog” to describe both factions (12, 30, 54), and in this context they comment that “heroic poetry has allowed courtesy between great-hearted foes ever since the time when Achilles entertained Priam in his tent” (259).Tennyson handles several other motifs with the same impartiality. In line 12 Grenville speaks of “the devildoms of Spain.” He refers to the Spanish as “the children of the devil,” and states that he never turned his back “upon Don or devil yet” (30–31).Towards the end of the poem the narrator uses the “devil” image to refer to Grenville: “Was he devil or man? He was devil for aught they knew” (108). In line 14 Grenville’s compatriot Thomas Howard “melted like a cloud.” The same image describes the Spanish ship “San Philip,” which “hung above us like a cloud” (43). In line 68 Grenville is wounded “in the side.” Three lines later the speaker refers to the Spanish fleet “with broken sides” (71). In line 34 the Spanish fleet is split: “For half of their fleet to the right and half to the left were seen.” When Grenville calls on his gunner to sink the “Revenge,” he says “split her in twain!” (89). Estrich and Sperber call attention to the pathos-evoking details and the “flamboyant, anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic motive” (249) of the third stanza.The hardened warrior, they observe, becomes almost tender as he “bore in hand” his sick men and “laid them on the ballast” (15, 18).What Estrich and Sperber neglect to mention is that in Stanza XIII some of the same pathos-evoking phrases describe the Spanish solicitude for Grenville. “And the stately Spanish men to their flagship bore him then,/Where they laid him by the mast” (97–98). They also “praised him to his face with their courtly foreign grace” (90). Other elements that help to align “The Revenge” with the heroic tradition include the likening of the cannon fire to a “thunderbolt” (44), to “battle-thunder” (49), and to “battle-thunder and flame” (59). The “Revenge” reflects the battle furor of its captain when it is described as “mad” (38). Grenville exhibits heroic qualities in his “pride” (82), in his defiant laughter (32), and in the “joyful spirit” with which he

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meets his foes and dies (103).The phrase “roared a hurrah” in line 32 comprises the traditional motifs of shouting and animality, and in line 96 Grenville is called a “lion.” The English fleet is also depicted using bird imagery.The reconnaissance boat in line 2 “came flying,” like a “fluttered bird.” This instance is succeeded by references to flying in lines 6, 9, and 25.These references give added weight to the word “Fleet” in the poem’s subtitle.As a verb, “fleet” can mean “to fly swiftly.” It can also mean “to fade away,” or “vanish,” which is what Thomas Howard does in Stanza III as he flies the scene of the battle. “The Revenge” adheres firmly to the heroic tradition but not quite so firmly to the sixteenth century chronicles of the battle the poem depicts. By coloring history with heroic idealism,Tennyson brings into question the proper relationship between the artist and the annalist. In other poems of this chapter we have seen Tennyson utilize his Homeric legacy to broach issues such as the true nature of glory, the value of unconventional forms of heroism, and the suitability of women for aggressive pursuits. Tennyson’s ability to make the heroic tradition relevant to topical issues contributed to his preparedness to sing the battles of his own day in his role as national bard.

Chapter Four

Contemporary Conflicts

T

ENNYSON’S POEMS ON CONTEMPORARY CONFLICTS SPAN AN EXTENSIVE chronological range, beginning with the “Exhortation to the Greeks,” published in 1827. Composed during the same period but not published until 1893 was “Written during the Convulsions in Spain.” In 1852 Tennyson turned to exhorting his own people and elicited critical convulsions in England with his controversial incendiary pieces. His two martial poems as laureate, the “Wellington Ode” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” appeared in 1852 and 1854 respectively, “The Defence of Lucknow,” with its “Dedicatory Poem to the Princess Alice,” in 1879, and “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade,” with its prologue and epilogue, in 1885. In this chapter the two “Charge” poems, because they both celebrate the Battle of Balaclava, are discussed consecutively. One thing that unifies all these poems in spite of their chronological variety is that in authoring them Tennyson fully realized the bardic ideal. He inspired real warriors and commemorated the exploits of his own national military heroes. In some cases his countrymen verified his claim that the song that nerves a nation’s heart is in itself a deed. “The Charge of the Light Brigade” was a favorite among the British soldiers in the Crimea, and “had a most heart-stirring effect on all” (Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson 288). Upon one bedridden soldiers hearing the piece, “the sick man’s eye lit up and he began a spirited description of the Charge. Before many hours had passed he was completely restored to health” (Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson 289). Tennyson had 2,000 copies of the poem sent to the British chaplain at the front, who wrote him that “The poet can now make heroes, just as in days of yore, if he will” (Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson 288). “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” asValerie Pitt recounts, “had its effect in the abolition of the purchase system in the staffing of the army” (206). Patrick Waddington observes that the poem “was treated as a kind of appendage of the actual charge, influencing other

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poets and building up for itself an overwhelming preponderance in the popular imagination” (77). During Tennyson’s funeral in Westminster Abbey, “the aisle was lined by survivors of Balaclava” (Levi 221). Even the fulminating poems of 1852 had a tangible impact. “TheVolunteers that Tennyson had been lustily yelling for,” writes Peter Levi, “…were formed in 1859, and in 1860 the rifle clubs met on Wimbledon Common: the Queen fired the first shot” (220). The first shot fired by Tennyson in his campaign to influence contemporary military action was his “Exhortation to the Greeks,” a poem with which the teenage Tennyson chastises the venerable country of Homer while tugging at the mantle of the ancient bard. His youthful audacity culminates with the concluding lines, “And there is not a voice to a nation so dear,/As the war-song of freedom that calls on the brave” (25–26), which seem self-referential. The two lines preceding these, “For there is not ought that a freeman can fear,/As the fetters of insult, the name of a slave” (23–24), emphasize the importance of words in sustaining honor and reputation. The four concluding lines establish an antithesis between “the fetters of insult” and “the war-song of freedom” with which a poet both rouses a nation to action and celebrates its honor. In lines 7– 10, “For know, that the former bright page of thy story/Proclaims but thy bondage and tells but thy shame:/Proclaims from how high thou art fallen…” the speaker presents a bard’s-eye view of history as a story, a heroic story for which honor demands a noble ending. Tennyson’s casting of himself in the role of a successor to Homer is consistent with his strategy of establishing a sense of continuity between the ancient and modern Greeks. He repeatedly calls upon Greece to remember its former days of glory. He complements this strategy by alluding to Paradise Lost, a work whose ancient biblical source only enhanced its modern relevance in the eyes of most Europeans of the time. Christopher Ricks (The Poems of Tennyson 1.160) cites “embodied” in line 14 as deriving from Paradise Lost 1.574, “such imbodied force.” The “imbodied force” is Satan’s battalion of devils in Hell.Tennyson’s reference to the Greek “phalanx,” also in line 14, presumably derives from the same Miltonic passage: in Paradise Lost 1.550, Milton notes that the devils “move/In perfect Phalanx….” These allusions help to draw a parallel between the Greeks and Milton’s devil brigade.The Greeks, like the devils, were once “high,” but have “fallen” (9).The Greeks’ “fallen” state, in conjunction with the thrice-repeated injunction to “Arouse thee, O Greece!” (1, 3, 11) and to “arise from thy sleep!” (12), recalls Satan’s demand that his troops “Awake, arise, or be for ever fall’n” (PL 1.330). In this context Tennyson’s use of the Homeric fire/ light image (4–7), especially in his seventh line’s reference to blazing, evokes the Miltonic fires of Hell. The epigraph to “Exhortation to the Greeks” coordinates well with the poems allusions to Paradise Lost In The Poems of Tennyson (1.159), Christopher Ricks translates the epigraph, “Lo, here, here is the freedom for which you have often

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longed.” Sallust’s The Conspiracy of Catiline, 20.14, provides the quotation, which is spoken by Catiline in a rousing oration to his fellow conspirators prior to their unsuccessful revolt. Just as Satan’s magnificent exhortations, culminating in the command to “Awake, arise, or be for ever fall’n,” prove ultimately futile, Catiline’s speech was unavailing. Interestingly enough, immediately preceding the words in Tennyson’s epigraph, Catiline cries, “Awake, then!” (190). Satan’s advice that “our better part remains/To work in close design, by fraud or guile/What force effected not” (PL 1.645–47), is paralleled by Catiline’s initial attempt to achieve his ends politically rather than violently, and also by Sallust’s discussion of the superiority of brains over brawn in the prefaces to both The Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jugurthine War. Tennyson implicitly compares the Greeks to Milton’s defeated devils, and he selects his epigraph from a speech preceding a revolution that would end in defeat. Perhaps in doing so he is invoking the heroic ideal of unremitting courage in the face of insurmountable odds.Tennyson’s boyhood reading in Shelley and Byron may have determined his view of Milton’s Satan as heroically defiant. In line 2 Tennyson refers to the wars between Ancient Greece and Persia, which gave rise to the Battle of Thermopylae, an archetypal example of a hopeless but heroic final stand (see Tennyson’s use of Thermopylae in the concluding lines of “The Third of February, 1852”). The reference in line 20 is to the Battle of Salamis, an encounter which demonstrated that a hopeless mismatch can occasionally result in the most glorious of victories. In 480 B.C.E., in the waters around the island of Salamis, 360 Greek ships routed a Persian fleet of 1200. Perhaps Tennyson’s intention in linking the Greeks with defeated devils and Romans was to offer a subtle hint that the Greek cause would have been lost if not for the British aid Greece received in its war against Turkey. In 1827, the same year “Exhortation to the Greeks” was published, Greece accepted military support from Great Britain, Russia, and France in its fight against Turkish efforts to regain control of the country after Greece had declared its independence in 1822. In 1824, Byron, whom the young Tennyson had idolized, had died in Greece while working for Greek independence. W.D.Paden (127) compares “Exhortation to the Greeks” to Byron’s Childe Harold 2.73–76, which also attempts to shame the modern Greeks into action by comparing them unfavorably to their glorious forbears, and which repeatedly sounds the note of freedom versus slavery with which Tennyson concludes his poem. In its tone and in its anapestic meter, the “Exhortation to the Greeks” resembles several of Byron’s trumpet-blowing pieces from the Hebrew Melodies of 1815, such as “Jephtha’s Daughter,” “Song of Saul Before His Last Battle,” or “The Destruction of Sennacherib.” Like “Exhortation to the Greeks,” “Written During the Convulsions in Spain” is an early piece whose epigraph carries a lot of its artistic weight. The epigraph, which Christopher Ricks translates, “to the Cantabrians not yet schooled to bear

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our yoke” (The Poems of Tennyson 1.168), comes from Horace’s Ode 2.6 (2–3). In the Ode, the Cantabrians of northwest Spain are specifically associated with Gadès, or Cadiz, the place where the revolt against Ferdinand VII, which Tennyson’s poem champions, began. The speaker of the Horatian Ode has been asked by his friend Septimius to accompany him to Spain, “where Cantabrians have not learned our/ Rule” (this and the subsequent quotations from the Ode are taken from the Charles E. Passage translation, pages 187–88).The speaker declines, saying, “I have had enough of the sea, and roads, and/Service with armies” (7–8). He prefers the alternative of a pleasant, pastoral life at Tibur (6—cf. Ode 1.7. 1–14) or in the “lovely Galaesus valley” (10), a place that “loves a fruitful/Bacchus” (18–19). Horace’s carpe diem philosophy is hedonistic rather than heroic, and his speaker’s reaction to the knowledge of impending death (in line 23 he speaks of his “yet-warm funeral ashes”) is comparable to the stance condemned by Isaiah: “let us eat and drink; for to morrow we shall die” (Isaiah 22.13). “Written During the Convulsions in Spain” calls attention to Horace’s Ode 2. 6 only to undercut the hedonistic orientation of the Ode. In Tennyson’s poem, it is battle, and not just battle, but death in battle, that will bring the pleasant, pastoral springtime Horace’s speaker desires as a refuge from warfare: Fresh be their tombs who fall, Green be they one and all, There may the red rose and wild laurel wave! There may the sunbeams glance, There may the maidens dance, There may the olive bend over their grave! (7–12)

Tennyson, perhaps mindful that Arcadia was in fact a harsh, mountainous land inhabited by a warlike people, makes death on the battlefield the mother of pastoral beauty. In his gloss on line 10 of Horace’s ode, Charles E.Passage describes “the lovely Galaesus valley” for which the speaker longs as the channel of the ancient Galaesus River, which is now called the Sinni (188). Weapons flow like water in “Written During the Convulsions in Spain”: “Streams o’er thy campaign the far-flashing glaive” (3). The bucolic meets the bellicose also in the battle cries of Tennyson’s poem, in which tones of music are discernible: “Hark to the battle-cries,/Pealing sonorous along thy blue sky!” (29–30). In his mingling of pastoral with heroic conventions Tennyson implicates a heroic response to the Sybaritic attitude of Horace’s Ode 2.6, a response comparable to that of Samuel Daniel’s Ulysses in his argument with the Siren: But natures of the noblest frame These toils and dangers please;

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And they take comfort in the same As much as you in ease; (“Ulysses and the Siren” 41–44)

In his allusions to the escapism of Horace,Tennyson may also have been attempting to emphasize the heroism of the Spanish revolutionaries by setting up an implicit contrast between their attitude and that of Horace’s speaker. In 1820 the Spanish troops of Ferdinand VII, like the speaker of Horace’s Ode, refused to leave home to wage war in foreign lands. Instead of favoring Horace’s hedonistic alternative, however, the Spaniards started a revolution at home. The vehemence of Tennyson’s support for the revolutionaries is reflected in the vigor of his dactylic verse. F.B.Pinion comments on “Written During the Convulsions in Spain,” “…the measure gives to some extent a foretaste of ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade,’ and has a rousing appeal” (68). The poem also features profuse alliteration and assonance, as the first stanza exemplifies. Every line of the first stanza contains at least “s” so und, a nd the “sp” of “spirit” in line 1 is echoed almost immediately by the “Sp” of “Spain” in line 2. The “far-flashing” glaive of line 3 alliterates with “Freedom” (4) and “future” (5). “Roused,” the first word of the poem, is assonant with “now” (1) and “brow” (2). “Spain” (2), “campaign” (3), “glaive” (3), “rays” (4), “days” (5), and “brave” (6) are assonant as well, as are “Streams” (3) and “Sweetly” (4). This same density of alliteration and assonance strengthens the succeeding stanzas as well. Tennyson complements the heroic vigor of the lines by evoking the heroic topoi of light (“Bright be their bays who live,/ Bright as all Earth can give,” “Brilliant their glory’s star” [13–14, 17]) and of shouting (“Arm them for combat and shout, ‘To the fight!’” [33]). The critical neglect of “Exhortation to the Greeks” and “Written During the Convulsions in Spain” is benign compared to the treatment received by the following group of infamous incitive poems from 1852. Critics of these four (selected here from a total of seven) hawkish pieces seem to have been unduly influenced by Charles Tennyson’s observation that his grandfather “wrote all these poems in a white heat of emotion; ‘Hands All Round’ in particular he composed with the tears streaming down his cheeks” (Alfred Tennyson 266). In the belief that Tennyson let slip these dogs of war from his pen with little thought or care, commentators have called the pieces everything from a “chronic hysterical war-whoop of the muse” (Jump 415) to “emotional doodles” (Kincaid 220). Robert Bernard Martin’s is a typical assessment: Alfred wrote a series of seven poems in January and February 1852 that any admirer would wish had never seen light. A few of their over-punctuated titles tell the story: “Rifle Clubs!!!” “Britons, Guard Your Own,” “Hands All Round!” In them Tennyson slips across the narrow line dividing ardent patriotism from hysteria, proclaiming his dislike of the French, shrilly urging England to “Arm, arm, arm!” and succeeding only

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The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry in manifesting the hollow belligerence of the unmartial man caught up in blind chauvinism. (365)

Many commentators, in their hysterical and belligerent condemnation of the inflammatory verses, are guilty of the sin they condemn. Although much of the criticism is justifiable, it is also justifiable to break new critical ground and say something constructive about the poems. Their ties to the heroic tradition make them worthy of being considered alongside Tennyson’s other battle pieces as legitimate works of art in the Homeric line. In lines 43–44 of “Britons, Guard Your Own,” the speaker hearkens back to old times: “We were the best of marksmen long ago,/we won old battles with our strength, the bow.” In adverting to the past these lines epitomize the strategy of a poem in which Tennyson’s call for undaunted resistance to the French evokes the ancient heroic ideal of his nation. “Britons, Guard Your Own” posits a situation in which Great Britain stands alone in defiance of Louis Napoleon: “He triumphs; maybe we shall stand alone” (5, 11). England may face insurmountable odds, but she must make a final stand undismayed: 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 fight the banded world alone, We swear to guard our own. (55–60)

Belief in the value of standing alone and defiant against an overwhelming force was the characteristic trait of the ancient Norse and Anglo-Saxon brand of heroism. Edith Hamilton writes of Norse mythology: “The heroes and heroines of the early stories face disaster.They know that they cannot save themselves, not by any courage or endurance or great deed. Even so, they do not yield.They die resisting” (Mythology 300). J.R.R Tolkien notes the “fundamentally similar heroic temper of ancient England and Scandinavia” (25), and speaks of the Anglo-Saxons’ “exaltation of undefeated will, which receives doctrinal expression in the words of Byrhtwold at the battle of Maldon” (23). Byrhtwold’s rallying cry (“Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre,/ mod sceal þe mare þe ure mægan lytlað” [“The Battle of Maldon” 312–13]) was, according to Tolkien, “made for a man’s last and hopeless day” (23n.). Such is the stage Tennyson sets in line 2, where the speaker’s warning suggests the Götterdämerung: “The world’s last tempest darkens overhead.” By supplementing the metaphor of the “tempest” with that of the battleships’ “thunder” in line 40,Tennyson evokes a Homeric trope for battle wrath. In lines 52– 53, “Nor seek to bridle/His rude aggressions…,” where “rude” means “sav-age,” Tennyson again touches on the Homeric theme of rampant fury. The use of the

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word “bridle” likens Napoleon’s aggressions to the wild charging of a horse, a traditional symbol of furor, as in Virgil’s description of Turnus in Aeneid 11 (which adapts Iliad 6. 503–14, one of the passages Tennyson translated). The traditional importance of the bard’s s role is another Homeric element adumbrated in “Britons, Guard Your Own.” The poem emphasizes the necessity of words in establishing honor and freedom. Napoleon is unreliable because he does not keep his word: “Peace lovers we—but who can trust a liar?—” (14). The animadversion on lying anticipates Maud, where “God’s just wrath shall be wreaked on a giant liar” (3.45), and the Idylls of the King, where “Man’s word is God in man” (CA 132). The hatred of falsehood is Homeric. In the Iliad, Achilles says, “For as I detest the doorways of Death, I detest that man, who/hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks forth another” (9.312–13, Lattimore 206). Words relate to the Napoleonic threat in another way: the French people can no longer speak for themselves. “We hate not France, but France has lost her voice” (19).The British people, on the other hand, are free to cry out their allegiance to the queen (26), and it is “free speech that makes a Briton known” (29). As in the heroic tradition, words promulgate renown.Tennyson’s poem, which is itself an exercise of free speech, celebrates the renown not of individual heroes but of his country. The refrain, “Britons, guard your own,” implies a sense of separation between the speaker and his countrymen. In the last line of the poem, the refrain changes to “We swear to guard our own,” which conveys a sense of national unity that includes the speaker. At the conclusion Tennyson steps into the role of national bard by assuming that his words have achieved their end of uniting his countrymen behind him. In the Memoir (1.344), Hallam Tennyson includes a shortened version of “Britons, Guard Your Own” under the heading, “National Songs.” The poem was set to Emily’s music. “The Third of February, 1852,” which was also set to music, is similar in its artistic devices to “Britons, Guard Your Own.” According to Hallam Tennyson, “The Third of February, 1852” was written in response to the occasion “when the House of Lords seemed to condone Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état in Dec. 1851, and rejected the Bill for the organization of the Militia when he was expected to attack England” (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 2.473). “On 3 Feb.,” writes Christopher Ricks, “Derby in the House of Lords was applauded after his attack on the British press for antagonizing Napoleon while lamenting our weak army” (The Poems of Tennyson 2.473). In support of the press “The Third of February, 1852” stresses the importance of unflinching speech, and it does so in part by equating words with deeds according to the heroic tradition. The poem begins, “My Lords, we heard you speak: you told us all/That England’s honest censure went too far;/That our free press should cease to brawl” (1–3).The press is brawling: the “mental fight” of the wordsmiths is described as if it were a literal, physical conflict. In contrast to the manly brawling of the press is the childish bawling of the “niggard throats of Manchester” (43), who require peace for the furtherance

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of their fortunes. Valerie Pitt finds in lines 43–45 “a useless cacophony of vowel sounds, ‘man, may, bawl, all,’ of which Tennyson at his best was incapable” (203). The cacophony of vowel sounds is not useless: it echoes the “bawling” of the Mancunians. Tennyson uses another martial metaphor in lines 5–6, “It was our ancient privilege, my Lords,/To fling whate’er we felt, not fearing, into words,” where the act of writing is described in terms that evoke the throwing of a spear. “Odin,” writes H.R.Ellis Davidson, “possessed the great spear Gungnir, and this was evidently used to stir up warfare in the world” (Gods and Myths 53).Tennyson’s words are intended to have the same effect, while constituting a form of warfare themselves. In the third stanza the speaker exercises his right of free speech in demanding the same.The stanza concludes with an interesting twist on the tradition of the bard as the recorder of heroic deeds: “… we must speak;/That if tonight our greatness were struck dead,/There might be left some record of the things we said” (16–18).The ancient hero’s hope for his actions, that they might be perpetuated in writing, is here the narrator’s hope for the speech of the British. The Achillean contempt for lying is found in line 10, “We dare not even by silence sanction lies.” The traditional heroic trope of animalism is in evidence, beginning in the fourth line, “Not sting the fiery Frenchman into war.” In contrast to the words of the brawling press, which in this fourth line are likened to a bee’s aggression, the “honeyed whispers” of the barons (36) relate to the too-sweet product of the bee.The association of the barons with production rather than with aggression is perfectly appropriate, considering that they side with the “cotton-spinners” (45) whose self-serving antipathy to national conflict has ironically left the country with “naked coasts” (40). Christopher Ricks (The Poems of Tennyson 2.474) notices the allusion to Endymion 1.955–56 (“send honey-whispers/Round every leaf, that all those gentle lispers…”) in lines 35–36, “O fallen nobility, that, overawed,/Would lisp in honeyed whispers of this monstrous fraud!” This allusion is perfectly apropos of the poem’s theme. The lines cited by Ricks are spoken by Endymion, who is accused by his sister Peona of sullying “the entrusted gem/Of high and noble life,…highfronted honour” (757– 59). Almost immediately after uttering lines 955–56, Endymion says that he “Stood stupefied with [his] own empty folly” (961). This context compounds Tennyson’s censure of the barons. The animal imagery continues in the fifth stanza, where the British people are likened to a bucking bronco: “Pricked by the Papal spur, we reared,/We flung the burthen of the second James” (27–28). Stanza 6 also suggests animal images: “muse” (31) derives from the Middle French word for “mouth of an animal,” while the words “breed” (32) and “sires” (33) extend the equine connotations of the previous stanza. The first half of stanza 6, which refers to the barons’ courageous ancestors, contains allusions to an animal, the horse, which the ancients associated with martial vigor. In the second half of the stanza, which describes the “fallen nobility” (35) of the Victorian barons, the animal imagery degenerates into that of a bee’s

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by-product and finally of a monster (“this monstrous fraud!” [36]). Tennyson’s references in the middle of the stanza to the battles of Lewes and Runnymeade are well chosen, as both battles resulted in victories for the medieval English barons over the monarchy. The epithet “Wild War” in line 8 cements the connection between war as an outburst of wild energies and the wild, animalistic courage of the British people. War is a “French God” (7) that “breaks the converse of the wise” (8), but in times past Tennyson’s countrymen overthrew the God of Papism and “broke” (30) their French antagonists. In line 14, “Though all the storm of Europe on us break,” Tennyson further develops the motif of “breaking” while adding the Homeric storm image as a symbol of military threat. “The Third of February, 1852” concludes with an affirmation that the British people, unlike their dishonorable Lords, possess the defiant courage of the ancient Spartans at Thermopylae. As he does in “Britons, Guard Your Own,” Tennyson appeals to the British legacy of venerating a valorous last stand. “Hands All Round!” gave Tennyson another opportunity to sing, quite literally, of arms and men. “[T]he old version of ‘Hands all round,’ written in 1852,” Hallam Tennyson writes, “was recast [in 1882] by request of Sir FredericYoung into a patriotic song for the Empire. The reprint was published with my mother’s setting …and sung all over Great Britain and the Colonies on the Queen’s birthday” (Memoir 2.264). Walter Savage Landor called “Hands All Round!” “incomparably the best (convivial) lyric in the language” (Memoir 1.345n.). Through its use of words with multiple meanings, the poem demonstrates the power of the weapons wielded by the bard. The word “Hands” in the title and the refrain means primarily “pledges,” but at the same time it refers to the assistance from America called for in the last two stanzas. “Hands” also connotes the idea of gaining the upper hand over tyrants, and even of hand-to-hand fighting. The word “confound,” in lines 10, 22, 34, 46, and 58, means “refute,” or “destroy,” but it can also mean “confuse,” a sense that contrasts with line 56, “She comprehends the race she rules,” and with line 52, “They can be understood by kings.” Line 51 plays a variation on the bardic “words as weapons” metaphor: “O speak to Europe through your guns!” Here, weapons are figurative words, which can be “understood” even as they “confound” the tyrant’s cause. The trope of line 51 helps to bring out the punning sense of “broadsides” in line 44: “But let thy broadsides roar with ours.” Broadsides, besides being the guns on the side of a ship, are verbal attacks and printed sheets of paper. Tennyson evokes a traditional symbol of furor with the “flashing heats” of line 29 and the “fire” of line 30.The word “blast” in line 30, when considered in conjunction with the broadsides of line 44, connotes the blasting of cannons. The “mad blast” of war in line 41 carries the same connotation, while also exemplifying the heroic battle/storm metaphor. In addition, the word “mad” suggests the frenzy

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of battle wrath. Other Homeric elements include the description of the broadsides as roaring (44), which recalls the tradition of symbolizing furor as a lion, and the emphasis on the “great name” of England, which appeals to the heroic ideal of reputation and honor. Four times (12, 24, 36, 48) Tennyson’s speaker declaims, “And the great name of England round and round.” In the last line of the poem, this refrain changes to, “And the great cause of freedom round and round.” The substitution of “cause of freedom” for “name of England” would seem to imply that the two things are interchangeable, that the name of England is synonymous with the cause of freedom. Tennyson followed up “The Third of February, 1852” and “Hands All Round!” both of which were published in The Examiner on February 7, with the last of the instigative poems of 1852, “Suggested by Reading an Article in a Newspaper,” which was also published in The Examiner, on February 14.The “article” of the title refers to the two slightly earlier newspaper pieces. Of the two, “The Third of February, 1852,” which emphasizes the power of the press, was apparently foremost in Tennyson’s mind while composing “Suggested by Reading an Article,” which vehemently exhorts the fourth estate. Like the other poems of early 1852, “Suggested by Reading an Article” insists on the power of language, by discussing writing in tropes traditionally indicative of heroically inspired action. Tennyson begins the poem by critiquing his own previous work: “How much I love this writers manly style!” (1). By the time he wrote this line, the “white heat of emotion” in which he had written “Hands All Round!” and “The Third of February, 1852” had presumably worn off. Tennyson had seen these poems in print and was sufficiently detached from the tumultuous creative state that produced them in order to offer a considered opinion of their quality. Significantly, the speaker of “Suggested by Reading an Article” loves the style of the preceding poems for its manliness.The attribution of manliness to his own work would seem to represent another attempt on Tennyson’s part to resolve what Christopher Ricks calls his “uneasy feeling that it was the soldier who epitomised action, duty, manliness, and courage” (Tennyson 53). Through the imagery of “Suggested by Reading an Article,” Tennyson reiterates his theme of the bard as a warrior in his own right. He uses the Homeric fire image in reference to writing, speaking of the “heat” of his own poetry (6) and of the press (31), and describing his own newspaper verse as “charactered in fire” (52). This characterization of the bard as inspired, like the warrior on the battlefield, by fire, is rem-iniscent of Ossian’s “Croma,” to which “The Song of the Five Bards,” Tennyson’s source for “The Old Chieftain” and “Oh! ye wild winds, that roar and rave,” is appended. In “Croma,” “Ten harps are strung; five bards advance, and sing, by turns, the praise of Ossian; they poured forth their burning souls” (189). Lightning, another traditional symbol for the transcendent wrath of battle, is associated with both words and war.The press can “blast a cause” (8), and it must keep above the “lower sphere

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of fulminating fools” (30). “Fulminate” comes from a Latin word meaning “to flash or strike with lightning.” The threat of invasion by Napoleon III is characterized as “Some vast Assyrian doom to burst upon our race” from the heavens (41–42). The speaker alludes to this threat again at the end of the poem: “I hear a thunder though the skies are fair” (88).The “storms” of line 74 represent a related Homeric image. In conjunction with the references to lightning and thunder, the description of the press as “one of the Great Powers on earth” (23) anticipates “The Coming of Arthur,” where during the battle of Mt. Badon “the Powers who walk the world/Made lightnings and great thunders over him” (106–107). The press is not just a Power but a “Great” Power. In line 6,Tennyson implies that his own newspaper verses are great. He implies as much again in lines 51–52, “We move so far from greatness, that I feel/Exception to be charactered in fire.” In the following line he idealizes “Godlike Greatness” (53). The poem’s high regard for greatness is consistent with the ancient heroic attitude. Aristotle’s discourse on the Great Man in the Ethics is an outgrowth of the earlier, Homeric ideal of aretê (see Kitto, The Greeks, 171ff.), which represented outstanding excellence or greatness. In line 84, the speaker calls for a specific kind of greatness: “O fools, we want a manlike God and Godlike men.” Edith Hamilton considers this ideal to be typically Greek and also Homeric. “[Homer] was quintessentially Greek,” she writes. “The stamp of the Greek genius is everywhere on his two epics…in the conviction that gods were like men and men able to be godlike” (The Greek Way 212). In stanza 6 Tennyson extols another heroic ideal, loyalty, a quality that was especially prized by the Anglo-Saxons in the comitatus relationship.The word “loyal” comes from the Latin “legalis,” and Tennyson’s lines signal the etymological connection: “Be loyal, if you wish for wholesome rule:/Our ancient boast is this— we reverence law” (33–34). The speaker claims that in spite of the British reverence for law, “wild Mahmoud’s s war-cry” (83) would be preferable to the “unheroic” (78) conditions of British society. In describing Mahmoud’s war cry as “wild,” Tennyson echoes the reference to England’s “wildest fights” (35) of the past. The adjective “wild” pertains to the heroic tradition of describing battles as manifestations of nature’s meteorological and animalistic fury. England’s mundane milieu is characterized as debased: “We drag so deep in our commercial mire” (50). The use of “deep” with reference to dragging through the mud lends a disparaging connotation to line 80, which sarcastically describes youthful philosophers as being “deep in natures plan.” As for the Church, its vessel may “sink” (74). It is the duty of men of letters to “raise the peo-ple” (5) from their “lower sphere” (30) up towards the heroic heights of the Parnassian mount.The poem concludes by likening the words of poet and press to a trumpet blast (“But shrill you, loud and long, the warning note” [89]) that should “make opinion warlike” (87).

