Tennyson : Lord Alfred (1809-92), chief representative of the Victorian Age, appointed poet laureate in 1850.
... Page 148 less elevated interests, the substitution of a more curious but less impetuous movement. The rich beauty of Keats is replaced by the careful opulent cultivated picturesqueness of Tennyson, the concentrated personal force of Byron by the many-sided intellectual robustness and energy of Browning, the intense Nature poetry and the strong and grave ethical turn of Wordsworth by the too... enough in the second rank, but the inner surge and satisfaction of a free or deep spirit, the strong high-riding pinion or the skyward look, these things are rare in Victorian poetry. The fame of Tennyson, now a little dimmed and tarnished by the breath of Time, occupied this epoch with a great and immediate brilliance. He is unquestionably the representative English poet of his time. He mirrors its... English mind. When we try to estimate the substance and see what it permanently gives or what new thing it discovers for the poetic vision, we find that there is extraordinarily little in the end. Tennyson wrote much narrative poetry, but he is not a great narrative poet. There is a curious blending of incompatible intentions in all his work of this kind and even his exceptional skill could not save ...
... audacious Elizabethan temper in this blank verse, and Milton, Keats , Arnold and the finest of Stephen Phillips are there as general influences much more than Tennyson. Least of all is the mood or the manner of the Idylls dominant. The early Tennyson had great lyrical and descriptive power, but the poet of the Idylls has, in the main, a marked lack of intensity and is more absorbed in decorating and... vitality is the distinguishing mark of the nineteenth-century Sri Aurobindo as it is of the twentieth-century one, and such vitality is the one thing that is mostly to seek in Tennyson of the Idylls. To look upon this Tennyson as "a master of rhythm and a Page 59 true delineator of beauty" is as serious a mistake as to see him cropping up in Sri Aurobindo. The Difference... and a sound poetic sensitivity based on the classics and much akin to that of many of the more conservative masters. Sometimes it is as if Sri Aurobindo had taken the cream of Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson and stirred it to boiling point in the cauldron of his Muse. There are some first-rate passages of blank verse, e.g. Only he listens to the voice of his thoughts, his heart's ignorant whisper ...
... audacious Elizabethan temper in this blank verse, and Milton, Keats, Arnold and the finest of Stephen Phillips are there as general influences much more than Tennyson. 1 Least of all is the mood or the manner of the Idylls dominant. The early Tennyson had great lyrical and descriptive power, but the poet of the Idylls has, in the main, a marked lack of intensity and is more absorbed in decorating and... vitality is the distinguishing mark of the nineteenth-century Sri Aurobindo just as it is of the twentieth-century one, and such vitality is the one thing that is mostly to seek in Tennyson of the Idylls. To look upon this Tennyson as "a Page 408 master of rhythm and a true delineator of beauty" is as serious a mistake as to see him cropping up in Sri Aurobindo. The Difference between... and a sound poetic sensitivity based on the classics and much akin to that of many of the more conservative masters. Sometimes it is as if Sri Aurobindo had taken the cream of Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson and stirred it to boiling point in the cauldron of his Muse. There are some first-rate passages of blank verse, e.g.: Only he listens to the voice of his thoughts, his heart's ignorant whisper ...
... Let us try to analyse the situation. Blank verse prior to Sri Aurobindo had become perfect as far as it could go with the group of poets that came after Milton: Wordsworth, Keats, Arnold, Tennyson, to name only some. Each gave something to it, some lucidity, grandeur, beauty, sweetness or flow. Sri Aurobindo's earlier attempts, like Love and Death, Urvasie and Baji Prabhou, reveal part... another world. He invokes them, and makes silent his vessel for their reception. How is the style of these two poets a departure form other poets? We shall examine this briefly. Here is Tennyson: The great band Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon, And flashing round and round, and whirl'd in an arch, Shot like a streamer of the northern mom, Seen where... Page 350 And in their silent faces could he read Unutterable love. The beauty of Wordsworth lies in his thought and his description of Nature. Here he is more deep than Tennyson. Compared to Milton, he can stand his ground by his contemplative strength and his love of Nature. He has no power; but he attempts sublimity. As blank-verse form, his poetry lacks the architectural ...
... give a living body to it. Well, both to set you on the right tack and to give you Page 170 the consolation that I was not idling while you had to sweat, let me make a comment on the Tennyson lines as well as on the Words-worth phrase. Face to face with the former, we have first to get an unthinking aesthetic impression by trying to enter into the general sense. Flung before us, revealed... clearly expressed connections, intellectually justified sequences. It is the way the words are used, the way the words sound, the way they are linked to one another that logicise a poetic statement. Tennyson does not tell us that since the lake is stretched out under the sky the light of the moon is both above and below: he simply takes the smoothly liquid consonant that has been associated with the prospect... the loud stream and the trembling stars. Here too a connection was to be established, making it perfectly natural that what applied to the river on earth applied also to the stars in the sky. Tennyson convinces us of the twofold application by so fashioning his phraseology that the same dominant consor nants occur in the words about the river and the stars. In "loud stream" and "trembling stars" ...
... prose set to organ music — grand resonance sweeping merely intellectual matter along. Tennyson suffered from triviality. He once declared to his friend Carlyle: "I think I am the greatest master, after Shakespeare, of the rhythmic phrase in poetry, but I have really nothing to say." I may add that Carlyle rated Tennyson highly and saw him as a mighty bard constantly "cosmicising the chaos within him".... not always lend itself to being set to a tune. And it is a curious fact that some of the greatest melopoeics in verse have had very little ear for music — they were practically tone-deaf. Shelley, Tennyson, Swinburne, Hugo, Yeats, though they have written about music itself, were all tone-deafs in more or less degree. Swinburne was such an extreme case that if he had heard the tunes, without the words... Perhaps what im-pressed Carlyle was not Tennyson's poetic speech so much as his Page 168 frequent capacity for silence. Tennyson used often to visit Carlyle and they would sit at either end of the fireplace, smoking away. Two or three hours of an evening they would thus spend, each hidden in his own cloud of smoke and uttering not a word. At the close of the evening they would shake ...
... he certainly knew well". Mind you, I am not a hundred per cent denigrator of Tennyson the Poet. I set a fairly high value on his "young experiment", but his old performance, which constitutes the bulk of his work, is well hit off by Sri Aurobindo himself apropos of Indians writing blank verse: "Tennyson is a perilous model and can have a weakening and corrupting influence and the 'Princess'... passage of Tennyson's and one of Sri Aurobindo's that have some similarity of general theme and pointed out the world of difference in vibrancy, sensitiveness, vision-vitality, art-intensity. Here is Tennyson in the middle of the Enid story: O purblind race of miserable men, How many among us at this very hour Do forge a life-long trouble for ourselves, By taking true for false, or... but immediately he soars up into an intoxicating ozone and his touch-down is still with "trailing clouds of glory". Mark too the dissimilarity of the sheer form, the verse-body that goes soaring. Tennyson is loosely articulated, with a generic shape, so to speak, rather than a specific one: only one line (the sixth) has some originality of contour — Page 252 Groping,/how man/y, ...
