Alfred Lord Tennyson's 'The Lady of Shalott'

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

The Lady of Shalott by George Edward Robertson

Another poem in which the poet has taken a story and adapted it.

Tennyson was a great poet, if technique is a criteria of greatness. Try writing stanzas using the rhythm and rhyme scheme he does here and see how hard it is. He doesn’t put a foot wrong if you pronounce glow’d/trode/flow’d/rode to rhyme.

There’s a sung version by Loreena Mckennit which brings out how melodious the lyric is far better than any reading can.

But being a great technician is not everything and for all the memorable lines, there’s something unpleasant about the story which is characteristic of Tennyson’s treatment of Arthurian material in general and the women in it in particular.

You are almost compelled to read the poem as a metaphor because as a story about people, even people in a fantasy pseudo-medieval world of magic, it doesn’t work unlike Keats’ ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. The poem asks to be understood in a symbolic fashion. But precisely what is symbolised isn’t clear and attempts to naturalise it, one essay on the web claims ‘she freezes to death as she floats down the river’, emphasise how unreal it is.

it’s not irrelevant that so many male painters in the 19th century liked painting dead women or that this particular story was so attractive to them. (Do a google image and you’ll see how popular the subject was.)

There are two versions of the poem. One published in 1833, one in 1842. The earlier poem has an extra verse and ends:

They cross'd themselves, their stars they blest,
  Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire, and guest.
   There lay a parchment on her breast,
   That puzzled more than all the rest,
                 The wellfed wits at Camelot.
     'The web was woven curiously,
      The charm is broken utterly,
       Draw near and fear not,—this is I,
                 The Lady of Shalott.'

which is awful and a tribute to Tennyson that he cut it.

Although it may not have been his source, it’s revealing to compare this poem to Malory’s story of Elayne of Ascolat. The comparison illuminates the limitations of Tennyson’s version. Tennyson may have been a great technician, but Malory was great.

Robert Browning 'Porphyria's Lover'

Robert Browning (1812-1889)

Reading aloud forces choices on the reader which are left unstated when the poem is read quietly. How does one read the last line of this poem? Is the speaker surprised, relieved disappointed? On the page they are all possible. Even the best reader has to choose. And for that reason I have been avoiding this poem for far too long.

Browning was the master of the dramatic monologue. And he perfected what we might loosely call ‘performative dissonance’. What is being said, is qualified or contradicted or undermined by the way it is being said. It’s an endemic characteristic in 19th Century fiction, from Gogol to Poe to Le Fanu to James.

It’s harder to achieve in a single monologue which has to create its own context. The effect is most famously achieved in ‘My Last Duchess’ where the message the speaker thinks he’s sending, and the one we receive, are so very different. He took it as far as it could go in “The Ring and the Book’ where the reader is presented with different versions of the same story.

In this case the effect is created much more simply, because what the speaker does and says are so far out of the normal definitions of sane behaviour. The problem is how to make him sound believable. If you are paying attention to the first half you can be forgiven for thinking you’re in familiar romance story territory. Then comes the swerve.

One of the familiar critical games to play with this poem is to try and gender the speaker from evidence within the poem. If you put aside the assumption the speaker is male, you will find no evidence within the poem to prove this. On the other hand, that’s also true for any number of first person poems. Browning exploits this common feature as part of the overall creepiness of the poem. (Creepiness is a very technical term…)

John Clare's 'I Am'

John Clare (1793-1864)

Clare is one of the contested figures in the ‘Romantic Movement’. He has the credentials, a farm labourer, his nature poetry was based on detailed observation of the world around him, he was mostly self educated and he ended his life in what was then called a lunatic asylum.

But his poetry sits awkwardly against his more well known and better connected peers. His ‘nature poetry’ reads like the product of man who had lived and worked in the landscapes he described. Attempts to claim he is central to the period sound like special pleading.

His biography is worth reading for an insight into the reality of poetry in the Romantic period.

