The Sun.
London, England, 1855-08-27 00:00:00

TENNYSON'S NEW POEM.

Maud, aild other Poems. By Alfred Tennyson,

D.C.L., Poet Laureate. Edward Moxon.

An indifferent poem by an exquisite poet is
necessarily a source to his admirers of very grievous
disappointment. That disappointment we have
ourselves but just experienced. We have risen from
the perusal of " Maud, and other Poems," by
Alfred Tennyson, with a somewhat poignant re-
gret that one so rarely gifted as the Poet Laureate
should have rushed into print with a volume alto-
gether so unworthy of his reputation. That repu-
tation has happily long since become firmly estab-
lished—otherwise the apparition of a ghost of a
poem like " Maud," must perforce have seriously
jeopardised its consolidation. While, however, we
are compelled to take exception thus earnestly to
the issue of a work by Mr. Tennyson, so unsatis-
factory as au emanation of his peculiar genius, it

must be confessed that we do so principally out of
the very fullness of our admiration of powers we
conceive to have been, herein, most inadequately
represented. Grateful in the recollection of those
treasures of poetry which his hand has poured forth
so unstintingly into the lap of his own privileged gene-
ration, we are inflamed by mingled feelings of regret
and amazement, when we find the merest pebble drop-
ped from the same honoured palm, the palm which
has so often endow( d us, as with benefaction after
benefaction, with those—

" Jewels five words long,
That on the stretched forefinger of all time
Sparkle for ever,"—

gems of verse, " pearls of great price," floating to
us from the golden waters of the Pactolus of Poet-
land, each, so to speak, " one entire and perfect
chrysolite." By the memory of " Locksley Hall"
alone we might claim the privilege of protesting
against "Maud," as altogether unworthy of Alfred
Tennyson. Assuredly, then, we may be permitted
so to repudiate this poem as an illegitimate off-
spring of the intellect of our laureate, when asso-
ciated with the memory of " Locksley Hall," we
cherish in tender recollection " Oriana," and the
" Lotus Eaters," and the "Miller's Daughter,"
and " Marian',a," and Lilian," and " Eleanor,"
and "Margaret," and with those, too, "The Sleeping
Beauty," and the " Lady of Burleigh," and
" Godiva," and " (Enone," and " Dora," and the
fragment of " Arthur," and all those delicious effu-
sions of a rare poetic genius—a genius which may
be said to have approached its meridian upon the
appearance of " The Princess," and to have in a
manner culminated on the advent of " In Memo-
riam." Nevertheless, while protesting against the
mere supposition, for one instant, that the thin
little volume of 154 pages, entitled ." Maud, and
other Poems," is to be accepted by us as a not un-
worthy sequel to productions such as those we
have just honeyed the ink in our pen by enumerat-
ing, it must be added entirely as a matter of course
and as it were by a wholly unavoidable necessity,
that the " plot" of this same " Maud" is sown
thickly, here and there, with sweetest thoughts
and daintiest expressions the frondage and
efflorescence of a luxuriant and cultivated imagi-
nation. It has been seriously suggested by a
contemporary critic, that the poem, as such,
is intended to be regarded as nothing else
than an allegory of the war, and through that as
a satire on the present generation. According to
which fantastic hypothesis Maud herself is to be
considered as an incarnation of the age, her com-
panions in the story being symbolical, more or less
directly, of the good or evil influences and results
of our existing state of civilisation. For ourselves
we cannot but laugh to scorn any such preposte-
rous absurdities in the way of elucidation —believ-
ing them in our conscience to be entirely alien from
the more simple, and earnest, and natural aim of
the Poet Laureate ! That aim we conceive to have
been throughout the natural, and earnest, and
simple narrative of a love story, replete with pas-
sionate meaning and emotional significance—a love
story telling us how Maud was won and lost, and
how the hero of the piece, the nameless lover of
Maud, a philanthropic misanthrope at first, be-
comes at last, through varying stages of love and
madness, what might be best described, perhaps,
by a reversed antithesis of phrase, as a misanthropic
philanthropist. The poem is portioned out in six
and twenty divisions—written in all imaginable
varieties of metre, of tone, of stanza—now pathetic,
now sprightly, now graceful, now lugubrious—here
sportive quatrains, here sorrowful couplets, there
wandering off into all kinds of rhythmical conceits,
rhyming vagaries,and melodiousfluctuationsofstyle,
of measure, of thought, and even, be it said, of phra-
seology. For, at intervals the poem is rendered
as remarkable by its colloquial homeliness as at
other times by its refined elevation of language—
language then occasionally as lovely by reason of
the exquisite delicacy of its rhetorical artifice as it
unquestionably is through the adroitly-introduced,
though seeming spontaneous, influence of its dulcet
and musical intonation. Maud, be it said at once,
is th - offspring of an arrant old hunx, who before
the story begins, appears to have acquired con-
sicleiable wealth by the ruin of the father of the
youthful misanthrope, once the child-playmate and
eventually the lover and beloved of that priceless
pearl and paragon of the grim curmudgeon—" a
grey old wolf and a lean "—Maud, 'seen in the
daylight with her " cold and clear-cut face "
Maud, thought of by night " luminous, gem-like,
ghost-like, death-like,"--Maud, the " milk-white
fawn "—" fed on the roses and lain in the lilies of
life "—Maud, with

