Romantic Influences in Victorian Poetry

In a certain sense Victorian poetry represents a continuation of Romantic poetry into

two further generations.
→ six major Victorian poets in parallel to the six major Romantics: Tennyson,
Browning, and Arnold (from an earlier generation) and Rossetti, Swinburne and
Hopkins, (born some twenty years later).
Opinion: the prophetic, visionary nature of Romantic poetry was inherited not by the
Victorian poets, but by the Victorian prose seers: Carlyle, Newman, Mill, Ruskin, and
the later Arnold, the later Morrison, and Pater.
Alfred Tennyson = shows the influence of Keats
// however his poetry represents a retreat from the intellectual romanticism of
Shelley. Carlyle called his poetry ‘the inward perfection of vacancy’: it may sometimes
seem that his technical skill is wasted on matters of minor importance and that he lacks
the force to face major existential issues: even his long meditation on mortality and the
death of his friend Hallam in In Memoriam does not seem to form an entirely satisfying
whole.
→ minor poets: the critic Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), Arthur Clough (1819-1861)
and George Meredith (1828-1909).

Neo-Gothic Medievalism – the reprisal of the Arthurian cycle

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)
Tennyson, perhaps the most important figure in Victorian poetry, was born in
Somersby, Lincolnshire. He went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he met his
close friend, Arthur Hallam, who has inspired much of his poetry.
 In 1832 he travelled the continent with Hallam, who died suddenly in 1833. Tennyson
spent seventeen years meditating on his tragic loss and writing the massive elegy In
Memoriam A.H.H (published in 1850).
Works. Tennyson’s early works are dreamy and introspective, and often relate to
themes such as hypnosis or entrapment. The poetry is prevented from becoming over-
morbid by his exquisite technical skill and command of sound and words.
Morte d’Arthur = Tennyson’s first Arthurian poem and a direct reaction to Arthur
Hallam’s death. Tennyson’s version follows the storyline fairly closely.
// a kind of sublime lament and a kind of mythologizing prefiguration of the long
sequence in Memoriam which was to come.
After a long battle, Arthur is dying, and wishes to fulfil his promise that he would
return Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake. He entrusts this mission to Sir Bedivere, who
twice hesitates because of the richness of the jewels on the splendid sword.
This extract starts where Sir Bedivere has been admonished by the King because he
has refused to throw the sword into the lake for a second time.
In Memoriam = Tennyson’s central work, a chain of brooding meditations on love,
mortality and redemption, which profoundly expresses the sense of loss on a personal
level, but also in a wider social context. The passage of time described in the poem
allows for the poet’s own extended period of mourning and for an acceptance of change
and decay in Nature. Published nine years before On the Origin of Species, it seems to
anticipate many of the more striking hypotheses of Darwinism.
 Ulysses = a dramatic monologue written in the autumn of 1833, a few days after
Hallam’s death. It represents Ulysses’ thoughts when he is required to go on a last
voyage after killing the suitors of Penelope’s hand. The poet later insisted that it stated
his ‘feelings about the need of going forward, and braving the struggle of life perhaps
more simply than anything in In Memoriam’.
However, the Ulysses in the poem seems to be based on Dante’s description in
Inferno XXVI than on the hero of the Odyssey. In the Inferno, Ulysses, depicted as an
evil counsellor, goes on a last voyage, to explore the world and when the Ithacans’ ship
comes to the Pillars of Hercules, which it was forbidden to pass, Ulysses urges his band
to go on and they are all washed down with him in the forbidden gulfs when they see the
mount of Purgatory.
Tennyson appears to have a more romantic view of Ulysses as a courageous man
who seeks truth and knowledge, but the poem subtly undercuts our admiration, since
Ulysses appears distant and cold, scorns his son’s sense of responsibility and there is
more than one echo of the defiant Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Books I-II.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCO3xgiL1EU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlBF1kNeNnU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nbq6Ur103Q
The Lady of Shalott = a richly suggestive description of the island of Shalott, near
King Arthur’s castle at Camelot, where lives, secluded in her tower, the fairy lady of
Shalott. The name is a variation of Astalot, and the poem is thus a version of the tale of
the Fair Maid of Astalot (Malory’s version of the story is in Book XVI of Morte d’Arthur),
who dies of a broken heart when Sir Lancelot, who has worn her favour at a tournament,
declines to marry her or to be her paramour. This poem helped form the style of Pre-
Raphaelite poetry, as well as that of Edgar Allan Poe.
John William Waterhouse - The Lady of Shalott
I am Half-Sick of Shadows, said the Lady of Shalott
John William Waterhouse,
The Lady of
Shalott Looking
at Lancelot
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntokfw2OOdQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0Rs1ZWXZsQ
Analysis: → the artist is caught between the world of illusions, of creation (the
mirror) and the need to enjoy life (the window). Living means the death of creation.
/ → the poem is about growing up and exchanging the world of illusion for the
(potentially damaging) world of reality. The Victorian critic R. H. Hutton argued that the
poem’s meaning is that we must turn away from the world of illusion, however
comforting that world may be, in favour of the real world – even if it ends up destroying
you. As Hutton wrote, the poem ‘has for its subject the emptiness of the life of fancy,
however rich and brilliant’.
This interpretation could easily sit alongside another, namely one which sees the
poem as essentially being about love. Love may be dangerous and may destroy us, but
it’s better to take that risk than to pine away, hiding yourself from the world. Or, as
Tennyson put it more famously in In Memoriam, “Tis better to have loved and lost / Than
never to have loved at all.’
Such an interpretation folds into another analysis of the poem, which focuses on the
fact that the Lady of Shalott is just that, a lady. Another Victorian critic, R. W. Croker,
saw the whole poem as constituting an extended pun on the word ‘spinster’: the Lady of
Shalott weaves or spins all day, because she is unmarried and locked away from the
rest of the world, including the world of love embodied by Camelot and Lancelot.
Medieval scholasticism. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
→ became a Jesuit in 1868 and decided that writing was not a suitable occupation
for a religious figure and burnt his work (though he did send some copies to his friend
Bridges); died of typhoid in 1889 but his poetry was not published until 1918, when
Bridges decided to reveal it to the literary world.
 Hopkins’s poetic achievement is an unusual one. His study of Old English and Welsh
literature together with his deep religious feeling, caused him to create a wholly original
kind of rhythmic structure in his poems: a return to a kind of alliterative tradition (see Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight), which he called ‘spring rhythm’. In spite of his modernity
(which was acclaimed in the 20th C), he remains a man of his time, with typically
Romantic conceptions appearing through the rather difficult surface of his poems.
→ the medieval scholasticism brought into focus
→ devotional poem

