The Works of Tennyson The Eversley Edition: Annotated by Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Edited by Hallam, Lord Tennyson |
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The Works of Tennyson | ||
LOCKSLEY HALL SIXTY YEARS AFTER.
A dramatic poem, and the Dramatis Personæ are imaginary. Since it is so much the fashion in these days to regard each poem and story as a story of the poet's life, or part of it, may I not be allowed to remind my readers of the possibility, that some event which comes to the poet's knowledge, some hint flashed from another mind, some thought or feeling arising in his own, or some mood coming— he knows not whence or how—may strike a chord from which a poem evolves its life, and that this to other eyes may bear small relation to the thought or fact or feeling to which the poem owes its birth, whether the tenor be dramatic or given as a parable?
Gladstone says: “The method in the old Locksley Hall and the new is the same. In each the maker is outside his work, and in each we have to deal with it as strictly ‘impersonal’” (Nineteenth Century, Jan. 1887).
Watch'd again the hollow ridges roaring into cataracts,
I myself so close on death, and death itself in Locksley Hall.
And you liken—boyish babble—this boy-love of yours with mine.
Babble, babble; our old England may go down in babble at last.
Eyes that lured a doting boyhood well might fool a dotard's age.
I remember how you kiss'd the miniature with those sweet eyes.
Happy children in a sunbeam sitting on the ribs of wreck.
I was left within the shadow sitting on the wreck alone.
You, not you! your modern amourist is of easier, earthlier make.
But your Judith—but your worldling—she had never driven me wild.
She that finds a winter sunset fairer than a morn of Spring.
While she vows ‘till death shall part us,’ she the would-be-widow wife.
Ev'n the homely farm can teach us there is something in descent.
Lies the warrior, my forefather, with his feet upon the hound.
Dead the warrior, dead his glory, dead the cause in which he died.
Close beneath the casement crimson with the shield of Locksley—there,
Lies my Amy dead in child-birth, dead the mother, dead the child.
I this old white-headed dreamer stoopt and kiss'd her marble brow.
Gone like fires and floods and earthquakes of the planet's dawning years.
Cold upon the dead volcano sleeps the gleam of dying day.
All his virtues—I forgive them—black in white above his bones.
Some thro' age and slow diseases, gone as all on earth will go.
She with all the charm of woman, she with all the breadth of man,
Woman to her inmost heart, and woman to her tender feet,
She that link'd again the broken chain that bound me to my kind.
Thou alone, my boy, of Amy's kin and mine art left to me.
Pining for the stronger heart that once had beat beside her own.
Good, for Good is Good, he follow'd, yet he look'd beyond the grave,
Deem this over-tragic drama's closing curtain is the pall!
Saving women and their babes, and sinking with the sinking wreck,
Ever, ever, and for ever was the leading light of man.
Felt within themselves the sacred passion of the second life.
Ev'n the black Australian dying hopes he shall return, a white.
Take the charm ‘For ever’ from them, and they crumble into dust.
Lost, or only heard in silence from the silence of a tomb.
Staled by frequence, shrunk by usage into commonest commonplace!
Let us hush this cry of ‘Forward’ till ten thousand years have gone.
Captives whom they caught in battle—iron-hearted victors they.
Timur built his ghastly tower of eighty thousand human skulls,
Christian conquerors took and flung the conquer'd Christian into flames.
Christian love among the Churches look'd the twin of heathen hate.
Rome of Cæsar, Rome of Peter, which was crueller? which was worse?
Celtic Demos rose a Demon, shriek'd and slaked the light with blood.
Crown'd with sunlight—over darkness—from the still unrisen sun.
‘Kill your enemy, for you hate him,’ still, ‘your enemy’ was a man.
Innocent cattle under thatch, and burn the kindlier brutes alive.
Twisted hard in mortal agony with their offspring, born-unborn,
Sisters, brothers—and the beasts—whose pains are hardly less than ours!
Read the wide world's annals, you, and take their wisdom for your friend.
Shape your heart to front the hour, but dream not that the hour will last.
When was age so cramm'd with menace? madness? written, spoken lies?
Cries to Weakest as to Strongest, ‘Ye are equals, equal-born.’
Charm us, Orator, till the Lion look no larger than the Cat,
Larger than the Lion,—Demos end in working its own doom.
Pause! before you sound the trumpet, hear the voices from the field.
Shall we hold them? shall we loose them? take the suffrage of the plow.