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Tennyson’s passion for the poems of early 1852 is evident from the emotional intensity he demonstrated while composing them, and his high esteem for them even in retrospect is manifested by his comments in “Suggested by Reading an Article.” He submitted “Hands All Round!” and “The Third of February, 1852” to The Examiner under the name “Merlin”; “Taliessin” was his pseudonym when submitting “Suggested by Reading an Article.” As Edward FitzGerald explains, the pseudonyms were prompted not by any wish on Tennyson’s part to disown the poems, but by political necessity: “The Authorship was kept secret, because of the Poet being Laureate to the Queen, then being, and wishing to be, on good Terms with Napoleon” (qtd. in Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 2.473). Tennyson’s choice of “Merlin” and “Taliessin” as noms de guerre suggests that he felt these poems to be worthy of acquiring Arthurian connotations. In their exclusively inflammatory tenor, the pieces conflict with the emphasis in the Homeric tradition on the need for balance and control, but Tennyson obviously felt that his contemporary countrymen suffered from a lamentable lack of any of the wrathful emotion that calls for moderation.The British nonchalance in the face of the French threat was antithetical to the Greek tradition. In The Greek Experience, C.M.Bowra writes, “Just as the hero differs from the common run of men in the unusual degree of his dynamis, or innate power, so a city displays its vitality by exerting the same force over other cities” (34). In his attempts to sting and rouse his apathetic compatriots Tennyson recalls the youthful “iambics” (polemics) of Horace. In Ode 1.16, Horace writes, “Back in my tender youth / My heart endured its fevers also,/Rushing in fury to write iambics” (22–24).Tennyson’s belief in the power of language to regulate emotions and drives would find fuller expression in the Idylls of the King. With the “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” Tennyson’s more typically Homeric objective is not to instigate but to commemorate, and in this mode his manner is appropriately more subdued. “[Tennyson’s] sense of Wellington as a great refrainer,” observes Christopher Ricks, “asked a comparable reverent bridling of himself” (Tennyson 308). Like a pastoral elegy, the “Wellington Ode” begins with a mournful recognition of death (“The great World-victor’s victor will be seen no more” [42]) and moves towards the recognition of a form of immortality (“And Victor he must ever be” [258]). Interwoven with the poem’s transcendentalist conception of immortality is the heroic conception of deathless honor. Tennyson’s artistry in adumbrating this heroic conception contributes to the depth and the greatness of the piece. The greatness of the “Wellington Ode” has been questioned by many of its appraisers.Although Charles Tennyson calls it “perhaps [Tennyson’s] greatest poem,” he recounts that upon its publication it “completely missed fire with the critics. Hardly a voice was raised in its defence, and so eminent a writer as G.H.Lewes described it in The Leader as ‘an intrinsically poor performance…the primary conception as insignificant as the execution’” (Alfred Tennyson 272). “For the first

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time speaking publicly as poet laureate, [Tennyson] found his performance almost universally condemned by the critics,” relates Robert W.Hill, Jr. “Given the fact that the poem is one of the very few first-rate pieces of occasional verse in the language, he was understandably depressed” (200n., original emphasis).The modern response is generally condemnatory as well. Paull F.Baum, Jerome H.Buckley,W.David Shaw, Robert Bernard Martin, and Alastair W.Thomson all find the “Wellington Ode” insupportably flawed. Valerie Pitt is one of the few modern scholars who express unqualified admiration for the poem. For her, the “magnificent” Ode “displays not merely Tennyson’s sense of public order, but, like The Charge of the Light Brigade,’ his response to personal courage” (154–55). Robert Bernard Martin concedes, “In spite of its faults the poem is one of the most successful he ever wrote with the intention of speaking for a whole country, and it does achieve the difficult fusion of the personal and the heroic that makes one man the symbol of a realm” (369). Margery Stricker Durham has a high regard for the Ode, but she finds no heroic values in it. In “Tennyson’s Wellington Ode and the Cosmology of Love” she sees Wellington as a Christ figure and his funeral as a sacred ritual that unites the British people in love. Her reading, though it coincides with the poem’s Christian overtones, is inimical to the heroic literary tradition that also informs Tennyson’s eulogy of the deathless Duke. Tennyson approached his task of immortalizing the Duke with a special intensity, inspired by his sense of public duty and perhaps also by the similarities in character between Arthur Wellesley and Arthur Hallam. Cecil Y.Lang claims in “Tennyson’s Arthurian Psycho-drama” (5) that line 39 of the “Wellington Ode,” “Which stood four-square to all the winds that blew!” links Wellington with Arthur Hallam, by way of a cancelled section of In Memoriam (“Young is the grief I entertain,” in Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 3.596). Lang sees Arthur Hallam, Arthur Wellesley, and King Arthur as parts of a tripartite Arthur-hero figure in Tennyson’s work. Tennyson’s feelings for Arthur Hallam were, incidentally, perfectly consistent with the heroic tradition. “Because of this [heroic] outlook,” C.M.Bowra writes, “much of the sentiment which in most countries exists between men and women existed in Greece between men and men. The Greeks gave to friendship the attachment and the loyalty which elsewhere accompany the love of women” (The Greek Experience 27). A tendency to see something of Arthur Hallam in Arthur Wellesley may have motivated Tennyson’s penchant for polishing the original version of his tribute. As Lang notes, Tennyson worked on refining the Ode for twenty years (3). Tennyson consigns Wellington to the same transcendental realm he postulates for Arthur Hallam. The Duke’s “other nobler work to do/Than when he fought at Waterloo” (256–57), is obviously analogous to Hallam’s posthumous activity in In Memoriam: “A life that bears immortal fruit/In those great offices that suit/The fullgrown energies of heaven” (40. 18–20). The “Wellington Ode” ends where In Memoriam begins—with an invocation of Christ. The transcendentalist/Christian

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strain in the Ode is accompanied, however, by inklings of a metaphysic more appropriate to the military theme of the poem. References to the Duke’s battles are linked, through a series of common images, with references to his commemoration. This artistic strategy insinuates the idea that Wellington’s deeds and his eternal glory are one and the same. “Not once or twice in our fair island-story/The path of duty was the way to glory” (209–10).Wellington’s journey, like that of Tennyson’s Ulysses, is his destination.Arthur Wellesley represents the chivalric ideal of Tennyson’s Arthurian knights, who do their deeds for the deeds’ sake and not to be noised of (“Gareth and Lynette” 558, 811). Achilles observes this standard in seeking honor only “in Zeus’ ordinance” (Iliad 9.608). In Book 9 of the Aeneid, Aletes, speaking to Nisus and Euryalus, invokes the same concept: “Young men, what prize is possible for you, what can match worth with such a daring deed? Your first and fairest prize will come from gods and out of your own conduct…” (Mandelbaum 223)

The use of traditional battle imagery in depicting both Wellington’s deeds and their commemoration helps to convey the sense that the Duke’s own conduct is his first and fairest prize. The first section of the “Wellington Ode” introduces the “noise” of the nation’s mourning (4), which consists of “a peoples voice,” to which the speaker refers four times (142, 144, 146, 151) in nine lines, and martial music.The repeated reference to Wellington’s own voice (36, 176ff.) helps to connect his life with its commemoration by the people’s voice, but the description of the “voices,” the “deep voices,” of the cannons of battle (63– 69) makes a more important connection. “For many a time in many a clime/His captain’sear has heard them boom/Bellowing victory, bellowing doom” (64–66). War and remembrance become one when the cannons bellow the Duke’s honor: “And the volleying cannon thunder his loss” (62). The thundering of the cannons typifies the Homeric storm image (cf. the “tempests” that may “thunder” in lines 175–77). The music that commemorates the Duke is likewise connected with battle: “And let the mournful martial music blow” (17). Trumpeting sounds the Duke’s honor just as it once accompanied his honorable feats. Tennyson’s description of the war in Spain mentions the “blare of bugle” (115), and his recollection of the Battle of Waterloo culminates when “Last, the Prussian trumpet blew” (127). The “blowing” of trumpets links battle and commemorative music with the “blowing” of storms, a Homeric symbol found in lines 39 and 155.Tennyson gives the trumpet image added resonance in line 197, “And affluent Fortune emptied all her horn.” The people’s voice is blended with martial music in the singing of “the sorrowing anthem,” which is “rolled” (60). In death Wellington approaches Nelson “to the roll of muffled drums” (87), which presumably accompanied the Duke’s battles as

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well. The speaker mentions that the “roll of cannon” (116) was present on the battlefields of Spain.The rolling song, which elegizes the roll of Wellington’s cannon, is “ever-echoing” (79), just as the feet of the people will “Echo round his bones for evermore” (12).The voice and the drumming steps of the people will roll on forever, the “proof and echo of all human fame” (145), and in that rolling the “deep voices“of Wellington’s victories resound. In line 9,Tennyson calls the echoing sound of those the Duke fought for a “roar,” a word that relates to the thundering and bellowing of the cannon. The rolling of song, drums and cannon evokes, as we have seen in “Sir Galahad” and “The Tourney,” the rolling of the tides, another traditional symbol of battle power (this evocation is made explicit in line 251). The rolling echoes of Wellington’s glory are reflected in the many repetitions of the poem. The most reverberative line, “With honour, honour, honour, honour to him,” is itself reiterated (149, 230). W.David Shaw, Robert Bernard Martin, and Alastair W.Thomson all rebuke the Ode’s redundancies. Martin, for example, claims that “It is when he has to shift to more abstract matters that Tennyson comes unstuck, as in the celebration of Wellington’s place in history. Repetition is nearly always for him a sign of lack of certainty” (369). In fact it is easy enough to believe that Tennyson used reiteration in the “Wellington Ode,” as he did in “The Ballad of Oriana,” with a considered purpose. Tennyson’s poem forms part of the people’s voice, and with repetition he foreshadows the rolling echoes of that voice as it honors the Duke through the ages. The roar mentioned in line 9 emanates from the central London surroundings of the Duke’s final resting place in St. Paul’s Cathedral, an area Tennyson describes in the same line as “streaming.” “Streaming” forms part of the description of the people who will keep Wellington’s name alive, and it also anticipates the battle descriptions, where England is “pouring on her foes” (117). In this same vein, the Battle of Waterloo is “A day of onsets of despair!/Dashed on every rocky square/ Their surging charges foamed themselves away” (124–26). The aquatic imagery concludes with lines 251–52, “The tides of Music’s golden sea/Setting toward eternity…” The streaming of the people who honor the Duke, the pouring and surging tides of battle, and the rolling tides of musical tribute all recall the ancient association of surging water with the turmoil of battle, as in the Xanthos River episode of the Iliad. Another stormy element prevalent in the Iliad and the Aeneid is wind, which Tennyson, following the example of Homer and Virgil, uses here to represent the forces of war: “O fallen at length that tower of strength/Which stood four-square to all the winds that blew!” (38–39).Though the Duke’s tower has fallen, line 55 hints that he has not utterly perished. His hearse, which, significantly for the heroic aspect of the poem, is blazoned with Wellington’s deeds (56), is “towering” (55). Though the Duke “will be seen no more” (42), his deeds tower on. Just as the four-square Duke once “stood” (39) against the winds of war, now his great example will “stand”

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(220).The word “stand” is etymologically related to the word “state,” a connection that lends heroic implications to lines 274–75: “…we believe him/ Something far advanced in State.” The Duke’s new “State” is, in a sense, an extension of the “state” (200) his heroism served. As he once stood for the British “state” as an unflinching, towering presence on the battlefield, he stands in his new “State” as a towering example for future generations. The passage on the “Giant Ages” beginning at line 259, in spite of its redolence of the In Memoriam sections influenced by Charles Lyell, is amenable to a heroic construction.The speaker’s astronomical/metaphysical disquisition makes a suitable metaphor for the durability of Wellington’s honor.The invulnerability and significance of the human spirit in the face of destructive eons and myriad alien worlds is Wellington’s situation in macrocosm: For though the Giant Ages heave the hill And break the shore, and evermore Make and break, and work their will; Though world on world in myriad myriads roll Round us, each with different powers, And other forms of life than ours, What know we greater than the soul? On God and Godlike men we build our trust. (259–66)

Though time has leveled Wellington’s tower, his example still stands “Colossal” (221), a match for the “Giant” ages.The “myriad myriads” of worlds (262) echo the “myriads of Assaye” (99) that Wellington defeated.The myriad worlds “roll” (262), a function that connects them with the rolling cannon of Wellington’s victorious battles (116) and with the rolling drums that honor him as victor (87). Just as the “soul” (265) survives the “Giant Ages” (259) and stands significant amidst “world on world” (262), Wellington’s “Eternal honour” (150, 231) will survive “many and many an age” (226) and his example will be “seen of every land” (221). Christopher Ricks (The Poems of Tennyson 2.491) suggests a source for the “Giant Ages” passage in Wordsworth’s “To Enterprise” 114–16: “An Army now, and now a living hill,/That a brief while heaves with convulsive throes—/Then all is still.” Wordsworth’s own source, according to his 1822 note, was Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden 1.2.497–98: “Awhile the living hill/Heaved with convulsive throes, and all was still” (Wordsworth 703). Darwin’s lines describe the destruction of the army of Cambyses in a sandstorm, and line 113 of Wordsworth’s poem makes it clear that he had the same event in mind: “Or caught amid a whirl of desert sands….” Wordsworth’s and Darwin’s lines, as analogues and possible sources of Tennyson’s meditation on the “Giant Ages,” augment the military associations of the passage and thus enhance its relevance to the Duke of Wellington’s military career.

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Another possible Wordsworthian source for the “Wellington Ode” is line 182 of “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” Wordsworth’s resolute affirmation of “the primal sympathy/Which having been must ever be” (181–82) may have influenced Tennyson’s similarly resolute declaration, “And Victor he must ever be” (258), a line that relates to the Homeric conception of an “unperishing order of being” (Bowra, Homer 164). Christopher Ricks makes a misleading comment about this conception: What an honest poet cannot imagine, he had better not write of; his honesty will let him down. The same goes for everything that the “Ode” says about Wellington’s “eternal honour,” his “ever-echoing avenues” of fame. For Tennyson did not, as he perhaps once had, really believe in the eternity of such honour. Fame, he had come to realise, is lost and emptied in the great vistas of geological and astronomical time. (Tennyson 226)

Ricks’s remarks are misleading because they imply that Tennyson was oblivious to the heroic distinction between fame and honor. C.M.Bowra, discussing the heroic outlook in The Greek Experience, observes that “Fame is the reward of honour” (21). The ancient heroes and the bards who immortalized them knew that fame may indeed be “lost and emptied in the great vistas of geological and astronomical time,” but they also believed that true honor stood apart as something eternal and unchanging. Bowra explains the distinction: …a man who had done something really worth doing passes outside time into a timeless condition, in which his aretê is fixed and permanent….The man so remembered [in song] was the true man, the essential self, who by his exertions had found his full range and passed outside the changing pattern of his development into his ultimate reality. Celebration in visible memorials or in song gave an appropriate crown to a man’s career, but they were worth nothing if he had not won them by his deserts.What mattered was that he should fulfill his human aretê and attain his own kind of perfection in being truly himself. (The Greek Experience 200–201)

The commemoration of heroic deeds in song immortalized the deeds not necessarily because the song would last forever, but because the song crystallized the timeless aretê, or honorable excellence, of the hero. Heroic songs “recall a man as he was at his triumphant best and enshrine him…against the enmity of time” (Bowra, The Greek Experience 200). The speakers realization that “Victor he must ever be” (258) implies not only the deathlessness of Wellington’s soul, but also the fixed and permanent reality of his heroic actions. From a heroic perspective line 258 represents the fulfillment of what Cedric Whitman calls the heroic “intuition of a potential permanence, an absolute selfhood” (The Heroic Paradox 47), and as such it also epit-omizes the significance of the image

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pattern equating the remembrance of Wellington’s deeds with the deeds themselves. “What could more manifest [Wellington’s] intense enduring presence, even in death,” asks Christopher Ricks, “than the fact that we are unremittingly conscious of him even while never having to name him?” (Tennyson 317). In reading the “Wellington Ode,” we are aware of the Duke’s enduring presence not because Christ has received his soul, but because Wellington’s patriotic victories define his essential nature. As Cedric Whitman writes of Ajax, “Physis, essential nature, seeks a positive act in which to vindicate itself permanently and undeniably as being” (The Heroic Paradox 52). By affording a glimpse of what Whitman calls “the heroic vision of glory and permanent value” (Homer and the Heroic Tradition 238), Tennyson counterbalances the transcendentalism of the “Wellington Ode” and enhances the poem’s complexity. The resulting masterpiece well exemplifies the traditional reciprocity between warrior and bard. In epitomizing the timeless greatness of Wellington, Tennyson also epitomizes his own greatness as poet and preserves a broad approach of fame for his own ever-echoing song. By means of Tennyson’s most famous battle song, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” a terrible beauty was born from the massacre of a British cavalry unit in the Crimean War. Not only Tennyson’s poem itself but also its historical background suggests an analogy between the bard’s power of language and the warrior’s power. The “blunder” that resulted in the charge’s taking place and to which Tennyson refers in line 12 was a failure of language. During the Battle of Balaclava, Lord Lucan, because of his misinterpretation of written orders from Lord Raglan, had failed to follow up the advantage gained by the charge of the Heavy Brigade.When Lord Raglan dispatched Captain Louis Edward Nolan with a subsequent written order to Lord Lucan to prevent the Russians from capturing British guns on the Causeway Heights overlooking the “valley of Death,” Lord Lucan was once again unsure of the message’s import. The fiery Captain Nolan, who had been seething with impatience and resentment over Lucan’s restraint of the Light Brigade, responded to Lucan’s confusion by impetuously indicating the Russian cannons in the valley as the British objective (see the accounts in Selby, 145–62, WoodhamSmith, 222–49, and Adkin, 115–37).Tennyson’s own previous contempt for the restraint of Parliament and the press in face of the French threat, and his impetuous instigation of his countrymen, may have given him a sense of identity with Nolan, whom he mentions by name in the 1854 version of the poem. Although the written words of Lord Raglan contributed to the futile doom of the Light Brigade, the words of Tennyson’s poem help to define and immortalize the brigadiers’ defiant heroism. Many critics of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” have misread Tennyson’s poem as grievously as Lord Lucan and Captain Nolan misread Lord Raglan’s orders. Charles Tennyson recounts that even upon its publication the piece was in some quarters “violently criticized.” “Charles d’Eyncourt down at Bayons was particularly

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incensed with it. ‘Horrid rubbish’ he called it. ‘What an age this must appear,’ he reflected, ‘when such trash can be tolerated and not only tolerated but enthusiastically admired’” (Alfred Tennyson 283). Though Charles Tennyson d’Eyncourt was not an impartial or even a qualified critic, recent scholars have corroborated his assessment. In “Tennyson and the History of Criticism,” Jerome J.McGann discusses the modern status of the piece as follows: We survey the reception history of this poem to find that it has not merely fallen out of favor…but that it has come to seem mildly ludicrous, slightly contemptible….The only reader who has anything good to say about the poem is Christopher Ricks, and he confines his remarks to stylistic matters. Like everyone else, Ricks goes out of his way to avoid discussing the poem’s subject matter—both the historical events and their ideological significance. The Crimean War, the famous charge at Balaclava, and Tennyson’s own attitudes toward these matters are universally recognized by the critics, but only because they are universally regarded as embarrassments, both in themselves and to the poem. (239)

For McGann, the poem has value primarily, if not solely, as a guinea pig for his demonstration of the necessity of historical criticism. He describes his article about “The Charge” as a “historical reading,” but aside from his recognition of the double meaning of “Light,” he presents not a reading of the poem at all but merely an account of the historical background of its composition. Though McGann is for the most part correct in characterizing Ricks as unreceptive to the heroic ethos of “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Ricks is uniquely astute in his appreciation of Tennyson’s technical achievement in the piece. In an article written with Edgar F.Shannon (and reprinted as Appendix B in Ricks’s Tennyson), ‘“The Charge of the Light Brigade’: The Creation of a Poem,” he recounts the genesis of the poem and its development through its many versions, demonstrating in the process how “analysis of the surviving documents provides extensive testimony to [Tennyson’s] painstaking artistry” (Tennyson 362).Among Ricks’s more penetrating observations is his comment that “…‘half a league’ is more than a poetical (albeit accurate) way of saying ‘more than a mile,’ since it allows the poem to set before us from the very start the sense of ‘Half,’ just as the charge forward was only half the story” (Tennyson 346). Also noteworthy is Ricks’s analysis of the conclusion, which, he allows, conveys a sense of “exultation” (Tennyson 353): “The conclusiveness of the poem’s final stanza gains much of its force from every line’s being so strongly terminally punctuated, just as the courageous impetuosity of the engaged battle stanza (IV) is marked by the fact that six of its twelve lines do not have terminal punctuation” (Tennyson 357). Ricks’s greatest contribution towards the restoration of the poems reputation may lie in his rescu-ing the piece from the stigma of Tennyson’s own comment. Tennyson’s admission that “The Charge” was “not a poem on which I

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pique myself” has sometimes been cited as evidence against the excellence of the piece (see Buckley, 134, for an example). Even Ricks himself, in The Poems of Tennyson, cites the comment without explanation (2.511). In Tennyson, however, he points out that Tennyson’s remark occurred in a letter to Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, after Tuckerman had received a copy of the “spoiled” 1855 version of the poem, in which “not only was the final stanza rewritten, but the eight lines which included the repeated ‘Some one had blunder’d’ were gone’” (331). Ricks concedes that “The Charge of the Light Brigade” is “an undying utterance of the English tongue” (Tennyson 362), an appraisal that recognizes the popular acclaim the poem enjoyed for decades. Patrick Waddington discusses the work’s popular appeal: Tennyson’s “Charge”…became one of the most famous pieces in the English language and, as such, was incorporated in anthologies for general readers and for schools…. It was set to music numerous times right through into the 20th century, and most of the many pictorial representations of the charge were based upon it, rather than upon historical records. Elizabeth Southerdon Thompson (afterwards Lady Butler) used for the central figure of her painting Balaclava the survivor W.H.Pennington, who in his acting career recited “The Charge” in many theatres and on numerous occasions. (77)

“Tennyson wrote a poem,” observes Peter Levi, “that was stirring for a hundred years” (221).To George Orwell “The Charge” was “The most stirring battle poem in English” (qtd. in Waddington 1). The ability of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” to stir a popular audience may be attributed in large part to its dactylic meter, which perfectly reflects the rhythm of the galloping horses. Tennyson sacrificed historical accuracy on the altar of versification. His “Noble six hundred” were in reality some seven hundred men, but the report on the charge in The Times, upon which Tennyson based his account, mentioned only 607 (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 2.510). When Tennyson learned of the discrepancy, he wrote to John Forster, “Six is much better than seven hundred (as I think) metrically so keep it” (Lang 2.101). Hallam Tennyson cites as the origin of the poem’s meter the phrase “some one had blundered” in the account of the charge in The Times (Memoir 1.381).The actual words of The Times dispatch were, “The British soldier will do his duty, even to certain death, and is not paralyzed by feeling that he is the victim of some hideous blunder” (qtd. in Ricks, Tennyson 324). Christopher Ricks explains, “Those last three words moved Tennyson by their substance and their cadence to create the line which his son came to believe had actually figured in The Times” (Tennyson 324). Commenting on possible sources, Ricks notes that “Drayton’s Ballad of Agincourt was suggested at least as early as 1872; T. said it ‘was not in my mind; my poem is dactyllic.’ Chatterton’s Song to Ælla is similar

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in rhythm, form, and theme…T. may have remembered it unconsciously” (The Poems of Tennyson 2.511). Peter Levi also mentions Drayton (the charge of the Light Brigade took place on the same date, October 25, as the Battle of Agincourt) and Chatterton as possible influences, but his suggestion that “the dactyls may in this case derive from Virgil’s cavalry verses” (221) seems more valid in view of the classical influence on Tennyson’s battle poems. A Roman influence is also manifest in Tennyson’s numbering of the stanzas in Roman numerals (the six stanzas correspond to the six hundred brigadiers in the poem), a practice Christopher Ricks considers “appropriate because of their traditional (and military) dignity” (Tennyson 355). It may be that the emphatic and evocative meter of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” has made the poem vulnerable to parody and to disrepute as a serious work of art.The editors of the Norton Anthology of English Literature comment on the “simplicity” of the poem (Abrams 1055). Even Tennyson’s friend, Richard Monckton Milnes, called it “a real gallop in verse and only good as such” (qtd. in Ricks, Tennyson 355).Valerie Pitt, on the other hand, finds in the blatancy of Tennyson’s versification a reflection of the poem’s ideology: “The strength of movement in ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’…springs from [Tennyson’s] response to genuine courage” (205). Christopher Ricks’s comment on the poem’s final stanza is a perfect response to the accusation of “simplicity” brought by the Norton editors: “in its simplicity sublime” (Tennyson 352). An examination of the poem’s title is sufficient to demonstrate a level of artistic sophistication exceeding that of an ordinary “gallop in verse.” Tennyson’s intention in this work is to recount an act of transcendent courage and to call for the commemoration of that courage, a call that answers itself as the poem embodies the commemoration it enjoins. Both of the poem’s objectives are reflected in the multi-ple meanings of the words “Charge” and “Light” in the title. Besides its obvious meaning here, “charge” can mean “to impose a task or responsibility on.” The poem imposes a task or responsibility on the reader by its injunction to “Honour the charge they made!/Honour the Light Brigade” (53–54). “Charge” can also mean “to assume as a heraldic bearing,” or “to place a heraldic bearing on,” both of which definitions relate to the ideals of honor and remembrance.The word “Charge,” therefore, defines the two functions of the poem: in its most obvious sense it denotes the military attack the poem recounts, and it also relates to the commemoration of glory the poem imposes on its readers.The fact that one word can refer to both the attack and the remembrance of glory carries implications of the heroic ideal integral to the “Wellington Ode”: the ideal of deed and honor as one and the same. As for the word “Light,” its primary meaning here is “lightly armed or equipped,” but its alternate meaning of “brightness” fits with the image of the flashing sabers in the description of the attack and also with the literal meaning of “glory.” As does “Charge,” “Light” encompasses within one word

