“A Perfect Form in Perfect Rest”: Spellbinding Narratives and Tennyson’s “Day Dream”

Fairy Tale Temporalities

Victorian reflections upon temporality often conjure up metaphors of enchantment, of beguilement, of charmed sleep that threatens progress. In Past and Present, Thomas Carlyle distinguishes between “a virtual Industrial Aristocracy, as yet only half alive—spell-bound amid money-bags and ledgers; and an actual idle aristocracy seemingly near dead in somnolent delusions” (1117). He implores his “Princes of Industry” to wake: “[i]t is you who are already half-alive, whom I will welcome into life; whom I conjure in God’s name to shake off your enchanted sleep and live wholly!” (1118) In casting himself as author-prince, giving the kiss of life to the capitalists, Carlyle refers overtly to the narrative of “Sleeping Beauty,” a fairy tale that, this essay will argue, not only inhabited, but also shaped the diverse Victorian discourses of political economy, architecture, philosophy, and poetry. In Stones of Venice, for example, John Ruskin posits: “[i]t is that strange disquietude of the gothic spirit that is its greatness, that restlessness of the dreaming mind . . . and it can neither rest in, nor from, its labour, but must pass on, sleeplessly, until its love of change shall be pacified forever in the change that must come alike on the them that wake and them that sleep” (181). Ruskin imagines an historical age as a mind that dreams but paradoxically must not sleep if it is to enact change, and thus, like Carlyle, renders “sleep” as a narcotic “quietude” that must be shaken off. Still later in the century, the narrator of George Eliot’s Theophrastus Such, though “determined . . . not to grumble at the age in which I happen to have been born” nevertheless confesses to “an inborn beguilement which carries my affection and regret continually into an imagined past” (34). Here nostalgia casts a charm so powerful that it can cause one to “lose all sense of moral proportion unless I keep alive a stronger attachment to what is near” (34–35). These authors, then, identify progress as a wakeful, restless, moral, linear, temporal journey forward. Let us not forget, however, that they conjure themselves into an imaginary past to make these very progressive arguments.

By contrast, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s undated, unfinished sonnet “To His Watch” renders the forward motion of time itself as an unbreakable spell:

Mortal my mate, bearing my rock-a-heart Warm beat with cold beat company, shall I Earlier or you fail at our force, and lie The ruins of, rifled, once a world of art? The telling time our task is; time’s some part, Not all, but we were framed to fail and die— One spell and well that one. There, ah thereby Is comfort’s carol of all or woe’s worst smart.

(1–8)

The title gives us to think that a human speaker addresses his timepiece. However, though the poem compares the “warm beat” of the human heart with the “cold beat” of the clock, “mortal my mate bearing my rock-a-heart” (emphasis added) identifies the timepiece as the speaker, guardian over its human “watch.” Time binds the machine to the machine who fashioned it; there is but “one spell,” and this suggests both the brevity of mortal life and the community of all things governed by time. Finally, the verse’s very fragmentation proleptically points to the poet’s body and the poem: both spell-bound, metered worlds of art.

Whether their authors believe that literary composition orders time or is ordered by it, these passages read time and social progress at least obliquely through the spells and slumbers of “Sleeping Beauty.” This essay claims that “Sleeping Beauty” provided Victorian literary artists with a narrative of temporality in all senses of the word—“temporal” means the condition of being temporary; it relates to material acquisition; it refers to structures situated in the temples (like the temporal artery); it describes our placement in time. To demonstrate this argument, I shall turn to Alfred Tennyson’s sadly neglected early poem “The Day Dream.” Although “Day Dream” is virtually absent from criticism...