Pied Beauty
To Christ our Lord

Glory be to God for dappled things—

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise Him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKjy7YrT2vs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARbav1N3BFU
 The Light of the
World (1851–53),
William Holman
Hunt (1827–1910)
- an allegorical painting by the
English Pre-Raphaelite artist,
representing the figure of Jesus
preparing to knock on an
overgrown and long-unopened
door, illustrating Revelation
3:20: "Behold, I stand at the
door and knock; if any man
hear My voice, and open the
door, I will come in to him,
and will sup with him, and he
with Me". According to Hunt:
"I painted the picture with
what I thought to be by Divine
command, and not simply as a
good Subject.” The door in the
painting has no handle, and
can therefore be opened only
from the inside, representing
"the obstinately shut mind".
 Analysis: The author expresses his gratitude to God for making all the beautiful
things that we now see in this world. The last line in the poem “praise him” is indented
differently from the rest of the poem, providing a very powerful message for the
conclusion, as if the poet was saying ‘Amen’ at the end of a prayer.
His religious poetry shows that everything is connected with everything in the
universe because it was created by God and he is everywhere. Everything rhymes in the
world, it is harmonious since it has a common origin: the Creator. In every manifestation
of the matter, there is a pattern, an inscape, and things communicate with one another
by invisible forces, energies that Hopkins called instress.