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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
The two following essays are separate studies joined by a common source. The unpublished Tennyson poems, Hail, Briton! and Tithon, are taken from the Heath MS. at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England.
John Moore Heath was a college friend of Tennyson, a member, like him, of the Cambridge Apostles group. During the years of his closest friendship with Tennyson, 1883–35, Heath was an assistant tutor of Trinity College. The two men met there and corresponded often; at the same time they were both associated with other members of the old Cambridge group. Like most of these literati of the 1830's, Heath kept a Commonplace Book in which he laboriously and faithfully copied out the work of his friends, Arthur Hallam, Richard Trench, William Donne, Frederick, Septimus, Edward, and Alfred Tennyson. The flyleaf of his MS book Heath inscribed with the date September 24, 1832, clearly the } time at which he began to record the poetry. The Tennyson entries, however, he certainly made later, most of them in 1833, probably all within the limit 1835.
1 Hallam Lord Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir (London, 1897), i, 71.
2 Charles Tennyson makes this clear in his letter of March, 1831 (Memoir, i, 73).
3 Heath MS., pp. 265–276.
4 Wrists: suggested reading (MS. illegible).
5 own] self MS. deleted.
6 Lips: suggested reading (MS. illegible).
7 rights were wholly cast] privileges past MS. deleted.
8 loins: suggested reading (MS. illegible). 9 Stanza in margin: later addition?
10 man] we MS. deleted.
11 at heart] in truth MS. deleted.
12 Line set within brackets.
13 Memoir, i, 110–111.
14 Charles Tennyson, ed., Unpublished Early Poems by Alfred Tennyson (London, 1931), p. 73.
15 Ibid., pp. 73–74.
16 Heath MS., pp. 262–264, 276–277, and 278.
17 The Works of Tennyson, ed. Hallam Lord Tennyson, Eversley Edition (London, 1907–08), iii, 161.
18 Eversley, iii, 82. In the In Memoriam MS leaf preserved at the Huntington Library the text of Section 44 confirms this borrowing. The fourth line of the stanza is here exactly that of the political poem.
19 Shakespearean Showbook (London, 1884). The stanza is not included in the Eversley Edition. See The Poetic and Dramatic Works of Tennyson, ed. W. J. Rolfe, Cambridge Edition (Boston and New York, 1898), p. 793. Hallam Lord Tennyson includes this stanza with its later revision in his text of The Statesman (Memoir, i, 111).
20 Eversley, vii, 3.
21 It is ironie, in view of this re-use, that Stephen Gwynn singles out these opening stanzas as an instance of Tennyson's best Horatian manner—Tennyson: A Critical Study (London, 1899), p. 142. And Harold Nicolson, echoing Gwynn, speaks of their “perfectly graduated transition”—Tennyson: Aspects of his Life, Character and Poetry (London, 1923), pp. 276–277.
22 Eversley, ii, 213.
23 Published in The Examiner, Feb. 14, 1852.
24 In Memoriam, Section 109 (Eversley, iii, 156).
25 See D. C. Somervell, English Thought in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1938), p. 73.
26 See Memoir, i, 51–55. Even in this adventure, however, Tennyson's interest seems to have been distracted from the political excitement. Home again, he wrote nothing about the revolutionaries; he wrote Mariana in the South.
27 James Spedding soon left Shelley and returned to tradition. See Frances M. Brook-field, The Cambridge “Apostles” (New York, 1907), pp. 262–263. Milnes called the Reform Bill of 1832 “the curse and degradation of the nation”—T. Wemyss Reid, The Life, Letters and Friendships of Richard Monckton Milnes, First Lord Houghton (London, 1890), i, 126. Arthur Hallam, despite his early death, found time to become a Tory. See, for example, his letter of December 15, 1832, to James Milnes Gaskell in An Eton Boy, ed. Charles Milnes Gaskell (London, 1939), p. 219.
28 Memoir, i, 185–186.
29 Memoir, i, 97, 168, 178–179; also Tennyson and his Friends, ed. Hallam Lord Tennyson (London, 1911), p. 408.
30 Early in 1860 Tennyson wrote the Duke of Argyll: “You will see a little poem of mine in the Cornhill Magazine. My friend Thackeray and his publishers had been so urgent with me to send them something, that I ferreted among my old books and found this ‘Tithonus,’ written upwards of a quarter of a century ago, and now queerly enough at the tail of a flashy modern novel. [This seems now a rather inadequate description of Trollope's Framley Parsonage.] It was originally a pendent to the ‘Ulysses’ in my former volumes, and I wanted Smith to insert a letter, not of mine, to the editor stating this, and how long ago it had been written, but he thought it would lower the value of the contribution in the public eye” (Memoir, I, 459). This statement is confirmed by Tennyson's letter of December 28, 1859, to the editor of the Cornhill (Maggs Catalogue No. 737, 1944). See also Memoir, ii, 9.
31 Hallam Tennyson speaks of his father's “finishing his ‘Tithonus’ ” in November, 1859 (Memoir, i,443).
32 Heath MS., pp. 262–264.
33 beat the roads: uncertain reading.
34 wild MS. deleted (illegible).
35 In the original myth Tithonus in the end becomes a grasshopper. Tennyson showed his interest in the myth as early as 1830: The Grasshopper was published in Poems Chiefly Lyrical and afterwards suppressed.
36 This was still the opening line of the 1860 Cornhill Magazine text.
37 Elaborate inversion is, of course, one of the most repeated rhetorical devices of elevated expression in the poem.
38 The substitution here of “thy” for “these” was another reinforcement of parallelism.
39 At the same time the change establishes the liquid tills/field and erases the rather stubborn earth/beneath. “Field” first appeared in the 1864 Enoch Arden volume.
40 Tennyson's hatred of sibilants is mentioned in the Memoir, ii, 286, 289.
41 The addition in line 44 of “then before thine answer given” was evidently prompted by the same purpose.
42 The shroud is suggested by the verb “wind”, burial by “lap me deep.”
43 It should also be noticed that with this change, “renew” in line 74 establishes another light thread of repetition.
44 In similar emphasis upon this quality, in line 69 of the final version Tennyson substituted “dim” for “still.”
45 Memoir, i, 196.
46 W. C. and M. P. DeVane, eds., Selections from Tennyson (New York, 1940), p. 457.
47 Memoir, i, 135.
