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III
The new edition was twenty-nine lines longer than the first and contained numerous alterations. Exactly when Tennyson began to revise is unknown; but he probably started not long after the funeral and continued his efforts until near the date of publication of the second edition.[44] Although Henry Taylor wrote, "I hear you are going to see the Duke buried," Tennyson did not actually witness the interment.[45] From Somerset House in the Strand he watched the magnificent procession that conveyed Wellington's body from the Horse Guards to St. Paul's and pronounced it "very fine." He may have visited the interior of the cathedral after the funeral; and he later read an account of the burial.[46]
To commemorate a great public event is easier than to anticipate it. After Tennyson had been stirred by pomp and pageantry and had
While it seems unlikely that Tennyson would have emended his Ode so fully as he did if the reception of the first version had been entirely laudatory, he paid scant attention to the strictures on his versification or to condemnation, for one reason or another, of specific passages. Among a dozen such passages his treatment of only one implies a possible reaction to criticism. The Illustrated London News had cited the opening seven-line strophe of the poem —
With an empire's lamentation,
Let us bury the Great Duke
To the noise of the mourning of a mighty nation,
When laurel-garlanded leaders fall,
And warriors carry the warriors pall,
And sorrow darkens hamlet and hall. —
Warriors carry the warrior's pall,
And sorrow darkens hamlet and hall.
If Tennyson disregarded censure of other passages, he seems to have taken into account several general objections that the critics registered. For example, The Times had remarked, "The severe old soldier on the battlefield is not before us — the stern, unbending statesman — inflexible till inflexibility became a fault — does not strike our minds with awe." To the celebration in strophe IV of Wellington's qualities as a statesman Tennyson prefixed the following two lines:
To the account in strophe VI of the Duke's military exploits he added five lines on Wellington's activities in the peninsular campaign (ll. 103-107).With some justification the Leader had complained that the ode was not about the death of the Duke but about his burial — "which it neither describes nor calls up before the reflective eye, suggesting grand and mournful images." Tennyson had given structure and movement to his poem through presenting his eulogy against a background of action — the decision upon a place of burial, the procession through the streets, the entrance to St. Paul's, the awakening of the shade of Nelson, the entrusting of the soul to God. But he had omitted the climax toward which the poem moved — the committal of the body to the earth. Now after the event and after reading a report of the ceremony, he skillfully supplied this lack. The inserted lines 251-253, concerning the "tides of Music's golden sea/Setting toward eternity," and the alteration of line 254 from "For solemn, too, this day are we" to "Lifted up in heart are we" shifted the mood from solemnity to exaltation. Four additional lines, concluding with the words from the order for burial in the Book of Common Prayer, provided a specific description of the descent of the coffin:
The dark crowd moves: and there are sobs and tears:
The black earth yawns: the mortal disappears;
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust . . . .
(ll. 267-270)
The English Review took strenuous exception to the ending of strophe III: "The last great Englishman is low." Tennyson had qualified this dictum as he began strophe IV: ". . . for to us he seems the last: / Our sorrow draws but on the golden Past"; but the English reviewer cried, "Let us hope that the assertion of the last line will not be verified by future events" and digressed from literary analysis long enough to write fourteen lines of verse declaring:
Liberty yet on earth is found,
Truth on her Island throne sits crown'd,
And viewless walls are reared by Heav'n Britannia's shores around.
Perchance a darkening future yields
Some reverse from worse to worse,
The blood of men in quiet fields,
And sprinkled on the sheaves of peace.
(ll. 170/171)
His Saxon in blown seas and storming showers,
(ll. 154-155)
The direct injunction to thank the Divinity in the lines Tennyson added here are symptomatic of an intensified religious note in the second edition. As he revised, Tennyson may simply have found himself in a more confident mood than he had experienced when he first wrote
Round us, each with different powers,
And other forms of life than ours,
What know we greater than the soul? —
(ll. 262-265)
And break the shore, and evermore
Make and break, and work their will . . . .
