Edward FitzGerald had a good story about rowing across Lake Windermere at the end of May 1835 with his old friend Alfred Tennyson. As they rested on their oars and gazed into the clear, still water, Tennyson recited some lines from his work in progress, ‘Morte d’Arthur’, describing how the Lady of the Lake fashioned Excalibur out of sight: ‘Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps/ Upon the hidden bases of the hills.’ Then he gave himself a little pat on the back: ‘Not bad that, Fitz, is it?’
The lines are better than not bad, as they imagine an invisible process of creation by incorporating several fragments of earlier writing. These include Horace’s advice in the Ars Poetica to hang on to a poem for nine years before publishing it (‘nonumque prematur in annum,/ membranis intus positis’) and the phrase ‘bases of the hills’, which Tennyson had borrowed from an unpublished draft of his earlier poem, ‘The Lover’s Tale’. But perhaps the most intriguing echo is of Charles Lyell’s book of popular science, Principles of Geology, which had tried to explain the huge changes wrought on the Earth’s surface over millions of years by facts of the strange-but-true variety. These included geological evidence that ‘the sea once washed the base of the rocks on which the pyramids of Memphis stand’. Look at Tennyson’s lines with that sort of timescale in mind and they start to resemble rock strata with little fossils of earlier poems embedded in them, as if they weren’t only describing the passage of time but were actively trying to embody it in their form.
Tennyson often quarried key ideas and phrases from his scientific reading. It was a habit that began early and continued to the end of his life. He was particularly drawn to theories of evolution, possibly because they chimed with his own painstaking compositional processes, as he developed poems over years and even decades, making tiny incremental changes until each poem was ready to be published. For example, Tennyson’s son was told that as a boy his father ‘would reel off hundreds of lines’ such as:
The quick-wing’d gnat doth make a boat
Of his old husk wherewith to float
To a new life! all low things range
To higher! but I cannot change.
More than 30 years later, Tennyson was still using the same ideas, and even the same rhymes, in the collection of elegies for his friend Arthur Hallam that he finally published in 1850 as In Memoriam:
Our voices took a higher range;
Once more we sang: ‘They do not die
Nor lose their mortal sympathy,
Nor change to us, although they change.’
The bereaved are often reluctant to accept change, unhappy that life will go on without one life in particular; but here Tennyson suggests how much continuity there can be even in a world of ceaseless flux. His rhymes are the links that bind life’s changes.
His fascination with science was no less enduring. In ‘Parnassus’, a poem he completed just three years before his death, he wrote about the two powers that increasingly rivalled – or even outstripped – religion for many of his contemporaries. These were ‘Astronomy and Geology, terrible Muses!’ Both made human life seem far smaller than people had previously imagined. Technological advances in telescope design had expanded the Victorian sense of space by revealing that the Earth was one of a countless number of planets in the universe, no more significant than a grain of sand on an endless beach. Meanwhile, new research by Lyell and other scientists had extended the Victorian sense of time by revealing that the Earth was far older than previously thought, and in fact was still a work in progress, as new rocks were created or eroded to dust over millennia. And, as Richard Holmes points out in this spryly written but deeply learned biography, from a young age Tennyson was fascinated by it all.
His early scientific investigations included careful prose descriptions of plants, birds and wildlife that he slotted into his notebooks, and the use of a solar microscope to reveal the hidden life that was busily going on all around him. There was also a telescope in his childhood home that he borrowed to study the solar system, encouraging him to write a fragment of verse in which he imagined what it would be like to stand on the pitted surface of the moon like a character in a Jules Verne novel. And underneath everything else, lurking just below the surface of consciousness, there was the mysterious figure of the Kraken. Holmes identifies this as a symbol of everything that most fascinated and terrified Tennyson and his contemporaries, from ‘the idea of relentless evolution’ to ‘the inevitable extinction of every species on planet Earth, including the human race itself’.
Astronomy and geology may have been terrible muses, but they helped Tennyson to write some terrific poetry. Often his scientific interests are woven into the smallest details of his verse, as when he uses a section of In Memoriam to describe the vast geological changes slowly rippling across the surface of the Earth:
The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.
Here Tennyson demonstrates what he means by showing how easily the word ‘from’ can be reshaped into ‘form’ just by shifting a couple of letters around. As so often, he uses his verse – a word which comes from the Latin vertere, to turn – to reflect on change in the very grain of his writing.
On one occasion he fell to his knees on the grass so that he could observe a rose through a dragonfly’s wings
Holmes is excellent on the scientific background of lines like these but rather less persuasive on how they work as poetry. For example, throughout his book he sets out the In Memoriam stanza flush against the left hand margin of the page, whereas Tennyson insisted on it being printed with the central rhymes indented, so that each set of four lines would appear to edge forward before flinching back, like a visual echo of the speaker’s difficulty in moving on past the early stages of mourning. Nor does Holmes mention the fact that Tennyson had first experimented with this stanza in some political poems written near the start of his career, which set the scene for his later interest in evolution by demonstrating his belief that society developed just as slowly. As T.S. Eliot later wittily put it, Tennyson ‘believed explicitly in progress, and believed implicitly that progress consists in things remaining much as they are’, and stanzas that rhymed ABBA offered a perfect literary model of this broadly conservative view of development.
If Tennyson took the long view when it came to history and geography, he was equally fascinated by what could only be seen up close and personal. It isn’t just that he was so short-sighted he needed spectacles to prevent the world from becoming a blur. Sometimes he appears to have treated this world as a place that was full of its own lenses, on one occasion falling to his knees on the grass so that he could observe a rose through a dragonfly’s wings. But whatever he was writing about, he was prepared to look at it in a new way.
By focusing on Tennyson’s turbulent early years, before he became the bearded sage behind mystical fantasies such as Idylls of the King, Holmes’s biography tries to do something similar for Tennyson himself, and to a large extent succeeds. The poet we encounter in these pages is not the establishment stooge James Joyce sneered at as ‘Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet’, but a far more uncertain and experimental figure. He is prone to fits of depression and crippled by self-doubt, needing words in much the same way that an artist might need a box of paints. They allowed him to face up to a messy and unstable universe by putting it into some sort of perspective. And, as Holmes persuasively shows, the careful study of disciplines such as geology and astronomy was central to Tennyson’s need to make sense out of life by making sentences out of it. It was the only way he knew of keeping his feet on the ground while allowing his imagination to roam among the stars.
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