6. Tears, Ay, Dull Tears: Tennyson's Idle Idol-Idyl
As when we dwell upon a word we know,
Repeating, till the word we know so well
Becomes a wonder, and we know not why...
--"Lancelot and Elaine"The noted critic and editor of the most important collection of Tennyson's poetry makes an unimportant but suggestive tiny slip in his fine study of the poet's life and works. In a discussion of the 1855 publication, Maud, Christopher Ricks writes that "Tennyson at this stage of his life was haunted by the feeling that the dead are all too intimidatingly alive"; and, lending the poet the words of Maud's narrator, Ricks continues: "He remembers his dead mother--`And that dead man at her heart and mine'" (Tennyson 242). In fact, however, Alfred Tennyson's mother, Elizabeth, was to live for ten years following Maud (indeed the date is reported by Ricks in an footnote [222]). Can the living be intimidatingly dead? Ricks' elision of Tennyson's mother is the more curious since he chooses as the epigraph for his first chapter these lines from "The Coming of Arthur":
Moreover, always in my mind I hearand writes that this cry and weeping "were the core of his childhood and youth." But that first chapter, titled "Tennyson and his father till 1827" (when the poet turned 18), is after more dramatic and accessible material than the "good and kind" mother (10), and we soon read that what Tennyson "deeply and experimentally felt from his earlier years" was "the plight of his father" (10). Certainly growing up as a younger son of an epileptic dipsomaniac locked in a struggle with his rejecting father ("the old man of the wolds") offers ample occasion for psychic traumata: "When the Rector's moods were at their worst, Alfred would run through the night to the churchyard and throw himself prostrate among the graves, wishing that he were dead" (Martin 25). Such a problematic paternal model might well lend a greater prominence to the mother's role in shaping the son's sensibilities, though to be sure, Tennyson, more than most, insists on our keeping in mind the inaccessibly complex interactions of genetic endowment (the all-too-evident "black blood" of the Tennysons) and family conflict across generations and bloodlines, not to mention intimate family dynamics.
A cry from out the dawning of my life,
A mother weeping [1]Tennyson's few comments about his mother suggest some post-adolescent idealization: in a letter written when he was twenty-three he refers to her as "one of the most angelick natures on God's earth, always doing good as it were by a sort of intuition" (Letters [L] 1.90), and at her funeral he told the officiating clergyman, rather fulsomely, "`I hope you will not think that I have spoken in exaggerated terms of my beloved mother, but indeed she was the beautifullest thing God Almighty ever did make'" (L 2.394 n.).
These descriptions sit a bit awkwardly with the ludicrous picture a thirty-nine year old Tennyson relates of his mother "grovelling on the floor in an extremity of fear" during a thunderstorm, and his following comment that "My mother is afraid if I go to town even for a night; how could they get on without me for months?" (L 1.171). So the narrator of Maud recalls
... my dark-dawning youth,Alan Ker, one of the poet's in-laws, reported for Hallam Tennyson's memoir of his father that Elizabeth Tennyson was "so sensitive that touch her feelings ever so lightly and the tears rushed to her eyes" (H. Tennyson 220). This account continues with the remarkable information that, "Then it was we used to hear your father say, `Dam your eyes, mother, dam your eyes!' and then she smiled and applied the white pocket-handkerchief and shook her head at her son" (220). However improbable the suggestion of the poet's punning on the abusive expression "damn your eyes!," the description seems drawn from life--or if not, adds strikingly to Ker's recollection of Maud and the narrator's memory of his mother:
Darkened watching a mother decline
And that dead man at her heart and mine:
For who was left to watch but I?
Yet so did I let my freshness die.
(690-94, 2.557)For how often I caught her with eyes all wet,These teary mother's eyes are far from those the poet earlier fantasized for the "trustful infant" who knows "Nothing beyond his mother's eyes. / They comfort him by night and day" ("Supposed Confession of a Second-Rate Sensitive Mind" 44-45, 1.218). These "mild deep eyes upraised" may manifest "The beauty and repose of faith, / And the clear spirit shining through" (ibid. 75-76, 1.219), but in realizing that her faith is not faith in him the boy soon experiences cognitive dissonance and ambivalence.
Shaking her head at her son and sighing
A world of trouble within!
