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.

The theory of Deconstruction by Jacques Derrida

Derrida – Deconstruction

              Deconstruction is a theory of post structuralism, which helps to find the concept of work of art within itself. ‘Deconstruction’ is a theory which focus upon readers and the hidden text within the text, and this text is from reader’s point of view. The term is given by Jacques Derrida from influence of Heidegger and Nietzsche.

Jacques Derrida – 1930-2004

            

         Derrida in his last years of life has given this concept of ‘Deconstruction’, in his essay “Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human science – 1966”. In this essay Derrida given the clear cut concept that meaning is always postpone and he has also given the concept of words,

Sign – Signifies nothing

Play – free play of words

       

      Derrida has derived the term from Heidegger and Nietzsche, who have given the concept of “Destruction” and “Demolition” in German; from this the idea of “Deconstruction” is derived. The influence of Saussure and Claude Levi – Strauss is also important that Derrida criticized their idea of arbitrariness and structure of text.

Deconstruction

              

      As per Derrida deconstruction is a very difficult to define, he has tried to search that whether it is possible to define something for one and whole? But the answer is ‘NO’. He denied defining the term deconstruction because he did not want to put boundaries to his concept.

            

       He further said that the term is not about destroying the text but it is all about inquiring the text, and what we get is the understanding of text. It could be different from person to person. So it is not to destroy but to inquire.

          

      The most important part of deconstruction is can be said that it happens to its own, a reader or a critic do not need to do such efforts, but is requires only a close reading and while reading the text our own mind would ask such questions to us and the text as well.

Concept of DifferAnce

            

        Derrida has given the term “phonocentrism” which suggests western philosophy of speech over writing, which Derrida has challenged. Derrida has given an importance to writing more than speaking as he says that ‘to spell’ is different but most of the times ‘to speak’ have various similarities in pronunciations. He has given the concept of differAnce with two words, to defer and to differ.

To differ + to defer = DifferAnce

To differ Þ  Differentiate/ binary oppositions

To defer Þ  Postpone meaning 

     

    1)    By differentiating the things, we could grasp the meaning. If we take an example of a word “Interest” and we want to find its meaning we have to take  a help of dictionary, while referring to dictionary we would find that meanings are:

Interest:  - Hobby

-         Want to know

-         Share in finance

-         Advantage

-         Liking

             

        So we have  many words to define ‘interest’ but what we get is not a proper meaning of word but what we do is only stop asking the question because we have understand the concept of word but not the ultimate meaning. So Derrida says that we have just an illusion that we have grasped the meaning, but actually the meaning is postponed, as he says,

“The meaning of word is a set of another words”

2)    To defer is to postpone the meaning as we take an example of a word ‘Cat’ 

      

 Cat – a four legged animal, Organism 

Organism – non human, Animal 

 Human – Man, child, woman

     From the word ‘Cat’ we found ‘Organism’ and to find out its meaning we found a word ‘non-human’ and to understand that we have to be aware with what is ‘human’ thus this chain never ends. Thus we could say that the meaning is ultimate postpone.

The concept of speech over writing fails, here are some examples:

     1)    Wait- Weight - almost same pronunciation, a slight difference.

    2)    Bat  - same word has different meaning such as a cricket bat, a mammal, a club

    3)    Pharmakon  - A Greek word which suggests poisons as well as cure.

So the idea of differentiating the things could provide us a meaning,

Love / hate

Black / white

Good / bad

Darkness / light

Man / woman

Divine / evil

Derrida has also challenges the idea of arbitrariness by saying that, 

          Saussure - signifiers signifies some sign and sign is the meaning

          Derrida – signifiers are free play of words and sign signifies NOTHING.

                    

     Thus the idea of arbitrariness is failed. It depends upon the concept of writing, speaking and differentiating. To prove his argument he has given the law of metaphysics of presence.

“the presence of one thing can be understood by the absence of another thing”

      For example, while student writes the answer in the exam, examiner is not present, and while examiner is checking the answers student is not present. Derrida continued the idea of structuralism by taking the text as a whole entity and there should not be any interruption of author.

Logocentrism suggests the word in its reason. For example,

What is inside / what is outside

What is on / what is under

               

      We have to take help of outside if we want to say what is inside; if we want to give an address of our home we have to describe the outsider elements to give directions. So everything is connected with everything else.

As per Derrida,

“Language bears within itself the necessity of its own critic”

    Language itself has its boundaries; it misses something in it all the time as we have seen in examples above. That is the reason that it requires the critic to solve the problems of it.