University of Virginia Library

Alfred Tennyson was a consummate and indefatigable craftsman, and the relation of his craftsmanship to his art is superbly evidenced in his first major poem as Poet Laureate, the Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington. The present writers have previously described the compositional background of the poem and its critical reception, and from manuscripts and proof sheets at Harvard University as well as printed editions spanning twenty years, have offered extensive evidence of Tennyson's care in bringing his work to its finished state.[1] There is now available to scholars the only full and (except for two MS fragments of strophes IV and VI at Harvard) the earliest manuscript of the Ode—that at Trinity College, Cambridge, a manuscript which formerly could be neither copied nor quoted; and cataloguing of the family materials at the Tennyson Research Centre in Lincoln has brought to light a galley proof for the first edition, containing Tennyson's autograph corrections. Since these two new documents make it possible to add considerably to the history of the poem, our enterprise here is to augment, especially from the rich mine of the Trinity MS, the previous account of Tennyson's creative process and to provide a full collation that records the alterations in all manuscripts and the textual variants in existing MSS and printed states.[2] Throughout

the account which follows, all references to the places within the Collation where the particular early readings are located appear in square brackets. Other line references are shown in parentheses. All numbers key to the lines of the authoritative text in the Eversley Edition, from which final readings are quoted.[3]

The Lincoln galley proof (of which there is a detailed description below in the Bibliographical Note) was pulled from the same type as the uncorrected galley proof for the first edition at Harvard. Its many autograph corrections range from the simple correcting of misprints, through numerous changes of punctuation (particularly important to a poem of which the movement and pace are firmly commanded), to substantial changes in wording. These may be simple but central, as in the justifiably confident assertion that Wellington 'asserts his claim' (70) to his great name—an autograph correction from 'prefers his claim', which had an air either of archaism or of mere predilection. Other corrections to the proof involve a whole sequence, and in particular a self-awareness as to the poem's duty of reverent reticence. Thus in the final lines of the proof, in the final strophe,

are amplified (but in the opposite way from an amplifier) when Tennyson wrote in their place these lines evoking a noble swell of controlled feeling:

A detailed description of Tennyson's creation of the poem, folio by folio in the Trinity MS, is given below (see the Bibliographical Note). As a brief introduction to a critical consideration, it is enough to point out here that the manuscript in Trinity Notebook 25 runs from folio 6 to folio 16; and that in the MS Tennyson worked by expanding his drafts on the versos, doing a great deal of re-writing, usually without deleting his earlier drafts, and building up passages and strophes with elaborate care. The final text of the poem in this state consists of 233

lines, as compared with the 251 lines of the first edition and the 281 lines of the ultimate version.

There was only one structural decision which Tennyson had not as yet made: the addition of strophe II, on where the Duke was to be buried. The most substantial revisions, involving several drafts, occur—not surprisingly—in the three strophes which together constitute more than half of the poem: VI, VII, and VIII. These are the strophes which are bent imaginatively upon the past and the future (as against the imminent present of the burial ceremony) and which are most compacted of argument and high doctrine—religious, political, and patriotic.

All revisions, however minute, by a poet as scrupulous and gifted as Tennyson are important, but the large-scale points are these: that by the time of the Trinity MS strophes I, III, and IV were substantially shaped for publication; that V did not at this stage prick Tennyson into much revision, but was to be revised and expanded for publication; that VI prompted several re-draftings, was to be further revised for publication, and included in MS six lines which were probably the germ of VII:

that VIII was drafted before VII; that VII prompted several re-draftings, was to be further revised, and included a group of lines on Hampden [151, 153, 156-158] (which were deleted and the lines as published inserted), as well as a lengthy passage on 'Their Great Napoleons' [173-179], which would not finally figure in the poem; that VIII likewise prompted several re-draftings, was to be further revised, and included a few deleted and rewritten lines on the French attitude to Wellington [192-231; also 192-197]; and, lastly, that IX was expanded from jottings, through a first draft, to what was substantially the text as first published.

One may first ask of the MS what it manifests which is germane to the question of the extent to which, and the spirit in which, Tennyson attended to the reviews. The MS evidence supports the belief that Tennyson was usually prompted by reviews to revision only when he felt a concurrence grounded in his maturing sense of things (pp. 160-163; and Shannon, Tennyson and the Reviewers, 1952). Four main heads were suggested, in 1960, under which Tennyson's published revisions

may have been influenced by the reviewers: the addition of lines evoking Wellington as soldier and as statesman; the addition of lines on the interment; the qualifying of the very dark picture of England's loss and of England's future; and an intensification of the religious note. What light do the revisions—both within the MS and from the MS—throw upon these?

