Sunday Pages: "Locksley Hall—Sixty Years After"

A poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Dear Reader,

Britain’s longest-tenured Poet Laureate was born Alfred Tennyson in 1809. He remained plain-old Alfred Tennyson—possibly an Al, probably a Freddie—until age 72, when Queen Victoria, at the behest of his longtime “frenemy,” the Prime Minister William Gladstone, created him “Baron Tennyson, of Aldworth in the County of Sussex and of Freshwater in the Isle of Wight.” By then, he’d been a published poet, famous and much beloved, for half a century.

Al/Freddie was “very peculiar looking,” the Queen wrote in her diary after meeting him for the first time—“tall, dark, with a fine head, long black flowing hair & a beard, oddly dressed, but there is no affectation about him.” The affectation would come later, after 1884, when the comma and the “Lord” were inserted into the middle of his name, forever changing what we call him. History’s funny that way. A century from now, I wonder, will lovers of music refer to the famous and much beloved Beatle only as Sir Paul McCartney?

Tennyson’s father was a wife-beating drunk with a big brain but bigger ambitions, well enough off but not as successful as he wanted to be. A rector at work and a tyrant at home, he had eleven children that survived into adulthood, most of them suffering from various mental health issues, including chronic depression and drug and alcohol addiction. In his teenage years Alfred escaped his miserable household, fleeing to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he wrote poetry, briefly joined a secret society called The Apostles, and ran in the same circles as Gladstone, the future PM. Both men were friends with the B.M.O.C., the brilliant Renaissance Man Arthur Henry Hallam. Hallam’s death—young and tragic—informed much of Tennyson’s most evocative work, including his 1850 book-length elegy “In Memoriam A.H.H.”, from which comes one of the best-known lines in all of English poetry, so oft-quoted it is practically a cliché:

I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
’Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

Tennyson also wrote “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” the “Stairway to Heaven” of Victorian poetry, after learning of a military mishap during the Crimean War.

He was odd, as the Queen noted (her observations about people were generally, and royally, astute)—odd and peculiar. Probably Michael Shannon plays him in the movie. He drank too much, and did a lot of drugs, and could never quite shake the dread of poverty, even in his advanced years, when he was sufficiently wealthy. He experienced a great deal of loss in his long life, including the death of his son Lionel, who was drowned in a shipwreck off the Arabian Sea.

Alfred Tennyson by Elliott & Fry, ca 1868.

I have Tennyson on the brain, not because I use the rousing end of “Ulysses” as an epigraph to my 2018 Trump/Russia book Dirty Rubles, but because his poem “Locksley Hall” is alluded to in Marathon Man, the Dustin Hoffman/Laurence Olivier classic I re-watched this week. (If you haven’t seen the film in a while, as I had not, stream it ASAP; you’re welcome.) In the movie, Hoffman plays a graduate student who is writing his doctoral thesis on fascism. His grouchy professor quotes a line (“Let us hush this cry of ‘Forward’ till ten thousand years have gone”), asks the handful of students to name the author, becomes irritated when none of them know—and we see Hoffman write and then cross out “Tennyson” and “Locksley Hall” on the back of his spiral notebook.

As it turns out, the line is not from “Locksley Hall” but from a later poem, “Locksley Hall—Sixty Years After,” published in 1886, when Tennyson was 78. In the original poem, published in 1835 but likely written years earlier, our narrator, then a young man of 20, walks the grounds of the ancestral place, ruminating on his ill-fated love life (a mutually-shared passion for his sickly cousin, who bore the very un-Victorian-English name of Amy), lamenting much about the world and his place in it, and generally exhibiting the 19th century iteration of teenage angst.

Part Deux—the 1886 “Sequel” to 1836’s “Taxi”—finds him once again walking the grounds of Locksley Hall, speaking ostensibly to his grandson but really to himself, taking stock of his life at 80 years old. Checking in at 282 lines (or 141 rhyming couplets of trochaic octameter, which, if he were more generous with the line breaks, is basically 564 four-beat lines, or, if you prefer, 2,256 trochees—but who’s counting?), “Sixty Years After” is a long poem that toggles between expressing his own individual emotions and sharing a more universal wisdom-of-age.

