19th Century Literature

1. Alfred Tennyson: The Lotus Eaters & In Memoriam (Lyrics 7 and 54)

Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892), Poet Laureate from 1850 until his death, is the central voice of Victorian poetry — the age's doubts and its faiths both pass through him. Two set texts show his two great modes: The Lotus Eaters (published 1842) is a mythic-dramatic poem of weariness and temptation, while In Memoriam (1850) is a long elegy for his closest friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly in 1833 at twenty-two. Tennyson worked on In Memoriam for seventeen years; its 131 lyrics trace grief moving, very slowly, toward a hard-won faith.

The Lotus Eaters. The poem retells an episode from Homer's Odyssey: Odysseus's sailors land on an island where the natives eat the lotus fruit, which makes men forget home and duty. Tennyson's mariners taste it and, in a long choric song, argue themselves into staying — why return to labour, war and wandering when the island offers rest? The famous opening of the chorus sets the drugged atmosphere at once:

"There is sweet music here that softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass,
Or night-dews on still waters between walls
Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass…"

The theme is the temptation of ease against the Victorian gospel of work. The mariners' argument — "How sweet it were… to rest" — sounds reasonable, but the poem quietly condemns it: to stop striving is a kind of death. Examiners love the contrast with Ulysses (also 1842), where Tennyson's hero declares "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." Read the two poems as a pair: The Lotus Eaters is the voice of surrender, Ulysses the voice of resolve. Note the form: a narrative opening in Spenserian-like stanzas giving way to the choric song — the sailors persuading themselves aloud, which is why the poem feels half-dramatic.

In Memoriam — Lyric 7. "Dark house, by which once more I stand / Here in the long unlovely street" — the speaker returns to the London house where Hallam once lived and finds it empty. The lyric is pure elegiac desolation: the hand that used to open the door is gone, and the street itself seems to share the grief. Everything Tennyson does here is quiet — no grand rhetoric, just a man standing outside a dark house. It is one of the most anthologised lyrics because it makes absence physical.

In Memoriam — Lyric 54. Here grief turns philosophical. The speaker confronts the new Victorian science — geology and early evolutionary thought suggesting a wasteful, suffering nature — and still trusts that good may somehow come from it. The lyric's famous doctrine is doubt honestly faced, then faith re-won — Tennyson's signature Victorian position:

"Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they."

The lyric's famous doctrine is doubt honestly faced, then faith re-won — Tennyson's signature Victorian position. And from Lyric 27 comes the single most quoted line of the whole elegy, usable in almost any Tennyson answer:

"'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all."

2. Gerard Manley Hopkins: Spring and Fall

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) is the most original technician among the Victorian poets — and the strangest publishing story: a Jesuit priest who burned his early poems on entering the order, wrote in secret for twenty years, and was published only posthumously in 1918 (edited by his friend Robert Bridges). Spring and Fall: to a young child is his most anthologised short lyric, and the official syllabus lists it for *detailed study.

Summary. The speaker watches a little girl, Margaret, grieving over falling autumn leaves in a wood called Goldengrove, and asks her why she weeps. She will grow up, he says, and learn that the real reason for grief is not the dying leaves but her own mortality:

"Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?..."

The poem's turn comes in the closing lines, among the most famous in Victorian poetry:

"It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for."

Themes. (1) Innocence to experience: Margaret's childish sorrow over leaves is the seed of the adult knowledge that all beauty dies — including her own. (2) Mortal beauty: Hopkins's lifelong subject — the world is charged with God's grandeur, but everything in it falls. (3) Compassion: the speaker does not mock the child; he honours her grief because it is true in advance — she intuits what she cannot yet name.

Form. Fifteen lines — a sonnet with a coda, or a "curtal" (shortened) sonnet shape stretched by one line. The diction mixes Anglo-Saxon monosyllables ("leaves," "grief," "fall") with Latinate weight ("unleaving," "wanwood"), which is Hopkins's signature music.

3. Matthew Arnold: Dover Beach

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) — poet, critic ("the best that has been thought and said"), and inspector of schools — wrote the Victorian age's great poem of religious doubt. Dover Beach was published in 1867 (New Poems) but drafted around 1851, probably on his honeymoon at Dover. It is set at night on the English Channel shore, addressed quietly to his wife — and it turns a seascape into an elegy for faith.

