# Tennysoniana/Chapter 12

CHAPTER XII.
ON TENNYSON'S VERSIFICATION.
In his earliest volume Alfred Tennyson had already attempted a great variety of lyrical measures; and Arthur Hallam had spoken of this variety with praise, as exhibited in the Poems of 1830. The author of "Christabel," indeed, in 1833, accused Tennyson of writing verses which he could not scan, and recommended him, as a corrective, to write for the next few years in none but the most common and strictly-defined metres. But with this one exception, even his severest critics have allowed him to be a perfect master of melody. "Tennyson is endowed," says Emerson, "precisely in points where Wordsworth wanted. There is no finer ear, nor more command of the keys of language."
Tennyson's early command of blank-verse, as ​evinced in "Timbuctoo" and in "The Lover's Tale," is indeed wonderful: blank verse being perhaps the most difficult and unmanageable of all measures. The poet having no longer the factitious aid of rhyme, must depend for effect upon the variety of his cadences and pauses. His verse must read like good prose, and yet be without baldness.
This kind of verse Tennyson has since cultivated with great success in many of his smaller idylls, in "The Princess," in the grand Arthurian epic, for such it deserves to be termed, and in "Enoch Arden."
There is no weak Miltonic or Wordsworthian echo in his blank verse: it is all his own, or, indeed, if he ever reminds us of anybody, it is of Shakespeare. Some of his lines hare the true ring of the master.
Although, however, rhyme is, as Milton insisted, no necessary adjunct of good poetry, it may be a very pleasing ornament. Wordsworth notices somewhere in his preface to the "Lyrical Ballads," the exquisite ​pleasure derived from rhyme when a poem has all the logical and orderly sequence of prose. Perhaps no poet has ever been more happy in his rhymes than Tennyson. He has no startling or unlooked-for rhymes, like those of the author of "Hudibras," or Robert Browning; nor does he ever fall into the monotonous jingle of the pseudo-Pope school. Take the Song of the Brook as a fine but not solitary instance.
Like Homer, and like the Old Testament writers, he has a great love of repetition. All readers of Tennyson will immediately call to mind several beautiful examples of this art in the "Morte d'Arthur," in "The Brook," in the "Idylls of the King," and in "In Memoriam."
The Sonnet he has rarely attempted except in his earlier volumes, and it does not seem to be a form suited to his genius. His two most successful early efforts, the Sonnets on Poland, are, after all, mere echoes of ​Milton and Wordsworth. Some of his recent Sonnets, however, such as "Montenegro," the memorial Sonnet on Brookfield, and the Sonnet to Victor Hugo are incomparably fine specimens of that very curious and difficult form of writing.
Alliteration, which may degenerate into a vulgar trick, he has used sparingly; but I remember an instance or two in "In Memoriam," where it most aptly enforces the idea:
He has introduced several new measures into our language; witness "The Daisy," and particular sections of "Maud." And by the melody of them he has ​successfully shown that it is a mistake to call our Teutonic tongue harsh and rugged; that, while it is far stronger, it may at the same time be made as sweet as the languages of the south.
The elegiac metre of "In Memoriam" has been erroneously supposed to be new. But though Tennyson did not introduce it, he has perfected it and made it so peculiarly his own, that it now seems almost a sacrilege for any less skilful hand to touch the same strings.
In the Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington he has soared to lyric heights to which, perhaps, even Pindar never attained. The tolling of the Bell, the solemn and slow funeral march, the quick rush of battle, and the choral chant of the cathedral all succeed each other, and the verse sinks and swells, rises and falls to every alternation with equal power.
The Experiments of Classic Metres in Quantity are admirable as showing Tennyson's mastery over even these difficult measures, and his wisdom in rejecting them as unsuited to our language. Let the reader turn ​to the lines "all composed in a metre of Catullus" and to the ludicrous burlesque of English hexameters and pentameters.
It remains to notice our poet's success in making sound expressive of sense, an art of which there are a few inimitable specimens in Virgil and Pope.
In such lines as—
we can actually hear the church-bells pealing forth their joyous epithalamium; and who does not hear the distant approach of horsemen in
"The sound of many a heavily-galloping hoof,"
or "the shingle grinding in the surge," or the echoes "dying, dying, dying"? Is not the struggle with the water, where the Prince is rescuing Ida, admirably conveyed in the line
"Strove to buffet to land in vain"?
I leave the reader to recollect other equally fine imitative metres.
* ↑ Such, for instance, as those in the "Morte d' Arthur":"Woe is me! Authority forgets a dying king, Laid widow'd of the power in his eye That bow'd the will." And still more markedly in "Ulysses" and "Tithonus."
* ↑ "Alfred Tennyson never seems to have cared much for the Sonnet; at least, he has very rarely clothed his own thoughts in this form. One sonnet of his, of moderate merit, I can remember; another, found in the earlier editions of his Lyrical Poems, has dropt out of the later."—Archbishop Trench, Afternoon Lectures on Literature and Art (Lond. 1867), p. 163.
* ↑ The following is from Mr. Venables' "Memoir of Henry Luskington" (pp. 91-92): "One day at Paris, when I had read to him, from an unpublished copy which I had brought from England, Mr. Tennyson's "Daisy" and his little poem "To the Rev. F. Maurice," he said: "How the simple change in the last line from a dactyl to an amphibrachys changes a mere experiment into a discovery in metre."
* ↑ It has been used by Ben Jonson in an Elegy, in his "Underwoods," commencing: "Though Beauty be the mark of praise."
* ↑ "A Welcome to Alexandra."
* ↑ "Idylls of the King," p. 69.
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