(706-8, 2.557).The piety of Tennyson's mother can be gauged from one of her few letters to him which survive, albeit one written when she was near eighty and her "Dearest Ally" fifty. "It does indeed" give her "the purest satisfaction," she writes, "to notice that a spirit of Christianity is perceptible" through her son's latest volume (Idylls of the King):
O dearest Ally, how fervently have I prayed for years that our merciful Redeemer would intercede with our Heavenly Father, to grant thee His Holy Spirit to urge thee to employ the talents He has given thee, by taking every opportunity of endeavouring to impress the precepts of His Holy Word on the minds of others. My beloved son, words are too feeble to express the joy of my heart in perceiving that thou art earnestly endeavouring to do so. Dearest Ally, there is nothing for a moment to be compared to the favour of God: I need not ask thee if thou art of the same opinion. Thy writings are a convincive proof that thou art. My beloved child, when our Heavenly Father summons us hence, may we meet, and all that are dear to us, in that blessed state where sorrow is unknown, never more to be separated. (In H. Tennyson 379-80.)Her son's contention that "There lives more faith in honest doubt, / Believe me, than in half the creeds" (In Memoriam 96.11-12, 2.415) evidently didn't warrant concern (Tennyson's feelings about religion included his punning "Te Deum" into "tedium" [Martin 480]).But for Tennyson, the disjuncture between his doubts and his mother's faith pointed to something more serious, and at twenty, his "Supposed Confessions of a Second-Rate Sensitive Mind" wonders "wherefore do we grow awry", and
What Devil had the heart to scatheAs speaker moves to conclude his confession, he expresses his fear that "everywhere / Some must clasp Idols." "Yet, my God," he wonders, "Whom call I Idol?" (177-80, 1.222). Devotion to what Tennyson called "mein liebes Ich" (H. Tennyson 268) is the desperate defense against the second-rate sensitivity bequeathed by the mother:
Flowers thou hadst reared--to brush the dew
From thine own lily, when thy grave
Was deep, my mother, in the clay?
Myself? Is it thus? Myself? Had I
So little love for thee? But why
Prevailed not thy pure prayers?
(83-89, 1.219)O weary life! O weary death!"Perdidi Diem," whose title invokes the Emperor Titus's lament for a day lost to good action, is another early poem which suggests pre-oedipal phantasies. Here the speaker reports that
O spirit and heart made desolate!
O damnéd vacillating state!
(188-finis, 1.222).I must needs pore upon the mysteriesThis self-wasting idleness is glossed by the ensuing extended simile which tells of "Young ravens fallen from their cherishing nest" (24). Though they cry continually and "trail and spoil / Their new plumes on the misty soil," still "not the more for this / Shall the loved mother minister" to them nor win them to their wonted rest "With sleep-compelling down of her most glossy breast":
Of my own infinite Nature and torment
My spirit with a fruitless discontent
(19-21, 1.294).In chill discomfort still they cry:Once again "trustful infancy" with "no care of life or death" ("Supposed Confessions ..." 48) drops into hyper- consciousness of that opposition and attempts to escape in idle poring upon the self-idol and the idle--ineffectual for real change--outpouring of writing.
What is the death of life if this be not to die?
(34-35, 1.294).Tennyson's disciple and the famed anthologist of The Golden Treasury F. T. Palgrave reported the poet as saying, more than once, "`that his poems sprang from a "nucleus," some one word, may be, or brief melodious phrase which had floated through the brain, as it were unbidden'" (in Gillett 324). The most celebrated instance of this is Hallam Tennyson's story of how his father "wrote `The Charge of the Light Brigade' in a few minutes, after reading the description in the Times in which occurred the phrase `some one had blundered,' and this was the origin of the metre of his poem" (320). Edgar Shannon and Christopher Ricks make this account still more interesting by pointing out that the actual source phrase read "some hideous blunder" and that it appeared in the Times three weeks before the poem's composition (Ricks, Tennyson 325). "Far--Far--Away," written when Tennyson was seventy-nine offers another example, the title (and refrain) being words that "had always a strange charm" for him (H. Tennyson 9). One wonders if the charm of the phrase owed anything to a context where Tennyson may have met (or re-met) it and which it then served to condense: for in Coleridge's Zapolya, published in 1817, he would have read that "Love's dreams prove seldom true" and hence, "We must away; / Far, far away!" (Part II, II.ii.75,79-80).
