Irish Jesuit Province

Nature Notes in Tennyson's Poetry

Author(s): C. Kegan Paul
Source: The Irish Monthly, Vol. 31, No. 363 (Sep., 1903), pp. 526-530
Published by: Irish Jesuit Province
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20500495
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 [ 526 ]

NATURE NOTES IN TENNYSON'S POET'RY'*

A POET attains popularity because he translates into ordered
and beautiful language the ideas of his time, and he is only
popular in so far as he is the child of his time. He may wait for
recognition, or his fame may wane, and yet he will be at either of
those periods as great a poet as at the hour of his fullest accept
ance.
What may be Tennyson's place in literature it is obviously as
yet impossible to say, but of two facts there can be no sort of
doubt, he has been for very many years the most popular English
poet, among the learned and unlearned alike; and next, while all
admire his dexterity in the use of words, and his gracious melody
of verse, he is less popular than he was among the more thoughtful
and literary readers. This second fact would seem to show that in
some degree the problems of our age require a new poetic inter
preter, and makes it possible to consider, without attempting
ungracious comparisons, what it is that has given Tennyson the
place which he holds in the estimation of his countrymen.
The ideas which have most affected the mind of the age now
passing away are those of science, and of the EAspects of Nature,
and in both of these fields Tennyson has translated the thoughts of
men's minds into ordered words. For instance, when what is now
known as Darwinism, and the doctrine of evolution, was only
beginning to be, the poet put the whole into four beautiful lines.
He has now suppressed them, probably because his English ear
revolted against a rhyme which to \a Frenchman would have been
absolutely correct:
All nature widens upward; evermore
The simpler essence lower lies,
More complexis more perfect, owning more
Discourse, more widely wise.

* The late distinguished convert, Mr. Kegan Paul, contributed this

interesting little paper to the small Selborne Society periodical which has for
its name the first two words of the above title.-ED. I. M.

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 NATURE NOTES IN TENNYSON'S POETRY 5'27

And again when he speaks of the birth of man we have the

remarkable lines:
A soul shall draw fromn out the vast,
And strike his being into bounds,
And, moved through life of lower phase,
Result in man, be born and think,
And act and love, a closer link
Betwixt us and the crowning race.

The popularity of the whole of In Memnormscz appears to

arise mainly from the touches of science, from the descriptions of
nature, and from the fact that in an age which tends to reject
revelation, and yet craves after a knowledge of the future, it gives
the best hope of a life to come, which can be attained without a
revelation. But this is by the way, and only a hint for the student
of Tennyson that his poems bristle wit h modern science transmuted
into poetry, and translated into ordinary language.
I wish here especially to note his view of nature-the sights,
sounds, scents of the country--believing that he has taught us
much when we have looked through his eyes and heard with his
ears.
No doubt some of us remember the delightful old ftrmer in
Cranford to whom Tennyson had taught so much; and who de
clared that until the poet revealed it, no one had observed that ash
buds were black
More black than ash buds in the front of March;

and in the same way he has been the first to draw the attention of
thousands to minute facts and processes always open to notice,
but rarely noticed before he wrote. Take the wonderful lines,
easily verified any, hot day in summer by the margin of a still
pool
To-day I saw the dragon fly
Come from the wells where he did lie.

An inner impulse rent the veil

Of his old husk: from head to tail
Came out clear plates of sapphire mail.
He dried his wings: like gauze they grew:
Through crolts and pastures wet with dew
A livinog flash of light he flew.

Let us take our Tennyson, mark each passage referrinir to

nature, and ask ourselves whether we knew it all befote; or if the

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 528 THE IRISH MONTHLY

poet has not given us a new fact, or a new interpr

fact ?
But not to dwell too closely on details, which each can examine
for himself, it may be interesting to get certain broad principles
to explain how the poet looks on nature. It is often said that no
{sense is more full of memories thani the sense of smell. Tennyson
is much aware of the subtle perfumes of the country, a-nd especially
of the garden
The air is damp and hushed and close
As a sick man's room when he taketh repose
An hour before death.
My very heart faints and my whole soul grieves
At the moist rich smell of the rotting leaves,
And the breath
Of the fading edges of box beneath
And the year's last rose.
Again:
The yellow-banded bees
Through half open lattices
Coming in the scented breeze;
or
Blossom-fragrant slipt the heavy d
Gathered by night and peace.
Buzzings of the honied hours,

and a hundred such lines will, when

back to us in country lanes when th
send forth their scents, and the dews
the lime.
Perfume too is subtly suggested when vision only is named; as
Like two streams of incense free
From one censer in one shrine.

