Away from palaces to solitude; out of cities to hedgerows and the woods and wild-flowers,--there is the secret of perennial poetry. And Tennyson is the climax of this dissent from Pope and Dryden as elaborated in Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns, Thomson, and Wordsworth. The best of this wine was reserved for the last of the feast; for Tennyson appears to me the greatest of the nature poets. And this return to nature, as the phrase goes, means taking this earth as a whole, which we are to do more and still more. Thomson"s poetry was not pastoral poetry at its best; seeing inanimate nature is not in itself sufficient theme for poetry, lacking pa.s.sion, depth, power. Sunrise, and flowing stream, and tossing seas are valuable as a.s.sociates of the soul and helping it to self-understanding. Tennyson took both men and nature into his interpretation of nature. His voice it is, saying,
"O would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me!"
The sea helps the soul"s lack by supplying words and music. Tennyson never was at his best in a National Ode, unless one speaks from the elocutionary standpoint, because such tasks lack the poetical essential of spontaneity, and because, too, the themes seem to carry him outside of his nature-mood. Art in our century has gone out of doors. Scenery has never had lovers as now; and partic.i.p.ative in this mood is Tennyson. He lives under the sky. He loved to be alone; and nature is loneliness as well as loveliness. Nor is his love of nature a pa.s.sing pa.s.sion, but is pa.s.sionate, intense, endearing. He never outgrew it.
"Balin and Balan" is as beautiful with nature-similes as were "Enid"
and "Oenone." In Tennyson we have the odors of the country and the sea and the dewy night. He is laureate of the stars. Nature is not introduced, but his poems seem set in nature as daisies in a meadow.
He was no city poet. Of the poet Blake, James Thomson writes:
"He came to the desert of London town Gray miles long.
He wandered up, he wandered down, Singing a quiet hymn."
Not so Tennyson. London and he were compatriots, but not friends; for he belonged to the quiet of the country woods, and the clamor of sea-gulls and sea-waves, whose very tumult drown the voice of care.
Tennyson was to express the yearning of his era, and his poems are a cry; for, like a babe, he has
"No language but a cry."
Our yearning is our glory. The superb forces of our spirits are inarticulate, and can not be put to words, but may be put to the melody of a yearning cry. Souls struggle toward expression like a dying soldier who would send a message to his beloved, but can not frame words therefor before he dies. Our pathos is--and our yearning is--
"O would that my lips could utter The thoughts that arise in me!"
But we have no words; and Holmes, in his most delicately-beautiful poem, ent.i.tled "The Voiceless," has made mention of this grief:
"We count the broken lyres that rest Where the sweet wailing singers slumber; But o"er their silent sister"s breast The wild-flowers, who will stoop to number?
A few can touch the magic string, And noisy Fame is proud to win them: Alas for those that never sing, But die with all their music in them!
Nay, grieve not for the dead alone, Whose song has told their heart"s sad story,-- Weep for the voiceless, who have known The cross without the crown of glory!
Not where Leucadian breezes sweep O"er Sappho"s memory-haunted billow, But where the glistening night-dews weep On nameless sorrow"s churchyard pillow.
O hearts that break and give no sign Save whitening lip and fading tresses, Till Death pours out his cordial wine, Slow-dropped from Misery"s crushing presses,-- If singing breath or echoing chord To every hidden pang were given, What endless melodies were poured, As sad as earth, as sweet as heaven!"
Souls cry, "Give us a voice;" and nature enters into our yearning moods. The autumn and the rain grieve with us, and June makes merry with us as at a festival, and the deep sky gives room for the soaring of our aspirations, and the solemn night says, "Dream!" And for our heartache and longing, Tennyson is our voice; for he seems near neighbor to us. He lay on a bank of violets, and looked into the sky, and heard poplars pattering as with rain upon the roof. Really, in all Tennyson"s poems you will be surprised at the affluence of his reference to nature. His custom was to make the moods of nature to be explanatory of the moods of the soul. Man needs nature as birds need air, and flowers, and waving trees, and the dear sun. Tennyson will make appeal to
"The flower in the crannied wall"
by way of silencing the agnostic"s prating against G.o.d. Hear him:
"Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies-- Hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower,--but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what G.o.d and man is."
Here follow a few, among many, very many, delicious references to the out-of-door world we name nature, as explanatory of the indoor world we call soul:
"Who make it seem more sweet to be The little life on bank and brier, The bird that pipes his lone desire And dies unheard within his tree."
"A thousand suns will stream on thee, A thousand moons will quiver; But not by thee my steps shall be, Forever and forever."
"Storm"d in orbs of song, a growing gale."
"I saw that every morning, far withdrawn, Beyond the darkness and the cataract, G.o.d made himself an awful rose of dawn, Unheeded."
"There let the wind sweep and the plover cry; But thou go by."
"As through the land at eve we went, And pluck"d the ripen"d ears, We fell out, my wife and I,-- O we fell out, I know not why, And kiss"d again with tears.
For when we came where lies the child We lost in other years, There above the little grave,-- O there above the little grave, We kiss"d again with tears."
"Set in a cataract on an island-crag, When storm is on the heights of the long hills."
"Tall as a figure lengthen"d on the sand When the tide ebbs in sunshine."
"Ask me no more: the moon may draw the sea; The cloud may stoop from heaven, and take the shape, With fold to fold, of mountain or of cape; But O too fond, when have I answered thee?
Ask me no more."
"And she, as one that climbs a peak to gaze O"er land and main, and sees a great black cloud Drag inward from the deeps, a wall of night."
"That like a broken purpose wastes in air."
"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 G.o.d."
"So be it: there no shade can last In that deep dawn behind the tomb, But clear from marge to marge shall bloom The eternal landscape of the past."
"I sleep till dusk is dipt in gray."
"But Summer on the steaming floods, And Spring that swells the narrow brooks, And Autumn, with a noise of rooks, That gather in the waning woods."
"From belt to belt of crimson seas, On leagues of odor streaming far, To where in yonder Orient star A hundred spirits whisper "Peace.""
"There rolls the deep where grew the tree: O earth, what changes thou hast seen!
There where the long street roars, hath been The stillness of the central sea.
The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands; They melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go."
"If e"er when faith had fall"n asleep, I heard a voice, "Believe no more,"
And heard an ever-breaking sh.o.r.e That tumbled in the G.o.dless deep."
"As slopes a wild brook o"er a little stone, Running too vehemently to break upon it."
"Whole, like a crag that tumbles from the cliff, And like a crag was gay with wilding flowers; And high above a piece of turret stair, Worn by the feet that now were silent, would Bare to the sun, and monstrous ivy-stems Claspt the gray walls with hairy-fibered arms, And suck"d the joining of the stones, and look"d A knot, beneath, of snakes; aloft, a grove."
"For as a leaf in mid-November is To what it was in mid-October, seem"d The dress that now she look"d on to the dress She look"d on ere the coming of Geraint."
"That had a sapling growing on it, slip From the long sh.o.r.e-cliff"s windy walls to the beach, And there lie still, and yet the sapling grew: So lay the man transfixt."
"For one That listens near a torrent mountain-brook, All thro" the crash of the near cataract hears The drumming thunder of the huger fall At distance, were the soldiers wont to hear His voice in battle, and be kindled by it."
"And in the moment after, wild Limours, Borne on a black horse, like a thunder-cloud Whose skirts are loosen"d by the breaking storm, Half ridden off with by the thing he rode, And all in pa.s.sion, uttering a dry shriek, Dash"d on Geraint"