Alfred Lord Tennyson: His Two Voices and Divided Will

Volume II, Issue VIII, December 2014 - ISSN 2321-7065 Alfred Lord Tennyson: His Two Voices and divided will Goutam Karmakar Assistant Teacher, Department of English Bhagilata High School (H.S) Raiganj Uttar Dinajpur West Bengal Abstract: Alfred Lord Tennyson was one of the major poets of Victorian era. He was such a poet who could take criticism in his style and he was neither weak nor wayward. Weighed in the balance, he was not found wanting but steadily growing. He would not abandon his art at the voice of censure, but correct and perfect it. But in his poetry we find some kind of dualism, two worlds or rather two voices with conflict, comparisons, dilemma and he throughout his poetic career tried to make a good balance between them. Actually he was not only a man and a poet, but he wanted to become the voice of the whole people, and many others kinds of excellence that are the characteristic of present day writing could be illustrated from Tennyson. In this paper, I have attempted to show the dualism, two voices or divided will with some of his everlasting eternal verse. KEY WORDS: Dualism, Divided will, complexity, conflict http://www.ijellh.com 450 Volume II, Issue VIII, December 2014 - ISSN 2321-7065 Introduction: “An infant crying in the night, An infant crying for the light And with no language but a cry.” -- Tennyson (In Memorium, A.H.H: 54) The Victorian poetry, which marks the transition from the Romantic to the Modern, attempted with fair success in experimentation with respect to subject matter. The popular belief that Sir Alfred Lord Tennyson was the representative of his age in this regard. But he often forgets to trace the innate contradiction that underlies in his poetry. Taking it for granted that Tennyson was a Victorian poet laurate, critics have a kind of lop-sided view about his poetry. Thomas Carlyle observed that Tennyson possessed the completeness of a limited mind. Matthew Arnold found him deficient in intellectual power. W.H. Auden found him as undoubtedly the stupidest of the English poets. It is because in many of his important poems, Tennyson seems to be grappling the fundamental view- points about religion, low or social relationship. Tennyson was a complacent Victorian. But this view was tacitly challenged and corrected by T.S. Eliot. In his essay on “In Memorium”, he made the famous observations that Tennyson was only the surface flatterer of his own times. Eliot wanted to suggest that we should go deeper into his poetry in order to understand the contradiction, the divided will, the two voices or the two worlds of his poetry. Eliot’s observation has shown us a way out of the critical obsession to regard Tennyson as an acquiescent bard of Victorian era. In order to see Tennyson’s world we have to keep in mind the conformity rebellion dualism of his temperament and recognize his simultaneous commitment to public duty and to his poetic impulse. Metaphorically Tennyson’s poetry seems to reveal the problematic condition of the centre and the circumference, the former being his poetic impulse and the latter his duty to the age. Far from being naive or complacent Tennyson was actually alive to the complexities of the human condition not as a poet Laurate or representative Victorian poet, but as a humanist that all http://www.ijellh.com 451 Volume II, Issue VIII, December 2014 - ISSN 2321-7065 poets should be at heart. The result is that in poem after poem, we find him weighing and balancing the claims of the opposites: Ideal versus actual, reason vs passion, society vs. the individual, spiritual vs. the sensuous and religion vs. science. Tennyson’s dualistic vision is best expressed when T.S. Eliot said regarding’ In Memorium’. For Eliot ‘In Memorium’ is justly be called a religious poem, but for another reason than that which made it seem religious to his contemporaries. It is also not religious because of the quality of its faith, but because of the quality of its doubt. Its faith is a poor thing, but its doubt is a very intense experience.” It may be pointed out that Eliot was not first to comment on Tennyson’s dualistic vision. Victorian critics like Goldwin Smith pointed out that Ulysses is a symbol of passivity rather than action. W. H. Robson pointed out that poems like Love and Duty, Enoch Arden and The Lotos Eaters reveal the same kind of dualism that has been missed by the staunch critics of Tennyson. In Ulysses we find a conflict between science and religion in the contrast of the characters of Ulysses and his son Telemachus. Ulysses embodies the Victorian passion for the exploration of new kingdom of science and Telemachus respects for traditional religion: “Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere Of common duties, decent not to fail In offices of tenderness, and pay Meet adoration to my household gods, When