The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord TennysonTennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron
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The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson
Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron
English poetry -- 19th century
As when a man, that sails in a balloon,
Downlooking sees the solid shining ground
Stream from beneath him in the broad blue noon,
Tilth, hamlet, mead and mound:
And takes his flags and waves them to the mob
That shout below, all faces turned to where
Glows rubylike the far-up crimson globe,
Filled with a finer air:
So, lifted high, the poet at his will
Lets the great world flit from him, seeing all,
Higher thro' secret splendours mounting still,
Self-poised, nor fears to fall.
Hearing apart the echoes of his fame.
While I spoke thus, the seedsman, Memory,
Sowed my deep-furrowed thought with many a name
Whose glory will not die.
=Miscellaneous Poems and Contributions to Periodicals=
=1833-1868=
XL
=Cambridge=
[This poem is written in pencil on the fly-leaf of a copy of _Poems_
1833 in the Dyce Collection in South Kensington Museum. Reprinted with
many alterations in _Life_, vol. I, p. 67.]
Therefore your halls, your ancient colleges,
Your portals statued with old kings and queens,
Your bridges and your busted libraries,
Wax-lighted chapels and rich carved screens,
Your doctors and your proctors and your deans
Shall not avail you when the day-beam sports
New-risen o'er awakened Albion--No,
Nor yet your solemn organ-pipes that blow
Melodious thunders through your vacant courts
At morn and even; for your manner sorts
Not with this age, nor with the thoughts that roll,
Because the words of little children preach
Against you,--ye that did profess to teach
And have taught nothing, feeding on the soul.
XLI
=The Germ of 'Maud'=
[There was published in 1837 in _The Tribute_, (a collection of
original poems by various authors, edited by Lord Northampton), a
contribution by Tennyson entitled 'Stanzas,' consisting of xvi stanzas
of varying lengths (110 lines in all). In 1855 the first xii stanzas
were published as the fourth section of the second part of 'Maud.'
Some verbal changes and transpositions of lines were made; a new
stanza (the present sixth) and several new lines were introduced, and
the xth stanza of 1837 became the xiiith of 1855. But stanzas xiii-xvi
of 1837 have never been reprinted in any edition of Tennyson's works,
though quoted in whole or part in various critical studies of the
poet. Swinburne refers to this poem as 'the poem of deepest charm and
fullest delight of pathos and melody ever written, even by Mr
Tennyson.' This poem in _The Tribute_ gained Tennyson his first notice
in the _Edinburgh Review_, which had till then ignored him.]
XIII
But she tarries in her place
And I paint the beauteous face
Of the maiden, that I lost,
In my inner eyes again,
Lest my heart be overborne,
By the thing I hold in scorn,
By a dull mechanic ghost
And a juggle of the brain.
XIV
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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