Tennyson as a Victorian Poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) achieved, what so many poets and writers throughout the centuries were unable to achieve, fame and success during his lifetime. Indeed, in 1850, after the publication of “In Memoriam”, he was installed to the position of poet laureate. Tennyson not only distinguished himself by his work to date, but also honored with the responsibility of representing the state during its most solemn and celebratory occasions.
As Poet Laureate, he represented the literary voice of the nation and, as such, he made occasional pronouncements on political affairs.For example, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854) described a disastrous battle in the Crimean War and praised the heroism of the British soldiers there. In 1859, Tennyson published the first four Idylls of the King, a group of twelve blank-verse narrative poems tracing the story of the legendary King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. This collection, dedicated to Prince Albert, enjoyed much popularity among the royal family, who saw Arthur's lengthy reign as a representation of Queen Victoria's 64-year rule (1837-1901).As a lyric and elegiac poet, he has very few rivals in the English language.
He bespeaks the main movement of mind and morals of his era. He is, in fact, the representative poet of Victorian Age. He entered fully into the moods of his age. He molded and then satisfied the tastes of his contemporaries.
He is triumphant to show us the restless spirit of his nation. His poetry demonstrates national spirit more than personal spirit and also, like mirror, reflects the social, political moral, and religious trends of the time.Tennyson’s poetry reflects the general feelings of his age on the great things of the world- religion, morals and social life. “Ulysses”, for instance, represents the spirit of inquiry, intellectual ferment, quest for knowledge, and urgency of going ahead, carrying on, and the life full of earnestness. Now, Tennyson’s Ulysses is Homer’s Odysseus felt through Dante.
But the vibration of this poem of Tennyson is not due merely to a modern poets response to the Renaissance. The emotion to which it gives this dramatic expression is something personal to the poet, as a man alive in his own time.What the poem meant to Tennyson we know. He tells us that “Ulysses” was written soon after the death of his dear friend Arthur Hallam. It was the most devastating blow of his entire life.
The poet said, ‘it (the poem) gives the feeling about the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life. ’ As so often in Tennyson, the resolve, the will, to undertake responsible public action and effort, is linked with the need to find release from an overwhelming personal sorrow.This message, then, about ‘the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life’, is the point of juncture between the poet as a private individual, with his private sorrows, and the poet as a responsible social being, conscious of a public world in which he has duties. The poet is exhorting himself to seek consolation in ‘going forward’. No one can doubt the admirable Victorian seriousness, which should be saluted in ‘Ulysses’.
And the desire to express it is manifestly an important part of the poem’s inspiration. A man never reaches an age where he should give up. Whatever takes place; he should fight till the end.The poem's final line, "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield," came to serve as a motto for the poet's Victorian contemporaries. This is Victorian spirit.
And a Victorian man is born with a stiff upper lip. Thus for Tennyson's immediate audience, the figure of Ulysses held not only mythological meaning, but stood as an important contemporary cultural icon as well. In ‘The Lady of Shalott’, we see the lady as alone as both Mariana and Oenone, though in the poem bearing her name the lady has not specifically been deserted. She is isolated from all the activities of the world.
Her isolation receives little narrative elaboration: just as Measure for Measure supplies only attenuated hints about the origin of Mariana’s predicament, so the reason for the curse upon the Lady of Shalott by which she will die if she tries to enter the real world is unstated. She lives in a magical world of art, imagination, and inactivity. She lives in her own alienated world. And she is destined to do so. The Lady is exiled from the world both by water and by height.
She is imprisoned on a ‘silent isle’ within ‘four gray walls and, four gray towers’ that ‘overlook a space of flowers. In a sense, the world outside, is a world of passion; on the other hand, she lives in a world of paralyzed emotions. Now, we can regard the Lady as a symbol of artists and poets of the Victorian age. And it is quite impossible for her to involve herself in any sort of social causes. But the involvement became increasingly important to the poets and artists of the Victorian period. The Lady only knows of love and knightly adventures, spirituality, the natural world, and the politics of life at court, but she is not vitally connected to any of it.
