O Darling Room Poem Answers
hile Tennyson's earliest poems are not unsophisticated, they are unremarkably very uncomplicated, almost every bit if the poet had established for himself in each poem a single structural, thematic, or technical problem. Information technology is remarkable how deliberately and continuously these poems utilise the clichés of irony and, to a lesser extent, comedy. Tennyson here serves his generic apprenticeship in public and presents a programme of his later progress in irony, where he volition take the themes and techniques, isolated here, and combine them, reworking the clichés into poems that course the eye of the developing conventions of irony.
As for comedy, he appears to take needed no apprenticeship. The Devil and the Lady, written when he was fourteen, is so assured in mode and and so easy in development that it is, as anybody who mentions information technology says, "astonishing." There are youthful excesses, certainly, but also a surprising maturity, particularly in the poetic vision that could produce such a troubled and potentially night comedy. This is no piece of high-spirited merriment or confident satire, It begins in the Jonsonian manner, simply Tennyson seems quite uninterested in corrective satire, even at this early phase, and the comedy shortly moves across correction to a more unsettled and complex grade.
With Poems by Two Brothers, comedy is fabricated clearly subordinate, every bit the young poet begins to develop the materials of irony, Anyone reading through his contributions to this drove is bound to be struck by the poems' well-nigh uniform grimness. In simply well-nigh one-fourth of them is any sort of comic spirit evident, and even [15/16] there it is often rather bizarre. All the others, I call up, are deliberate and careful exercises in the ironic style.
To cite simply i case, "The Dell of E-" demonstrates Tennyson's experiments both with structural reversal and with the inversion or burlesque of comic principles. Exactly half of the poem asserts a unification of man and nature which is flatly denied by the other half The showtime stanza describes objectively the beauty the dell once possessed; the 2nd moves us closer to its restorative, calming powers. There is and then an abrupt switch to an paradigm of desolation. Human, it turns out, has destroyed what he needed almost. The final stanza goes on to climax this irony, suggesting that the trees may have been cut to build warships, that what once gave men joy at present functions as their killers, bearing "terror circular / The trembling earth" (ll. 51-52).
This double climax or "capping" is very mutual in Tennyson; he often adds a final and unexpected twist that brings the theme into focus abruptly and with a shock. That men set out to ravage their greatest friend is one irony; that they have transformed this friend into an instrument of death complements and intensifies the point. Only the verse form is quick to block any moralistic renderings of this perception. In fact, the real indicate of the poem is that there is no signal. We are not asked to reverberate that we ought not to do such things but to accept how sad and horrible information technology is that we do. The poem ends not with admonition, nor even with the ironic stupor discussed earlier, but with the understated reflection that the trees really served ameliorate in their previous state, that, instead of being used to kill, it would have been
lovelier, had they notwithstanding
Whispered unto the breezes with low sound,
And greenly flourished on their native hill. (ll. 52-54).
The effeminateness and simplicity of lovelier are deliberate, and they contain virtually of the force of the poem. This is decidedly non cosmetic irony — It sees simply the loveliness of Paradise and the applesauce of its loss; information technology never suggests that this loss can be recovered. While such themes are less blatantly announced and such reversals generally less sudden in Tennyson'due south mature poetry, the bones principles are adult here in Poems past Two Brothers.
Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and Poems(1832) are both more sophisticated and much more varied than Tennyson's contributions to Poems past Two Brothers, simply in the major poems of these two [16/17] volumes are the same dominance of the ironic mode and curious persistence of the comic that marked the before poems. What had been simple, nevertheless, at present becomes more than complex, and the deliberate separation of themes, images, and techniques now yields to combination and pinch. Tennyson has mastered the rudiments of irony and begins in these volumes to experiment with the various technical and thematic possibilities information technology allows him. Though many of these poems are imperfect, a few are every bit successful equally any poesy Tennyson was to write. Already with these early volumes, Tennyson reaches maturity in that form. His afterward ironic poems tend to become more subtle and even more than experimental; they expand the genre itself by challenging its limits. These 1830 and 1832 volumes, nonetheless, do more than merely prefigure Tennyson's major ironic work; they contain some of it.
