Poets and their visions 25 – Yeats

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A Prayer for my Daughter, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Lake Isle of Innisfree, Leda and the Swan, poems, Poetry, Robert Browning, Sailing to Byzantium, T S Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Wild Swans at Coole, Yeats

As with Tennyson and Browning, Eliot and Yeats were long considered a pair of poets who best represented their age. As with Browning, Yeats now is considered far less important than his more enduring contemporary. This judgment is largely true, but nevertheless Yeats like Browning was a considerable writer and well deserves to be read even now.

Though more orthodox than Eliot in style and subject matter, Yeats too had a wide range. Yet many of his best poems deal with the subject of age and transition. The beautiful Wild Swans at Coole exemplifies the manner in which he transits from scenic description to cognizance of the years passing.

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

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Poets and their visions 8 – Mathew Arnold

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Alfred Lord Tennyson, Dover Beach, Eminent Victorians, Empedocles on Etna, John Keats, Mahabharatha, Mathew Arnold, Nature red in tooth and claw, Percy Bysshe Shelley, poems, Poetry, Robert Browning, Sarachchandra, Sinhabahu, Sohrab and Rustum, The Scholar Gypsy, To Marguerite, Tom Brown’s Schooldays

In the sense in which we generally use the term, Mathew Arnold was the most Victorian of the poets, perhaps of the writers, of the 19^th century. Tennyson and Browning led highly individualistic lives, and the ideas and the emotions they conveyed were characteristic of that age of extremely exciting change. But we are more conscious now of the continuities of that age, and perhaps, under the influence of the debunking of the next generation, in particular Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, we see it as stolid and serious.

Mathew Arnold’s life was emphatically serious. He was an Inspector of Schools, in a context in which one might claim that in fact the greatest contribution of the Victorians to social continuity and development was education. Arnold was born to that tradition, for his father was Thomas Arnold, the legendary headmaster of Rugby, who transformed public school education into a serious and intellectually stimulating process. Unfortunately he is remembered best for his institutionalization of games, because of the rousing impact of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, written by one of his less brilliant pupils, Tom Hughes. But even the fact that Hughes was an idealist of sorts, concerned to do his bit for society, is a tribute to Arnold’s introduction of an ethos of commitment, and the socialization he brought to a system that had previously been indulgent to the idiosyncrasies of the rich and purely functional with regard to the less fortunate.

Poets and their visions 7 – Browning

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Alfred Lord Tennyson, Bishop Blougram’s Apology, Elizabeth Barrett, Men and Women, My Last Duchess, New Lankan Review, poems, Poetry, Richard de Zoysa, Robert Browning, Sonali Deraniyagala, The New Lankan Review, The Ring and the Book, Yasmine Gooneratne

Browning was long twinned with Tennyson as the other great Victorian poet, which is understandable given both his range and his talent. His popularity was also perhaps assisted by his marriage to Elizabeth Barrett, which was in itself a romance with public appeal, while the fact that she was a distinguished poet herself added to his prestige. The very different romantic appeal of Tennyson marrying the sister of his adored best friend was not in those days the stuff of which romance was made.

Yet there can be no question at all about him being in Tennyson’s league, and even in Victorian times he was much less accessible. His great epic, The Ring and the Book, was not widely read then, and is almost unreadable now. Its elaborate plot, and the subtle characterization, based on an old Italian tale of intrigue, has little resonance in the modern world.

Poets and their visions 6 – Tennyson

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Alfred Lord Tennyson, Arthur Hallam, George Gordon Lord Byron, Harold Bloom, Lyrical Ballads, Mariana, or the Madness, poems, Poet Laureate, Poetry, Romantic period, The Idylls of the King, Ulysses, Virginia Woolf, William Wordsworth, Wolcott Ballestier

The Romantic period of English poetry in effect ended with Byron’s death in 1824. Coleridge and Southey lived on for several years, the latter as Poet Laureate until 1843. He was succeeded by Wordsworth, who died in 1850 when he was 80. This was more than 50 years after he and Coleridge had revolutionized poetry with the Lyrical Ballads of 1798.

However hardly anything he wrote in the latter half of his life was memorable and by the 40s a new generation was emerging. They could not but acknowledge the achievements of the older Romantics but, as Robert Browning put it in the Lost Leader, they also registered their disappointment.

Browning however was not the dominant poet of his age. That position belongs emphatically to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who at the age of just over 40, succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate. Though he was not the first choice, his selection was eminently suitable, for he seemed to capture both the spirit of the Victorian Age, and its emotional predilections. This was established, in fact in 1950, with In Memoriam, an elegy for his great friend Arthur Hallam, who died young, and it strikingly conveyed the angst of a period in which old certainties about religion were fading away. Darwin’s discoveries about evolution shed doubts on what had long been thought of as the Gospel Truths of the Bible (including the Old Testament), while textual analysis of even the New Testament suggested that Jesus was not necessarily a divine being who had provided clear and convincing revelations to Man about God.