As it happens, the single word "idle" of the quintessentially Tennysonian lyric known by its incipit "Tears, idle tears" revises an earlier "foolish" ("Tears, foolish tears"), but the exponential increase in meaning that the revision achieves reveals an aural matrix of idols, idyls, and idleness, not to mention the repetition compulsion now incipient in the sounds ("Tears, idle tears, I ..."). "Idle," "idol," and "idyl" each represents a different emphasis or interpretation or hearing of the poem; each reflects a different drive motivating the text. The poem presents a particularly successful compromise between the different voices that would claim it--that want to speak through it as a single voice. In the unconscious ongoing negotiation of composi- tion and revision the seemingly unbidden, floating phonemes of the poem's "charged word," "idle" (Hartman 111), come together as a kind of Knotenpunkt or nodal point which binds up the text, ensuring that each conflicting, constituting element has the possibility of a hearing. The identical sound of the semes facilitates the plurality of themes. "Idle" can be imagined as first the catalyst and lastly the precipitate of the mix making up the text's authority, the trace of tension in whatever intention one imputes to the author.
The poem is not a hostage to language, to be liberated by deconstruction, but a new moment and monument of Tennyson's language, his mother tongue, participating in an orbit of associations the ideal display of which (were it ever accessible) would show something like the terms and structure of Tennyson's unconscious. As Ricks observes, "No poem of Tennyson compacts more of his deepest feelings with a more graceful fluency" (Tennyson 190). Hearing the different meanings broached by the mother word requires a sense of parallel (rather than serial) mental processing with which one will probably never be entirely at ease. The sound of the poem's second word, at any rate, activates several channels: the OED pronounces "idle," "idol," and "idyl" as [ id'l], [ i d'l], and [ i dil], while Daniel Jones's English Pronouncing Dictionary (12th ed., 1964) suggests ['aid l], ['aidl], and ['idil] or ['aid-l].
`Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.`Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.
`Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.`Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.'
(The Princess IV.21-40, 2.232- 33)The poem's conflicting voices come closest to the surface with the image of friends brought "up from the underworld." An audience concerned with physical reality and its mimesis might construe "the underworld" as "the Antipodes" or Australia ("down under"), and for this sense-- as the first instance--the OED cites this passage. But since the publication of The Well Wrought Urn in 1947 readers have had the benefit of Cleanth Brooks's sense that the word would "necessarily suggest the underworld of Greek mythology" (170),--an argument for Tennysonian "paradox and ambiguity" now thoroughly assimilated. In "Ulysses," Tennyson joins Homer's account of Odysseus' sailing to the entrance of the underworld with Dante's vision of Ulysses' sea-voyage to Purgatory, so that Tennyson's old wanderer says:
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down,But the hero of the Odyssey, as Tennyson could expect his readers to know, meets Achilles not in any "Happy Isles" or Elysian "happy Autumn-fields," but in the land of the dead, where dwell the "mere imitations of perished mortals": "broton eidola kamonton" (Od. 11.476). These dead are idols (eidola--images, literally, "things seen"), as, in turn, some readers suspect Tennyson's Ulysses himself to be, an "idle king" speaking in a kind of afterlife as a "gray spirit" to his "mariners, souls" who, according to the Odyssey, at least, have long since died. The big tears ("thalaron dakru," Od. 11.466) which Homer's dead share with mortal Odysseus are, literally, idol tears; Tennyson, too, can imagine "phantasms weeping tears" ("The Palace of Art," 249, 1.454). Still more common are mortal tears shed for the idol or image of a loved one, like those of Odysseus for his dead mother--an "idoll" in Chapman's 1616 translation--or Aeneas for the "imago" of his wife (Od. 11.85 ff., Aeneid 2.771 ff.; the image becomes a commonplace). As the OED notes, "idol" functions as subjective and objective genitive, permitting "idol tears" that are both "tears of an idol" and "tears for an idol."
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
(62- 64)Odysseus' lament following the underworld interview with his mother--that embodiment of "first love"--can shade into that of the speaker of "Tears, Idle Tears" who ends "wild with all regret." Odysseus strives to embrace his mother's image, but, in the translation of Pope which young Tennyson often imitated,
Similarly, in In Memoriam:Thrice through my arms she slipp'd like empty wind,
Or dreams, the vain illusions of the mind.
Wild with despair, I shed a copious tide
Of flowing tears ...
