The Victorian Age was one of immense changes at all levels of British society. The lower classes underwent an intense shift away from the traditionally rural lifestyle to that of the new urbanization of the latter part of the British Industrial Revolution. The subsequent negative side-effects this had on the pace of people's lives, the environment, and society as a whole caused major negative reactions and divisions within the populace. The early part of the era, known as the Time of Troubles, saw large-scale unrest and rioting before broad reforms of the political system occurred. The arts were not spared this upheaval; many Victorian writers and artists commented directly on the social turmoil of the period, and all were shaped by it in one form or another.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson's most famously political works came in the latter parts of his career: "Charge of the Light Brigade" was published in 1854, and the Norton Anthology of English Literature notes that in the second half of his career there was "[A]n increased shrillness of tone [...] Tennyson realiz[ed] that he, like Charles Dickens, had a vast public behind him to back up his pronouncements" (1110). Sypher notes Tennyson's bombastic, jingoistic voice in the poems of "Maud" and "The Defense of Lucknow" (Sypher 101). Tennyson's earlier works, however, including "Mariana," "The Lady of Shalott," and "The Lotos-Eaters," are instructive to his reaction to the Industrial Revolution and creeping modernization in a different way than his later, obviously politically-charged and generally supportive of the British Empire poems, in their use of repetition, rhyme, vocabulary, and meter to evoke a slower, softer mode than the modern, rushed milieu that Tennyson found himself writing in, and casting Tennyson as in opposition to the changes that were occurring all around him.
"Mariana" is the first of these three poems, published early in Tennyson's career, in 1830. The main character, the poem's eponymous Mariana from the Shakespeare play Measure of Measure, awaits her lover in a rotting outbuilding. The descriptions are striking in their ability to present an appearance of lethargy: "crusted," "rusted," "unlifted," "weeded" in the sense of full of weeds, not the modern clear of weeds, and "moated." All these verbs occur in the first stanza, and all share the past-tense rhyming ending of -ed, giving the stanza a slothful feeling with just this internal assonance. The repetition continues: in the closing four lines of the stanza, which they themselves are repeated with small variations on every stanza of the poem, Mariana is described as speaking with the word "said" three times for two lines, one quote by her buttressed on both sides with the word. "She only said, 'my life is dreary, / He cometh not,' she said;" (9-10) This is extreme repetition, almost annoying to the ear. This repetition helps the poem seem to be rooted in place even as it's being read; in a sense, the poem is staying conservative and reactionary.
Reistley notes in Language and Structure in Tennyson's Poetry that Tennyson used long and short syllables to great effect throughout his poetry, and especially so in "Mariana."
"Tennyson understood, perhaps better than any English poet before him, the importance of length of vowel and syllable in English verse. [...] A line filled with long syllables will move more slowly than one made up of long ones. Blocks of consonants, sustained consonants such as nasals, long open vowels, all retard the line" (Reistley 29).
Long vowels are featured prominently throughout the poem; "Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn" (31), "Upon her bed, across her brow" (56), "Old voices called her from without" (68). That final line is the culmination of a sequence of three lines that all begin with "Old," and the line before that starting with a similar long-O sound, "Or from the crevice peered about" (65). The end-line rhymes of the poem make it feel even slower. They are consistently relatively simple rhymes, sometimes rhyming words that only a letter different; in the fifth stanza, for example, Tennyson rhymes "away" with "sway" and "cell" with "fell" (50-54). All of these long vowels serve to slow down the poem's reading speed and force the reader to linger, especially if the poem is being read aloud. This can be read as a reaction to the rapidly increasing pace of modern English life at the opening of the Victorian Era. By forcing the reader to take in the poem at a more leisurely pace than they might otherwise be inclined to, Tennyson imposed his more rural, traditional values on his reader.
In a similar fashion, "The Lady of Shalott," written in the years 1830 to 1831, uses simplistic rhyme schemes and extremely similar words to retard the sense of speed in the poem. The metaphoric image of the lady isolated on her shadowed isle is also one that bears close examination.
"Lie / rye / sky / by" are the four end-rhymes that the poem begins with, followed by the shorter "go / blow / below" (1-8). All extremely simple, but Tennyson exploits this simplicity here, and throughout the rest of the poem's similar rhyming, to give the poem a feeling of stasis. The effect of all those homophonic words is to delay the forward movement of the poem; with these rhymes, the poem has the auditory quirk of sounding like it's looping back on itself, like a skipping record.
