Nobler Tennyson
‘TENNYSON, poet of high school days, sonorously decked out platitudes in purple, agonised by lone frocks, and created a rich tapestry of knights and their ladies. This Tennyson I left, never looking back until recently when Chapter and Verse from 3YC caught me with the depth of feeling oftén expressed in Tennyson’s verse. Tennyson the typical Victorian either hid from the cause of his anguish-the evil things which grew up ‘under the complacent wing of the time-or, lacking a direct and practical
intelligence, almost never divined them. But his concern was real and urgent and has power to move us today. Nor should we forget, considering the way in which we too hide from evil, that on the occasion of the Queen’s Jubilee Tennyson either discovered or let his anxiety be known publicly. Both Tennyson and Gladstone felt that things were not as secure as they seemed. But Gladstone could not allow the sombre note to be sounded in the year of the Queen’s Jubilee and ‘set himself to explain away Lord Tennyson’s forebodings. To think that, fawned upon from his earliest years as he was, the ageing poet spoke the truth as he felt it makes him more worthy of the prophet’s mantle than many of us would be willing to admit.!
Westcliff
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19510727.2.20.2
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 630, 27 July 1951, Page 10
Word count
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216Nobler Tennyson New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 630, 27 July 1951, Page 10
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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