Consequently, as we know, she is ‘half sick’ of this way. Her heart longed for love, for someone in the wide world from which she has been so long secluded. She has a desire lurking inside to be taken out of her region of shadows into that of realities. But once the Lady moves toward that life outside, the brilliance begins to fade and nature dons a gray and gloomy facade.
She dies. Thus, she is forever denied the experience of an active and passionate involvement with the world. The moment of her being reawakened is also the moment of her death.Her first attempt to grasp hold of life is at the very same time her letting go. The end of artistic isolation leads to the death of creativity.
In this poem, Tennyson is not a believer of a complete alienation of the artist or poet. For in that way, the artist and the arts are deprived of any tribute or reinforcement. One cannot live totally away from the world. There are things to work out in the society. And as a Victorian poet, he always involved himself in any social, in fact, political causes.
In ‘The Lotos-Eaters’, Tennyson calls up memories of Greek classical myth in a Spenserian experiment in order to evoke a contrast between a past world of heroic male action and the golden retreat of the island, which offered rest to the sailors of Odysseus. The morality is cunningly embedded in the text, so that unlike ‘Oenone’, there is a degree of productive ambiguity for the readerly mind to tease away at. Once the mariners have eaten of the lotos fruit, they lapse into a somnambulistic trance, and at the opening of the poem their idle resignation is experienced as a form of resistance to the active order of their commander.The final line of the first stanza, where ‘the slender stream/Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem’ has been aptly characterized as ‘the slowest in English literature’. However, the opening stanzas set the scene for what appears to be a poem of seduction, dealing, like Antony and Cleopatra, with an abundant life, which may also bring death in its train.
The ‘land of streams’ is enervating and lifeless, in a climate where ‘it seemed always afternoon’. All things ‘ripen towards the grave/In silence’.The appeal throughout the text is for a kind of paradisal life freed from effort, so that the sailors may be seen as early ‘drop-outs’. Although the taste of the lotos and the vision of life it offers are seductive, the poem suggests that the mariners may be deceiving themselves in succumbing to the hypnotic power of the flower.
Partaking of the lotos involves abandoning external reality and living instead in a world of appearances, where everything "seems" to be but nothing actually is: the Lotos Land emerges as "a land where all things always seemed the same" (line 24).Indeed, the word "seems" recurs throughout the poem, and can be found in all but one of the opening five stanzas, suggesting that the Lotos Land is not so much a "land of streams" as a "land of seems. " In addition, in the final stanza of the choric song, the poem describes the Lotos Land as a "hollow" land with "hollow" caves, indicating that the vision of the sailors is somehow empty and insubstantial. The poem is, however, more than a brilliant technical exercise inspired by Homer. Tennyson preserves a critical balance between sympathy and judgment in the reader.The reader, too, is left with ambivalent feelings about the mariners' argument for lassitude.
Although the thought of life without toil is certainly tempting, it is also deeply unsettling. The reader's discomfort with this notion arises in part from the knowledge of the broader context of the poem: Odysseus will ultimately drag his men away from the Lotos Land disapprovingly; moreover, his injunction to have "courage" opens--and then overshadows--the whole poem with a sense of moral opprobrium.The sailors' case for lassitude is further undermined morally by their complaint that it is unpleasant "to war with evil" (line 94); are they too lazy to do what is right? By choosing the Lotos Land, the mariners are abandoning the sources of substantive meaning in life and the potential for heroic accomplishment. Thus in this poem Tennyson forces us to consider the ambiguous appeal of a life without toil: although all of us share the longing for a carefree and relaxed existence, few people could truly be happy without any challenges to overcome, without the fire of aspiration and the struggle to make the world a better place.
So, the bottom line, here is the Victorian earnestness. We always feel a temptation for a life of indolent ease and delight in the senses. In the poem, the world of change is rejected for a world of sameness, but a sameness, which promises ecstasy. The lotos seems curiously to allow complete self-absorption, and also, in a sense, communality. But Victorian lesson is to live life with social involvement and with restless toil. No matter how hard a man had fought he should never take rest.
