Poetry Speaks : Hear Great Poets Read Their Work from Tennyson to Plath

by Paschen, Elise

• ISBN13: 9781570717208
• ISBN10: 1570717206
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-10-01
• Publisher: Sourcebooks Inc

Summary

Superb, accessible...A unique and essental purchase. --School Library Journal The most ambitious, comprehensive and innovative poetry project to be published in years, Poetry Speaks combines the significant poetry of the last two with the authors themselves reading their poetry on audio CD. Poets range from Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot and Dorothy Parker to Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath and Gwendolyn Brooks.

Excerpts

Chapter One

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

1809-1892

b. Somersby, England

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, probably the most popular English poet of his day, was born the fourth of twelve children on August 6, 1809. The financial comfort of the Tennyson household was precarious. Tennyson's father, rector of a local church, practically disowned by his wealthy family, appears to have taken recourse to alcohol and drugs. As an escape from this dark atmosphere, Tennyson turned to writing poetry at the age of eight.

    In 1827, Tennyson published Poems by Two Brothers , a compilation of poems written by Tennyson and his older brother, Charles, and a few written by his brother Frederick. That same year, Tennyson enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he continued to write poetry winning the 1828 Chancellor's Gold Medal for his poem "Timbuctoo." While at Cambridge, he joined the Apostles, an exclusive intellectual society, and became acquainted with Arthur Hallam, another brilliant Victorian man of letters who was to become Tennyson's dearest friend and perhaps his greatest inspiration. In 1830, Tennyson published the volume, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical , to universal acclaim, but soon after began a decline. In 1831, his father died and left his family to cope with numerous debts, forcing Tennyson to withdraw from Trinity College and return home. He published another volume, Poems , in 1832, but it received mostly unfavorable reviews. Then, in 1833, Hallam died unexpectedly while traveling with his father. Tennyson's grief, poverty, and family problems (his brother Edward was committed to a mental asylum the same year Hallam died) conspired to distract Tennyson from the literary world, and though he continued to write, he published nothing for the rest of the decade. During this time, Tennyson attempted to court Emily Sellwood, the daughter of a family friend of the Hallams. Tennyson and Sellwood were engaged briefly in 1838, nine years after Arthur Hallam introduced the two, but they were officially separated in 1840 for financial reasons. Caught in a web of misfortunes, Tennyson had reached his life's low point.

    Prospects improved in 1842, when Tennyson's friends convinced him to publish the two-volume Poems . The book was a success and helped stabilize Tennyson's finances as well as his spirits. However, he chose to invest nearly all of his money in a business venture that failed and he lost essentially everything. In 1845, he received a government pension based on his literary accomplishments and financial need. In 1847, he published the book-length poem, The Princess , to great acclaim, and three years later, his finances were finally stable enough for him to marry Emily Sellwood. In 1850, he published In Memoriam , a brilliant lyric sequence memorializing Hallam, and the poem established Tennyson as the greatest poet of the day. Few were surprised when he was appointed Poet Laureate after William Wordsworth's death.

    While Poet Laureate, Tennyson lived happily with his wife and published such works as Maud, and Other Poems , "Charge of the Light Brigade," and Idylls of the King , all of which maintained or enhanced his reputation while helping shape Victorian tastes. In 1883, he was granted a barony and a seat in the House of Lords by the crown, the first person ever to receive such a position based merely on literary prowess. Tennyson died peacefully at his home on October 6, 1892, and was buried in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey.

Anthony Hecht on Alfred, Lord Tennyson

And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep, In blanchéd linen, smooth, and lavendered ...

--Keats

Her limbs are delicate as an eyelid,

Love has blinded him with tears ...

--Yeats

Music that gentlier on the spirit lies

Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes ...

--Tennyson

Here are three eyelid poets (of the three, Tennyson was the most enamoured of the word), all aiming at the same sense of delicacy, beautiful softness, and vulnerability. Yeats might well have had Keats and Tennyson lurking somewhere in the storages of his mind. The three have more than eyelids in common: they were all, at least at some points in their careers, lullingly musical in their commerce with the English language.

    In his biography of Auden, Humphrey Carpenter reports that the poet, "began editing a selection of Tennyson's poetry for a New York publisher; in his introduction to the volume, he wrote of Tennyson: `He had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet; he was also undoubtedly the stupidest.' This earned the comment from T.S. Eliot that if Auden had been a better scholar he would have known many stupider."