(11.249- 52)Tears of the widower, when he seesSo, also, section ten of In Memoriam imagines the sailing ship conveying Arthur Hallam's body as bearing "dark freight, a vanish'd life" and comments, "we have idle dreams ... home-bred fancies." The frequent collocation in English of "idle" and "fancy" must be in part encouraged by the semantic identity of "idol" (eidolon) and "phantom", a power of association evident in a somewhat different way when Tennyson writes how, looking in a stream "With idle care ... I saw your troubled image there" ("The Miller's Daughter" [1832 version] 73-76, 1.410 n.). But "vanity"--the quality of being (in) vain--seems to be the underlying sense joining idol ("late-lost form") and idle ("empty"): Swift, for example, writes of "vain, idle, visionary thoughts" ("A Modest Proposal"), while Pope, in a poem partly memorized by Tennyson, describes Dulness's created image of "A Poet's form" (gifted with "empty words") as an "Idol void and vain!" (Dunciad A 2.42). Blake, similarly, punningly mocks the vain, in vain "Idol Virtues of the Natural Heart" (Milton 38.46). And Joyce's "Araby" (Dubliners), has the narrator recall how, owing to his idolizing "adoration" of his first love, "My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why)"; at night and by day "her image came between me and the page," he relates, and the punning outcome is that his schoolmaster criticizes him for beginning "to idle."
A late-lost form that sleep reveals,
And moves his doubtful arms, and feels
Her place is empty, fall like these.
(13.1-4, 2.331)Eidola, according to Cicero, figure in the system of Epicurus as the films given off by any object and conveying an impression to the eye: the exterior eidola give rise to interior phantasia, fancy or mental vision (Epistulae ad Familiares, 15.16). Lucretius develops this idea in De Rerum Natura, Book 4, and, in Tennyson's poem about him, wonders, as he despairs of his "death-in-life," how he can be troubled by unbidden mental images: "'How should the mind, except it loves them, clasp / These idols to herself?'" ("Lucretius" 164-65, 2.715). So, "in looking," the image-films, the idol tears are torn from their source and, like the image of the happy Autumn-fields, "gather to the eyes" in some way that implicates "I". The poem, Tennyson said, "was written in the yellowing autumn-tide at Tintern Abbey, full for me of its bygone memories" (H. Tennyson 221). Those memories included Wordsworth's "Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey," and, more powerful for Tennyson, Keats's "To Autumn." But as Herbert F. Tucker notes, it is precisely at his greatest idol's [2] most personal and self-referential moment that Tennyson tears away into his own inner space (366). Keats asks "Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?", only to enjoin, "Think not of them, thou hast thy music too" ("To Autumn" 23-24). Tennyson's music, however, rises in "thinking of the days that are no more," and is finally unconcerned whether Autumn or Summer waits outside.
The emphatic source of the eye-dulling tears echoes though the poem in the vocal signature carried by the shifting first-person i sounds: "idle," "I," "rise," "eyes," "pipe," "dying," "wild," "Life." The speaker gives rise to the tears; indeed, "I" doles them out (like Tennyson's Ulysses, "an idle king ... I mete and dole" [3]) as dole (as when Elaine dies and "there was dole in Astolat" ["Lancelot and Elaine" 1129, 3.454]). In doling (out) his condition the speaker makes the poem, like so many others of Tennyson's, an elegiac idyl; and one, moreover, evoking a recurrent theme of the 1842 Poems (initially titled Morte d'Arthur; Dora, and other Idyls): "recollections of older men recalling their youth, in which the beloved had died" (Pattison 71). "Tears, Idle Tears" appears as a song in the volume which followed those idyls in 1847, The Princess (given Tennyson's habits of revision, publication dates give little indication as to compositional chronology; The Princess was begun, evidently, in 1839, and "Tears, Idle Tears" perhaps dates from 1834 [Martin 194]). When The Princess appeared, Tennyson was already strongly associated with the word "idyl"; contemporary reviews remarked the volume's "idyllic manner," and later critics call it "a series of idylls," "a poem that seeks to evolve the idyll beyond its previous Tennysonian limits" (Kozicki 59; Ryals 23; Pattison 95). William Allingham reports Tennyson using a curiously possessive turn of phrase to express displeasure over the title of Browning's Dramatic Idylls: "I wish Browning had not taken my word Idyll" (291). After his name, then, "idyl" would perhaps best qualify as "The word that is the symbol of myself" ("The Ancient Sage" goes on to say that "idle gleams to thee are light to me"; 231, 246, 3.145).
