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To all intents and purposes I never belonged where I began. Not as a full-time adult, I mean. I learned more than I can remember about too many things to count while growing up. I’ve used that learning numerous times as well. I enjoyed the wave-like movement of all that education and wish that I could recall it all clearly.

But, I never really fit that mold. I was the one who loved classical music and opera. Somehow, I was the one who introduced me to it. I was the one who taught myself about ballet and other dance forms and watched it whenever I could. I also read Shakespeare and Tennyson in upper elementary and middle school when others my age were devouring Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys. I never heard of those books until I was an adult.

I didn’t see anything by C.S. Lewis until in my late 30’s. All I had was adult reading material, and I learned to suck it in like a vacuum.

My family listened to early Country music much of the time that I didn’t tolerate very well. None of them could tolerate my preferences either. We accommodated the differences.

We attended great auctions back then. They were better and cheaper than going to the Drive-In theatre. Dad didn’t have to spend more than a few bucks for a hot dog and drink for each of us, and we could spend an entire evening watching people go frantic with bidding paddles and someone else’s junk. Learning how the operation worked was an education in itself. I especially learned to watch the auctioneers.

We all loved going to them.

Yet, when I was in eighth grade, my dad went to an auction without the rest of us. He returned with many things, plus a box specifically for me.

Inside it were books. The box was filled with books. The pièce de résistance nearly floored me. Nestled among the novels by Faulkner and Updike and English books, to the side of those volumes on history, was a complete set of Shakespeare bound in moss green fabric and gilt lettering (pub. England, 1863), including his sonnets and other poetry.

I knew I’d died and ascended to Heaven without realizing it. That’s when I saw the tiny tomes. Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Thoreau, etc. (pub. NY 1909 approx.,) each bound in exquisite jacquard fabric, small enough to fit inside a pocket, huddled behind Shakespeare like so many children behind their mother’s apron.

That one act of consideration on Dad’s part sealed my fate. I was a classicist and would never truly fit into my birth family completely. I would always love them and honor them, but never be one of them. I’d been set free with that box of books and the knowledge that my father had unwittingly given me the ticket on the train to a literary career somewhere in my future.

Looking back on that moment, I can relax now. I understand that the family that I love don’t have to understand why I do what I do, or even how I do it. It’s enough to know that they acknowledge that that’s who I am and that they accept the fact that I can’t be

After yesterday's poem, "Dulce et decorum est" by Wilfred Owen, my thoughts flew to one of the best-known, best-loved poems perhaps ever, "Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas, a villanelle with the recurring lines "Do not go gentle into that good night/Rage, rage against the dying of the light." That poem remains under copyright, however, and one of the few limits I've imposed on myself for this "Building a Poetry Collection" series is that the poems featured must be in the public domain here in the U.S. So, no Dylan Thomas today after all, although those of you inclined to read Thomas's exhortations to his dying father are free to follow the above link.

It then occurred to me to post "Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" by William Butler Yeats, which I've posted twice before (although not as part of this series). But I've already posted at least two Yeats poems this month, and that seemed a bit too Yeats-heavy for me, even though he is one of my favorite poets. I considered going with "O Captain! My Captain!" by Walt Whitman, but then it occurred to me that I recently posted some Whitman, and that I haven't included any Tennyson this year. And thinking we could all use a bit more Tennyson in our lives, I came to today's actual selection, selected largely for its third stanza, although the repetition in this poem and its excellent recite-ability was a factor in the choosing:

Break, Break, Break
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Break, break, break,
  On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
  The thoughts that arise in me.

O, well for the fisherman's boy,
  That he shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for the sailor lad,
  That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on
  To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
  And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break
  At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
  Will never come back to me.


Form: The poem is arranged in three rhyming stanzas, with the even lines in perfect rhyme. The metre is not fixed, but tends to include three or four stressed syllables per line (usually three). It trips off the tongue in what can be an almost sing-song manner, but were you to recite it aloud, you would of course try not to make it sing-songy.

Discussion: The speaker appears to be by the sea, watching the ships and boats as they come and go and the way the waves break on the shore. The second and first half of the third stanzas indicate that life is good for the fisherman's boy and the sailor and the stately ships, but the last two lines of the third stanza bring the speaker around to "the thoughts that arise in [him]": he is in mourning. In the final stanza, the speaker exhorts the sea to continue pounding against the rocks along the shore - or at least observes that the sea continues to pound - whereas the speaker will never again spend time with his lost loved one.