Rivals of realm-ruining party, when you speak were wholly true.
So the Higher wields the Lower, while the Lower is the Higher.
Here and there my lord is lower than his oxen or his swine.
Freedom, free to slay herself, and dying while they shout her name.
Step by step we rose to greatness,—thro' the tonguesters we may fall.
Teach your flatter'd kings that only those who cannot read can rule.
Pillory Wisdom in your markets, pelt your offal at her face.
Set the feet above the brain and swear the brain is in the feet.
Break the State, the Church, the Throne, and roll their ruins down the slope.
Paint the mortal shame of nature with the living hues of Art.
Down with Reticence, down with Reverence—forward—naked—let them stare.
Forward, forward, ay and backward, downward too into the abysm.
Have we risen from out the beast, then back into the beast again?
Dust in wholesome old-world dust before the newer world begin.
Patience! let the dying actor mouth his last upon the stage.
Noises of a current narrowing, not the music of a deep?
After all the stormy changes shall we find a changeless May?
Some diviner force to guide us thro' the days I shall not see?
Something kindlier, higher, holier—all for each and each for all?
All the millions one at length with all the visions of my youth?
Stronger ever born of weaker, lustier body, larger mind?
I have seen her far away—for is not Earth as yet so young?—
Every grim ravine a garden, every blazing desert till'd,
Universal ocean softly washing all her warless Isles.
All her harvest all too narrow—who can fancy warless men?
Can it, till this outworn earth be dead as yon dead world the moon?
In this gap between the sandhills, whence you see the Locksley tower,
She and I—the moon was falling greenish thro' a rosy glow,
Here we stood and claspt each other, swore the seeming-deathless vow. . . .
Yet the moonlight is the sunlight, and the sun himself will pass.
Closer on the Sun, perhaps a world of never fading flowers.
All good things may move in Hesper, perfect peoples, perfect kings.
We should see the Globe we groan in, fairest of their evening stars.
Yearn, and clasp the hands and murmur, ‘Would to God that we were there’?
Sway'd by vaster ebbs and flows than can be known to you or me.
Man or Mind that sees a shadow of the planner or the plan?
Well be grateful for the sounding watchword, ‘Evolution’ here,
And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud.
Insects of an hour, that hourly work their brother insect wrong,
All their planets whirling round them, flash a million miles a day.
Many an Æon too may pass when earth is manless and forlorn,
Shallow skin of green and azure—chains of mountain, grains of sand!
Set the sphere of all the boundless Heavens within the human eye,
Not to-night in Locksley Hall—to-morrow—you, you come so late.
Good, this forward, you that preach it, is it well to wish you joy?
City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?
Crime and hunger cast our maidens by the thousand on the street.
And the crowded couch of incest in the warrens of the poor.
Eighty winters leave the dog too lame to follow with the cry,
Yet I would the rising race were half as eager for the light.
Aged eyes may take the growing glimmer for the gleam withdrawn.
Something other than the wildest modern guess of you and me.
Would she find her human offspring this ideal man at rest?
Crook and turn upon itself in many a backward streaming curve.
Leave the Master in the first dark hour of his last sleep alone.
Kindly landlord, boon companion—youthful jealousy is a liar.
Let the trampled serpent show you that you have not lived in vain.
Science grows and Beauty dwindles—roofs of slated hideousness!
Till the peasant cow shall butt the ‘Lion passant’ from his field.
In the common deluge drowning old political commonsense!
All I loved are vanish'd voices, all my steps are on the dead.
Forward far and far from here is all the hope of eighty years.
Like a clown—by chance he met me—I refused the hand he gave.
I was then in early boyhood, Edith but a child of six—
Peept the winsome face of Edith like a flower among the flowers.
Shall I hear in one dark room a wailing, ‘I have loved thee well.’
Her that shrank, and put me from her, shriek'd, and started from my side—
Move among your people, know them, follow him who led the way,
Served the poor, and built the cottage, raised the school, and drain'd the fen.
Earth would never touch her worst, were one in fifty such as he.
Nay, there may be those about us whom we neither see nor name,
Strowing balm, or shedding poison in the fountains of the Will.
Till you find the deathless Angel seated in the vacant tomb.
I that loathed, have come to love him. Love will conquer at the last.
Then I leave thee Lord and Master, latest Lord of Locksley Hall.
The Works of Tennyson | ||