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connections to both the battle and its resultant honor. Jerome J.McGann also sees more than one connotation in “Light.” “Tennyson manages to suggest,” he writes, “that the name of the ‘Light Brigade’ carries a meaning which transcends its technical military significance. The pun on the word Light points to the quasireligious identity and mission of this small brigade of cavalry” (249). The “quasi-religious” import of “Light” derives from the ancient epics of men that strove with gods. The word “Light,” along with the word “Flashed” in lines 27–28 and the reference to “glory” in line 50, typifies Tennyson’s adoption of the Homeric fire/light symbol. As it sometimes does in Homer and Virgil, the fire/ light image contributes to a pattern of imagery likening the explosiveness of the battle to the force of a storm. The flashing of the sabers, occurring as it does while the cannons “thundered” and “stormed” (21, 22, 41, 42), evokes the flashing of lightning and thus a comparison between the fury of the charge and the wrath of nature. The speaker calls the charge “wild” (51). The actual charge was a rare example, temporarily at least, of battle wrath perfectly disciplined. Lord Cardigan, the leader of the attack, was “transported with fury,” but he “tightly restrained the pace of the Light Brigade: the line was to advance with parade-ground perfection” (Woodham-Smith 236, 237). Cecil Woodham-Smith describes the Light Brigade’s progress through the valley: Orderly, as if on the parade ground, the Light Brigade rode on, but its numbers grew every moment smaller and smaller as they moved down the valley. Those on the heights who could understand what that regular mechanical movement meant in terms of discipline and courage were intolerably moved, and one old soldier burst into tears. (238)

Once in range of the enemy, however, the Light Brigade demonstrated the truth of the lesson taught by Homer and Virgil. The cavalrymen’s battle wrath became impossible to control: “The men, no longer to be restrained, began to shoot forward in front of their officers, and Lord Cardigan was forced to increase his pace or be overwhelmed. The gallop became headlong, the troopers cheering and yelling; their blood was up, and they were on fire to get at the enemy” (Woodham-Smith 240). The rousing rhythm of the verses, the emphatic repetitions, and the use of exclamation points help to convey a sense of the men’s ecstatic fury, while a different kind of ecstasy is intimated by the poems Freudian overtones. The description of the charge is analogous to a sexual encounter: flashing their phallic sabers “bare” (27), the men penetrate a “valley” where most of them “die;” then they withdraw from the valley. The Light Brigade’s frenzied charge was so remarkable a departure from normal British military procedure that “[a]ll the world wondered” (31, 52) at it. In view of Cecil Woodham-Smith’s account of the intensely emotional reaction by the

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spectators on the Causeway Heights, Tennyson’s use of the word “wondered” is perhaps a bit restrained. Tennyson ascribes a wondering response not just to the British forces and their French allies on the heights, however, but to “[a]ll the world.” Lines 30–31, “Charging an army, while/All the world wondered,” indicate simultaneity between the Light Brigade’s heroics and the worlds wonder (Christopher Ricks notes “the superb breath-catching suspension of ‘while,’” which, he says, “makes one feel the world holding its breath in awe” [Tennyson 351, 357].). While the actual charge was underway, however, the world could not have known what was happening. Not in response to the actual charge, but to the written accounts of it, including Tennyson’s poetic rendering, did all the world wonder. Christopher Ricks’s comment on the phrase “[a]ll the world” suggests its relevance not just to Tennyson’s contemporaries but to ourselves as well. He speaks of “the feeling of indeflectible courage, of which we the onlookers (distant in place but not in spirit) can be proud but which is not ours” (Tennyson 344). Ricks’s admission goes far towards explaining the modern devaluation of the poem. Indeflectible courage was a British military ideal, and, immediately prior to the charge by the Light Brigade, the Heavy Brigade had demonstrated its courage by prevailing against superior numbers in hand-to-hand fighting. The Light Brigade demonstrated even greater courage in facing down a cannon bombardment, but it nevertheless failed disastrously.The ability of technological weaponry to negate such a splendid display of valor was undoubtedly a lamentable development to Tennyson, given his perception of a “malignant evil spirit” in the torpedo demonstration he witnessed later in the century (qtd. in Langand Shannon 3.418). His poem, one might say, is an attempt to negate the negation of that splendid valor. Tennyson’s eulogistic attitude towards the charge at Balaclava may indeed be embarrassing, as Jerome J.McGann claims above, to many modern critics who associate the futile sally with the wholesale, mechanical slaughters of feckless and helpless troops in the World Wars to come. Tennyson, however, innocently attempts to contextualize the charge within the tradition of heroic literature, where what matters is not technological force but “the heroic force, the assertive spirit which inspires a man to take prodigious risks and enables him to surmount them successfully or at least to fail with glorious distinction” (Bowra, Heroic Poetry 97).Tennyson’s injunction to the reader to recognize the glorious distinction of the Light Brigade represents to some extent a romantic protest against the scientific weapons of destruction that victimized the gallant cavalrymen.Tennyson’s description of the artillery entrenchments as “the mouth of hell” (25, 47) is in much the same vein as Don Quixote’s denunciation of “the dread fury of those devilish engines of artillery” (DQ 303). In a sense, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” elegizes not only the Brigadiers but also their chivalrous and athletic brand of warfare, which was already being superseded in Tennyson’s day. The victory of the cannons over the Light Brigade represents the supplantation of

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hand-to-hand battle-play by the technology of mass destruction, and it harbingers the advent of “total war.” Jerome J.McGann finds both heroic and tragic elements in Tennyson’s slaughterous subject, and he tentatively reaches towards a connection between them: “Some of Tennyson’s contemporaries, and a large part of Tennyson himself, saw the charge at Balaclava as a kind of heroic tragedy…. The Light Brigade achieved, in its famous assault, an immortality, a final spiritual triumph. In the event it suffered as well, in the words of The Times, a human ‘catastrophe,’ an ‘annihilation’” (250). J.William Hunt’s use of a classical example gives him greater assurance in aligning heroism with tragedy. “Turnus’ conduct,” Hunt writes, “demonstrates clearly that the heroic and the tragic are by their very nature interdependent—only in the special tragic conflict can the heroic choice prove itself, and only the rare capacity for heroic commitment makes tragedy possible” (59). “[I]t is time,” announces Walter Kaufmann, “that we noted the birth of tragedy from the spirit of Homer” (141, original emphasis).Tennyson’s reading of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” on the Edison cylinder recording emphasizes the tragic aspect of his own Homeric song.Tennyson recites most of the poem in a markedly plaintive tone. His reading of line 48, “All that was left of them,” is especially despairing; his mode of expression might well serve for a performance of Macduff’s despondent reaction to the murder of his family in Act IV of Macbeth. The poet reads even the final line, “Noble six hundred!” in a woeful manner. His emphasis on the word “Rode” in the final line of each of the first three stanzas has an ominous ring, as though the past tense reminds him that most of the cavalrymen would never ride again. One of the most interesting things about the reading on the Edison cylinder is Tennyson’s resounding emphasis on the word “knew” at line 11. “Tennyson’s voice swoops upon ‘knew,’” comments Christopher Ricks, “with an emphasis at once awed, exasperated, and half-incredulous at the immediately culpable folly of ‘some one’ (the effect in the recording is riveting)” (Tennyson 231).This emphasis highlights the hopelessness of the exploit by making it clear that the soldiers had no illusions about the possibility of success. They were positive that the charge was a blunder, and yet the knowledge did not dismay them, a fact that makes their actions all the more heroic.The Light Brigade’s willingness to “do and die” (“…we are ready to go again,” said one survivor immediately after the charge [Woodham-Smith 249]) partakes of the ancient Norse and Anglo-Saxon brand of heroism that inspires Edith Hamilton to comment, “heroism depends on lost causes” (Mythology 300). The ideology of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” harks back to the old Norse “faith in the value of doomed resistance,” and to the ancient, heroic literature in which “[t]he worth of defeated valour in this world is deeply felt” (Tolkien 27). The word “knew” finds no end rhyme in the poem, but it does rhyme with “do,” which appears in the middle of the fifteenth line.This rhyme helps to high-light the connection between knowledge and action, a connection Tennyson makes elsewhere,

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as when the hero of “Havelock” “Wrought with his hand and his head” (10), and when Ulysses makes his goal, which is “To follow knowledge like a sinking star,” equivalent to “Some work of noble note” (“Ulysses” 31, 52).The soldiers’ knowledge of the blunder makes their action all the more heroic, and their heroic action will result in knowledge: the charge will be known to others.The word “Noble” in the final line of the poem is very appropriate. It comes from the Latin nobilis, which means “knowable, well known.” “Noble” describes the heroic character of the six hundred and also suggests the honor and fame their character has won. In his essay, “The Case for Mortality,” Leon Kass discusses the necessity of mortality as a condition for nobility: To be mortal means that it is possible to give one’s life, not only in one moment, say, on the field of battle—though that excellence is nowadays improperly despised—but also in the many other ways in which we are able in action to rise above attachment to survival. Through moral courage, endurance, greatness of soul, generosity, devotion to justice—in acts great and small—we rise above our mere creatureliness for the sake of the noble and the good…. [Y]et for this nobility, vulnerability and mortality are the necessary conditions. The immortals cannot be noble. (184)

The knowledge of impending death incites the heroes of the Light Brigade to noble action, just as it does with Homer’s heroes. Richmond Lattimore translates the words of Sarpedon to Glaukos from Book 12 of the Iliad: Man, supposing you and I, escaping this battle, would be able to live on forever, ageless, immortal, so neither would I myself go on fighting in the foremost nor would I urge you into the fighting where men win glory. But now, seeing that the spirits of death stand close about us in their thousands, no man can turn aside nor escape them, let us go on and win glory for ourselves, or yield it to others. (322–28)

By trailing clouds of tragic glory in its daring charge, the Light Brigade fulfills the aspiration of Sarpedon, and also that of Hector, who wishes not to die “ingloriously,” but “in some action/memorable to men in days to come” (Iliad 22.305, Fitzgerald 525). While the charge of the Light Brigade was a disaster mitigated only by the defiant bravery of the brigadiers, the charge of the Heavy Brigade resulted in the successful routing of a superior Russian force.Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava” combines aspects of the “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade,” like “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” describes a single encounter during the Battle of Balaclava, and, like the “Wellington Ode,” it celebrates the

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achieve-ment of victory.With its epilogue, “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade” evokes the same heroic conception of substantive action that figures in the “Wellington Ode.” Though its reputation is obscured by that of “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade” is more artistically sophisticated, due in large part to its “frame.” The “Prologue to General Hamley” and the “Epilogue” contain echoes and parallels of each other and of the poem they surround. In all three parts of the work, patriotism and heroic deeds are threatened—in passages that feature similar vocabularies—with permanent disappearance.The prologue opens with a part of England (“Green Sussex”) “fading into blue/With one gray glimpse of sea” (7–8), while the general and the speaker are “gazing” at it and speaking of things “Most marvelous in the wars” (9, 11). In the poem, another colorful part of England, her “own good redcoats,” disappears in a “dark-gray sea” (42–43) of Russians, while the other brigadiers are “standing at gaze” and are “all in amaze” (37, 35). In the epilogue, the character of the poet at first fears that his own heroic work as an Englishman, his “song that nerves a nations heart” (79), will “vanish in the vast” (39); that the stars, which “amaze/Our brief humanities” (55–56), will outlast it. He laments that the “falling drop” will make even Homer’s fame as mortal as his own (57–60). However, the disappearance of patriotic heroism, whether caused by a “sea” or a“drop,” is only temporary. In each of the three parts of the work, a sort of resurrection occurs, and these “resurrection” scenarios are also described in mutually evocative ways. The speaker of the prologue expresses a wish to meet General Hamley again (21–22) and follows this with his assertion that Hamley’s “glory grew” (32) even though his deeds occurred in “the vanished year” (26). In the poem, the speaker’s group of soldiers fears that Scarlett’s brigade has vanished, “‘Lost one and all’” (46), but Scarlett’s men and their fellow brigadiers meet again in victory, resulting in “Glory to each and to all” (65).Though Scarlett’s brigade disappears “Like drops of blood in a dark-gray sea” (44), it reemerges and stands “like a rock” (56), and in the epilogue, the “stone” of Homer’s fame will not disappear under the “falling drop” (58–59) after all. The poet of the epilogue rallies and decides that the “vanished year” is really a “cycle year” in which the glory of great deeds has a permanent place. Man’s deeds will prevail even after “Earth passes, all is lost” (“Epilogue” 62), just as Scarlett’s brigade is “Lost one and all” (“The Charge” 46) in the battle, only to emerge alive and victorious. In lines 13ff., the prologue establishes an analogy between itself, as dedicated to General Hamley, and a picture of a warrior outside an inn, while the inn is analogous to the poem. The “cheer” mentioned in line 16 of the prologue is thus analogous to the “cheer” in line 61 of the poem, and to the cheering or nerving of a nation’s heart which Tennyson claims for his work in the conclusion to the epilogue (79). The prologue’s “True cheer with hon-est wine” can also be seen as prefiguring the intoxicating joy of battle experienced by the brigadiers.The poem refers to Scarlett’s brigade as “gallant” four times.The word “gallant” derives

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from the Old French galer, which, as we have seen in connection with “The Captain,” meant “to make merry” (OED 6.325).The speakers comparison of the poem to an “old-world” inn (“Prologue” 13) may owe something to the poem’s conformity to the traditions of “old-world” heroic literature. In keeping with those traditions, the poem symbolizes the Heavy Brigade’s ferocity by a combination of storm and fire/light imagery: the brigade “Burst like a thunderbolt,/Crashed like a hurricane” (27–28), and “Rode flashing blow upon blow” (32), whereupon the “Russian crowd/Folded its wings…/And rolled them around like a cloud” (38–40).After sinking into the “dark-gray sea” (43) of Russians, Scarlett’s brigade “Ranged like a storm or stood like a rock/In the wave of a stormy day” (56–57). In line 21 the speaker refers to the charge as “their fiery course.” The battle account also includes numerous images of circling: ‘“Left wheel into line’ and they wheeled and obeyed” (6); “And he turned half round” (8); “Whirling their sabres in circles of light” (34—a line that includes another instance of the fire /light symbol); “And rolled them around” (40); “and reeled/Up the hill” (62–63). The image appears in the epilogue in the reference to “all the peoples, great and small,/That wheel between the poles” (19–20). In addition, the word “Involving” in line 25 of the epilogue is etymologically related to “turning.” By associating the battle with the phenomenon of circling, Tennyson lays the groundwork for the conclusion to the epilogue, where the character of the poet asserts the invulnerability of brave deeds throughout the “cycle-year” of the cosmos: The man remains, and whatso’er He wrought of good or brave Will mould him through the cycle-year That dawns behind the grave. (73–76)

The Aeneid provides a precedent for Tennyson’s “cycle-year.” Aeneas’s father,Anchises, in his underworld lecture in the last part of Book 6, associates the fire image prevalent in the battle scenes of the epic with “time’s circle” and the “cycle of the ages” (Mandelbaum 156–57). As early as 1823 Tennyson concerned himself with the problem of impermanence in a universe of entropy. In the Memoir (1.23–25), Hallam Tennyson prints a fragment of a play, written by Tennyson at age fourteen, which includes the lines: I and my son’s sons and our offspring, all Shall perish, and their monuments, with forms Of the unfading marble carved upon them, Which speak of us to other centuries, Shall perish also…(21–25)

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Tennyson compiled one of his greatest works, In Memoriam, by offering all his hourly varied anodynes for the problem. In the epilogue to “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade” he once again takes up the issue, and in this case the resolution has heroic overtones appropriate to the poem’s military context.Tennyson’s poet acknowledges that even if Homer’s fame were to last as long as the earth itself, “Earth passes, all is lost… And deed and song alike are swept/Away…” (62, 65–66).All is in vain “except/ The man himself remain” (67–68), and the poet is not of those who cry that “man can have no after-morn” (71). Something of the mature Tennyson’s metaphysic is discernible in these lines, but the ostensible distinction between Tennyson and the poet (“Epilogue” 77–80), along with the connections between the heroic poem and its frame, would seem to justify a heroic reading of the passage. “The man remains” (73), in the sense that “a man who had done something really worth doing passes outside time into a timeless condition, in which his aretê is fixed and permanent” (Bowra, The Greek Experience 200). Whatever a man has “wrought of good or brave/Will mould him through the cycle-year/That dawns behind the grave” (74–76). In other words, a man’s honorable deeds will continue forever to determine his permanent, eternal reality, regardless of the death and destruction wrought by the processes of the cosmos. In lines 45–50 the epilogue discusses Horace’s claim in his first Ode that he will “strike…/The stars with head sublime” (46). Horace, in another of his Odes, epitomizes the ancient concept of substantive action that is discernible in the epilogue. As Edith Hamilton translates lines 45–49 of Ode 3.29, “Not Jove himself can blot out one single deed that lies behind, nor can he ever bring to naught or make undone what once the flying hour has borne away” (The Roman Way 114). Tennyson’s own voice concludes the epilogue: And here the Singer for his Art Not all in vain may plead “The song that nerves a nations heart, Is in itself a deed.” (77–80)

This claim is perfectly in keeping with the equal standing of hero and bard in the heroic view. If poetry is itself a deed, then the transcendent permanence the poet of the epilogue conceives for heroic acts appertains to poetry as well.Though the songs themselves may be swept away, nothing can blot out the great deed of having written them. In this sense, the glory of Horace’s greatness, along with Tennyson’s own, will not only strike the stars, it will outlast them; just as, in the “Prologue to General Hamley,” the “rampart-fire” in the glorious battle of Tel-el-Kabir makes the stars pale, “and the glory grew” (27ff.). In the epilogue, Tennyson, in the guise of the “POET,” confers eternal glory upon Homer and Horace and also basks in its undying rays himself. In doing so he

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provides yet another parallel with the poem proper, where, in its final two lines, one brigadier confers glory upon “all the Brigade” (66) and incidentally upon himself. The speaker of the poem, a member of one of four squadrons that followed up the attack of Scarlett’s “three hundred,” presumably belongs to the 4th Dragoon Guards. When “some of us…were held back a while from the fight” (35–36), the speaker says, “O mad for the charge and the battle were we” (41). According to Cecil Woodham-Smith, during Scarlett’s charge the 4th Dragoon Guards “had been held back almost dying of impatience” (223). In creating a first-person account of the fight,Tennyson perhaps assuaged the old uneasy feelings of inadequacy he felt when comparing his calling to the active, courageous life of the soldier. Tennyson’s reading on the Edison recording of “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade,” from its beginning through line 47, evinces a degree of empathy consistent with a first-person account.The “envious yearning” Ricks (Tennyson 231) perceives in Tennyson’s attitude towards the Crimean War is perceptible especially in his recitation of line 41, “O mad for the charge and the battle were we,” a line that conveys Tennyson’s own yearning for battle. His reading of the line is impassioned, expressive of the suppressed eagerness of the second wave of brigadiers, who by the time they attacked were “[w]ild with the rage of battle, yelling madly” (Woodham-Smith 222). Tennyson’s sensitivity to the emotions of the warriors is palpable also in line 45, where he subdues his voice in harmony with their dismayed whispering. At line 47 he lengthens out the word “dismay” in an appropriately distressed tone of voice. Throughout the surviving 47 lines on the recording, Tennyson’s reading is sufficiently dramatic to suggest his close involvement with the vicissitudes of the battle. His pause at the end of line 3 reflects the pause in the action. His rendition of the reiteration in line 11, “…up the hill, up the hill, up the hill,” is quick but restrained, and also monotonous, with an equal emphasis on the word “up” in each repetition. In The Charge, Mark Adkin describes the attack of the Heavy Brigade not as a rush forward but as a struggle uphill over ground full of holes and littered with tangled roots and briars (108–109).Tennyson’s reading of line 11 reflects the steady, laborious clambering of the brigade; his repeated emphasis on “up” signals the riders’ undaunted effort to surmount the hill. Tennyson’s rendition of line 12, “Followed the Heavy Brigade,” accentuates the stressed syllables in the two complete dactyls before ending with a final and culminating emphasis on the second syllable in “Brigade.” His intonation reflects the increased effort of horse and rider on the upper slopes of the hill and their climactic coup of attaining the top.The resounding weight with which Tennyson pronounces “Heavy Brigade” also reflects both the “heaviness” of the brigade itself and the permanent and fixed solidity of its glorious feat. In reciting line 16, he pronounces “who” with an ominous solemnity, sugges-tive of his appreciation of the danger faced by the brigade. In a similar manner he lends dramatic emphasis to the first half of line 23, “Fought for their lives….” He reads the first part

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of section 3 with a breathless rapidity that simulates the rapid action he describes and that also evinces his vicarious participation in it. The ability to empathize not just with compatriots but also with men of rival nations was required by the heroic ideal of chivalry, an ideal relevant to the character of the poet in the epilogue: Slav, Teuton, Kelt, I count them all My friends and brother souls, With all the peoples, great and small, That wheel between the poles. (“Epilogue” 17–20)

Though Tennyson’s artistic method was on occasion subtly “chivalrous” towards British enemies, as in the “Battle of Brunanburh” and “The Revenge,” his work was more often overtly and vehemently nationalistic, as with the 1852 newspaper poems. The gap between Tennyson and the speaker widens in lines 17–20, but it narrows when Tennyson uses his character of the poet to defend his own ardor for military heroics: And who loves War for War’s own sake Is fool, or crazed, or worse; But let the patriot-soldier take His meed of fame in verse; (“Epilogue” 29–32)

Here Tennyson argues that war is justifiable if it is fought for patriotic reasons— “though that realm were in the wrong/For which her warriors bleed” (33–34). Lines 33–34, Tennyson no doubt would have argued, were addressed to the Slav, Teuton, and Kelt and not to his own countrymen.Tennyson’s normally chauvinistic support of England, his England, was one more way he aligned his thinking with the heroic traditions of ancient Greece and Rome, where chivalry was circumscribed by strong national loyalty. C.M.Bowra comments on the ancient Greeks: This sense that a man owes a supreme sacrifice to his own people was deeply ingrained in the Greek character, and is a triumphant example of its adaptation of heroic ideals to a civic frame. Because he lives among other men and is bound by ties he cannot explain or assess, his first concern is their protection and their safety. (The Greek Experience 38)

Edith Hamilton observes of the ancient Romans, “High honor and love of country that made nothing of torture and death was what the Romans set first as the greatest thing of all” (The Roman Way 134). “The Defence of Lucknow” can be seen as constituting a “Defence” of British imperialism, but Valerie Pitt’s claim that in Tennyson’s battle poetry, “The Imperial Dream is, in a way, the outward symbol of courage against odds” (166), is a viable

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justification of Tennyson’s ostensible jingoism in the poem. “The Defence of Lucknow” is similar to “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade” in its first-person point of view, in the unwarranted dearth of critical attention it has received, and also in the method of its artistry. Tennyson weaves parallels between “The Defence of Lucknow” and its “Dedicatory Poem to the Princess Alice” as he does between the three parts of “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade.” Princess Alice’s selflessness and patriotism are made analogous to the heroism and glory of the British soldiers at Lucknow. Alice kissed her ill child (“the fatal kiss” [“Dedicatory Poem” 2]) and consequently died; the soldiers at Lucknow kiss the dead Henry Lawrence and consequently live more fully as inspired heroes. The symmetry between the scenarios—dying from kissing the living, and living more fully from kissing the dead—enhances the connection between Alice and the soldiers. The reaction to the end of the siege provides another link to Alice’s kiss: “women and children come out,/…/Kissing the war-hardened hand of the Highlander …” (100, 102). The “murmur of the people’s praise” in the “Dedicatory Poem” (7) anticipates the “jubilant shout” and the “conquering cheers” of the “sick from the hospital” and the Highlanders in victory (98–100). It is a tribute to Alice’s sickbed variation of heroism that hospital patients can “echo” (100) the shouting of warriors, which is a traditional indicator of the fiery joy of battle. The most important elements connecting Alice with the Battle of Lucknow are the flag on Alice’s coffin and the blowing banner in the refrain of the poem. The Union Jack is here a symbol of eternal glory, which ever hovers over heroic deeds, as in “The Passing of Arthur”: “…thy name and glory cling/To all high places like a golden cloud/For ever….” (53–55). Tennyson associates the banner with glory in line 3 of “The Defence”: “Never with mightier glory than when we had reared thee on high….” The flag, like the glory of heroes, cannot be kept down; it is invincible and invulnerable: “Shot through the staff or the halyard, but ever we raised thee anew,/And ever upon the topmost roof our banner of England blew” (5–6). In contrast to the underworld hell of the mines in sections 2 and 3, the banner blows forever in “heaven.” The dead Alice is literally covered with the glory of this same banner of England. Symbolically, she too has been “raised anew.” The murmur of the peoples praise “[a]scends” to her (“Dedicatory Poem” 10). Her own glory, like that of the heroes of Lucknow, is perennial. Her compatriots dress her coffin in the flag, just as “Love and Longing dress [her] deeds in light” (“Dedicatory Poem” 9). The flag, as a symbol of glory, is part of the “broken gleam from our poor earth” that “May touch thee” (18–19): the banner is literally touching her coffin. These parallels contribute to Tennyson’s strategy of heroizing the princess. Also towards this end he mentions the “Valour of delicate women who tended the hospital bed” in “The Defence of Lucknow” (87). “The Defence of Lucknow” can be seen as mingling its own poetic beams of glory with those of the flag:

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…where is he can swear But that some broken gleam from our poor earth May touch thee, while remembering thee, I lay At thy pale feet this ballad of the deeds Of England, and her banner in the East? (“Dedicatory Poem” 17–21)

As a commemoration of the light of noble deeds, Tennyson’s poetry is another part of the “broken gleam” that may “touch thee.” Tennyson’s “Dedicatory Poem” touches Alice in the sense that it speaks of her. The broken gleam may touch her “while” Tennyson, remembering her, lays his ballad at her feet.The use of the word “while” cements the link between the broken gleam and Tennyson’s poem. Tennyson’s artistry in “The Defence of Lucknow” involves yet again the use of imagery traditional to heroic literature. Storm imagery figures in the battle descriptions: “hailed” (13), “bullets would rain” (21), “that underground thunderclap” (32), “wild earthquake” (61), “deluge” (81), “Storm at the Water-gate! storm at the Bailey-Gate! storm, and it ran/Surging and swaying all round us, as ocean on every side/Plunges and heaves at a bank that is daily devoured by the tide” (37–39). The speaker calls his antagonists moles (26) and tigers (51), and he refers to the springing of mines as “Roar upon roar” (54).These symbols of battle power are counterpoised in the traditional manner by the speaker’s unflinching acknowledgment, particularly in stanza 6, of warfare’s hellish aspect. The hellishness is objectified by the mines, which also evoke the epic convention of the underworld voyage. Other strengths of the poem include the vigor of the long dactylic lines and the abundant alliteration. Tennyson’s shift from dactylic to iambic meter in the refrain corresponds to the dramatic shift of feeling expressed in those lines (6, 30, 45, 60, 72, 94, 106). In the middle of the sixth section, which describes the suffering of the besieged British,Tennyson adds connotations of springtime and renewal to the refrain with the line, “Thoughts of the breezes of May blowing over an English field” (83). In the second section, the word “death” occurs eleven times, one short of a full dozen, the standard number of completion in the great epics.Though the British at Lucknow are constantly threatened with imminent death, their heroism prevails. The perennial banner in the sky is a sign of their eternal glory, a warranty that for such heroes death will never complete its dominion. Northrop Frye’s commentary on Blake’s conception of “Being” is apropos of this heroic vision of the permanence of honorable deeds: “…events do not necessarily cease to exist when we have stopped experiencing them” (247). Blake anticipates Tennyson with his idea that “the destructive sword” is one of the “portions of eternity too great for the eye of man,” a Proverb of Hell (27) cognate with Tennyson’s traditional depictions of both the horror and the timeless sublimity of war. On the highest level of Tennyson’s art, war stands for what Nietzsche calls “[t]he pain implicit in the very structure of things…the antagonism in the heart of the world” (The Birth of Tragedy

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32). With his revelation of the glory implicit in the antagonism, Tennyson offers a vision conducive to the affirmation of life in this tough world. In Maud, the subject of the next chapter,Tennyson focuses on the struggle to respond with an Everlasting Yea to the battle of life. The reconciling vision his hero finally attains is consistent with the heroic tradition.