Adam Roberts is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, as well as a science fiction novelist. He is the editor of Tennyson: the Major Works, which was recently published in the Oxford World’s Classics series. In the original post below, he reviews the Booker shortlisted novel The Quickening Maze, by Adam Foulds, which features Tennyson as a main character.

If you’d like to read more by Adam Roberts, he also writes for literary blog, The Valve.

I picked up Adam Foulds’ excellent new novel The Quickening Maze (it has, as I’m sure you know, been shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize) with more than an ordinary reader’s interest. You see, this scrupulously researched historical novel takes Alfred Tennyson as one of the main characters; and I, as the editor of Tennyson: the Major Works, was curious as to how Foulds treats him.

I was not disappointed. The Quickening Maze is, throughout, a beautifully written fiction: set in 1840 and centred on the lunatic asylum run by Dr Matthew Allen on the outskirts of Epping Forest, the novel evokes its world with a poet’s eye and skill at phrasing—indeed the book is as much about poetry, or poetic perception, as it is about a series of events. The point-of-view shifts deftly between all the main characters, including a number of the inmates at the asylum; although the peasant poet, John Clare, is the main focus. A patient in Allen’s asylum, his sanity is precarious at the beginning of the tale and becomes less stable as it goes on. Fould’s vivid, precise way with poetic image, and his exquisite control of language, brilliantly evoke the world through Clare’s hyper-sensitive eyes.

But Tennyson has a large part to play too. He comes into the story as he oversees the admittance of his brother Septimus (suffering from the melancholic ‘black blood’ of the Tennysons) to the asylum, living there for nearly three years. Dr Allen befriends Tennyson, and persuades him to invest in his idea for an automated wood-lathe—in fact Tennyson put almost all the money he had, £3000, into this scheme, only to lose it all. The doctor’s pale, bookish daughter Hannah falls hopelessly in love with Tennyson, although the emotion is not reciprocated.

Foulds has certainly done his research. He credits Robert Bernard Martin’s dependable biography Tennyson: the Unquiet Heart in his acknowledgments, but I take this to be modest understatement on his part; because one thing that emerges from this book is how well Foulds knows his pre-1840s Tennyson. I’ll give a few examples. Early in the book Tennyson talks philosophy with Allen, who believes in a ‘Grand Agent’ behind the phenomena of reality: ‘a common cause, a unitary force.’ Tennyson concurs.

“I see. A Spinozism, of sorts.” And Tennyson did see: a white fabric, candescent, pure, flowing through itself, surging, charged, unlimited. And in the world the flourishing of forms, their convulsions: upward thrive of trees, sea waves, the mathematical toy of sea shells, the flight of dragonflies. [25]

This is nicely done; and if the reader of Tennyson recognises the sea-shell from Maud, the dragonfly from ‘The Two Voices’ it only contributes to the effect. Fould’s Tennyson goes on more specifically:

“As a boy I could put myself into a trance by repeating my name over and over until my sense of identity was quite dissolved. What I was then was a being somehow merging, or sustained, with a greater thing, truly vast. It was abstract, warm, featureless and frightful.” [The Quickening Maze, p.26]

This speech has been lifted from a letter Tennyson wrote (late in his life—in 1874) to an American mystic and writer Benjamin Paul Flood. Flood, it seems, believed it was possible to enter a spiritual trance state via the newly discovered medical technologies of anasthesia. Tennyson wrote:

I have never had any revelations through anaesthetics: but “ a kind of waking trance” (this for lack of a better word) I have frequently had quite up from boyhood. When I have been all alone. This has often come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently, till all at once as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being—and this not a confused state but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words—where Death was an almost laughable impossibility—the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life. [Tennyson: the Major Works, p.520]

What interests me here is how Foulds have adapted this famous self-description for the purposes of his novel: Tennyson’s actual 1874 account is surprisingly reassuring about this strange fugue state, and wholly positive: ‘not a confused state but the clearest of the clearest … Death was an almost laughable impossibility … no extinction but the only true life’. In the novel, though, it becomes something rather more unnerving: ‘abstract, featureless and frightful’—because The Quickening Maze’s main focus is on madness, on that breakdown of coherent consciousness and its fearful consequences.

