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THE HAMADRYAD

lines, the poem was designed to close upon the plain fact of death. Landor does not wish to suggest, even if Elpenor does, the brighter Elysium distinguished (by Latin poets) from Hades in general, the dim region of the dead. For his attitude toward death expressed in propria persona, see "Death stands above me" (page 296) and other poems.

IPHIGENEIA AND AGAMEMNON

The story of Iphigeneia was familiar tradition among the ancient Greeks, and is alluded to repeatedly in their literature. She was the daughter of Agamemnon, "king of men" (line 15) and leader of the expedition to Troy. While the Greek fleet was at Aulis, on the way to Troy, it was becalmed by the goddess Artemis (Diana), out of anger against Agamemnon because he had offended her. To appease her and so release the fleet, Agamemnon, following the advice of the seer Calchas, proceeds to offer his daughter as a sacrifice. It is the moment of final decision, with all the pathos and controlled passion accompanying it, that Landor, with his sculpturesque art, chose for his poem. The Greek legend goes on to tell how Artemis, at the sacrificial rites, put a hart in the place of Iphigeneia, and bore the maiden to Tauris, where she became the priestess of Artemis' temple. What would have been the effect if Landor had continued the story to this point?

(289.) 26. laid down my hair: i.e., a lock of hair as a propitiatory offering to Artemis (Diana) before marriage; cf. line 33. 33. Hymen's: Hymen is the god of

marriage.

34. those who mind us girls the most: those who have us most in their care, viz., Artemis and the nymphs (lines). 27 and 30).

35. our own Athena: Athena (Minerva), goddess of wisdom, the favorite deity of the kingdom of Mycenae, over which Agamemnon ruled.

(290.) 56. fillet: a leafy garland round the head, worn at sacrifices by the priest and other participants.

Three years before this poem appeared, the American poet Lowell published "Rhoecus," another rendering of

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this fairy legend of old Greece, As full of gracious youth and beauty still As the immortal freshness of that grace Carved for all ages on some Attic frieze." (Lowell)

Lowell was then a disciple of Keats, and he found in this legend just such a tale as Keats loved to tell with all his embroidery of delicate images and rhythms. Nymphs are everywhere in Keats's poetry; for the nymphs known as hamadryads, see the "Hymn to Pan," lines 236-237 (page 236). Of Keats's poetic style, Landor said that it "is extremely far removed from the very boundaries of Greece"; Landor's own diction is unquestionably much nearer the Greek. In "The Hamadryad" his tone not infrequently recalls Keats; but in the outline of the story itself the poet follows faithfully the late Greek writers who had told it. The word "hamadryad" comes from two words meaning "with" and "tree," the nymph being the spirit of the tree, born with it and dying with it.

2. Gnidos, the light of Caria: Gnidos, or Cnidos, a celebrated seaport city of Caria in Asia Minor, to which travellers came to see the statue of Aphrodite by Praxiteles. The sea-waves are visible from the hills where Rhaicos was born. inborn:

6. rose and myrtle For "rose and myrtle" see note to page 287, line 2, above. - Inborn: native, of local origin.

7-10. If from Pandion etc.: If the festival rites were not local but derived from Athens Pandion being a legendary king of Athens and Athena the special deity of that city then the olive, sacred to Athena, was used, woven with violets clustered in regular masses ("bosses").

12. one was their devotion: Aphrodite (Venus), the chief deity of the city. The power of Love is shown in the lines that follow.

(290.) 16. Poseidon reveres: Remember that the "mutable" Aphrodite was said to have been born by springing from the foam of the sea.

17-22. And whom his brother etc.: While Proserpine, a daughter of the gods, was amusing herself by gathering flowers round the plains of Enna, Pluto, god of Hades, bore her away to be his queen in the realms below. Pluto, or Dis, was the brother of Poseidon (Neptune).

86. platan: plane-tree.

(291.) 94. Cydonian bow: bow from Cydonia, in the island of Crete, famed for its archers.

(292.) 117-118. the source Whence springs all beauty: the deities of nature. 126. Within it: in the moss (cf. lines 56-58).

131. Ye men below: See lines 24

29, 40-41.

133-135. as she sate Before the shepherd etc. See the note to Tennyson's "Enone," page 719, below.

147-148. now begins the tale etc.: the story he asked for previously (line 120), but which he is still too enraptured to hear (line 154).

(293.) 190. religion: old and sacred cus

tom.

205-206. but the nymph as oft invisible: Supply "was" before "invisible." She rendered herself so whenever he came. (294.) 221. lentisk . . . oleander: fragrant shrubs.

243. the Hours: See note to page 204, line 37, above.

more:

see no

254-257. that light These superb lines recall the lyric "Give me the Eyes" (page 286).

