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  • What the Laureate Did Next: Maud
  • Timothy Peltason (bio)

I know that I braid too much my own Snapped-off perceptions of things as they come to me. They are private and always will be. Where then are the private turns of event Destined to boom later like golden chimes Released over a city from a highest tower? The quirky things that happen to me, and I tell you, And you instantly know what I mean? What remote orchard reached by winding roads Hides them? Where are these roots?

It is the lumps and trials That tell us whether we shall be known And whether our fate can be exemplary, like a star.

——John Ashbery, “The One Thing That Can Save America,” from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975)

When Tennyson was appointed poet laureate in 1850, soon after the protracted composition and triumphant publication of In Memoriam, the event might have struck him—indeed, might now strike us—as a pattern-confirming and thus suggestively providential moment of arrival, of just the kind that the speaker-poet of In Memoriam urgently hopes to discern in his own unfolding history and in the history of the species. More than any poet laureate before or after, Tennyson in 1850 had earned his appointment by speaking at once to and for the deepest anxieties of his culture, and there was thus a tantalizing fitness to the fact that the position should have fallen vacant just as he was proving his claim to it by gathering together his exemplary narrative of doubtful affirmation. Tantalizing fitnesses, moreover, were just what the exemplary first person of that poem (“‘I’ is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking thro’ him”)1 was persistently seeking out. Averring at the end of section 128 that “I see in part / That all, as in some piece of art, / Is toil cöoperant to an end,”2 the arranging intelligence of the piece of art that is In Memoriam looked out [End Page 197] hopefully (but with all the honest if quiet reservations of that ambiguous “in part”) for the interpretable signs of a redemptive and enclosing order. Amid the evidences of entropy, decay, and despair in the world at large, the historical scriptor, Alfred Tennyson (not yet a Lord, but suddenly on course to become one), found himself living an apparently scripted life, a life that had delivered him in a single year into marriage, celebrity, centrality.

Before the “wild and wandering cries” (IM, Prologue) of Tennyson’s elegy for Arthur Hallam had taken shape as the confirming evidence of this centrality, they had begun in sorrowful privacy and, apparently, with no conception that they would end either in the anticipation of the “far-off divine event” of the Epilogue to In Memoriam or in the immediate culminating event of the laureateship. Only in the years after 1850 could Tennyson have written with the certainty that he was speaking to a wide audience and with the nudging sanction of the laureateship to speak for as well as to them. Tennyson took seriously his vocation as laureate, but we have little documentary or epistolary evidence to tell us to what extent that vocation was present to his mind in the composition of individual poems. It is clear that he wrote deliberately as the poet laureate in the “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington,” published in 1852; almost as clear that he was doing so in “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in 1854. He also wrote in this period a number of militantly and now embarrassingly patriotic poems—“Britons, Guard Your Own,” “Hands All Round,” “The Penny-Wise (“Four hundred thousand slaves in arms / May seek to bring us under; / Are we ready, Britons all, / To answer them with thunder? / Arm, Arm, Arm!” [ll. 5–9])—poems designed to fortify the nation for armed struggles to come. Curiously, though, he declined to sign his name to these public-themed poems, perhaps considering them too evidently partisan to qualify as laureate-work. But what of Maud, his first major work and thus his first great act of poetic self...

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