For when one takes rest from struggle, he actually gives up.As a Victorian poet, Tennyson damns the universal tendencies human to take rest, to live without toil, to spend the entire lifetime in drinking and sleeping, and to take drugs to live in an active imaginative state. He wants people to stay fully awake. He hates the drowsiness and half-awakened state of the people who are not aware of the possibilities of life in the society. "The Charge of the Light Brigade" recalls a disastrous historical military engagement that took place during the initial phase of the Crimean War fought between Turkey and Russia (1854-56).
Under the command of Lord Raglan, British forces entered the war in September 1854 to prevent the Russians from obtaining control of the important sea routes through the Dardanelles. From the beginning, the war was plagued by a series of misunderstandings and tactical blunders, one of which serves as the subject of this poem: on October 25, 1854, as the Russians were seizing guns from British soldiers, Lord Raglan sent desperate orders to his Light Cavalry Brigade to fend off the Russians. Finally, one of his orders was acted upon, and the brigade began charging--but in the wrong direction!Over 650 men rushed forward, and well over 100 died within the next few minutes. As a result of the battle, Britain lost possession of the majority of its forward defenses and the only metaled road in the area.
In the 21st century, the British involvement in the Crimean War is dismissed as an instance of military incompetence; we remember it only for the heroism displayed in it by Florence Nightingale, the famous nurse. However, for Tennyson and most of his contemporaries, the war seemed necessary and just. He wrote this poem as a celebration of the heroic soldiers in the Light Brigade who fell in service to their commander and their cause.The poem glorifies war and courage, even in cases of complete inefficiency and waste. Unlike the medieval and mythical subject of "The Lady of Shalott" or the deeply personal grief of "Tears, Idle Tears," this poem instead deals with an important political development in Tennyson's day. As such, it is part of a sequence of political and military poems that Tennyson wrote after he became Poet Laureate of England in 1850, including "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington" (1852) and "Riflemen, Form" (1859).
These poems reflect Tennyson's emerging national consciousness and his sense of compulsion to express his political views.This poem is effective largely because of the way it conveys the movement and sound of the charge via a strong, repetitive falling meter: "Half a league, half a league / Half a league onward. " The plodding pace of the repetitions seems to subsume all individual impulsiveness in ponderous collective action. The poem does not speak of individual troops but rather of "the six hundred" and then "all that was left of them. " Even Lord Raglan, who played such an important role in the battle, is only vaguely referred to in the line "someone had blundered. Interestingly,Tennyson omitted this critical and somewhat subversive line in the 1855 version of this poem, but the writer John Ruskin later convinced him to restore it for the sake of the poem's artistry.
Although it underwent several revisions following its initial publication in 1854, the poem as it stands today is a moving tribute to courage and heroism in the face of devastating defeat. Anyway, Tennyson’s pride in being a Victorian Englishman is reflected in this poem. He was tremendously favored and admired by queen Victoria. He was a man of great social vision and commented on the issues of his times, a haracter that spoke for the nation.
This poem is one of his most influential contemporary political poems. He always recognized a duty to society in what he wrote. This poem was an inspiration that was needed by the Victorians. It also aroused some controversial arguments about him being right-wing, warmongering, and unthinking. Apart from these, this is a fine poem of national invigoration, motivation, and inspirit.
Like many other Victorian poets or writers, Tennyson’s writings often had concern to death. But he was never obsessed by the idea of death.Besides, he is a great patriot and glorifies Victorian heroes. He also reflects the success and belief in national prosperity that marked Victorian England.
His representative character, besides his superb artistry, accounts for the wide popularity he achieved in his age. ‘The Ode on the Death of Wellington’ is the best specimen of a class of poems for which Tennyson was distinguished throughout his age. He was always a patriot, and there is no feeling he expresses more fervently than that of pride in England. He contrasts her stability with the fickleness of France.
He is proud of her independence that is firmly kept. Patriotic ballads like ‘The Revenge’ and ‘The Defence of Lucknow’ are among the most prominent characteristics of his later volumes. His great success in the case of the Wellington Ode is due to the fact, first, that his heart is stirred by the sense that ‘the last great Englishman is low’; and secondly, to the fact that he saw in Wellington an impersonation of all that he had admired in England. The picture he draws of the duke is identical in its great features with that he had painted of the nation, and it has the advantage of being concrete.
