TENNYSON AND DEATH

Tennyson's life is the type of quiet English existence. Penury did not drive him along strange ways and among false hearts, as it drove a Scotch ploughboy who had the tongue of a poet; passion did not possess him until his life became "the pageant of a bleeding heart," as it possessed an English lord who had the gift of fiery song; disease did not cut him off untimely, as it cut off an English youth whose hymn of truth and beauty was beginning to be raised in stately measure. Shelter from the ruder shocks of circumstances was his; friends were his; long life was his. It is easy to view him as the peaceful poet of peaceful England, to think of him as of one who was spared the tumult, who never stood face to face with the enemy.

Yet not all enemies are material, not all battles are waged with blood and iron. In the still spaces and deep reaches of the mind is place for stubborn struggles of momentous issue, and Tennyson's life, quiet as it was, knew conflict, if not of the flesh, then of the spirit. He had an enemy - an ancient disturber of the minds of men. In life there is death. Here is the most universal of enemies; none can deny; none can escape. Not shelter, not friends, not long life could shield the peaceful poet.

Before personal losses came, the lines were drawn. On the one side stood the youth, sensitive, high-strung; on the other lurked the fact of death, the common enemy. Tennyson's first feeling was horror; he caught glimpses of a black truth; his mind dwelt on the physical, revolting aspects of the end of life. Into the eyes of the beast in the shambles come panic and woe; into the heart of the youth who first scents mortality spring fear and loathing. "More than once Alfred . . . . went out through the black night, and threw himself on a grave in the churchyard, praying to be beneath the sod himself." "He passed through moods of misery unutterable-when in London for the first time one of these moods came over him, as he realized that 'in a few years all its inhabitants would be lying horizontal, stark and stiff in their coffins.'

The foe moves in Tennyson's earlier poems:

His sockets were eyeless, but in them slept

A red infernal glow

As the cockroach crept, and the white fly leapt

About his hairless brow.

This driver of The Coach of Death, chattering with fleshless jaws, is a pasteboard phantom, but a more genuine spectre soon appears. The Juvenilia, with their Deserted House; their Dirge; their lament, All Things Will Die; their refrain, "The grave i' the earth so chilly"; are full of a melancholy presence. The poet does not rise above the shadow, but dwells there, caught in the contemplation of the sensual horror of dissolution. The worm is always at its work:

The Volume of 1833 and the Lover's Tale, written at this time, acknowledge the same presence:

Know I not Death? the outward signs?

I found him when my years were few ;

A shadow on the graves I knew,
And darkness in the village yew.

From grave to grave the shadow crept:
In her still place the morning wept:
Touched by his feet the daisy slept.

The simple senses crowned his head :
"Omega! thou art Lord," they said,
"We find no motion in the dead."

"Death drew nigh and beat the doors of life"; "the Power. from whose left hand floweth the Shadow of Death, perennial." The sufferer cries,

Would I had lain

Until the plaited ivy-tress had wound

Round my worn limbs, and the wild brier had driven

Its knotted thorns thro' my unpaining brows

and the gilded snake

Had nestled in this bosom-throne of Love.

He is haunted by phantoms, by "the hollow tolling of the bell, and all the vision of the bier." In the sequel the time comes when he is

kneeling there

Down in the dreadful dust that once was man,
Dust, as he said, that once was loving hearts.

Though some of the phrases are dramatic, they do not lose their significance. In later life Tennyson said, "I have written what I have felt and known, and I will never write anything else'; and again, "poets and novelists, however dramatic they are, give themselves in their works." The moods of this lyricperiod are Tennyson's own moods. He has searched into the loathly time beyond the hour of burial, he has pried into the vital secrets of the grave, and brought back horror and loathing.

The shadow which had passed across Tennyson's fancy was to fall across his heart, and years of silence were to ensue. Following the death of his father in 1831 came Hallam's death in 1833. There was now no abstraction; now was the time of the major struggle. It was a dark period. In 1838, say his son's Memoirs, the current of his mind ran constantly in the channel of mournful memories and melancholy forebodings; "so severe a hypochondria set in upon him that his friends despaired of his life." In Memoriam was written in these years, and in it are the traces of dark hours. But since it expresses not only doubt and despair but also faith and hope, it marks the close, as well as the course, of the conflict.

In the poetry that appeared meanwhile, death was no longer the skeleton in the closet of life. It was present in manifold shapes; now pitiful, now tragic, now releasing, but no longer merely horrible. Though the sharp-headed worm had ceased to haunt Tennyson's fancy, he had not come to a settled view of mortality. He was in a debatable land, where death had almost as many guises as it had entrances.

First, in the volume of 1842, comes the Morte d'Arthur, in which, though Arthur's mind is clouded with a doubt, he dreams. at least of passing to a healing island of Avilion. Then St. Simeon Stylites draws to his end, struck with no fear or horror, but full of the thought of the fate of his work on earth. After him Ulysses speaks Ulysses, to whose Greek mind "death closes all," but to whom comes a gleam,

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles.

As though to limn more sharply these three portraits of those who are about to die, stands Tithonus, whom "cruel immortality consumes." To him bitterly lamenting it seems that men who have the power to die are blessed, and he longs for "the grassy barrows of the happier dead."

St. Agnes' Eve reveals a woman exalted at the thought that death is near. To her it is the hoped-for end, the calling to the reward for a lifetime of devotion. Contrasted with this uplifted spirit is the pathetic Edward Gray, for whom the grave of Ellen Adair forms also the tomb of his own hopes. In the first poem is felt the joy of death for one whose life is not of this world; in the second its pity for one who through it loses that which is most dear to him.

There is almost a return to the youthful fear and loathing in The Vision of Sin, with its hysterical outburst:

Fill the cup and fill the can:
Have a rouse before the morn:
Every moment dies a man,

Trooping from their mouldy dens
The chap-fallen circle spreads:
Welcome, fellow-citizens,

Hollow hearts and empty heads!

You are bones, and what of that?
Every face, however full,
Padded round with flesh and fat
Is but modell'd on a skull.

Death is king, and Vivat Rex!

The same vision of the sequel of dissolution that haunted the youth appears in the lines —

Below were men and horses pierced with worms,

And slowly quickening into lower forms;

By shards and scurf of salt, and scum of dross.

The final note in the volume of 1842 is the lyric Break, Break, Break, with its cry—

....

.. for the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still.

There is, then, no prophet speaking in this volume, but only man in whose fancy death takes many shapes.

The Princess, 1847, with all its interest in the living problems of man and his relation to woman, does not look beyond the earthly latter end. In Lyric VI, to be sure,

Home they brought her warrior dead,—

but the pathos of that loss yields to resolution.

Some of these poems, though they came later than In Memoriam in composition, seem to be the product of that central period of fluctuation, of questioning, of alternate doubt and hope, which occupied the years of Tennyson's life following the death of Hallam. In Memoriam, also the product of that time, reflecting not only the ebb and flow of faith, but the view of life and death, which is to color the poet's later days and work, records the chief shock of the long struggle, and the issue.

The problems of death, life, and immortality are the material of the poem. Here experience forces Tennyson beyond the grave; throughout the poem the dead are looked upon as living; whether, as sometimes, Tennyson fears that this view is selfdelusion, or whether, as finally, he fully accepts it. In the poem may be found clear expression of that horror of and recoiling from death which darkened Tennyson's early work, and of that calm and founded faith which shone through his later poems. It marks each step of the passage from grief and despair to hope