Chapter One

Background of the Topic

Comparison is not a novel phenomenon in life and literature. Since his advent on earth,

man has been comparing different things. In literature, it has long been recognized as a

helpful method of evaluating different works of art, and a manner of estimating literary

figures. The importance of comparison cannot, therefore, be denied but it poses a great

problem when the objects compared are poles apart. The same difficulty has been faced

while comparing Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning, the two gigantic poetic

personalities of the Victorian period. Both of them were born in the same country and

produced their creative works during the same span of time but there is a wide difference

between them. It was this fact which provided a stimulus to explore the factors that

contributed to this difference between them. Yet another tempting fact to undertake this

project is that there has been no comparative study of these two poets although much has

been written on them separately.

This treatise, which aims at presenting a comparative study, comprises two chapters. The

first one deals with the background. It is further subdivided into two parts. The first part is

about the Age of Tennyson and Browning to show how far the discoveries of science, the

new conception of law and evolution and historical conditions affected their literary

mind. The second part provides a short biography to highlight the conditions that shaped

the private lives of Tennyson and Browning and evolved their peculiar perceptions of life.

The second chapter deals with the analysis of their works as a whole, to indicate its spit.

Some stylistic features are also discussed to conduct a comparative estimate of their

poetic style. In the conclusion an attempt is made to seek their relative place in literature,

as a result of their life and work and to measure the influence they exerted on their

contemporary as well as successive ages.

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Statement of the topic
In victorian age Tennyson and Browning create a great work that time. In third world
literature, that time some writer create a world famous work who accept the whole world.
This thesis really help me to know about literary forms of victorian age. It is really
blessed to me to know about literature their important work and I know it now.

Rational Evaluation

Often Browning is considered the more innovative of the two poets due to his often
unusual syntax, but actually under his mellifluous and fluid surface style, Tennyson is
perhaps even more radically innovative. Both poets wrote dramatic monologues, but
while many of Browning's narrators prove completely evil, Tennyson's often demonstrate
a sort of moral ambiguity. Both poets experimented with writing in dialect and using
nonlinear or complex narrative structures. While Tennyson often explores classical and
medieval themes, many of Browning's best known poems are set in the Renaissance.

While Browning's poems reflect a wide range of emotional tones, Tennyson is best
known for his evocation of melancholy, although he also could write entertaining poems
in dialect. There are major differences in style between these two poets, who were
contemporaries. Tennyson was of a much more romantic temperament, and his style is
generally very lyrical, meditative, and often elegiac. Browning's poetic style, on the other
hand, is generally more crisp and even clinical. Rather than lyrics, he is best known for
his dramatic monologues which often assume a quite realistic speaker's voice. However,
one similarity both poets share is that they like to delve deep into the psychology of their
characters.

Some characteristics, or features, of Victorian poetry move poetry away from the
Romantic era poets. One such characteristic, or feature, is the Victorian interest in
Medieval legends, myths and fables over the classical legends and mythology embraced
by the preceding Romantic poets. Another is a more realistic and less idealized view of
nature, for instance nature's "red claws" are as likely to show as her woolly lambs.
Another is a change of emphasis on what types of common people and common language
is emphasized in poetry: whereas for Romantics it was the country rustic, for the
Victorians it is more often the common urban dweller.

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Tennyson's poems featured spiritual lessons wrapped in Medieval traditions as in "The
Lady of Shallot." His symbolism led directly to pictures of humankind's condition and
were not emblematic, that is not symbolically drawing similarities between nature and
humankind's condition. Browning emphasized tales related to common urban people who
had uncommon psychological dilemmas, like in"Porphyria's Lover," that were resolved in
uncommon ways--not many people strangle their beloved with their own locks of hair.
Browning was the master at developing the psychological shadings of his poetic
characters in dramatic monologues as in "My Last Duchess."

Methodology

To do this Dissertation I have to follow some pioneer critics critical appreciations such

as Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, the Comparative Study between As I have to

depend as well as collect data and information on the basis of Secondary Source, so

undoubtedly my dissertation is a Secondary Research.

Objectives:

To learn a vast about victorian age.