Summary. Stanza 1: the calm night sea at Dover, moonlight on the straits, the "grating roar" of pebbles as waves withdraw — a beautiful, melancholy music. Stanza 2: Sophocles, Arnold says, heard the same sound on the Aegean and heard in it "the turbid ebb and flow / Of human misery." Stanza 3: the famous turn — the "Sea of Faith" was once full, girdling the earth "like the folds of a bright girdle furled," but now it retreats with a "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar." Stanza 4: therefore, "Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!" — since the world offers no certainty, only personal love can hold against the darkness:

"Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain…"

The poem closes on the celebrated bleak image:

"…we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night."

Themes. (1) Victorian crisis of faith: geology, Darwin (1859 was coming), and biblical criticism were draining religious certainty; the ebbing tide is that loss, made audible. (2) Love as refuge: with God withdrawn, only human fidelity remains — a deeply Victorian compromise. (3) The modern condition: Arnold diagnoses the world his century was becoming — beautiful on the surface, empty underneath. Note how the poem moves: nature picture → classical parallel → religious metaphor → personal plea → universal night.

4. Robert Browning: My Last Duchess

Robert Browning (1812–1889) is the Victorian master of the dramatic monologue, and My Last Duchess (1842, in Dramatic Lyrics) is the form's textbook example. The speaker is the Duke of Ferrara, a Renaissance Italian nobleman, showing a portrait of his late wife to an envoy who has come to arrange the Duke's next marriage. As he talks, he reveals — without meaning to — that he had the Duchess killed for smiling too freely.

Summary. The Duke draws a curtain to show the envoy the portrait: "That's my last Duchess painted on the wall, / Looking as if she were alive." He explains, with growing irritation, what offended him: she thanked everyone alike — the Duke's favour ranked no higher than a servant's gift:

"She thanked men, — good! but thanked
Somehow — I know not how — as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody's gift."

Her fault, in his words: "A heart — how shall I say? — too soon made glad, / Too easily impressed." The climax is chillingly casual:

"I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together."

He then smoothly returns to business — the dowry negotiations — and points out a bronze statue of Neptune "taming a sea-horse" as they descend the stairs: power over beauty, cast in metal.

Themes. (1) Power and art: the Duke collects beauty he can control — a painted Duchess who smiles only for him, a Neptune who tames. (2) Aristocratic pride: his "nine-hundred-years-old name" is worth more than a living woman. (3) Jealousy as ownership: he could not bear that her smiles "went everywhere." Browning's genius is that the Duke never calls it murder — "I gave commands" is all we get, and the envoy (and reader) must do the arithmetic.

Form. Rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter, but enjambed so continuously that the rhyme barely shows — the verse sounds like arrogant conversation, not a song. The poem is one long sentence of self-display.

5. W. B. Yeats: The Second Coming

William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), the great Irish poet (Nobel Prize 1923), wrote The Second Coming in 1919 — in the wreckage of the First World War, the Irish War of Independence, and a flu pandemic — and published it in 1920. It is the twentieth century's most quoted apocalyptic poem: a vision of a civilisation spinning out of control and a terrifying new age being born.

Summary. Stanza 1: the world is coming apart — "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." The "blood-dimmed tide" drowns innocence; "the best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." Stanza 2: surely some revelation is at hand — "Surely the Second Coming is at hand." But what comes is not Christ: out of "Spiritus Mundi" (the spirit of the world, a collective unconscious of images) a shape "with lion body and the head of a man" moves its "slow thighs" through desert sand — "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…"

Themes. (1) Collapse of order: every image is of things flying apart — falcon from falconer, centre from circumference. (2) Inversion of values: "the best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity" — the age's most quoted diagnosis of political fanaticism. (3) Anti-redemption: the Second Coming is reversed — Bethlehem, Christ's birthplace, receives a beast. The poem's terror is that the future will be worse than the present. Note the biblical frame turned inside out: Revelation's Second Coming becomes a nightmare.

Form. Two stanzas of irregular, roughly blank-verse lines — no fixed rhyme, hammering stresses. The diction is biblical and prophetic ("loosed," "revelation," "Bethlehem"), which makes the final question land like scripture.