Selected Poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

and the theme of the rest of the poem is, indeed, Keatsian in its rich and sensuous evocation of passion and love, but the context is that of purity and of an enclosed nun’s desire for the heavenly consummation that will only come with her death. In Keats, Porphyro is described, arising ‘Ethereal, flush’d, and like a throbbing star,’ while the nun’s union with her Bridegroom is describe in similar terms of light and warmth:

Draw me, thy bride, a glittering star,
In raiment white and clean.

He lifts me to the golden doors;
The flashes come and go;
All heaven bursts her starry floors,
And strows her lights below,

This is actually one of the few examples in Tennyson’s poetry of a straightforward celebration of sensuous (though not sensual) passion, and this is in the context of holy virginity and purity. In this sense, St Agnes Eve is something of a rejoinder to Keats; in Tennyson’s other poems of sensory delight, the situation is far more complex.

In The Lotos Eaters , for example, Tennyson creates a paradise – alluding, in fact, to its similarities to the Elysian Fields and the Garden of Eden itself – but part of his inescapable myth of the sensual is that paradise is a lure, a deceit. The wonderful terrain is carefully blurred and made ‘over-mellow’ so that the reader senses that such pleasures are forbidden and hide a desolate reality:

The Lotos blooms below the barren peak:
The Lotos blows by every winding creek:…
Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos-dust is blown.

The poem also suggests that such a life of sensual indulgence causes us to make gods in our own image, and to avoid the ‘whisper’ of our conscience that tells us of the great trial of life, which will end with our judgement to heaven or hell after death. It is this trial that the Lotos Eaters avoid, and stand condemned thereby.

It is not hard to find other examples of ‘forbidden fruit’ in Tennyson. Perhaps the clearest example of all is The Lady of Shalott , though this poem is usefully compared to Tithonus , another work with a classical theme.