Christina Rossetti's 'A Christmas Carol'

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

An obvious choice for the season.

Perhaps better known as the Carol, ‘In the Bleak Mid Winter’. It’s interesting attempting to read this while trying to ignore the familiar cadence of the sung version.

This is taken from the Penguin Classics ‘Christina Rossetti: Selected Poems’.

Gerard Manley Hopkins' 'Pied Beauty'

Gerald Manley Hopkins (1884-1889)

There was a time Hopkins featured on school lIterature syllabi. He may still do. He was often the first shocked encounter students had with a poet who was ‘difficult’. Generations floundered attempting to write something intelligent about something they found incomprehensible. 

They could of course get technical and try reading about ’sprung rhythm’, though that may have left them even more confused than before. They could delve into the biography and consider how Hopkins’ spirituality affected the poems. Either way they were moving further away from the object they were supposed to be considering. 

I think it’s better to wander through his poems, looking for ones that catch your attention. Rereading them allows you to tune into others. This does not mean you’ll soon be reading ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ and enjoying the experience, but it will allow you to enjoy some of his poems. 

‘Pied Beauty’ celebrates the glorious multiplicity of creation. What is there to not understand? 

This is taken from the Folio Society’s beautiful Selected poetry and Prose of Gerald Manley Hopkins. .

Thomas Hardy's 'Neutral tones'

Thomas Hardy ( 1849-1928)

Like D.H.Lawrence, Hardy is more famous as a novelist than poet. Unlike Lawrence, Hardy’s poetry would earn him a reputation without the prop of his prose. Much of it feels carved out of stone and reading his complete poems is an antedote to baggy writing.

This is one of my favourite poems, though it’s an awkward one to read aloud.

John Keats' 'The Eve of Saint Agnes'

John Keats (1795-1821)

Given what’s acceptable today, it’s difficult to imagine how shocking this poem was when it was being written.

It almost lead to a falling out between Keats and his Publisher.  John Taylor, who was convinced Keats was a genius, had stood with him despite the financial failure of Endymion, But he was shocked by the goings on in Madeline’s chamber. After all, they are not married!  He didn’t like the last verse either. He wanted Keats to change the poem so that it wouldn’t shock his (female) readership or give hostile critics a new stick with which to beat Keats.

This lead Keats to write:

‘‘I shall ever consider them (people) as debtors to me for verses, not myself to them for admiration-which I can do without’.

For someone who was trying to make a living as a poet it was an untenable position. For a publisher investing in a writer it was too self destructive to be acceptable.

The argument was smoothed over. Changes that made the ‘solution sweet’ more explicit were dropped.

I’ve always thought this poem is like a play where the characters are not as believable as the setting and the props.

Henry Lawson's 'Up the Country'

Henry Lawson (1867-1922)

Lawson is ‘the other’ famous Australian writer from the late 19th century. He’s the darker twin. He almost ticks all the boxes: born poor, deaf, an alcoholic suffering from depression , unhappy marriage, brief fame before decline into poverty etc etc.

These days he’s perhaps more famous for his short stories than his poems. One editor of an Australian anthology claimed that only a small proportion of his prodigious output ‘rises above conventional versifying’.

'Up the Country' is Lawson’s response to poets like Banjo Paterson. It was published in ‘The Bulletin’. Paterson replied, defending ‘the Bush’, Lawson responded. How much the opposing views were sincerely held and how much they were literary affectation is an obvious and unaswerable question. Whether ‘Up the country’ is more accurate or just as one sided is another. But If you read something like Paterson’s ‘Clancy of the Overlow’ (or listen to it on The Poetry Voice) you’ll see Lawson’s target.

A.B. Paterson's 'Clancy of the Overflow'

'Banjo' Paterson (1864-1941)

As one editor of an anthology of Australian Poetry wrote: ‘Although critical opinion does not rate Paterson’s poetry highly, as the author of ‘Clancy of the Overflow’, ‘The Man from Snowy River’ and ‘Waltzing Matilda’ …he holds an unchallenged place in the popular view of Australian culture’.

