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Poets' Corner
Number Twenty Nine : 18th April 2016
Alfred Lord Tennyson
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Born in 1945, I could sense in the adult world around me a mixture of war-weary relief at its
victorious conclusion amid widespread expectations of a new social dawn. By the time of the
queen’s coronation
in 1953, when plentiful cinemas still screened annual numbers of war films, there was talk of a
“new Elizabethan age” in prospect. As it turned out , this queen’s tenure of the throne was to
outlast that
of the queen who preceded her, whose reign has become known as the “Victorian age” (1837-1901).
While we blithely say that the Victorians did this, or thought that, the historians best
acquainted with them
deem the popular notion of “The Victorians” to be a myth engendered by the long life of their
sovereign. Consider the ever-changing assumptions and new technologies thronging the 60-odd years
since 1953 and
you apprehend the radical pace of incessant change that took place across Victoria’s reign.
The 1950s ushered in the first stirrings of post-war prosperity in the UK, with expanding numbers
of cars and TV sets, as the Cold War rumbled on in the background. For those who became teenagers
(itself a
neologism of the decade) there was skiffle , rock n’ roll and the transistor radio. Yet mine was
the last generation to have encountered surviving physical details of Victorian life.
Waiting-rooms on British
Railways stations boasted their original gas-lights. The manufacturing towns of the Midlands and
the North were still belching smoke from their last remaining factory chimneys. Some of the
huddled terraced
housing of the mill-hands and the large detached houses of the owners remained intact and statues
of the side-whiskered bigwigs stood in the town square and lined the (Victorian) municipal parks.
For those
of my age they seem nearer to the world we grew up in than the current screen-gazing culture does,
with its uneasy alliance between World Bank-driven austerity measures and frenzied mass
consumption. Steam
and industrial machinery had made wage-slaves of the Victorian lower orders. Nowadays its silicon
technology that makes salary-slaves of the insecure masses.
Tennyson (1809-1892) was a
popular Poet Laureate during much of the Victorian era and gave voice to many of its achievements,
its angsts
and its excitements. He expressed doubts about the after-life and a fear that the universe itself
might be a mindless machine, sentiments gathering momentum under many of the stove-pipe hats of
the day. The
following lines come from his long poem In Memoriam (published in 1850), an elegy commemorating
the death of a young friend :
Ring out wild bells to the wide sky
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring happy bells across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
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Archive
Poets' Corner #1 – Poetic
Pessimism, 13th September 2012
Poets' Corner #2 – The Workman's
Friend, 10th October 2012
Poets' Corner #3 – On The Trail of
Two Dylans, 12th November 2012
Poets' Corner #4 – Omar Khayyam,
14th December 2012
Poets' Corner #5 – William Blake,
25th January 2013
Poets' Corner #6 – A Minor Poet,
19th February 2013
Poets' Corner #7 – Thomas Hardy,
20th March 2013
Poets' Corner #8 – Shakespeare's
Sonnets, 21st April 2013
Poets' Corner #9 – Edward Thomas,
20th May 2013
Poets' Corner #10 – Harry Smith's
Anthology, 19th June 2013
Poets' Corner #11 – William
Plomer, 21st July 2013
Poets' Corner #12 – Ghosts ,
20th August 2013
Poets' Corner #13 – William
Dunbar, 20th September 2013
Poets' Corner #14 – Bathtub
Thoughts, 20th October 2013
Poets' Corner #15 – Bagpipe Music,
20th November 2013
Poets' Corner #16 – Sylvia &
Emily, 20th December 2013
Poets' Corner #17 – The Fall Of
Icarus, 16th January 2014
Poets' Corner #18 – Those Gone
Before, 20th February 2014
Poets' Corner #19 – Rudyard
Kipling, 20th March 2014
Poets' Corner #20 – Martin Bell,
20th April 2014
Poets' Corner #21 – Another Modest
Proposal, 20th May 2014
Poets' Corner #22 – Thomas Gray
and The Eighteenth Century, 20th June 2014
Poets' Corner #23 – Edgar Allan
Poe, 18th July 2014
Poets' Corner #24 – Tread Softly,
19th August 2014
Poets' Corner #25 – Mad To Be
Saved, 24th December 2015
Poets' Corner #26 – Wants,
20th January 2016
Poets' Corner #27 – Samuel
Johnson, 15th February 2016
Poets' Corner #28 – T.S.Eliot,
10th March 2016
Poets' Corner #29 – Alfred Lord
Tennyson, 18th April 2016
Poets' Corner #30 – Leonard Cohen,
12th November 2016
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