Outside of the metrical aspects of the poem, the Lady of Shalott lives a life that is filled with meaning for the reader. Her dwelling of "four gray walls, and four gray tower" (15) suggests the newly urbanized life of the industrial worker, living not in nature in the countryside, as they traditionally would have, but instead living with buildings looming overhead, chained to their manufacturing job. It is not coincidental that the Industrial Revolution's first major changes were in the textile industry and that the poor Lady works all day at her loom. Hellstrom, in On the Poems of Tennyson, points out that when the Lady leaves the tower, and the curse is brought upon her,
"Her choice is both a positive choice of the world outside and a rejection of the world inside the tower, and it is her choice that brings upon her the curse. [...] It also frees the Lady, if not from the 'cruel immortality' of Tithonus, at least from a kind of death-in-life. [...] There has been no life in the tower" (Hellstrom13).
The "shadows of the world" (48) that the Lady sees at her loom are not enough for a good life, Tennyson points out, and have little substance. The "colors gay" of the weavings she makes are no substitute for being in the natural world, as exemplified by the vitality of the court of Camelot and Lancelot's direct gaze. The vibrancy of the description of the dashing Lancelot, in particular, with the "dazzling" sun "flamed upon the brazen greaves" (75-76) , his "golden Galaxy" (84) bridle, his "thick-jeweled" (92) leather. Here is the true beauty of man, astride a horse, amid the nature of the barley fields. The towers and walls of Shalott can not hold a candle to this reality.
The sailors of "The Lotos-Eaters" have the same problem with reality as the Lady of Shalott. It is in "The Lotos-Eaters" that Tennyson reaches the apex of his slow-rhyming style. The first and third lines of the poem rhyme "land" with itself, a technique which makes little sense within traditional poetry, but fulfills Tennyson's desire to create poems that seem to exist apart from time, instead twisting back on themselves. "The Lotos blooms / The Lotos blows" (145-146) starts two lines within the Choric Song, the repetition here enforcing the ennui of the existence that the sailors are rebelling against. The rhyme scheme never attempts to do anything surprising for the reader, and falls into extremely simple patterns, with the rhymes themselves never ending up being challenging. The meter is in a lock-step iambic pattern, which is almost hypnotically regular. A tired reader might read themselves asleep with these designs.
The problem that one encounters in interpreting "The Lotos-Eaters" as an attack on Victorian earnestness is that the source of this myth, The Odyssey, treats the deserting sailors as behaving wrongly (Hellstrom15). To interpret their actions as positive, or encouraged, requires the reader to set aside this original connotation of their actions and read only Tennyson's work, which presents the sailors as giving rationalizations for their abandonment of the quest homeward, rationalizations which seem to be rather strong. The tenderness with which Tennyson treats the sailors, and the reasonableness of their complaint, would lend credence to this. Stanza six of the Choric Song is the core of their argument: There's nothing left for us at home, so why bother returning there? To look at it another way, and treat the sailors' resting point as their new home, they can be seen as arguing against foreign excursions, and against, in that case, the concept of the British Empire at all. What folly, they say, there is in wandering afield at all; "O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more" (173).
Tennyson was a man for whom the speed and chaos of the Victorian Era was simply too much, too fast. His reaction to this greatly informed his poetry, including poetry that is not obviously political. In the three poems "Mariana," "The Lady of Shalott," and "The Lotos-Eaters," Tennyson uses the poetic forms to react to the speed of urban life by forcing the reader to slow down while reading the poems. The dichotomy of the urban towers of the isle of the Lady in "The Lady of Shalott" are contrasted with the traditional idyllic rural world of the knights of the tales of King Arthur. The sailors of "The Lotos-Eaters" reject wholesale the striving, earnest life of Odysseus for the rest and nihilism of the Lotos plant. In many ways, then, in his early works Tennyson was less a cheerleader for the earnestness of the Victorian Age and instead resided in loyal opposition to the ways of modernity and industrialization.
Citations
- Hellstrom, Ward. On the Poems of Tennyson. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1972.
- Priestly, F. L. E.. Language and Structure in Tennyson's Poetry. London: William Clowes & Sons, Limited, 1973.
- Sypher, F. J.. "Politics in the Poetry of Tennyson." Victorian Poetry 14, 2(1976) 101-112. 30 Mar 2009 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/40002376>.
- Poem page and line numbers are from the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth Edition.