Alfred, Lord Tennyson

O me, my pleasant rambles by the lake,
My sweet, wild, fresh three-quarters of a year,
My one Oasis in the dust and drouth
Of city life! I was a sketcher then:
See here, my doing: curves of mountain, bridge,
Boat, island, ruins of a castle, built
When men knew how to build, upon a rock,
With turrets lichen-gilded like a rock:
And here, new-comers in an ancient hold,
New-comers from the Mersey, millionaires,
Here lived the Hills—a Tudor-chimnied

I.
Thy dark eyes open’d not,
Nor first reveal’d themselves to English air,
For there is nothing here
Which, from the outward to the inward brought,
Moulded thy baby thought.
Far off from human neighborhood
Thou wert born, on a summer morn,
A mile beneath the cedar-wood.
Thy bounteous forehead was not fann’d
With breezes from our oaken glades,
But thou wert nursed in some delicious land
Of lavish lights, and floating shades;
And flattering thy childish thought
The oriental fairy brought,
At the

O thou that sendest out the man
To rule by land and sea,
Strong mother of a Lion-line,
Be proud of those strong sons of thine
Who wrench’d their rights from thee!

What wonder if in noble heat
Those men thine arms withstood,
Retaught the lesson thou hadst taught,
And in thy spirit with thee fought–
Who sprang from English blood!

But thou rejoice with liberal joy,
Lift up thy rocky face,
And shatter, when the storms are black,
In many a

Long lines of cliff breaking have left a chasm;
And in the chasm are foam and yellow sands;
Beyond, red roofs about a narrow wharf
In cluster; then a moulder’d church; and higher
A long street climbs to one tall-tower’d mill;
And high in heaven behind it a gray down
With Danish barrows; and a hazelwood,
By autumn nutters haunted, flourishes
Green in a cuplike hollow of the down.

Here on this beach a hundred years ago,
Three children

Thy prayer was ‘Light-more Light-while Time shall last!’
Thou rawest a glory growing on the night,
But not the shadows which that light would cast,
Till shadows vanish in the Light of Light.
-Epitaph On Caxton by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Warrior of God, man’s friend, and tyrant’s foe,
Now somewhere dead far in the waste Soudan,
Thou livest in all hearts, for all men know
This earth has never borne a nobler man.
-Epitaph On General Gordon by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Thou third great Canning, stand among our best
And noblest, now thy long day’s work hath ceased,
Here silent in our Minster of the West
Who wert the voice of England in the East.
-Epitaph On Lord Stratford De Redcliffe by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I

Doubt no longer that the Highest is the wisest and the best,
Let not all that saddens Nature blight thy hope or break thy rest,
Quail not at the fiery mountain, at the shipwreck, or the rolling
Thunder, or the rending earthquake, or the famine, or the pest!

II

Neither mourn if human creeds be lower than the heart’s desire!
Thro’ the gates that bar the distance comes a gleam of what is higher.
Wait till

What sight so lured him thro’ the fields he knew
As where earth’s green stole into heaven’s own hue,

Far–far–away?

What sound was dearest in his native dells?
The mellow lin-lan-lone of evening bells

Far–far–away.

What vague world-whisper, mystic pain or joy,
Thro’ those three words would haunt him when a boy,

Far–far–away?

A whisper from his dawn of life? a breath
From some fair dawn beyond the doors of death

Far–far–away?

Far, far, how far? from o’er the gates of

O love, Love, Love! O withering might!
O sun, that from thy noonday height
Shudderest when I strain my sight,
Throbbing thro’ all thy heat and light,
Lo, falling from my constant mind,
Lo, parch’d and wither’d, deaf and blind,
I whirl like leaves in roaring wind.

Last night I wasted hateful hours
Below the city’s eastern towers:
I thirsted for the brooks, the showers:
I roll’d among the tender flowers:
I crush’d them on my breast, my mouth;
I look’d

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower–but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
-Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I.
‘He is fled—I wish him dead-
He that wrought my ruin-
O the flattery and the craft
Which were my undoing…
In the night, in the night,
When the storms are blowing.

II.
Who was witness of the crime?
Who shall now reveal it?
He is fled, or he is dead,
Marriage will conceal it…
In the night, in the night,
While the gloom is growing.’

III.
Catherine, Catherine, in the night,
What is this you’re dreaming?
There is laughter down in Hell
At your simple

Frater Ave atque Vale

Row us out from Desenzano, to your Sirmione row!
So they row’d, and there we landed–‘O venusta Sirmio!’
There to me thro’ all the groves of olive in the summer glow,
There beneath the Roman ruin where the purple flowers grow,
Came that ‘Ave atque Vale’ of the Poet’s hopeless woe,
Tenderest of Roman poets nineteen-hundred years ago,
‘Frater Ave atque Vale’–as we wander’d to and fro
Gazing at

I.

