No More Learning

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_.


An illustration of the same thing, almost as offensive, is in 'Enoch
Arden', where, in an otherwise studiously simple diction, Enoch's wares
as a fisherman become

Enoch's _ocean spoil_
In ocean-smelling osier.


But these peculiarities are less common in the earlier poems than in the
later: it was a vicious habit which grew on him.

But, if exception may sometimes be taken to his diction, no exception
can be taken to his rhythm. No English poet since Milton, Tennyson's
only superior in this respect, had a finer ear or a more consummate
mastery over all the resources of rhythmical expression. What colours
are to a painter rhythm is, in description, to the poet, and few have
rivalled, none have excelled Tennyson in this. Take the following:--


And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain
_On the bald street strikes the blank day_.

--'In Memoriam'.

See particularly 'In Memoriam', cvii. , the lines beginning "Fiercely
flies," to "darken on the rolling brine": the description of the island
in 'Enoch Arden'; but specification is needless, it applies to all his
descriptive poetry. It is marvellous that he can produce such effects by
such simple means: a mere enumeration of particulars will often do it,
as here:--


No gray old grange or lonely fold,
Or low morass and whispering reed,
Or simple style from mead to mead,
Or sheep walk up the windy wold.

--'In Memoriam', c.

Or here:--


The meal sacks on the whitened floor,
The dark round of the dripping wheel,
The very air about the door Made misty with the floating meal.

--'The Miller's Daughter'.


His blank verse is best described by negatives. It has not the endless
variety, the elasticity and freedom of Shakespeare's, it has not the
massiveness and majesty of Milton's, it has not the austere grandeur of
Wordsworth's at its best, it has not the wavy swell, "the linked
sweetness long drawn out" of Shelley's, but its distinguishing feature
is, if we may use the expression, its importunate beauty.