... he certainly knew well". Mind you, I am not a hundred per cent denigrator of Tennyson the Poet. I set a fairly high value on his "young experiment", but his old performance, which constitutes the bulk of his work, is well hit off by Sri Aurobindo himself apropos of Indians writing blank verse: "Tennyson is a perilous model and can have a weakening and corrupting influence and the 'Princess'... passage of Tennyson's and one of Sri Aurobindo's that have some similarity of general theme and pointed out the world of difference in vibrancy, sensitiveness, vision-vitality, art-intensity. Here is Tennyson in the middle of the Enid story: O purblind race of miserable men, How many among us at this very hour Do forge a life-long trouble for ourselves, By taking true for false, or... but immediately he soars up into an intoxicating ozone and his touch-down is still with "trailing clouds of glory". Mark too the dissimilarity of the sheer form, the verse-body that goes soaring. Tennyson is loosely articulated, with a generic shape, so to speak, rather than a specific one: only one line (the sixth) has some originality of contour - Groping, / how man/y, until / we pass ...
... February 1935 Tennyson I suppose you know that I have no great consideration for Tennyson. I read him much and admired him when I was young and raw, but even then his In Memoriam style seemed to me mediocre and his attempts at thinking insufferably second-rate and dull. These lines [ "An infant crying in the night ... " ] are better than others, but they are still Tennyson. 12 September... and out of date. It is so far off from me in memory that it is difficult to say how I would now estimate it. It should have a place, I suppose—but a really high place? Perhaps. 23 January 1935 Tennyson and Wilde I could never swallow In Memoriam even in the days when I admired him—very early days! It has been well described as "sorrow in kid gloves". I suppose he was sincere, but he failed... Browning My opinion of Browning has been expressed, I think, in The Future Poetry . I had a fervent passion for him when I was from seventeen to eighteen, after a previous penchant for Tennyson; but like most calf-love both these fancies were of short duration. While I had it, I must have gone through most of his writings ( Fifine at the Fair and some others excepted) some half-dozen times ...
... where it listeth unless it preserve the boundaries prescribed by Nature. Each is a separate syllable in the grand poem of the universe: and it is all so inalterable because it is so perfect. Yes, Tennyson was right, tho' like most poets, he knew not what he said, when he wrote those lines on the flower in the crannies: if we know what the flower is, we know also what God is and what man. Wilson... Similarly Nature in moulding man, made a mistake of the first importance. She gave him the faculty of reason and by the use of her gift he has stultified the beauty of her splendid imaginations. Tennyson, by one of his felicitous blunders, has again hit upon the truth when he conceives the solemn wail of a heaven-born spirit in the agony of his disillusioning. I saw him in the shining of his... possessed in common by human beings and animals, are animal? Wilson —You are right. Keshav —And such qualities ought to be worked out of our composition? Page 61 Wilson —Yes, as Tennyson says, we ought to be working out The tiger and the ape. Keshav —Then we ought to get rid of fidelity, ought we not? Wilson —Why so? Keshav —Because it is a quality possessed ...
... "epiphany" is seen for a short while. The "one far-off divine event" is momentarily glimpsed. Yes, a Tennyson-ian suggestion glimmers in the background. But, of course, the consummation which Tennyson alludes to is not quite the same as the world-fulfilment Sri Aurobindo's yoga labours towards. Tennyson has a Christian outlook, and strains his eyes in the direction of a world-end leading to a Supreme... divine event To which the whole creation moves. But there is no direct parity between the Aurobindonian "Event" and the Tennysonian. Sri Aurobindo points to a daily occurrence, while Tennyson presumably talks of the end of universal history. And yet, behind the daily working of divine forces to which Sri Aurobindo alludes, we may discern a final "divine Event", when the Gods, the Lords ...
... a hyperbole—for I suppose you know that I have no great consideration for Tennyson. I read him much and admired him when I was young and raw, but even then his In Memoriam style seemed to me mediocre and his attempts at thinking insufferably second rate and dull. These lines are better than others, but they are still Tennyson. But truly you are a unique and wonderful translator. How you manage to... doubt has been raised also with regard to Homer. September 12,1931 Sri Aurobindo's comments on Dilip's translation into Bengali of three poems from James Cousins, Jehangir Vakil and Tennyson. Page 103 The first translation is good, the second superb and the third (third version) superlative. Cousins' poem is very felicitous in expression—generally he just misses the best... Page 124 My opinion of Browning has been expressed, I think in the Future Poetry. I had a fervent passion for him when I was from seventeen to eighteen, after a previous penchant for Tennyson; but like most calf-love both these fancies were of short duration. While I had it, I must have gone through most of his writings (Fifine at the Fair and some others excepted) some half dozen times ...
... knows. The guide, of course, is Virgil with his "sense of tears in earthly things" as Matthew Arnold puts it, Tennyson, in a lovely poem of nine-foot lines attempting to echo the Latin hexameter, hails him: Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of humankind! Tennyson has also tried to echo Dante directly, though in a different style in the second line of that couplet from "Locksley... distinct in some aspects of Nature than in others as the seer of the Lake District knew when he spoke of the secret universal Being Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns. Do you know that Tennyson regarded this line as the grandest in English poetry? He may well be nearly right, for to my mind both the art and the heart of it are superb. Take the vowellation to start with. A softly penetrating... in their beauty. To intellects fed on the elaborate pomp and imagery of Kalidasa's numbers... Vyasa may seem bald and unattractive. To be fed on the verse of Spenser, Shelley, Keats, Byron and Tennyson is no good preparation for the severest classics. It is indeed I believe, the general impression of many 'educated' young Indians that the Mahabharata is a mass of old wives' stories without a spark ...
... of thee. The children born of thee are sword and fire, Red ruin, and the breaking up of laws. —Tennyson × The moan of doves in immemorial elms, And murmuring of innumerable bees. —Tennyson × ... rise to a very high poetic peak,—but still there is something in this limitation, this predominance of the ingenious intellect which makes us understand Arnold's stricture. The second quotation from Tennyson 11 is eloquent and powerful, but absolute perfection seems to me an excessive praise for these lines,—at least I meant much more by it than anything we find here. There is absolute perfection of ...
