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 3 – Byron

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‘When we two parted, Childe Harold, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Don Juan, George Gordon, George Gordon Lord Byron, Greek War of Independence, he Prisoner of Chillon, he two Foscari, Lord Byron, Lyrical Ballads, Marino Falieri, ottava rima, poems, Poetry, Robert Browning, Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, She walks in beauty, So we’ll go no more a’roving, The Lost Leader, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, William Wordsworth

The publication in 1798 of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge certainly transformed poetry. Though The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was the most memorable (and by far the longest) poem in the book, Harold Bloom was right to single out Wordsworth as the seminal force in the enterprise, and he went on over the years to exemplify the new approach of an interpreting and interpreted consciousness. Or, rather, one should say he did this in the limited period in which he remained a major poetic force for, as Bloom notes, before long he was spent poetically, and turned into a rather sad old figure.

He was appointed Poet Laureate, in succession to his more radical and then more conservative contemporary Robert Southey, and became, in the words of a much younger poet, Robert Browning, ‘The Lost Leader’ (1845).  But the change had been bewailed even earlier, by the generation of poets that immediately succeeded Wordsworth’s, notably in ‘To Wordsworth’ that Shelley published in 1816.

The leader of that group of poets was George Gordon, Lord Byron. Born in 1788, he was older than both Shelley and Keats and outlived them both, though like them he died comparatively young. He was only 36 when he died, in Missolonghi, where he had gone to join in the Greek War of Independence. More than a hundred and fifty years later, I was at a Conference in Missolonghi organized by the Byron Society to celebrate his continuing influence.