'The Etherial Satisfaction of the Recitationist'

“. . . the old year lies a-dying. / Old year you must not die; / You came to us so readily, / You lived with us so steadily, / Old year you shall not die.” 

I sometimes have to remind myself how much I enjoy and respect Tennyson, though he's not Shakespeare or Eliot, poets with lines preserved years ago in memory. At about age eleven, in a junk shop in Cleveland, I bought a beat-up paperback of Idylls of the King. I can’t say what attracted me. I’m not smitten with the Arthurian legends but I found Tennyson’s blank verse attractive and his stories compelling. I’m also taken with something he wrote to his fiancé in 1839: “I dare not tell how high I rate humour, which is generally most fruitful in the highest and most solemn human spirits.” Today I’m likeliest to reread “In Memoriam A. H. H.” and a dozen or so of his shorter poems, including the one quoted above, “The Death of the Old Year.” This is a poem made for reading aloud:

 

“Shake hands, before you die.

Old year, we’ll dearly rue for you:

What is it we can do for you?

Speak out before you die.”

 

I reread the poem after seeing it mentioned in the letter Edwin Arlington Robinson wrote to his friend Arthur Gledhill on January 4, 1891, recounting his New Year’s Eve “damphool excursion” with another friend, George Barstow:

 

“The thermometer stood 25° below zero in Gardiner that night. We spent the evening smoking and reading Shakspeare [sic] and Tennyson; and at 12 o’clock George read the ‘Death of the Old Year’ with great pathos: he was in about the right condition.”

 

Not renowned as a teetotaler, Robinson coyly adds: “But as I do not meddle with such liquids I do not suppose that I was able to realize the etherial satisfaction of the recitationist.”

 

Less well-known but still a favorite Tennyson poem is light-toned “To the Vicar of Shiplake.” He wrote it for the Anglican priest Drummond Rawnsley who on June 13, 1850 performed the marriage ceremony for Tennyson and Emily Sellwood. I cite it to suggest Tennyson’s varied tone. Here are the first three stanzas:

 

“Vicar of that pleasant spot,

            Where it was my chance to marry,

Happy, happy be your lot

 In the Vicarage by the quarry:

You were he that knit the knot.

 

“Sweetly, smoothly flow your life.

            Never parish feud perplex you,

Tithe unpaid, or party strife.

            All things please you, nothing vex you;

You have given me such a wife.

 

“Have I seen in one so near

Aught but sweetness aye prevailing?

Or, through more than half a year,

            Half the fraction of a failing?

Therefore bless you, Drummond dear.”

 

This is the grateful, ingratiating, light-hearted side of Tennyson, not the familiar Victorian parody.