... penultimate which hasn't much of poetry but brings a little originality of contour. Put Sri Aurobindo and Tennyson side by side and you cannot help marking the difference. In the one the verse-body moves with an organic flexibility - in the other it is loosely articulated and goes shuffling. Nor does Tennyson have the vision-vitality, the art-intensity of Sri Aurobindo. Please don't think I am offering... line's complex alliteration around an ever-changing vowel-play? As sheer sound it is for me a source of inexhaustible pleasure. To make your pulse respond better to the passage I'll cite a few lines of Tennyson that have some similarity of general theme and a touch of common phraseology at the start: O purblind race of miserable men, How many among us at this very hour Do forge a lifelong trouble ...
... things of beauty and majesty, who lures us with magical or tranquil distances and Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns. Tennyson regarded this line from Tintern Abbey as the grandest in the entire range of English poetry. Perhaps Tennyson indulged in a little exaggeration, but part of the exaggeration consists in overlooking the fact that some other lines of Wordsworth himself... Even in his younger days he had always a certain self-righteousness and a particularly high opinion of all he expressed in his writings. No poet of the nineteenth century, except perhaps Tennyson who perpetrated lines like "The monkey would not eat since little Willie died," could have come out quite seriously with the line "A Mr. Wilkerson, a clergyman" as if it were great poetry, or with ...
... how to keep silent. There is the famous story of his visits to the poet Tennyson. The two friends would often sit at opposite ends by the fireplace, puffing at their pipes. After a couple of hours of absorption in their own thoughts, without the exchange of a single word, they would get up to part. Carlyle would say to Tennyson: "What a fine evening we have had!" One may wonder what was going on in... in them- during those two hours of keeping mum. A hint lies in Carlyle's general comment on Tennyson on one occasion: "He is a great fellow given to deep silences spent in cosmicising the chaos within him." To cosmicise the inner chaos may be regarded by us as the true object of our Yoga. The process would be not only to bring the various parts of our being - often in conflict with one another ...
... far-off divine event" is momentarily glimpsed. Yes, a Tennysonian suggestion glimmers in the background. But, of course, the consummation which Tennyson alludes to is not quite the same as the world-fulfilment Sri Aurobindo's yoga labours towards. Tennyson has a Christian outlook, and strains his eyes in the direction of a world-end leading to a Supreme Hereafter for all the elements of the Creation... far-off divine event To which the whole creation moves. But there is no direct parity between the Aurobindonian "Event" and the Tennysonian. Sri Aurobindo points to a daily occurrence, while Tennyson presumably talks of the end of universal history. And yet, behind the daily working of divine forces to which Sri Aurobindo alludes, we may discern a final "divine Event", when the Gods, the Lords ...
... Wordsworth and Keats, or to accept it as an abrupt but gratifying attention, which was ordinarily the good fortune of the great poets in ancient Athens and Rome and of poets like Shakespeare and Tennyson in modem times. Posterity does not always confirm the contemporary verdict, very often it reverses it, forgets or depreciates the writer enthroned by contemporary fame, or raises up to a great ... got my turn for compound epithets from the latter! The only romantic poets of the Victorian Age who could have had any influence on me, apart from Arnold whose effect on me was considerable, were Tennyson perhaps, subconsciously, and Swinburne of the earlier poems, for his later work I did not at all admire. Still it is possible that the general atmosphere of the later Victorian decline, if decline... Meredith's from Modern Love I have been unable to trace concretely — unless I consider . some of the more pointed and bitter-sweetly reflective turns in Songs to Myrtilla to be Meredithian. That of Tennyson is noticeable in only a delicate picturesqueness here and there or else in the use of some words. Perhaps more than in your early blank verse the Tennysonian influence of this kind in general is ...
... distinguished as an artist. Milton is acknowledged to be the pre-eminent artist among English poets. Only five others qualify to come anywhere near him: they are, in order of time, Spenser, Keats, Tennyson, Rossetti, Yeats. Out of them Keats is the most original: in originality he is far superior to Milton. Sri Aurobindo calls Keats "the first entire artist in word and rhythm in English poetry, - not... Milton, but direct and original in his artistry." 9 Rossetti stands next in subtle pictorial directness. Yeats is as masterly - though more mystical - in musical suggestions deepening the sight. Tennyson is at times fine both in eye and ear but often gives an impression of decoration. Spenser is a most melodious rhythmist and a sensitive word-painter, but tends to monotony. And, except for Spenser... the quality that one at once is aware of in Milton, Wordsworth, Page 76 Aeschylus and which even their most fervent admirers would hardly attribute to Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Euripides...." 15 "There can be a very real spirit and power of underlying austerity behind a considerable wealth and richness of expression. Arnold in one of his poems gives the image of a ...
... sound poetic sensitivity based on the classics and much akin to that of many of the more conservative masters. Sometimes it is as if Sri Aurobindo had taken the cream of Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson and stirred it to boiling point in the cauldron of his Muse. There are some first-rate passages of blank verse, e.g.: Only he listens to the voice of his thoughts, his heart's ignorant... Sri Aurobindo's poetry and a certain haste in making up his mind. Page 122 When he pictures Sri Aurobindo as sometimes stirring and boiling the cream of Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson in his own Muse's cauldron, it is not easy to agree even if the critic's statement be applied to Sri Aurobindo's early work which is not that of a full-fledged Yogi; but when we come to his later... hardly be equated with the vision and experience of a Master of Yoga. As for the manner, it is equally individual in its turns and tones. Except that Sri Aurobindo, like Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson, does not bring in the typical modernist idiom a la Eliot of The Waste Land, nowhere are these poets discernible in either the substance or the style of lines like Impassive he lived immune ...
... quantities and stress or accentual pitch, wherever these came in, coincided as far as possible. But the result was not encouraging; it made the verse readable indeed, but stiff beyond measure. Even Tennyson in his lines on Milton, where he attempts this combination, seems to be walking on stilts,—very skilfully and nobly, but still on stilts and not on his own free God-given feet. As for other attempts... English literature as a new form perfectly accomplished and accepted. This may be perhaps because the attempt was always made as a sort of leisure exercise and no writer of great genius like Spenser, Tennyson or Swinburne has made it a main part of his work; but, more probably, there is a deeper cause inherent in the very principle and method of the endeavour. Two poets, Clough and Longfellow, have... creates a genuine length valid for any rhythm which is native to the language. To find out what does constitute true quantity is the first need, only then can there be any solution of the difficulty. Tennyson, like Harvey, missed this necessity; he was content to fuse long syllable and stress and manage carefully his short quantities conceived according to the classical law; this he did admirably, but ...
