The Rimes of the Ancient Tennyson

Yesterday evening I started "Tithonus," a thus far bleak poem about immortality, which is apparently like the "death in life" that J.K Rowling describes in the case of Voldemort after he drank the unicorn blood. I also browsed the poem about St. Simeon Stylites. In it, the saint wails about his sinfulness, but he does not give any particular examples of it, or try to make amends in any way other than flagellating himself verbally and letting himself rot away in the open for several decades. Also, he belittles the sufferings of the other saints as part of his argument as to why he should get into heaven, which is not what I would do if I were trying to recommend myself to God. To me it makes more sense to make amends for sins by doing good for other humans (like St. Elizabeth of Hungary, for example) and by trying to do better next time. But I suppose that healing people by miracle, as St. Simeon apparently did, is already sufficiently good.

But I am not calculated to find much good in austerity, because I fall apart without my beloved physical comforts. It's like a character says in an Agatha Christie book: forget heroic stoicism -- run a few pins into people and most of them would fold. But I think that everyone is dependent on comfort, psychological if not physical; even many strong and self-disciplined people crave not only the satisfaction of contemplating their own strength, but also the satisfaction of generously disciplining other people who seem unable or unwilling to do it themselves. And I suppose that, if one does austerity properly, one is deriving comfort from a sense of getting closer to God.

Recently I read the end of "The Princess: A Medley," which is essentially about womens' suffrage. In the unintentionally hilarious final pages, the Amazonian heroine dissolves into tears over the sick-bed of the prince-hero, reads a book of sentimental poetry as she watches him devotedly, and admits weepingly once he recovers that she had been silly and proud, and that all she ever needed was a man to complete her soul . . . The transformation is a little abrupt.

Anyway, as for "Claribel," I'm not sure if this strikes anyone else, but I find the constant "eth"s (Anglo-Saxon run amok) considerably amusing:

"At eve the beetle boometh
Athwart the ticket lone:
At noon the wild bee hummeth
About the moss'd headstone:
At midnight the moon cometh,
And looketh down alone."

You would think that would be enough, but . . .

"Her song the lintwhite swelleth,
The clear-voiced mavis dwelleth,
The callow throstle lispeth,
The slumbrous wave outwelleth,
The babbling runnel crispeth,
The hollow grot replieth
Where Claribel low-lieth."

It is also funny when one maliciously translates the poetry into prose: "At evening the beetle "booms" through the detached hedge, the bee hums in the graveyard, the moon looks down alone (the stars evidently having run off to the other hemisphere), the birds are singing -- except for the mavis, which prefers to "dwell" --, a sleepy wave is bulging, a creek is "crisp"ing and a cave is echoing it, and Claribel (hopefully a sleeping fairy, but perhaps a deceased human) is lying about somewhere nearby." Well, I must admit it's poetic even after I've mangled it.

As for "Sir Galahad," it reminded me of the way I thought of the title character when I read Sir Roger Lancelyn Green's Sir Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table when I was little. The more conflicted characters like Sir Lancelot, Balin and Balan, King Arthur himself, etc., appealed to me more than Sir Galahad did. Their errors made for unhappy reading, but at least they suffered and grew, instead of being perfect from the beginning. The opening four lines of "Sir Galahad" are certainly obnoxious, -- partly, I believe, because of the first-person narration:

My good blade carves the casques of men,
My tough lance thrusteth sure,
My strength is as the strength of ten,
Because my heart is pure.

To move on to the leper poem that I mentioned in a previous blog entry, I now find that it is entitled "Happy: A Leper's Bride." I would call that an irony overload. (By the way, an air raid siren is wailing -- from the television in the corner room. The world wars live on, after all.)

Anyway, to be serious, I do like all of Tennyson's poems that I've read so far, no matter how much I find to criticize in them. Besides the story of "The Falcon," I particularly like that of "Lady Clare." Many of the poet's lines and phrases are old friends because I've encountered them in books (except for "the even tenor of her way," which has become more like an old enemy because it has been so frequently used). There are also, I think, few better ways of exploring the questions that occupied the philosophical Victorian mind than by reading his later poems. And, even in our time, it's always nice to read lines like, "Kind hearts are more than coronets,/ And simple faith than Norman blood." In the realm of the ideal, it remains "as true today as it was, when it was written."