No More Learning

Capricious as the gyrations of a sea-gull seem the poet's moods and
movements. We have now the reveries of a love-sick maiden, now the
picture of a soul wrestling with despair and death; here a study from
rural life, or a study in character, there a sermon on politics, or a
descent into the depths of psychological truth, or a sketch from nature.
But nothing could be more concentrated than the power employed to shape
each fragment into form. What Pope says of the 'Aeneid' may be applied
with very literal truth to these poems:--


Finish'd the whole, and laboured every part
With patient touches of unwearied art.


In the poems of 1842 we have the secret of Tennyson's eminence as a poet
as well as the secret of his limitations. He appears to have been
constitutionally deficient in what the Greeks called 'architektonike',
combination and disposition on a large scale. The measure of his power
as a constructive artist is given us in the poem in which the English
idylls may be said to culminate, namely, 'Enoch Arden'. 'In Memoriam'
and the 'Idylls of the King' have a sort of spiritual unity, but they
are a series of fragments tacked rather than fused together. It is the
same with 'Maud', and it is the same with 'The Princess'. His poems have
always a tendency to resolve themselves into a series of cameos: it is
only the short poems which have organic unity. A gift of felicitous and
musical expression which is absolutely marvellous; an instinctive
sympathy with what is best and most elevated in the sphere of ordinary
life, of ordinary thought and sentiment, of ordinary activity with
consummate representative power; a most rare faculty of seizing and
fixing in very perfect form what is commonly so inexpressible because so
impalpable and evanescent in emotion and expression; a power of catching
and rendering the charm of nature with a fidelity and vividness which
resemble magic; and lastly, unrivalled skill in choosing, repolishing
and remounting the gems which are our common inheritance from the past:
these are the gifts which will secure permanence for his work as long as
the English language lasts.

In his power of crystallising commonplaces he stands next to Pope, in
subtle felicity of expression beside Virgil. And, when he says of Virgil
that we find in his diction "all the grace of all the muses often
flowering in one lonely word," he says what is literally true of his own
work. As a master of style his place is in the first rank among English
classical poets. But his style is the perfection of art.
His diction,
like the diction of Milton and Gray, resembles mosaic work. With a touch
here and a touch there, now from memory, now from unconscious
assimilation, inlaying here an epithet and there a phrase, adding,
subtracting, heightening, modifying, substituting one metaphor for
another, developing what is latent in the suggestive imagery of a
predecessor, laying under contribution the most intimate familiarity
with what is best in the literature of the ancient and modern world, the
unwearied artist toils patiently on till his precious mosaic work is
without a flaw. All the resources of rhetoric are employed to give
distinction to his style and every figure in rhetoric finds expression
in his diction: Hypallage as in


_The pillard dusk_ Of sounding sycamores.

--_Audley Court_.


Paronomasia as in


The seawind sang _Shrill, chill_ with flakes of foam.

--_Morte d'Arthur_.


Oxymoron as

_Behold_ them _unbeheld, unheard Hear_ all.

--'? none'.


Hyperbaton as in

The _dew-impearled_ winds of dawn.

--'Ode to Memory'.


Metonymy as in

The _bright death_ quiver'd at the victim's throat.

--'Dream of Fair Women'.


or in

For some three _careless moans_ The summer pilot of an empty heart.

--'Gardener's Daughter'.


No poet since Milton has employed what is known as Onomatopoeia with so
much effect.