... of Wordsworth and Keats, or to accept it as an abrupt but gratifying attention, which was ordinarily the good fortune of the great poets in ancient Athens and Rome and of poets like Shakespeare and Tennyson in modern times. Posterity does not always confirm the contemporary verdict, very often it reverses it, forgets or depreciates the writer enthroned by contemporary fame, or raises up to a great height... got my turn for compound epithets from the latter! The only romantic poets of the Victorian Age who could have had any influence on me, apart from Arnold whose effect on me was considerable, were Tennyson perhaps, subconsciously, and Swinburne of the earlier poems, for his later work I did not at all admire. Still it is possible that the general atmosphere of the later Victorian decline, if decline ...
... however, that romanticism is not only the cause of Shakespeare's way with images. In romantic poetry itself there are two ways of using imagery — that of poets like Spenser, Milton and Tennyson and that of poets like Shakespeare and Donne. Donne differs from Shakespeare in several respects and is a much inferior and less harmonised poet on the whole and often he falls, as you once... some of these points in Shakespeare, quoted the phrase: Was the hope drunk Wherein you dressed yourself? Such a phrase would be impossible to find in Spenser or Tennyson, very rare in Milton for all his compact force. I am not quite clear as to what conclusion I should draw about the nature of poetry from your paragraph about aesthetics and the Overmind ...
... I may add, however, that romanticism is not the only cause of Shakespeare's way with images. In romantic poetry itself there are two ways of using imagery -that of poets like Spenser, Milton and Tennyson and that of poets like Shakespeare and Donne. Donne differs from Shakespeare in several respects and is a much inferior and less harmonised poet on the whole and often he falls between two stools... of these points in Shakespeare, quoted the phrase: Was the hope drunk Wherein you dressed yourself? Such a phrase would be impossible to find in Spenser or Page 135 Tennyson, it would be very rare in Milton for all his compact force. As for a quick play of varying images in mystical poetry, there is a striking passage in the first canto of Savitri, where a symbolic ...
... I may add, however, that romanticism is not the only cause of Shakespeare's way with images. In romantic poetry itself there are two ways of using imagery - that of poets like Spenser, Milton and Tennyson and that of poets like Shakespeare and Donne. Donne differs from Shakespeare in several respects and is a much inferior and less harmonised poet on the whole and often he falls between two stools... recent writer, noting some of these points in Shakespeare, quoted the phrase: Was the hope drunk Wherein you dressed yourself? Such a phrase would be impossible to find in Spenser or Tennyson, it would be very rare in Milton for all his compact force. As for a quick play of varying images in mystical poetry, there is a striking passage in the first canto of Savitri, where a symbolic ...
... I'll tell you a funny story. Tennyson, the English poet, was a great friend of Carlyle's. Surely you know Garlyle? His French Revolution is truly an admirable book. I believe Nolini, even in his early teens, had already read the entire book. Anyhow, when these two writers met, they often sat by the fireside smoking for hours without exchanging a single word. And when Tennyson got up to leave, they both ...
... analysis and appreciation that could have been turned out only by the creative force of a truly plenary understanding. The chapter on the Victorian, Poets concentrates on the big three - Tennyson, Browning and Arnold - and then follow four chapters on "Recent English Poetry", the focus of interest being on Whitman, Carpenter, Tagore, A.E., Phillips and W.B. Yeats, all of whom were "recent... coarser croak upon our Helicon? Page 625 Hexameters no worse than daring Germany gave us, Barbarous experiment, barbarous hexameters. It is doubtful though if Tennyson would have stood by this generalised derogation if he had had a chance of reading Ahana or llion, in which Sri Aurobindo has put into practice his own "sound and realistic theory" of true quantity ...
... the entire philosophical ground; but they follow different paths, for The Rishi is Upanishadic in cast while In the Moonlight is more of a meditative reverie. Although distantly reminiscent of Tennyson in his speculative vein and even of Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam in some places. In the Moonlight is rather more typically of Amoldian vintage - the Arnold of "high seriousness". The poem opens with... little doubt that Sri Aurobindo had easy access to the mantra, and hence he could, since the early years at Baroda, command the Djinn's services. Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, they all knew the secret, and they all could breathe into the seeming irregularity of blank verse the norm of iambic rhythm - a norm that permitted a hundred and one fluctuations ...
... Englishmen they are taught to profess a sort of official admiration for Shakespeare & Milton but with them as with the majority of Englishmen the poets they really steep themselves in are Shelley, Tennyson & Byron and to a less degree Keats & perhaps Spenser. Now the manner of these poets, lax, voluptuous, artificial, all outward glitter and colour, but inwardly poor of spirit and wanting in genuine... numbers and Page 304 the somewhat gaudy, expensive & meretricious spirit of English poetry, Vyasa may seem bald and unattractive. To be fed on the verse of Spenser, Shelley, Keats, Byron & Tennyson is no good preparation for the severest of classics. It is indeed, I believe, the general impression of many "educated" young Indians that the Mahabharata is a mass of old wives' stories without a ...
... universally — in the direction of the line's beginning and in that of its end. An apt technique is everywhere to do justice to the marvellous aptness of the words. Excepting the best of Keats and early Tennyson I know of scarcely any descriptive writing to approach the all-round expressive power of this short passage in the "grand style". Nor is Sri Aurobindo perfect only when his brush moves with... heaped Page 25 Moss-grown disordered stones, and all the water Is hidden with its lotuses and sways Shimmering between leaves or strains through bloom. Keats and early Tennyson would have been proud to sign also under this picture. So finely realised are Sri Aurobindo's word-pictures that they are as if on a canvas before us, or rather in three-dimensional Nature ...
... has a more direct play in the Seumas O'Sullivan that you find a clearer ideative effect there than in the Tennyson and pick it out for a 'clincher' against the supposed presence of 'thought' in that intense phrase in the Shakespearean passage. The line from Claudio pitted against the Tennyson has a strong subjective tone: the nerves of mental sensation — to quote a phrase of Sri Aurobindo's — receive ...
... and pieces only. How shall I make a whole poem out of them? Many poets do that—jot down something that comes isolated in the hope that some day it will be utilisable. Tennyson did it, I believe. You don't want to be like Tennyson? Of course it is always permissible for you to pick and choose among these divine fragments and throw away those that are only semi-divine. Already words and lines of ...
