No More Learning

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, [5]
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.



[Footnote 1: Virgil, 'AEn'. , i. , 748, and iii. , 516. ]

[Footnote 2: 'Odyssey', i. , 1-4. ]

[Footnote 3: 'Cf'. Shakespeare, 'Troilus and Cressida':--

Perseverance, dear, my lord,
Keeps honour bright: To have done, is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty nail
In monumental mockery. ]


[Footnote 4: How admirably has Tennyson touched off the character of the
Telemachus of the 'Odyssey'. ]

[Footnote 5: The Happy Isles, the 'Fortunatae Insulae' of the Romans and
the

[Greek: ai t_on Makar_on naesoi]

of the Greeks, have been identified by geographers as those islands in
the Atlantic off the west coast of Africa; some take them to mean the
Canary Islands, the Madeira group and the Azores, while they may have
included the Cape de Verde Islands as well. What seems certain is that
these places with their soft delicious climate and lovely scenery gave
the poets an idea of a happy abode for departed spirits, and so the
conception of the _Elysian Fields_. The _loci classici_ on these abodes
are Homer, Odyssey, iv. , 563 _seqq_.
:--

[Greek: alla s' es Elysion pedion kai peirata gaiaes athanatoi
pempsousin, hothi xanthos Rhadamanthus tae per rhaeistae biotae pelei
anthr_opoisin, ou niphetos, out' ar cheim_on polus, oute pot' ombros
all' aiei Zephuroio ligu pneiontas aaetas _okeanos aniaesin
anapsuchein anthr_opous.

[But the Immortals will convey thee to the Elysian plain and the
world's limits where is Rhadamanthus of the golden hair, where life is
easiest for man; no snow is there, no nor no great storm, nor any
rain, but always ocean sendeth forth the shrilly breezes of the West
to cool and refresh men],

and Pindar, 'Olymp'. , ii. , 178 'seqq'. , compared with the splendid
fragment at the beginning of the 'Dirges'. Elysium was afterwards placed
in the netherworld, as by Virgil. Thus, as so often the suggestion was
from the facts of geography, the rest soon became an allegorical myth,
and to attempt to identify and localise "the Happy Isles" is as great an
absurdity as to attempt to identify and localise the island of
Shakespeare's 'Tempest'. ]








LOCKSLEY HALL

First published in 1842, and no alterations were made in it subsequently
to the edition of 1850; except that in the Selections published in 1865
in the third stanza the reading was "half in ruin" for "in the
distance". This poem, as Tennyson explained, was not autobiographic but
purely imaginary, "representing young life, its good side, its
deficiences and its yearnings". The poem, he added, was written in
Trochaics because the elder Hallam told him that the English people
liked that metre. The hero is a sort of preliminary sketch of the hero
in 'Maud', the position and character of each being very similar: both
are cynical and querulous, and break out into tirades against their kind
and society; both have been disappointed in love, and both find the same
remedy for their afflictions by mixing themselves with action and
becoming "one with their kind".

'Locksley Hall' was suggested, as Tennyson acknowledged, by Sir William
Jones' translation of the old Arabian Moallakat, a collection from the
works of pre-Mahommedan poets. See Sir William Jones' works, quarto
edition, vol. iv. , pp. 247-57.