By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The Princess, a long narrative poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson published in 1847, is not much read or studied now. In the vast editions of Tennyson’s collected works, it languishes unread alongside his plays about Thomas Becket and his various ‘sequel’ poems (‘Mariana in the South’, ‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’), although it did go on to inspire Princess Ida by the Savoy opera composers, Gilbert and Sullivan.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Taken from his long elegy In Memoriam, published in 1850, this poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92) virtually concludes the cycle of poems as a whole. In Memoriam A. H. H. is an elegy, comprising a whopping 133 cantos, for Tennyson’s friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who had died suddenly in 1833. ‘Ring Out, Wild Bells’ shows Tennyson regaining his faith and overcoming his grief when hearing the bells ringing in Christmas Day.
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Just as rivers flow into the sea, so brooks flow into larger rivers, as Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92) highlights in this charming poem, ‘The Brook’: ‘And out again I curve and flow / To join the brimming river, / For men may come and men may go, / But I go on for ever.’
The Brook
I come from haunts of coot and hern,
I make a sudden sally
And sparkle out among the fern,
To bicker down a valley.
By thirty hills I hurry down,
Or slip between the ridges,
By twenty thorpes, a little town,
And half a hundred bridges.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Tithonus’ is not as famous as some of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s other dramatic monologues – ‘Ulysses’ enjoys considerably more popularity – but it is worth analysing because it offers something different from much other poetry. As the poet-critic William Empson put it, ‘Tithonus’ is ‘a poem in favour of the human practice of dying’, because the poem exposes the horrific reality of what it would be like to live forever.
By Dr Oliver Tearle
‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ is one of Alfred, Lord Tennyson‘s most famous poems. Here is the poem, followed by a few words by way of textual analysis. Its meaning is relatively straightforward, but some of its linguistic effects are worth commenting on.