To understand human nature, religion, and society.
Learn the similarity of their poem.
To learn new techniques and styles in poetry writing.
To study the innermost psychology of characters ,external specific realities, ideas,

and objects and to express it through ornate language.

To know the nature of expression and write it energetic melancholic way which

give touch of nostalgia.

To recall the conscious mind an environment through ornate language.

To have interest in the remote part , abroad , especially in the Italy of the

Renaissance.

To know the meaning and mysteries of Nature as a whole, flowers, trees and

birds.

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 To learn dedication for gaining knowledge and experience.

Conclusion

Tennyson and Browning are important Victorian poets, they differ in background and

style. Browning is considered the more innovative of the two poets due to his often

unusual syntax, but actually under his mellifluous and fluid surface style, Tennyson is

perhaps even more radically innovative. Both poets wrote dramatic monologues. Both

poets experimented with writing in dialect or complex narrative structures. While

Tennyson often explores classical and medieval theme sand many of Browning's best

known poems are set in the Renaissance.

Browning's poems reflect a wide range of emotional tones and Tennyson is best known

for his evocation of melancholy.We just studied especially in their methods of

approaching the truth, the two man are the exact opposites. Tennyson is the first artist

and then the teacher, brownings message is always the important thing and he careless,

in which it is described.

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 Chapter Two

The Life sketch of Tennyson and Browning

Robert Browning:

Robert Browning (7 May 1812 12 December 1889) was an English poet and

playwright whose mastery of the dramatic monologue made him one of the foremost

Victorian poets. His poems are known for their irony, characterization, dark humour,

social commentary, historical settings, and challenging vocabulary and syntax.Browning's

early career began promisingly, but was not a success. The long poem Pauline brought

him to the attention of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and was followed by Paracelsus, which

was praised by Wordsworth and Dickens, but in 1840 the difficult Sordello, which was

seen as wilfully obscure, brought his poetry into disrepute. His reputation took more than

a decade to recover, during which time he moved away from the Shelleyan forms of his

early period and developed a more personal style.

In 1846 Browning married the older poet Elizabeth Barrett, who at the time was

considerably better known than himself. So he started one of history's most famous

literary marriages. They went to live in Italy, a country he called "my university", and

which features frequently in his work. By the time of her death in 1861, he had published

the crucial collection Men and Women. The collection Dramatis Personae and the book-

length epic poemThe Ring and the Book followed, and made him a leading British poet.

He continued to write prolifically, but his reputation today rests largely on the poetry he

wrote in this middle period.

When Browning died in 1889, he was regarded as a sage and philosopher-poet who

through his writing had made contributions to Victorian social and political discourse as

in the poem Caliban upon Setebos, which some critics have seen as a comment on the

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theory of evolution, which had recently been put forward by Darwin and others.

Unusually for a poet, societies for the study of his work were founded while he was still

alive. Such Browning Societies remained common in Britain and the United States until

the early 20th century.

Browning's admirers have tended to temper their praise with reservations about

the length and difficulty of his most ambitious poems, particularly The Ring and the

Book. Nevertheless, they have included such eminent writers as Henry James, Oscar

Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, Ezra Pound, Jorge Luis Borges, and

Vladimir Nabokov. Among living writers, Stephen King's The Dark Tower series and

A.S. Byatt'sPossession refer directly to Browning's work.

Today Browning's critically most esteemed poems include the monologues Childe

Roland to the Dark Tower Came, Fra Lippo Lippi, Andrea Del Sarto, and My Last

Duchess. His most popular poems include Porphyria's Lover, How They Brought the

Good News from Ghent to Aix, the diptychMeeting at Night, the patriotic Home

Thoughts from Abroad, and the children's poem The Pied Piper of Hamelin. His abortive

dinner-party recital of How They Brought The Good News was recorded on an

Edisonwax cylinder, and is believed to be the oldest surviving recording made in the

United Kingdom of a notable person.