... the imagination" in the past which is really not the past at all. The tradition of poetry has a continuity over the ages and, when a surge of epic creativity comes with an organic turn towards what Tennyson has called "the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man" and when a profound interpretative insight visits one in connection with an old theme, one is not imitating but breathing new life... was meant to be. I like what you write about Blank Verse, and of course it is the essential poetic rhythm of the English language, and has been used both by Shakespeare and Milton, Keats and Tennyson with great narrative beauty. But I have heard Page 28 Indian music (and Arabinda Basu used to expound its rhythms to me) and also heard Indian poetry recited (in Hindi and in Sanskrit ...
... of the whole starry sky. Tennyson thus translates the phrase in well-modulated and expressively enjambed blank verses: ...the immeasurable heavens Break open to the highest and the stars Shine... I believe Homer puts everything into one single line and naturally the effect is fuller and finer, more faithful to the amplitude laid bare at once. But Tennyson shows great skill managing ...
... off from the fountainheads of creation and wilfully preparing its own decline and sterility. The age of which Callimachus & Apollonius of Rhodes were the Simonides & the Homer and the age of which Tennyson is the Shakespeare & Rudyard Kipling the Milton present an ominous resemblance. Page 174 ...
... a long time so imitating the West, trying to become like it or partly like it and have fortunately failed, for that would have meant creating a bastard or twy-natured culture; but twy-natured, as Tennyson makes his Lucretius say, is no-natured and a bastard culture is no sound, truth-living Page 44 culture. An entire return upon ourselves is our only way of salvation. There is much ...
... languid or crude or characterless. Except for a few poems, like Tennyson's early Morte d'Arthur, Ulysses and one or two others or Arnold's Sohrab and Rustam , there is nothing of a very high order. Tennyson is a perilous model and can have a weakening and corrupting influence and the Princess and Idylls of the King which seem to have set the tone for Indo English blank verse are perhaps the worst ...
... you. Meredith's from Modern Love I have been unable to trace concretely—unless I consider some of the more pointed and bitter-sweetly reflective turns in Songs to Myrtilla to be Meredithian. That of Tennyson is noticeable in only a delicate picturesqueness here and there or else in the use of some words. Perhaps more than in your early blank verse the Tennysonian influence of this kind in general is there ...
... work of Dryden and Pope, the whole mass of eighteenth-century verse, Cowper, Scott, Wordsworth in his more outward moments, Byron without his Titanism and unrest, much of the lesser Victorian verse, Tennyson without his surface aestheticism and elaborate finesse, the poetry of Browning. For this much we need not go outside the Anglo-Norman temperament. That also would give, but subject to a potent ...
... s line in the following way in order to please H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler I shall decline without thanks. Shakespeare wrote, if I remember right, " , strategems and spoils"; Shelley, Tennyson, any poet of the English language, I believe, would do the same—though I have no books with me to give chapter and verse. I lived in both northern and southern England, but I never heard vision pronounced ...
... (vii) On p. 352, line 5, "verily evidently" is a misprint for "very evidently". These are, however, flaws of little importance. More serious is the claim, put forward on p. 321 that Spenser, Tennyson and Swinburne were great geniuses. It would be nearer the truth to say that they were poets whose technical ability was considerable. New and strange opinions! "My opinion" would be preferable ...
... more varied but less elevated interests, the substitution of a more curious but less impetuous movement. The rich beauty of Keats is replaced by the careful opulent cultivated picturesqueness of Tennyson, the concentrated personal force of Byron by the many-sided intellectual robustness and energy of Browning, the intense Nature poetry and the strong and grave ethical turn of Wordsworth by the ...
... to the knowledge of the fundamental unity and they begin therefore at the bottom and climb upwards—a slow but, one might imagine, a safe method of procession. "Little flower in the crannies" cries Tennyson addressing a pretty blossom in the wall in lines which make good thought, but execrable poetry, "if I could but know what you are, I should know what God and man is." Undoubtedly; the question is ...
... possible. A final point needing to be touched upon is the very first word in the line: "Sweet". It has an easily-found air and may even be charged with sentimentality or sugariness in the mode of Tennyson at his most Victorian. We have more than once referred to the freshness of mountain water, but the adjective "fresh" would be flat and prosaic as a line-opener here. "Cool" would be appropriate to ...
... Sufi 70 sukshma sharira 116 Sun of Truth 38,86 Supermind 51,58 Supernature 12,128,208,273,315 Swinburne 42,127 T Tagore, Rabindranath 34, 70 Tantra 273 Tennyson 66,216,259 Thibaudet 62 Thompson, Francis 20,22,27,108 transformation power of true 273 translation 210 true soul 28,160 Truth-Consciousness 51 Turiya 99 ...
... of words here is one of the most comprehensive and varied and that it is not * P. Lal, Modem Indo-Anglian Poetry, p. 11. Page 223 restricted to "poetic" words as in Tennyson, Swinburne and the Decadent poets. There is daring originality in such choice, as in: We must fill the immense lacuna we have made, Re-wed the closed finite's lonely consonant With ...
... Fowler and F.G. Fowler, In mai/den med/itation / fan/cy free, I shall decline without thanks. Shakespeare wrote, if I remember right, "treasons, stratagems and spoils"; Shelley, Tennyson, any poet of the English language, I believe, would do the same — though I have no books with me to give chapter and verse. I Page 191 lived in both northern and southern England, but ...
... that was Subramaniam Bharati had passed away. Bharati's Poetical Works The circumstances of Bharati's life were such that he could not - as a Wordsworth or a Tennyson did - pursue the profession of poetry either with security or with steady success. Few lives could have been more chequered, and he had constantly to struggle against poverty at home and Government ...
... poetic expression. Professor Vivian de Sola Pinto has drawn my attention to the marked resemblance between Tennyson's blank verse at its best and the verse of Savitri. Writing of Tennyson in The Future Poetry, Sri Aurobindo remarked: There has been no more consummate master of the language, and this mastery is used with a careful, sure and unfailing hand. Whatever ...
... the fine felicity of rhythm in these lines had stirred my young heart too a great Page 29 deal. That was my first introduction to Matthew Arnold. The greatness of the poet-laureate Tennyson had already reached the ears of even the ordinary student at college, but Matthew Arnold and Browning were still unknown. , All this is however quite beside the point. Let me come back ...
... He said that after drinking he got thoughts which he could never get when he was sober. Coleridge wrote most of his poems when he was under the influence of opium. Somebody once praised a line of Tennyson. He said : "Ah ! that line ! It cost me 25 cigars !" So there is no reason to suppose why a Sadhaka should not derive help from it. ( Then After a pause ) I don't hope you have serious intentions ...
... blank verse in the Tennysonian form on Irish Celtic subjects. There is one long piece about a king, a queen and a divine lover: I forget the name. He has given his blank verse a greater beauty than Tennyson was capable of. ...
