CHAPTER III STUDIES CONSIDERING how large a part melody plays in poetry; remembering the sensuo-sympathetic use of nature which is so characteristic of our poet; realising the insensible gradations between thought and emotion, whether the subject of attention be nature or man, it need not surprise us that the boundary lines between the groups dealt with in this chapter are vague and uncertain. Yet it seems probable that each poem does grow out of a definite root, that each is in its genesis from the poet's mind a study or a lyric— a study of melody or nature, or man, or the utterance of an emotion awakened by nature or man. For of course this is the distinction between a study and a lyric; the study grows out of intellectual interest in the thing or in the work of portraying it, while a lyric is the fruit of emotion stirred by the thing. Emotion-that is, artist emotion; emotion of the imagination. In the emotion of the heart and in the emotion of the conscience, which turns principles into sentiments, a poet may be no richer, and may be poorer than others. But because of the eminence of his imagination, ideas, seen by him more vividly, move him more strongly in the imagination than they move others. It should not surprise us (though it is often otherwise with young poets) that a large proportion of the Juvenilia are studies. In most of them the poet writes as a man collecting his materials and preparing his implements. He consciously puts himself through an apprenticeship to his art. Skill in word-music, the knowledge of the elements of nature and of man, and the power of depicting these elements are the fundamentals of the poetic art; and to the gaining of these he devotes himself. To the fact, and to the skill he had already acquired, his first publication bears witness. It consists almost entirely of studies or study-like pieces. There is but one ambitious poem-Supposed Confessions of a Second-rate Sensitive Mind (and this was suppressed for many years), though also it should be added that there are two poems which, studies, perhaps, in their first conception, do, partly on account of their subjects, and partly through the power with which the subjects are treated, move the reader, and must, I should think, have moved the poet. Mariana and The Ballad of Oriana are the poems I mean, and they seem to me to have so much emotional force in them that I have not put them among the studies. The poems which I have called Melody Studies, namely― Claribel. Song (The winds as at their hour of birth). Second Song, to the Same. The Sea-Fairies. The Merman. The Mermaid. The Islet (From this point of view). The Window. Child-Songs, 1 and 2. are those in which the production of word-music is the chief aim. Some of these are full of music. In Claribel, for instance, the music is perfect. The poem does not mean much; it would not matter if it meant nothing. But yet it is more than a melody; it foreshadows that careful and minute study of nature for which Tennyson is so remarkable, and also his power of producing natural pictures in harmony with the mood of the poem. This is a matter of which I have already spoken, calling it our poet's sensuo-sympathetic use of nature. He has written no "Skylark" or "Sensitive Plant"; some human character is almost always the centre of his picture, and nature is used to aid in intensifying the portraiture of this character or its moods. Even in In word-music it is doubtless true that many of our poet's later poems are quite as rich as, and many much richer than, most of these, while in them his attention is concentrated upon the thought, and the music comes altogether spontaneously. But this will only happen to one who has trained his ear to a critical sensitiveness to the music in words. Of course I do not mean that any amount of ear-culture will make a poet, or even a musical writer. this lower sense the poet is born, not made. intensest natural sense of beauty—whether in colour, or form, or sound, or imagery, or thought-needs culture, and the poet who neglects thus to train his beauty sense is as unfair to his genius as a painter would be who did not study drawing and the harmony of colours. But the culture once accomplished, and the poet's true work entered upon, the music will take care of itself. But the There are one or two other poems that I was tempted to put among the Melodies; chief of them are the Lotus-Eaters and Oriana. They belong elsewhere, but it is manifest that the poet thought much of their sound as he wrote them. Oriana must be read aloud, or heard, to be at all fully enjoyed; and in reading it aloud there is a peculiar tolling effect to be got by the almost monotonous intonation of the word "Oriana,” while a peculiar length and force is given to the broad a in the middle of the word. What I would call the Nature Studies are Claribel (again). Song (The winds as at their hour of birth). All Things will Die. Leonine Elegiacs. The Dying Swan. The Eagle. To E. L. I called Claribel a typical melody, yet one feels the minute observation of nature in it, as I have said. In the third, fourth, and fifth of these Nature Studies it is obvious how much of human mood there is; they might almost have been called Emotion Studies. Some of their statements are true only to the mood, not to the facts of nature. It is the sensuo sympathetic use of nature again. Emotion and Mood Studies. A Dirge. The Deserted House. A Song (A spirit haunts). Early Sonnets, 10, 11. My Life is full of Weary Days. Move Eastward. Come not when I am Dead. The Death of the Old Year. I would suggest the trying the poems of each of these three groups under the cue of the titles of the other two, for the purpose of testing the extent to which, in these studies, melody, nature, and emotion play into each other. I am not pretending that any of these poems are very interesting; they must be read, as they were written, as studies. Of these Portrait Studies the following things are to be remarked : All the later ones are dramatic in form: the tendency to this form, always strong in him, grew with Tennyson's years. Some in both lists are almost as much narratives as portraits. When the form is dramatic it is hard to draw a line between these two. |