[8] In Professor Tyndall’s reminiscences of Tennyson, inserted in Tennyson’s _Life_, he says he once asked him for some explanation of this line, and the poet’s reply was: “The power of explaining such concentrated expressions of the imagination was very different from that of writing them”. And on another occasion he said very happily: “Poetry is like shot silk with many glancing colours. Every reader must find his own interpretation, according to his ability, and according to his sympathy with the poet”. Poetry in its essential forms always suggests infinitely more than it expresses, and at once inspires and kindles the intelligence which is to comprehend it; if that intelligence, which is perhaps only another name for sympathy, does not exist, then, in Byron’s happy sarcasm:— “The gentle readers wax unkind, And, not so studious for the poet’s ease, Insist on knowing what he _means_, a hard And hapless situation for a bard”. Possibly Tennyson may have had in his mind Keats’s line:— “There was an awful rainbow once in heaven” Come not, when I am dead... First published in _The Keepsake_ for 1851. Come not, when I am dead, To drop thy foolish tears upon my grave, To trample round my fallen head, And vex the unhappy dust thou wouldst not save. There let the wind sweep and the plover cry; But thou, go by.[1] Child, if it were thine error or thy crime I care no longer, being all unblest: Wed whom thou wilt, but I am sick of Time,[2] And I desire to rest. Pass on, weak heart, and leave me where I lie: Go by, go by. [1] _The Keepsake_:—But go thou by. [2] _The Keepsake_ has a small _t_ for Time. The Eagle (fragment) First published in 1851. It has not been altered. He clasps the crag with hooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ring’d with the azure world, he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;[1] He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls. [1] One of Tennyson’s most magically descriptive lines; nothing could exceed the vividness of the words “wrinkled” and “crawls” here. Move eastward, happy earth... First published in 1842. Move eastward, happy earth, and leave Yon orange sunset waning slow: From fringes of the faded eve, O, happy planet, eastward go; Till over thy dark shoulder glow Thy silver sister-world, and rise To glass herself in dewy eyes That watch me from the glen below. Ah, bear me with thee, smoothly[1] borne, Dip forward under starry light, And move me to my marriage-morn, And round again to happy night. [1] 1842 to 1853. Lightly. Break, break, break... First published in 1842. No alteration. This exquisite poem was composed in a very different scene from that to which it refers, namely in “a Lincolnshire lane at five o’clock in the morning between blossoming hedges”. See _Life of Tennyson_, vol. i., p. 223. Break, break, break, On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me.