Tennyson’s poetic output covers a breadth difficult to
comprehend in a single system of thematics: his various works treat
issues of political and historical concern, as well as scientific
matters, classical mythology, and deeply personal thoughts and feelings.
Tennyson is both a poet of penetrating introspection and a poet
of the people; he plumbs the depths of his own consciousness while
also giving voice to the national consciousness of Victorian society.
As a child, Tennyson was influenced profoundly by the
poetry of Byron and Scott, and his earliest poems reflect the lyric
intensity and meditative expressiveness of his Romantic forebears.
These early poems demonstrate his ability to link external scenery
to interior states of mind. However, unlike the Romantics, whose nature
poems present a scene that raises an emotional or psychological
problem, Tennyson uses nature as a psychological category. In “Mariana,” for
example, he uses Keatsian descriptions of the natural world to describe
a woman’s state of mind; he conveys via his natural setting the
consciousness of a woman waiting vainly for her lover, and her increasing
hopelessness.
Not only is Tennyson a poet of the natural and psychological
landscape, he also attends frequently to the past, and historical
events. “The Lady
of Shalott” and the poems within Idylls of
the King take place in medieval England and capture a world
of knights in shining armor and their damsels in distress. In addition
to treating the history of his nation, Tennyson also explores the
mythological past, as articulated in classical works of Homer, Virgil,
and Dante. His “Ulysses” and “The Lotos-Eaters” draw
upon actual incidents in Homer’s Odyssey.
Likewise, his ode “To Virgil” abounds with allusions to incidents
in the great poet’s Aeneid, especially the fall of Troy.
Tennyson thus looked both to historical and mythological pasts as
repositories for his poetry.
Tennyson’s personal past, too, figures prominently in
his work. The sudden death of his closest friend Arthur Henry Hallam
when Tennyson was just 24 dealt
a great emotional blow to the young poet, who spent the next ten
years writing over a hundred poems dedicated to his departed friend,
later collected and published as “In Memoriam” in 1850.
This lengthy work describes Tennyson’s memories of the time he spent with
Hallam, including their Cambridge days, when Hallam would read poetry
aloud to his friends: thus Tennyson writes, “O bliss, when all in
circle drawn / About him, heart and ear were fed / To hear him,
as he lay and read / The Tuscan poets on the lawn!” Tennyson grapples
with the tremendous grief he feels after the loss of such a dear
friend, concluding famously that “ ’Tis better to have loved and
lost / Than never to have loved at all.”
“In Memoriam” also reflects Tennyson’s struggle with the
Victorians’ growing awareness of another sort of past: the vast
expanse of geological time and evolutionary history. The new discoveries
in biology, astronomy, and geology implied a view of humanity that
much distressed many Victorians, including Tennyson. In Maud, for
example, he describes the stars as “cold fires, yet with power to
burn and brand/ His nothingness into man”; unlike the Romantics,
he possessed a painful awareness of the brutality and indifference
of “Nature red in tooth and claw.” Although Tennyson associated
evolution with progress, he also worried that the notion seemed
to contradict the Biblical story of creation and long-held assumptions
about man’s place in the world. Nonetheless, in “In Memoriam,” he
insists that we must keep our faith despite the latest discoveries
of science: he writes, “Strong Son of God, immortal Love / Whom
we, that have not seen they face, / By faith, and faith alone, embrace
/ Believing where we cannot prove.” At the end of the poem, he concludes
that God’s eternal plan includes purposive biological development;
thus he reassures his Victorian readers that the new science does
not mean the end of the old faith.
Tennyson also spoke to his Victorian contemporaries about
issues of urgent social and political concern. In “The Princess”
he addresses the relations between the sexes and argues for women’s
rights in higher education. In “The
Charge of the Light Brigade,” he speaks out in favor
of a controversial diplomatic maneuver, the disastrous charge on
the Russian army by British troops in the Crimean War. Thus, for
all his love of the past, Tennyson also maintained a lively interest
in the developments of his day, remaining deeply committed to reforming
the society in which he lived and to which he gave voice.
