Tennyson's Latest

 

A few years ago, Mr John Howard and I enjoyed a week’s book-browsing sojourn in the Lincolnshire Wolds, one of the least-known parts of England. These gently rolling hills contrast with the fens to the South, the crumbling North Sea coastline to the East and the industrial encrustations along the Humber to the North.

Within the Wolds there are some pleasant small towns, including Louth, scene of my forthcoming story ‘Kraken Tide’, and Horncastle, which had one of the most extraordinarily overcrowded second-hand bookshops ever seen, with the narrowest of passages between great tottering towers of tomes.

The shop also had a few curios and, for a reason that now eludes me, I decided I wanted a green ceramic Humpty Dumpty with gilt shoes that was in the window.  The proprietor’s attempts to lure this out caused ominous tremblings in the book stacks which, had they fallen, would certainly have shaken chimney-pots and caused the crows to caw across a wide area. 

I don’t even like eggs.

Also nearby is Woodhall Spa, an early Victorian hydro and still a quiet resort set among ancient woods and heath-land, with a mock-Tudor pavilion that became a picture house, the ‘kinema in the woods’. Nearby was the scene of my story ‘In Cypress Shades’ (available in The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things), where a clearing in the woods witnesses an unusual rehearsal of John Milton’s Comus, A Maske.

It was during this visit that we also made a pilgrimage to Somersby, the birthplace of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, still a very sleepy out-of-the-way village. When we drew up, two young girls were firing arrows at the post box on the village green, with all the semblance of some arcane Artemisian ritual.

One might imagine that such a mighty eminence in English Literature would be celebrated at the very least with a visitor centre involving a café, audio-visuals, a declaiming actor in cloak and tall hat, and a gift shop selling Charge of the Light Brigade plastic sabres, Come Into the Garden Pot Pourri and Crossing the Bar Funeral Stationery, with perhaps even a few books of his poems.

Nothing of the sort. What was charming here was the highly diffident acknowledgement of the poet’s association with the place. This was only to be found in the church, and consisted in its entirety of a fabric pin-board with a few fading information sheets and a small glass case containing one of the poet’s quills. This modest display was much more pleasing than anything grander. Later, even in the shire city itself, we discovered that the Tennyson Room in the museum, remembered by Mr Howard from many previous visits while residing in Lincoln, had vanished and was unknown to the attendants.

It all reminded me of the rather vague sense of the poet held by P G Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster who is being wooed by a spoony girl who asks him, ‘Do you like poetry, Bertie?’, to which he replies (I paraphrase), ‘Oh, er, rather. There’s nothing I like better than curling up with Tennyson’s latest.’

However, there are still those who recognise the grandeur and power of Tennyson’s vision and among them is the Peterborough poet Cardinal Cox. His recent opuscule Idylls of the Poet is a rich, sympathetic response to Tennyson’s work and, in particular, his Arthurian themes. I remember once reading a poetry editor of the kitchen-sink Fifties complaining that every other poem he was sent was about King Arthur, but this is no longer the case and Mr Cox is to be commended for his attention both to Tennyson and to the mythic king.

His booklet begins with a boy, escaped from the stuffy rectory, lying on an ancient burial mound, where his imagination begins to interlace with that of a Dark Age minstrel reaching out to him over many centuries. This is a beguiling device, which reminded me of Lucian Taylor dreaming in the Roman camp near Caerleon, in Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams. The two poets resume their association in further prose interludes throughout the booklet, as Tennyson grows older. This strange overlapping is a form of haunting, perhaps, or a timeslip: that is left nicely ambiguous.

Within this framework, Cardinal Cox offers ten poems, each based on a Pre-Raphaelite picture with an Arthurian theme, by such renowned artists as Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but with some lesser-known ones too. These re-tell, or re-imagine, otherworldly scenes of knights and damsels, sorcerers and seers, raven queens and rune-casters, in a timeless, mythic realm.

Suitably, these verses are composed in a High Victorian style, in closely rhymed couplets or quatrains or other traditional patterns, incantatory, like old magical spells. These forms also help to suggest the spectral influence of the ancient bard, who would have woven just such refrains in the feasting-halls of forgotten kings.

The ambience is satisfyingly redolent of the medievalist Arts & Crafts work of William Morris and his followers, but also laced with the haughty grotesquerie of Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations to Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur.

Idylls of the Poet may be obtained direct from Cardinal Cox in return for an SAE, from 58 Pennington, Orton Goldhay, Peterborough, PE2 5RB, or by contacting:

cardinalcox1[at]yahoo[dot]co[dot]uk