... an example of the Overhead inspiration at work over prolonged jets of utterance, and as an experiment in blank verse that avoids the Miltonic polyphonic paragraphs and returns to the clarities of Tennyson and the pre-Shakespearean Marlowe, and more particularly the Kalidasian and Upanishadic fusion of finish and power. Even people with no academic background - perhaps they far more than the mere academics ...
... 15, 16-17, 62, 147, 220,244,247,273,550,571, 615 Tandon, Purushottamdas, 534 Tegart, Sir Charles, 287 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 442,443ff Telang, K. T., 15 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 164, 177,615, 690 Tehmi, 595 Théon, M., 396 Thompson, Francis, 631 Thor, with Angels, 147 Thornhill, T.,310,370 Thought the Paraclete. ...
... and cold. Even in his own sphere the man without any training of the right hand can only progress in a settled groove; he cannot broaden the base of human culture or enlarge the bounds of science. Tennyson describes him as an eye well practised in Nature, a spirit bounded and poor, and the description is just. But a cultivated eye without a cultivated spirit makes by no means the highest type of man ...
... Some are pointing to this as a sign of intellectual barrenness; but it is not so. Shakespeare and Milton came within the limits of a century! Since then there have been Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, but not a second Shakespeare or Milton. Dante and Boccaccio came successively: since then there have been Berni, Boiardo, Alfieri, Tasso, but not a second Dante or Boccaccio. Such men come rarely ...
... average Bombay graduate who has taken English Literature for Page 361 his optional subject, know of that literature? He has read a novel of Jane Austen or the Vicar of Wakefield, a poem of Tennyson or a book of Milton, at most two plays of Shakespeare, a work of Bacon's or Burke's full of ideas which he is totally incompetent to digest and one or two stray books of Pope, Dryden, Spenser or other ...
... repressed by long control expires at last or feebly mans the soul, why should not our countrymen benefit by the advice of Goldsmith and begin to chafe at the attempt to prolong this alien control? If Tennyson is justified in taking a pride in his country which freemen till, which sober-suited Freedom chose, where girt with friends or foes a man may speak the thing he will, where freedom slowly broadens ...
... (Charu Chandra Dutt) Strong Sun of God, immortal love, Whom we, that have not seen thy face, By faith, and faith alone, embrace, Believing when we cannot prove. In Memoriam, Tennyson Dadoo he was to us, his students. He was known to others and the world at large as C. C. Dutt, I.C.S. or at least as Charu Dutt. The full name is Charu Chandra Dutt. He was probably quite ...
... Page 250 it is the quality that one at once is aware of in Milton, Words worth, Aeschylus and which even their most fervent admirers would hardly attribute to Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Euripides. But there is also an austerity in the poetic manner and that is more difficult to describe or to fix its borders. At most one can say that it consists in a will to express the thing ...
... masterful exuberance: the older poet surpassed Swinburne in sense of character and in narrative skill, but in the true furor poeticus the younger was with the very few masters of English verse, while Tennyson never fulfilled on a grand scale that subtle yet pungent quality his genius possessed by which he could interpret languid and intricate distempers of the heart against a changing detailed background ...
... and each sunrise leads on to a finer harmony of the various parts in their turning towards the Infinite and the Eternal. Love of the Supreme leads in a preeminent degree to the state which the poet Tennyson, writing of love between humans at its best, conveys most memorably in those two lines: Love took up the harp of life and smote on all the chords with might - Smote the chord of self ...
... Eternal and the Infinite, it will indeed be a pity if we fail to be in as vivid a relationship as possible with such a great gesture of the Supreme's Grace towards weak and ignorant humans. Tennyson has called each of us An infant crying in the night, An infant crying for the light, And with no language but a cry. In answer to this appeal from age to age the Heavenly Parents ...
... there is a drift of dreamy fancifulness not very far removed from de la Mare. Even on some occasions the colouring shows a touch of the minutely marking as well as luxurious painter eye of the young Tennyson, and not infrequently the phrasing bears an aspect of traditional poeticism from Spenser down to William Watson, which especially the rebellious modernist ear may dub wearying. In a semi-modernist ...
... and he "resolved to outdo him". He outdid his cousin by writing five hundred lines. His cousin also introduced him to some of the major British poets like Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Keats. Under the influence of Byron he wrote "two interminable poems in the Byronian ottava rima based on surreptitious feasting on Beppo and Don Juan" which he was strictly forbidden to read ...
... of the worst Page 81 Elizabethan type, Shelley even, forgetting his discovery of a new and fine literary form for dramatic poetry to give us the Elizabethan violences of the Cenci , Tennyson, Swinburne, even after Atalanta , following the same ignis fatuus, a very flame of fatuity and futility, are all victims of the same hypnotism. Recently a new turn is visible; but as yet it is doubtful ...
... either to have got clear away from this first motive or at least to have transmuted it by the infusion of much higher artistic motives. To give only one instance in many, it got sadly in the way of Tennyson, who yet had no real turn for the reproduction of life, and prevented him from working out the fine subjective and mystic vein which his first natural intuitions had discovered in such work as the ...
... possesses into the world of European thought and culture; but at least as possessed at present, it is a painfully small and insufficient opening. English poetry for all but a few of us stops short with Tennyson and Browning, when it does not stop with Byron and Shelley. A few have heard of some of the recent, fewer of some of the contemporary poets; their readers are hardly enough to make a number. In this ...
... occasionally the same tendency in a stronger but less happy force; for it is weighted down by an increased intellectuality, in Browning by the robust strenuousness of the analytic intelligence, in Tennyson by the tendency to mere trimming of expression or glitter and wealth of artistic colour; but we have its voice sometimes, as in this line of the Lotos-Eaters ,— Portions and parcels of the dreadful ...
... grave and severe; it is the quality that one at once is aware of in Milton, Wordsworth, Aeschylus and which even their most fervent admirers would hardly attribute to Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Euripides. But there is also an austerity in the poetic manner and that is more difficult to describe or to fix its borders. At most one can say that it consists in a will to express the thing of ...
... could not long keep a living glow on its own. It was Wordsworth who had sustained Coleridge's already awakened genius, but it was Coleridge who by his contact gave Wordsworth's music a noble accent. Tennyson had a half-morbid half-visionary strain in him which with his curious eye for scenic detail would have brought us colourful and quivering or magically intonated masterpieces on a large scale, if he ...
... blue sky, and in the mind of man, A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. I may remark, en passant, that Tennyson considered the phrase, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, the grandest line in English poetry. It is, at least, one of the grandest and as long as Wordsworth was alive to the feeling ...