I am gone.” (Ulysses) Also it is a poem about society and individual, reason with passion. Ulysses had a heart which was never satisfied with travelling. Even he had less interest in domestic life. He is tired of his duties and from those savage people who are not even able to appreciate his idealism: “It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws into a savage race, That Hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.” (Ulysses) http://www.ijellh.com 452 Volume II, Issue VIII, December 2014 - ISSN 2321-7065 But at the same time, Tennyson brings Telemachus to balance the poem. Society also needs this kind of people who work for the preservation and continuation of fruits won by their more advanced fellows. In his Love and Duty (1842), it is not sure that whether this poem is autobiographical and has references to the compulsory separation of Tennyson and Miss Emily Sellwood, it is impossible to say as Tennyson in his life of his father is silent on this subject. The same kind of dualism, conflicts, anxieties are also here: “Of love that never found his earthly close, What sequel? Streaming eyes and breaking hearts? Or all the same as if he had not been? No so. Shall Error in the round of time Still father Truth?” (Love and Duty) Tennyson’s dualism or two voices are often found in “The Brook”. In this poem, the brook plays the role of the narrator and it tells the reader about its journey. Here the poet shows the conflict and comparison between eternity and mortality. He has perhaps been overwhelmed by the timeless existence of the stream and man’s helplessness before the cycle of birth and death. And it is shown several times by repeating lines. In the last stanza, the brook finally joins the river, its final destiny. The brook again mocked the human as ordinary mortals who get consumed by time. On the other hand, the brook is perennial and undying: “And out again I curve and flow To join the brimming river, For men may come and men may go, But I go on forever.” (The Brook) It is useful to remember that Tennyson’s dualistic vision was largely shaped by the cross currents of literary opinion generated by his poetry. Hallam gave Tennyson a typically ambivalent advice regarding the function of the artist. Tennyson was urged to give his allegiance to both ethics and aesthetics. On the one hand Hallam advocated the Keatsean doctrine that http://www.ijellh.com 453 Volume II, Issue VIII, December 2014 - ISSN 2321-7065 whatever imagination seizes as beauty must be truth. On the other he warned Tennyson against the danger of aestheticism. It is incumbent upon sensuous natures, he wrote to remember that their mission as men, which they share with fellow beings is of infinitely higher interest than their missions as artists. Tennyson had failed to reconcile his natural tendency towards the picturesque and the sensuous, and an acquired cultural concern with the important issues of the day- a view that recognizes the existence of a dichotomy between Tennyson’s innate and acquired propensities. In the 1960s, the publication of three important books on Tennyson, all of which take him to account the poet’s divided sensibility. In his book “Tennyson, The Growth of A Poet”, J. H. Burkley noted very significant comments. Actually there is in Tennyson a constant reaction between public knowledge and private feelings. From the beginning he felt some responsibility to the society he lived in, and until the end he remained obedient to the one clear call of his imagination. Victorian scholars amply demonstrated that the age was one of anxiety and uncertainty, of sharp conflicts and tensions. Possessed with what he calls in “The Two Voices”, a divided will, Tennyson was from his early career tossed between the two opposing worlds – the outer and the inner. Actually Tennyson wrote this poem after the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam in 1833. He explained, “When I wrote ‘The Two Voices’ I was so utterly miserable, a burden to myself and to my family, that I said, ‘If life worth anything?” (Hill, 54). Here in this poem a debate was there between two voices. One told him to commit suicide but the other said that he should not throw away what God has made. Here is also the struggle and conflict between religious conviction and artistic productivity: “A Still small voice spoke unto me, Thou art so full of misery, Were it not better not to be?” (The Two Voices) But at last he decided to live and his frozen heart began to beat again: “And wherefore rather I made choice http://www.ijellh.com 454 Volume II, Issue VIII, December 2014 - ISSN 2321-7065 To commune with that barren voice, Than him that said, “Rejoice! Rejoice.” (The Two Voices) In any case, Tennyson’s double awareness wanted to accommodate the two worlds of the realist and the visionary.

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