Apt to the first head (Wellington as soldier and statesman), though not involving such an added emphasis as The Times was to ask for, Tennyson's revisions of strophe IV show that he early understood what was needed here, but he did not, for instance, arrive at once at the right tribute to the statesman: 'O voice from which their omens all men drew' (36). The earliest MS fragment (Harvard MS1) contains the line, but beginning 'Lost voice . . .'. Tennyson saw that this would not do, presumably because 'Lost' is doubly unsatisfactory: first, in too much cutting off the present from the Duke's statesmanlike wisdom, as if it were irrecoverably lost; and second, in the altogether unwanted suggestion—'Lost voice'—of losing one's voice. So Tennyson dropped the line, which does not appear in the Trinity MS. But the line made its rightful appearance in the galley proofs and the published text, with 'Lost voice' replaced by 'O voice'. The misleading suggestions have gone, and moreover there is the dignified and surprisingly unexclamatory sequence of exclamations: four consecutive lines beginning with 'O', the fourth then swelling into the line which crowns them, and all terminating in a single simple exclamation mark:

Tennyson has himself handled this statesmanly note in a statesmanly manner—one that was natural, too, to the poet who asked in 'Sea Dreams':

As for Wellington the soldier, the MS provides ample evidence that Tennyson more and more came to see the need for incorporating a substantial and specific sense of Wellington's character and achievements. Thus strophe VI moved through three drafts [80-150], where the development is clear: the first did not specify Wellington's achievements as 'the greatest soldier'; the second added the victories in Hindustan, in

the Pyrenees, and at Waterloo; the third amplified the description of Waterloo itself.

Under the next head (the addition in 1853 of lines 266-270 on the interment itself), the MS again shows that Tennyson had already moved in the direction in which he may have come to be further influenced. For the appearance in the galley proofs of strophe II, which is not in the MS, is one crucial step towards the factual and final 'committal of the body to the earth' (p. 161). Strophe II begins:

The Trinity MS, though it had not arrived at this decisive moment of decision as to the burial itself, was in readiness for it, since it included (as the previous Harvard fragment, MS1, did not) the later line from which these lines in strophe II about the place of burial were created retrospectively, in both senses: 'For such was he whom we deplore' [40]. In strophe V, on the other hand, it may at first seem that Tennyson retreated from the evocation of the actual burial, when he progressed from the Trinity MS to the published text. For the MS [43-61] has, twice, the line 'Bury him under the dome', and then 'Lay the warrior there in his latest home'. But one can guess why these lines did not satisfy Tennyson. For a start, they constituted the wrong sort of repetition, circling back to the poem's opening lines enjoining that the Duke be buried. Next, there was the prepositional ambiguity created by 'under' in 'Bury him under the dome' (under the earth under the dome?). More substantially, the 'committal of the body to the earth', with its finality, would find its fitting place only in the final strophe of the poem. Tennyson's revision when he published the text was one which managed to anticipate, in the right sense, the final committal of the body, and yet—in its calculated distance of phrasing—not to anticipate it in the wrong sense. For in strophe V he dropped the lines 'Bury him . . .', 'Bury him . . .', and 'Lay the warrior . . .', and replaced them within:

These lines are apposite to another of the categories where Tennyson may later have been influenced by reviewers though in a direction already estimated and esteemed by him, the 'intensified religious note in the second edition' (pp. 162-163). Thus Tennyson came to hear that the

opening injunction in strophe V in the Trinity MS, 'Give him back to the Giver!' [43-61], lacked the right note; indeed, the words could too easily be misheard as a perfunctoriness of ingratitude, as when someone sends us their love and we catch ourselves asking that it be sent back. The published text rectified this possibility by making gratitude explicit and reiterated, and by the intensification latent within this repetition, one which finally modulates into a turn that both is and is not a repetition:[4]

Strophe V, with its evocation of St. Paul's Cathedral, is particularly compacted of such instances, as Tennyson came to move from his early thoughts in the Trinity MS to his published text. Thus the MS does not have the sombre religious note, as of a deeply discreet half-allusion to 'It is finished', with which Tennyson, paradoxically, was to open V: 'All is over and done'. Nor does the MS have the tolling of the bell—in itself an intensified religious note—which three times rings out 'Let the bell be toll'd' (46, 53, 58), a sound which then merges into another religious note such as was not heard in the MS: 'And the sound of the sorrowing anthem roll'd' (60).