Chapter Five

Maud

I

N THE ILIAD, HOMER SINGS OF THE DEVASTATING WRATH OF ACHILLES; IN MAUD, Tennyson sings of the psychic devastation of his own wrathful hero. The title of Maud gives the first indication of the poems heroic aspects. The name “Maud,” as Linda K.Hughes notes, “is derived from the same source as Matilda, the Old German Mahthildis, a compound of mahti, meaning ‘might’ or ‘strength,’ and hildi, ‘battle’ or ‘strife’” (171–72). Chris R.Vanden Bossche also recognizes the heroic significance of the title character’s name. “Maud,” he writes, “is the diminutive of ‘Matilda,’ the name of several medieval queens, most notably Empress Matilda (1102–1167), also known as Maud; true to her name, which means ‘mighty battle-maid,’ she led an invasion of England” (79). Tennyson had a sister named Matilda, a situation conducive to an awareness on his part of the name’s etymology. The poems subtitle, “A Monodrama,” also relates to the heroic tradition.Tennyson called Maud a “monodrama” because, as he said, “The peculiarity of this poem is that different phases of passion in one person take the place of different characters” (Memoir 1.396).The passion of Tennyson’s speaker is comparable to the titanic intensity exhibited by the mythic heroes of yore. The different phases of his passion may be likened to the changing stances of Achilles towards the Trojan War, to the different forms of monomania exemplified by Dido and Turnus, and to the highly variable influence of Odin on the berserks. In Maud, Tennyson gives an ancient theme a romantic, psychological treatment. The main region of his song is not an external but an internal battlefield, where the hero’s great exploit is the recovery of his sanity. The poem was at first called Maud or the Madness (Memoir 1.402), but its “mad” hero is in the beginning not so much insane as incensed. Early in the poem we find him “raging” (1.53), an impotent expression of the fury from which his eventual

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derangement derives—and of which it to some degree consists. In her examination of insanity in Tennyson’s work, Ann C.Colley discusses passion as a precipitant of madness in such terms that the two conditions are almost indistinguishable (Tennyson and Madness 77–78). Although Tennyson referred to his hero as a“madman” who is “constitutionally diseased” (Lang and Shannon 2.137), his madman is not only first, but also foremost, a man with an “angry spirit” (1.487). The speaker suffers from the same epic vehemence characteristic of Achilles, Aeneas,Turnus, and Cuchullain. He suffers because the bursting ardor of his passionate soul unfits him for a mundane existence in a Mammonite society where “only the ledger lives” (1.35) and only the “underhand” (1.28) variety of aggression is encouraged. In this respect the narrator of Maud resembles the character of Willy in Tennyson’s “Rizpah.” Though he was scrupulously honorable,Willy “was always so wild,” that “he never could rest” (26–27). His mother proposes, in retrospect, a solution to Willy’s problems: “The King should have made him a soldier, he would have been one of his best” (28). In “The Sailor Boy,” Tennyson presents a hero with a similar nature, but one who finds his proper sphere of activity: “God help me! save I take my part Of danger on the roaring sea, A devil rises in my heart, Far worse than any death to me.” (21–24)

The speaker of Maud even more closely resembles the speaker of “Locksley Hall,” who says, “I myself must mix with action, lest I wither by despair./What is that which I should turn to, lighting upon days like these?/Every door is barred with gold, and opens but to golden keys” (98–100).The speaker of “Locksley Hall” seeks a setting where “the passions cramped no longer shall have scope and breathing space” (167). The terrific passion of Maud’s narrator is ruinous to him, not because he allows it to run rampant as Achilles and Turnus do, but because his combativeness is not allowed what Tennyson seems to consider its proper scope. The repressed hero’s fiery spirit flares once before Part III, in the disastrous confrontation with Maud’s brother, only to sink into utter stultification in the madhouse, where it consumes itself in idleness like the corroding brand of Tennyson’s “The Old Sword.” Several of the speaker’s references to “madness” and “passion” are evocative of the Homeric phenomenon of battle wrath. In line 37 of Part I, the hero empathizes with the violence-inducing “vitriol madness” of the ruffian in the filthy by-lane. Paul Turner finds a source for “vitriol madness” in Kingsley’s Alton Locke, “where gin is called ‘vitriol’” (142). From a Homeric perspective, the association of madness with alcohol calls to mind the intoxicating nature of battle fury. In response to the mes-sage of a pacifist preacher, the hero equates war with “the passions that make earth Hell!” (1.375).The narrator follows the heroic tradition in implicitly ascribing

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a version of his own internal combustion to poets, who have a “passionate heart” (1. 140). In his account of the angry confrontation preceding the duel with Maud’s brother, the hero refers to the brother as a “madman” (2.18) for striking him. The flaring of the hero’s fiery spirit in the duel results in “a passion so intense/One would think that it well/Might drown all life in the eye” (2.107), but instead his “sharper sense” (2.111) allows him to notice one of the dead brother’s many rings (2.116). In the Iliad (5.124ff.), the fury of Diomedes is likewise accompanied by clarity of perception. “Fury like your fathers/I’ve put into your heart,” says Athena, who has also, she tells Diomedes, “cleared away the mist that blurred your eyes/a moment ago, so you may see before you/clearly” (Fitzgerald 113). Helping to align the turmoil of Maud’s protagonist with the fury of epic heroes is the frequent occurrence of the words “madness” and “passion” in conjunction with Homeric indicators of battle wrath such as shouting. The vitriol madness of the ruffian results in the “yell” of the trampled wife (1.38).The hero’s mother responds to her husband’s suicide with a “passionate shriek” (1.57); prior to which, the hero’s father would “rave” (1.60). Maud’s battle song is a “passionate ballad” (1.165), which is “like a trumpets call” (1.166). She sings it in a “wild voice pealing up to the sunny sky” (1.174).The “passionate shriek” of the hero’s mother in Part I is echoed by the “passionate cry” (2.5, 33) of Maud in response to the duel. In Part III, immediately after exhorting his own “passionate heart” (3.30, 32), the speaker joins in the shouting of a battle cry (3.35). In contrast to these instances of passionate shouting, the hero in the beginning damps his fires, seeking a “passionless peace” (1.151) in woodland ways that are, appropriately, “quiet” (1.150). In the beginning the hero recalls how his father before him had “muttered and maddened” (1.10) before turning his fury violently upon himself, an occasion Tennyson associates with the storm imagery common to the ancient epics: “out he walked when the wind like a broken worldling wailed” (1.11). In two instances madness and passion are related to both shouting and storms. While the speaker is tormented by his initial attraction to Maud, he walks out, “Listening now to the tide in its broad-flung shipwrecking roar,/Now to the scream of a maddened beach dragged down by the wave,/…in a wintry wind” (1.98–100). In section IV of Part II (“O that ‘twere possible”), the speaker is haunted by a recurrence of the “passionate cry” (2.187), whereupon “a sullen thunder is rolled” (2.189). In addition, storm imagery appears in the account of the duel (“And thundered up into Heaven the Christless code” [2.26]) and in connection with the Crimean War (“Let if flame or fade, and the war roll down like a wind” [3.54]). The ancient symbol of the lion, which in Maud is also connected with passion, helps to ascribe warlike savagery to the narrator. On Maud’s garden gate, “A lion ramps at the top,/He is clasped by a passion-flower” (1.495–96). Earlier in the poem the protagonist refers to himself as a lion (“To have her lion roll in a silken net /And fawn at a victor’s feet” [217–18]), and in Part III Virgil’s symbol of Furor indi-cates

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Britain’s involvement in the Crimean War: “…and pointed to Mars/As he glowed like a ruddy shield on the Lion’s breast” (3.13–14). John Killham notices the abundance of animal imagery in the poem: “The English are represented in terms of a rat, a ‘little breed,’ ‘long-necked geese,’ and serpents. It is easy to see many other examples. The bull, the fly, the lean and hungry wolf, the raven, the drone, the venomous worm, the bird of prey, the titmouse, all represent various men. The speaker sees himself as ‘a wounded thing with a rancourous cry’” (229). In a description of the dinosaurs, the speaker uses Homeric imagery: “A monstrous eft was of old the Lord and Master of Earth,/For him did his high sun flame, and his river billowing ran,/ And he felt himself in his force to be Natures crowning race” (132–34). Another quality of the protagonist that links him with warriors of the heroic age is pride. He reveals himself to be inordinately proud by his paranoid ascription of pride to others. In Part I, 114ff., the hero first demonstrates his own pride, then projects the same trait onto Maud: When have I bowed to her father, the wrinkled head of the race? I met her today with her brother, but not to her brother I bowed: I bowed to his lady-sister as she rode by on the moor; But the fire of a foolish pride flashed over her beautiful face. O child, you wrong your beauty, believe it, in being so proud; Your father has wealth well-gotten, and I am nameless and poor.

(The narrator’s reference to himself as “poor” leagues him with the army: “Last week came one to the county town,/To preach our poor little army down” [1.366– 67].) The speaker reveals the prominence of pride in his makeup by his characterization of mankind: “We are puppets, Man in his pride” (1.126). He fears becoming the tool of Maud’s family because “often a man’s own angry pride/Is cap and bells for a fool” (1.250–51). His infatuation with Maud temporarily supersedes his preoccupation with pride: “‘No surely, now it cannot be pride’” (1.313). “I to cry out on pride/who have won her favour!” (1.428–29). Her brother, however, pricks his pride so deeply that blood eventually flows.The speaker’s exclamation about the brother is self-revealing: “Fool that I am to be vext with his pride!” (1.448). Even in the madhouse the hero denounces Maud’s father for his being “so full of pride,/ He linkt a dead man there to a spectral bride” (2.316–17). The narrators desire for “a calm” (1.77), for a “passionless peace” (1.151), is reminiscent of the ancient Greek desideratum, the “Golden Mean.” “The attention which the Greeks paid to the Mean,” writes C.M.Bowra, “suggests not so much that they observed it as that, in the fullness of their blood, they felt that they needed some curb for their more violent ambitions and more reckless undertakings” (The Greek Experience 34). The protagonist’s wish to “keep a temperate brain” (1.141) follows the same ancient line of thinking, and his subsequent observation is also traceable to

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Greco-Roman ideology: “For not to desire or admire, if a man could learn it, were more/Than to walk all day like the sultan of old in a garden of spice” (1.142–43). In connection with this passage Christopher Ricks (The Poems of Tennyson 2.531) cites Horace’s “Nil admirari” from Epistles 1.6.1, and Aristotle’s description of the Great Man in the Ethics is also pertinent. As H.D.F.Kitto translates, the great man “will not be given to admiration, as there is nothing that strikes him as great” (The Greeks 246). The speaker expresses another Horatian idea twice in section XI of Part I: “Then let come what come may,/What matter if I go mad, /I shall have had my day”; “Then let come what come may/To a life that has been so sad,/I shall have had my day” (1.401–403; 1.409–411). Christopher Ricks compares the phrasing of these passages to Macbeth and King Lear (The Poems of Tennyson 2.544), but the sentiment recalls Horace’s Ode 3.29.As Edith Hamilton translates, “He is master of himself and happy who as the day ends can say, I have lived—tomorrow come cloud come sunshine” (The Roman Way 114). The hero hates the “Civil war” of peacetime because it is hypocritical, “not openly bearing the sword” (1.28). He detests this form of dissimulation because, like Achilles, he detests lying. The heroic contempt for lying as a cowardly and ignoble practice (“concealment is a sign of fear,” writes H.D.F.Kitto of the ancient Greeks [244]) is one of the protagonist’s most salient characteristics. In the beginning he naively admires his fathers “honest fame” (1.18) and wonders who would have faith in a tradesman’s word (1.26). He lives in a time “when only not all men lie” (1.35). In line 56 of Part I, the horror of his fathers death is matched by the horror of “a wretched swindler’s lie” (1.56). Prior to his suicide, the hero’s father would “rave at the lie and the liar” (1.60). Christopher Ricks cites a cancelled passage immediately following line 60, which contains the lines, “But over and over again these words flasht into my head:/The work of the lie—the work of the lie—the work of the lie” (The Poems of Tennyson 2.524). In the village below the hero’s home, “Jack on his alehouse bench has as many lies as a Czar” (1.110).The speaker longs to remove himself “Far-off from the clamour of liars belied in the hubbub of lies” (1.151). Maud’s brother, the speaker believes, campaigns for office on a platform of “brazen lies” (1.244), while the speaker desires “one/Who can rule and dare not lie” (1.395).The speakers hatred of the lie is implicated in the brothers provocation of him: “He fiercely gave me the lie” (2.16). Maud, after singing her battle song, comes to represent the antithesis of the lie. The speaker finds that “Maud is as true as Maud is sweet” (1.475), and he trusts that she cannot “break her word” (1.565). Her martial music inspires him to asso-ciate truth with fighting: “Not die; but live a life of truest breath,/And teach true life to fight with mortal wrongs” (1.651–52). Maud is truth itself; in walking with her he walks “awake with Truth” (687). Though Maud’s brother is “the heir of the liar” (1.761), Maud is “tender and true” (1.768), and the hero is her “true lover” (1.831– 32). Finally, in Part III, the hero acts on the truth of Maud’s trumpet call, by openly

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bearing the sword against the Russian Czar. Because Nicholas I is “a giant liar” (3.45), the war against him gives the protagonist a heroic outlet for his heroic hatred of the lie. The similarities between the narrator of Maud and Achilles extend beyond the narrators aversion to falsehood. The speakers wrath, as it rages out of control in the confrontation with Maud’s brother, is Achillean. In Book 9 of the Iliad,Achilles vows not to join the fighting until it reaches the Greek ships. In Part III of Maud, the protagonist emerges from his isolation, like Achilles emerging from his tent, to join in the war effort, a scene that takes place on the deck of a ship: “And I stood on a giant deck and mixed my breath/With a loyal people shouting a battle cry” (3. 34– 35). Paul Turner recognizes the narrator’s likeness to Achilles: When the speaker says of Maud’s brother, “This lump of earth has left his estate The lighter by the loss of his weight” (1.537–38),Tennyson is adapting a Homeric phrase, “a useless weight on the earth,” applied to himself by Achilles, in remorse at having kept out of the fighting, and so failed to protect his friend Patroclus. The brother, constantly denigrated by the speaker, turns out at the end to be the more magnanimous…, and the Homeric allusion already hints at this truth. It is the speaker himself who is the “useless weight,” the caricature of Achilles, raging about a private grievance in his tent, and letting other people do the fighting. The recurrent weight image is used to mark his gradual movement from the negative to the positive aspect of Achilles. (138)

Turner compares the hero’s development to that of Hamlet as well: “…the hero of Maud begins like Hamlet the ineffectual recluse, and ends like Hamlet the potential Fortinbras” (139). Turner’s evocation of the melancholy Dane is prompted by Tennyson’s reference to Maud as “a little Hamlet” (Memoir 1.396).As Hamlets perception of the time as out of joint turns the earth into a sterile promontory for him, the hero of Maud allows his detestation of “Timour-Mammon” to taint his entire world. His reaction against the ignoble and cowardly “spirit of murder” (1.40) in commercial enterprise generates an aversion to the redness of tooth and claw in the natural world, which he describes as “one with rapine” (1.123). He finds himself in “a world of plunder and prey” (1.125), where he is a potential quarry: “No, there is fatter game on the moor; she will let me alone” (1.74). It is in the context of the speaker’s alienation from the violence of life that his love for Maud is given its fullest meaning. Maud’s martial song is an overture to the narrator from life itself, with all its antagonism and pain. In singing of men in battle array that march to the death, Maud brings her own beauty and innocence into conjunction with the murderous aspect of life. For the speaker she represents a coniunctio oppositorum uniting rose and lily, blood and purity. In Jungian terms, she becomes the hero’s anima, “who draws him into life …and not only into life’s reasonable and useful aspects, but into its frightful para-doxes and ambivalences where good and evil, success and ruin, hope and despair, counterbalance one another”

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(Jung 13). Maud’s battle song temporarily inoculates the speaker against the psychic ravages of social Darwinism and its natural paradigm. By extending his hero’s rejection of the underhand war of commerce to a temporary rejection of the terms of life itself, Tennyson enhances the universal relevance of Maud.The poem is comparable in its philosophical expansiveness to the Iliad, where Homer ascribes the atrocities of war to the purpose of God and the doom assigned. Explicating the fifth line of the Iliad, which he translates, “the plan of Zeus was fulfilled,” H.D.F.Kitto writes: And what does this mean? That all this was specially designed by Zeus for inscrutable reasons of his own? Rather the opposite, that it is part of a universal Plan: not an isolated event—something which, as it happened, so fell out on this occasion—but something that came from the very nature of things: not a particular, but a universal. (47)

The very nature of things in Homer, according to G.E.Dimock, Jr., is epitomized in the name of Odysseus, which Dimock translates as “trouble” (411).The universe of the Odyssey, Dimock writes, “is full of hostility, it includes Poseidon, but it is not ultimately hostile. Zeus has been showing Odysseus not anger, but a terrible fondness” (424).Walter Kaufmann, in his comment on Iliad 7.54ff., recognizes the life-affirming quality of Homer: In large parts of the Western World today one sees no vultures; and death, disease, and old age are concealed. In Calcutta, vultures still sit in trees in the city, waiting for death in the streets; and sickness, suffering, and the disintegration of age assault the senses everywhere. But it is only in Homer that, while death is ever present to consciousness, the vultures in the tree are experienced as Athene and Apollo, delighting in the beautiful sight of a sea of shields, helmets, and spears. In this vision death has not lost its sting; neither has life lost its beauty. The very vultures are no reproach to the world. (145)

After observing the horrific nature of the “brute facts” the Iliad describes, Gilbert Murray marvels that “the poet makes of it a tale of chivalry and splendour!” He remarks that “the contrast provided by the Heroic Ages with their miseries and their exhilaration as against our own times, with their comparative comfort and depression of spirits, becomes almost startling” (202). Like Maud, Homer sings of death, but he also, like Maud, sings a chivalrous battle song, of honor that cannot die.The effect of Maud’s martial song culminates in Part III, where the narrator rejects what he calls his “morbid hate and horror…/Of a world in which I have hardly mixt” (1.264–65) in favor of the affirmative worldview that Kitto, Dimock, Jr., Kaufmann, and Murray ascribe to Homer. James R.Kincaid,Valerie Pitt, and John Killham all see Maud’s martial song as a call to life, and war as representing life’s essential conflict.To Kincaid, Maud’s chivalrous

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battle song is “really a song that is within [the hero], arising from the deep and unconscious sense that only in full acceptance of all life can he live” (120). “Having rejected the true, fallen nature of the world and its union of opposites,” Kincaid writes,“[the hero] must reenter that world through its most elemental and extreme coalition. He must accept the existence of honor in murder, life in death, purity in hideous slaughter” (132). Pitt observes that the hero “falls in love, and love restores relationship, puts a value not only on the thing beloved but on the whole world” (179). Killham sees as fundamental to Maud the notion that “violence and death have to be faced as part of [man’s] lot on earth” (224). In the beginning the protagonist is “cowed by life,” because “life involves an unremitting resort to either violence or cunning, the struggle inevitably culminating in death” (221). Killham assesses the speakers final position: “Accepting his weakness, but trusting his strength, he is finally able to enter a world where violence, rapine and greed exist naturally in the hearts of men and nations…” (235). The validity of the hero’s final position is the most controversial issue raised by the critics of Maud. Many of the poem’s detractors belie their pacifistic stance by their zeal in taking up arms against the likes of Killham. Some scholars, including Stopford A.Brook,A.Dwight Culler, and James Norman O’Neill, find the conclusion of Maud unacceptable because of the devastation incurred by the Crimean War. Culler writes: If [Tennyson] had set his poem in the Middle Ages and had his hero go off on the Crusades, no one would have objected, for it has always been considered legitimate for a hero to solve his personal problems by giving himself to some larger cause. But Nolan’s blunder at Balaklava, the state of the hospitals at Scutari, plus modern pacifism have effectively ruined Tennyson’s symbol, and it is idle to say that anyone can now read the final scene of Maud and like it. (205)

Other critics, such as Ward Hellstrom and James R.Kincaid, find the historical aspect of the war irrelevant to its symbolic import. “What the hero does,” Hellstrom believes, “is enroll himself on the side of the warrior saints, who war in this life for the good” (84). Another group, which includes Ann C.Colley, James R.Bennett, and Linda K.Hughes, explains the bellicosity of the ending by ascertaining that the speaker has emerged from the madhouse still insane. According to Colley, the denouement is “illusory, still ‘mad,’ and despairing” (85). Chris R.Vanden Bossche recognizes the standard alternatives available to the defenders of Part III: “Most critics have apparently felt that they have only two choices when confronted with Part III: either they must concede that the narrator is still mad at the end of the narrative, or they must regard the war in purely symbolic terms, disregarding historical reference in favor of the imaginative construct in the ical approach, one that endorses the hero’s belief in the Crimean War as preferable

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poem” (73).Vanden Bossche then considers the historical support for another critto a Mammonite peace. “The narrator’s criticisms of society,” he writes, “may be regarded as symptoms of his misanthropic rage, but they are, nonetheless, consistent with the depictions of a society at war with itself to be found in the writings of the prophets and social critics—Carlyle, Ruskin, Kingsley, Maurice, Gaskell, Dickens that he echoes” (76).Vanden Bossche claims that the narrator’s desire for a declared war represents a position that was popular in Tennyson’s day: The belief was widespread that fighting a just war would not only bring about the liberation of the enslaved peoples of Europe but would also improve the social situation of England. Fighting for others, it was argued, would rid the nation of the selfishness of laissez-faire individualism and turn to “higher aims /…a land that has lost for a little her lust of gold” (3.38–39). (75)

Michael C.C.Adams reviews at some length the historical background of the speaker’s climactic stance, using a cross-cultural approach “to show that Tennyson was talking about real war, that he was sincere and was not simply throwing sops to the masses” (406). Adams’s comparison of Tennyson’s war poetry of the 1850’s with American writings in the period from 1830 to 1865 supports his claim that “the idea of war as a rejuvenating force for prosperous commercial-industrial nations was widely held among introspective men…. [J]udged by the highest intellectual standards of his own day, the poet’s views were quite legitimate” (406–407).Adams quotes numerous pacifistic critics who “all refuse to believe that Tennyson sincerely could have regarded the Crimean War as a rejuvenating force” (406), but in fact, Adams asserts, “Tennyson’s sentiments about the Light Brigade suggest that at the time he wrote Maud he was optimistic about war’s curative powers” (418).The testimony of Garnet Wolseley, whom Adams calls “Britain’s leading soldier in the later Victorian period” (417), provides Adams with convincing evidence of the realism and legitimacy of Part III. Wolseley says: I thought then, and I think still, that [the desire for combat] was a manly, elevating aspiration, for surely war with all its horrors exercises a healthy influence on all classes of society.There is an epoch in the history of nations when man becomes so absorbed in the pursuit of wealth and the enjoyment of ease, that the drastic medicine of war alone can revive its former manliness and restore the virility that has made its sons renowned. (417)

Winston Collins decides that “even though Tennyson attempted to dissociate himself from his speaker, I think that there is little doubt that on the question of peace and war they speak as one” (127). Robert James Mann, Henry Van Dyke, Alan Sinfeld, Valerie Pitt, and Christopher Ricks agree with Collins, and they all defend Tennyson’s position based on the following premise, as set forth by Pitt: “Tennyson is not glorifying war quâ war, but war as a remedy for what he thought a worse disease” (180). The

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disease is, in Mann’s words, “the debased condition of simulated peace, where murder and rapine lurk in disguise” (qtd. in Jump 211). Though Tennyson, and other writers of the time as well, may have believed that the evils of commerce could temporarily be superseded by the “drastic medicine of war,” it is not mandatory to condemn or to defend the conclusion of Maud on that basis. In Maud the Crimean War represents not necessarily a cure for the covert operations of capitalism. The war signifies, as James R.Kincaid puts it, the “most elemental and extreme coalition” (132) of a violent world. Unlike the “Civil war” (1. 27) of Part I or the “lawless war” (2.332) of Part II, the “blood-red blossom of war” (3.53) in Part III is neither duplicitous nor illicit. The narrator sees the war as an acceptable outlet for his heroic drive, which, because it is no longer repressed, no longer magnifies his hatred of the simulated peace into a distaste for life itself.Tennyson glorifies neither war quâ war, nor war as a remedy for the debased condition of simulated peace—he glorifies, if anything, his speakers final, heroic affirmation that “It is better to fight for the good than to rail at the ill” (3.57).The war does not cure society, which has lost its lust of gold only “for a little” (3.39), but it does bring the narrator back to life, back from the madhouse.The hero “finally finds solace,” writes Robert Pattison, “not in the pastoral, but in the heroic” (131). The war revives the narrator’s sense of reconciliation with the violent aspect of life, restoring to him the affirmative outlook Maud had inspired: “I embrace the purpose of God and the doom assigned” (3.59). Throughout the poem the imagery helps to equate the hero’s love of Maud with the affirmation of life. The imagery typically develops through three phases, which correspond to the hero’s different “phases of passion”: the poem begins with the speaker’s lurid visions of an oppressively hostile environment; the malignancy of these images is then softened and beautified by Maud; finally, the renovated imagery is associated with warfare in Part III. John Killham outlines this process with regard to the imagery of redness and flowers: [T]he colour red, powerfully and violently associated with violent death and blood, is discharged of its baleful associations by being assimilated to the image of the rose, first mentioned contemptuously in a context (I. iii. x) of poison flowers (source of the cruel madness of love), but progressively developed until at the end of Part I it represents sexual passion. Finally, as an indication of his being cured, the colour reverts to a reference to violence, but with the flower-image now serving along with it: “The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire.” The painful associations of redness revealed at the beginning of the poem [quotes first four lines] have been neutralized. (230–31)

The world itself has painful associations for the hero. In the very first lines the speaker associates a natural setting with blood and death. The “dreadful hollow” where his father killed himself has “lips” that are “dabbled with blood-red heath,/The red-ribbed

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ledges drip with a silent horror of blood” (1.1–3). (The sexual suggestiveness of the passage anticipates the connection between Maud and the natural world.) The speaker rails against nature as “a world of plunder and prey” (1.125), and then voices his skepticism regarding God’s plan. “Do we move ourselves,” he asks, “or are moved by an unseen hand at a game/That pushes us off from the board, and others ever succeed?” (1.127–28). “For the drift of the Maker is dark,” he says, “an Isis hid by the veil./Who knows the ways of the world, how God will bring them about?” (1.144–45). He washes his hands of such a world: “Shall I weep if a Poland fall? shall I shriek if a Hungary fail?/Or an infant civilisation be ruled with rod or with knout?/have not made the world, and He that made it will guide” (1. 147–49). He wonders at his finding “the world so bitter/When I am but twenty-five” (1.221–22), and acknowledges his “morbid hate and horros…/Of a world in which I have hardly mixt” (1.264–65). The speaker describes himself as being “At war with myself and a wretched race,/Sick, sick to the heart of life, am I” (1. 364–65). The hero’s love of Maud catalyzes his acceptance of life by transmuting his distorted perception of the world. After his encounter with Maud, he refers not to the bloody hollow but to a landscape that reflects his blossoming love: “The silent sapphirespangled marriage ring of the land” (1.107). Maud sweetens his soured view of life: “Then the world were not so bitter/But a smile could make it sweet” (1. 226–27, 283–84). Her ability to affect the narrator’s perception of his environment is exemplified by lines 434–35 in Part I, “For her feet have touched the meadows / And left the daisies rosy.” The personified natural world is no longer threatening or macabre, but sympathetic to his new mode of passion: The red rose cries, “She is near, she is near;” And the white rose weeps, “She is late;” The larkspur listens, “I hear, I hear;” And the lily whispers, “I wait.” (1.912–15)

With his passion redirected into a socially acceptable channel, the hero is able to accept his madness. He immediately strikes a knightly if overly dramatic stance, declaring that he “would die/To save from some slight shame one simple girl” (1. 642–43). This declaration prompts a justification of death consonant with heroic ideology: “Would die; for sullen-seeming Death may give/More life to Love than is or ever was/In our low world, where yet “tis sweet to live” (1.644–46).The idea that death makes life more dear is integral to Homer, according to Walter Kaufmann: “In the Iliad the brevity of life is no objection to the world but an incentive to relish its pleasures, to live with zest, and to die gloriously. The shadow death casts does not stain the earth with a slanderous gloom; it is an invitation to joy and nobility” (160). “Beauty has danger and death as its neighbor,” H.D.F.Kitto observes of the Iliad (62). For Harold Bloom, the “heroic ethic” involves the notion that

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“the natural is beautiful and apocalyptic precisely because it is physical and ephemeral” (Visionary Company 415). Because the speaker’s love for Maud changes his feeling about life, he tends to associate her with life itself. She sings her battle song “in the morning of life” (1. 167). He calls her “Life of my life” (1.657), and “my life, my fate” (1.911). In the aftermath of the duel, the speaker comments, “And there rises ever a passionate cry /From underneath in the darkening land” (2.5–6). The “passionate cry” of Maud, her “cry for a brothers blood” (2.33–34), has been assimilated by the landscape. After the hero manifests his passionate nature as deadly anger against Maud’s brother, he becomes even more conflicted.The duel magnifies his feelings of alienation from a society that places hypocritical strictures on violence. The speaker’s guilty feelings are intensified by the fact that his victim was the brother of his beloved, and by the magnanimity the dying brother demonstrated. As a result the speaker rejects life again, expressing a longing “to creep/Into some still cavern deep” (2.235–36) where he can weep his soul out to Maud.The protagonist’s desired cavern of solitude and solace recalls the cave of Calypso in the fifth book of the Odyssey. G.E.Dimock, Jr. comments on the Calypso episode: Though she offered immortality, not death—an immortality of security and satisfaction in a charming cave—it is still an immortality of oblivion, of no kleos [“recognition”], of nonentity. Leaving Kalypso is very like leaving the perfect security and satisfaction of the womb; but, as the Cyclops reminds us, the womb is after all a deadly place. In the womb one has no identity, no existence worthy of a name. (412–13) The speaker of Maud does, in effect, creep into a cavern deep—the madhouse—and it is indeed a deadly place: “For I thought the dead had peace, but it is not so;/To have no peace in the grave, is that not sad?” (2.253–54). His fellow inmates in the asylum are there because, like the protagonist, they cannot come to terms with life. Each tries to “wheedle a world that loves him not” (2.277). Eventually, the hero, like Odysseus, leaves the oblivion of his “cave” and ships off to win identity: “And many a darkness into the light shall leap,/And shine in the sudden making of splendid names” (3.46– 47).The hero’s resurrection from the madhouse is heralded by a vision of Maud, who “seemed to divide in a dream from a band of the blest,/And spoke of a hope for the world in the coming wars” (3.10–11). Christopher Ricks notes that several cancelled drafts of the last stanza “show T. attempting to relate the war to the love for Maud” (The Poems of Tennyson 2.584). As the martial song of Maud remedied the narrator’s anger and cynicism, Maud’s announcement of a real war, of a national military cause, counteracts his more serious madness and life-denial.