261. anise cakes: cakes flavored with the seeds of the anise, a Mediterranean plant. The checker-board, in place of nature's kindly fruits, is ominous! (295.) 278-280. From that day - — — insect wing: This is the reverse, so to speak, of his initial experience of the Hamadryad; see lines 49-52.

284. milk and honey: propitiatory offerings to the spirits of the wood. - The plain close of the narrative recalls Wordsworth's "Michael" (page 29): these two

poems afford a suggestive contrast in pastoral poetry.

TO YOUTH

The closing stanzas recall Moore's "Oft in the Stilly Night" (page 97). Which is the better poem?

4. the Hours: As in "The Hamadryad," line 243 (page 294).

9. befell: Used in the usual sense of "happened," and also, as the next line shows, in the literal sense of "fell" (on it). This follows out the image in line 8.

SO THEN, I FEEL NOT DEEPLY

In his life of Landor, Sidney Colvin asks: "Did Landor then really, we cannot help asking ourselves, feel very deeply the breaking up of his beautiful Italian home or not? A few years before he could not bear his children to be out of his sight even for a day; did he suffer as we should have expected him to suffer at his total separation from them now? . . . The same question which we have thus been led to ask ourselves as to the depth or lack of depth in Landor's private and domestic feelings, seems to have been addressed to him in person by some friend about this time. Here is his reply:" - and the biographer quotes the present poem. Landor's "reply,"

if it is such, — sets forth a view of the relation of experience and poetry that recalls Wordsworth's wellknown dictum, cited in the note to "I Wandered Lonely," page 661, above. (296.) 7. near Memory's more shade:

quiet

The remembrance of the grief must be "near," i.e., keen, and yet quieter than the grief itself. The image as a whole is that of a brook which runs on, from a steep gorge or the like, into a quiet forest.

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PART TWO: THE MIDDLE NINETEENTH CENTURY

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN

(1801-1890)

"We in Oxford," wrote Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy, "brought up amidst the beauty and sweetness of that beautiful place, have not failed to seize one truth, the truth that beauty and sweetness are essential characters of a complete human perfection." To the

recognition of this truth Arnold attributes the strength of the "great movement which shook Oxford to its centre" in the 'thirties. "It was directed, as any one who reads Dr. Newman's Apology may see, against .. the great middle-class liberalism, which had for the cardinal points of its belief the Reform Bill of 1832, and local self-government, in politics; in the social sphere, free-trade, unrestricted competition, and the making of large industrial fortunes; in the religious sphere, the Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion." To this middle-class liberalism as well as to the expansive revolutionary spirit of the beginning of the century, from which industrial liberalism grew many of the leading minds of the Victorian age opposed themselves; seeking, each in his own way, some principle of control to give shape and direction to the intellectual and moral forces of the modern world.

One of these leading minds was Newman, whose task it was to combat the anarchic tendencies of the age within the sphere of religion. "My battle," he wrote in his spiritual autobiography, "was with liberalism; by liberalism I mean the antidogmatic principle and its developments.

Dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery." To religion as a mere senti-| ment, and to rationalism as a substitute

for religion, Newman opposed himself with all the strength of his subtle mind, his deep spiritual sense, and his winning personality. With Keble, Pusey, and others he sought to reëstablish religion, within the Church of England, on a firm foundation. "I had a supreme confidence in our cause; we were upholding that primitive Christianity which was delivered for all time by the early teachers of the Church, and which was registered and attested in the Anglican formularies and by the Anglican divines. That ancient religion had well-nigh faded away out of the land, through the political changes of the last 150 years, and it must be restored. It would be in fact a second Reformation." As this reformation progressed, Newman drew closer and closer to the Roman Catholic Church, until, in 1845, he took the decisive step of transferring his allegiance: "it was like coming into port after a rough sea.' His spiritual struggle had come to an end. "From the time that I became a Catholic, of course I have no further history of my religious opinions to narrate."

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It was in prose-in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, his Idea of a University, his works on church doctrine, and his remarkable sermons that Cardinal Newman made his chief contribution to Victorian literature. But the rare qualities of his mind are also plainly present in his poems.

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amid the flames," the poet dexterously throws his emphasis upon Cranmer's actual resolution, instead of its legendary aftermath. This closing couplet is peculiarly felicitous, considering the title and opening quatrain of the sonnet.

DISRAELI: WELLINGTON

was

but

He

Compare the three last sonnets from Wordsworth (pages 55-56), which were written not long before the present one. At this time, Benjamin Disraeli (18041881), through pen and politics, advancing the idea of so-called "Tory democracy": namely, that the government should be conservative in form, widely serviceable to the people. and others of his generation distrusted political revolutionism as a means of progress, and believed in a strong central government that could hold the respect and imagination of the people. (This side of Disraeli is well brought in P. E. More's Aristocracy and Justice.) But such a government, he thought, must abandon the favorite doctrine of "laissez-faire" and provide measures of social and industrial reform.