Another revision, from the Trinity MS to the published text, is a parallel of a sort to an instance of a published revision which perhaps owed something to a reviewer. In 1853 Tennyson added thanks to God for 'England's natural strategic advantage' (p. 162):

This published revision ministered to an uncomplacent (God-acknowledging) patriotism of past and future. There is a revision from the Trinity MS to the text in the galley proofs which has a similar impulse. For the published text, unlike the MS, acknowledges, tactfully but powerfully, the blessing of Heaven at the victorious moment of Waterloo: 'Heaven flash'd a sudden jubilant ray' (129). So here too the poem grew already for Tennyson along lines which he was to be further stimulated to follow after publication; moreover it is a characteristic felicity that the grateful acknowledgment should be grounded upon a historical fact. Tennyson in the Eversley Edition says: 'The setting sun glanced on this last charge of the English and Prussians'.

Not, of course, that every reference to God would be sure to constitute an intensifying of the religious note; Tennyson was right to decide against (and to delete before the poem reached galleys) those lines where the Trinity MS too grandly made play with God on England's side, and which far from deepening the religious note would have shallowly and sententiously polemicized it:

These lines bring us to the one remaining category of review-spurred revision: the patriotic and the English. Tennyson had a task of delicacy and complexity here. He needed to praise England for begetting the Duke, and the Duke for embodying England. He needed to praise the Duke as unique, belonging to a giant race, and yet as having inculcated a patriotic education and having provided an example such as must live on. It was a moment for national pride, and it was no time for national complacency.

The statement 'The last great Englishman is low' (18) had been followed in 1852 by a necessary and heart-animating qualification, and was to have the qualification clarified in 1853, perhaps because of a reviewer (p. 162). It is clear from the MS that Tennyson was aware of danger here; and the emphasis—at once salutary and a salutation—which grows throughout the growth of the poem is upon Wellington's especial power to teach, to inspire, to instil a like mind, a power which is greater than just the power to win by his own prowess:

For in the Trinity MS 'a soldier' had been, more grandly and less greatly, 'a victor'. ('Alone I did it', vaunts Coriolanus.) The words proceeded through a characteristic maturing of judgment: from 'So wise a victor broke him there', through 'So great a soldier led them there' (Harvard MS4), into the truly educative, 'So great a soldier taught us there | What long-enduring hearts could do . . .'. Not a victor, but a soldier; and not that he broke him (Napoleon), or led them, but that he taught us.

The sequence shows Tennyson bent upon doing justice to Wellington's greatness: that he was not only great, but the cause that greatness was in others. There is an analogous revision in line 192, where the Trinity MS 'Victor' became 'leader': 'Lo, the leader in these glorious

wars . . .'.[5] Wellington's glory is that he did not arrogate all such glory to himself, and his sharing the glory (as the word 'leader' does and the word 'victor' did not) does not diminish but augment it. The final, capitalized 'Victor' in line 258—'And Victor he must ever be'—gains its metaphysical and religious force from the poem's not having squandered the word in earlier aggrandisements. For the only previous use of the word is now one that trumps Napoleon's vainglory with the word: 'The great World-victor's victor' (42).

Such a sharing of credit in a way which gains a higher credit is evident, too, in the acknowledgment of the Prussians' part at Waterloo. 'Last, the Prussian trumpet blew' (127): there was no such line in the Trinity MS, and the omission was not only an ungrateful historical suppression but might also be bad for the English, of whose national complacency Tennyson was fearful. It was a simple addition, and an important one, yet it cost Tennyson more trouble than one would have expected, going through four slightly-varied versions. Could it be that he felt obliged to make the correction on the Lincoln proof, from 'The trumpet of the Prussian blew', because he suddenly heard and saw Prussian blue?

To turn now to the other class of revisions (pp. 163-166), those which were apparently independent of the reviewers. Here too the published revisions are often anticipated within the MS growth of the poem. The most important such impulse after 1852 was the muting of 'the shrill anti-Gallic note', and Tennyson had felt this impulse (to curb his natural impulses) during the earlier stages of composition. There were printed in 1960 (p. 151,n.7), from the Pierpont Morgan copy of 1852, Tennyson's passionately polemical lines against 'Their Great Napoleons' [173-179]. The lines had taken virtually the same form in the Trinity MS. Tennyson was unquestionably right to expunge them. For one thing, their scorn is too shrill, too little like the high scorn of heaven which Tennyson invokes:

For another, the effect is of polemicizing the occasion (Wellington's life and death) by harnessing it too brusquely to a political topicality, however urgent. Another weakness of the lines is that they fall victim to a familiar nemesis in hyperbolical dispraise (and conversely in hyperbolical praise): that it ends up carrying unwanted possibilities of the opposite. 'A man of silence in a world of babble': what was meant as distrust of Napoleon III inadvertently carries a possibility of Wellington-like dignity. Indeed, when Tennyson dropped the anti-Napoleon lines, he here transferred the quality of silence to the dead Wellington, once admirably laconic and now alas silent, except as an exemplary voice which must be heeded but cannot be heard: 'Who never spoke against a foe': Tennyson rightly decided that he must imitate the Duke's restraint. It was not until 1855, however, that Tennyson was able to add that line (185) to the published text, after he had curbed his own impulse to speak against his foes.