... gift is a man's 'caste' surely, were he a carpenter or a musician or a yogi. It is really futile to go on arguing about Sri Aurobindo's poetry, whether it be like Milton or like Matthew Arnold or Tennyson, for my point about 'nowness' is that a poet should work with language as it comes to his own time and place. I find his style full of linguistic clutter -'well-loved', 'overwhelming sweetness' ...
... shoulders above other modern countries in poetry. Neither in modern Europe nor anywhere else do we find such a poetic galaxy as Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Francis Thompson and Yeats. If we may add from those to whom English was native outside England, there is the free-verse giant, Whitman. In consequence of the intensely inspired ...
... to Masefield? NIRODBARAN: Perhaps because he is the poet-laureate. SRI AUROBINDO: Poet-laureate! Anybody can be a poet laureate. The only people of real worth to whom the title was given were Tennyson and Wordsworth. Masefield's poems are Georgian, full of rhetoric. PURANI: Thompson asked me to read the poems of Eliot. He was in ecstasy over them. I read them. I couldn't find anything there ...
... poet like Browning has plenty of mass, volume, "girth" as you say, but he is a different case. Once he used to be rated a great poet. NIRODBARAN: Browning? SRI AUROBINDO: Yes. Both Browning and Tennyson ranked as great—they were just below Shakespeare and Milton. But can Browning be taken to be a greater poet than Thompson? Has he any single poem as great as "The Hound of Heaven"? NIRODBARAN: ...
... used to like him very much because of his pleasing manners and his intellectual gifts. He used to tell me a great deal about English literature, - about Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelly and Tennyson. He himself was a poet and used to explain to me how to write poems. None in our family or in his family came to know of the developing relationship between him and Alka; but it was evident that ...
... feeling, the deep pathos, the fine felicity of rhythm in these lines had stirred my young heart too a great deal. That was my first introduction to Matthew Arnold. The greatness of the poet-laureate Tennyson had already reached the ears of even the ordinary student at college, but Matthew Arnold and Browning were still unknown. All this is however quite beside the point. Let me come back to the story ...
... 24, 25, 210, 283, 293-295,347.359,400 Tagore, Rabindranath 3-5, 13, 17, 19, 47, Tasso 381,383 Tate, Allen 314, 366,390-392, 414, 419 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 315, 344, 345, 396, Thompson, Francis 270,311 Thought the Paraclete 42, 321 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar 10,19, 25 Tillyard, E.M.W. 337,379,395, 445 456 ...
... the 'Cretan glance' includes more of the joy of life than the Stoic or the Sophoclean, though quite as much of its clarity and strength and integrality. Kazantzakis imagines (like Tennyson) that Odysseus, on his homecoming to Ithaca, neither pleases nor is pleased himself, and so sets out again on his wanderings with a few picked rugged companions. His first hop is at Sparta, and ...
... n; and iii. Rescue or rebirth. This applies no less to Sri Aurobindo's Urvasie, Love and Death and Savitri. (See Introduction to A Selection from the Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1946. p.xv). 120. Savitri,?. 827. 121. ibid.,p.917. 122. Cf. S.K.. Maitra's article on 'Faust and Savitri' in The Meeting of the East and the West in Sri Aurobindo's ...
... Why were they sent to Masefield? Disciple : Perhaps, because he was the poet Laureate. Sri Aurobindo : Generally Poet-Laureates are uninteresting : Very few are like Wordsworth and Tennyson. Masefields' poems are Georgian rhetoric. Disciple : Do you remember Volsung Saga by William Morris? Sri Aurobindo : It is a very good poem; it is an exercise in Epic. I remember ...
... worked out in Love and Death." Sri Aurobindo noted, "The only romantic poets of the Victorian Age who could have had any influence on me, apart from Arnold whose effect on me was considerable, were Tennyson perhaps, subconsciously, and Swinburne of the earlier poems, for his later work I did not at all admire. Still it is possible that the general atmosphere of the later Victorian decline, if decline ...
... with gilded toys and useless tinsel. Why waste your energy in granting "concessions" when none is wanted? After imparting this sage advice the Statesman proceeds to present a prose rendering of Tennyson's well-known description of England as the land Page 506 "Where Freedom slowly broadens down From precedent to precedent". In the case of countries conquered by England "reforms" ...
... examples. My friend Ravindra Khanna drew my attention to an incident connected with Tennyson's 'Crossing the Bar' For years and years in both England and America critics have exercised themselves over the question of why Tennyson's 'pilot' remained on board after the vessel had crossed the harbour bar. Tennyson's explanation was that the pilot had been on board all the time, but in the dark he had ...
... thinkers, and they can even, if the occasion demands it, transcend both action and thought. It is not therefore surprising that Odysseus (or Ulysses) has become almost the archetype of the modern man. Tennyson's Ulysses first widely popularised the figure of the restless adventurer to whom ease is but sloth and who is determined "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield". The Poundian Odysseus ...
... set me wondering with its flawless music what supreme beauty of chaste aloofness it was that had worn the disguise of those chill and empty branches while hinting itself through words so magical. Tennyson's Let the wild Lean-headed eagles yelp alone moved me in an analogous way, though here the allusion seemed to be of some highest beauty of intense and solitary power shining out in a symbol ...
... even secondary magnificence. One no longer looks for Shakespeare or Dante to return, but even Wordsworth or Racine have also become impossible. Hugo's flawed opulence, Whitman's formless plenty, Tennyson's sugared emptiness seem to have been the last poetic speech of modern Europe. If poetical genius appears, it is at once taken prisoner by the applauding coterie or the expectant multitude and, where ...
... experience of love between human beings, with the heart beating faster in joy, could turn into that vision a la Flecker: Page 60 A red immortal riding in the hearts of men. Tennyson's quiet, solemn, simple representation: Twilight and evening star would change into that revelation made by an Aurobindonian poet intimately known to you: The wideness with one star that ...
... thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves or few or none do hang Upon the boughs that shake against the cold Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang. Or take single-line examples: Tennyson's piercingly felt Tears from the depth of some divine despair or on a sublimer scale Wordsworth's meditatively discovered Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. Not only do ...
... above have somehow managed to awake the "soul value", the "direct spiritual power", in the words brought together. An adroit balance of ideas and sounds may turn out lines that are in Lord Alfred Tennyson's words, Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, Dead perfection, no more. 65 Andrea del Sarto, in Robert Browning's poem, concedes that although he may be a ...
... brought to bear on a single feeling for its enlargement with a great power of intuitive and revealing suggestion. This enlarging of the particular to meet and become one with the universal and infinite—Tennyson's knowing of what God and man is from a deep and intimate perception of all that is meant by Nature in a single little flower in the crannies—is a very characteristic and indicative feature of this ...