The effect of Maud on the hero is comparable to the influence of Athena on the Greeks in the Iliad. Robert Fitzgerald translates Iliad 2.450ff.:

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So down the ranks that dazzling goddess went to stir the attack, and each man in his heart grew strong to fight and never quit the mêlée, for at her passage war itself became lovelier than return, lovelier than sailing in the decked ships to their own native land. (50)

Walter Kaufmann sees Athena as the prototype of the ethos formulated by Pericles: “We prefer to meet danger with a light heart….They are surely to be esteemed the bravest spirits who, having the clearest sense both of the pains and pleasures of life, do not on that account shrink from danger” (143). Maud’s martial song, if the narrator’s description of it is any indication, voices a similar ethos.The mean-spirited strife of Mammonite society, on the other hand, is evocative of the god of war himself, Ares, whom Athena viciously reviles twice (Iliad 5.825ff., 21.391ff.) as a “thing of fury, evil wrought” (Lattimore 150), and to whom even his father, Zeus, says, “To me you are most hateful of all the gods who hold Olympos./Forever quarrelling is dear to your heart, wars and battles” (5.890–91, Lattimore 152). Kaufmann sees these passages as expressing the notion that “A life centered in quarreling and fighting is felt to be odious, though a brave man, when a fight is thrust upon him, will acquit himself nobly” (143). Both Athena and Zeus call Ares a “doublefaced liar” (Iliad 5.831, 889), an epithet that heightens his relevance to the lying world of covertly violent commerce the speaker of Maud despises. In delineating the hero’s progress from his first expression (1.1) of Ares-like rancor, “I hate” (Erida, the goddess of hate in the Iliad, is the sister and companion of Ares), to his last verbal phrase, “I embrace” (3.59), the most prominent of Homeric images, fire and light, are instrumental. These ancient symbols of battle inspiration are the axis from which a cluster of images radiates. Appropriately, the image of fire is prominent in the scenes pertaining to violence.The speaker says that when he killed Maud’s brother, “The fires of Hell brake out of [the] rising sun,/The fires of Hell and of Hate” (2.9–10). In his account of the preparation for war in Part III, the speaker notes that “now…/…flames/The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire” (3.51–53). “Let it flame or fade” (3.54), he exclaims. Maud, as the hero’s Athena-like source of strength and courage, is herself evocative of brightness and burning. Her residence “glimmers” (1.111), and from outside the Hall the hero sees her “pass like a light” (1.112). The speaker describes one of his first encounters with Maud: “But the fire of a foolish pride flashed over her beautiful face” (1.116). When Maud sings her martial song, her voice rises “up to the sunny sky” (1.174), and the hero admires “the light of her youth” (1.176). Maud’s room, the narrator supposes, is a place she “Lights with herself” (1.500). He admires “the grace that, bright and light as the crest/Of a peacock, sits on her shin-ing head” (1.552–53). Her beauty is the “one bright thing” that may save him (1. 556). He imagines the “glory” and the “splendour” of Maud at the political dinner (1.823,

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836). In the section that begins “Come into the garden, Maud,” the speaker mentions the “glimmer” of Maud’s pearls, and he exhorts Maud: “Shine out, little head, sunning over with curls,/To the flowers, and be their sun” (1.904, 906–907). In the seminal lyric, “O that ‘twere possible,” he speaks of her “shining head” (2.185), recalls the time she “Came glimmering through the laurels” (2.217), and imagines her spirit as dwelling in the “realms of light and song” (2.222). In Part III, he says that Maud’s eyes had been his “one thing bright” (17). The imagery of fire and light complements the characterization of Maud as both delightful and disturbing. When the narrator first encounters Maud after having heard her battle song, “the sunset burned/On the blossomed gable ends” (1. 197– 98).The conjunction of fire and blossom in these lines anticipates one of the poem’s most striking emblems of the dual aspect of violence, the “blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire” in Part III (53). The protagonists emotional encounter with Maud (the morning following this meeting is appropriately “stormy” [1.190]) has an incandescent effect on him: And thus a delicate spark Of glowing and growing light Through the livelong hours of the dark Kept itself warm in the heart of my dreams, Ready to burst in a coloured flame;…(1.204–208)

The spark Maud ignites in the narrator eventually becomes “a spark of will/Not to be trampled out” (2.104–105), while the “coloured flame” again anticipates the fiery blossom of war. Maud, as befits her capacity to unite the contraries of life for the narrator, has a smile that is “sunny” but also “cold” (1.213). Her hand is a “treasured splendour,” but it also comes “sliding” out of her glove, like a gleaming dagger (1.273–74). When the narrator sees Maud riding with her brother and her suitor, who is both a military captain and a captain of industry, “Something flashed in the sun…Like a sudden spark” (1.323, 326), an incident that foreshadows the flaring of hostilities between the narrator and the brother. Maud is frequently compared to things that reflect light, one of which is the moon. She is “the moon-faced darling of all” (1.72). Her hand is “as white/As ocean-foam in the moon” (1.505–506).The speaker compares her to “a beam of the seventh Heaven” (1.509).Twice in the lyric, “Come into the garden, Maud,” the narrator refers to “the setting moon” (1.867, 872). Before the hero comes under Maud’s influence, he rails against the crimes that occur, appropriately, on “moonless nights” (1.42). Another reflector of light to which Maud is compared is a jewel. Maud is “luminous, gemlike” (1.95). Her feet are “like sunny gems” (1.175).The hero calls her “my jewel” (352), and compares her to a “precious stone” (1.498). At the political dinner “Maud will wear her jewels” (1.813). Her feet leave a “jewel-print” (1.890) in the

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meadow. The first occurrences of the “jewel” motif evoke the disturbing aspect of Maud.The speaker refers twice to Maud’s “cold and clear-cut face” (1.79, 88), which he finds to be “Faultily faultless, icily regular” (1.82). The hard brilliance of jewels makes them also an appropriate correlative for Maud’s brother, who is alternately cold and fiery.The speaker calls him “That jewelled mass of millinery” (1. 231), and he notes the “barbarous opulence jewel-thick” that “Sunned itself on his breast and his hands” (1.455–56). The brother has a “glassy smile” (1.238). Immediately after the duel, the narrator “noticed one of his many rings” (2.116). The “jewel” image figures in the connection between Maud and the natural world.The speaker’s love for Maud induces him to see his “jewel” in the landscape: “A million emeralds break from the ruby-budded lime/In the little grove where I sit… The silent sapphire-spangled marriage ring of the land” (1.102–103, 107). Because in Maud the narrator has “found a pearl” (1.640), he also finds that “A livelier emerald twinkles in the grass,/A purer sapphire melts into the sea” (1.649–50). After the duel the speaker focuses on “a lovely shell,/Small and pure as a pearl” (2. 49–50), which has a “diamond door” (2.64). Complementing the imagery of precious stones are repeated references to stones in general, and to the dust that results when stones are crushed. Early in Part I, the narrator establishes both the stoniness of Mammonite society and the connection between dust and death. The failure of his father’s business interests occasions a suicidal plunge in which the father is accompanied by a falling rock (1.8).The hero says that he may eventually conform to his environment—“May make my heart as a millstone, set my face as a flint,/Cheat and be cheated and die: who knows? we are ashes and dust” (1.31–32).The speaker sees Maud’s brother as a representative of the stony world of commerce: “But then what a flint is he!” (1.740). He says that on one occasion the brother “Gorgonised me from head to foot/With a stony British stare” (1.464–65).The narrator marks the process of his own petrifaction, first by referring to his “heart half-turned to stone” (1.267), and then by asking, “O heart of stone, are you flesh…?” (1.268). Finally, he twice exhorts his “heart of stone” (2.132, 136). His utter spiritual death is accompanied by the implied crushing of his stony heart into dust. As his father before him had been “crushed” (1.7) in his suicide, the narrator’s heart becomes “a handful of dust” (2.241). Prior to this, he enhances the deathly connotation of dust by referring to the “dust of death” (1. 654) and by calling on God to “Strike dead the whole weak race of venomous worms,/That sting each other here in the dust;/We are not worthy to live” (2. 46–48). In Part I, while he maintains his relationship with Maud, he says: My dust would hear her and beat, Had I lain for a century dead; Would start and tremble under her feet, And blossom in purple and red. (1.920–23)

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This passage, from the last stanza (XI) of “Come into the garden, Maud,” anticipates the madhouse scene in Part II (section V), where the narrators mental and spiritual “death” is indicated by his hearts becoming a handful of dust (2.241) and by the repeated, infernal beating of the horses’ hoofs (2.246ff.). The speaker’s prophecy in 1.920ff. is in a sense fulfilled when his dead and dusty heart responds to the vision of Maud which heralds “The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire” (3.53). Tennyson’s reading of the last stanza from “Come into the garden, Maud” on the Edison recording demonstrates the connection between the speaker’s love for Maud and his violent temperament. Tennyson recites the first four lines (1.916–19) breathlessly, without hesitation or pause, thus indicating the barely controlled passion that the speaker directs towards Maud. Tennyson pauses markedly after line 916, as though his protagonist were attempting to rein in his charging emotions. In line 922, he speaks the words “start and tremble” portentously and, one might say, menacingly, suggesting the close relationship between love and violence in the narrator’s mind.Tennyson’s voice trails off at the conclusion of the recitation, so that the words “purple and red” in line 923 are barely discernible. By reading the line this way, Tennyson may have attempted to suggest his speaker’s tendency to reject the gory aspect of life, a tendency that the dual nature of Maud helps him to overcome. Tennyson’s rhythmic, heavily accentuated style of recitation is especially appropriate with respect to this stanza, given its repeated reference to “beating” (1.918, 920). In the madhouse scene the speaker uses the word “beat” four times in three lines (2.246–48). “Beating” forms part of a chain of motifs that includes repeated references to hearts and pulses, to blood and blood-red flowers, and to the redness of the sunset and of the rose-like Maud. One of the most unlikely and yet one of the most significant images associated with beating is that of starlight. The “star” motif contributes to the fire/light imagery and helps to delineate the hero’s conversion from cynicism and madness to the acceptance of life. The narrator at first sees the stars as representing the cold indifference of the universe. The insignificance of earthly life amidst the host of stars contributes to his nihilism: “Our planet is one, the suns are many, the world is wide” (1.146). He addresses the stars as “Cold fires, yet with power to burn and brand/His nothingness into man” (1.637–38), and acknowledges to them that he has been “brought to understand/A sad astrology, the bound-less plan/That makes you tyrants in your iron skies” (1.633–35).The speaker also, however, associates Maud with the stars, beginning with his expression of contempt for her “Passionless, pale, cold face, star-sweet on a gloom profound” (1.91).After comparing Maud’s movement to that of a light, he exclaims, “But sorrow seize me if ever that light be my leading star!” (1.113). His eventual love for Maud’s “starry head” (1.620) changes his sad astrology to glad: “And you fair stars that crown a happy day/Go in and out as if at merry play” (1.628–29). He exhorts the stars to “Beat to the noiseless music of the night!” (1.675). “Beat, happy stars,…” he says, “Beat with my heart more blest than heart can tell” (1.679–80). The narrators

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“sad astrology” regains the ascendancy after the duel, as indicated by the anguish he feels when “the broad light glares and beats” (2.229), and by the torturous “beating” of the horses’ feet (which he perceives as being above him, like the stars). In the end he perceives the war as an opportunity to fight against his former nihilism.The “iron tyranny” that “now should bend or cease” (3.20) is an extension of the “tyrants” in the “iron skies” (1.635) that ruled his despairing view of life. The speaker’s decision to take up arms is heralded by appropriate astronomical signs. His mental state changes when “the Charioteer/And starry Gemini hang like glorious crowns/Over Orion’s grave low down in the west” (3.6–8). The mention of Orion, the great hunter, implies a reversal of the speaker’s prior anguish over the natural worlds being “a world of plunder and prey” (1.125). James R.Bennett comments on the reference to Gemini: “Gemini,…at least in the Greco-Roman tradition, is identified with a central legend, that of the twins Castor and Pollux, great, courageous warriors…. Castor was killed in a quarrel and Pollux begged to be reunited with him, perhaps as the narrator yearns to be with Maud, the ‘nothingness’ of modern astronomy transformed by the grace of Maud” (“Maud, Part III: Maud’s Battle-Song” 41). As Maud had once revived the speaker with her martial song, in Part III the speaker is reinvigorated by his vision of Maud pointing to Mars, “As he glowed like a ruddy shield on the Lion’s breast” (3.14). Tennyson’s use of Mars is quite fitting here.As Edith Hamilton observes, “The Romans liked Mars better than the Greeks liked Ares. He never was to them the mean whining deity of the Iliad, but magnificent in shining armor, redoubtable, invincible” (Mythology 34). Hamilton’s description of the warriors in the Aeneid is applicable to the speaker in Part III of Maud: “far from rejoicing to escape from [Mars], [they] rejoice when they see that they are to fall ‘on Mars’ field of renown.’ They ‘rush on glorious death’ and find it ‘sweet to die in battle’” (Mythology 34). Though the Romans were passionate about the prospect of glorious death, they were also one of the earliest exponents of strict military discipline. Georges Dumézil, in Horace et les Curiaces (23), describes the Romans’ efforts to curb and regiment the kind of bellicose enthusiasm that the speaker of Maud demonstrates in Part III. Whereas Roman soldiers, like those of more modern times, were expected to subordinate their individual motivations to the exigencies of the national interest, the ancient Greeks, the Anglo-Saxons, the Celts, and the Vikings all emphasized the glories of individual honor. James R.Bennett sees the narrator as conforming to the traditional heroic emphasis on personal glory: “For the narrator is not averse to shining in glory like Ulysses in Tennyson’s poem by that title; indeed, it is one of his basic needs to achieve glorious heroism, just as it was to triumph over Maud’s insolent brother and wealthy suitor” (“Maud, Part III: Maud’s Battle-Song” 47).The speakers reference to “the Charioteer” (3.6) hints at the possible disaster his anachronistic attitude may cause. It is easy to imagine the fervid speaker roiling the disciplined ranks of the British army as destructively as Phaëthon drives his father’s car.Though

he feels himself, in his zeal for the British cause, to be one with his kind, the unbridled frenzy of the speaker may actually render him as ill-suited for “loud war by land and sea” (1.47) as he was for the “Civil war” (1.27) of domestic life. “The narrator, in becoming a warrior,” writes Roger S.Platizky, “does seem to have certain needs gratified that were not fulfilled in his being either a son or a lover…. But Tennyson leaves the reader to question whether the protagonist of Maud will ever be able to escape his inherited destiny” (65). Another element of Part III that leads us to wonder about the ultimate “doom” (3.59) of the protagonist is his twofold and equivocal vision of Maud. The “ghastly Wraith” (2.32) that torments the narrator after the duel becomes in Part III, for the first and only time, a blessed dream as she points to Mars, the war god of the disciplined, patriotic Romans (3.10–13), and speaks of “a hope for the world in the coming wars” (3.11). In Part III Maud’s ghastly aspect is represented by the “dreary phantom” that arises and flies “Far into the North, and battle, and seas of death” (3.36–37). As the “passionate cry” of Maud had been assimilated by the landscape in 2.33–34, here her disturbing, violent associations blend with the war itself. In the end the narrator’s tendency to mingle the erotic with the martial is realized in action through his passionate espousal of the war effort. Tennyson leaves it to his readers to decide if this volatile mixture results finally in tragedy or in triumph. In the subject of the next chapter, the Idylls of the King, the mingling of erotic and mar-tial passion results unequivocally in tragedy, as Arthur’s attempt to harness the ardor of aggressive men ultimately fails.

Chapter Six

Idylls of the King

R

OBERT PATTISON, IN DISCUSSING THE TRADITIONAL ASPECT OF THE Idylls of the King, observes that the Idylls “have continuity with the rest of Tennyson’s work: he drew on the tradition of his own poetry for the Idylls as freely as he drew upon the classics” (136). In the Idylls of the King the classical themes of Tennyson’s battle poems attain their culmination in a work of epic scope and greatness. Fundamental to the Idylls is the primary theme of the ancient epics: the difficulty of controlling heroic passion. “The King is the complete man,” Tennyson commented to William Allingham, “the Knights are the passions” (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 3.259). As Achilles, Odysseus, and Aeneas all fail in the end to restrain the vehemence of their explosive tempers,Tennyson’s Arthur fails in the concluding books of the Idylls to control the volatile passions of his Knights. Hallam Tennyson writes that “if Epic unity is looked for in the Idylls, we find it not in the wrath of an Achilles, nor in the wanderings of an Ulysses, but in the unending war of humanity in all ages,—the world-wide war of Sense and Soul…” (Memoir 2:130).The theme of “Sense at war with Soul” (“To the Queen” 37) is closer to “the wrath of an Achilles” than Hallam Tennyson’s comment would seem to indicate. Achilles’s wrath, both his wrath at Agamemnon that causes him to misuse his power by abstaining from battle, and his wrath at Hector that rages in uncontrolled violence, results from the inability of his soul, or reason, to regulate his passion. Arthur, as the “complete man,” is able, by virtue of his strength of soul, to harness his passions so that they benefit the kingdom. His subjects, so long as they are indeed subject to his ideal and example, are able to channel their fervor into chivalrous pursuits, but in the end their sensual fires run riot and destroy Arthur’s realm. Tennyson’s preference for referring to the books of his Arthurian epic as “idylls,” a term often associated with Theocritus, fails to mitigate the thoroughly heroic

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quality of the poem. Tennyson’s piecemeal process of composition precluded the narrative unity of an Iliad or an Aeneid, but the Idylls of the King attains the epic status of an “Arthuriad” in most every other respect, and the title of the poem helps to suggest its conformity to the epic tradition. Tennyson intended the second “l” in “Idylls” to distinguish his heroic Arthurian material from his own Theocritan, pastoral “English Idyls.” Paul Turner sees Theocritus as an inspiration for the Idylls of the King by virtue of the ancient pastoral poet’s epic aspirations: “Of his four works in this mini-epic genre (Idylls xiii, xxii, xxiv, xxv) three relate to Heracles, and as Andrew Lang observed (1880), ‘it is not impossible that Theocritus wrote, or contemplated writing, a Heraclean epic, in a series of idyls.’ This was Tennyson’s final model” (164– 65). Robert Pattison discusses the idylls of the Hellenistic writers as attempts to reproduce the virtues of Homer while avoiding futile efforts to equal his handling of the epic form. “From the epic, then,” Pattison writes, “the idyll borrowed the fundamentals of its mythology, the epic meter, and epic claim to universality” (23– 24).This practice “indicated that the idyll, while it would be different from the epic, would at least be epic in intent” (22). J.M.Gray finds a connection with the heroic epic tradition even in the sequence of Tennyson’s composition process: “There is some evidence to show that the twelve books of Virgil’s masterpiece, the Aeneid, were composed in a similar order” (Thro’ the Vision of the Night 4). Robert Pattison discusses Tennyson’s “great pains to bring the total number of books up to the traditional epic number of twelve” (140). “Tennyson produced in the Idylls of the King a legitimate epic,” Pattison declares. “That he intended to produce a poem in the epic tradition, and that his contemporaries so perceived the Idylls, is clear from Gladstone’s and Mallock’s comments and from Tennyson’s composition of the poem” (140). Paul Turner, with great assurance, also categorizes the Idylls as an epic: “Tennyson, of course, wished to write a classical…epic. The Idylls were to resemble the Iliad in relating the fall of a great city and civilization, the Aeneid in presenting a hero with a divine, historic mission threatened by the woman that he loves (Dido, Guinevere), and Paradise Lost in explaining the loss of ideal happiness through sin and disobedience” (163). When Tennyson, through the character of the poet Everard Hall in “The Epic,” deprecates “‘His epic, his King Arthur’” (28) as ‘“faint Homeric echoes, nothingworth’” (39), his false modesty is obvious.Tennyson borrowed the phrase “nothingworth” from his disingenuous epigraph, taken from Martial, to Poems by Two Brothers: “We know these efforts of ours are nothing worth” (see Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 1. xxiv). The Homeric echoes of the Idylls of the King are not so faint that they have eluded the ears of Tennyson’s critics, several of whom have recognized the Homeric background of the Arthurian epic.The Idylls are “the omega to Homer’s s alpha” (302), comments William E.Buckler. “[T]he most imaginative turning that Tennyson gave his central literary inheritance,” he continues,”…is the return

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at the very deepest level of this post-Theocritan, post-Virgilian literary development to primary coherence with Homer” (312). “Arthur and Ulysses,” Buckler observes, “share the ‘Ten thousand perils’ that brought them ‘to the West,’ and Arthur along with Ulysses—that is, conscientious man in all ages—is being reinvested with a portion of that Homericism of which Virgil, Dante, and the Middle Ages had divested him” (316). William R.Brashear comments, “Arthur’s dream-kingdom can be compared to the Apollonian illusion that Nietzsche sees as triumphant in the heroic ideals of Homer” (48–49). “The Idylls were composed under the shadow of Homer,” writes Richard Jenkyns. “Like Virgil, [Tennyson] leaves the reader to pick up the Homeric parallels for himself” (211). The reader can consult Wilfred P.Mustard, in “Tennyson and Homer,” and J.M.Gray, in his copious notes to the Penguin Classics edition of the Idylls of the King, on Tennyson’s myriad borrowings from Homer. The Idylls of the King echoes Homer and other ancient bards in its conformity to many of the conventions of epic poetry. Examples of epic conventions in the Idylls include the numerous extended formal speeches by the main characters, with set lines often introducing and closing speeches, the words of one speaker being quoted by another, the repetition of words and lines, the cataloguing of warriors and armies (see “The Coming of Arthur” 110ff.), the use of set epithets, the use of flashback narrative technique (“Gareth and Lynette,” as James R.Kincaid remarks [166], is the only idyll with a strictly chronological structure), and the frequent employment of the epic simile (“Certainly Tennyson makes a liberal use of the Homeric simile,” writes W.P.Ker [26]). Several commentators have recognized that the Idylls of the King is informed not only by the Greek heroic tradition, but also by the Roman, the Germanic, and the Celtic. F.E.L.Priestley sees the Idylls as reflecting the heroic side of Virgil: “Against the Lucretian spirit Tennyson upholds the Vergilian. The two have been well characterized by the late Professor C.N.Cochrane: ‘The one holds up an ideal of repose and refined sensual enjoyment; the other, one of restless effort and activity…” (Priestley, “Tennyson’s Idylls” 255). J.Philip Eggers claims that the plot of the Idylls resembles a passage from the Aeneid, spoken by Evander, about the rise and fall of the Golden Age (16–17), while J.M.Gray finds Arthur’s exemplary character analogous to that of Aeneas: “Just as Aeneas is pius, Arthur is ‘the blameless King’” (Gray, Thro the Vision of the Night 61). John Rosenberg compares Bedivere at the end to “an Anglo-Saxon warrior who outlives his lord and wanders homeless and liegeless in an alien world” (100). Paul Turner ascertains that the three-line stanza for many of the Idylls’s songs, as well as Merlin’s “triplets,” are derived from the ancient Welsh bards (166). The Idylls of the King moves inexorably to a conspicuously tragic denouement, and, as we have seen in chapter four with respect to “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” the tragic and the Homeric traditions are closely related. David Staines, J.