The poem is worth reading in its entirety, which you can do here, but for today’s purposes, and at the risk of ruining its careful narrative structure, I am going to boil it down to the more essential lines: first, because I’m not as interested in his personal narrative, which can get a bit cloying, and second, because parts of “Sixty Years Later” are cringingly racist and not a little misogynistic—although this couplet

Cross’d! for once he sail’d the sea to crush the Moslem in his pride;
Dead the warrior, dead his glory, dead the cause in which he died.

is a bit more topical this morning than it was 24 hours ago.

After 70 opening lines—I told you it was long!—in which Tennyson sets the scene, introduces the grandson, and waxes poetic on the long-dead Amy and his actual wife, Edith, who is also dead, as well as his dead parents and dead son, the heart of the poem begins. This is the section where we find the excerpt referenced in Marathon Man:

Truth for truth, and good for good! The Good, the True, the Pure, the Just;
Take the charm ‘For ever’ from them, and they crumble into dust.

Gone the cry of ‘Forward, Forward,’ lost within a growing gloom;
Lost, or only heard in silence from the silence of a tomb.

Half the marvels of my morning, triumphs over time and space,
Staled by frequence, shrunk by usage into commonest commonplace!

‘Forward’ rang the voices then, and of the many mine was one.
Let us hush this cry of ‘Forward’ till ten thousand years have gone.

Go back ten thousand years, he suggests, and what has changed in the interval? Are we any better off now than in the days of the “vanish’d races” written of in the Hebrew Bible? What horror has Western Civilization wrought? What has Christianity?

Far among the vanish’d races, old Assyrian kings would flay
Captives whom they caught in battle—iron-hearted victors they.

Ages after, while in Asia, he that led the wild Moguls,
Timur built his ghastly tower of eighty thousand human skulls,

Then, and here in Edward’s time, an age of noblest English names,
Christian conquerors took and flung the conquer’d Christian into flames.

Love your enemy, bless your haters, said the Greatest of the great;
Christian love among the Churches look’d the twin of heathen hate.

From the golden alms of Blessing man had coin’d himself a curse:
Rome of Caesar, Rome of Peter, which was crueller? which was worse?

Go back and read the last two lines again. Dig that beautiful metaphor of minting a cursèd coin out of something pure and good! Man has taken God’s golden blessing and ruined it—tarnished it with avarice!

Humankind strives for goodness, for greatness, for perfection, but time and again loses its way:

Hope was ever on her mountain, watching till the day begun
Crown’d with sunlight—over darkness—from the still unrisen sun.

Have we grown at last beyond the passions of the primal clan?
‘Kill your enemy, for you hate him,’ still, ‘your enemy’ was a man.

Have we sunk below them? …Are we devils? are we men?
Sweet St. Francis of Assisi, would that he were here again,

He that in his Catholic wholeness used to call the very flowers
Sisters, brothers—and the beasts—whose pains are hardly less than ours!

Here, Tennyson gives what amounts to a brilliant and poetical shrug emoji:

Chaos, Cosmos! Cosmos, Chaos! who can tell how all will end!
Read the wide world’s annals, you, and take their wisdom for your friend.

Hope the best, but hold the Present fatal daughter of the Past,
Shape your heart to front the hour, but dream not that the hour will last.

Ay, if dynamite and revolver leave you courage to be wise:
When was age so cramm’d with menace? madness? written, spoken lies?

That last line hits different now, in the Trump Redux, when menace, madness, and lies written, spoken (and lies tweeted, Truth Social’d) are everywhere around us. So do these next four lines:

Chaos, Cosmos! Cosmos, Chaos! once again the sickening game;
Freedom, free to slay herself, and dying while they shout her name.

Step by step we gain’d a freedom known to Europe, known to all;
Step by step we rose to greatness,—thro’ the tonguesters we may fall.

“Tonguesters” is a pretty spot-on coinage for internet trolls and full-of-sound-and-fury MAGA maniacs—to say nothing of the small-minded (and short-fingered) monster who leads us to ill-advised war with his noisome deceit.

