When I was a kid I had two favorite
card games: “Old Maid” and “Authors.” The appeal of “Old Maid” was obvious, with
its brightly colored characters like Tumbledown Tess in her red ski sweater and
Fifi Fluff in her movie-star sunglasses and high-heeled pumps.
I’m not sure, though, why I liked “Authors,”
so much. The portraits on the cards were, after all, either extremely grim or
just plain bizarre. Why, for example, was Nathaniel Hawthorne painted with long,
bright yellow locks (I secretly thought of him as “Banana Head”), and why was
Robert Louis Stevenson’s face and hair tinged with purple shadows? Fitting in
neatly with these unappealing pictures was a scowling Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
who, with his balding head and big scraggily beard didn’t look like anything
special to my six-year-old self.
How wrong I was. Alfred Tennyson, in
fact, was a big, popular success in his own lifetime. So big, in
fact, that Queen Victoria made him England’s poet laureate, which meant he got
to represent his country at all sorts of official celebrations and got paid for
the position too. His writing was so remunerative that by 1850 he’d finally
made enough money to marry his sweetheart and was eventually able to buy a
house in the country where he could let his crinkled beard grow while he wrote more
spectacular poems.
And spectacular they were. Today
people are still in awe of the music of his work as well as the vivid pictures
he created with words. Take these snippets from “The Eagle”: “He clasps the
crag with crooked hands” and “The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls.”
Try saying these lines out loud, or better
yet, go outside and recite them while you’re walking. I guarantee the words will
be some of the most delicious things you’ve ever had in your mouth.
In the 1880’s, Tennyson was made a
baron, which meant he got to add “Lord” to his name and had a seat in the House
of Lords. When he died he was buried in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey,
which includes memorials to Geoffrey Chaucer, Lord Byron and George Eliot
(a.k.a. Mary Ann Evans).
Despite this success, Alfred’s
life was not all flowers and rainbows. His childhood, for one thing, was as
grim as anything Charles Dickens could have dreamt up. His father was a bitter
man who’d been disinherited by his own dad and was forced to get a job as a cleric
to support his family. Fueling his unhappiness with alcohol, Reverend Tennyson
was such an abusive father that he once reportedly threatened to stab one of
Alfred’s brothers in the throat.
Needless to say, the reverend’s 12
children didn’t thrive in such an environment. One brother was put in an insane
asylum and another was addicted to opium. Tennyson, however, found some
happiness when he left home for Cambridge, where he made friends with other
people who recognized his poetic gifts and encouraged him to keep writing. I suspect
it was like finding the magic key that let him out of a dungeon. By writing
beautiful and powerful verse, he not only rose above his miserable childhood,
but he also found love and admiration and connection with people outside the grim
walls of his family home.
Due to some financial woes, Tennyson had
to leave Cambridge without earning his degree, and more hard times came when his
early works were attacked by critics. Worst of all, his beloved school friend,
Arthur Hallam, suddenly died in 1833. Once again, Tennyson used language to
deal with his loss. The poem he wrote for Hallam, “In Memoriam,” is still considered
to be one of his greatest achievements. In this piece, Tennyson struggles with
the big questions about the fragility of life:
Our
little systems have their day;
They
have their day and cease to be:
They
are but broken lights of thee,
And
thou, O Lord, are more than they.
But he also asserts:
I
hold it true, whate’er befall;
I
feel it, when I sorrow most,
'
Tis
better to have loved and lost
Than
never to have loved at all.
After Hallam’s death, much of
Tennyson’s work had an elegiac theme. He wrote of the dead Lady of Shallot
floating on a barge toward Camelot (“A gleaming shape she floated by,/A corse
between the houses high”) and of the death of King Arthur (“So like a shatter’d
column lay the king”).
You’d think a poet who dwelt on death
so much would make for a gloomy companion. But Tennyson also weaves a note of
hopefulness within his work, a suggestion that good things are still ahead.
Take, for example, the end of “Ulysses,” a poem about the hero’s restlessness after
returning safely home. “Tho’ much is taken, much abides,” Tennyson writes.
After all Ulysses has suffered – the brutal battles of the Trojan War and the terror of facing
everything from the gargantuan Cyclops to the wily sirens – the old hero still
wants more action:
Made
weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To
strive, to seek to find, and not to yield.
Today, writing probably isn’t the
quickest way to make money or win points with the public. But as a means of
creating order or beauty out of chaos or grief, it’s no card trick. Whether you
pen formal poems or scribble in a journal now and then, putting your thoughts
on paper can still work wonders.
