'Your Presence Will Be Sun in Winter'

There is no right way to first encounter a writer. If my experience is worth anything, it’s best to meet him early, far from the classroom and syllabus, perhaps in the stacks of a library or at a garage sale. Budding readers learn to rely on the unlikeliest acts of serendipity. Tennyson I met thanks to a card game, a variation on Go Fish called Authors. I remember Twain, Longfellow, Dickens and Louisa May Alcott. Memory tricks me into thinking William Cullen Bryant was part of the deck, but that seems not to be the case. Twain and Dickens I had already read but something made me curious about Tennyson. I probably found a selection of his work at the library and clearly remember buying a used paperback copy of Idylls of the King, a strange choice because the Arthurian legend has otherwise never much interested me.

It’s good to start early with Tennyson, one of those tireless, industrious Victorians. He was hugely prolific and requires a lifetime to read. Like Wordsworth, he wrote too much and much of what he wrote is bombastic and dull, but sifting discloses wonders and sifting takes time. I defy a reader not to declaim “Milton”:

“O mighty-mouth’d inventor of harmonies,

O skill’d to sing of Time or Eternity,

     God-gifted organ-voice of England,

          Milton, a name to resound for ages . . .”

 or “Crossing the Bar”:

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place

      The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

      When I have crost the bar.”

or “To the Rev. F. D. Maurice”:

“Come, when no graver cares employ,    

Godfather, come and see your boy:         

  Your presence will be sun in winter,      

Making the little one leap for joy.”

Tennyson was born on this date, Aug. 6, in 1809 (annus mirabilis, so were Lincoln and Darwin). Josh, my oldest son, was born on this date in 1987. Happy birthday, Josh and Alfred.