In the framing context of The Princess, the "mournful song" of "Tears, Idle Tears" is sung by "a maid ... with such passion that the tear, / She sang of, shook and fell" (IV.41-42). The Princess, however, condemns the song, using an association already noted to argue that women should stop their ears to such a siren song of "fancies hatched / In silken-folded idleness" (IV.48-49). Following a revealing line of association, she urges that women "let the past be past" and not care though "the wild figtree split / [Men's] monstrous idols" (IV.61-62). Tennyson names the Princess "Ida," and at one point permutates the name in the space of fifty-five lines from "Sweet Ida" to "Sweet dream" to another "Sweet Idyl" set within the text (VII.120, 134, 175). For Tennyson, the name "Ida" powerfully associates with the idea of "mother" and death of the "I" through the story and obsessive refrain of "Oenone" (first published in 1832):
My eyes are full of tears, my heart of love,The male protagonist of The Princess, whose presence in effect occasions "Tears, Idle Tears," is himself a kind of eidolon, as Tennyson made clear in revising the poem. Subject to recurrent "weird seizures," the Prince often seems "to move among a world of ghosts," himself "the shadow of a dream" (I.14, 17-18; III.188; IV.560-61; V.481--some half-century later, "Akbar's Dream" will feature "`The Shadow of a dream--an idle one'" [5, 3.236]). Given the old proverb "after wyrd comes weird" and the poet's being possessed by "some one word, may be, or brief melodious phrase," one wonders whether the Prince's trances might not be "seizures" by "words, / Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world" ("The Ancient Sage," 238-39, 3.145). Towards the end of The Princess, the action of which revolves around the Prince's attempt to make Ida his own, the Prince, near defeat, gives himself up to tears "all for langour and self-pity" and asks Ida only "to kiss me ere I die" (VII. 124, 135).
My heart is breaking, and my eyes are dim,
And I am all aweary of my life.
`O mother Ida, many-fountained Ida,
Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die.
(30-34, 1.422)As the conclusion unfolds, the Prince argues for a kind of mutual marriage--"The two-celled heart beating, with one full stroke" (VII.289)--and Ida asks him from what woman he learned that idea. The response is a long encomium on his mother, concerning which the poet once evasively assented that it was indeed based on Elizabeth Tennyson (H. Tennyson 221):
No Angel, but a dearer being, all diptDespite such praise and professed importance of his mother, it is oddly "never clear whether she is alive or dead" (Ricks Tennyson 184). Princess Ida immediately notes that this idealization doesn't suit her and marks her distance from it:
In Angel instincts, breathing Paradise,
Interpreter between the Gods and men,
Who looked all native to her place, and yet
On tiptoe seemed to touch a sphere
To gross to tread, and all male minds perforce
Swayed to her from their orbits as they moved,
And girdled her with music. Happy he
With such a mother! faith in womankind
Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high
Comes easy to him, and though he trip and fall
He shall not blind his soul with clay.
(VII.301-12)It seems you love to cheat yourself with words:But the Prince, swept up in his projection, denigrates his doubts with what for Tennyson would be a most fantastic possibility: "the past / Melts mist-like into this bright hour, and this / Is morn to more" (VII.333-35).
This mother is your model. I have heard
Of your strange doubts ....
(VII.315-17)According to its author, "Tears, Idle Tears" expresses "[t]he passion of the past, the abiding in the transient" (H. Tennyson 211), which suggests that one might see its speaker as weeping over the little picture (eidullion, idyl) of his self-idolizing or idyllizing. Tennyson refers not to some antique passion for the past but raises the suggestion of a past suffering on in his present: suffering on and being suffered (passus, whence "passion," is the perfect participle of patior, "I suffer"). The speaker of "Tears, Idle Tears" might in this case be heard to recognize that the action in which he is engaged (idyl-making) is potentially "idle"--that his very poetic spinning of wheels prevents the authentic experience of a different, transformed reality which is, at least on one level, desired. If the speaker knows he doesn't know what his tears mean and thus what he himself means and is ("Tears, idle tears, I know not what I mean"), then he is in one way admitting to "idle chatter" in the face of the gospel that "every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give an account thereof in the day of judgment" (Matt. 12:36). That Day, says Revelation, "there should be time no longer" (10:6), or, as Tennyson preferred to translate it, "time should be no more" (H. Tennyson 233).