Simply not much. That the apprenticeship phase of Poems by Ii Brothershas not been left entirely behind is credible in poems like "A Dirge," which deals starkly with the superiority of expiry to life, non in religious but in naturalistic terms. Co-ordinate to this view, life is and so horrible that the coffin seems like freedom and the gnawings of "the small cold worm" (l. 9) comfortable. Though the poem somewhat confusedly mixes this startling perception with incongruously comic lines that suggest the unification of the body with nature, the urgent rejection of life overrides any assurances. The desire for escape from the tangled ugliness of the world to the peace of death is voiced over and over in Tennyson: those most sensitive to life'south promise, he says, are those who are forced to refuse what now passes for life. The apparent simplicity of "A Dirge," then, covers a very remarkable and extreme appeal, the aforementioned ane that nosotros recognize after, in its full evolution, in such poems equally "The Lotos-Eaters." [17/xviii] the cardinal word to describe the most prevalent motive of nineteenth-century irony. By redefining man as the animate being with the power to append certainty, irony created the rootless man, not undefined but defined only by the trap lie is in, caught between every bit unavailable or unattractive alternatives.
Information technology is not, then, a thematic conflict betwixt belief and atheism that is presented and then much every bit the state of suspension acquired past that conflict. Tennyson displays here at its perfection a technique lie will often apply to demonstrate that suspension between alien worlds. In the climax of the verse form the speaker begins a prayer to God for mercy and enlightenment. At its start the prayer is graceful and undisturbed:
Allow thy pigeon
Shadow me over, and my sins
Be unremembered, and Thy honey
Enlighten me [ll. 180-83].
Equally the prayer goes on, however, the comic promise gradually modulates to bitterness, as the imagery becomes harsher and grimmer: "0 teach me yet / Somewhat before the heavy clod / Weighs on me, and the busy fret / Of that sharp-headed worm begins / In the gross blackness underneath" (ll. 183-87). The prayer thus contains its own hopeless antonym and mirrors the stasis of the narrator'due south mind. Hope and despair are held together in the ironic suspension of doubtfulness.
Calculation to this tension, finally, is the rhetorical altitude that is maintained.' Though the subject area matter of the verse form and much of the language are highly charged and highly personal, at that place is an farthermost cocky-consciousness at work that keeps the narrator himself at a curious remove from the personality examined. The narrator's capacity for self-criticism almost certainly separates him from usa and establishes a rhetorical tension between the strong quality of emotion and our sense of distance from information technology. Thus, much like the speaker, we are ourselves poised and unable to find an adequate release for the emotion raised.
Mariana
"Mariana" likewise portrays and engenders a suspended position. The poem is, in the start identify, remarkably adrift from its presumed Shakespearean source. As John Stuart Mill said, "At that place is no mere amplification; information technology is all product, and production from that single germ" ("Review"). It is certainly "all production," developing from an intense [twenty/21] and single-minded imaginative speculation on the curt and evocative phrase, "Mariana in the moated grange." By separating Shakespeare's character and so completely from the play, Tennyson achieves the intense focus that also makes the desolation seem uncaused. There is no point in looking to Mensurate for Measure outin club to find out why "he will not come," much less to determine that he will, every bit he does in the play, come after all, Here in that location is no narrative movement at all, the whole point being that Mariana's beloved is senselessly denied, that her fruition is cut off without reason. At to the lowest degree, past restricting the verse form to her baffled ignorance, Tennyson makes information technology clear that any reasons are radically disproportionate to the implications of pointless imprisonment. "He cometh non" is all that matters, and the poem thus develops die purity of a catholic statement of irony.
For though the poem is often treated as a moving-picture show of sheer pathos, a "giving in" to melancholy, our response is surely not and so simple and very definitely not and then easy and relaxed as the word melancholy would suggest. The poem seems to move to a climax, but information technology actually mocks climactic structures. The picture of a chains that cannot exist broken is created and reinforced past all the details of the poem: the thick, clogged opening lines, for instance, or the metrics of the refrain, where the quick, regular movement of "She only said, 'My life is dreary,/ He cometh not,' she said" is interrupted by the unexpected lethargy of the next line-"She said, 'I am aweary, aweary' — a line which not only suggests the very hopelessness and weariness information technology is talking virtually but also retards and thus emphasizes the decisive final line of the refrain — "I would that I were dead!"
Ane should besides annotation the brilliant manner in which Mariana'south heightened sensitivity is suggested: she both sharpens modest details and obliterates the stardom between big ones. She knows all about the patterns on the bark of the single poplar tree but confuses waking and sleeping states (11. 3o, 61). The distortion here [21/22] resembles that of nightmare, with its horrifying clarity of detail and its accented lack of boundaries, its absenteeism of familiar context. Similarly, her stasis is supported fifty-fifty by the slight ambiguity of "she only said," repeated in every refrain and suggesting either that this was all she said, or that all she did was to say this. It is an absorbing ambiguity that goes nowhere. There are no choices to be fabricated; either meaning is equally appropriate, or equally inappropriate. The notion of her doing nothing all 24-hour interval except saying this, or the notion that the terror of her situation evoked only this minimal response, strike usa as uncoordinated but equally applicable meanings.