. ler sunny hair
An smile as sunny as cold"—

Maud, cries her lover " My Delight,"—

" Maud, my bliss,
Maud, made my Maud by that long lover's kiss"—
Maud, "Queen lily and rose in one." Maud, clad—
" In gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls,
Shin ng out with a head sunning over with curls,
Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls."
Maud, in short, the exquisite, the incomparable,
the divine, and wondrously beautiful goddess of
the young dreamer's distraught imagination. Dis-
traught his imagination is, before Maud comes back
to the hall in the flower of her perfected maiden-
hood, distraught by the remembrance of—
" The shrill-edged shriek of a mother dividing the shud-
dering night."

When the father is brought home dead—either by
suicide or murder—from—

The dreadful hollow behind the little

wood,
Its lips in the field above all dabbled with blood-red

heath,
The red-ribbed ledges dripping with silent horror of
blood,
And Echo there, whatever is asked her, answering
' Death !' "
Thither the old man, bankrupt in fortune and hap-
piness, had wandded.out in the autumnal evening—
" . . Where the wind like a broken worldling wailed,
And the flying gold of the ruined woodlands drove
through the air."

Thence his mangled remains are brought home-
wards to be buried—there, hard by the desolated
hearth, where the son is one day, long after, startled
from his sorrowful musings, by intelligence that
the adjacent hall " the dark old place," to be " gilt
by the touch of a millionuaire," is being made
ready for Maud and the Sultan (later on, so called)
her brother. Maud, remembered only as she was
a little after infancy—

" Maud, with her venturous climbing sand troubles, and
childish escapes,
Mabuadli,the delight of the village, the ringing joy of the
Maud, with, her sweet purse•mouth when my father dan-
gled the grapes,
appears now to the gaze of her sometime playmate
as she is, in all the loveliness of "sweet seventeen"—
" Perfectly beautiful . • • •
Faultily faultless, icily regular,,plendidly null,
Dead perfection .....
So that he almost longs for a flow somewhere—
" For a chance of travel, a paleness, an hour's defect of
the rose,
Or an underlip, you may call it a little too ripe, too
full,
Or the least little acquiiine curve in a sensitive nose."
After this fashion he speaks of Maud, and a little
laters luvlet
an, find himherßrother--
rt
ohtuse
r_carping and cavilling' over
the
44 •
• • . That dandy despot, he,
That jewelled mass of millinery,
That oiled and curled Assyrian Bull
Smelling of musk and of insolence."
Adding a little further on in the narrative—
" His form I grant in spite of spite,
Has a broad brown comeliness red and white,
And six feet two as I think he stands.
But his essences turn the live air sick,
And barbarous opulence jewel thick
Suns itself on his breast and hands."
Returning to the hall from abroad, Maud and her
brother arrive about the dawn of the fair spring
season, when in the little grove—
"g million emeralds break from the ruby•buddal lime."
Frozen back at first into himself by the sight of
what ho imagines to be Maud's frigidity of loveli-
ness, the young dreamer reverts for relief to his
previous solitude and meditation.
List'ning now to the tide in its broadflung, shipwrecking
roar,
Now to the scream of a maddened beach dragged down
by the wave :"
But waking up at last to the recognition of
" Maud, in all her glory," when h beholds again