Throughout his poetic career, Tennyson wrote several poems in pairs, and others in small groups and longer sequences. These poems form such a significant part of his canon, and include some of his most famous and impressive work, that ~hey should play an important part in the current revaluation of the poet. Tennyson's early experiments in writing paired poems began while he was at Cambridge, and reflect his formal studies and the discussions of the Apostles, as well as certain aspects of his temperament.
The early pairs, such as "The Merman" and "The Mermaid", "Nothing Will Die" and "All Things Will Die", and "The Poet" and "The Poet's Mind", all reveal a characteristic mode of expression which Christopher North, in an early review of Tennyson, analyzed in another context as an "aversion from the straightforward and strong simplicity of nature and truth." But what North condemns is, for Tennyson, an attempt to convey different attitudes and frames of mind, to transcend the straight-forward and obvious, in search of the complexity of a broader truth. This first, exploratory phase culminates in The Lover's Tale which, although not a paired poem, in its complete form deals with varying perspectives on a particular incident. It is in the context of these earlier poems that we should read Tennyson's pendant poems, "Ulysses" and ''Tithonus". The death of Arthur Hallam in 1833 must not obscure the fact that in these poems, Tennyson depicts two mythological figures who voice contradictory views on the value of human striving and the attainment of divine knowledge. The dilemma of how to reconcile two opposing points of view is dealt with most extensively and resolved more successfully in The Princess where all the philosophical, thematic, generic, technical, and structural contraries are subordinated to the ideas of a "medley'' and marriage,/ both of which effect a reconciliation without denying individuality as a prior condition. In his later career Tennyson completed three important pairs of sequel poems, two of them rounding off poems published by 1842, the "Oenone" and the "Locksley Hall" poems;the'~orthern Farmer" poems are entirely a product of his later years, as are the others written in dialect. In these sequels, Tennyson emphasises differences in time more than differences in speaker. Time, change, and the prospect of death become, not surprisingly, prominent themes, not in their own right, but to recall the old themes of open-mindedness and skepticism concerning the limitations of human knowledge, and Tennyson's unshaken faith in the ultimate value and reality of the spiritual world.
Tennyson's paired poems are important for an understanding of not only The Lover's Tale and The Princess, but also of his other major poems --In Memoriam, Maud, the Idylls of the King --and of his major historical plays. All of these can be shown to draw considerable technical and thematic strength from the paired poems. On a more sophisticated level, they reflect the two essential characteristics of Tennyson's poetry discussed here --complete fidelity to the details of experience, and a flexible and tolerant attitude to this world balanced by an awareness of the transcendent value of divine insight attained in death or at the end of history, and in rare moments of mystical revelation. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/15695 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Miller, John Arthur |
| Contributors | Ferns, Dr. H.J., English |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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