The ultimate dissatisfaction of "Tears, Idle Tears," then, is with "days that are no more" than a meaningless, inauthentic "Death in Life,"--with, finally, itself. The poem cannot escape Shelley's earlier insight in The Revolt of Islam that
It is the dark idolatry of self,Grounds for the narcissistic avoidance of the reality- principle inherent in laboring such idleness (as well as in the long tradition of English literary melancholy) can be seen in George Meredith's dissection of Sir Willoughby Patterne's I-doll in The Egoist (1879). There, Patterne's "hatred of the world" stems from "an appalling fear on behalf of his naked eidolon, the tender infant self swaddled in his name before the world, for which he felt as the most highly civilized of men alone can feel, and which it was impossible for him to stretch out his hands to protect" (356).[3]
Which, when our thoughts and actions once are gone,
Demands that man should weep, and bleed, and groan;
O vacant expiation!
(8.22.3- 6)The self-idol or self-hood is that state the individual enters as he or she grows, losing touch with an imagined original eidos or form: " I am not what see/ And other than the things touch(>In Memoriam 45.7-8). "I," in this reading, originates in the separation of "the baby" from "the circle of the breast" (ibid. 1, 3), and despair over such un-pairing seems the source of "Tears, Idle Tears" and much of Tennyson's work. Despair is the active link to that ancient break, hence "divine" or idolized in order that, as Odysseus says to the image of his mother, "we may delight ourselves with sorrow" (Pope's translation of Od. 11.212). The holding on to sorrow occurs unconsciously for the most part, following a dynamic Tennyson identified in dedicating his Arthurian cycle to the memory of the Prince Consort: "since he held them dear, / Perchance as finding there unconsciously / Some image of himself" (so, he continues, "I dedicate, I consecrate with tears-- / These Idylls" ["Dedication" 1-5, 3.263]).
But the last half of "Tears, Idle Tears" offers the possibility of breaking the idle idol-idyl by dying to this world, not necessarily by physical death, since the poet proposes in the first section of In Memoriam that "men may rise on stepping stones / Of their dead selves" (3- 4). The third stanza of "Tears, Idle Tears" calls up mythic imagery to set the scene for this death of the self. As the body "dies," the birds awaken, and the spirit awakens to join them, like the soul of the speaker in Andrew Marvell's "The Garden" (51-60). The birds are, perhaps, a new form of the idols, "our friends," recognized as we change form of being. Here again, In Memoriam, section thirteen, supplies an apposite comment:
For now so strange do these things seem,The "fancies," or phantoms, idols, rise--like tears to the eyes and friends from the underworld--and take wing in bird- form. In Tennyson's early "Remorse" the speaker feels himself condemned by "shadowy forms of guilt" to "living death" and proposes that his "soul shall wing her weary way" to underworld depths where "glow / The glimmerings of the boundless flame" (3, 22, 27, 30).
Mine eyes have leisure for their tears;My fancies time to rise on wing,
And glance about the approaching sails.
(15-18).The casement that slowly turns into a glimmering square of window invokes one of Tennyson's favorite images in Keats, the "Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn" of "Ode to a Nightingale" (69-70; Allingham records two instances of Tennyson's quoting this [296, 327]). As in Keats, the glimmering threshold--the "square of text," the "arch wherethrough / Gleams that untravelled world" ("Merlin and Vivien," 671; "Ulysses," 19-20)--is no sooner formulated than (and in consequence) the speaker is thrown back to his burden of loss, solitude, desperation, and his attempt to write a passage out of the world rendered idle:
There he sat down gazing on all below;
There did a thousand memories roll upon him,
Unspeakable for sadness. By and by
The ruddy square of comfortable light,
Far-blazing from the rear of Philip's house,
Allured him, as the beacon-blaze allures
The bird of passage, till he madly strikes
Against it, and beats out his weary life.
("Enoch Arden" 719-26, 2.644)The polysemous line which opens the final stanza of "Tears, Idle Tears" establishes the possibility that the speaker himself is among the dead (remembering kisses during life), so confirming the silent presence of the poem's "idol" and giving one reason for its tears. "Hopeless fancy" can thus offer an instance of one idol's idle idyl hopes. The lack of such surplus of meaning in the words prompts the text's lament that there is "no more," but the "sweetness" attributed to "feigned"--imaginary--kisses reveals that real contact with "others" is not the surface speaker's only desire. "Hopeless" brings up its Latin equivalent from line two, "despair" (desperare), and evidently both "hopeless fancy" and "divine despair" offer the speaker a certain pleasurable melancholy. Fancy and despair are false others, spurious formulations of the speaker's ground which in reality permit a narcissistic avoidance of the encounter with the other, particularly that other the self may become through change. Instead of a poem bemoaning inconsolable loss, we begin to see the outline of one which, like a young Rasselas, turns inward to lament its own regret (and regression). The succeeding charac- terization, "deep as first love," adds to this impression. First love, rooted in the pre-oedipal relation to the mother, is but another form of self-love, the intrinsic self-regard arising in infancy and then projected on to another. The artist-narrator of "The Gardener's Daughter" literally defines himself through the eidolon he has painted to keep his past before him; at the poem's climax he raises the veil from the picture of
My first, last love; the idol of my youth,Here again the "idol" is a function of present memory, and the speaker's "first, last love" equates in effect with the self-imaged "memory of mine."
