University of Virginia Library

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

shared with his countrymen the emotions of the occasion, he could more effectively strike the appropriate mood than he could possibly have done beforehand. It was inevitable that he would make additions and corrections to the Ode, especially since circumstances had forced him to publish without his customary period of testing and perfecting. Certainly he wished the poem to take its place as a fitting and enduring memorial to "England's greatest son." The reviewers' objections indicated that he had not attained his goal and may have crystallized his determination to silence his detractors. His severest critic, J. A. H. in the Illustrated London News, had predicted that the future would bring from Tennyson a suitable tribute to the Duke. T. K. Hervey had envisaged a longer and nobler poem as the result of time and further reflection. Such opinions were earnest of a favorable predisposition toward a revised edition.

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 —

as an example of "what one of Shakespeare's fools calls 'the false gallop of verse' — most full and most facile in its rhymes." The Spectator had commented that this strophe betrayed "strong traces of Tennyson's mannerism and affectation of simplicity, pushed almost to babyism" and "might have been suggested by the well-known dirge of 'Who Killed Cock Robin?'" Even the friendly English Review said, "We like least the opening, which is abrupt. . . ." Although Tennyson left the rhyme scheme and the first four lines unchanged in the second edition, he altered lines 5 and 6 so that the last three lines read, Thus he improved the syntax of the strophe, intensified the attitude of mourning by reiterating the participle, and avoided a sing-song repetition of "And" at the beginning of lines 6 and 7. "Laurel-garlanded" was a trite and awkward epithet with inappropriate implications. Its omission silenced the insistent alliteration and assonance of the line and shifted the associations from those of classical triumph to modern leadership.

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:

There can be no doubt of the extent to which these lines enhance the resolution of the poem in the second and all subsequent editions.

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:

Apparently in response to this critic, Tennyson clarified his qualifying lines to read, ". . . for to us he seems the last: / Remembering all his greatness in the Past." The poet also suppressed five lines in strophe VII suggesting the possibility of an apocalyptic future for England: Possibly two lines added near the opening of strophe VII, concerning England's natural strategic advantage — owe something to the reminder in the English Review of "Truth on her Island throne" and the "viewless walls" that Heaven had reared "Britannia's shores around."[48]

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

the ode. Possibly, upon extended reflection, he felt obliged to express emphatically what he though that he and the people of England ought to believe; but he may have been stung by the charge in the English Review that he tried to be "all things to all men," that he seemed to offer some lines for Christians and others for "the transcendental deist or pantheist, Carlyleite or Emersonian." Quoting from its review of In Memoriam, the English Review had reiterated the opinion that Tennyson's poetry contained "a little Christianity . . . , a little infidelity, and a good deal of scepticism." To his original passage attesting the pre-eminence of the human soul — Tennyson prefixed, in the new edition, three lines concerning geological evolution: In this way, he stressed the permanence of the soul by contrasting it with terrestrial flux; and while acknowledging the discoveries of science, he proclaimed an unshaken faith in the spirit. And to conclude the passage he inserted the line:

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

dignity of the Duke's activity. At the same time he muted the shrill anti-Gallic note. Opening this recast line with "Back to France," which the next line repeated, strengthened the reader's sense of the irresistible pressure that the Duke exerted against his adversaries. "Boundless reverence" in line 157, was obviously superior to "Most unbounded reverence" (see note 44 above). "And help the march of human mind" became "And drill the raw world for the march of mind" (l. 168).

Still other alterations underlined aspects of the poet's message. For

Tennyson substituted Eight lines later he expanded his eulogy of the Duke to include And in the succeeding strophe he changed to read Besides suppressing any implication of possible failure and dispensing with redundancy and a chiming internal rhyme, Tennyson accentuated a Carlylian doctrine of work, which adequately prepared for the conviction, expressed in the first and all later editions, that in the afterlife Wellington must have "other nobler work to do / Than when he fought at Waterloo" (ll. 256-257).

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

prophetic hope for universal acceptance of the moral of the Duke's life — and of the poet's words:

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

"He bad you guard the sacred coasts" (l. 172). Three additional lines augmented the picture of the Duke's character in strophe VII: In 1853, after hearing the music in St. Paul's "Setting toward eternity," the poet had declared, "Lifted up in heart are we." In 1855 the line had been expanded to "Uplifted high in heart and hope are we" (l. 254). In 1853 "the Dead March sounds in the people's ears"; in 1855 it "wails" (l. 267).

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

Years After," that a society may as easily disintegrate as advance and that progress may be retrograde as well as ameliorative.