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Philip Eggers,William Brashear, Henry Kozicki,William E.Buckler, and Paul Turner all describe the Idylls as a tragedy, and Turner goes to some pains to apply Aristotle’s paradigm for tragedy to Tennyson’s poem. Buckler writes, “From a poet like Tennyson, stern of mind and learned in the best epic and dramatic traditions, we know that matters will work themselves through many literary-experiential variations to their severest tragic conclusion and that only so much of a remnant hope will be saved as classical tragedy allows” (346). Implicated in Buckler’s linking of the epic traditions with those of classical tragedy is Walter Kaufmann’s thesis, “the birth of tragedy from the spirit of Homer” (141). J.William Hunt’s comment on the Aeneid is equally applicable to the Idylls of the King: “It is clear that tragic and heroic themes are both inextricably bound together in the fabric of the poem” (13). The tragedy of Tennyson’s Camelot is the inability of its denizens to maintain their fires of passion at the equable midrange the ancient Greeks called the Mean. In the Iliad, Achilles demonstrates the two extremes to which the heroic temperament is prone. At first, sulking in his tent over his treatment by Agamemnon, Achilles wastes his fiery force by abstaining from the battle. In the end, of course, Achilles goes to the opposite extreme, allowing his tempestuous wrath to rage savagely and horribly against the noble Hector.Arthur’s heroic subjects, like the speaker of Maud, are susceptible to these same extremes of behavior. The heroic disposition is liable to tragic excesses of love as well as of hatred, and in the great heroic epics these two channels of frenzy converge. Odysseus’s climactic rampage is motivated partly by marital jealousy. Dido, as Virgil describes her in Aeneid 4.697, is “set aflame by a sudden madness.” Michael C.J.Putnam comments on this passage, “As in the case of the earlier allusions to [Dido’s] furiae/furor, we are reminded of how closelyVirgil’s words anticipate Aeneas, furiis accensus. Each is driven by inner furies to maddened action” (186). Citing Horace’s Epistle 1.2, Putnam describes the Iliad as “the story of the interaction of lust and anger” (181). As Paris’s overwhelming desire for Helen initiates the Trojan War in the background to Homer’s poem, it is Lancelot’s uncontrollable passion for Guinevere that sparks the final battle in the west that destroys Camelot. Through his depiction in the Idylls of the calamitous mingling of sexual lust with battle lust,Tennyson elaborates his strictures on the courtly love tradition, which he introduced in “The Ballad of Oriana.” The lapses of Arthur’s people into disastrous extremes of amatory as well as aggressive fervor reflect the tendency in the heroic tradition to characterize love affairs not as an inspiration but as a temptation. The titanic fervor of the heroic temperament, whether it is used appropriately (by Arthur, and, temporarily at least, by most of his knights), unprofitably restrained, or unleashed in disastrous paroxysms martial or erotic, is represented in the Idylls of the King by three symbols from the heroic tradition, symbols which are prominent in almost all of Tennyson’s battle poetry: beasts, rushing water, and fire. We have already encountered animal symbolism in “The Vale of Bones,” “The Druid’s

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Prophecies,” “The Expedition of Nadir Shah,” “God’s Denunciations against Pharoah-Hophra,” “Boädicea,” “The Revenge,” “Britons, GuardYour Own,” “The Third of February, 1852,” “Hands All Round!” “The Defence of Lucknow,” and Maud. In the Idylls, the “beast” image is most salient in “The Coming of Arthur” (CA), where Arthur’s founding of a civilized realm involves the slaying of “wolf and boar and bear” (all of which animals signify battle frenzy in Homer,Virgil, and the Scandinavian sagas), and also the subduing of “wolf-like men, / Worse than the wolves” (CA 23, 32–33). Sir Bedivere says that Arthur’s savage predecessors “‘Have foughten like wild beasts’” (CA 225). In keeping with the tradition of the shapeshifting berserks, these ferocious warriors are described as wild beasts themselves: “‘the lords/Of that fierce day were as the lords of this, / Wild beasts’” (CA 214–16). Another striking animal image in “The Coming of Arthur” is Gawain’s coltish cantering: “And Gawain went, and breaking into song / Sprang out, and followed by his flying hair/Ran like a colt, and leapt at all he saw” (CA 319–21).These lines, as Wilfed Mustard notes (“Tennyson and Homer” 151), were no doubt modeled on Homer’s description of Paris in Book 6 of the Iliad (503-l4), a passage which, as we have seen in chapter three,Tennyson translated.Tennyson was preceded by Virgil in adapting the Homeric description: in Book 11 of the Aeneid Virgil depicts Turnus in a remarkably similar manner. In “Balin and Balan” (BB), Balin is killed when his horse, “Rolling back upon Balin, crushed the man/ Inward” (BB 553–54), an incident that prompts J.M.Gray to comment,”… Tennyson has shown the knight ironically destroyed, as it were, bestially and from within, a fitting end for one who from the first was unable to govern his urges” (“Tennyson’s Doppelgänger” 9).The image of the beast eventually comes full circle in the Idylls of the King: when savage battle frenzy once again prevails over Arthur’s civilizing influence in “The Passing of Arthur” (PA), the King laments that “all my realm/Reels back into the beast, and is no more” (PA 25–26). The beast is associated with the unreserved yielding of the self to primal force, but the force itself, through its entire range of manifestations, is symbolized most often in the Idylls by the familiar Homeric images of fire and of turbulent water. Arthur, who taps the power of the berserk in order to subdue the rampant, destructive exercise of the same power by the “heathen,” is himself closely aligned with these two traditional symbols.The divine nature of the warrior’s transcendent power is reflected in one of the more striking passages of “The Coming of Arthur.” After the Battle of Mt. Badon, Lancelot exclaims to Arthur, “‘Sir and my liege…the fire of God/Descends upon thee in the battle-field:/I know thee for my King!’” (CA 127– 29). Lancelot alludes to this same incident again, in “Lancelot and Elaine” (LE): “‘Yet in this heathen war the fire of God/Fills him: I never saw his like: there lives/No greater leader’” (LE 314–16). Once his realm is established, Arthur indulges himself in an exercise of this sublime power again when he effortlessly strikes down Balin and Balan, an incident that occurs in the presence of flowing water: “So coming to

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the fountain-side beheld/Balin and Balan sitting statuelike” (BB 21–22). Clyde de L.Ryals recognizes that “Like Carlyle’s heroes Arthur is king by right of power, not by right of birth. It was to make this very point that Tennyson arranges, in the first idyll, to becloud the legitimacy of Arthur’s claim to the throne” (From the Great Deep 104). Arthur, as the supreme wielder of sublime power, is presented as originating from, and returning to, the power source: ‘“From the great deep to the great deep he goes’” (CA 410, PA 445). We have seen a similar trope in “The Revenge,” where Richard Grenville sinks at last into the main. In her account of Arthur’s origin, Bellicent mixes the imagery of fire with that of a crashing wave: “Wave after wave, each mightier than the last, Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame: And down the wave and in the flame was borne A naked babe, and rode to Merlin’s feet, Who stoopt and caught the babe, and cried ‘The King!’” (CA 378–84)

The combination of the two Homeric symbols indicates Arthur’s superior degree of passion and power. Tennyson’s battle poems, as we have seen throughout this study, are suffused with fire imagery. The image of the wave, which recurs in the battle context of “Lancelot and Elaine” (480), also appears in “Babylon,” “The Ballad of Oriana,” “Sir Galahad,” the “Wellington Ode,” “The Revenge,” and “The Defence of Lucknow,” and it is suggested in “The Tourney.” Tennyson’s use of waves and tides, and of rolling rivers in “God’s Denunciations against Pharaoh-Hophra” and “Boädicea,” harks back to the River Xanthos episode in Book 21 of the Iliad. The “voices” in the fiery wave that bears the infant Arthur are highly significant, for they represent the control integral to the efficacy of Arthur’s fighting force.The spoken word, as an exemplar of the power of reason, is the means by which Arthur maintains the “sublime repression of himself” (“Dedication” 18) needed for victory over the bestial, irrational forces he subdues.This relationship between the word and the passions finds a precedent in heroic epic. Richard Jenkyns comments on the Aeneid: “Turnus at the end becomes the earlier Aeneas, helpless before Juno’s savagery. But the hero is saved by the intervention of Neptune whose statesmanship is metaphorized as soothing words” (214). In the final episode of the Aeneid,Turnus’s words allay the rage of Aeneas until the sight of Pallas’s belt reignites the flaming furor of the epic’s hero. John D.Rosenberg finds the Christian element central to the Idylls, but Clyde de L.Ryals subordinates the Christian to the heroic: “With Carlyle [Tennyson] evidently agreed that Christianity is ‘the highest instance of Hero-worship’…. [I]n almost every reference to Him, we see only the poet’s belief in Jesus as the great, perhaps perfect, man” (From the Great Deep 103–104). The most prominent connec-tion to

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Christianity in the Idylls is the primacy the poem gives to the Logos. “The power of the word is central in the Idylls,” A.Dwight Culler writes (236). For Arthur, in the beginning is the word of control over fighting frenzy.The King’s first spoken words in the poem are words of restraint on the battlefield: Then, before a voice As dreadful as the shout of one who sees To one who sins, and deems himself alone And all the world asleep, they swerved and brake Flying, and Arthur called to stay the brands That hacked among the fliers, “Ho! they yield!” (CA 115–20)

Arthur’s dreadful voice heralds the sublime power of the word to moderate “the fire of God.” As was suggested by the framing device in “Boädicea,” the wielding of transcendent power necessitates transcendent control.Tennyson’s account of the battle of Mt.Badon concludes with an homage to the supremacy of the controlling force: “‘Man’s word is God in man’” (CA 132). Man’s word is also a pledge of truthfulness, and we have seen the Achillean contempt for lying in “The Third of February, 1852,” Maud, and “Britons, GuardYour Own.” The sacredness of the word is implicated in the vows that Arthur’s knights take at his coronation: “Then the King in low deep tones, And simple words of great authority, Bound them by so straight vows to his own self, That when they rose, knighted from kneeling, some Were pale as at the passing of a ghost, Some flushed, and others dazed, as one who wakes Half-blinded at the coming of a light.” (CA 259–65)

The vows produce in the knights “‘A momentary likeness of the King’” (CA 270): temporarily, they order their lives to Arthur’s ideal of passionate power harnessed by the rational faculty for “‘use and name and fame’” (“Merlin andVivien” 302). Henry Kozicki emphasizes the “military orientation” (Tennyson and Clio 119) of the vows: “Arthur as universal soul asks for absolute obedience not in order to cloister the virtues but to make them active in military and political affairs” (Tennyson and Clio 120). “The vows that bind the knights to Arthur,” Kozicki writes, “…too often are seen as a version of the Ten Commandments instead of as the working rules for great slaughters and, therefore, historical supremacy” (Tennyson and Clio 119). At the coronation the Lady of the Lake also signifies the advent of control by the word of reason over the turbulent waters of passion: “But there was heard among the holy hymns A voice as of the waters, for she dwells

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Down in a deep; calm, whatsoever storms May shake the world, and when the surface rolls, Hath power to walk the waters like our Lord.” (CA 289–93)

Kozicki comments that Arthur’s vows are “…symbolized by the Lady of the Lake walking on and ‘controlling’ the water…” (Tennyson and Clio 139). Arthur’s control of the rolling waters of passion by means of the word extends to the sexual sphere.At his wedding with Guinevere, again “there past along the hymns/ A voice as of the waters” (CA 463–64), and he later avows to her, “‘For I was ever virgin save for thee’” (“Guinevere” 554). Arthur’s wedding vow, “‘Let chance what will, I love thee to the death!’” (CA 467), echoes his battlefield vow to Lancelot: ‘“Let chance what will, I trust thee to the death’” (CA 133). Similarly, Arthur’s first encounter with Guinevere has overtones of violence: “But Arthur, looking downward as he past,/Felt the light of her eyes into his life/Smite on the sudden” (CA 55–57). This passage foreshadows the final battle, where “Modred smote his liege/Hard on that helm which many a heathen sword/Had beaten thin” (PA 165–67). Smiting also occurs in association with mystical vision. At Arthur’s coronation, ‘“Down from the casement over Arthur, smote/Flame-colour, vert and azure, in three rays’” (CA 273– 74). In “The Holy Grail,” “‘there smote along the hall/A beam of light seven times more clear than day’” (186–87), and Galahad sees “‘the fiery face as of a child/That smote itself into the bread’” (466–67).The motif of smiting makes a connection between the passions of love, battle, and mysticism, the three roads of excess in the Idylls. The power of the word to harness the potency of passion relates the Idylls to one of the most prominent traditional themes of Tennyson’s battle poetry, the equality of the bard with the warrior. Accordingly, the “voice” motif recurs in “The Passing of Arthur,” where we find that the bold warrior, Sir Bedivere, has become a sort of bard who tells Arthur’s story: “That story which the bold Sir Bedivere,/First made and latest left of all the knights,/Told, when the man was no more than a voice” (PA 1–3). In making Bedivere “no more than a voice,” Tennyson hints at the ultimate value of the knight’s second career as a wielder of words. Tennyson’s selection of a great and noble warrior as the teller of “The Passing of Arthur” links the idyll with the 1852 incendiary poems, with the epilogue to “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade,” with “Sir Galahad,” and with any number of other pieces that evince Tennyson’s desire to reconcile his own calling with his admiration for the courageous deeds of the soldier. “The poem,” writes John R.Reed of “The Passing of Arthur,” “is [Tennyson’s] gesture, his deed, and it signifies his faith in the positive though dangerous value of language” (154). As Reed recognizes, language, like the fires of passion it is capable of restrain-ing, is dangerous as well as valuable.As Tennyson illustrates in “Boädicea,” the incendiary power of words renders speech as susceptible to abusive excess as passion itself. Arthur’s speech is controlled; when he swears in his knights at his coronation, he

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speaks ‘“in low deep tones,/And simple words of great authority’” (CA 259–60). Arthur’s low, deep tones reflect his command of the power of the great deep, and his mellow modulation stands in contrast to the shrilling trumpet tones of battle wrath. The battle of Mt. Badon is accompanied by “trumpet-blast,/And shouts, and clarions shrilling unto blood” (CA 101–102). In “The Passing of Arthur,” the ghost of the wild Gawain is likewise described as “shrilling” (PA 33). Tennyson’s usual word for unrestrained speech is “babble,” as when the people “Began to scoff and jeer and babble” of Geraint in “The Marriage of Geraint” (58–59). “Babble,” as the stereotypical word for the sound of a brook, links destructively wayward speech with the dangerous fighting frenzy symbolized by flowing water. In “Guinevere” (G), the queens little maid at Almesbury prates of destructive rumors with a “babbling heedlessness” (G 149). The maid, “like many another babbler, hurt/Whom she would soothe, and harmed where she would heal” (G 352–53). Guinevere asks herself, in response to the onslaught of words, “‘Will the child kill me with her innocent talk?. …Will the child kill me with her foolish prate?”’ (G 212, 223). The injurious potential of language necessitates discipline; the word must be used judiciously if it is to control rather than inflame the passions. Arthur’s demand for the balanced use of the rational and the sensual faculties is reflected in Tennyson’s many references to the “Order” of the Round Table (CA 269 and 473, for example) and to the harmonious music and song that prevail at Camelot, the city “‘built/To music’” (GL 272–73). (Troy, too, was built to music, to the music of Apollo, the god of, among other things, the light of reason—Tennyson himself wrote a poem, “Ilion, Ilion” [Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 1.281] about this tradition.) In the Idylls the test for the harmonious ordering of Sense and Soul is vision.When the sensual passions are harnessed by the soul for “use and name and fame,” the result is not merely victory but clairvoyance as well: When Arthur reached a field-of-battle bright With pitched pavilions of his foe, the world Was all so clear about him, that he saw The smallest rock far on the faintest hill, And even in high day the morning star. (CA 95–99)

Arthur’s vision at Mt. Badon, which accompanies his victorious use of “the fire of God,” is tantamount to a theophany, as evidenced by “The Passing of Arthur,” where the King says, “‘I found Him in the shining of the stars’” (9). Stanley J. Solomon comments on Arthur’s “mystical insight into the divinity of the universe” (260), a pantheistic trait that aligns him with the Homeric tradition. As Carlyle emphasizes repeatedly in On Heroes, “The essence of all Pagan mythologies, we found to be recognition of the divineness of Nature” (30).Thomas Greene writes of the Aeneid, “Aeneas is forever open to a capacity in earthly things for assuming divin-ity” (43).

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The coincidence of Arthur’s clairvoyance with his exercise of “the fire of God” is reminiscent of the “sharper sense” (2.11) possessed by the narrator of Maud after the duel. Both episodes evoke Iliad 5.124ff., where the efficacious fury of Diomedes is ascribed a divine origin and accompanied by clarity of perception. In describing the battle of Mt. Badon Tennyson also may have remembered Paradise Lost 3.619ff, where Satan, after landing on Earth, finds that …the Air, Nowhere so clear, sharp’n’d his visual ray To objects distant far, whereby he soon Saw within ken a glorious Angel stand,…(PL 3. 619–22)

The name of this angel, Uriel, in Hebrew means “the fire of God” (Hughes 274n.). Milton’s passage, like Tennyson’s in “The Coming of Arthur,” links “the fire of God” with clear and penetrating vision. When the fire of God is allowed to flare wantonly, vision is obscured. In contrast to the battle of Mt. Badon, the melee in “The Passing of Arthur” is characterized not by the judicious use of the fire of God, but by “shouts of heathen and the traitor knights,/Oaths, insult, filth, and monstrous blasphemies,/Sweat, writhings, anguish, labouring of the lungs” (PA 113–15). The reversion to the beast is accompanied by a “‘blind haze’” (PA 76), a “deathwhite mist” (PA 95). “For friend and foe were shadows in the mist,/And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew” (PA 100– 102). The fallen knights “Looked up for heaven, and only saw the mist” (PA 112). The mist is an addition to Malory.Tennyson’s own comment draws attention to the contrasting degrees of visibility on the two battlefields: “This grim battle in the mist contrasts with Arthur’s glorious battle in the Coming of Arthur, fought on a bright day when ‘he saw the smallest rock far on the faintest hill’” (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 3.552). In Book 17 of the Iliad, when the Achaians fall victim to the slaughterous frenzy Hector, the scene is also shrouded in mist. Paul Turner notes the relevance of the Homeric passage to “The Passing of Arthur.” Lines 95–117 of Tennyson’s poem, Turner remarks, are “primarily modelled on a passage in the Iliad (xvii, 645–7) which Longinus quoted as an instance of the sublime. There Ajax prays to Zeus to disperse the mist, and ‘kill us in the light.’ His prayer, unlike those of Arthur’s knights, is answered” (164). In the Aeneid as well, untrammeled furor is blinding. Michael C.J.Putnam writes, “For Aeneas, caught up in the passionate swirl of Troy’s final hours, a black cloud dulls the vision….This blindness we have seen Aeneas himself, in Book 2, twice associate with fury…a rage against which Virgil counterpoises Venus’ clear and clarifying vision” (193).The mist enshrouding Arthur’s final battle is a variation on the Homeric water symbol. Mist, as water in its most diffuse form, represents the dissolution of the warrior’s effective force in wanton, random mayhem. In the form of mist, water is not flow-ing; it has no power.

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The seeds of the disastrous, final battle of the Idylls are sown in the first book of the poem, where Arthur “in twelve great battles overcame/The heathen hordes, and made a realm and reigned” (CA 517–18). At the beginning of the ten books comprising “The Round Table,” it is, as Donald S. Hair notes, “a time when Arthur’s chief work is done, a time of relative stability and contentment which gradually gives way to decline and decay” (Domestic and Heroic 137). Henry Kozicki discusses the cankers of this peaceful period in a manner that recalls Tennyson’s 1852 newspaper poems and Maud: “Heroic passions, being immutable,…begin to eat inwardly…. [T]he ideal [of Camelot] is a controlling order for historical purpose that is lost gradually through the slackening of will that results when external opposition is eliminated” (Tennyson and Clio 118, 132). For a space, however, Arthur’s ideal of contained and efficacious passion prevails. At the conclusion of “The Coming of Arthur” (CA 481–501), the knights sing what Hallam Tennyson referred to as a “Viking song” (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 3.280). The song is an inflammatory war cry, but every stanza ends with the words, “‘Let the King reign.’” The knights’ temporary submission to Arthur’s ideal results in the noble deeds he ordained as the proper function of his Order. “Gareth and Lynette” (GL) opens with a Homeric symbol of battle frenzy as Gareth “Stared at the spate” (3). He identifies with this powerful force of nature as it uproots a pine, but he recognizes the force as a “‘senseless cataract’” (GL 7), whereas he himself has both “‘strength and wit’” (GL 12). For Gareth, the power of reason, of the word, is equal to the power of the natural forces. He immediately demonstrates his facility with language by inventing a word, “‘ever-highering’” (GL 21).Though he has “kindling eyes” (GL 41, 61, 631), he is “‘rather tame than wild’” (GL 38). His controlled ferocity allows him, though a novice, to hold his own in a tilt with the wild Gawain, while the “‘mute’” and “‘sullen’” (GL 31–32) Modred watches. Appropriately, the evil Modred, who instigates the destruction of Arthur’s Order, never speaks, never modulates his burning malevolence, before he finally, in “Guinevere,” gives vent to his internal combustion by shouting (105), an Achillean outlet for fury and a motif that also appears in “The Old Sword,” “Oh, ye wild winds,” “Babylon,” “Boädicea,” “Written During the Convulsions in Spain,” “The Defence of Lucknow,” Maud, and, of course, “Achilles Over the Trench.” Gareth is heroic in his “princely-proud” (GL 158) bearing and in his desire for “‘Fame’” (GL 113) and “glory” (GL 156, 468). Gareth’s request of Arthur to ‘“Let be my name until I make my name!’” (GL 562) is the desire of a heroic warrior. “In heroic societies,” J.B.Hainsworth notes, “there was a convention that a young man could acquire a real and lasting name only when he had achieved an exploit” (229; original emphasis). For Gareth, as for the Duke of Wellington and for the Light and Heavy Brigades, action is substantive: “‘My deeds will speak,”’ he says. ‘“[F]or the deeds sake have I done the deed’” (GL 563, 811). His identity, his ego, depends upon noble action; the primacy he assigns to deeds is reflected in the inverted syn-tax of

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his claim to Arthur: “‘…joust can I’” (GL 533). “Successful deeds bring glory,” writes Paul Edmund Thomas, “and upon that glory hangs reputation, not just the meaning of a warriors life, but his very soul” (xl). Gareth’s exploit is to use both his fighting skill and his chivalrous nature to aid and to soften Lynette, a strident woman whose name makes a punning connection to the linnet of the animal kingdom and thus to the imagery of uncontrolled passion. She is presented as “shrilling” at Gareth (GL 732). “Shrilling” is the same word Tennyson uses to describe the frenzied tones of battle trumpets (CA 102) and of the mocking ghost of Gawain (PA 33).When Gareth is assigned the quest of aiding her, Lynette evinces her “wrath” (GL 641). Gareth’s influence, through his disciplined and controlled prowess in five hostile encounters, mollifies Lynette, who eventually conforms to his avoidance of “‘foolish heat’” (1149). Gareth’s victories both result from and symbolize the subjugation of wild passions. His first three encounters with the brethren of Day and Night take place either over a river or in the river itself.The river, the Homeric symbol of rampant battle wrath, represents the lawlessness and the untrammeled passions, both sexual and militant, of the four brothers, who are attempting to have their way with Lady Lyonors. The second brother, the Sun, is carried away by the river, while the third, the Star of Evening, is hurled into it. The defeat of the brothers, who are ruled, to their discredit, by the passion the river symbolizes, is marked by their immersion in the river.The second brother emits an inarticulate, animalistic grunt (GL 1012), while the fourth brother, Death, is conspicuously silent: their wildness coincides with a failure of language.The chivalrous Gareth, on the other hand, derives efficacious and controlled inspiration from the speech of Lynette. He says that her words of abuse “‘send/That strength of anger through mine arms, I know/That I shall overthrow him’” (GL 925–27). When she encourages his efforts, “Gareth hearing ever stronglier smote” (GL 1113). “‘[T]hy foul sayings fought for me,”’ Gareth says. ‘“And seeing now thy words are fair, methinks/There rides no knight, not Lancelot, his great self,/Hath force to quell me’” (GL 1151–54). Gareth demonstrates his chivalry by his courtesy towards Lynette and also by his reaction to his encounter with Lancelot. His laughter upon being overthrown is consistent with the joy of battle in the heroic tradition (and in the tradition of Tennyson’s battle poems—see “The Old Sword,” “The Old Chieftain,” “Oh! ye wild winds,” “The Tourney,” “Battle of Brunanburh,” and “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade”), as is Lancelot’s description of his own charger: “‘Not to be spurred, loving the battle as well/As he that rides him’” (GL 1269–70). The kind of influence that Gareth exerts over Lynette is mutual in “The Marriage of Geraint” (MG) and “Geraint and Enid” (GE). In these poems we see Geraint and Enid balancing each other’s extremes, helping each other to attain the Mean between excessive and overly suppressed passion. Tennyson’s description of Geraint’s uxoriousness gives a sense of the knight’s inordinate passion:

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Forgetful of his promise to the King, Forgetful of the falcon and the hunt, Forgetful of the tilt and tournament, Forgetful of his glory and his name, Forgetful of his princedom and its cares. (MG 50–54)

The repetition (which Tennyson uses to the same end in “The Ballad of Oriana,” a poem about another uxorious knight) reflects Geraint’s obsessiveness, while the primary word that is repeated, “Forgetful,” suggests the mindlessness of his condition: the regimental faculty of reason is in abeyance. Tennyson’s description of Geraint’s “heroic” (MG 75) physique adapts a Theocritan simile to the Homeric symbol scheme of the Idylls of the King.Tennyson, in depicting Geraint’s “arms on which the standing muscle sloped/As slopes a wild brook o’er a little stone,/Running too vehemently to break upon it” (MG 76–78), alters Theocritus’s comparison, in Idyll 22.48ff., of muscular arms to the stones in a brook (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 3.326–27). Tennyson’s version of the simile helps to characterize Geraint as the possessor of heroically vehement passion that needs proper balance. In the flashback scenes of “The Marriage of Geraint,” Geraint demonstrates his fidelity to the Arthurian ideal, using his own fiery temperament to subdue a wild and ferocious opponent. Geraint shows his own “fire of God” when he “flashe[s] into sudden spleen” (MG 273) in contempt of Edyrn, whose bestial sobriquet, “the sparrow hawk,” befits his feral nature. Edyrn’s tempestuous pride and passion are described using fire imagery. Before the encounter with Geraint, Edyrn’s “face/ Glowed like the heart of a great fire at Yule,/So burnt he was with passion” (MG 558–60). Edyrn later calls his “‘prideful sparkle in the blood’” a “‘furious flame’” (GE 826–27). During the clash,Yniol’s battle cry fortifies Geraint (MG 571)—the incendiary capacity of the word on this occasion fanning a needful fire—and Geraint achieves an Arthur-like victory over a representative of the beast. As Arthur had called out, “‘They are broken, they are broken!’” (LE 309) after his victory over the bestial forces at Mt. Badon, Edyrn admits, “‘My pride is broken’” (MG 578) after Geraint prevails.Tennyson makes a similar use of the “breaking” motif in “The Third of February, 1852.” Geraint’s solicitation of Edyrn’s name after the fight is a heroic convention.Warriors were expected to reveal their identity only after a battle was over. In a note to Ossian’s “Carthon,” James Macpherson explains: To tell one’s name to an enemy was reckoned, in those days of heroism, a manifest evasion of fighting him; for, if it was once known, that friendship subsisted, of old, between the ancestors of the combatants, the battle immediately ceased; and the ancient amity of their forefathers was renewed. A man who tells his name to his enemy, was of old an ignominious term for a coward. (Ossian 447, n.36)

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Gareth’s mother, Bellicent, insists that he withhold his name in Camelot, an appropriate policy considering the bestial imagery associated with Kay, Gareth’s overseer in the kitchen and the‘“most ungentle knight in Arthur’s hall’” (GL 738). Kay’s residual baseness stands in enmity to the lofty ideals of Arthur’s realm. As for Edyrn, after the fight with Geraint he learns to harness his fiery spirit for noble deeds and eventually dies a good death, fighting for Arthur in the last battle. Enid’s father,Yniol, veers from the Mean like Edyrn, but in the opposite direction. Yniol’s problem is not an excess of passion and pride but an excess of restraint. “‘…I myself sometimes despise myself;’” he admits to Geraint, “‘For I have let men be, and have their way;/Am much too gentle, have not used my power’” (MG 465–67). Enid’s song about Fortunes wheel reflects her father’s dispassion. According to William E.Buckler, the fault of the song lies in its “self-congratulatory inducement to moral, aesthetic, spiritual inertia. It is recessive rather than active, stoical rather than contestant” (85). Enid’s test in “Geraint and Enid” is to balance her familial tendency towards shrinking resignation by virtue of her passion for Geraint.The equivalence between word and deed in heroic societies is realized in Enid: to speak is for her a daring act. She repeatedly dares to defy Geraint’s orders by speaking to him, warning him of imminent danger. In doing so she is at least partly motivated by a typically heroic consideration, the concern for name and fame: “‘For, be he wroth even to slaying me,/Far liefer by his dear hand had I die,/Than that my lord should suffer loss or shame’” (GE 67–69). Her “low firm voice” (GE 194) recalls the ‘“low deep tones’” (CA 259) with which Arthur governs his knights, and by daring to speak she saves Geraint from the dangers of his own unbalanced passion. “The bandits that Geraint first encounters,” observes John R.Reed, “are comparable to uncontrolled passions” (63). In “Geraint and Enid” Geraint’s state of passionate jealousy and neglected fighting spirit is accompanied by his abstention from speech: …he fain had spoken to her, And loosed in words of sudden fire the wrath And smouldered wrong that burnt him all within; But evermore it seemed an easier thing At once without remorse to strike her dead, Than to cry ‘Halt,’ and to her own bright face Accuse her of the least immodesty: (GE 105–111)

Geraint’s unwillingness to cry “Halt” (the first spoken word of Arthur in the Idylls is “Ho!”) is compounded by his censure of Enid’s words. “Geraint, in his ignorance, silences the voice that can lead him best to a joyful music,” writes John R.Reed. “In so doing, he makes language the test of Enid’s obedience, while he, himself, can

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hardly sustain utterance because ‘his passion masters him.’ As with Merlin or Balin, when self-command wanes, utterance also fails as a worthy adjunct” (166).The two renegade lords, Limours and Doorm, symbolize the opposite extremes between which Geraint is unsuccessfully navigating. Limours (cf. “l’amour”) reflects Geraint’s uxoriousness in “The Marriage of Geraint.” Geraint’s amatory excess sparks rumors that his “manhood was all gone” (MG 59); Limours is “Femininely fair and dissolutely pale” (GE 275). Limours’s eroticism is also excessive: he is “wild” (GE 277, 308, 311), with “‘exceeding passion” (GE 335) for Enid. The bestial Earl Doorm is the Scylla to Limours’s Charybdis. Doorm and his retinue exemplify the abasement resulting from an excess of the martial passion. His men identify so exclusively with fighting that they have become weapons: Doorm “called for flesh and wine to feed his spears” (GE 600). An abundance of animal imagery indicates the men’s brutality, as does their lack of speech: “And none spake word” (GE 603). Tennyson subtly suggests that Doorm’s lack of balance results in a lack of vision as well. Doorm’s first words, “‘What, is he dead?’” are the same words spoken by the blinded Gloucester in King Lear 4.6.255. When Geraint regains his knightly manhood by slaying the brutal earl, his severing of Doorm’s head accords with Doorm’s relinquishment of the humanizing power of reason. By the passion he inspires in her, Geraint enables Enid to surmount her passivity, to complement her “low voice” (GE 639) with the “sharp and bitter cry” (GE 721) that saves them both from Doorm. By her daring speech, Enid wins Geraint’s trust and cures his jealous passion so that he can return to knightly deeds. Like Geraint and Enid, Balin and Balan exemplify inverse character traits; the complementarity of the two brothers, however, results not in salvation but in tragedy. The tragedy of “Balin and Balan” is the tragedy of the Idylls as a whole: the impracticability in civilian life of profitably harnessing the intensely aggressive fervor of the heroic temperament.The illicit and unwarranted “‘violences’” (BB 186, 429) of Balin, “‘the Savage’” (BB 51), exemplify the fault common to zealous warriors. Balin’s penchant for aggressive flare-ups in the innocuous milieu of Camelot (BB 53ff, 214ff) recalls an incident from Chapter 40 of Egil’s Saga, as recounted by H. R.Ellis Davidson: Such fits of rage could be inconvenient in private life, and this is illustrated by a story from the life of a famous poet, Egill Skallagrimsson. His father appears to have been a berserk in his youth, and when he had married and settled down in Iceland, he became over-excited one evening in a game of ball with his child. In a mad frenzy he killed the little boy’s nurse, and came very near to destroying his son Egill as well. (Gods and Myths 68)