Early years

Robert Browning was born in Walworth in the parish of Camberwell, Surrey,

which now forms part of the Borough of Southwark in south London. He was baptized on

14 June 1812, at Lock's Fields Independent Chapel, York Street, Walworth, the only son

of Sarah Anna and Robert Browning. His father was a well-paid clerk for the Bank of

England, earning about 150 per year.Browning's paternal grandfather was a wealthy

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slave owner in Saint Kitts, West Indies, but Browning's father was an abolitionist.

Browning's father had been sent to the West Indies to work on a sugar plantation, but, due

to a slave revolt there, had returned to England. Browning's mother was the daughter of a

German ship-owner who had settled in Dundee in Scotland, and his Scottish wife.

Browning had one sister, Sarianna. Browning's paternal grandmother, Margaret Tittle,

who had inherited a plantation in St Kitts, was rumored (within the family) to have a

mixed race ancestry, including some Jamaican blood, but author Julia Markus suggests St

Kitts rather than Jamaican. The evidence, however, is inconclusive either way. Robert's

father, a literary collector, amassed a library of around 6,000 books, many of them rare.

As such, Robert was raised in a household of significant literary resources. His mother, to

whom he was very close, was a devout nonconformist and a talented musician. His

younger sister, Sarianna, also gifted, became her brother's companion in his later years,

after the death of his wife in 1861. His father encouraged his children's interest in

literature and the arts.

By twelve, Browning had written a book of poetry which he later destroyed when

no publisher could be found. After being at one or two private schools, and showing an

insuperable dislike of school life, he was educated at home by a tutor via the resources of

his father's extensive library.By the age of fourteen he was fluent in French, Greek, Italian

and Latin. He became a great admirer of the Romantic poets, especially Shelley.

Following the precedent of Shelley, Browning became an atheist and vegetarian. At the

age of sixteen, he studied Greek at University College London but left after his first year.

His parents' staunch evangelical faith prevented his studying at either Oxford or

Cambridge University, both then open only to members of the Church of England. He had

inherited substantial musical ability through his mother, and composed arrangements of

various songs. He refused a formal career and ignored his parents' remonstrations,

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dedicating himself to poetry. He stayed at home until the age of 34, financially dependent

on his family until his marriage. His father sponsored the publication of his son's poems.

First published works

In March 1833, "Pauline, a Fragment of a Confession" was published

anonymously by Saunders and Otley at the expense of the author, Robert Browning, who

received the money from his aunt, one Mrs Silverthorne. It is a long poem composed in

homage to Shelley and somewhat in his style. Originally Browning considered Pauline as

the first of a series written by different aspects of himself, but he soon abandoned this

idea. The press noticed the publication. W.J. Fox writing in the The Monthly Repository

of April 1833 discerned merit in the work. Allan Cunningham praised it in the The

Athenaeum. However, it sold no copies. Some years later, probably in 1850, Dante

Gabriel Rossetti came across it in the Reading Room of the British Museum and wrote to

Browning, then in Florence to ask if he was the author. John Stuart Mill, however, wrote

that the author suffered from an "intense and morbid self-consciousness". Later,

Browning was rather embarrassed by the work, and only included it in his collected

poems of 1868 after making substantial changes and adding a preface in which he asked

for indulgence for a boyish work.

In 1834 he accompanied the Chevalier George de Benkhausen, the Russian consul-

general, on a brief visit to St Petersburg and began Paracelsus, which was published in

1835. The subject of the 16th century savant and alchemist was probably suggested to

him by the Comte Amde de Ripart-Monclar, to whom it was dedicated. The publication

had some commercial and critical success, being noticed by Wordsworth, Dickens,

Landor, J. S. Mill and the already famous Tennyson. It is a monodrama without action,

dealing with the problems confronting an intellectual trying to find his role in society. It

gained him access to the London literary world.

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As a result of his new contacts he met Macready, who invited him to write a

play.Strafford was performed five times. Browning then wrote two other plays, one of

which was not performed, while the other failed, Browning having fallen out with

Macready.

In 1838 he visited Italy, looking for background for Sordello, a long poem in heroic

couplets, presented as the imaginary biography of the Mantuan bard spoken of by Dante

in the Divine Comedy, canto 6 of Purgatory, set against a background of hate and conflict

during the Guelph-Ghibelline wars. This was published in 1840 and met with widespread

derision, gaining him the reputation of wanton carelessness and obscurity. Tennyson

commented that he only understood the first and last lines and Carlyle claimed that his

wife had read the poem through and could not tell whether Sordello was a man, a city or a

book.