(ll. 259-261)
(l. 266)
Whatever influence the reviewers seem to have had upon Tennyson, he was never subservient to them, and his corrections of the Ode, like those in his previous poems, went far beyond anything that his critics had to suggest. Other significant alterations in the 1853 text of the Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington appear to be entirely independent of criticism. Some of these produced improvements in tone, others in force of expression. For instance, in strophe V, after the admonition "Let the bell be toll'd," the subsequent line, "A deeper knell in the heart be knoll'd" (l. 59), imposed upon all the necessity of inner, personal grief as well as external acts of respect. In strophe VI, by calling the French forces "banded swarms" instead of "bandit swarms" (l. 110), he increased the accuracy of his modifier and the
Still other alterations underlined aspects of the poet's message. For
Respect his sacred warning; guard your coasts . . .
Revere his warning; guard your coasts:
Your cannon moulder on the seaward wall . . . .
(ll. 171-173)
With rugged maxims hewn from life.
(ll. 183-184)
(l. 218)
The theme of the ode — twice stated in strophe VIII of the first edition — had been that devotion to duty, not self-aggrandizement, is the way to earthly glory. In the second edition, singing this thematic refrain for a third time, Tennyson expanded the text to embrace a
Let his great example stand
Colossal, seen of every land,
And keep the soldier firm, the statesman pure;
Till in all lands and thro' all human story
The path of duty be the way to glory . . . .
(ll. 219-224)
The new version of the Ode was a different poem from that which had displeased a majority of the reviewers in 1852. In the Athenaeum, on March 5, 1853, John Abraham Heraud pointed out a number of Tennyson's revisions and applauded the superiority of the second edition: "There are a completeness and compactness, produced by what is added and what is subtracted, that satisfy and fill the imagination with a sense of harmony that was previously wanting. . . . The poem as it stands has the mature stamp of the artist upon it."[49] Heraud's only cavil was over the imperfect rhyme of "priest" with "guest" and "rest" in the first three lines of strophe VI. He hoped to see a line subsequently added that would rhyme with "priest." In this desire he was disappointed; and despite his approval of the contrast that the poet had introduced in strophe II between the isolated situation of the Duke's death, "on Walmer's lonely shore," and London, his place of burial, Tennyson recognized that the line about Walmer interfered with the direct antiphonal reply to the question "Where shall we lay the man whom we deplore?" and deleted it when the poem next appeared in Maud, and Other Poems, 1855.
Other corrections for the text of 1855 are not extensive, but they indicate continued care for exactness and felicity of phrase. The very first line gained by the shift from "Let us bury" to "Bury." The piece also benefited by the deletion of an unnecessary line between the initial defeat of Napoleon and the return from Elba that too specifically relaxed the enumeration of the Duke's exploits: "He withdrew to brief repose" (l. 118/119). The debt that England owes to great men Tennyson expanded from one "Of boundless reverence and regret" to that "Of boundless love and reverence and regret" (l. 157). The admonition "Revere his warning; guard your coasts" became explicitly
Thro' either babbling world of high and low;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Who never spoke against a foe.
(ll. 181-182, 184)
These and other emendations brought the poem to a nearly final form. The Ode reached its permanent length of 281 lines in 1855, and after that date Tennyson's alterations were few. In the second edition of Maud, and Other Poems, 1856, he changed the phrase "worlds on worlds" to "world on world" (l. 262). The text of A Selection from the Works of Alfred Tennyson, 1865, reveals emendation of five words and two initial letters from lower case to capital. With the reading "world-earthquake" for "world's-earthquake" (l. 133) in volume III of the Library Edition of the laureate's works, 1872, the text had attained its definitive state. Yet, as slight as these modifications are, each minutely contributes to the finish of the poem — and attests the poet's extended search for perfection.
As a discussion of the revisions indicates and scrutiny of the text confirms, the Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington is far from a perfunctory funeral panegyric. It is a diligently wrought piece of artistry and, Janus-like, facing both Tennyson's poetical past and future, is an epitome of his mature thought. His views on such subjects as common sense, freedom, love of country, public virtues, constitutional monarchy, and social progress echo the patriotic and political poems of the '30's and early '40's, "Locksley Hall," and "The Poet's Song." His insistence upon duty, work, and personal immortality recall the burden of "Love and Duty," "The Golden Year," and In Memoriam. Military devotion to country anticipates the conclusion of "Maud"; and the paramount value of the soul foreshadows the central allegory of The Idylls the of King. Although Tennyson suppressed the lines concerning "some reverse from worse to worse," they survive as a brief reminder of his consciousness, years before he became obsessed with the idea in "The Last Tournament" and "Locksley Hall Sixty
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