The Duke of Wellington, whose defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo is referred to in the opening lines, was disliked by radicals for his Toryism. But his character, as the sonnet suggests, exerted a strong influence during his old age. His death a few years later (1852) was commemorated by Tennyson's "Ode," and by Longfellow's "Warden of the Cinque Ports."

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON (1809-1892)

"The King is dead, long live the King!" When Byron died in 1824, Alfred Tennyson, then a youth of fifteen, "thought the whole world was at an end; I thought everything was over and finished for everyone - that nothing else mattered. I remember I walked out alone and carved 'Byron is dead' into the sandstone." Keats was dead, Shelley was dead, Coleridge had ceased to count as a poet, Scott had turned to the novel, Wordsworth's poetic energy

had ebbed: so that with the death of Byron the last of the kings of the romantic dynasty had gone, and a new age waited for its leader and spokesman. That leader and spokesman was destined to be Tennyson himself. In 1827, three years after Byron's death, Alfred and Charles Tennyson published a volume of somewhat Byronic Poems by Two Brothers. In 1830, Alfred published Poems, Chiefly Lyrical; in 1832, Poems; and in 1842, Poems in two volumes. With the publication of the last of these collections, a new king of poetry had assumed the throne.

His childhood and boyhood had been spent at Somersby Rectory in Lincolnshire, amid peaceful English landscapes that imprinted themselves on his mind and heart, and not far from the North Sea coast, whose waves were to sound again and again in his poems. Instructed for years by his father, Tennyson had a sound preparatory training, and in 1828 entered Trinity College, Cambridge. Here he became one of twelve young literary enthusiasts known as "The Apostles," another of whom was Arthur Henry Hallam, described in In Memoriam as "the master bowman of the group." "The effects produced on the minds of many at Cambridge," Arthur Hallam wrote in a letter, "by the single creation of that Society of 'Apostles' is far greater than I dare to calculate, and will be felt both directly and indirectly in the age that is upon us.' dozen friends were interested in far more than poetry; as Tennyson's son reports, they "read their Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Butler, Hume, Bentham, Descartes, and Kant, and discussed such questions as the Origin of Evil, the Derivation of Moral Sentiments, Prayer, and the Personality of God." While in college, Tennyson won the Newdigate prize with a poem in blank verse on "Timbuctoo;" and, in his Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, gave promise of greater things. Leaving Cambridge in 1831, Tennyson spent most of the next two years (partly in travel in the Pyrenees and on the Rhine) with Arthur Hallam, who died in 1833.

The

The early death of his dearest friend, "as near perfection as mortal could be," signalized a turning-point in Tennyson's

development. The years that followed were a time of absorption and reflection. Richly endowed by nature, Tennyson now disciplined himself and his art by studying the ancient classics and English literature, by reshaping his own early poems, by working hard at new compositions, and most of all, probably, by attempting to relate his mind and spirit to the ultimate mysteries of life as these appeared in the new age that followed the romantic revival. It is with a profounder art and a profounder message that he comes before the public once more in the 1842 Poems: "Morte d'Arthur" (later republished as "The Passing of Arthur," page 378), "Ulysses" (page 311), "Locksley Hall" (page 314), "Sir Galahad" (page 319), "Break, Break, Break" (page 320), and others. Such poems as these mark an extraordinary advance over the prettiness and sweetness of his earlier work. The volumes were received with acclaim, and henceforth Tennyson had only to pass from triumph to triumph.

During the half century that followedfrom the Poems of 1842 to his death in 1892-Tennyson's biography is mainly an account of the volumes that he published. In 1847 came The Princess, to which he later added the exquisite lyrics (pages 320-321) that surpass the poem in which they were imbedded; in 1850, the year of his marriage and of his succession to the Laureateship, In Memoriam (this was his annus mirabilis); in 1855, Maud, containing "Come into the Garden" (page 363); in 1859, Idylls of the King, added to in later years; in 1864, Enoch Arden, with "The Northern Farmer" (page 386); in 1875, Queen Mary, followed by half a dozen other plays; in 1880, Ballads and Other Poems, including "The Revenge" (page 391), "Rizpah" (page 394), etc.; in 1885 and after, several volumes, containing some of his finest work, the mature fruit of long experience, such as "To Virgil" (page 396) and "Crossing the Bar" (page 403).

THE LADY OF SHALOTT

In this, his first venture into the great realm of Arthurian legend, Tennyson made use (if a statement by Palgrave may

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