A DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN First published in 1833 but very extensively altered on its republication in 1842. It had been written by June, 1833, and appears to have been originally entitled Legend of Fair Women (see Spedding's letter dated aist June, 1832, Life, i.. 116). In nearly every edition between 1833 and 1853 it was revised, and perhaps no poem proves more strikingly the scrupulous care which Tennyson took to improve what he thought susceptible of improvement. The work which inspired it, Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, was written about 1384, thus "preluding" by nearly two hundred years the "spacious times of great Elizabeth". There is no resemblance between the poems beyond the fact that both are visions and both have as their heroines illustrious women who have been unfortunate. Cleopatra is the only one common to the two poems. Tennyson's is an exquisite work of art—the transition from the anarchy of dreams to the dreamland landscape and to the sharply defined figures—the skill with which the heroines (what could be more perfect that Cleopatra and Jephtba's daughter?) are chosen and contrasted—the wonderful way in which the Iphigenia of Euripides and Lucretius and the Cleopatra of Shakespeare are realised are alike admirable. The poem opened in 1833 with the following strangely irrelevant verses, excised in 1843, which as Fitzgerald observed "make a perfect poem by themselves without affecting the 'dream'":— As when a man, that sails in a balloon, Downlooking sees the solid shining ground Stream from beneath him in the broad blue noon, And takes his flags and waves them to the mob, So lifted high, the Poet at his will Lets the great world flit from him, seeing all, No more unfurl the straining sail ; We will abide in the golden vale Of the Lotos-land till the Lotos fail; We will not wander more. Hark! how sweet the horned ewes bleat On the solitary steeps, And the merry lizard leaps, And the foam-white waters pour ; And the dark pine weeps, And the lithe vine creeps, And the heavy melon sleeps On the level of the shore : Oh! islanders of Ithaca, we will not wander more, Surely, surely slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore Than labour in the ocean, and rowing with the oar, The fine picture in the text of the gods of Epicurus was no doubt immediately suggested by Lucretius, iii., 15 seq., while the Icaromenippus of Lucian furnishes an excellent commentary on Tennyson's picture of those gods and what they see. if. too the Song of the Parca in Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris, iv., 5. Hearing apart the echoes of his fame. While I spoke thus, the seedsman, memory, I Read, before my eyelids dropt their shade, Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath The spacious times of great Elizabeth With sounds that echo still. And, for a while, the knowledge of his art Held me above the subject, as strong gales Hold swollen clouds from raining, tho' my heart, Brimful of those wild tales, Charged both mine eyes with tears. In every land Beauty and anguish walking hand in hand Those far-renowned brides of ancient song Peopled the hollow dark, like burning stars, And I heard sounds of insult, shame, and wrong, And trumpets blown for wars; And clattering flints batter'd with clanging hoofs: And I saw crowds in column'd sanctuaries; And forms that pass'd3 at windows and on roofs Of marble palaces; 1 Suggested apparently by Denham, Verses on Comity's Death ;— Old Chaucer, like the morning star To us discovers Day from far. 'Here follow in 1833 two stanzas excised in 1842 In every land I thought that, more or less. The stronger sterner nature overbore The softer, uncontrolled by gentleness And selfish evermore: And whether there were any means whereby. In some far aftertime, the gentler mind Might reassume its just and full degree $1833. Screamed. |