1.Tennyson and his father till 1827

Abstract

Alfred Tennyson had such a cry always in his mind. He was a sixty-year-old smiling (and gruffly scowling) public man when he wrote those lines. He was Poet Laureate. His father would have been proud of him: “My father who was a sort of Poet himself thought so highly of my first essay that he prophesied I should be the greatest Poet of the Time.” But could Tennyson feel proud of his father? The cry from out the dawning of his life, the mother weeping: these were the core of his childhood and youth. “In no other English poet of comparable rank,” said W. H. Auden, “does the bulk of his work seem so clearly to be inspired by some single and probably very early experience. Tennyson’s own description of himself as

• An infant crying in the night:

• An infant crying for the light:

• And with no language but a cry

is extraordinarily acute. If Wordsworth is the great English poet of Nature, then Tennyson is the great English poet of the Nurs ery.” But the early experience was not for Tennyson a single one, and it lasted long past the nursery; it was (as the biography by the poet’s grandson, Sir Charles Tennyson, first let the world know) a snarled web of family feud, bitterness, genteel poverty, drunkenness, madness, and violence.

Moreover, always in my mind I hear A cry from out the dawning of my life, A mother weeping, ( “The Coming of Arthur”)