The dedication
explains
the allegory intended.
Tennyson
And after supper, on a bed,
Upon my lap he laid his head:
O the Earl was fair to see!
I kiss'd his eyelids into rest:
His ruddy cheek upon my breast.
The wind is raging in turret and tree.
I hated him with the hate of hell,
But I loved his beauty passing well.
O the Earl was fair to see!
I rose up in the silent night:
I made my dagger sharp and bright.
The wind is raving in turret and tree.
As half-asleep his breath he drew,
Three times I stabb'd him thro' and thro'.
O the Earl was fair to see!
I curl'd and comb'd his comely head,
He look'd so grand when he was dead.
The wind is blowing in turret and tree.
I wrapt his body in the sheet,
And laid him at his mother's feet.
O the Earl was fair to see!
TO-----
WITH THE FOLLOWING POEM
I have not been able to ascertain to whom this dedication was addressed.
Sir Franklin Lushington tells me that he thinks it was an imaginary
person.
The dedication explains the allegory intended. The poem appears
to have been suggested, as we learn from 'Tennyson's Life' (vol. i. , p.
150), by a remark of Trench to Tennyson when they were undergraduates at
Trinity: "We cannot live in art". It was the embodiment Tennyson added
of his belief "that the God-like life is with man and for man". 'Cf. '
his own lines in 'Love and Duty':--$
For a man is not as God,
But then most God-like being most a man.
It is a companion poem to the 'Vision of Sin'; in that poem is traced
the effect of indulgence in the grosser pleasures of sense, in this the
effect of the indulgence in the more refined pleasures of sense.
I send you here a sort of allegory,
(For you will understand it) of a soul, [1]
A sinful soul possess'd of many gifts,
A spacious garden full of flowering weeds,
A glorious Devil, large in heart and brain,
That did love Beauty only, (Beauty seen
In all varieties of mould and mind)
And Knowledge for its beauty; or if Good,
Good only for its beauty, seeing not
That beauty, Good, and Knowledge, are three sisters
That doat upon each other, friends to man,
Living together under the same roof,
And never can be sunder'd without tears.
And he that shuts Love out, in turn shall be
Shut out from Love, and on her threshold lie
Howling in outer darkness. Not for this
Was common clay ta'en from the common earth,
Moulded by God, and temper'd with the tears
Of angels to the perfect shape of man.
[Footnote 1: 1833.
I send you, Friend, a sort of allegory,
(You are an artist and will understand
Its many lesser meanings) of a soul. ]
THE PALACE OF ART
First published in 1833, but altered so extensively on its republication
in 1842 as to be practically rewritten. The alterations in it after 1842
were not numerous, consisting chiefly in the deletion of two stanzas
after line 192 and the insertion of the three stanzas which follow in
the present text, together with other minor verbal corrections, all of
which have been noted.
