Tennyson’s ‘Tears’ and ‘the lyric modality of suffering’.

By ALISON CHAPMAN [Victorian Poetry Network] – As Paul Fyfe quipped in the “Performative Poetry” seminar, Victorian poetry can be seen to be a tissue of sound bites, more to do with its life in the air than its life as a text. And, of course, Victorian poetry very often figures itself as mediating between distance and proximity, near and far (Aurora Leigh‘s “double vision”). The voice in “Tears, Idle Tears” on the one hand plays with the sense of the voice as an authentic expression of personal loss, the lyric modality of pain and suffering. And yet, on the other, the poem is supremely secondary, mediated and belated, as the response to a visit to a historic ruin so profoundly associated with another poem of loss, Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”, itself positioned at a distance above the very ruin it contemplates. Wordsworth’s poem strives for a form of recuperation of loss, through the silent presence of his sister Dorothy (although what of her potentially resisting “wild eyes”…?). So Tennyson’s poem mediates and swerves away from Wordsworth’s poem. And Tennyson’s lyric is in fact part of a larger narrative, The Princess (1847), although in its popularity for musical settings in the nineteenth century it had a life of its own, away from its mother-text, remediated into Victorian musical culture. And Holman Hunt’s picture nicely underscores this, by painting the poem into the picture as a sign for a gift that symbolizes a grief and loss that cannot be explicitly named.

Continued at Victorian Poetry Network | More Chronicle & Notices.

This Fortnightly Review article is filed under the following rubrics: Chronicle & Notices, Poetry & Fiction.
Publication: Tuesday, 29 November 2011, at 10:22.
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Tennyson’s ‘Tears’ and ‘the lyric modality of suffering’.

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