'Lead a Summer Life'

“In reading Tennyson the other day, I came across a little poem in blank verse dedicated to the Princess Beatrice, in which he speaks of her marriage as ‘that white funeral of the single life.’ A Poet Laureate is worthwhile when he says things like that.” 

The poem Edwin Arlington Robinson refers to is “To H.R.H. Princess Beatrice”(Tiresias, and Other Poems, 1885), dedicated to Queen Victoria’s youngest child at the time of her marriage to Prince Henry of Battenberg. Robinson quotes the poem’s best-known phrase, “white funeral,” which came to mean a benign transition in life as opposed to the “black funeral’ of death. Robinson is writing to his friend Harry de Forest Smith on this date, June 10, in 1894. He continues:

 

“And, speaking of Tennyson, how would it do to read him some this summer? His greatest charm lies in the fact that one can read him over and over again without tiring of him. I have read ‘Maud’ aloud three times, and am quite ready to do so again -- or listen to you. Perhaps the best way to read a long poem like that is alternately. The metre, like the poem, is hard (in a certain sense) and strange. And there are always the Idyls [sic].”

 

Tennyson was the first “grownup” poet who grabbed my interest as a boy, beginning with Idylls of the King (which shares the Arthurian theme with Robinson’s Lancelot, Merlin and Tristram). Like Keats, Tennyson is made for intoning – think “Break, Break, Break” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Robinson was fond of quoting this line from “Locksley Hall” -- “But the jingling of the guinea helps the hurt that Honour feels” – and this from “The Death of the Old Year”: “He was full of joke and jest, / But all his merry quips are o’er.” I was surprised some years ago when the late Helen Pinkerton told me how much she admired Tennyson whom she called a “musician.”

 

After the death of Prince Albert, Victoria was reluctant to let go of Beatrice. Only after more than a year of persuasion did the queen consent to her daughter’s marriage. That bit of gloss helps explain the conclusion of “To H.R.H. Princess Beatrice”:   

 

“But moving thro’ the Mother’s home, between

The two that love thee, lead a summer life,

Sway’d by each Love, and swaying to each Love,

Like some conjectured planet in mid heaven

Between two suns, and drawing down from both

The light and genial warmth of double day.”