Selected Poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
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In this poem, Tennyson does not allude directly to the ‘violent and unruly’ love of Mariana for Angelo that forms the background to Shakespeare’s play Measure for Measure (see III.i.243). Instead, the character is seen only in the final phase of decline after a glorious moment of sensual enlightenment, and consequently she is trapped in a gradual breakdown of her emotional and mental health. Her cruellest moments are when light penetrates her shadow world:
This melancholy strain inevitably informs the poems which Tennyson wrote in response to Arthur Hallam’s death in 1833. Break, Break, Break is a poignant lyric lamenting the ‘touch of a vanished hand,’ while Ulysses shows a desperate longing to recover something that has been lost, again seen in terms of light: ‘all experience is an arch wherethrough/Gleams that untraveled world…’ At such moments, Ulysses, whose voice is deftly satirised throughout the rest of the poem, seem to speak for all who wish ‘To follow knowledge like a sinking star,/Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.’
Such philosophical yearnings, coupled with a sense of bereavement, inspired much of Tennyson’s later verse, though it is interesting to find in the late poem Godiva a very Tennysonian celebration of sensual chastity. He even takes us into the Lady’s bedroom to watch her undrape, and, very successfully, he creates a beautifully sensuous richness out of her chastity, describing her in terms both of water (‘shower’d the rippled ringlets to her knee’) and of light (‘like a creeping sunbeam’). Although not a major work, Godiva does see Tennyson reconciling his ‘light-bringing’ imagery of passion with the purity that he earlier idealised in St Agnes Eve .
but most she loathed the hour
When the thick-moted sunbeam lay
Athwart the chambers,
This melancholy strain inevitably informs the poems which Tennyson wrote in response to Arthur Hallam’s death in 1833. Break, Break, Break is a poignant lyric lamenting the ‘touch of a vanished hand,’ while Ulysses shows a desperate longing to recover something that has been lost, again seen in terms of light: ‘all experience is an arch wherethrough/Gleams that untraveled world…’ At such moments, Ulysses, whose voice is deftly satirised throughout the rest of the poem, seem to speak for all who wish ‘To follow knowledge like a sinking star,/Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.’
Such philosophical yearnings, coupled with a sense of bereavement, inspired much of Tennyson’s later verse, though it is interesting to find in the late poem Godiva a very Tennysonian celebration of sensual chastity. He even takes us into the Lady’s bedroom to watch her undrape, and, very successfully, he creates a beautifully sensuous richness out of her chastity, describing her in terms both of water (‘shower’d the rippled ringlets to her knee’) and of light (‘like a creeping sunbeam’). Although not a major work, Godiva does see Tennyson reconciling his ‘light-bringing’ imagery of passion with the purity that he earlier idealised in St Agnes Eve .
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