Alfred Tennyson - A poet of The Victorian Age

           Alfred Tennyson is one of my favorite Poets; I have studied him during the second semester of my post graduation. I would like to share my views about the poet.

Alfred Tennyson – 1809-1892

           

        Alfred Tennyson was one of the twelve children of a very beautiful couple Tennyson and Elizabeth. His mother was a very pretty and sweet nature lady, whom as a son Tennyson tribute at the ending part of his poem ‘Princess’.

                       

           At the age of twelve he has sent to his grandmother’s house for school education, and he had a very bad experience there with the students and the environment of school. He soon came back and then went to university; he was a very favourite among the students of university as a poet. There he wrote a poem, “Poem by two Brothers”, which got success.

                     

          In 1850, after a death of the great poet William Wordsworth, Tennyson has became the poet laureate and this how the time of his good life begun. He was in love with Elizabeth from last thirteen years but he was not able to marry with her because of his poverty. After having this position of poet laureate he married her and wrote a poem dedicating his wife,

“Her, whose gentle will has changed my fate,

And made my life perfumed altar flame”

                     

         After the Romantic age, it was the end of romance in literature with the death of Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Shelly and Coleridge. Victorian age was all about prose rather than poetry, there were only two poets in the age, Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson. If we observe the poetry of Tennyson we would find that he has all the qualities of romantics like, melody of Keats, fantasy of Coleridge, imagination of Scott and Shelly and simplicity of Wordsworth.

                    

       Tennyson’s works are still considers as the greatest works of the age.

“Over the margin,

After it, follow it,

Follow the gleam”

                  

          The poem he has written at the age of eighty-one, this poem has the whole description of his struggle in his life. Another important poem is “Maud”, where there is a story of murder, then recovery, this was Tennyson’s favourite poem and the most popular line from this poem was,

“Come into the garden Maud”

                 

           Here the description of woman in his poetry has depicted, another woman oriented poem is “Mariana” as it has the most important theme of Tennyson’s poem, ‘Tragic death’ where she says,

“I would that, I were dead”

                  

         Another one poem is “The Lady of Shallot” where she is cursed and imprisoned in a tower, by this poem Tennyson has depicted woman as a pure and divine as an Anglo-Saxon woman, in his poetry there is a depiction of ‘imprisoned women’ and in his another poem “Princess, a medley” he has answered the question about woman’s sphere and woman’s rights.

                  

         Tennyson has a great influence of science upon his poetry; he was very fond of imagination as well as inventions of his age. Victorian era was an era of revolution such as Darwin’s the origin of spices, galaxies and geology. As we can read in his poem “The Lotus Eater” he has presented different kind of flowers, and in his very important poetry “crossing the Bars” he has said,

“I hope to see my pilot face to face,

When I cross the bars”

                     

         Tennyson as a poet laureate has a duty to write about London and his country and in his poems we could find ‘The great London’ for example in “The Charge of the Light Bridget” there a description of the war and sacrifice of soldiers. Another important aspect of his poetry is his connection with ‘ancient worlds’ he finds Greece and Rome as ideal countries, he has presented his this view in “Idyll of the king”, and Tennyson has presented Arthur as a perfect king.

                 

        The most important work or we could consider it a master piece of Victorian age is “In Memoriam”, in which he has given tribute to his friend Hallam who died at the age of twenty-two. He wrote,

“One of the few immortal names,

Who did not born to die”

                   

      Tennyson was very upset with his friend’s death, he has quit writing for almost ten years, and after this period he has given this gift to his friend. It was a great loss of Tennyson’s life as he has himself has depicted in poem,

 “Tis better to have loved and lost,

Then never to have loved at all”

               

          Most of readers consider this line as lover’s feelings, but it has dedicated to Hallam from Tennyson. The poem contains the theme of love of human immortality.

               

        Thus, Tennyson is the most important part of Victorian Age, who has given the impulse of poetry to an era and contributed his best.