Balin resembles the speaker of Maud, in that the vehement spirit of both men demands a proper outlet:

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“Well had I foughten—well— In those fierce wars, struck hard—and had I crowned With my slain self the heaps of whom I slew— So—better!” (BB 173–75)

The difficulty for Balin is that Arthur’s fierce wars are over. The problem in “Balin and Balan,” according to Henry Kozicki, is that “The court is langourous and its courtesy is becoming precious. No battle alarms ring” (Tennyson and Clio 134).This period is “less heroic than the time of the twelve great battles,” writes Donald S. Hair, “for Lancelot refers to the jousts as ‘our mimic wars’” (Domestic and Heroic 136). Instead of striking hard in battle, Balin “fought/Hard with himself” (BB 233–34) in an attempt to harness his combative fires for chivalrous peacetime use. After he sees evidence of the illicit passion between Lancelot and Guinevere, however, he doubts the efficacy of Arthur’s Order and proves himself “‘Fierier and stormier from restraining’” (BB 224). In a time when external challenges have been eliminated and Arthur’s Order has been compromised by the infraction of Lancelot and Guinevere, the ideal of Camelot is insufficient to regulate the wrath of a warrior of Balin’s heroic proportions. It is a critical commonplace to see Balin and Balan as representing the conflicting but complementary halves of one psyche.The moderate and disciplined Balan, whose customary function is to pacify the fiendish moods of Balin (BB 137–38), mistakes his fiery and unruly brother for Garlon, the demon of the woods, and when Balan attempts to quell the “demonic” Balin, the result is the destruction of both brothers. Balin’s mistaken identity is appropriate, for Pellam and Garlon are analogues of Balan and Balin respectively.The ascetic Pellam, in turning from fighting Arthur and in taking, “‘as in rival heat, to holy things’” (BB 97), epitomizes the feckless and even dangerous practice of suppressing the fires of passion. It is Pellam’s “holy spear” (BB 547), a token from his ascetic cloister, that proves fatal to Balan, whose role as the disciplinarian of his ferocious brother smacks of Pellam’s severity. “In ‘Lucretius,’ in Maud, in the Idylls” Lawrence Poston writes, “Tennyson repeatedly shows that the recoil from passion is fully as dangerous as the passion itself; asceticism, as the figure of Pellam reminds us, is simply the far side of lust” (203–204).Vivien’s song in “Balin and Balan” indicates Pellam’s situation: “‘Old priest, who mumble worship in your quire—/Old monk and nun, ye scorn the world’s desire,/Yet in your frosty cells ye feel the fire!’” (BB 438–40). Vivien, combining the Homeric symbols of fire and flowing water, celebrates the excessive inten-sity that Pellam attempts to renounce: “‘The fire of Heaven is lord of all things good, /And starve not thou this fire within thy blood,/But follow Vivien through the fiery flood!’” (BB 446–48). The fervor Vivien praises has run riot and exceeded its bounds—it is a “‘flood.’” The savage Garlon, whom Pellam calls “‘mine heir’” (BB 114), inherits the powerful passions, “‘Fierier and stormier from restraining’” (BB 224), of Pellam. Garlon, whose name,

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according to J.M.Gray, “may derive from the Welsh term for werewolf” (“Tennyson’s Doppelgänger” 44), and Balin, the wolves’ “‘brother beast, whose anger was his lord’” (BB 481), embody the primal force of the shape-shifter that Pellam and Balan strive to sublimate. Tennyson’s disapproval of asceticism as a form of sublimation is evinced by Balin’s use of Pellam’s holy relic to pole-vault and land “on earth” (BB 408). Even though Balin’s inner fires burn too hotly for his civil environment (he is, appropriately, “blind in rage” when he comes to Pellam’s chapel [BB 323]), his act of putting “‘heavenly things’” to “‘earthly uses’” (BB 415–16) aptly symbolizes the Arthurian ideal of “life and use and name and fame” (“Merlin and Vivien” 212). Pellam’s “ruinous donjon” (BB 329), on the other hand, is a “home of bats” (BB 331), his “‘rival heat’” (BB 97) an example of the “‘wandering fires’” Arthur condemns in “The Holy Grail” (319, 887). Pellam’s cloistering of his fiery fervor is analogous to Achilles’s wasting of his battle wrath by sulking in his tent. It is the fate of Merlin, as we see in “Merlin and Vivien” (MV), to exemplify the same errant extreme. A woman, Briseis, was a factor in Achilles’s abstention from the battle; Vivlen’s seduction of Merlin results in his permanent abstention from the battle of life. Merlin’s “tent” is a “hollow oak” in which he “lay as dead,/And lost to life and use and name and fame” (MV 967–68). We have previously seen the speaker of Maud in an analogous predicament in the madhouse. Merlin’s encounter with Vivien is a conflict as well as an enticement, and he yields to an excess of both Eros and anger. “That the climax is symbolically sexual,” comments William E.Buckler, “is so forcefully insinuated that one hesitates to detail the tumultuous patterning” (108).A.Dwight Culler emphasizes the element of opposition between the sage and the seductress: “It is by means of their song contest that Merlin and Vivien principally contend with one another” (231). Their contention is described at the end of the poem as if it had been a battle: “For Merlin …/Had yielded…” (MV 963–64). “‘I have made his glory mine!’” Vivien cries out in triumph (MV 969). The many references to Merlin’s “charm,” which has the power to hold a man in thrall, evoke Homer’s many references to the kharme of battle, the joyous frenzy that can likewise overwhelm a warrior. Merlin is a seer whose faculty of vision is corrupted by passion. “Merlin tells [Vivien],” writes J.Philip Eggers, “the story of A maid so smooth, so white, so wonderful,/They said a light came from her when she moved’ (MV 564–65). Such, he allows himself to see in Vivien, as she glitters like a serpent in the ‘glare and gloom’ of the storm (line 967). Merlin’s failure of vision is the turning point of the Idylls” (189). Merlin is a sage and a bard, who nevertheless diverges tragically from the Mean because of a failure of reason, of the word: “And the dark wood grew darker toward the storm/In silence, while his anger slowly died/Within him, till he let his wisdom go” (MV 888–90). “It is important to note,” argues Donald S.Hair, “that so long as Merlin speaks…he does not give in to Vivien. At the end, when he does give in, narrative once again is used; we are told about his fall rather than

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shown it. The failure of the word is thus reflected in the structure of the idyll itself” (Domestic and Heroic 176). A.Dwight Culler discusses the “‘glorious roundel’” (MV 424) that Merlin describes to Vivien: With such a “noble song” to offer, why does not Merlin win the song contest? The answer surely is that he does not sing it. Had he sung it, in all its original fire and glory,Vivien would have slunk off through the woods and Merlin, reinspired, would have returned straight to Camelot to reinspirit the king. But only Vivien actually sang her song. (232)

Though Tennyson himself identified the glorious roundel as “The song about the clang of battle-axes, etc., in the Coming of Arthur” (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 3. 407), Merlin’s description of a “noble song” (MV 431) with “trumpet-blowings in it“(MV 416) reminds Culler of Tennyson’s incendiary poems of 1852, “Hands All Round!” “Britons Guard Your Own,” and “Suggested by Reading an Article in a Newspaper” (233). The story that Merlin tells about the glorious roundel and the hart with golden horns may be interpreted as an allegory of the Arthurian ideal.The glorious roundel is, according to Tennyson’s comment, the song from “The Coming of Arthur” that celebrates the establishment of Arthur’s Order. In its combination of military incitement (“‘Blow trumpet!’”) with the recognition that martial fervor needs to be regulated (“‘Let the King reign’”), the song exemplifies the idea of Camelot: the use of controlled passion for the accomplishment of noble deeds. A. Dwight Culler sees the hart with golden horns as an extension of the song: “…one may almost believe that the hart with golden horns was created by that song” (232). “The flashes of its golden horns,” Culler continues, “are clearly the ‘gleam’ which, in ‘Merlin and the Gleam,’ typifies the poetic ideal that Tennyson pursues” (232). The knights follow the Gleam, the ideal, to “‘the fairy well/That laughs at iron’” (MV 426–27). Considering the use in the Idylls of rushing water as a symbol of battle fury, the fact that a well contains water makes it an appropriate symbol of battle fury that is properly contained or controlled.At the beginning of “Balin and Balan,” the two lusty brothers station themselves beside a rushing fountain, where they overthrow all challengers. After Arthur defeats them and contains their furor, the fountain, as J.M.Gray notices (“Tennyson’s Doppelgänger” 29), is subtly transformed into a well: “‘Tell me your names; why sat ye by the well?’” (BB 48). As for the well Merlin describes, its reactions may be likened to those of Arthur himself, as characterized by Lancelot: “However mild he seems at home, nor cares For triumph in our mimic wars, the jousts— For if his own knight cast him down, he laughs Saying, his knights are better men than he— Yet in this heathen war the fire of God Fills him…” (LE310–15)

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The pins and nails at which the well laughs (“‘as our warriors did,’” says Merlin [MV 427]) are analogous to the mimic wars of the jousts, while the sword corresponds to the heathen wars. The buzzing of the well, in evoking the sound of a bee, relates to the animalistic imagery associated with battle frenzy. Arthur’s lawless opponents, whose rampant battle wrath only Arthur is able to subdue, are elsewhere compared to bees: in “The Coming of Arthur” they are described as swarming (9), and in “The Holy Grail” (HG) Arthur goes to “‘smoke the scandalous hive of those wild bees’” (HG 214). The fairy well, therefore, is an icon of the early days of Arthur’s realm, of the time before the passions of his knights, in reaction to the absence of battle alarms, began to erode his ideal. The loss of Merlin, as it involves elements of both conflict and sexual possessiveness, is comparable to the temporary loss of Achilles by the Achaians; the loss of Elaine, in “Lancelot and Elaine,” is attributable to her exceeding passion for the great Lancelot, and is thus analogous to the Dido episode in the Aeneid. In fact, the action of the entire idyll bears something of an inverse relationship to the Dido story. In Book 6 of the Aeneid, Aeneas takes a boat from the land of the living to the underworld home of the dead; in “Lancelot and Elaine,” the dead Elaine travels on a boat from her deathlike world of seclusion to Camelot, the land of the living.The oarsman on the Styx is the aged, grim, and appalling Charon (Aeneid 6.298ff.); the “old” and “myriad-wrinkled” (LE 169) oarsman on the Thames looks the part: that oarsman’s haggard face, As hard and still as is the face that men Shape to their fancy’s eye from broken rocks On some cliff-side, appalled them,…(LE 1242–45)

In contrast to the vituperative Charon, however, Elaine’s oarsman is dumb (an indicator of Elaine’s failure to control her passion with language, the tool of reason—in the presence of Lancelot, she is “without the power to speak” [LE 914]). In one of the most famous scenes in the Aeneid, the shade of Dido turns away from Aeneas in the underworld. As Allen Mandelbaum translates Book 6, line 469, “She turned away, eyes to the ground” (Mandelbaum 148). In “Lancelot and Elaine,” it is Lancelot who, with eyes averted, ignores Elaine: “…Lancelot knew that she was looking at him./ And yet he glanced not up, nor waved his hand,/Nor bad farewell, but sadly rode away” (LE 978–80). “Lancelot and Elaine” inverts the story of Dido to evoke it as a classical precedent for Elaine’s amorous frenzy. Driven by her wanton desire, Elaine contravenes the Arthurian ideal that Merlin expresses in the previous idyll: “‘Rather use than fame’” (MV 478). Like the victimized Merlin, “Closed in the four walls of a hollow tower” (MV 207), Elaine sits “in her tower alone” (LE 982). “Elaine…is now like all those before her whose passion has possessed them and trapped them in a hol-low, barren

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world” (Colley 103).When Arthur reads the letter she bears in her funeral barge, she gains name and fame, but only in death. Prior to her death, she has no life and use, because her untrammeled passion consigns her to the hollow tower.Arthur’s reading of the letter, his contribution of the moderating element of speech, comes too late. Virgil, as we saw in the first chapter, uses the same imagery in his descriptions of Dido’s love frenzy as he does in depicting Aeneas’s battle furor. Accordingly, Tennyson refers to Elaine’s overwrought passion using the same traditional battle imagery he uses in the Idylls to describe the rampant wrath of warriors. At the tourney, “a fury,…/A fiery family passion for the name/Of Lancelot” (LE 474– 76) seizes Lancelot’s relatives, who, like a “wild wave” (LE 480), overbear their disguised kin. Similarly, Elaine sings her “Song of Love and Death,” “All in a fiery dawning wild with wind/That shook her tower” (LE 1013–14), and she, like the wild knights Gareth defeats, is literally borne away by the water of the river (which she repeatedly refers to as “‘the flood,’” a term that recalls the “‘fiery flood’” of Vivien’s song). As Arthur calls out, “‘They are broken, they are broken!’” (LE 309) at the battle of Mt. Badon, and as the defeated Edyrn admits that “‘My pride is broken’” (MG 578), Elaine’s family attempts to “break the passion in her” (LE 1072), and urges Lancelot to “‘blunt or break her passion’” (LE 968). Tennyson’s reading of the final two stanzas from Elaine’s “Song of Love and Death” on the Edison recording has the effect of further conflating the two modes of passion. Though he writes of Elaine’s song, “sweetly could she make and sing” (LE 999), Tennyson’s recitation is far from sweet, and he confounds all expectations of a melancholy or despairing tone.The impassioned verve of his rendition builds to a crescendo in the culminating line, “‘Call and I follow, I follow! let me die’” (LE 1011), which is delivered in a rousing manner appropriate to a reading of “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade” (Tennyson mumbles the final phrase, “‘let me die,’” as if attempting to shrug off an irrelevancy). By substituting Elaine’s song for her religious meditation in Malory 18. 19 (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 3.450), Tennyson suggests that Elaine’s self-isolating sexual passion is interchangeable with cloistered religiosity as a mode of divergence from the Arthurian standard. In “The Holy Grail,” the disease of religious extremism spreads from Pellam to the Knights of the Round Table, who waste their heroic fires in the pursuit of lurid illusions. With “nothing for the knights to do” (Culler 241) after the twelve great battles, the quest for the Grail amounts to a substitute for the kind of heroic, military quest that Gareth accomplishes early in the Idylls. In numerous subtle ways, including the use of traditional battle imagery,Tennyson characterizes the “‘wandering fires’” (HG 319, 369, 887) of the Grail quest as a misdirected version of the fire of God that fills Arthur on the battlefield. The cloud that surrounds the Grail when it appears at Arthur’s hall (HG 189) antic-ipates the mist that enshrouds the final, savage battle in “The Passing of Arthur,” and the thunder that heralds the Grail’s arrival is common to the heroic tradition and to Tennyson’s

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battle poems. The beam of light on which the Grail descends is filtered through images of Arthur’s battles: “And, brother, had you known our hall within, ....................................................................................... Where twelve great windows blazon Arthur’s wars, And all the light that falls upon the board Streams through the twelve great battles of our King.” (HG 246, 248–50)

The frenzied Galahad announces his vision in a voice that is “‘shrilling’” (HG 289), like the battle clarions “shrilling unto blood” in “The Coming of Arthur” (CA 102). Accompanying the Grail in Galahad’s vision at the hermitage is a face that is “‘fiery’” and that “‘smote itself into the bread’” (HG 466–67).The fieriness and the smiting, as well as the Grail’s “blood-red” appearance (HG 473–76), are suggestive of battles. When Galahad crosses the “great black swamp” (HG 499) to reach the “spiritual city” (HG 526), the vanishing bridges are a point of contrast with the glorious battles of Gareth, who defeats two of his enemies on bridges. Sir Bors, though he is characterized by Arthur himself as a “loyal man and true” (HG 753), wanders from the Arthurian way in prioritizing vision over deeds, and the epiphany he attains implicitly criticizes the direction of his quest. Bors, overpowered and imprisoned by a remnant of the conquered pagans, sees the Grail in conjunction with a sign of the battle fury evinced by the clairvoyant, triumphant king in “The Coming of Arthur.” Bors sights the Grail “[a]cross the seven clear stars” of the Round Table (HG 689), a constellation Tennyson identified as “The Great Bear” (Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson 3. 483). Arthur’s name is believed to derive from the Welsh word for “bear,” arth, a tradition that links him with the shapeshifting bear-sarks. In “The Last Tournament” (LT), stars of the Great Bear are mentioned in the context of the savage battle wrath at Pelleas’s tower (LT 479).The stars Bors sees subtly recall the battlefield setting of Arthur’s astral vision, a setting which stands in stark and significant contrast to Bors’s prison cell, which as a symbol relates to the Idylls’s “hollow towers.” Clyde de L.Ryals brings a telling indictment against another aspiring mystic, Percivale, describing him as a failed knight who, unable to “distinguish himself in knightly ‘glory,’…eagerly turns to the Grail quest when the idea presents itself” (From the Great Deep 154). Percivale’s one moment of glory occurs in the send-off tourney, when, as he says, “‘a strength/Was in us from the vision’” (HG 333–34). On this occasion Percivale uses his spiritual strength in the field of action, and in doing so he stimulates the kind of enhanced vision that Arthur experiences—the true vision that Percivale eschews in his illusory quest: “And I was lifted up in heart, and thought Of all my late-shown prowess in the lists, How my strong lance had beaten down the knights,

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So many and famous names; and never yet Had heaven appeared so blue, nor earth so green, For all my blood danced in me…” (HG 361–66)

When Percivale turns to pursuing revelation as an end in itself, his wasted fighting power is reflected in the traditional battle imagery used to describe his hallucinations. His account of his approach to the spiritual city with Galahad (HG 489–539) contains references to water-courses, storm, lightning, blazing thunder, fire, shouting, roaring, floods, and a war-horse. Similarly, in Lancelot’s account of his own quest (HG 763– 849) we find swine, stormy winds and turbulent waters, lions, a sword, fire, and five references to “madness.” As the Grail knights pursue vision for its own sake and expend their force in chasing wandering fires, Pelleas, in “Pelleas and Ettare” (PE), pursues love for its own sake and attains only to the bestial condition of fiery hatred. He tells King Arthur, “‘I love,’” (PE 8), but just as the wandering fires of the Grail quest “possess no historically viable form” (Kozicki, Tennyson and Clio 138), Pelleas’s love has no viable object: “‘Where?/O where? I love thee, though I know thee not’” (PE 40–41). “Pelleas and Ettare” reverses the action of “Gareth and Lynette.” Whereas Gareth wins over the initially contemptuous Lynette, Pelleas becomes enthralled by Ettare, his sexual fanaticism corrupting Arthur’s conception of courtly love as instilling “the desire of fame” (G 479): “Behold me, Lady, A prisoner, and the vassal of thy will; And if thou keep me in thy donjon here, Content am I so that I see thy face But once a day: for I have sworn my vows, And thou hast given thy promise,…” (PE 232–37)

Pelleas’s “‘donjon’” calls to mind the “ruinous donjon” (BB 329) of Pellam. Disturbingly, Pelleas is willing to accept a scenario that resembles Merlin’s tragically enchanted condition, as it is described in “Merlin and Vivien”: The man so wrought on ever seemed to lie Closed in the four walls of a hollow tower, From which was no escape for evermore; And none could find that man for evermore, Nor could he see but him who wrought the charm Coming and going, and he lay as dead…(MV 206–211)

Pelleas resembles Merlin in his failure to use the power of the word to mitigate his passion. Pelleas’s bankruptcy of speech is conspicuous:

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Again she said, “O wild and of the woods, Knowest thou not the fashion of our speech? Or have the heavens but given thee a fair face, Lacking a tongue?” (PE 95–98)

Pelleas, as he reels back into the beast, acknowledges the waning activity of reason that his failure of language represents: “‘Fool, beast—he, she, or I? myself most fool; /Beast too, as lacking human wit—disgraced’” (PE 466–67). Immediately prior to these lines, he vents his wrath towards Ettare and Gawain in a passage (454–63) featuring the Homeric motifs of storm, fire, bellowing, screaming, earthquake, wind, and animals. The conclusion of “Pelleas and Ettare,” as J.M.Gray notes (Thro’ the Vision of the Night 46), provides an ironic reversal of the finale of the Aeneid.Whereas the helpless Turnus pleads for his life, only to be dispatched by Aeneas, the fallen Pelleas urges Lancelot to kill him, whereupon Lancelot spares his life. In contrast to Gareth, who demonstrates his chivalrous joy of battle by laughing when unhorsed by Lancelot, Pelleas’s reaction to the same mishap prompts Guinevere’s inquiry, “‘Hath the great heart of knighthood in thee failed/So far thou canst not bide, unfrowardly,/A fall from him?’” (PE 584–86). Pelleas’s blind, uncontrolled passion, which begins as love frenzy and develops into battle frenzy, results in a loss of name and fame, as indicated by his response to Lancelot, who asks, “‘What name hast thou/ That ridest here so blindly and so hard?’” “‘No name, no name,’” Pelleas shouts (PE 551–53). In “The Last Tournament,” where Pelleas becomes known as the Red Knight, an epithet indicative of the fiery passion that characterizes him,Arthur cannot remember his embittered adversary’s former name: “Arthur knew the voice; the face /Wellnigh was helmet-hidden, and the name/Went wandering somewhere darkling in his mind” (LT 454–56). Donald S.Hair’s assessment of this incident relates it to the heroic convention of earning one’s name by an exploit: “In the Idylls,Tennyson’s emphasis is not so much on the discovery of one’s true identity as it is on the making of it— as Arthur says, it is the ambition of every young knight ‘To win his honour and to make his name’ (LE 1351)—but if one’s name can be made, it can also be destroyed” (Tennyson’s Language 165). It is when Arthur has taken a company of his young knights to win their names by the quelling of Pelleas’s forces, that the Last Tournament takes place. As for those left to the “gracious pastime” (HG 324) of Camelot, their unexercised battle wrath explodes in lawless frenzy. The wild tournament takes place, predictably, during a storm (LT 153–55); it occasions roaring (LT 167) and the revelation that Modred resembles a “vermin” (LT 165). Lancelot, Arthur’s appointed arbiter, allows the riot to rage wantonly, because he does not speak (LT 161). He gazes on a “faded fire” (LT 157): the final, destructive sputtering of the knights’ fallow fire of God. Tristram

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acknowledges the ultimate origin of the savage outbreak: “‘…the heathen wars were o’er,/The life had. we sware but by the shell’” (LT 269–70). The weakening of the knights’ vows affects the King himself, who worries about the erosion of his authority (LT 112–25).When it comes time for him to harness the passion of his young fighters at the tower of the Red Knight, the dreadful voice of the conqueror at Mt. Badon is silent. Instead of shouting, “Ho!” when his troops all yearn to challenge Pelleas, Arthur “waved them back” (LT 436). His gesture recalls the charm “of waving hands” in “Merlin andVivien”: “Significantly enough,” writes John R.Reed, “the charm consists of ‘woven paces’ and ‘waving hands,’ but no words” (51).The lapse of Arthur’s “‘simple words of great authority’” (CA 260) redounds to a riotous display of fiery, bestial battle frenzy: …then the knights…roared And shouted and leapt down upon the fallen; There trampled out his face from being known, And sank his head in mire, and slimed themselves: Nor heard the King for their own cries, but sprang Through open doors, and swording right and left Men, women, on their sodden faces, hurled The tables over and the wines, and slew Till all the rafters rang with woman-yells, And all the pavement streamed with massacre: Then, echoing yell with yell, they fired the tower,…(LT 467–77)

Tennyson uses Ardiur’s reaction to heighten the contrast between this inhumane slaughter and the chivalrous, controlled aggression of the twelve great battles. After the battle of Mt. Badon, “in the heart of Arthur joy was lord” (CA 123), but after the massacre of the Red Knight’s forces, “in the heart of Arthur pain was lord” (LT 485). The tower of the Red Knight joins the “hollow tower” of Merlin and the cloisters of Pellam and Elaine as analogues of Achilles’s tent or of Calypso’s cave in Homer. In “Guinevere,” Tennyson uses the “hollow tower” motif once again as a sign of excessive, misspent passion (“Excess binds rather than liberates,” writes Ann C.Colley. “It locks people into hollow towers” [106]), and he alters Malory’s version of the story in order to do so. In Tennyson’s account of the entrapment of Lancelot and Guinevere, he “has changed the place of discovery from the queen’s chamber to a tower” (Gray, Thro’ theVision of the Night 20).The “‘nunnery walls’” (G 225) behind which Guinevere eventually takes refuge are yet another version of the same motif. Ann C.Colley compares Guinevere’s doom to that of Merlin: “[Merlin’s] end is prophetic of Guinevere’s. She too will be locked within the convent’s hollow walls, useless and barren” (102). The waving of Arthur’s hands over Guinevere’s head (G 580) recalls the charm that entrances Merlin.