‘May I ask you, what is your opinion of Lord Byron’s poetry?’ Hannah, the doctor’s daughter enquires later on in the narrative Tennyson replies:

I remember when he died. I was a lad. I walked out into the woods full of distress at the news. It was the thought of all he hadn’t written, all bright inside him, being lost for ever, lowered into the darkness for eternity. I was most gloomy and despondent. I scratched his name onto a rock, a sandstone rock. It must still be there, I should think. [The Quickening Maze, pp.102-3]

The original for this is a conversation Tennyson had late in life with his son, Hallam.

We talked of Byron and Wordsworth. “Of course,” said Tennyson, “Byron’s merits are all on the surface. This is not the case with Wordsworth. You must love Wordsworth ere he will seem worthy of your love. As a boy I was an enormous admirer of Byron, so much so that I got a surfeit of him, and now I cannot read him as I should like to do. I was fourteen when I heard of his death. It seemed an awful calamity; I remember I rushed out of doors, sat down by myself, shouted aloud, and wrote on the sandstone: “Byron is dead!” [Tennyson: the Major Works, p.541]

Once again Foulds has done something interesting with his source material. The substance of the recollection is the same, but where Tennyson’s original account is a cathartic outpouring—he ‘rushed out of doors’ at the news, ‘shouted aloud’ and wrote on rock to express himself—Foulds internalises the grief. His Tennyson is filled, even glutted, with a grief that is inside: he goes ‘into the woods’; he is ‘full of distress’ at ‘the thought of all he hadn’t written, all bright inside him.’ This interiorisation of experience is one of the main thrusts of the novel. Foulds’ characters all inhabit their subjectivities much more than they live in the world, some to the point of monomaniac madness. The exception also proves the rule: Clare, whose perceptions of the natural world around him furnish the novel with some of its most beautiful moments, cannot escape his own imprisoning imagination. He sinks into a grief-filled interiority—even believing himself to be Lord Byron himself—for he has been unable to cope with the death of his childhood sweetheart Mary, and the fantasy of her being alive again overwhelms him.

The parallels with Tennyson are unobtrusively drawn: in 1840 he was also sunk in grief, at the premature death (in 1833) of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam. Foulds’ Tennyson reverts to memories of Hallam time and again, and across the course of the novel he is writing the elegiac lyrics that were later collected into Tennyson’s most famous poem, ‘In Memoriam A. H. H.’ Foulds quotes the ninth:

Fair ship, that from the Italian shore
Sailest the placid ocean-plains
With my lost Arthur’s loved remains,
Spread thy full wings, and waft him o’er.

So draw him home to those that mourn
In vain; a favourable speed
Ruffle thy mirror’d mast, and lead
Thro’ prosperous floods his holy urn.

All night no ruder air perplex
Thy sliding keel, till Phosphor, bright
As our pure love, thro’ early light
Shall glimmer on the dewy decks.

Sphere all your lights around, above;
Sleep, gentle heavens, before the prow;
Sleep, gentle winds, as he sleeps now,
My Friend, the brother of my love;

My Arthur, whom I shall not see
Till all my widow’d race be run;
Dear as the mother to the son,
More than my brothers are to me. [The Quickening Maze, pp. 107-8; Tennyson: the Major Works, p.209]

That Tennyson is sane, and Clare mad, has as much to do with the different emphases of their imaginative engagements with mourning. Tennyson styles himself, patiently, as Arthur’s ‘widow’, in the last stanza there; a feminisation that Foulds develops in his fictional recreation of the poet’s personality. Clare, on the other hand, chafes against his restrains. He believes himself a famous pugilist, and fights with the asylum’s warders and with local gypsies. He roams restlessly through Epping forest, and—in a superb passage at he novel’s end—walks all the way back to his home village, a journey of 80 miles or more, overcoming the obstacles placed in his way, landscape, hunger and weakness. By comparison Tennyson moves smoothly: Foulds captures well his stillness and inwardness, his silences, the way he draws things into himself—not least, tobacco smoke (Allen “watched Tennyson relight his pipe, hollowing his clean-shaven cheeks as he plucked the flame upside down into the bowl of scorched tobacco’ [23]”). In all, it’s very deftly and sensitively done. The novel is highly recommended.

What we read today (an excerpt; “the astronomer” is a boy named Dick, who is stargazing with his sister, Dorothea):

“Got it,” he said. “Just over the top of the hill. Come and see it.”

Dorothea joined him. He pointed out the bright Aldebaran and the other stars of Taurus, and offered her the telescope.

“I can see a lot better without,” said Dorothea.

“How many of the Pleiades can you see?”

“Six,” said Dorothea.

“There are lots more than that,” said Dick. “But it’s awfully hard to see them when the telescope won’t keep still. How far away does it say the Pleiades are?”