Which is a sniffy way of saying a lot of people like his poems.

Born a year before Kipling, and outliving him by five years, it’s difficult not to make comparisons between them. But it’s also worth remembering that T.S.Eliot wrote most of his major poems in Paterson’s lifetime.

I first heard Clancy of the Overflow as a song, long before I’d heard of Banjo Paterson.

And if you're wondering, A. B. stands for Andrew Barton... 'Banjo' was the name of a favourite horse which he took as his pen name...

Christina Rossetti's 'A Chilly Night'.

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

At some stage i will get round to reading her ‘Goblin Market’ which is a poem I admire very much. But it requires a day when no dogs bark, no one rings the door bell, the wind isn’t rattling the windows and the traffic is muted or slient. Until such a day, this strange piece.

It’s not in my copy of ‘Selected Poems’, but in a fascinating anthology called ‘Poets on Poets’ (1997) edited by Nick Rennison and Michael Schmidt and published by Carcanet.

Percy Bysshe Shelley's 'Ozymandias'

Percy B. Shelley. (1792-1822) A close tie with Wordsworth for my least favorite Romantic Poet. But this is one of the classic poems in English, and since it was requested by a friend, here it is.

A few posts back in the notes to the Rime of the Ancient Mariner I mentioned Richard Holmes’ superb biography of Coleridge. He also wrote a superb biography of Shelley. Didn’t make P.B.S sound like someone I’d like to meet, but it is an excellent biography.

And yes, if you wish to hear a poem read, send suggestions via the website and I’ll see what I can do.

Lewis Carroll's 'Jabberwocky'.

One of the great pieces of nonsense, possibly a parody of Old English, but who really cares.

It seemed a shame to ‘read’ it, so here’s a version done from memory. I don’t remember when I first memorised it so appologies for any mistakes.

Byron's 'To Thomas Moore'

George Gordon, Lord Byron, mad bad and dangerous to know unless you were one of his small circle of friends, and Thomas Moore was one of them. Poems about friendships aren’t that common, and this is one of the better ones. It’s self-conscious, over-exaggerated, and humerous as though the genuine sentiment had to be protected by the bluster. That doesn’t make the sentiment any less genuine.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'

STC, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834).

Hundreds of thousands have written and published poetry over the centuries, and very, very few of them wrote poems that are still worth reading. An even smaller number might be justifiably called ‘original’. STC was one of these, and he produced a body of work that is unlike anyone else’s. Before he wrecked his talent on an excess of Drugs and Wordsworth which both had a disasterous effect on his lack of self-confidence, he produced some of the outstanding poems in English.

It’s hard to believe now that Wordsworth was embarassed by The Rime and even tried to drop it from later editions of ‘Lyrical ballads’, claiming it had been ‘an injury to the volume’. But this was the man who dumped the first part of Christobel.

It’s even harder to believe the reaction to the poem amongst some of the critics: ‘A poem of little merit’ said one, another, Charles Burney, in the Monthly Review, wrote ‘..the strangest story of a cock and a bull that we ever saw on paper; yet, though it seems a rhapsody of unintelligble wildness and incoherrence, (of which we do not perceive the drift, unless the joke lies in depriving the wedding guest of his share of the feast) there are in it poetical touches of an exquisite kind’.

This is taken from Coleridge, sellected poems, Edited by Richard Holmes.

Anyone interested in Coleridge should read Holmes’ 2 volume biography, which is one of the great literary biographies.

'Ulysses' by Alfred Lord Tennyson

This is one of the great dramatic monolgues in English. It’s easy to be carried along by the speaker’s undimmed enthusiasm for exploration (mental or physical) and his reluctance to give into old age. The last two lines are justly famous. But in this poem, as in the best of Browning’s, what is being said is undercut by how it is said. If you pay attention, the poem is having its cake and eating it; admiring the exuberant old explorer, while allowing you to see his arrogance and selfishness.