9. Poetry

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy autumn-fields,

And thinking on the days that are no more.

‘These lines,’ Tennyson said, ‘came to me on the yellowing autumn-tide at Tintern Abbey, full for me of its bygone memories.’ (Tintern is on the Wye, a tributary of the Severn, on the shore of which his friend Arthur Hallam was buried.) The poems echo with voices and memories. Tennyson both created landscape and inscribed emotion on real landscapes.

He was the sixth of twelve children of the Rector of Somersby, Lincolnshire. The disinherited eldest son of a landowner, the Rector was an unwilling clergyman. Melancholia, drunkenness, violence, opium and madness visited the Rectory, yet it

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Alfred Tennyson, aged about 30, an engraving after an oil painting by Samuel Laurence, 1838.

produced three poets among its sons. Alfred, taught Greek by his father, imagined Troy on a North Sea beach: ‘Here often, when a child, I lay reclined;/I took delight in this fair strand and free:/Here stood the infant Ikon of my mind,/And here the Grecian ships did seem to be.’

At Cambridge, Alfred became a friend of the brilliant Arthur Hallam, eldest son of Henry Hallam, a historian predeceased by all twelve of his children. Arthur, who had published theology and literary criticism and was to have married Tennyson’s sister, died of a brain hæmorrhage at twenty-two. This event darkened Tennyson’s life. Rejected by his first love for a richer suitor, the poet drifted, staying with friends, writing:

... for the unquiet heart and brain

A use in measured language lies; The sad mechanic exercise,

Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

He married late and lived in the country, on the Isle of Wight and in Surrey. After Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830), collections came every few years, notably in 1832 and 1842. Larger works include In Memoriam (1850); Maud (1855), Enoch Arden (1864), and the Arthurian Idylls of the King (1859-88).

Critical opinion divides over the long poems, except In Memoriam. This elegy for Hallam, expressing agonized doubts about Christianity and human destiny, is the most emotional English poem of its length. Its 132 lyrics, all in the same stanza, were not written as a sequence, but finally arranged to span three Christmasses. The keynote is pure loss:

Tennyson was the first poet to come to terms with geological time and Evolution. In Memoriam climbs slowly, moaning, towards a hard-won Christian faith. It dramatizes inner feelings and projects them onto an outer world of landscape, space and time. Notable lyrics of natural symbolism act as points of emotional transition on the journey to the third Christmas: ‘Calm is the morn without a sound’; ‘To-night the winds begin to rise’; ‘Witch-elms that counterchange the floor’; ‘The time draws near the birth of Christ’; ‘Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky’; ‘Now fades the last long streak of snow.’ The cycle makes its effect from repetition as much as from arrangement. Its composer’s gift was for song, scene and soliloquy rather than narrative or architecture. Like Wordsworth before him and Hardy and Eliot after him, he ‘sees by glimpses’ and ‘remembers’. His best work is from the first half of his career, but he kept his lyric gift.

The Romantics had turned poetry towards autobiography, real, pretended or disguised. The Victorians often avoided selfdisclosure by the use of a first-person speaker, historical, legendary or invented. Tennyson’s best poems outside In Memoriam include dramatic monologues such as Ulysses and Tithonus. Without context, monologue is open to various interpretation. In Ulysses, Odysseus plans a last voyage into the western ocean; he hopes, if he dies, ‘to see the great Achilles, whom we

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knew’. Tennyson said that the poem expressed his own ‘need of going forward and braving the struggle of life’ after the death of Hallam; the need can be felt more than the braving. The ghosts of Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare and Milton speak in the rhythms and phrasing of Ulysses. Tennyson was steeped in the classical, and, more than any predecessor, in the whole of the English poetic tradition also. As an undergraduate he had translated a little of Beowulf, the first English poet to do so. He chose the lines in which Beowulf ‘his wordhoard unlocked’.

Tithonus, like Tiresias, The Lotos-F,aters and other poems drafted after 1833, longs for death. Its speaker was loved by the goddess Aurora (Dawn), who gave him eternal life but not eternal youth. Nothing is more Tennysonian than the opening:

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,

The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,

Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,

And after many a summer dies the swan.

Me only cruel immortality

Consumes; I wither slowly in thine arms ...

Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning

When in 1846 Robert Browning (1812-89) secretly married Elizabeth Barren (1806-61), she was the more popular poet. Only after her death in 1861, when he returned to England from Italy, did his reputation eclipse hers. Her Sonnets from the Portuguese (not translations, but her own love-poems) were much admired – ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways’ - but they now seem too declamatory. The lower-pitched reaches of her verse-novel Aurora Leigh make better reading.

