No More Learning

There the passions cramp'd no longer shall have scope and
breathing-space;
I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.

Iron-jointed, supple-sinew'd, they shall dive, and they shall run,
Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun;

Whistle back the parrot's call, and leap the rainbows of the brooks.
Not with blinded eyesight poring over miserable books--

Fool, again the dream, the fancy! but I _know_ my words are wild,
But I count the gray barbarian lower than the Christian child.

_I_, to herd with narrow foreheads, vacant of our glorious gains, [15]
Like a beast with lower pleasures, like a beast with lower pains!

Mated with a squalid savage--what to me were sun or clime?
I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time--

I that rather held it better men should perish one by one,
Than that earth should stand at gaze like Joshua's moon in Ajalon!

Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range.
Let the great world spin [16] for ever down the ringing grooves [17]
of change.

Thro' the shadow of the globe [18] we sweep into the younger day:
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay. [19]

Mother-Age (for mine I knew not) help me as when life begun:
Rift the hills, and roll the waters, flash the lightnings, weigh the
Sun--[20]

O, I see the crescent promise of my spirit hath not set.
Ancient founts of inspiration well thro' all my fancy yet.

Howsoever these things be, a long farewell to Locksley Hall!
Now for me the woods may wither, now for me the roof-tree fall.
Comes a vapour from the margin, blackening over heath and holt,
Cramming all the blast before it, in its breast a thunderbolt.

Let it fall on Locksley Hall, with rain or hail, or fire or snow;
For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go.



[Footnote 1: 1842. And round the gables. ]

[Footnote 2: "Gleams," it appears, is a Lincolnshire word for the cry of
the curlew, and so by removing the comma after call we get an
interpretation which perhaps improves the sense and certainly gets rid
of a very un-Tennysonian cumbrousness in the second line. But Tennyson
had never, he said, heard of that meaning of "gleams," adding he wished
he had. He meant nothing more in the passage than "to express the flying
gleams of light across a dreary moorland when looking at it under
peculiarly dreary circumstances". See for this, 'Life', iii. , 82. ]

[Footnote 3: 1842 and all up to and including 1850 have a capital 'R' to
robin. ]

[Footnote 4: Cf. W. R. Spencer ('Poems', p. 166):--

What eye with clear account remarks
The ebbing of his glass,
When all its sands are diamond sparks
That dazzle as they pass.

But this is of course in no way parallel to Tennyson's subtly beautiful
image, which he himself pronounced to be the best simile he had ever
made.