Tennyson was always wont to sound hysterical when contemplating 'The blind hysterics of the Celt' (In Memoriam, CIX), and the anti-Gallic note is loud and clear in the Trinity MS, as in the fiery lines:

Such is the first draft; with the second version, Tennyson had somewhat cooled down: With the final Trinity MS text, Tennyson had jettisoned all that, and had gained instead the dignity of 'Lo the Victor in those glorious wars . . .' [192]. The poem is about victories over oneself as the condition of victories over others, and Tennyson became victorious over some of his own artistically-damaging tendencies. In the Epilogue to 'The Charge of the Heavy Brigade', Tennyson later etymologized the word 'refrain' by hyphenating it: His sense of Wellington as a great refrainer asked a comparable reverent bridling of himself, and the word 'refrain' makes a crucial appearance within the lines (not in the Trinity MS) which Tennyson added in autograph on the Lincoln proof:

Tennyson was right to incorporate into his poem his urgent warning about national security; it was apt, and no derogation from the dignity of the occasion. But he would have been wrong to retain so local a glint as the Trinity MS injunction to Nelson and Wellington to be 'Britains guardian angels' 'If France intend aught but good—& fair' [151-191]. No, gently did it, as when Tennyson, instead of excoriation, was able to use intimation, hinting at a crucial distinction between the political worlds of England and France and speaking of

The Trinity MS had said only 'the throne', whereas 'ancient throne' is a covert rebuke to the new unstable Napoleon-worship; and the Trinity MS had said 'Our Britains loyal passion for her kings', whereas the poised repetition of 'our' and the symbiotic equipollence of the epithets ('loyal . . . temperate') establish a weighed and weighty reciprocity and political balance such as constitute a tacit impugning of French intemperance and disloyalty.

It should be added, though, that the muting of the shrill anti-Gallic note, in revision, was at one with the muting of the note that shrilled against English appeasers. For this note too threatened the dignity of the occasion, and Tennyson became vigilant about protecting his urgent patriotism of national security against any suspicion that it was a polemical opportunism and a manipulation of the Duke's memory. Hence Tennyson's decision not to elaborate, and indeed to expunge for publication, his reference here:

The observation is itself too carping for such a time and no improvement from the earlier draft: 'Despaird-of war had such a close' [80-150]. It was better to pass over any such reprimand to the carpers and despairers and to pause instead at the simple dignity of 'Such a war had such a close' (118).

A similar consideration rescinded the line twice-phrased as 'On men that only seek for power & place', and 'To truckling hearts that only pant

for place' [151-191]; the passage as published achieved a higher and graver tone:

All these major categories of independent revision in the published text (pp. 163-166)—an increased accuracy, a safe-guarding of the dignity of the Duke's activity, an intensification of the patriotic warnings, an increased emphasis upon work, and a prophetic hope for the universal acceptance of the Duke's life as exemplary—gain antecedent support from the changes both within the Trinity MS and from it. Not all the revisions are incontestably for the better, and there remain some readers who believe, for instance, that the increasing emphasis upon work was a mistake, since no more than the rest of us was Tennyson able to imagine work in Heaven, leave alone work adequate to keep the Duke of Wellington (in Lord Reith's famous phrase) 'fully stretched'. But rather than elaborate with MS findings the established account of the published revisions, it seems best to move now to four further aspects of the poem which the MS illuminates: metaphors, ambiguities, questions, and names.

One concern in revision was to scrutinize metaphors. Tennyson was alert to extinguish any distracting flickers. An example is his deciding against the Trinity MS description of the Napoleonic eagle as 'Clutching fire & crown'd with his star' [120/121], presumably because the metaphors create a Gallic furore—how and why does an eagle clutch fire, and how and why is it crowned with a star, and moreover how do the two fit together? Conversely Tennyson revised to create a fitting metaphorical continuity, as when he changed the MS 'His eighty winters breathe rebuke' [151-191], first by seeing no force in 'breathe' (in relation to either 'winter' or 'rebuke') and so trying to minimize the metaphors in 'winters': 'His eightywintered life is all rebuke' [151-191]; next in the final version of the Trinity MS with 'His eighty winters are but one rebuke' [186]; and last by moving in the opposite direction and intensifying the metaphor: 'His [Whose 1852(a)] eighty winters freeze with one rebuke . . .' (1852). The play of 'glitter'd' and 'sunlight' against 'winters' in the Trinity MS proved a distraction, and Tennyson rejected it [173-179]. The 'race | Of honour' in the early passage [151-191] could not satisfactorily be accommodated to Wellington's old age or to his military prowess, and Tennyson simply dropped it.

