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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 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,
Clamorous memories, all too free . . .
Must be with us, watching here
At this, our great solemnity.
Whom we see not we revere.
We revere, & we refrain
From talk of battles loud & vain,
And brawling memories all too free . . . .(242-248)
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
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:
Brother Angels bright & strong
If France intend aught but good—& fair
Be Britains guardian angels there
And guard this last free commonweal from wrong
Labour great Ghosts in your old countrys cause . . . [151-191]
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
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:
O voice from which their omens all men drew,
O iron nerve to true occasion true,
O fall'n at length that tower of strength
Which stood four-square to all the winds that blew! (35-39)
Not first, and third, which are a riper first? (65-66)
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
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:
Render thanks to the Giver,
England, for thy son.
Let the bell be toll'd.
Render thanks to the Giver,
And render him to the mould. (43-48)
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
Render thanks to the Giver,
And render him to the mould.
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):
His Saxon [Briton 1864] in blown seas and
storming showers . . . (154-155)
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:
Their Great Napoleons live & die
With rolling echoes by the nations heard.
But shall we count them Gods who break their word
The word is God: thou shalt not lie . . . [173-179]
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:
What long-enduring hearts could do
In that world-earthquake, Waterloo! (131-133)
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
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:
Their Great Napoleons live & die . . . .
For ever; and whatever tempests lour
For ever silent; even if they broke
In thunder, silent; yet remember all
He spoke among you . . . . (174-178)
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:
Wellesley fortune's minion here on earth
What is half so blind as wounded pride? [192-231]
Your leader Fortune's minion from his birth . . . .
Or Trade re-frain the Powers
From war with kindly links of gold . . . . (13-14)
We revere, & we refrain
From talk of battles loud and vain,
And brawling memories all too free . . . . (245-249)
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
Betwixt a people and their ancient throne,
That sober freedom out of which there springs
Our loyal passion for our temperate kings . . . . (162-165)
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:
Elaborated a carp'd at war. [118, 118/119]
A similar consideration rescinded the line twice-phrased as 'On men that only seek for power & place', and 'To truckling hearts that only pant
Nor palter'd with Eternal God for power . . . . (179-180)
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
Remembering all his greatness in the Past (19-20)
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:
Mourn for the man of long-enduring blood . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Mourn for the man of long-enduring blood . . . . (24)
With lifted hand the gazer in the street.
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:
And lay your earthly fancies down
Xt receive him; leave him leave him. [232-281]
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:
Against the myriads of Assaye
Clash'd with his fiery few and won . . . . (98-100)
Clashing with his fiery few
On their myriads at Assaye
Charged & shock'd & overthrew . . . . [80-150]
Lifted up the spirits of men
And led them on, with blows on blows . . . .
Back to France her banded swarms,
Back to France with countless blows . . . . (109-111)
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
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:
Why the banner & the music & the soldier & the priest?
Who is this? [80-150]
With banner and with music, with soldier and with priest,
With a nation weeping, and breaking on my rest? (80-82)
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:
Who dodge & shuffle with the truth . . . . [151-191]
To all men's comments till his latest hour)
A man to dodge and shuffle with the Truth
And palter with Eternal God for power? [173-179] (180)
Nor palter'd with Eternal God for power. (179-180)
Who shall doubt it . . . .
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
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:
The tyrant, and asserts his claim
In that dread sound to the great name,
Which he has worn so pure of blame,
In praise and in dispraise the same,
A man of well-attemper'd frame.
O civic muse, to such a name,
To such a name for ages long,
To such a name,
Preserve a broad approach of fame,
And ever-echoing avenues of song. (69-79)
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:
Truth-lover was our English Duke . . . . (188-189)
Wellesley fortune's minion here on earth . . . . [192-231]
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':
On that loud sabbath shook the spoiler down . . . . (122-123)[13]
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:
The future world assume
Our work is ours—the single note
Will vibrate till the doom. [151, 153, 156-158]
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
That shines over city and river . . . (49-50)
That lifts above the city her cross of gold . . . . [43-61]
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
The greatest sailor since the world began. (85-86)
Truth-lover was our English Duke . . . (188-189)
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:
Here, in streaming London's central roar. (8-9)
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.
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