Browning lacks Tennyson’s beauty of verse and language, but the poets apply the Romantic legacy in ways that can be compared. After his early verse was criticized as self-obsessed, Browning chose not to wear his heart on his sleeve. Turning outwards, he wrote a number of unsuccessful plays - melodramatic acting vehicles - then went back to the dramatic monologue. Whereas Tennyson spoke indirectly through classical myth and literary legend, Browning’s speakers are, or seem, historical. He had read much out-of-the-way Renaissance history, as demonstrated in the romance Sordello. He perfected the monologue in ‘My Last Duchess’: the Duke, who speaks, has had his last wife killed because she smiled at everyone. Browning develops the form further in Men and Women (1855), Dramatis Personae (1864), and others. ‘The Bishop Orders his Tomb’, a compact and energetic short story, is a fine representative of the form.

Browning’s artists, humanists and clerics, ancient and modern, talk as compulsively as Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. Like characters in the ‘humour’ comedy of Ben Jonson, they sacrifice proportion, humanity and morality to a ruling passion. Spirit and strong will can seem self-justifying in these confessions, for the author does not offer context or judgement. Yet in Browning, as in Dickens, the fascination of egotism is to be read against a humane and undogmatic Christianity. When authorial judgement is explicit, as in ‘The Lost Leader’, ‘Prospice’ and the Epilogue to Asolando, Browning’s attitudes are strong, even crude. Browning needed his masks. He insisted that his poems were dramatic, not personal, as did Tennyson and Hardy. The modern speakers are often lovers, dissatisfied, possessive or obsessive. ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ tells of strangling Porphyria with her own hair, ending ‘And yet God has not said a word.’ The grotesque fascinates Browning, who rarely satisfies the

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curiosity he arouses. But he did not want to satisfy: ‘a man’s reach should exceed his grasp/Else what’s a heaven for?’ (‘Andrea del Sarto’).

His later years produced The Ring and the Book, a verse-novel of monologues about a 17th-century Roman murder, in which twelve participants tell what happened. This use of separate perspectives, found in the old epistolary novel, became a formal principle in the work of Browning’s admirer, the American novelist Henry James. It remains a formula of the detective story. Browning had a novelist’s fascination with the inscrutability of motives and the unpredictability of their combined effects. The monologue was a gift to Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. In the hands of its master, however, the monologue offers the fascination of a feat or a puzzle. Like many 19th-century musical virtuosi, for example the Abbe Liszt, Browning enjoys drawing attention to his own skill, and manner upstages matter. ‘Irks care the crop-full bird?’ asks the speaker of ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’: ‘Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?’

Browning’s striking talent is put to better use in short poems such as ‘Home-Thoughts from Abroad’, ‘Meeting at Night’ and ‘Parting at Morning’, and in some of his modern love poems, such as ‘Two in the Campagna’, which ends:

No. I yearn upward, touch you close,

Then stand away. I kiss your cheek,

Catch your soul’s warmth - I pluck the rose

And love it more than tongue can speak —

Then the good minute goes.

Already how am I so far

Out of that minute? Must I go

Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,

Onward, whenever light winds blow,

Fixed by no friendly star?

Just when I seemed about to learn?

Where is the thread now? Off again!

The old trick! Only I discern —

Infinite passion, and the pain

Of finite hearts that yearn.

This was a gift that he did not lose with his wife’s death, as testified by many late poems, including one, ‘Inapprehensiveness’, from 1889, his last year.

Matthew Arnold

English Romantic poetry was not always romantic. Keats was the first strongly to associate Romantic yearning with love, the ideal of post-Romantic life and literature. The only Victorian poem both great and perfect - as Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ has been called - opens with Nature:

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straights - on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night air!

The second subject, Love, returns in the final verse-paragraph: ‘Ah, love, let us be

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true/To one another!’ But nature and love, beauty and passion, are not at the heart of the poem. There is a new reason why the lovers must be true to one another:

for the world which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

From this island once brightly girdled by ‘the Sea of Faith’, Arnold can ‘only hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’. He had gone from his father’s Rugby School to an Oxford torn between Tractarianism and liberalism, and from his father’s Broad Church liberal faith to realizing that the Bible was only partly historical. A. H. Clough, Arnold’s friend and his father’s prize pupil, resigned his college fellowship in 1848, unable to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England.

This crisis of faith in Christianity lent Arnold a keen sense of human isolation, expressed in the poetry of his earlier career. ‘I have less poetical sentiment than Tennyson,’ he was to write to his mother, ‘and less intellectual vigour and abundance than Browning; yet, because I have perhaps more of a fusion of the two than either of them, and have more regularly applied that fusion to the main line of modern development, I am likely enough to have my turn.’ Arnold’s self-analysis is clear-sighted, as is his forecast that ‘the movement of mind’ would bring him readers. His diagnosis of the moral ailments of modern life is sound, but he saw also that his poems lack the tonic effect of true tragic poetry. They are intensely sad, whereas his later prose, forging new roles for literature and religion in society, sparkles with wit.

