Tennyson: Selected Poetry

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Professor Norman Page, Norman Page, Professor Norman Page, Norman Page

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134967124
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Editor a renowned and respected Tennyson scholar Distills a large and sometimes daunting body of work into an accessible selection Historical, critical and biographical context essential to an understanding of Tennyson - most selections of his work don't contextualize There is a renewed interest in the Victorian poets in teaching and research

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Selected Poetry

MARIANA

‘Mariana in the moated grange.’

Measure for Measure

With blackest moss the flower-plots

Were thickly crusted, one and all:

The rusted nails fell from the knots

That held the pear to the gable-wall.

The broken sheds look’d sad and strange:

Unlifted was the clinking latch;

Weeded and worn the ancient thatch

Upon the lonely moated grange.

She only said, ‘My life is dreary,

He cometh not,’ she said; 10

She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!’

Her tears fell with the dews at even;

Her tears fell ere the dews were dried;

She could not look on the sweet heaven,

Either at morn or eventide.

After the flitting of the bats,

When thickest dark did trance the sky,

She drew her casement-curtain by,

And glanced athwart the glooming flats. 20

She only said, ‘The night is dreary,

He cometh not,’ she said;

She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!’

Upon the middle of the night,

Waking she heard the night-fowl crow:

The cock sung out an hour ere light:

From the dark fen the oxen’s low

Came to her: without hope of change,

In sleep she seem’d to walk forlorn, 30

Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn

About the lonely moated grange.

She only said, ‘The day is dreary,

He cometh not,’ she said;

She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!’

About a stone-cast from the wall

A sluice with blacken’d waters slept,

And o’er it many, round and small,

The cluster’d marish-mosses crept. 40

Hard by a poplar shook alway,

All silver-green with gnarled bark:

For leagues no other tree did mark

The level waste, the rounding gray.

She only said, ‘My life is dreary,

He cometh not,’ she said;

She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!’

And ever when the moon was low,

And the shrill winds were up and away, 50

In the white curtain, to and fro,

She saw the gusty shadow sway.

But when the moon was very low,

And wild winds bound within their cell,

The shadow of the poplar fell

Upon her bed, across her brow.

She only said, ‘The night is dreary,

He cometh not,’ she said;

She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!’ 60

All day within the dreamy house,

The doors upon their hinges creak’d;

The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse

Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek’d,

Or from the crevice peer’d about.

Old faces glimmer’d thro’ the doors,

Old footsteps trod the upper floors,

Old voices called her from without.

She only said, ‘My life is dreary,

He cometh not,’ she said; 70

She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!’

The sparrow’s chirrup on the roof,

The slow clock ticking, and the sound

Which to the wooing wind aloof

The poplar made, did all confound

Her sense; but most she loathed the hour

When the thick-moted sunbeam lay

Athwart the chambers, and the day

Was sloping toward his western bower. 80

Then, said she, ‘I am very dreary,

He will not come,’ she said;

She wept, ‘I am aweary, aweary,

Oh God, that I were dead!’

SONG

I

A spirit haunts the year’s last hours

Dwelling amid these yellowing bowers:

To himself he talks;

For at eventide, listening earnestly,

At his work you may hear him sob and sigh

In the walks;

Earthward he boweth the heavy stalks

Of the mouldering flowers:

Heavily hangs the broad sunflower

Over its grave i’ the earth so chilly; 10

Heavily hangs the hollyhock,

Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.

II

The air is damp, and hush’d, and close,

As a sick man’s room when he taketh repose

An hour before death;

My very heart faints and my whole soul grieves

At the moist rich smell of the rotting leaves,

And the breath

Of the fading edges of box beneath,

And the year’s last rose. 20

Heavily hangs the broad sunflower

Over its grave i’ the earth so chilly;

Heavily hangs the hollyhock,

Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.

THE LADY OF SHALOTT

Part I

On either side the river lie

Long fields of barley and of rye,

That clothe the wold and meet the sky;

And thro’ the field the road runs by

To many-tower’d Camelot;

And up and down ...