Alfred, Lord tennyson - Selected Poems (Penguin) - Poetry

This is the first of nine threads on the work of Tennyson.

This is an audiobook, with commentary and biography interspersed with his poems.

This is the Penguin “Selected Poems,” well presented and excellently read by (amongst others) Derek Jacobi and Prunella Scales.

Tennyson's power to evoke beauty itself acts as an intoxicant - in the amber light and languid air of some inhuman paradise Lotos-eaters, with the hypnotically vivid perceptions of drugged isolates, gaze upon and are absorbed by the blue screen of sea and sky - each day the same day in this foreshadowing of our post-modern Neverland....

Sun reflects off gleaming armour and is captured in a mirror world of images - the hermetically sealed consciousness that lives a life of shadows....

In a cold marble palace infinitely aged immortality, yearning for death, broods on universal process....

The hard, heroic will, that once fought “far on the ringing plains of windy Troy”, now, in the face of the infinitely open sea, contemplates the ultimate experience of oblivion....

Beneath the nostalgia and long persistent note of melancholy, the extremes of subjectivity, sloughs of abysmal meaninglessness, anxious vertigos and trance-like states, we sense a region of dread and doubt . Deep, buried emotion, like the Kraken, threatens to burst the dark, dissembling surface.

If at times he lapses into somnambulism, ingrown convolutions and bad patriotic verse no one today would casually remark upon his “stupidity” or describe his verse as thoughtless melody.

Poetry

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