Arnold’s best poetry is personal, a category which in his case includes intellectual autobiography (‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’ and ‘The Buried Life’) and poems to other writers, as well as the love poems to Marguerite and the academic pastorals, The Scholar Gipsy and Thyrsis. In all these poems, land, water and sky lend symbolic power and plangency. His literary criticism is impersonal, ‘seeing life steadily and seeing it whole’, applying the moral and intellectual criterion of ‘high seriousness’, asserting that great literature is ‘a criticism of life’, and quoting briefly to show what is classic. Arnold’s poetic criticism has not been improved upon, even by Eliot, who borrowed much from him. His command of classical, European, English and biblical literature shows the quality of high Victorian culture. Scholar-critics such as W. P. Ker or Eric Auerbach can match his knowledge, but they do not quote so tellingly.

His own poetry meets the tests he proposed, but its style and rhythm can seem too studied. Here is the conclusion to the pastoral elegy Thyrsis:

Too rare, too rare, grow now my visits here! ’Mid city noise, not, as with thee of yore,

Thyrsis! in reach of sheep-bells is my home.

— Then through the great town’s harsh, heart-wearying roar, Let in thy voice a whisper often come,

To chase fatigue and fear:

Why faintest thou? 1 wandered till I died, Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.

Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill, Our Scholar travels yet the loved hillside.

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Arthur Hugh Clough

‘Thyrsis’ is Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-61). Clough’s squibs are often quoted to illustrate Victorian Doubt, but his long poems now hold our attention. In Amours de Voyage and Dipsychus, his frankness, irony, conversational texture and play of mood seem very modern. His most perfect work is the early verse-novel, The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, a high-spirited mock-epic romance, in Homeric hexameters, of the adventures of a ‘reading party’ of Oxford men in the Highlands.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti

In 1848 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, son of an Italian political refugee, founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of young artists including John Millais and Holman Hunt, sworn to an anti-academic realism, a simple directness unmodified by classical norms, and so ‘medieval’. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood lasted five years, but Rossetti later worked with or close to William Morris, Ford Madox Brown and Edward Burne-Jones. J. M. Whistler and A. C. Swinburne stayed with him in Chelsea.

Rossetti’s often unfinished paintings and uneven poems have a willed emotional intensity. An admirer of Keats, he had at eighteen written ‘The Blessed Damozel’ in which a beauty ‘leaned out/From the gold bar of Heaven’, longing to be reunited with her earthly lover. The poem jumbles sensuous with spiritual imagery; the Damozel leans ‘until her bosom must have made/The bar of heaven warm.’ Rossetti’s symbolism, and his association of erotic love with death, anticipate Aestheticism and Decadence. When his wife, a former model, committed suicide, he buried with her a book of poems which he later exhumed. His bohemian lifestyle gave scandal, and his verse was attacked in a pamphlet, The Fleshly School of Poetry.

His sister Christina Rossetti (1830-94) retained a Pre-Raphaelite truth to nature,

‘Buy from us with a golden curl’: the frontispiece to a volume of Christina Rossetti’s verse, Goblin Market (1862), published by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s illustration is based on a line from the title poem.

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with bright colours and clear edges. A devout Anglo-Catholic, she renounced two engagements on religious grounds, cared for her family, and wrote poetry. For ten years she did voluntary work to help ex-prostitutes. Her poem ‘In An Artist’s Studio’ reflects upon her brother’s doomed world: ‘One face looks out from all his canvases,/ One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans ... Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;/Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.’ Songs such as ‘When I am dead, my dearest’, ‘My heart is like a singing bird’ and ‘Does the road wind up-hill all the way?’ show her fine lyric gift - the best English woman poet, thought Virginia Woolf. Delicacy and a wan fancy are her characteristics, and she wrote well for children, though ‘An Apple-Gathering’ is more than girlish. Her masterpiece, Goblin Market, is a richly-charged fairy story of forbidden fruit, of two sisters, of innocence lost and redeemed. Its adult themes, close to her brother’s, are managed with a tact and discipline beyond him, and a sensuous verbal and rhythmic energy.