Only in the image of desolation and weariness finally is balanced by the poem's remarkably strong support of Mariana'due south associations with youth, growth, and hope. The poem'due south irony is defined by the force per unit area of the undeniably just claims of love and comic promise against the equally undeniable fact of denial. The positive side is, of course, unsaid very strongly by the enveloping state of affairs: Mariana's youth and hope are supported past the fact that she is waiting for a lover, every bit they are likewise by her connection with a pastoral landscape (somewhat distorted, of form) and with romantic terms like "casement."
Primarily, though, the positive level is presented by inverting the usual images of comedy and the pastoral. The poem is filled with references to dazzler, club, and hope-all, of course, bitterly distorted only nonetheless there. The opening lines give a parody of a beauty that is ordered and controlled. Human's capacity for both enjoying and arranging nature is mocked in the image of sluggish decay overcoming the flower-plots, rust and disorder invading the advisedly controlled growth of the ornamental pear tree. The image of human being every bit master of nature's beauty is thrown against that of human being every bit victim of nature's anarchy.
Mariana, it must once more be insisted, is not caught past this last image simply; she is caught between the ii. On one hand at that place is the "blackest moss" but on the other is the poplar tree, one of the poem's most important symbols. In the midst of the dark and brackish waters of the marsh grows a single poplar tree, "all silver-dark-green" (l. 42), the simply relief in "the level waste, the rounding gray" (l. 44). One entire stariza (ll. 49-60) is devoted to the shadow of this tree and the implications of this teasing symbol of the growth [22/23] and promises that are denied her but are everpresent to her, falling "Upon her bed, beyond her brow" (l. 56), and making itself a office of her mind. It is a symbol of genuine hope that tin be neither claimed nor forgotten; it stands for all that makes release incommunicable for Mariana. Likewise supporting this mocking, positive side of the poem is the recurrence of the solar day's cycle, with each morning bringing a renewal of the bitter knowledge of what is not there and, more important, the taunting reference to "the sweet sky" (I. 15), a heaven of which she is constantly aware, even though it is closed to her.
This same conjunction of illusory hope and a noesis of hopelessness is mirrored in the intricate structure of the poem. The simply movement is the but apparent one inside actual stasis. Though the refrain does suggest a 18-carat development in its modify from "He cometh not" to "He will not come," we recognize that these are not actually separate perceptions, that they but state the tension that defines her unabridged beingness, the waiting with the certain knowledge that there is no signal in waiting. And we encounter, too, that is verse form is narrated from such a afar perspective as to draw not a climactic move simply a slice of life, a typical day with its recurrent hopelessness, rising to a finality that will be dissolved past the renewed hopeless hope of a new day. The activeness, then, is ironically recurrent, not tragically complete. The tragic simplicity of a climax is distorted to a conclusion merely of a mouse squeaking and a fly buzzing. The tragic sensibility has at present only these materials; merely trivia surround her.
This poem is a epitome of Tennysonian irony, formulating [23/24] many of the techniques and attitudes that appear later, but it is also a highly instinctive form of a vision which, even in afterwards poems, is often put more obtrusively. When the ironic dilemma is stated more than overtly, the poetry appears more obviously thematic, sometimes even thematically "divided." Because of this, it is easy, but I think wrong, to approach information technology every bit only dualistic. Such an approach ignores the potential unity provided by ironic tension. Tennyson is not on 1 side of the statement or the other; like all ironists, he is on neither side-and both.
"A Dream of Fair Women,"
A practiced example of a verse form that appears to exist but is not a "thesis poem" is "A Dream of Fair Women," which establishes its irony partly in reference to its credible source, Chaucer's The Legend of Good Women. Tennyson's poem resembles Chaucer's only superficially; the earlier poet's comforting, stable framework is removed, and the cosmic resonance of the tales, comforting or not, is implicitly denied. Taking the place of Chaucer's coherent series of portraits of faithfulness, beloved, and tragedy, Tennyson's group emphasizes the discontinuity of history and the pointlessness of presumed grandeur. The catastrophes hither are either paltry or uncaused. The ironic conjunction is put immediately in the deceptively limpid introductory lines:
In every state
I saw, wherever low-cal illumineth,
Beauty and anguish walking manus in hand
The downward slope to death. [ll. xiii-xvi]
What ties the portraits together is the "hand in mitt" wedlock of beauty and anguish. In that location is no further thematic point.