The darling of my manhood, and alas!
Now the most blessed memory of mine age.
(271-73, 1.569)The speaker of "The Miller's Daughter" manifests a slightly less idolizing attitude toward the object of his memory as he recalls a song occasioned by a "blue Forget-me- not" and which recognizes the possibility that
Love is made a vague regret.This same speaker as much as confesses to an earlier idle idol-idyl as he remembers lines from his "long and listless" youth which "haunted me, the morning long, / With weary sameness in the rhymes, / The phantom of a silent song" (69- 71, 1.410). Wordsworth's Matthew, somewhat similarly, finds
Eyes with idle tears are wet.
Idle habit links us yet.
(210-12, 1.416).My eyes are dim with childish tears,But in "Tears, Idle Tears," the speaker's wild emotions stem from the realization, as one critic observes of the (again, evidently male) speaker of Tennyson's "Break, Break, Break," that "not only will his friend never come back, but he will never be able to recapture his presence in memory" (Rackin 226). In "Tears, Idle Tears," the presence that cannot be recaptured is that of the speaker himself, who in the very act of articulation begins to slip away from, to tear himself from--and so, know more about--the days that are no more. We verge here on the poem's desperate yet trance- like, obsessive refrain and injunction, no mor. But the speaker's superficial hope for no mortality, Revelation's promise of "no more death" (21:4), founders on an inability to accept that "the former things are passed away" (idem). Tennyson's concern with the repeated phrase appears in a short poem written when he was seventeen and evidently the germ for "Tears, Idle Tears":
My heart is idly stirred,
For the same sound is in my ears
As in those days I heard.
("The Fountain," 29-32)Oh sad No More! Oh sweet No More!
Oh strange No More!
By a mossed brookbank on a stone
I smelt a wildweed-flower alone;
There was a ringing in my ears,
And both my eyes gushed out with tears.
Surely all pleasant things had gone before,
Lowburied fathomdeep beneath with thee, NO MORE!
(1.175)The self-idol or self-hood is that state the individual enters as he or she grows, losing touch with an imagined original eidos or form: "I am not what see/ And other than the things I touch." Memory (me-moriso to speak) is form of Death in Life idol pastthough present poem (as realtime) even that dying. singleconcluding exclamation mark inserted by some editors ( days are no more!") [4] may serve to mark the sense (or hope!) that the speaker is entering into his future, a critical experience of self-awareness and the realization of change. At the same time that he is filled with wild regret for the days past, he experiences anxious agitation that his days are no more than a memory- filled Death in Life. At the same time that he would fain live a fuller life to relieve the pressure of loss, he weeps for the impending change in psychic investment which such a fuller life implies ("O last regret, regret can die!" [In Memoriam, 78.17]). So one might argue, as does Leo Spitzer, that the poem offers "two protagonists"; but while Spitzer limits these to "the poet who sheds idle tears" and a god named Death-in-Life, "wrapped in idle despair," his discussion suggests another possibility. The "impersonal supernal power" of which Spitzer sees the poet becoming aware at the end, "in a manner reminiscent of ancient tragedy" (194n.) is not despair but consciousness itself, a textual "I" verging on the "the place where that was" (Lacan, Ecrits 171). But like a belated Peter Pan--like so many of Tennyson's characters young and old--the speaker suggests a powerful drive never to grow up, change, shift, or become conscious. "Memory [feeds] the soul of Love with tears," we learn in "The Lover's Tale" (810, 1.362), which is to say that memory, that fancy word for phantasized reconstruction of the past, offers an easy defense against the pain for what never was.