Tennyson gives voice to what will become the entire MAGA ethos, presciently denouncing the United States of 2025:

You that woo the Voices—tell them ‘old experience is a fool,’
Teach your flatter’d kings that only those who cannot read can rule.

Pluck the mighty from their seat, but set no meek ones in their place;
Pillory Wisdom in your markets, pelt your offal at her face.

Tumble Nature heel o’er head, and, yelling with the yelling street,
Set the feet above the brain and swear the brain is in the feet.

Bring the old dark ages back without the faith, without the hope,
Break the State, the Church, the Throne, and roll their ruins down the slope.

What writers are supposed to do in these dark times, the poet explains, is tell the truth about what’s happening—without reticence or reverence for authority. Expose them! Shine a light on their fuckery! Make the world behold the naked emperor!

Authors—atheist, essayist, novelist, realist, rhyme-ster, play your part,
Paint the mortal shame of nature with the living hues of Art.

Rip your brothers’ vices open, strip your own foul passions bare;
Down with Reticence, down with Reverence—forward—naked—let them stare.

Feed the budding rose of boyhood with the drainage of your sewer;
Send the drain into the fountain, lest the stream should issue pure…

Do your best to charm the worst, to lower the rising race of men;
Have we risen from out the beast, then back into the beast again?

Only ‘dust to dust’ for me that sicken at your lawless din,
Dust in wholesome old-world dust before the newer world begin.

At this point of what amounts to a long soliloquy, the narrator’s bored grandson is rolling his proto-Gen-Z eyes at the old man’s fury. There is the implication that the young man says something to the effect of, “Geez, Pops, you’re a bit heated. Maybe take it down a peg?” But the old man will have none of that:

Heated am I? you—you wonder—well, it scarce becomes mine age—
Patience! let the dying actor mouth his last upon the stage.

Cries of unprogressive dotage ere the dotard fall asleep?
Noises of a current narrowing, not the music of a deep?

Ay, for doubtless I am old, and think gray thoughts, for I am gray:
After all the stormy changes shall we find a changeless May?

Then he expounds on that last stray thought, allowing himself, at long last, to imagine a brighter, better future (cue the John Lennon piano):

After madness, after massacre, Jacobinism and Jacquerie,
Some diviner force to guide us thro’ the days I shall not see?

When the schemes and all the systems, Kingdoms and Republics fall,
Something kindlier, higher, holier—all for each and each for all?

All the full-brain, half-brain races, led by Justice, Love, and Truth;
All the millions one at length, with all the visions of my youth?

All diseases quench’d by Science, no man halt, or deaf or blind;
Stronger ever born of weaker, lustier body, larger mind?

Earth at last a warless world, a single race, a single tongue,
I have seen her far away—for is not Earth as yet so young?—

Every tiger madness muzzled, every serpent passion kill’d,
Every grim ravine a garden, every blazing desert till’d,

Robed in universal harvest up to either pole she smiles,
Universal ocean softly washing all her warless Isles.

(Note: If we go back and review this last section, we may observe that everything Trump is now doing runs counter to Tennyson’s hopeful vision of comfort, peace, prosperity, and kindness.)

He’s looking up at the sky now, at all the countless stars in the heavens:

…Might we not in glancing heavenward on a star so silver-fair,
Yearn, and clasp the hands and murmur, ‘Would to God that we were there’?

Forward, backward, backward, forward, in the immeasurable sea,
Sway’d by vaster ebbs and flows than can be known to you or me.

All the suns—are these but symbols of innumerable man,
Man or Mind that sees a shadow of the planner or the plan?

He wonders if evil is (literally) universal or peculiar to this cursèd planet:

Is there evil but on earth? or pain in every peopled sphere?
Well be grateful for the sounding watchword, ‘Evolution’ here.

Tennyson is writing in 1886, a quarter century and change after the publication of On the Origin of the Species. Darwin, and his theory of natural selection, was all the rage among the Victorian cognoscenti—and with it, the implicit belief that nature was always correcting itself. Always improving. Always evolving. But reflecting on the transits of his life, he sees only retrograde motion:

Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good,
And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud.