... before really great verse can be produced; everyone knows that verse may scan well enough & yet be very poor verse; there may beyond this be skilful placings of pause & combinations of sound as in Tennyson's blank verse, but the result is merely artificially elegant & skilful technique; if emotion movement is super-added, the result is melody, lyric sweetness or elegiac grace or flowing & sensuous beauty... certain effects easily created within the rich quantitative variety of ancient languages, of which an equivalent in English can only be found by the aid of rhyme. No competent critic would declare Tennyson's absurd experiment in Boadicea an equivalent to the rushing, stumbling & leaping metre of the Attis with its singular & rare effects. A proper equivalent would only be found in some rhymed system ...
... value but the rest will shine with an increasing brightness. But even the vital and popular elements in the work may have different values—Shakespeare's vitality has the same appeal now as then; Tennyson's has got very much depreciated; Longfellow's is now recognised for the easily current copper coin that it always was. You must remember that when I speak of the vital force in a poet as something ...
... today, superexistentialist: I am, I love, I see, I act, I will.²² Here is an utterance deriving its force and resolution from deeper layers of being than the famous close in Tennyson's poem about Ulysses and his comrades: Made weak by fate and time, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. 19. Ibid., p. 385 ...
... taught us The Princess. This was his comment on the book. "You know what this work is like? If Tagore had cared to write a poem on female emancipation, it would have been something like this book of Tennyson's. But even in this arid expanse there are some oases, as for instance these charming lines: Page 430 Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tears from the depth of some ...
... "What d'ye think?", "Thank ye", "I tell ye". But poetry too is not devoid of instances which leave no doubt. When we read Scott's Hush ye, hush ye, little pet ye! Page 296 or Tennyson's 'Damsel,' he said, 'ye be not all to blame', the singular number is apparent. At this place we may glance at the highly original proposition that Keats is addressing the Urn. Since he ...
... Page 238 There is only one point of likeness, the rest is mostly a divine bounty. I do not know of a better image of impression than the one giving us a starlit scene. I am quoting Tennyson's version: As when in heaven the stars about the moon Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid, And every height comes out, and jutting peak And valley, and the immeasurable ...
... "links of relevance". There is only one point of likeness, the rest is mostly a divine bounty. I do not know of a better image of impression than the one giving us a starlit scene. I am quoting Tennyson's version: As when in heaven the stars about the moon Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid, And every height comes out, and jutting peak And valley, and the immeasurable ...
... today, super-existentialist: I am, I love, 1 see, I act, I will. [p. 594] Here is an expression deriving its force and resolution from deeper layers of being than the famous close in Tennyson's poem about Ulysses and his comrades: Made weak by fate and time, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Page 66 Those deeper layers render ...
... entialist: Page 157 I am, I love, I see, I act, I will. Here is an expression deriving its force and resolution from deeper layers of being than the famous close in Tennyson's poem about Ulysses and his comrades: Made weak by fate and time, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Those deeper layers render Sri Aurobindo's line ...
... diction. There seems to be a strained and abrupt reaching out towards poetic height of tone, not the assured continuity of the really grand rhythmic ascension, a reflex of which we can feel in even Tennyson's translation of the same passage: the immeasurable heavens Break open to their heights, and all the stars Shine... Perhaps the jog-trot ballad metre disguised by Chapman as a fourteener ...
... popular today, super-existentialist: I am, I love, I see, I act, I will. 12 Here is an expression deriving its force and resolution from deeper layers of being than the famous close in Tennyson's poem about Ulysses and his comrades: Made weak by fate and time, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Those deeper layers render Sri Aurobindo's line ...
... with Melopoeia. And this pleasure is not found even in the early Milton and early Sri Aurobindo we have cited; for their meaning is still not vital enough. Much less can we stop with effects like Tennyson's The mellow ouzel fluting in the elm or his more famous and quite perfect The moan of doves in immemorial elms And murmuring of innumerable bees. From early Sri Aurobindo ...
... Morris, the author of "The Epic of Hades", was complaining to Oscar Wilde of what he regarded as studied neglect of his claims when possible successors to the Laureateship were being discussed after Tennyson's death. Page 301 Said Morris: "It is a complete conspiracy of silence against me - a conspiracy of silence! What ought I to do, Oscar?" "Join it," replied Wilde, with happy readiness ...
... give up the mature "fruitbearing" years of his *In the course of a letter to Prema Nandakumar, Mr. K. D. Sethna has compared this passage from Love and Death with the following passage from Tennyson's Idylls: O purblind race of miserable men, How many among us at this very hour Do forge a life-long trouble for ourselves, By taking true for false, or false for true; ...
... size and in performance, even their nose-colour and engine-throb repeating flawlessly. The translation is, as Enid Hamer would say, "spirited and musical, but the lines show the same tendency as Tennyson's to break after the fourth foot, and the whole technique is very similar" to Locksley Hall . The couplet, with curtailed eight-foot lines, can easily be broken up into an eight- Page 567 ...
... size and in performance, even their nose-colour and engine-throb repeating flawlessly. The translation is, as Enid Hamer would say, "spirited and musical, but the lines show the same tendency as Tennyson's to break after the fourth foot, and the whole technique is very similar" to Locksley Hall. The couplet, with curtailed eight-foot lines, can easily be broken up into an eight-seven-eight-seven ...
... that word, the long "a" of "gates" hints the openness which those objects are capable of and which the poet desires to be evoked from them. The long "i" of "wide" needs no explanation. Listen to Tennyson's And on a sudden lo! the level lake. Here what adds to the poetic spell of the alliteration is the right sprinkling of long with short vowels in the alliterative words. In "lo!" the vowel ...
... inferior in beauty to all that is near it; if so, she is not a careful housewife but a slattern. The Muse has a careful housewife,—there is Pope's, perfect in the classical or pseudo-classical style or Tennyson's, in the romantic or semi romantic manner, while as a contrast there is Browning's with her energetic and rough-and-tumble dash and clatter. You ask why in these and similar cases I could not ...
... vibrations of a naturally vocal sensibility. Nevinson writes of him in his New Spirit in India: "I found him there (in the Presidency College) teaching the grammar and occasional beauties of Tennyson's 'Princess' with extreme distaste for that sugary stuff." Some of his poems have been incorporated in a few anthologies of English verse, published in England, and George Sampson, writing about ...
... value, but the rest will shine with an increasing brightness. But even the vital and popular elements in their work may have different values—Shakespeare's vitality has the same appeal now as then; Tennyson's has got very much depreciated; Longfellow's is now recognised for the easily current copper coin that it always was. You must remember that when I speak of the vital force in a poet as something ...
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