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) was an anti-Victorian immoralist; he referred to Tennyson’s Morte d'Arthur as the Morte d'Albert. A libertarian aristocrat and amateur of Greek lyric poetry, he followed Shelley and Landor. Victorian restrictiveness produced in him an extreme reaction. Swinburne was a hedonist, a literary aesthete and an expert in Greek impropriety, favouring the ecstastic Greek cults above that of ‘the pale Galilean’, Jesus Christ. Metrically he was a virtuoso, and his Songs and Ballads were in vogue in the 1860s, but his appeal lay in his inversion of respectability and of moral ‘uplift’. In him, the Victorian cult of the dead takes a post-erotic tinge. To intone, in appropriate circumstances, the chants by which he is represented in anthologies, ‘When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces’ and ‘I will go back to the great sweet mother’ and ‘The Garden of Proserpine’, can be fun. But re-reading shows them to be vague in sense, fond of their own manner, and designed to induce maudlin despair. His versions of the 15th-century criminal poet Villon have lasted better. The octosyllabics of the original curb the translator’s fluency, fatally evident in his elegy to his idol, the French poet Charles Baudelaire (182167).

Masochism and alcohol led to Swinburne’s collapse. In his last thirty years, under voluntary restraint, he poured out verse, plays, pornography, prejudiced literary criticism and an odd novel. ‘We Poets in our youth begin in gladness’, wrote Wordsworth, ‘But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.’ Swinburne’s heirs flowered and fell in the 1890s.

Gerard Hopkins

The poetry of Gerard Hopkins (1844-89) - he disliked his middle name, Manley - was first published by his friend Robert Bridges in 1918. Converted at Oxford (and cut off by his family), Hopkins was received into the Catholic Church by J. H. Newman, and entered the Society of Jesus in 1868. Courageous, sensitive, often ill, he worked in industrial parishes, then as a conscientious Professor of Greek at University College, Dublin, dying of typhoid.

Hopkins put aside his early verse, but in 1877 a casual remark by his Rector prompted him to write The Wreck of the Deutschland, and to submit it to a Jesuit journal. It was rejected. Hopkins thereafter thought that the Society might regard

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Gerard Hopkins SJ (1844-89). A late photograph.

poetry as inconsistent with his profession. He exchanged poems privately with Robert Bridges and R. W. Dixon; his were extremely unconventional in style. Even in the 1930s they seemed experimental and modern - The Wreck of the Deutschland begins The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936) - and were imitated. The shock has worn off, the astonishing achievement remains.

‘A horrible thing has happened to me,’ Hopkins wrote in 1864, ‘I have begun to doubt Tennyson.’ His instinct, he said, was ‘to admire and do otherwise’. Hopkins avoided smooth movement and harmony of language in order to make the reader see and think. He believed with Coleridge that Nature is ‘the language that thy God utters’. His tutor at Balliol, Walter Pater would have encouraged a scrupulous articulation of moments of perception. Hopkins believed further that the Incarnation meant that ‘the world is charged with the grandeur of God’, and he tried therefore to catch the selfhood of each created thing in matching words. To do this in an age slipping into what Blake called ‘single vision and Newton’s sleep’, he had to awaken the forces in language - spring in rhythm, grasp in syntax, quickness in diction - to sharpen its apprehension of reality.

God creating nature is his first theme, as in ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’:

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise

Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour

Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier

Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, lift up heart, eyes,

Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour:

And eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a

Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

The flour of cloud-fragments is gleaned for a reply to the priest’s uplifted heart. Nature-mysticism becomes almost eucharistic. This transforming intensity is such that the alliteration on mould and melt and on glory and gleam, and the extraordinary rhyming on Saviour, seem functional. He liked things ‘original, counter, spare, strange’, but his idiosyncrasy never became predictable. His diamond condensation

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makes Browning seem an Ancient Mariner. Pascal’s apology, for writing a long letter as he had not time to write a short one, is not required for Hopkins’s poetry. Only four of his fifty-three completed poems are of more than two pages in length, and few of them are less than intense. Even the musical ‘Binsey Poplars felled 1879’ ends with a significant discord on ‘únselve’. He has a higher proportion of outstanding poems than any contemporary; he must rank as a poet with Tennyson and Browning.

Hopkins began his adult writing with the words ‘Thou mastering me/God!’ The Wreck of the Deutschland to the happy memory of five Franciscan nuns exiled by the Falck Laws drowned between midnight and morning of Dec. 7th, 1875 is a terrifying work. His often lyrical vision of the world as incarnating divine glory includes tragedy and suffering at its centre. His ecstatic vision ‘The Windhover’ ends: ‘and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,/Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.’ The late ‘terrible’ sonnets (addressing God as ‘O thou terrible’) wrestle bitterly with God and with despair. ‘No worst, there is none’ is out of the world of King Lear. ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day’ is a Christian nightmare. It is wrong, however, to see these anguished poems outside a tradition of spiritual conflict which goes back to the Old Testament Book of Job. Hopkins’ range is not wide, but he touches the depths and the heights.

Further reading

Armstrong, I. Victorian Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993).

Richards, B. (ed.). English Verse, 1830-1890 (Harlow: Longman, 1980). An annotated anthology.

Ricks, C. (ed.). The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). A fresh new selection.