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Tennyson's “Oh! That 'Twere Possible”: A Link Between In Memoriam and Maud
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Alfred Tennyson'S poetical career, extending over sixty-five years between first and last volumes—from Poems by Two Brothers in 1827 to his posthumous volume published three weeks after his death in 1892—is punctuated not only by recurrent themes but also by the reworking of old manuscripts and his well-known revision of published texts. His revision and expansion of 110 lines beginning “Oh! that ‘twere possible” published in The Tribute in 1837 resulted in 1855 in the much longer Maud, in which the earlier lyric, now beginning “O that ‘twere possible,” is Part II, Section iv. This lyric is interesting as the nucleus around which Maud developed and also because of its affinities with In Memoriam.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1963
References
1 For the correspondence between Milnes and Tennyson see Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son (London, 1897), I, 157–160, hereafter referred to as Memoir.
2 The background of the annuals is delineated by Thomas R. Lounsbury, The Life and Times of Tennyson (New Haven, 1915), pp. 245–264, and Tennyson's contributions to them are discussed on pp. 265–278.
3 An account of this occasion is given by Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson (London, 1949), p. 281.
4 This manuscript has been the subject of several articles: Charles Tennyson, “Tennyson Papers: II. J. M. Heath's ‘Commonplace Book’,” Cornhill Magazine, CLIII (1936), 426449, which discusses the Heath-Tennyson relationship and in general the contents of the Commonplace Book; Mary Joan Donahue, “Tennyson's Hail, Briton! and Tithon in the Heath Manuscript,” PMLA, LXIV (1949), 385–416, an intensive study of the two poems named in the title; Mary Joan Donahue, “The Revision of Tennyson's Sir Galahad,” PQ, XXVIII (1949), 326–329; and Mary Joan Ellmann, “Tennyson. Revision of In Memoriam, Section 85,” MLN, LXV (1950), 22–30. Joyce Green also used the manuscript in “Tennyson's Development during the ‘Ten Years’ Silence' (1832–1842),” PMLA, LXVI (1951), 662–697. The manuscript, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, was purchased from the Heath family on 25 July 1932, in which year the Fitzwilliam also acquired a copy of Tennyson's Poems (1833), inscribed to Heath by Tennyson, and “containing numerous autograph additions and emendations” (Eighty-fourth Annual Report of the Fitzwilliam Museum Syndicate, for the year 1932, Cambridge, 1933, p. 4).
5 Joyce Green, in noting that the mood of “Oh! that ‘twere possible” in the Commonplace Book is “one of intense personal grief,” observes that it was probably composed during the late autumn of 1833, immediately after news of Hallam's death reached Tennyson (“Tennyson's Development during the ‘Ten Years’ Silence' [1832–1842],” PMLA, LXVI, 1951, 671). Miss Green also shows how for publication of “On a Mourner” in 1865 Tennyson masked the personal aspect of the poem by a change of pronoun from first person to third. She also publishes two previously unpublished manuscript stanzas which link “On a Mourner” to Arthur Hallam (ibid., 672, n. 46).
6 Mary Joan Donahue suggests that Tennyson, in choosing the mask of Tithonus, used the symbol of love between man and woman “to express the peculiar and individual nature of his own emotional injury” (“Tennyson's Hail, Briton! and Tithon in the Heath Manuscript,” PMLA, LXIV, 1949, 416).
7 Among these are Morton Luce, A Handbook to the Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson (London, 189S), p. 305; A. C. Bradley, A Commentary on Tennyson's In Memoriam (London, 1901), p. 175; and Poems of Tennyson, ed. Henry Van Dyke and D. Laurance Chambers (Boston, 1903), p. 412 (Notes). Bradley also notes the similarity of the idea in the last two lines in the eighth stanza (p. 174) (“And on my heavy eyelids / My anguish hangs like shame”) to a line in Section vn of In Memoriam: “And like a guilty thing I creep”; he adds the comment that “this section of Maud was, in its original form, written many years before the rest of the poem” (pp. 88–89).
8 Memoir, i, 107. Observe the alternating rhyme, which Tennyson also employed in several manuscript stanzas of In Memoriam. See Edgar F. Shannon, Jr., and W. H. Bond, “Literary Manuscripts of Alfred Tennyson in the Harvard College Library,” Harvard Library Bulletin, x (1956), p. 256. This ghostly presence also occurs in the Commonplace Book (p. 257) in stanzas headed “Christmas Eve. 1833,” now Section XXX of In Memoriam, when the Tennyson family's attempt at merriment at Christmas is muffled by “an awful sense / Of one mute shadow watching all.”
9 Memoir, ii, 83. In relating this incident Sir Charles Tennyson adds: “Of course this had not been connected with Arthur in anyone's mind as nothing was yet known of his death” (Alfred Tennyson, p. 145).