What are men that He should heed us? cried the king of sacred song;
Insects of an hour, that hourly work their brother insect wrong,

While the silent Heavens roll, and Suns along their fiery way,
All their planets whirling round them, flash a million miles a day.

Many an Æon moulded earth before her highest, man, was born,
Many an Æon too may pass when earth is manless and forlorn,

Earth so huge, and yet so bounded—pools of salt, and plots of land—
Shallow skin of green and azure—chains of mountain, grains of sand!

Only That which made us, meant us to be mightier by and by,
Set the sphere of all the boundless Heavens within the human eye,

Sent the shadow of Himself, the boundless, thro’ the human soul;
Boundless inward, in the atom, boundless outward, in the Whole.

As above, so below.

Science, technology, progress, industry—for all of the achievements of humankind in Victorian England, one only need look as far as the slums of London to see that we have a long ways to go:

…Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the Time,
City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?

There among the glooming alleys Progress halts on palsied feet,
Crime and hunger cast our maidens by the thousand on the street.

There the Master scrimps his haggard sempstress of her daily bread,
There a single sordid attic holds the living and the dead.

There the smouldering fire of fever creeps across the rotted floor,
And the crowded couch of incest in the warrens of the poor.

Incest is hardly unique to the poor, but whatever.

Nay, your pardon, cry your ‘forward,’ yours are hope and youth, but I—
Eighty winters leave the dog too lame to follow with the cry,

Lame and old, and past his time, and passing now into the night;
Yet I would the rising race were half as eager for the light.

I choose to interpret “rising race” as meaning “next generation,” and not a white supremacist’s ugly belief that the world is going to hell because of the advancement of Black and brown people—although, shamefully, it can be read that way, too.

Light the fading gleam of Even? light the glimmer of the dawn?
Aged eyes may take the growing glimmer for the gleam withdrawn.

Far away beyond her myriad coming changes earth will be
Something other than the wildest modern guess of you and me.

And then, much to his grandson’s relief, he winds it down:

…Poor old voice of eighty crying after voices that have fled!
All I loved are vanish’d voices, all my steps are on the dead.

All the world is ghost to me, and as the phantom disappears,
Forward far and far from here is all the hope of eighty years.

And after a bit more lamenting, he closes with:

Ere she [the Earth] gain her Heavenly-best, a God must mingle with the game:
Nay, there may be those about us whom we neither see nor name,

Felt within us as ourselves, the Powers of Good, the Powers of Ill,
Strewing balm, or shedding poison in the fountains of the Will.

Follow you the Star that lights a desert pathway, yours or mine.
Forward, till you see the highest Human Nature is divine.

Follow Light, and do the Right—for man can half-control his doom—
Till you find the deathless Angel seated in the vacant tomb.

Forward, let the stormy moment fly and mingle with the Past.
I that loathed, have come to love him. Love will conquer at the last.

(The actual last two lines—lines 281 and 282—are a denouement, so I’ve cut them.)

I’m not certain what is the antecedent of “him” in that last quoted line. Does this refer to “the Past”? The “deathless Angel”? I don’t think it’s God, because “him” is not capitalized. I like to think Tennyson here means his fellow man (and not, because he was kind of a sexist, his fellow woman). He used to despise humankind and now, at the end of his life, he realizes that, in spite of or perhaps because of eight decades of loss and woe, the opposite is true. When the curtain closes and the music stops, he understands, finally, that the most powerful force in all the universe, and thus the ultimate victor, is Love.

What I most appreciate about “Sixty Years After” is the emotional peaks and valleys, the lurching swings of mood that mirror real life. He is not an optimist, although he is often hopeful; nor is he a pessimist, despite his clear-eyed view of the downside of earthly existence. He is complex, full of change, constantly evolving, constantly mutating, and still, at 80, struggling to make sense of it all.

He is, in short, human.

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ICYMI

We served The Five 8 “neat” this Friday: no guest, just me and LB. We talked about a lot of stuff, because this was quite the week:

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Photo credit: Etchings from a 19th century edition of “Locksley Hall.”