According to Tennyson, "Tears, Idle Tears" did not express real woe, but "rather the yearning that young people occasionally experience for that which seems to have passed away from them for ever" (2.232 n., emphasis added). Yet one might well wonder if this is only another one of Tennyson's "two voices," here defensively passing the poem off as "not real woe." Section VI of The Princess, for instance, looks back to describe "Tears, Idle Tears," as "the mournful song" and also tells, for the first time, that it was sung by someone named "Violet" (298). In the 1832 song, "Who can say," Tennyson finds that "The violet, recalls the dewy prime / Of youth and buried time" (6-7, 1.493). Similarly the speaker of "A Dream of Fair Women" (1832), familiar with the "tearful glimmer of the languid dawn" (74), reports that "the smell of violets" pours
... back into my empty soul and frameHere, then, are "the days that are no more" and the attraction of a life free from guilt. "A Dream of Fair Women" concludes with an image of inviolate memory which belies the "not real woe" and "occasional yearning" that the author used to characterize his "Tears, Idle Tears":
The times when I remember to have been
Joyful and free from blame.
(78-80, 1.484)As when a soul laments, which hath been blest,"Melancholia" seems the appropriate description of this condition, which, as Freud defines it, "borrows some of its features from mourning, and others from the process of regression ... to narcissism" ("Mourning and Melancholia" 250).
Desiring what is mingled with past years,
In yearnings that can never be exprest
By signs or groans or tears;Because all words, though culled with choicest art,
Failing to give the bitter of the sweet,
Wither beneath the palate, and the heart
Faints, faded by its heat.
(281-88, 1.492)Still, one might claim for the poem the insight that, despite the narcissistic opposition of the surface speaker, the dying of the old self through change and growth is already underway, that the dynamic of "Tears, Idle Tears" connects with the "one basic action" Donald S. Hair identifies in his study of Tennyson's idyls, the process of "dying out of an unsatisfactory life and ... a birth into a new and better one" (103, 104). As the speaker is dis- paired (tears tear him away) from the old days, from the dead, from idle language and "Melancholy's idol dreams" (Wordsworth, Letters 74), so--the poem begins painfully to divine--"rounds he to a separate mind ... / His isolation grows defined" (In Memoriam 14.9, 12). Like the melancholic in Freud's analysis, the speaker begins to feels that "he himself has willed [the condition]" and so feel anxiety as guilt. Guilt, here, for the idleness he has willed by wallowing in the continually asserted "fresh" and "so sad" quality of his emotions, "emotion" (as F. R. Leavis objected) "for its own sake without a justifying situation" (cited Pattison 100). In such a case, the speaker "wild with all regret" would be only a few steps from "no longer caring to embalm / In dying songs a dead regret" (In Memoriam, "Epilogue" 13-14, 2.452). But the immediate and nearly universal affect-effect of the poem on readers testifies that an idyllic appeal to our narcissistic identification, our idol, is its own justification--however guilty our complicity in that idle thrill, whatever the account to be required in the day of judgment.
Ricks points out (2.232n.) that the "idle tears" can be compared with those Aeneas weeps on leaving Carthage and Dido:
Mens immota manet; lacrimae volvuntur inanesMany critics have noticed Virgilian parallels and sentiment in Tennyson's work, and one commentator even describes "Tears, Idle Tears" as "the century's most intense lyric distillation of the Vergilian `tears of things'" (McSweeney 70). But where Aeneas serves the impersonal power of history, Tennyson's speaker is but a man emoting. The speaker himself is the victim, caught (mens immota) between the conflicting drives of an Other-seeking Eros and a narcissistic, stasis-seeking Thanatos. As the product of merely one moment of equilibrium in the history of those drives, the text has, finally, no one speaker, no "I" at all--at least, we know not what its "I" means (even arguing that whatever it meant it means no more). If we credit the presence of such unconscious authority, perhaps it is not surprising to find one of the central terms behind the poem, "idol," making a cryptographic appearance in the variously identified "tortured cry," "loose appositive," or (and) "vocative" address of the poem's concluding line:
(Aeneid 4.449).O Death in Life, the days that are no moreso as to subjoin, "Idol, the days that are know more."[5]. As Blake has it, "the ratio of all we have already known. is not the same that it shall be when we know more" ("There is No Natural Religion"). The "I" that comes to know more is that "I" no more, just as the "I" that grasps "no more," even unto "Death in Life," is an "I" that comes to know more. So does Tennyson's idle idol-idyl rise in the hearing as we gather in its "I"s.
Chapter 6 -- Notes