It is one of the earliest, if not the very earliest, of
Tennyson's domestic English idylls, poems with conspicuous beauties,
but not without sacrifices to that Muse of the home affections on
whom Sir Barnes Newcome delivered his famous lecture. The seventh
stanza perhaps hardly deserved to be altered, as it is, so as to
bring in "minnows" where "fish" had been the reading, and where
"trout" would best recall an English chalk stream. To the angler the
rising trout, which left the poet cold, is at least as welcome as the
"reflex of a beauteous form." "Every woman seems an angel at the
water-side," said "that good old angler, now with God," Thomas Todd
Stoddart, and so "the long and listless boy" found it to be. It is
no wonder that the mother was "SLOWLY brought to yield consent to my
desire." The domestic affections, in fact, do not adapt themselves
so well to poetry as the passion, unique in Tennyson, of Fatima. The
critics who hunt for parallels or plagiarisms will note -
"O Love, O fire! once he drew
With one long kiss my whole soul thro'
My lips,"
and will observe Mr Browning's
"Once he kissed
My soul out in a fiery mist."
As to OEnone, the scenery of that earliest of the classical idylls is
borrowed from the Pyrenees and the tour with Hallam. "It is possible
that the poem may have been suggested by Beattie's Judgment of
Paris," says Mr Collins; it is also possible that the tale which
"Quintus Calaber
Somewhat lazily handled of old"
may have reached Tennyson's mind from an older writer than Beattie.
Pages:
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46