A further category of revisions involves ambiguities. It is remarkable how many of them had crept into a poem of such sturdy Wellington-like

manliness of wording—'In his simplicity sublime' (34). Thus the final text (1853) of was shaped to rectify the sense that the 1852 text seemed rather to moan than mourn: 'Our sorrow draws but on the golden Past'. But Tennyson's earlier thought, which stands in the Trinity MS, had been open to a different objection. 'Partial sorrow loves the past'—this would not do for various reasons. First, the assonance of 'Partial . . . past' was at once insistent and imperfect (contrast 'the weight and fate of Europe', 240). Second, 'partial', by which Tennyson meant to suggest a proper propensity not to be impartial (sorrow, honourably enought, has a vested interest in the past), not only introduced an inappropriate complication of distinction but also invited the wrong other sense of 'partial', as if the sorrow were not full or complete but only partial. Six lines earlier Tennyson had written 'As fits an universal woe', and there was necessarily an uneasy fit between that line and any reference to 'Partial sorrow'.

A related revision a few lines later shows Tennyson guarding his reader against what might otherwise trap him into a false sense of parallelism. The Trinity MS has:

This sets up a gratuitous or excessive soliciting by juxtaposing two lines that begin with 'Mourn' and 'for', where the 'for' has quite different meanings (Mourn, because / Grieve at the loss of).[6] Tennyson finally retained this grave play or turn, but with a sufficient pause within which to rotate, and so without a reliance on the comma alone to make clear the distinction of sense and the turn of thought: Not only did he, in 1853, interpolate lines 21-22: He also re-worded, for publication in 1852, the line which is intermediate between line 19 and line 24, so that it no longer read 'Mourn, for our chief State-oracle is mute', but 'O friends, our chief state-oracle is mute' (23).

Such an instance as 'Mourn . . .' has particular importance because the whole poem is composed of injunction and adjuration, from its opening words: 'Bury the Great Duke' (a simple but inspired revision in 1855) modulating at once into the less imperious 'Let us bury the Great Duke', through to that repeated urging of injunction, 'Peace' (peace in honour of the great warrior), and so to the final adjuration, which is not command but prayer: 'God accept him, Christ receive him'. Such conclusive simplicity had no room for the turn, which the Trinity MS shows Tennyson to have contemplated, of 'leave to' (cease to) against 'leave', in an early Trinity MS draft:

Not only does that have the distracting play of 'leave to' against 'leave' and the unwanted ambiguity (noun or verb?) in 'leave to speak' (permission to speak, sir—in the military idiom), but it also creates entirely the wrong tone with its repetition 'Xt receive him; leave him leave him', which sounds not like tranquil trusting resignation but like exasperation.

Clearly Tennyson did not wish to remove from his poetry all those innumerable delicacies of decision by which a reader experiences the active life of a poem in his own active construing and construction of it. But the revisions make it clear that Tennyson was vigilant about setting limits to such possibilities of flickers of hesitation or misreading. Thus to 'clash with' someone would normally be to conflict with them, with functioning there as opposition and not alliance. But Tennyson used the expression with local successful surprise, so that it did mean alliance:

'Clash'd with' retains its slight and justified oddity (as if fighting off the usual hostile sense); what protects the reader against a flat misconstruction is that the line is preceded by the indisputably hostile preposition 'Against', and it is exactly this protection which was lacking in a Trinity MS draft: The sequence there is such that for a moment the words make it sound as if Wellington were quarrelling with—clashing with—his own 'fiery' troops, instead of clashing, in command of them, against the enemy. But then the whole of this section [80-150], when in MS, was alive with unwanted uncertainties: Who are 'they'? There is no clear antecedent except the 'myriads at Assaye'.[7] And wasn't it not so much men's as Englishmen's spirits that were lifted up? And isn't the following 'them' not really the spirits but the men? And doesn't 'with blows on blows' here sound as if Wellington were leading them by cudgelling them? The next MS revision then neutralized this last possibility in advance: 'Beating back with blows on blows' [109/110], and so into the published text, which became in 1853:

Or, still in the same passage, there was the dangerous vagueness of 'When the Godlike portent grew', which was meant as a dark shaft at the French but which sounds at once reverent, sarcastic, and wobbly. (Likewise the word 'Genius' in 'let the tyrant Genius fall' [192-123]. Then, three lines after the 'Godlike portent', there was: 'He taught what hearts of oak can do'. But 'hearts of oak', with its famous naval timbre, makes Wellington too much trespass upon Nelson's realm. Tennyson's revision, 'long-enduring hearts' (132), was magnificently felicitous because the epithet is used of Wellington himself earlier in the poem. The reciprocity of the leader and the led is perfectly joined in their both being 'longenduring', and the reciprocity is further deepened by the relation of Wellington's 'long-enduring blood' (24) to these 'long-enduring hearts'. If Wellington 'taught' all this, he did so—as the taking-up of the epithet (which itself thus means endures) from the earlier line has intimated—by the best means: personal example, itself a matter of that reciprocity

which is integrity: 'O iron nerve to true occasion true' (37), where Harvard MS1 had the unreciprocating 'each occasion'.[8] There is comparable reciprocity and grateful continuity in the line 'Warriors carry the warrior's pall' (6), which was revised from the Trinity MS 'And the heads of the people carry the pall', a line which not only lacked the reciprocity and continuity but which also suffered from an ambiguity in 'heads . . . carry'.

Tennyson in revision was very sensitive to the appositeness of epithets. One which might be right within a certain context—'Worthy of our gorgeous rites' (93)—might sound callously aesthetic elsewhere, even though it was within the same strophe: 'He to such a gorgeous close' [118]. Tennyson's change from this line in the Trinity MS was characteristic not only in expunging the risky epithet, but also in then relying entirely upon 'such'; for the two lines became on publication: 'Such a war had such a close'. Instead of the single 'such', there was now the balanced reciprocity of the two; and 'such' is admirable for Tennyson's purposes in its confident allusiveness to the unmistakably known.[9]

Matters of tone arise with another category of revision which is related to a singular strength of the poem: its way with questions. The poem as published asks only three questions; each is of a different kind, and all three gain force from this and from the fact that they are so few. There is a literal question from the public voice, inaugurating a strophe: 'Where shall we lay the man whom we deplore?' (8). There is a figurative question from the imagined shade of Nelson, again inaugurating a strophe: 'Who is he that cometh, like an honoured guest . . .?' (80). And there is a rhetorical question—deep within the final strophe—from the general human consciousness, except that 'rhetorical' is the wrong word for so strongly undeviating an affirmation: 'What know we greater than the soul?' (265). The Trinity MS lacked the first of these questions, since it did not have strophe II. Tennyson supplied this question, and no less importantly he modified the tone of Nelson's imagined question, a question incidentally ('Who is he . . .?') which, because it opens the strophe, wins some of its value from the reader's not yet knowing that the shade of Nelson speaks, so that the reader is pressed aptly to the same question 'Who is he . . .?'. The first draft of these lines had sounded, not like patriarchal inquiry, but like irritation:

Compare the published text: The tone of dignified yet unaggrieved interrogative remonstration is a consequence of the revisions: that instead of three brusquely successive questions, there is now one only; that there is no longer the exasperated air which came with the repetition of 'Who is this?', and indeed with the word 'this' instead of 'he'; that there is no longer the acerbity of the question 'Why the banner & the music & the soldier & the priest?' (Nelson's not to reason why), exacerbated as it was by the four items listed with their sharp accumulative 'and's' (the published text not only abolished the tetchy 'Why the . . .', but also placated the rhythm down into poised pairs of pairs: 'With banner and with music, with soldier and with priest'); and that the participle 'breaking' has been calmed to 'breaking on my rest',[10] rather than 'breaking in upon my rest' (which sounds like social crassness), and moreover has already been neutralized by the unaggressive pathos of the other participle which now immediately precedes it: 'With a nation weeping, and breaking . . .'. All these, and other effects (such as those of rhythm and rhyme, or the removal of the clumsy singular/plural tremor in 'the nation bury'), give the question in its final form a particular lucidity.

The poem's third question, 'What know we greater than the soul?', is one of which Tennyson in 1853 increased the just impact by adding lines 259-261—'For tho' the Giant Ages heave the hill . . .' (p. 163); so that the question became the climax to a pageant of historical and cosmic vistas. Yet the clarity of all three of these questions depended upon their having no tawdry or less telling associates, and the MS shows Tennyson at first yielding to and then rejecting the solicitations of interrogative rhetoric. Again it is a matter of a stridency such as detracts from the Duke's dignity even in a moment of praising him, with what is a falsely rhetorical questioning:

This question remained through two more drafts, and in the final draft, and even in the MS (later than the Trinity MS) which is tipped into the Morgan copy of 1852 (and is listed in the Collation as ET/52(a)): Wellington's greatness was best served by eschewing the bluster of a rhetorical question, and the printed text of the galley proofs for the first edition arrived at the dignified affirmation: But then it is a marked characteristic of the substantial MS passages which Tennyson grew to reject that they ring with rhetorical questions, as with this question, two lines before 'Was our great Chief . . .?': 'But shall we count them Gods who break their word' [173-179]. Or, of 'the fiery Frenchman': 'What is half so blind as wounded pride?' [192-231]. This negative question was succeeded by a positive one no less hollow in tone, especially as flanked immediately by yet another rhetorical and undoubting question: Tennyson dropped both the negative and the positive questions, the MS making it clear that he maturely arrived at the final sequence through the poem of three questions only, none of them polemically rhetorical. A similar judgment would arise from a comparison of the exclamations —especially those involving 'O' and exclamation marks—within the poem and within the MS drafts.

Last, the Trinity MS increases our respectful understanding of one of the poem's most striking qualities, striking and yet so discreet and justified as not to be startling: its resolute abstention from names. No-where in this tribute to the Duke of Wellington, except in the title, does his name occur. What could more manifest his intense enduring presence, even in death, than the fact that we are unremittingly conscious of him even while never having to name him? He has earned the tribute, even greater than that of the dukedom of Wellington, of the highest namelessness. His greatness is a matter of his being simply and sublimely 'the Great Duke',[11] from the first line on; and supporting this designation are all the other tributes which function in the poem as names for him, among them: 'the warrior', 'the Man', 'the last great Englishman', 'our chief state-oracle', 'the statesman-warrior', 'our dead captain', 'England's

greatest son', 'the greatest soldier', 'their great commander', 'their ever-loyal iron leader'. The last alludes, of course, to the sobriquet 'the Iron Duke' and does so without making Wellington sound too indurately or foreignly iron; Tennyson had revised away the Trinity MS epithet 'ironnatured' [192-231] as too harsh, and in any case it was too close to the song of battle-triumph in The Princess (1847): 'There dwelt an iron nature in the grain' (VI, 34).

The imaginative procedure is a courageous one, in that elegiac poetry traditionally felt the duty to blazon forth a name. But Tennyson's Ode intimates that there are some heroes so great as to make us need no reminding of their names. A second aspect of the imaginative decision is that, though the poem says so much about Wellington's great name, the greatness is understood to be that of a name which is true fame and true reputation:

'Eternal honour to his name': thus end two strophes, VI and VIII.

The poem concludes with the naming of God and Christ and with the unnamed unmistakable repeated him: 'God accept him, Christ receive him'. And throughout the poem there occurs only one proper name:

Whereupon we recall that Alfred—whose name indeed has lived through the centuries—was likewise named the Great.[12] So there is no surprise in Tennyson's repudiation of the Trinity MS lines which breached this noble reticence, a reticence which was grounded in the right kind of public familiarity with the Duke's person and prowess, his solidly known achievements. For the Trinity MS first draft had urged: 'Wellesley' was variously wrong; for one thing, it introduced a confusing distinction or wobble as to Wellesley/Wellington; for another, it rescinded the tribute that had been granted as the name of Wellington (a very different thing from being so aware of it as never to need to name it); and for a third, it gratuitously violated the self-denying ordinance of not naming. So Tennyson at first revised 'Wellesley' into 'Your leader' [193], and then later removed the whole passage as also too simply and rhetorically anti-French.

The muting of the anti-French note is at one with the decision about names in the dropping of the passage about 'Their Great Napoleons' [173-179]. For if, on the highest grounds, Wellington was not to be named, it would have been inappropriate to name his opponents. 'Their Great Napoleons' was therefore abandoned, in accordance with the principle which never named even the greatest Napoleon. Napoleon—and here the unnaming potency works for contempt and not for reverence—remains 'the spoiler':

Wellington's supremacy over Napoleon is expressed, succinctly and with-out naming either of them, in the turn which speaks of Wellington as 'The great World-victor's victor' (42).