O thou so fair in summers gone,
While yet thy fresh and virgin soul
Inform’d the pillar’d Parthenon,
The glittering Capitol;

II.

So fair in southern sunshine bathed,
But scarce of such majestic mien
As here with forehead vapor-swathed
In meadows ever green;

III.

For thou–when Athens reign’d and Rome,
Thy glorious eyes were dimm’d with pain
To mark in many a freeman’s home
The slave, the scourge, the chain;

IV.

O follower of the Vision, still
In motion to the distant gleam
Howe’er blind force

O thou most holy Friendship! wheresoe’er
Thy dwelling be–for in the courts of man
But seldom thine all-heavenly voice we hear,
Sweet’ning the moments of our narrow span;
And seldom thy bright foot-steps do we scan
Along the weary waste of life unblest,
For faithless is its frail and wayward plan,
And perfidy is man’s eternal guest,
With dark suspicion link’d and shameless interest!–

’Tis thine, when life has reach’d its final goal,
Ere the last sigh that frees

The last tall son of Lot and Bellicent,
And tallest, Gareth, in a showerful spring
Stared at the spate. A slender-shafted Pine
Lost footing, fell, and so was whirled away.
‘How he went down,’ said Gareth, ‘as a false knight
Or evil king before my lance if lance
Were mine to use–O senseless cataract,
Bearing all down in thy precipitancy–
And yet thou art but swollen with cold snows
And mine is living blood: thou dost His will,
The

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;
Here, through the feeble twilight of this world
Groping, how many, until we pass and reach
That other, where we see as we are seen!

So fared it with Geraint, who issuing forth
That morning, when they both had got to horse,
Perhaps because he loved her passionately,
And

I.
Will my tiny spark of being wholly vanish in your deeps and heights?
Must my day be dark by reason, O ye Heavens, of your boundless nights,
Rush of Suns, and roll of systems, and your fiery clash of meteorites?
II.
‘Spirit, nearing yon dark portal at the limit of thy human state,
Fear not thou the hidden purpose of that Power which alone is great,
Nor the myriad world, His shadow, nor the silent

I waited for the train at Coventry;
I hung with grooms and porters on the bridge,
To match the three tall spires; and there I shaped
The city’s ancient legend into this:—
Not only we, the latest seed of Time,
New men, that in the flying of a wheel
Cry down the past, not only we, that prate
Of rights and wrongs, have loved the people well,
And loathed to see them overtax’d; but she
Did more, and

Queen Guinevere had fled the court, and sat
There in the holy house at Almesbury
Weeping, none with her save a little maid,
A novice: one low light betwixt them burned
Blurred by the creeping mist, for all abroad,
Beneath a moon unseen albeit at full,
The white mist, like a face-cloth to the face,
Clung to the dead earth, and the land was still.

For hither had she fled, her cause of flight
Sir Modred; he that

First pledge our Queen this solemn night,
Then drink to England, every guest;
That man’s the best Cosmopolite
Who loves his native country best.
May freedom’s oak for ever live
With stronger life from day to day;
That man’s the true Conservative
Who lops the moulder’d branch away.
Hands all round!
God the traitor’s hope confound!
To this great cause of Freedom drink, my friends,
And the great name of England, round and round.

To all the loyal hearts who long
To

I.
Why wail you, pretty plover? and what is it that you fear?
Is he sick your mate like mine? have you lost him, is he fled?
And there—the heron rises from his watch beside the mere,
And flies above the leper’s hut, where lives the living-dead.

II.
Come back, nor let me know it! would he live and die alone?
And has he not forgiven me yet, his over-jealous bride,
Who am, and was, and will

Hateful is the dark-blue sky,
Vaulted o’er the dark-blue sea.
Death is the end of life; ah, why
Should life all labor be?
Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,
And in a little while our lips are dumb.
Let us alone. What is it that will last?
And things are taken from us, and become
Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.
Let us alone. What pleasure can we have
To war with evil? Is there any peace
In

Helen’s tower, here I stand,
Dominant over sea and land.
Son’s love built me, and I hold
Mother’s love in letter’d gold.
Love is in and out of time,
I am mortal stone and lime.
Would my granite girth were strong
As either love, to last as long
I should wear my crown entire
To and thro’ the Doomsday fire,
And be found of angel eyes
In earth’s recurring Paradise.

O you chorus of indolent reviewers,
Irresponsible, indolent reviewers,
Look, I come to the test, a tiny poem
All composed in a metre of Catullus,
All in quantity, careful of my motion,
Like the skater on ice that hardly bears him,
Lest I fall unawares before the people,
Waking laughter in indolent reviewers.
Should I flounder awhile without a tumble
Thro’ this metrification of Catullus,
They should speak to me not without a welcome,
All that chorus of indolent reviewers.
Hard,