    One must puzzle about Auden's accusation. Tennyson's biographer, Robert Bernard Martin, reports in connection with the poet's student years at Cambridge that, "Though he was no true intellectual he early cast his lot with those who were," meaning The Apostles, among others. But Martin also declares, "His instincts were deeply conservative, but otherwise tended to confuse political thought with xenophobic patriotism," which Auden would have deplored; but it is worth adding that

Auden had little sympathy with the moods of nostalgia and regret that characterize so much of Tennyson's most beautiful lyrics.

When Thomas Hardy wished to strike the note of forlorn abandonment, he summons Tennyson by name, and slyly echoes him:

The bower we shrined to Tennyson,

Gentlemen,

Is roof-wrecked; damps there drip upon

Sagged seats, the creeper-nails are rust,

The spider is sole denizen;

Even she who voiced those rhymes is dust,

Gentlemen!

Surely those rusty nails recall the opening of "Mariana":

With blackest moss the flower-pots

Were thickly crusted, one and all;

The rusted nails fell from the knots

That held the pear to the gable-wall.

But Tennyson could convey many moods, from the heroic ("Ulysses") to the lethargic ("The Lotus-Eaters") to the neurotic ("Maud" and "Saint Simeon Stylites"). I want here to reflect upon one of his most beautiful, erotic, and languorous songs from The Princess , "Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal":

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;

Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;

Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font.

The fire-fly wakens; waken thou with me.

Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,

And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,

And all thy heart lies open unto me.

Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves

A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,

And slips into the bosom of the lake.

So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip

Into my bosom and be lost in me.

    Our finest Tennyson critic, Christopher Ricks, observes of this poem, "Tennyson succeeds in the hardest task of all: distinguishing love from lust in erotic poetry." He also informed me that the poem is a species of Ghazal, and some of its leading images and details--crimson and white petals, cypress and palace, peacock, stars, and lilies--are commonly to be found in Persian love poetry; and while Tennyson assured a questioner that he knew no Persian, one of his close friends was Edward FitzGerald, translator of The Rubaiyat .

    Tennyson was rarely careless (he was one of the most scrupulous of revisers) so that we must puzzle about the pronoun "she" in the sixth line, which can refer only to the peacock, which is male. I will attempt to account for this anomaly by suggesting that there is something equivocal about gender throughout the song. In context, it is read sotto voce by the princess as she sits beside her half-conscious prince, with whom, against her firm resolve, she is falling in love. I want to propose that in the course of this brief poem there is a deliberate and conscious shift from the masculine to the feminine posture of the mind, that the first eight lines present an invitation to love, protected by the privacy conferred by dusk, and encouraged by the veiled and ghostly obscurity surrounding the peacock, and the yielding posture of Danaë (who thwarts the imprisonment of a puritanical father, the agent of prudery and repression) and at one with the waking fireflies. But beginning with the ninth line, the mode of expression--with the furrowing and planting of thought, its earthen fertility, and the invitation to enter the bosom of the speaker--appears to shift to the feminine. And I would suggest that this shift is indicative of the change in the princess herself who initially founded a female university from which men were sternly excluded; an institution invaded by the prince and mo of his friends, all disguised as women; they are exposed, and the prince sues for the love of the princess, only to be coldly informed that she has foresworn marriage; the prince and his fellows are wounded in a tourney whereupon the princess, aroused by sympathy for his plight, begins to yield to the softnesses of affection. The story is in fact that of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost , with the genders reversed. As Martin says, "The story begins lightheartedly ... with a direct inversion of all the accepted roles for men, now taken by women," but in which at the end the old familiar erotic impulses win their way through to a happy ending.

Ulysses

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel; I will drink

Life to the lees. All times I have enjoy'd

Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those

That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when

Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades

Vext the dim sea. I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known,--cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

Myself not least, but honor'd of them all,--

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!

As tho' to breathe were life. Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains; but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this grey spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,

To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,--

Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil

This labor, by slow prudence to make mild

A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees

Subdue them to the useful and the good.

Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere

Of common duties, decent not to fail

In offices of tenderness, and pay

Meet adoration to my household gods,

When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail;

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me,--

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads,--you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.

Death closes all; but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;

The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends.

'tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

"The Bugle Song"

from The Princess

The splendor falls on castle walls

And snowy summits old in story;

The long light shakes across the lakes,

And the wild cataract leaps in glory.

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,

Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O, hark, O, hear! How thin and clear,

And thinner, clearer, farther going!

O, sweet and far from cliff and scar

The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!

Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying,

Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky,

They faint on hill or field or river;

Our echoes roll from soul to soul,

And grow for ever and for ever.

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,

And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

[1850]

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Poetry Speaks by . Copyright © 2001 by Sourcebooks, Inc.. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.