Dorothea went back to the fire and found the place in the book.

“The light from the group known as the Pleiades (referred to by Tennyson in ‘Locksley Hall’)…”

“Oh, hang Tennyson!”

“The light from the group known as the Pleiades reaches our planet in rather more than three hundred years after it leaves them.”

“Light goes at one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second,” said the voice of the astronomer in the darkness.

But Dorothea was also doing some calculations.

“Shakespeare died 1616.”

“What?”

“Well, if the light takes more than three hundred years to get here, it may have started while Shakespeare was alive, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, perhaps. Sir Walter Raleigh may have seen it start…”

“But of course he didn’t,” said the astronomer indignantly. “the light of the stars he saw had started three hundred years before that…”

“Battle of Bannockburn, 1314. Bows and arrows.” Dorothea was off again.

But Dick was no longer listening. One hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second. Sixty times as far as that in a minute. Sixty times sixty times as far as that in an hour. Twenty-four hours in a day. Three hundred and sixty-five days in a year. Not counting leap years. And then three hundred years of it. Those little stars that seemed to speckles a not too dreadfully distant blue ceiling were farther away than he could make himself think, try as he might. Those little stars must be enormous. The whole earth must be a tiny pebble in comparison. A spinning pebble, and he, on it, the astronomer, looking at flaming gigantic worlds so far away that they seemed no more than  sparkling grains of dust. He felt for a moment less than nothing, and then, suddenly, size did not seem to matter. Distant and huge the stars might be, but he, standing here with chattering teeth on the dark hill-side, could see them and name them and even foretell what next they were going to do. “The January Sky.” And there they were, Taurus, Aldebaran, the Pleiades, obedient as slaves…He felt an odd wish to shout at them in triumph, but remembered in time that this would not be scientific.

—from Winter Holiday by Arthur Ransome,
one of the Swallows & Amazons books

Where it took us:

* We read the opening of “Locksley Hall,” a long and complex poem which I enjoyed thinking my way through later in the day. With the kids, I read and discussed the first several stanzas, all of us lingering especially over:

Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,
Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.

Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro’ the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.

* Of course after that we had to see the Pleiades. Discovered Google Sky. Oh. My. Goodness. Truly, we live in an amazing age.

* Spent a long time playing with Google Sky, looking up many constellations including all those mentioned in the Winter Holiday chapter. Rose told me the story of Orion being chased by the serpent, and we read the legend of the Pleiades, those seven sisters, daughters of Atlas. Beanie fetched D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths because both she and Rose wanted to read me several relevant passages.

* Hunted up our copy of Rey’s Find the Constellations and read about the different magnitudes of stars, among other things.

* Rose found Sirius, the Dog Star, her favorite star, says she, because she loves Diana Wynne Jones’s fantasy novel, Dogsbody, so.

“Here about the beach I wandered,” Tennyson’s poem continues, “nourishing a youth sublime / With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time…”

Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Whether true or not, it's been reported that Alfred, Lord Tennyson once said that others may have written better poetry than he, but none had written poems that sounded better. He may be on to something there, because he was certainly (as I have commented before) a master of assonance (repetition of vowel sounds), alliteration (repetition of consonants) and, well, repetition, as well as onomatopoeia (use of a word that imitates the sound it describes). And he crafted poems that were designed for performance, or at the very least, to be read aloud. All those devices he uses make his lines easier to memorize, and enable a speaker to sound like a true orator.

Today's poem is actually a small section of a long work entitled The Princess. The premise of The Princess is that a group of seven college students, on holiday, get involved in a discussion with a few females about issues such as women's rights - and, more specifically, the education of women - as well as the need for education of the poor. Tennyson (quintessential Victorian that he was) felt the need to make clear that women should not be treated the same as men, nor should they aspire to the same careers or positions as men, and his poem was criticized as anti-feminist. That said, The Princess does champion the notion of teaching women history, science (as then understood, which included phrenology, which is, if memory serves, how to understand human nature by reading the bumps on one's skull), socialism (then a word for learning how to understand society and the roles within it), math, geography and languages. And if one reads some of it, one gets the idea that Tennyson realized that women were largely treated like cattle - and may not have approved. But truly, I digress.

Today's excerpt from The Princess is usually referred to by its first line. You should know that its my opinion that this is an erotic, sexual poem, a position which I'll set forth in full. But first the poem, and then the conversation.


Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, Now the White
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry* font:
The fire-fly wakens: waken thou with me.

Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

Now lies the Earth all Danaë** to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me.

Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake:
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.

*porphyry: a purple-red stone containing crystals throughout, coming from a quarry in the eastern desert of Egypt that was rediscovered in 1823 (during Tennyson's lifetime).

**Danaë: a character in Greek mythology, who, after being locked up in a subterranean chamber made of bronze by her father, was euphemistically "visited" by Zeus in a shower of gold rain (no - I do not want to call it a "golden shower"), thereby conceiving Perseus. Those of you interested in astronomy are likely aware that the Perseid meteor showers derive their name from Perseus, because they appeared to come from the constellation of Perseus.

Let's look first at form

A first reading of this poem gives you the impression that it is written in rhyme, but that is not actually correct. In fact, the end rhyme that you see is actually just the word "me", repeated. The poem is written in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), but the frequent use of the end-word "me" makes it seem like it rhymes, as does the near-rhyme in the final four-line stanza of the words "up" and "slip".

The poem is broken into five stanzas: the first and fifth contain four lines, and the middle three contain two lines each.

Analysis of the poem's structure and meaning

Why the five stanzas? Well, the first and fifth stanzas are bookends, I think. The first sets the scene (it's evening! in a garden!), but it also makes clear that this poem is addressed to someone (whether male or female is unclear, but the notion that it is a lover, or a person that the speaker would like to have as a lover, comes clear as we go along).

The second stanza talks about two things: seeing a white peacock in the night garden, and how the woman he sees glimmers in the moonlight/starlight like a ghost. It's an interesting construction, because he is talking to a person, but in this stanza, it sounds as if he's talking about her instead.

The third makes another comparison, and this is where things get really, really interesting. In the first line, he says "Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars". Taking into account the story of Danaë that I summarized above, he means that the Earth is open to being (for want of a better term) fertilized by the stars in the night sky. He quickly follows that with "And all thy heart lies open unto me." Romantic, definitely. Erotic, too, if you ask me.

The fourth makes both the romantic and the sexual intent clear in my books (not that I've seen a lot of discussion of this poem as having anything to do with sex, but that's only because historically, folks liked to give Victorians credit for not talking about sex. As we know, however, that's not really the case, and many "repressed Victorians" were horndogs, or at least keen enough observers of human nature to know what was what.) That fourth stanza again? "Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves /A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me." The sliding meteor and shining furrow, in conjunction with the earlier reference to Danaë is not, I would argue, accidental, but is again a sexual reference. That said, it's also a reference to the Perseid meteor showers, which rain down on the earth from "the stars", with tails that could appear to leave (for the moment) a furrow in the sky. Going back to the reference to Danaë, however, those meteors come streaking toward earth like golden rain, fertilizing their target. In this stanza, it's the poets thoughts that have been fertilized. (Again, this works on two levels - he's thinking about the unknown female subject of the poem, but he's also thinking fertile thoughts, if you catch my drift.) Also? Traditionally the word "furrow" goes with "plowing" and "plowing" is a euphemism for intercourse. So.

The fifth stanza is the closing bookend - four lines for additional weight, to balance the four that started the poem and set the scene. Here's the payoff, as it were (pun intended). In the first two lines, he talks of how the water lily folds "all her sweetness up/And slips into the bosom of the lake". First off, water lilies don't really submerge, to my knowledge, and given the keen interest in botany that prevailed during Victorian times, Tennyson probably knew that, which means that he was taking license for a reason. That reason? To show a complete yielding of the female, who is not merely submerged, but completely possessed by the the lake. The final two lines are spoken directly to the person who was addressed at the close of the first stanza:

So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.

Wow. So lovely. And still, erotic. And quite possibly a reference to the notion of two becoming one, although with the phrase "be lost in me", it seems to intimate a sense of sexual abandon, I think.

I love this poem for its surface beauty, for its gorgeous word choices, and for the way it sounds when you read it aloud. And I love it even more for its erotically charged imagery and secret meaning. How 'bout you?

I was totally not in the spirit of the season until I went to a party yesterday with my writing critique group. Now I'm sketching all kinds of holiday doodles.

Merry Christmas!

At this time of year, I start itching to make things. I like to do crafty things year-round, but the minute Thanksgiving is over, this feeling grows. Nothing gets me into the holiday mood more than baking and making little things. I think I may be part "elf" or something.

Here's a little bunny I made for my son, out of felt and his Dad's old shirt. I figured he'd had enough cookies.