The dream itself takes place in the mocking familiarity of the narrator'southward retentiveness, a continual symbol in Tennyson for comedy, here used to create a distorting framework: "The odor of violets, subconscious in the green,/ Poured back into my empty soul and [24/25] frame / The times when I remember to have been /blithesome and free from blame" (ll. 77-80). And all this happy nostalgia prefaces a nightmare. The commencement figure, Helen, begins past putting in clipped, asunder, and very dramatic phrases the essence of her ironic function. Because she was beautiful, carnage resulted: "Where'er I came / I brought calamity" (ll. 95-96). Though the narrator naïvely tries to twist this into a romantic framework, claiming that he besides would accept died for such a face, such escapes are disallowed. He is presently overwhelmed by the march of hideous and meaningless deaths: Iphigenia relates the grim, realistic details of the pocketknife moving "through my tender throat" (l. 115) in a cede which led merely to further desolation; Cleopatra reduces her potentially tragic position to ludicrous capriciousness, saying that death really is not then bad except that "I take no men to govern in this wood: / That makes my only woe" (ll. 135-36). She turns her grand suicide into an deed of petty revenge: "Of the other [Caesar]: with a worm I balked his fame. /What else was left?" (ll. 155-56).
Jephtha's daughter, who follows, is the most circuitous case of all. Her sacrifice had depended on a grisly kind of gambling, her father having promised God that for victory over the children of Ammon he would impale the first person he saw leaving his house to run across him. Though she continues later on death to defend her male parent and to proclaim the rightness of God'due south law, the narrator ignores all this and responds just to the monstrousness of the situation:
My words leapt forth: 'Heaven heads the count of crimes
With that wild oath.'[ll. 201-02]
The absurdity of Jephtha's sacrifice is that perceived past Browning's Caliban, for whom divine justice is represented past the determination to murder every twenty-first crab: "Let twenty laissez passer, and rock the twenty-outset, / Loving non, hating not, merely choosing then." The girl's pathetic defence of her murderer is further undercut past a long simile comparing her voice to the sound of a "holy organ" in a cathedral. The Christian context mocks the Old Testament ruthlessness without offering whatsoever further hope, for the last distressing portrait is of the Christian Rosamond, "whom men call fair" (fifty. 251).
The poem ends with a typical ironic capping: the naive narrator adds that he unfortunately woke before the expert function of the dream, [25/26] before he was able to come across Margaret Roper, Joan of Arc, or Edward I's married woman, Eleanor, "who knew that Dear can shell Expiry" (fifty. 269). The ingenuous persona blandly makes the signal that all heroic and comic aspects of expiry are denied. The concluding gruesome twist is his complaint that poetic language is bereft to describe his dream. Such language is also pure; it fails to provide adequate tension, particularly "to requite the biting of the sugariness" (l. 286)-equally if the terrible vision we have just seen has been "sweet."
Accompanying this irony is a persistent strain of comedy, which is establish here in many poems, most of which are deliberately understated, self-conscious, and very calorie-free in touch. The self-parodying "O Darling Room" seems simply an extreme of this, not, as Croker assumed, too ridiculously self-indulgent and self-centered, but rather too discrete, cocky-aware, and apologetically trivial. just equally specialized and partial is the comic impulse behind a poem like "Lilian," which plays off against the slavish adoration implied in about of the poems in this extended female gallery — "Isabel," "Adeline," "Madeline," and so along-past treating the tinkling laughter of the brutal "Airy, fairy Lilian" (fifty. 1) as a cause for irritation rather than romantic lethargy. Instead of being mastered by her gay coquetry, the lover adopts a masterful tone himself, alert her that lie is becoming so borcd with her laughing that if praying won't stop her he will stomp on her, "crush" her. There is a limited but 18-carat comic satisfaction provided here, not simply in the caricatural of the essentially ironic lover-slave tradition, merely in the bolstering of the human (especially the male) ego by suggesting that the volition can command whatever emotion.
