No More Learning

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. No alterations were made in the text after 1853.
The allegory Tennyson explains in the dedicatory verses, but the
framework of the poem was evidently suggested by 'Ecclesiastes' ii.
1-17. The position of the hero is precisely that of Solomon. Both began
by assuming that man is self-sufficing and the world sufficient; the
verdict of the one in consequence being "vanity of vanities, all is
vanity," of the other what the poet here records. An admirable
commentary on the poem is afforded by Matthew Arnold's picture of the
Romans before Christ taught the secret of the only real happiness
possible to man. See 'Obermann Once More'. The teaching of the poem
has been admirably explained by Spedding. It "represents allegorically
the condition of a mind which, in the love of beauty and the triumphant
consciousness of knowledge and intellectual supremacy, in the intense
enjoyment of its own power and glory, has lost sight of its relation to
man and God".