Who does not smell as well as see the twin columns of the sweet
vapour, one on each side of the acolyte, as his censer swings
rhythmically at Benediction?
Then all the sounds of the country are set forth in Tennyson,
sometimes, it is tli-e, with an over-abundance of imitation, where a
mere suggestion would have been better. For instance
Birds in the high Hall-garden
When twilight was falling,
Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud,
They were crying and calling.
is somewhat too realistic. A lover must have but slender sense of

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 NATURE NOTES IN TENNYSON'S POETRY 529

the melody of his lady's name who fancies he hears it in the noisy
cawing of the rooks. But as a rule we find a keen sense of the
beauty of country sounds
Then, while a sweeter music wakes,
And through wild March the throstle calls,
Where all about your palace-walls,
The sun-lit almond-blossom shakies.
Or
She heard her native breezes pass
And runlets babbling down the glen;

or the magnificent song of the echoes at Kil

guide's bugle takes the wvhole tone of the gr
around, and becomes
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing.
But of course the sense above all others by
external nature is that of sight, and here it i
find what Tennyson can teach us, and where
He can show us, as perhaps no other can, the
what he can take in his hand-the black of
flower out of the crannied wall, the veining
speedwell's darling blue, the moss on flower p
bottom of a blossom, the arrow seeds of the
understand the gain which compensates for
shortsighted eyes in this microscopic minuten
did not know from a thousand portraits that
very near-silghted, we could gather it from his
he interesting to any student to work out the in
We look again through his eyes at the dist
the same fact is apparent. He shows us little
-quite close and had impressed itself upon him
tion, as
The seven elms, the poplars four
That stand beside my father's door;

but he gives broad effects of light, masses of colour, which do not

depend on any special power of vision if they are visible at all.
The hills are always "purple," the sky " golden," or " rosy
bright"; the moon is "dim-red," and we see " scarlet shafts of
* The writer of this little paper ought to have cited the miller in Entoch
Arden:
"Him, like the working bee in blossom dust,
Blaniched with his mill, they found."
VOL. xxxi.-No. 363. 2 N

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530 THE IRISH MONTHLY

sunrige." The series of pictures in " The Palace o

great sweeps of colour:--" One seemed all dark and
sound," "cRealms in upland, prodigal in oil, an
wind," and the like. There is no middle distance, or, i
picked out by specks of colour: "c The red cloaks o
or "c long-haired pagp in crimson clad." If the poe
work, it is when she adds "1 a crimson to the quain
But we have said enough. Our aim is not to
Tennyson's nature notes, but to lead others to do
better way of stuidying a poet than to take one subje
through all his writings. To ask ourselves how T
on the outward world, and what he can teach us o
sky, the sea, the flowers, will be, when we can answ
no bad fragment of a liberal education.

OUR LADY'S TREE*

WHITE BLOSSOM for a crimson fruit,
My little Babe, Thou art;
As ivory bloom on holly-shoot,
That turns to blood-red heart.
That is a perfumed star in June,
And is bird's food anon;
So soon, my little SonL, so soon
Thy life's white flower is gone.
All strewnl in white upon life's road,
As is Thy holy life;
All shed, a pathway red with blood,
After deatth's winter-strife.
All white, Thou art Thy Mother's bliss,
All red, all mankind's food;
For this Thy bloom-for this, yea this,
Thou camest to Thy Rood.
M. R. B. W.
L If you have ever noticed the fall of 'blossomn where there are mnany
forest holly trees, and then the scattermg of the berries by the birds till the
wood-path looks,really lhke blood-you will appreciate this Cornish name for
the holly tree They call it also ' Aunt Mary's Tree '-Aunt Mary being their
pet-name for Our Lady, as they call everyone aunt whom they are fond of."
Exti act from letter.]

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