"The Mermaid" and "The Merman"
In that location are instances of much fuller and genuinely liberating comedy in these volumes, most notably in the lovely paired poems, "The Mermaid" and "The Merman." These poems confront explicitly the prototype of the isolated self and motility to the celebration of joy and union. Both poems open with a brief stanza that is part invitation, function pure song, emphasizing both the beauty (thrones, golden crowns or curls) and the loneliness ("Sitting alone, / Singing alone") of the magical state enjoyed by, the mer-creatures. The second stanza not merely admits the isolation but emphasizes it, carefully restricting information technology, even so, to the daytime, to the rational, dutiful part of the merman's life, and the self-absorbed breach of the mermaid. This admission out of the way, the full strength of the [26/27] poem can fall on the nighttime life, the life of the consummate imaginative self, of irrational fulfillment:
Oh! what a happy life were mine
Under the hollow-hung sea greenish!
Soft are the moss-beds under the sea;
Nosotros would live merrily, merrily. ["The Merman," ll. 37-40]
It is true that the merman and mermaid envision somewhat different nighttime paradises: his is free, open, promiscuous — "I would osculation them often under the ocean, / And kiss them again till they kissed me" (ll. 34-35) — while hers is quieter and more controlled"But the rex of them all would bear me, / Woo me, and win me, and ally me" (ll. 45-46). Only there is no existent conflict here; the discrepancy is part of the gentle joke, bringing up the extra force of the one-act-of-manners sexual boxing to support the chief Edenic comedy. More important, this compartmentalization of the solitary from the communal cocky is an important strategy and an important part of comedy'southward answer to irony. The poems here admit the argument that all men are isolated, simply they come across that isolation just as a past of a multiplicity of conditions, a multiplicity, furthermore, which contains not only isolation but happiness and freedom. The ironic strategy is to focus and solidify; comedy's is to expand and gratis, to reject entirely the absolutism of irony.
Simply one-act is merely equally susceptible to attack from irony, and it is certainly more usual in Tennyson to discover the comic solution subverted. The ironic poems are oftentimes generically pure; the comic poems very seldom are. One may offer plausible biographical or sociological reasons for this fact, but simpler reasons are implicit inside the forms. Irony is based on parody and thus is, in a way, parasitic. Information technology is, farther, defensive and hides its premises; comedy, at its best, is expansive and exposes all its secrets. When the ii modes are competing, every bit in Tennyson, it is difficult for comedy to survive. Irony with a comic twist results in the sheer peculiarity of "Mariana in the South;" one-act transformed to irony results in the compatible power of "Mariana."
This ability of irony to attack comedy is more conspicuously illustrated in the contrasting poems, "The Poet" and "The Poet'southward Mind." "The Poet" is certainly a comic poem, though exclusively public and social in its emphasis. Nevertheless, it provides a strong and effective image of the forcefulness of poetry, expressed in the specifically comic terms, "hope," "youth," "spring." The one thousand object is to recapture. Eden, non but for the poet but for the unabridged globe: "Thus truth was [27/28] multiplied on truth, the globe / Similar ane keen garden showed" (ll. 33-34)- It would be an Eden ruled by the expansive goddess of comedy, "Freedom" (fifty. 37).
But "The Poet's Listen" shows a garden that is shrunken and delicate, threatened by a very dangerous enemy: the rational heed, the dry and shallow wit of the "dark-browed sophist" (l. eight), The flowers "would faint" (50. fifteen), the plants would be fated, the "merry bird" would be killed (ll. 22 23) if the sophist were to enter. Well-nigh important, the source of all this life and joy, the large fountain in the center, fed "from the brain of the purple mountain" (l. 29) and recalling the great symbol for poetic free energy in "Kubla Khan," would itself "shrink to the globe if you came in" (50. 37). Great images of power, lightning and thunder, are associated with this frail and threatened fountain
In the center leaps a fountain
Similar canvas lightning,
E'er brightening
With a depression melodious thunder. [ll. 24-27]
Merely in that location seems to be only an illusory wedlock of power and beauty, only a faint echo of the confident and unendangered voice of Wisdom set loose past the garden in "The Poet": "Her [Wisdom'south] words did get together thunder as they ran, / And as the lightning to the thunder . . . / And then was their pregnant to her words" (ll. 49-50, 53). "The Poet'due south Heed" is thus an inversion of "The Poet;" it suggests the ironic trap that may wait the besides-certain vision of comedy.
Though comedy never entirely disappears and though it later reaches full expression in Tennyson's poetry, it is irony which came to dominate his writing of this menstruum. It controls Poems by Ii Brothers, the volumes of 1830 and 1832, and, to an even greater extent, Poems of 1842.
Web version created March 2001
Terminal modified viii August 2016
O Darling Room Poem Answers,
Source: https://victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/kincaid/ch2.html
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