Alfred Tennyson

Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) was a poet-laureate, born at Somersby, in Lincolnshire, son of a clergyman, and of aristocratic descent. He was educated at the grammar school of Louth and at Trinity College, Cambridge, which latter he left without taking a degree. Having already devoted himself to the "Ars Poetica," an art which he cultivated more and more all his life long. He entered the university in 1828, and issued his first volume of poems in 1830, though he had four years previously contributed to a small volume conjointly with a brother. To the poems of 1830 he added others, and published them in 1833 and 1842, after which, endowed by a pension from the Civil List of £200, he produced the "Princess" in 1847, and "In Memoriam" in 1850. In 1851, he was appointed to the laureateship, and next in that capacity wrote his "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington". In 1855 appeared his "Maud," in 1859 the first four of his "Idylls of the King," which were followed by "Enoch Arden" and the "Northern Farmer" in 1864, and by a succession of other pieces too numerous to mention here. He was raised to the peerage in 1884 on the recommendation of Mr. Gladstone.

Tennyson was a poet of the ideal, and was distinguished for the exquisite purity of his style and the harmony of his rhythm. He had a loving veneration for the past, and an adoring regard for everything pure and noble, and if he indulged in a vein of sadness at all, as he sometimes did, it was when he saw, as he could not help seeing, the feebler hold regard for such things had on the men and women of his generation than the worship of Mammon. Carlyle thought affectionately but plaintively of him, "One of the finest-looking men in the world," he writes to Emerson; "never had such company over a pipe!... a truly interesting son of earth and son of heaven ... wanted a task, with which that of spinning rhymes, and naming it 'art' and 'high art' in a time like ours, would never furnish him".

Wisdom & Quotes

• Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea.
- Crossing the Bar

• For men may come and men may go,

But I go on forever.
- The Brook

• The time draws near the birth of Christ;

The moon is hid; the night is still;
The Christmas bells from hill to hill
Answer each other in the mist.
- In Memoriam

• 'Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.
- In Memoriam

• Nature, red in tooth and claw.

- In Memoriam

• Ring out the thousand wars of old,

Ring in the thousand years of peace.
- In Memoriam

• He seems so near and yet so far.

- In Memoriam

• And a day less or more

At sea or shore,
We die - does it matter when?
- The Revenge

• We shall live to fight again and to strike another blow.

- The Revenge

• Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,

And after many a summer dies the swan.
- Tithonus

• Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with gods.
- Ulysses

• Every moment dies a man,

Every moment one is born.
- The Vision of Sin

• He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
The Wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
- The Eagle

• Flower in the crannied wall,

I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower - but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
- Flower in the Crannied Wall

• He makes no friend who never made a foe.

- Lancelot and Elaine, in Idylls of the King

• For man is man and master of his fate.

- Lancelot and Elaine, in Idylls of the King

• Pray for my soul, More things are wrought by prayer

Than this world dreams of.
- The Passing of Arthur, in Idylls of the King

• 'Tis only noble to be good,

Kind hearts are more than coronets.
- Lady Clara Vere de Vere

• Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.

- Locksley Hall

• In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns

To thoughts of love.
- Locksley Hall

• Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs,

And the thoughts of men are widened,
With the process of the suns.
- Locksley Hall

• Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.

- Locksley Hall

• Death is the end of life; ah, why

Should life all labour be?
- The Lotus-Eaters

• Theirs is not to reason why,

Theirs is but to do and die.
- The Charge of the Light Brigade

• Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,
All in the Valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
- The Charge of the Light Brigade

• Cannon to right of them

Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them.
Volleyed and thundered.
- The Charge of the Light Brigade

• Into the jaws of death,

Into the mouth of hell
Rode the six hundred.
- The Charge of the Light Brigade

• O, tell her, brief is life but love is long.

- The Princess

• Sweet and low, sweet and low,

Wind of the western sea.
- The Princess

• Sleep my little one, sleep my pretty one, sleep.

- The Princess

• The woman's cause is man's: they rise or sink

Together.
- The Princess

• The woman is so hard

Upon the woman.
- The Princess

• Man for the field and woman for the hearth:

Man for the sword and for the needle she:
Man with the head and woman with the heart:
Man to command and woman to obey;
All else confusion.
- The Princess

• The Old order changeth, yielding place to new,

And God fulfills Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
- Morte D' Arthur

• My strength is as the strength of ten,

Because my heart is pure.
- Sir Galahad

• Things seen are mightier than things heard.

- Enoch Arden

• The worst is yet to come.

- Sea Dreams

William Ewart Gladstone