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Guinevere’s retreat to a convent because of her ungovernable sexual passion demonstrates once again that “the recoil from passion is fully as dangerous as the passion itself” (Poston 203). In the heroic ethos of the Idylls, ruttishness and religiosity alike are culpable extremes because they compromise the power to achieve name and fame. Guinevere’s faithlessness to Arthur is on one level only a symbol of her failure to be “A woman in her womanhood as great/As he was in his manhood” (G 297–98). Even in the environment of the convent, she regrets not so much her sinfulness as her “‘name of scorn,’” and the “‘defeat of fame’” (G 622–23). Concomitant with her ungoverned passion, as with the untrammeled passion of battle wrath in the misty, final battle, is faulty vision: “‘It would have been my pleasure had I seen./ We needs must love the highest when we see it’” (G 654–55). Vision is also a prominent element of “The Passing of Arthur.” Arthur trains Bedivere to become the lone visionary who will carry the Arthurian torch beyond the frenzied melee in the mist. William E.Buckler comments on Bedivere’s “fortunate fall” of temporary disobedience: “…the degree to which Bedivere has gained access to the Arthurian world-apprehension brings him closer to Arthur in the final episode, where they ‘see’ as one—‘Then saw they how’ (361) and ‘they were ware’ (363)” (42). In order to chant mystic lays as a bard, Bedivere must master the fire of God that in the heroic tradition fills both warrior and poet alike. Bedivere sees the vision of the Lady of the Lake only when he performs an act evocative of the heroic age, an act that also represents the proper command over the heroic fire of battle.The casting of Excalibur into the mere partakes of the Germanic heroic tradition, as described by H.R.Ellis Davidson: “…the panoply of war—swords and mailcoats, shields and spears—must be offered to the god of war, cast into the swamps or the lakes…” (Gods and Myths 71). The runes on Excalibur, “‘Take me,’” and “‘Cast me away!’” (CA 302, 304), indicate the precarious balance maintained by an effective warrior, who must use his destructive power as needed without losing all detachment from it. In returning Excalibur to the water (which the Lady of the Lake, who takes the sword, has the power to walk on, or control), Bedivere ritualizes Arthur’s effective management of the fire of God. As a combination of weapon and work of art, Excalibur makes an effective symbol of the equivalent status of bard and warrior in the heroic tradition. In “The Passing of Arthur” Tennyson uses Excalibur to characterize aestheticism as antithet-ical to Arthur’s view of art, which is the same as that of Tennyson’s heroic “Old Chieftain,” who lauds “the united powers/Of battle and music” (13–14). Excalibur’s “Myriads of topaz-lights, and jacinth-work/Of subtlest jewelry” (PA 225–26) temporarily bedazzle Bedivere into becoming an effete aesthete. Bedivere, “‘like a girl/Valuing the giddy pleasure of the eyes’” (PA 296), at first feels that Excalibur should be “‘kept,/Stored in some treasure-house of mighty kings’” (PA 268–69). Finally, he closes his eyes to the sword’s ornamentation, “‘lest,’” as he says, “‘the gems/Should blind my purpose”’ (PA 320–21), and performs his duty to the King. Though he at first thinks the hilt of the sword a “‘miracle’” (PA 324), when he prioritizes duty

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over beauty he beholds the truly miraculous Lady of the Lake. Bedivere’s temporarily errant approach to art parallels the instances of unheroic abstention from action in the Idylls. Bedivere resembles the Grail knights in his valuing of “‘the giddy pleasure of the eyes’” for its own sake, and he evokes the “hollow tower” motif in his wish to store and hoard Excalibur. Arthur’s scathing censure of Bedivere, which recalls his criticism of the Grail quest, implicitly defends his own use of the beautiful Excalibur not to please the eyes of many men but to beat his foemen down. The final Idyll concludes with a flourish of heroic allusion.The reference to the “weird” rhyme foretelling Arthur’s fate (“‘From the great deep to the great deep he goes’” [PA 444–45]) evokes the Anglo-Saxon “wyrd,” or “fate,” a concept which Bertha Phillpotts characterizes as crucial to the heroic philosophy: “[The philosophy of the Anglo-Saxons] depends equally on the conception of Fate and on the conception of Fame. Neither can be taken away without shattering the web of thought” (6). As J.M.Gray and Christopher Ricks have documented, Tennyson’s description (PA 427ff.) of Arthur’s destination, Avilion, is densely packed with borrowings from the Iliad (9.151) and the Odyssey (4.566ff., 6.42, 10.195). “Tennyson’s Avalon,” observes Gray, “is a subtle blend of many heroic traditions” (Thro’ the Vision of the Night 166n.45). One allusion to the Aeneid that has been neglected by both Gray and Ricks, and also by Wilfred Mustard, is found in lines 463–65, “…and saw,/ Straining his eyes beneath an arch of hand,/Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the King,…” The expression, “saw…or thought he saw,” echoes Virgil’s “Aut videt, aut vidisse putat” (Aeneid 6. 454), which Allen Mandelbaum translates, “either sees or thinks he sees” (147). In addition to Tennyson, Milton (PL 1.783–84) and Wordsworth (The Prelude 8.716–17, 1805; 8.565, 1850) borrow the same Virgilian expression. Arthur’s disappearance into light (PA 468) is relevant to Homer’s use of light as a metonym for victory in the Iliad (8.282, 15.741, 16.95, 18.102; see Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition, 121). In spite of the tragic end of his kingdom,Arthur triumphs in attaining the honor a traditional warrior seeks. His victories in the twelve great battles make his “‘name and glory cling / To all high places like a golden cloud/For ever’” (PA 53–55).This image is comparable to another Tennysonian symbol of the substantive quality of glorious action, the glorious banner of England streaming aloft in “The Defence of Lucknow.” William E.Buckler relates the final tableau of “The Passing of Arthur” to the Homeric tradition: [The Idylls’] ultimate image of human conscientiousness is that of Bedivere standing high and alone, under his “arch of hand” straining his eyes to see and, because he stares into the sunrise, not being sure that what he sees are not simply his own eye-specks. This is an image eminently Homeric, perennially Odyssean, and Tennyson’s myth of the return at the subtlest literary level is played out as a return to Homer. (313)

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*** This book has attempted to show that at the subtlest literary level almost all of Tennyson’s poetry dealing with martial subjects, from “The Old Sword” and “TheVale of Bones” to Maud and the Idylls of the King, is a return to Homer and the heroic tradition. In “The Passing of Arthur” Tennyson’s myth of the return comprises the return of Excalibur to the mere, and Excalibur itself marks a return of sorts to Tennyson’s first extant war poem, “The Old Sword.” The traditional background of Tennyson’s battle pieces provides, as we have seen in this and in the preceding chapter, a context for accentuating the heroic element in Maud and in the Idylls of the King.The greater multivalence of the two copious and comprehensive works, meanwhile, helps to amplify the meaningfulness of the sparer battle poems. Our ready acceptance of the figurative quality of Excalibur, for example, can send us back to “The Old Sword” more receptive to the wider implications of its corroded blade.The rusting brand suggests, as Excalibur does in the Idylls, the “double-edged” nature of a warrior’s fury. As an icon of regimented battle wrath, Excalibur represents the ideal realized in Tennyson’s war poetry by the Duke of Wellington, by Sir Richard Grenville, by Sir Ralph of “The Tourney,” by the Light and Heavy Brigades, and by the British forces at Lucknow.Tennyson’s heroes who can “take” but not “cast away” the primal force include Nadir Shah, the Captain, Boädicea, and the speaker of Maud. As a work of art suitable for an arsenal, Excalibur helps to relate Tennyson’s great epic to his least reputable, incendiary battle pieces. With poems such as “Exhortation to the Greeks,” “Britons, GuardYour Own,” and “The Third of February, 1852,” Tennyson dramatizes the ability of the artist to inspire the same sort of valiant deeds he commemorates. The desire of Merlin (Tennyson’s archetype of the poet in the Idylls and in “Merlin and the Gleam”—and it is appropriate here to recall Tennyson’s signatures to two of the 1852 newspaper poems) for “‘life and use’” (MV 372) is Tennyson’s desire for his verse: And here the Singer for his Art Not all in vain may plead “The song that nerves a nation’s heart, Is in itself a deed.” (“Epilogue” to “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade” 77–80)

John R. Reed recognizes the celebration of poetry’s inspirational power in the Idylls: “Poetry resembles Arthur’s music, or the song of the hopeful young knight, in the tale of the hart with the golden horns, that prompted men to action” (183–84). In general, heroic battle poetry prompts men to action by inspiring in its readers renewed vigor to attack the difficulties of their own lives. The horrors of warfare epitomize the worst that life has to offer, and the joy of battle exhibited by the warriors of heroic poetry represents the ability of the human spirit to stand undaunted

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in the fell clutch of disastrous, though not necessarily military, circumstance.Tennyson’s romantic forerunners realized that in their own lives there was “no want /Of aspirations which have been—of foes/To wrestle with and victory to complete” (Wordsworth, “Home at Grasmere” 945–47). Blake describes his poetry as “the march of long resounding strong heroic Verse/Marshalld in order for the day of Intellectual Battle” (The Four Zoas, 1.2–3). In the dedication to Laon and Cythna, Shelley writes that he “Wrought linked armour for [his] soul, before/It might walk forth to war among mankind” (41–42).Though in the Iliad Homer writes in gruesome detail about a real war, he invites an interpretation of battle as a metaphor for the inevitable conflicts and struggles of life. Early in Book 14, Odysseus addresses Agamemnon: Our lot from youth to age was given us by Zeus: danger and war to wind upon the spindle of our years until we die to the last man. (Fitzgerald 332)

It is easy to read Odysseus’s speech as more than an assessment of a particular situation; it serves as a philosophical statement of universal applicability. Likewise, Sarpedon’s realization in Book 12 that “a thousand shapes of death surround us,/ and no man can escape them” pertains to us all, as does, in a figurative sense, his corollary resolution: “Let us attack” (Fitzgerald 291). In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus finds relevant examples for modern life in the torments of the Homeric underworld and in the presumable courage and joy of the tireless boulder bearer. The battlefield courage and joy in the ancient epics, and in Tennyson’s poetry as well, are no less applicable to our own “allotted field” (HG 904) of “fruitful strifes and rivalries of peace” (“Dedication” to the Idylls 37). Tennyson enhances the relevance of his battle poetry in such a way that he too invites a metaphorical interpretation of his military accounts. In early works such as “Gods Denunciations against Pharaoh-Hophra” and “Babylon,” Tennyson draws on the Old Testament tradition of a sword-wielding Jehovah, a tradition that influenced the martial metaphors of Christian literature. “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade,” “Boädicea,” the “Morte d’Arthur,” and even the Idylls of the King itself are all pre-sented inside “frames” that help to make the poems more relevant to civilian life. In “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Tennyson emphasizes the effect of the charge on the civilian world by repeating the line, “All the world wondered” (31, 52). The hero of “Sir Galahad” stands as an example for the readers of heroic poetry, by virtue of his adaptation of the heroic norm to a non-aggressive field of endeavor. The “Wellington Ode” establishes a connection between the “peoples voice” (142, 144, 146, 151), which will preserve the honor of the Duke, and the “deep voices” (67, 69) of the cannons, with which Wellington “wrought,/ Guarding realms and kings from shame” (67–68).As the Duke has “other nobler work to do/Than when he fought at Waterloo” (256–57), the people,Tennyson’s ode suggests,

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should follow Wellington’s “great example” (220) and pursue their own “path of duty” as the “way to glory” (224). By smoothing Sir Richard Grenville’s rough edges in “The Revenge,” Tennyson makes him a more appealing hero, with the result that Tennyson’s account of Grenville’s courage better serves as an inspiration to the readers of the poem. Part of the problem for the hero of Maud seems to be his life of privilege, in which only a love affair or warfare relieves the self-absorption of his passionate heart. Most of us, however, can “fight for the good” (3.57) in our daily lives without enlisting under a literal “banner of battle unrolled” (3.42), and the speaker’s sense of salvation through the war effort can inspire us to “embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assigned” (3.59) in our own lives of ample struggle. In its potential to inspire a renewed affirmation of life, the Homeric element in the Tennyson canon resembles the martial song of Maud, but the criticism of Tennyson’s own martial songs is often reminiscent of the initial reaction to Maud’s song by her unbalanced lover: Silence, beautiful voice! Be still, for you only trouble the mind With a joy in which I cannot rejoice, A glory I shall not find. (Maud 1.180–83)

For the critics who see Tennyson’s martial poetry as backwards and barbaric, the poetic tradition of using battle as a symbol for “mental fight” seems to carry little exculpatory weight. While the glories of battle often appear on the perimeters of Tennyson’s pictures, his center of focus is usually rusting swords, vales of bones, or failing kingdoms; however, his fidelity to the ancient bards in his balanced, cautionary depictions of warfare is also unavailing with most of his calumniators. It may be that the objection to Tennyson’s use of war as a subject is really an objection to his ideas on the proper function of poetry. His belief in poets as the trumpets which sing to battle, even figurative battle, is uncongenial to the modern disdain of Victorian uplift. Tennyson, as theVictorian bard who intrudes the heroic tradition into our modern milieu, resembles his own Sir Bedivere, “‘Among new men, strange faces, other minds’” (PA 406). Alan Sinfeld recognizes “a speaker very different from ourselves” (7) in Tennyson’s Crimean War poetry, and Christopher Ricks comments that the courage of the Light Brigade “is not ours” (Tennyson 344).Whether the antiquation ofVictorian values reflects well or poorly on the modern world of letters is irrelevant to Tennyson, who, as Ernest Dowson recognizes, “joins his elders of the lyre and bay,/Led by the Mantuan” (“The Passing of Tennyson” 15–16).Tennyson’s war poetry, by virtue of its being in many ways more Virgilian than Victorian, is of the ages.The “faint Homeric echoes” of Tennyson’s battle songs may win him few fresh laurels, but his lyre, in the words of his Tiresias, “Is ever sound-ing in heroic ears/Heroic hymns…” (“Tiresias” 173–74).

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Index

Adams, Michael C.C, 3, 8, 15, 127 Adkin, Mark, 102, 113 Aeschylus, 39 Alexander, Michael, 6, 75–79 Alexander the Great, 29, 30, 31, 35 Allingham, William, 137 Anderson, William S., 17 Andrews, Alfred Carleton, 36 Aristotle, 140 Nichomachean Ethics, 95, 123 Arnold, Matthew, 70, 71 “On Translating Homer,” 70 Aviram, Amittai, 67, 68 Barker, George, 3 “Battle of Brunanburh, The,” 6, 9, 77–79 “Battle of Maldon, The,” 77, 90 Baum, Paull F., 7, 63, 79, 97 Bennett, James R., 8, 126, 135 Bespaleff, Rachel, 19, 23 Blake, William, 116, 164 Four Zoas,The, 164 “Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The,” 116 Bloom, Harold, 3, 129 Book of Leinster, 19 Bosworth, Joseph, 75–78 Bowra, C.M., 13, 14, 15, 17, 42, 54, 78, 96, 97, 101, 107, 112, 114, 122

Brashear, William R., 139, 140 Brook, Stopford A., 126 Brookfield, William, 14 Browning, Robert “Herve Riel,” 81 Buckler, William E., 138–139, 140, 150, 153, 161, 162 Buckley, Jerome H., 13, 45, 63–64, 97, 104 Burke, Edmund, 63, 64 Philosophical Inquiry, A, 62, 64 Bush, Douglas, 4, 12 Byron, George Gordon, 6th Lord, 23, 87 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 23, 87 “Destruction of Sennacherib, The,” 87 Hebrew Melodies, 87 “Jephtha’s Daughter,” 87 “Song of Saul Before His Last Battle,” 87 Camus, Albert, 8, 164 Myth of Sisyphus,The, 164 Carlyle, Jane, 10 Carlyle, Thomas, 3, 13, 15, 53, 81, 127, 142 On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, 13, 18, 24, 33, 54, 145 Past and Present, 53

181

182 Carr, Arthur J., 3 Catullus, 66 Cervantes, Miguel de Don Quixote, 107 Chadwick, Owen, 12 Chapman, George, 73 Chatterton, Thomas, 105 Song to Ælla, 105 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 8 Canterbury Tales,The, 5 Chesterton, G.K., 12 Claudian, 36 In Eutropium, 36 Cochrane, C.N., 139 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 52, 56 “Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The,” 52, 55, 56 Colley, Ann C., 9, 120, 126, 155, 160 Collins, Winston, 127 Cowper, William, 67, 70 “Boädicea, An Ode,” 67 Culler, A.Dwight, 13, 126, 143, 153, 154, 156 Cyrus, 29–31, 44, 45 Daniel, Samuel “Ulysses and the Siren,” 88–89 Dante, 139 Darwin, Erasmus Botanic Garden,The, 100 Davidson, H.R.Ellis, 17, 18, 19, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 33, 39, 41, 43, 54, 64, 65, 92, 151, 161 Day, Aidan, 9 Dickens, Charles, 53, 127 Dimock, Jr., G.E., 125, 130 Donne, John “Crosse,The,” 55 Dowson, Ernest, 165 “Passing of Tennyson,The,” 165 Drayton, Michael, 105 Ballad of Agincourt, 104 Dryden, John, 5 Dumézil, Georges, 17, 19, 135

Index Durham, Margery Stricker, 97 Ebbatson, Roger, 3, 8, 16 Edison, Thomas, 4, 10, 69, 108, 113, 134, 156 Eggers, J.Philip, 139, 140, 153 Egil’s Saga, 151 Elijah, 38 Elisha, 38 Emerson, Ralph Waldo “Heroism,” 42 Estrich, Robert M., 6, 7, 80–82 Euripides Phoenissae, 9 Exodus, 35 Ezekiel, 25–26, 37 FitzGerald, Edward, 46, 47, 96 Fitzgerald, Robert, 22, 72, 74, 109, 121, 130, 164 Fletcher, John, 47 Fordyce, C.J., 66 Forster, John, 104 Freud, Sigmund, 49, 60, 106 Froissart, Jean, 63 Chronicles,The, 63 Frye, Northrop, 116 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 127 Gladstone, William E., 138 Gray, J.M., 138, 139, 141, 152, 154, 159, 160, 162 Gray, Thomas “Bard,The,” 32, 34 “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” 42 Greene, Thomas, 18, 145 Guest, Edwin, 75–78 Hainsworth, J.B., 22, 34, 147 Hair, Donald S., 16, 147, 152, 153, 159 Hallam, A.H., 6, 14, 46, 97 Hamilton, Edith, 90, 95, 108, 112, 114, 123, 135

Index Hatto, A.T., 22 Hellstrom, Ward, 126 Henley, William Ernest, 23 “Song of the Sword,The,” 23 Herbert, Sir Thomas, 12 Herodotus, 44 Heyne, C.G., 10 Hill, Jr., Robert W., 97 Hixson, Jerome C., 75 Homer, 4, 6, 8, 11, 12, 13, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 41, 44, 47, 50, 51, 53, 55, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 69, 71, 72, 73, 75, 77, 78, 81, 83, 86, 90, 1, 93, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 101, 102, 106, 108, 109, 110, 112, 119, 120, 122, 124, 125, 129, 131, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 152, 153, 159, 160, 163, 164, 165 Iliad, 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 17, 18, 20, 22, 23, 26, 27, 37, 42, 43, 47, 60, 61, 65, 66, 69– 75, 78, 79, 81, 91,98,99, 109, 119, 121, 124, 125, 129, 130, 131, 135, 138, 140, 141, 142, 146, 162, 164 Odyssey, 12, 16, 20, 42, 125, 130, 162 Horace, 10, 12,19,88,89,96,112 Epistles, 123, 140 Odes, 19,88,96, 112, 123 Hughes, Linda K., 49, 64, 119, 126 Hughes, Merritt Y., 31, 146 Huizinga, Johan Homo Ludens, 23 Hunt, J.William, 18, 108, 140 Hunt, Leigh, 6, 45 Hutton, R.H., 45 Huxley, Francis, 17, 33, 45

183 Jowett, Benjamin, 12, 13 Jung, Carl, 124 Juvenal, 10 Kass, Leon, 109 Kaufmann, Walter, 18, 26, 27, 78, 108, 125, 129, 131, 140 Keats, John Endymion, 92 “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” 48 Ker, W.P., 139 Killham, John, 8, 122, 125, 126, 128 Kincaid, James R., 7, 8, 9, 47, 51, 52, 54, 79, 80, 89, 125, 126, 128, 139 II Kings, 38 Kingsley, Charles, 127 Alton Locke, 120 Kipling, Rudyard, 3 Kitto, H.D.F., 26, 53, 54, 78, 81, 95, 123, 125, 129 Knowles, James, 69 Kozicki, Henry, 5, 9, 21–22, 23, 64, 140, 143, 144, 147, 152, 158 Landor, Walter Savage, 93 Lang, Andrew, 138 Lang, Cecil Y., 15, 97, 120 Langbaum, Robert, 3 Lash, John, 16, 19 Lattimore, Richmond, 60, 72, 74, 75, 78, 91, 109, 131 Leaf, Walter, 12 Levi, Peter, 70, 85, 104, 105 Lewes, G.H., 96 Leyden, John “Ode on Visiting Flodden,” 25 Longinus, 68, 146 Lyall, Sir Alfred Lyell, Charles, 100

Isaiah, 43, 44, 45, 88 Jenkyns, Richard, 8–9, 16, 139, 142 Jeremiah, 44 Joel, 35

Macpherson, James, 38, 149 Malory, Sir Thomas, 146, 156, 160 Mandelbaum, Allen, 33, 98, 111, 155, 162 Mann, Robert James, 8, 127, 128

184 Markley, A.A., 4, 12 Martial, 50, 138 Martin, Robert Bernard, 5, 8, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 21, 50, 74, 89–90, 97, 99 Maurice, F.D., 127 McGann, Jerome J., 7, 103, 106, 107, 108 McKay, Kenneth M., 25, 29 Milnes, Richard Monckton, 105 Milton, John, 29, 30, 31, 70, 86, 87, 146, 162 Paradise Lost, 16, 32, 36, 37, 86, 138, 146, 162 Paradise Regained, 29, 30, 31 MLA International Bibliography, 5 Montalvo, Garcia Rodríguez de Amadis de Gaula, 47 Murray, Gilbert, 125 Mustard, Wilfred P., 4, 11, 139, 141, 162 Napoleon I ,11 Napoleon III, 90, 91, 95 Nebuchadrezzar, 37, 38 Nero, 32, 34 Nicolson, Harold, 3, 6, 7, 10, 46, 63, 79 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 33, 40, 139 Birth of Tragedy,The, 116 “Homer’s Contest,” 33 Human, All-Too-Human, 33 Nitchie, Elizabeth, 12, 19 Norton Anthology of English Literature,The, 3, 105 O’Neill, James Norman, 8, 126 Orwell, George, 104 Ossian, 38, 39, 41, 43, 48 “Carthon,” 149 “Croma,” 42, 94 “Song of the Five Bards,The,” 38, 41, 42, 43, 94 Owen, Wilfred, 15 Paden, W.D., 11, 21, 43, 47, 87 Parry, Milman, 73

Index Passage, Charles E., 19, 88 Pattison, Robert, 4, 8, 11, 12, 128, 137, 138 Pennington, W.H., 104 Phillpotts, Bertha, 162 Pindar, 12 Pinion, F.B., 6, 45, 57, 59, 89 Pitt,Valerie, 7, 13, 16, 58, 79, 85, 92, 97, 105, 114, 125, 126, 127 Platizky, Roger S., 136 Poston, Lawrence, 152, 161 Pope, Alexander, 11, 70 Priestley, F.E.L., 45, 139 Putnam, Michael C.J., 140, 146 Racine, Jean Alexandre le Grand, 35 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 80 Rawnsley, R.D.B., 12 Redpath, Theodore, 4, 6, 70, 73, 79 Reed, John R., 144, 150, 160, 163 Ricks, Christopher, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 21, 22, 25, 26, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37, 40, 43, 47, 50, 51, 55, 58, 59, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 71, 72, 76, 77, 80, 81, 86, 87, 91, 92, 94, 96, 97, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 113, 123, 127, 130, 137, 138, 145, 146, 147, 149, 154, 156, 157, 162, 165 Robson, W.W., 12 Robertson, J.M., 51, 56 Rollins, Charles, 43 Rosenberg, John, 139, 142 Ruskin, John, 127 Ryals, Clyde de L., 5, 13, 57, 142, 157 Sallust Conspiracy of Catiline,The, 87 Jugurthine War,The, 87 Sassoon, Siegfried, 15 Schein, Seth L., 17, 19, 22, 23, 72 Scott, Patrick, 75 Scott, Sir Walter, 11, 19, 40 Harold the Dauntless, 19

Index Lady of the Lake,The, 25 Lay of the Last Minstrel,The, 40 Marmion, 47 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 47, 48 Selby, John, 102 Shakespeare, William Hamlet, 40, 41, 124 Henry IV Part I, 28 Henry V, 35, 37 King Lear, 123, 151 Macbeth, 108, 123 Shannon, Edgar F., 8, 15, 103, 120 Sharma, Tika Ram, 13, 57 Shaw, W.David, 97, 99 Shelley, P.B., 14, 87, 164 Laon and Cythna, 164 Sinfeld, Alan, 127, 165 Sjoestedt, M.L., 17 Skallagrimsson, Egil, 39, 151 Solomon, Stanley J., 145 Spedding, James, 59 Spenser, Edmund, 47 Sperber, Hans, 6, 7, 80–82 Spiller, Brian, 70 Staines, David, 57, 139 Steiner, George, 72 Steytler, Charles, 9 Suetonius Lives of the Caesars, 34 Swinburne, A.C., 7 Tennyson, Alfred “Achilles over the Trench,” 20, 69, 72–73, 147 “Armageddon,” 11 “Audley Court,” 71 “Babylon,” 20, 43–45, 142, 147, 164 “Ballad of Oriana,The,” 6, 20, 21, 45–50, 61, 99, 140, 142, 149 “Battle of Brunanburh,” 10, 20, 75–79, 80, 114, 148 “Boädicea,” 6, 10, 20, 63–69, 72, 80, 141, 142, 143, 144, 147, 164 “Britons, GuardYour Own,” 7, 20, 90–91, 93, 141, 143, 154, 163

185 “Captain, The,” 6, 20, 51–56, 62, 81, 111 “Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava,The,” 7, 8, 10, 13, 20, 60, 75, 85, 109–113, 115, 148, 156, 163, 164 “Charge of the Light Brigade,The,” 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 20, 85, 89, 97, 102–110, 139, 164 “Crossing the Bar,” 81 “Dedicatory Poem to the Princess Alice,” 20, 85, 115–116 “Defence of Lucknow,The,” 7, 20, 85, 114–116, 141, 142, 147, 162 “De Profundis,” 81 “Devil and the Lady, The,” 5 “Druid’s Prophecies,The,” 20, 32–34, 37, 38, 39, 141 “Epic,The,” 138 “Epilogue,” 13, 20, 60, 75, 110–112, 114, 144, 163 “Exhortation to the Greeks,” 20, 85, 86–87, 89, 163 “Expedition of Nadir Shah into Hindostan,The,” 20, 34–36, 141 “God’s Denunciations against PharoahHophra,” 20, 37–38, 80, 141, 142, 164 “Hail Briton!” 52, 53 “Hands All Round!” 7, 10, 20, 93–94, 96, 141, 154 “Harp, Harp, the Voice of Cymry,” 10 “Havelock,” 109 Idylls of the king, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 20, 21, 47, 58, 68, 91, 96, 136, 137–164 “Balin and Balan,” 141, 142, 151–153, 154, 158 ”Coming of Arthur,The,” 95, 139, 141–147, 148, 154, 155, 157, 160, 161 “Dedication,” 68, 142, 164 “Garath and Lynette,” 98, 139, 145, 147–148, 150, 158

186 “Geraint and Enid,” 148–151 “Guinevere,” 144, 145, 147, 160–161 “Holy Grail,The,” 56, 58, 59, 61, 144, 153, 155, 156–158, 159, 164 “Lancelot and Elaine,” 141, 142, 149, 154, 155–156 “Last Tournament,The,” 157, 159–160 “Marriage of Geraint,The,” 145, 148–151, 156 “Merlin and Vivien,” 143, 135–155, 160, 163 “Passing of Arthur,The,” 11, 58, 81, 115, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146, 148, 156, 161–162, 163, 165 “Pellaes and Ettare,” 158–159 “To the Queen,” 137 “Ilion, Ilion,” 145 “I loving Freedom for herself,” 52 In Memoriam, 97, 100, 112 “Kraken,The,” 74 “Little bosom not yet cold,” 9 “Locksley Hall,” 10, 120 “Lotus Eaters,The,” 31 “Love and Duty,” 57, 71 “Love thou thy land,” 52 “Lucretius,” 152 “Mariana,” 46 Maud, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 20, 21, 47, 49, 53, 91, 117, 119–136, 140, 141, 143, 146, 147, 151, 152, 153, 163, 165 “Merlin and the Gleam,” 154, 163 “Mithridates Presenting Berenice with the Cup of Poison,” 21 “Montenegro,” 7, 9 “Morte d’Arthur,” 164 Mungo the American, 11 “Northern Farmer,The,” 10 “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington,” 7, 10, 20, 85, 96–102, 105, 109, 110, 142, 164

Index “Of old sat Freedom,” 52 “Oh! Ye wild winds that roar and rave,” 20, 38, 41–43, 94, 147, 148 “Old Chieftain,The,” 20, 38–41, 60, 62, 94, 148, 161 “Old Sword,The,” 5, 20, 21–25, 26, 120, 147, 148, 163 “Persia,” 5–6, 20, 29–32, 65 Poems by Two Brothers, 5, 21, 50, 138 Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, 6 “Poet,The,” 60 “Poet’s Mind,The,” 60 “Poland,” 7, 16 Princess,The, 9, 41, 61, 62, 63 “Prologue to General Hamley,” 8, 20, 110–112 “Recollections of the Arabian Nights,” 45 “Revenge,The,” 6, 7, 20, 51, 79–83, 114, 141, 142, 165 “Rizpah,” 120 “Sailor Boy,The,” 120 “Sir Galahad,” 6, 20, 56–61, 99, 142, 144, 164 “Specimen of a Translation of the Iliad,” 6, 20, 69–72 “St. Agnes’ Eve,” 57, 58, 59 “St. Simeon Stylites,” 57, 58 “Suggested by Reading an Article in a Newpaper,” 20, 94–96, 154 “Third of February, 1852,The,” 20, 87, 91–93, 94, 96, 141, 143, 149, 163 “Timbuctoo,” 11 “Time:An Ode,” 21 “Tiresias,” 71, 165 “Tithonus,” 71 “Tourney,The,” 20, 61–63, 99, 142, 148, 163 “Ulysses,” 22, 70, 98, 109, 135 “Vale of Bones,The,” 5, 20, 25–29, 34, 49, 80, 140, 163 “Voyage,The,” 53 “What Thor Said to the Bard,” 10

Index “Written during the Convulsions in Spain,” 20, 85, 87–89, 147 Tennyson, Charles (A.T.’s grandson), 10, 12, 14, 16, 46, 58, 79, 85, 89, 96, 102 Tennyson, Hallam, 21, 52, 75–78, 91, 137, 147 Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, 9, 10–11, 12, 13, 14, 52, 59, 69, 81, 91, 93, 104, 111, 124, 137 Tennyson d’Eyncourt, Charles, 103 Theocritus, 12, 137, 138, 139, 149 Idylls, 138, 149 Thomas, Paul Edmund, 148 Thomson, Alastair W., 7, 45, 46, 79, 97, 99 Thompson, Elizabeth Southerdon, 104 Tolkien, J.R.R., 90, 108 Torrijos, José Maria, 14 Tuckerman, Frederick Goddard, 104 Turner, Paul, 8, 12, 14, 15, 59, 63, 64, 120, 124, 138, 139, 140, 146 Twain, Mark Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 46 Vanden Bossche, Chris R., 119, 126 Van Dyke, Henry, 5, 6, 127 Virgil, 4, 10, 11, 12, 18, 19, 31, 47, 61, 63, 91, 99, 106, 121, 138, 139,

187 141, 156, 162, 165 Aeneid, 4, 5, 16, 17, 18, 20, 22, 27, 31, 33, 41, 47, 63, 66, 91, 98, 99, 111, 135, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 145, 146, 155, 159, 162 Waddington, Patrick, 85, 104 Wellington, Duke of, 11, 96–102, 147, 163 Whitman, Cedric H., 17, 18, 22, 60, 61, 79, 101, 102, 162 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 51 Williams, R.D., 17, 19 Wilson, John, 6, 46 Wolseley, Garnet, 127 Woodham-Smith, Cecil, 102, 106, 108, 113 Wordsworth,William, 25, 81, 100, 101, 162 “Home at Grasmere,” 164 “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” 101 Prelude,The, 162 “Tintern Abbey,” 25 “To Enterprise,” 100 Yeats, W.B., 15, 62 Explorations 62 Zola, Émile, 81