No poet since Milton has employed what is known as
Onomatopoeia
with so
much effect.
much effect.
Tennyson
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. Not to go farther than the poems of 1842, we have in the
'Morte d'Arthur':--
So all day long the noise of battle _rolled
Among the mountains by the winter sea_;
or
_Dry clashed_ his harness in the icy caves
And _barren chasms_, and all to left and right
The _bare black cliff clang'd round_ him, as he bas'd
His feet _on juts of slippery crag that rang
Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels_--
or the exquisite
I heard the _water lapping on the crag_,
And the _long ripple washing in the reeds_.
So in 'The Dying Swan',
And _the wavy swell of the soughing reeds_.
See too the whole of 'Oriana' and the description of the dance at
the beginning of 'The Vision of Sin. '
Assonance, alliteration, the revival or adoption of obsolete and
provincial words, the transplantation of phrases and idioms from the
Greek and Latin languages, the employment of common words in uncommon
senses, all are pressed into the service of adding distinction to his
diction. His diction blends the two extremes of simplicity and
artificiality, but with such fine tact that this strange combination has
seldom the effect of incongruity. Longinus has remarked that "as the
fainter lustre of the stars is put out of sight by the all-encompassing
rays of the sun, so when sublimity sheds its light round the sophistries
of rhetoric they become invisible". [1] What Longinus says of "sublimity"
is equally true of sincerity and truthfulness in combination with
exquisitely harmonious expression. We have an illustration in Gray's
'Elegy'. Nothing could be more artificial than the style, but what poem
in the world appeals more directly to the heart and to the eye? It is
one thing to call art to the assistance of art, it is quite another
thing to call art to the assistance of nature. And this is what both
Gray and Tennyson do, and this is why their artificiality, so far from
shocking us, "passes in music out of sight". But this cannot be said of
Tennyson without reserve. At times his strained endeavours to give
distinction to his style by putting common things in an uncommon way led
him into intolerable affectation. Thus we have "the knightly growth that
fringed his lips" for a moustache, "azure pillars of the hearth" for
ascending smoke, "ambrosial orbs" for apples, "frayed magnificence" for
a shabby dress, "the secular abyss to come" for future ages, "the
sinless years that breathed beneath the Syrian blue" for the life of
Christ, "up went the hush'd amaze of hand and eye" for a gesture of
surprise, and the like. One of the worst instances is in 'In Memoriam',
where what is appropriate to the simple sentiment finds, as it should
do, corresponding simplicity of expression in the first couplet, to
collapse into the falsetto of strained artificiality in the second:--
To rest beneath the clover sod
That takes the sunshine and the rains,
_Or where the kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of God_.
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. Not to go farther than the poems of 1842, we have in the
'Morte d'Arthur':--
So all day long the noise of battle _rolled
Among the mountains by the winter sea_;
or
_Dry clashed_ his harness in the icy caves
And _barren chasms_, and all to left and right
The _bare black cliff clang'd round_ him, as he bas'd
His feet _on juts of slippery crag that rang
Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels_--
or the exquisite
I heard the _water lapping on the crag_,
And the _long ripple washing in the reeds_.
So in 'The Dying Swan',
And _the wavy swell of the soughing reeds_.
See too the whole of 'Oriana' and the description of the dance at
the beginning of 'The Vision of Sin. '
Assonance, alliteration, the revival or adoption of obsolete and
provincial words, the transplantation of phrases and idioms from the
Greek and Latin languages, the employment of common words in uncommon
senses, all are pressed into the service of adding distinction to his
diction. His diction blends the two extremes of simplicity and
artificiality, but with such fine tact that this strange combination has
seldom the effect of incongruity. Longinus has remarked that "as the
fainter lustre of the stars is put out of sight by the all-encompassing
rays of the sun, so when sublimity sheds its light round the sophistries
of rhetoric they become invisible". [1] What Longinus says of "sublimity"
is equally true of sincerity and truthfulness in combination with
exquisitely harmonious expression. We have an illustration in Gray's
'Elegy'. Nothing could be more artificial than the style, but what poem
in the world appeals more directly to the heart and to the eye? It is
one thing to call art to the assistance of art, it is quite another
thing to call art to the assistance of nature. And this is what both
Gray and Tennyson do, and this is why their artificiality, so far from
shocking us, "passes in music out of sight". But this cannot be said of
Tennyson without reserve. At times his strained endeavours to give
distinction to his style by putting common things in an uncommon way led
him into intolerable affectation. Thus we have "the knightly growth that
fringed his lips" for a moustache, "azure pillars of the hearth" for
ascending smoke, "ambrosial orbs" for apples, "frayed magnificence" for
a shabby dress, "the secular abyss to come" for future ages, "the
sinless years that breathed beneath the Syrian blue" for the life of
Christ, "up went the hush'd amaze of hand and eye" for a gesture of
surprise, and the like. One of the worst instances is in 'In Memoriam',
where what is appropriate to the simple sentiment finds, as it should
do, corresponding simplicity of expression in the first couplet, to
collapse into the falsetto of strained artificiality in the second:--
To rest beneath the clover sod
That takes the sunshine and the rains,
_Or where the kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of God_.