Neither Wellington's adversary is named, nor his mighty peer Nelson, who is joined with him in an honourable emulation. The shade of Nelson is imagined as asking 'Who is he that cometh . . . ?'. The name of Wellington is not supplied in reply, nor is Nelson's name heard when he is then replied to as 'Mighty Seaman', 'thou famous man, | The greatest sailor since our world began' (83-86). But the MS shows that here too Tennyson grew into an understanding of his imaginative process. For the first draft in the Trinity MS had the direct address of 'Noble Nelson' [80-150], which—since Wellington is not named—damaged the equipollence of 'The greatest sailor . . . the greatest soldier' (86, 88).[14]

Similarly, it would have been a mistake for Tennyson to retain the first draft lines of strophe VII which refer to Hampden:

Not only does Hampden, because of ship-money, mildly confuse the sailor/soldier balance of the poem, but his name—unlike that of Alfred—simply has not the weight which could counterpoise the unnamed Nelson, let alone the unnamed Wellington. Moreover, such weight as Hampden has was of the wrong kind anyway. Tennyson had first alluded to Hampden, twenty years earlier, in Hail Briton!; he found the right place for these Trinity MS lines, a further twenty years later, in England and America in 1782, where Hampden's honourable rebellion against royal tyranny is pertinent to the American rebellion. Hampden was in no way appropriate to the politics of the Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington.

Nor is it only persons' names to which Tennyson found that he had to be attentive. One of the characteristic reticences is that which alludes to St. Paul's Cathedral without ever naming it, as in

through to the penultimate line of the poem, 'the vast cathedral' (280). The effect of these references lies in their being so massively known as to ask a reverent reserve. Not that Tennyson had in fact in the Trinity MS originally used the name 'St. Paul's', but he had there permitted himself a word which sat uneasily in the vicinity of the unnamed St. Paul's—the word 'her': The pressure there from 'him' upon 'her' aggravates the clumsy contrariety between the feminine 'her' and the masculine 'St. Paul's', and Tennyson's revision removed the perfectly understandable but imperfect 'her'.

A corollary, only at first surprising, of this refraining from names is that in one respect the poem intensely names. The name of England grew in weight and frequency as the poem grew in Tennyson's under-standing. The 'England' of line 45 and of line 161 is not to be heard in the Trinity MS, and the crucial weight given and taken by the word 'English' in line 97—'Nor ever lost an English gun'—is a revision Tennyson made on the Lincoln proof, from 'He that never lost a gun'. Line 95 is a cognate but a more complicated case. Although the Trinity MS does not have 'England' here, it used the word in this vicinity, in honouring Nelson [80-150]. The revision in the Trinity MS from 'England honours

thee', into 'Thy country loves thee', and then into 'Thine island loves thee well' (85), is a notable one. It was not until later that Tennyson saw how to reserve the full force of 'England' for Wellington here (in line 95: '. . . this is England's greatest son', which the poet added on the Lincoln proof). His second thought—'Thy country'—wants strength; but 'Thine island' is admirable in its quiet emphasis of England's strategic position and of Nelson's particular military indispensability, different from Wellington's: There is a similar judicious gravity in the weight of where 'English' balances, and is answered by, 'England's'. The earliest draft of these lines in the Trinity MS [151-191] first had 'our noble Duke', which lacked the weighed parallel and offered a ghostly play of 'noble' and 'Duke', as well as creating the complication of attributing nobility to Wellington while not attributing it to Alfred. This draft also had 'our Saxon Alfred', which again lacked the parallel, and which invited a feeling not of historical continuity but of historical discontinuity. Given Tennyson's decision for 'England's' over 'Saxon' in the final version in the Trinity MS, it is the more surprising that he so long left 'His Saxon' (155, 1853-1862) before seeing that he should say 'His Briton' (1864); but perhaps he would not have lapsed into this 'Saxon' had he written lines 154-155 at the same time as he was revising 'Saxon' out of line 188 in the same strophe, rather than writing them as he did after publication in 1852 for the 1853 edition.

Tennyson deserves much and various honour for what he does and does not do with names throughout the poem, but perhaps it will suffice finally to make two points. First, there is only one local place-name (as against England, France, and Europe) which appears more than once, and this with the greatest force of aptness: Waterloo. Second, the decision to name London, as Tennyson did when he added strophe II (not in the Trinity MS), was not only a recognition of a needed factual simplicity, but was also a fitting acknowledgment of the centrality of Wellington to English life comparable to that of London itself:

'Central' acknowledges both the centre of London and London as centre, and this, as is clear from the three lines following, conduces to Wellington's central and capital importance. Tennyson's first published text in 1852 does not have line 9 ('Here . . .'), which meant not only that the question (Where?) was left hanging for ever without explicit answer, but also that the strophe lacked the central dignity which was finally accorded by and to London.

The reason why it was a lapse of judgment by Tennyson (at once rectified) to interpolate in 1853 between the first and second lines of strophe II the words 'He died on Walmer's lonely shore' is not only that the words 'interfered with the direct antiphonal reply to the question "Where shall we lay the man whom we deplore?"' (p. 165), but also that there is such an imbalance between 'Walmer' and 'London', in a poem where the weight and fate of names is so sensitively and strongly felt.

'Eternal honour to his name', Wellington's and Tennyson's.