Browning's reputation began to make a partial recovery with the publication, 18411846,

of Bells and Pomegranates, a series of eight pamphlets, originally intended just to include

his plays. Fortunately his publisher, Moxon, persuaded him to include some "dramatic

lyrics", some of which had already appeared in periodicals.

In 1845, Browning met the poet Elizabeth Barrett, six years his elder, who lived as a

semi-invalid in her father's house in Wimpole Street, London. They began regularly

corresponding and gradually a romance developed between them, leading to their

marriage and journey to Italy (for Elizabeth's health) on 12 September 1846. The

marriage was initially secret because Elizabeth's domineering father disapproved of

marriage for any of his children. Mr. Barrett disinherited Elizabeth, as he did for each of

his children who married: "The Mrs. Browning of popular imagination was a sweet,

innocent young woman who suffered endless cruelties at the hands of a tyrannical papa

but who nonetheless had the good fortune to fall in love with a dashing and handsome

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poet named Robert Browning." At her husband's insistence, the second edition of

Elizabeths Poems included her love sonnets. The book increased her popularity and high

critical regard, cementing her position as an eminent Victorian poet. Upon William

Wordsworth's death in 1850, she was a serious contender to become Poet Laureate, the

position eventually going to Tennyson.

From the time of their marriage and until Elizabeth's death, the Brownings lived in Italy,

residing first in Pisa, and then, within a year, finding an apartment in Florence at Casa

Guidi (now a museum to their memory). Their only child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett

Browning, nicknamed "Penini" or "Pen", was born in 1849. In these years Browning was

fascinated by, and learned from, the art and atmosphere of Italy. He would, in later life,

describe Italy as his university. As Elizabeth had inherited money of her own, the couple

were reasonably comfortable in Italy, and their relationship together was happy.

However, the literary assault on Browning's work did not let up and he was critically

dismissed further, by patrician writers such as Charles Kingsley, for the desertion of

England for foreign lands.

Spiritualism incident

Browning believed spiritualism to be fraud, and proved one of Daniel Dunglas Home's

most adamant critics. When Browning and his wife Elizabeth attended one of his sances

on July 23, 1855, a spirit face materialized, which Home claimed was Browning's son

who had died in infancy: Browning seized the "materialization" and discovered it to be

Home's bare foot. To make the deception worse, Browning had never lost a son in

infancy.

After the sance, Browning wrote an angry letter to The Times, in which he said: "the

whole display of hands, spirit utterances etc., was a cheat and imposture." In 1902

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Browning's son Pen wrote: "Home was detected in a vulgar fraud." Elizabeth, however,

was convinced that the phenomena she witnessed were genuine, and her discussions

about Home with her husband were a constant source of disagreement.

Major works

In Florence, probably from early in 1853, Browning worked on the poems that eventually

comprised his two-volume Men and Women, for which he is now well known,[14]

although in 1855, when they were published, they made relatively little impact.

In 1861 Elizabeth died in Florence. Among those whom he found consoling in that period

was the novelist and poet Isa Blagden, with whom he and his wife had a voluminous

correspondence. The following year Browning returned to London, taking Pen with him,

who by then was 12 years old. They made their home in 17 Warwick Crescent, Maida

Vale. It was only when he became part of the London literary scenealbeit while paying

frequent visits to Italy (though never again to Florence)that his reputation started to

take off.

In 1868, after five years work, he completed and published the long blank-verse poem

The Ring and the Book. Based on a convoluted murder-case from 1690s Rome, the poem

is composed of twelve books: essentially ten lengthy dramatic monologues narrated by

various characters in the story, showing their individual perspectives on events,

bookended by an introduction and conclusion by Browning himself. Long even by

Browning's standards (over twenty-thousand lines), The Ring and the Book was his most

ambitious project and is arguably his greatest work; it has been called a tour de force of

dramatic poetry. Published in four parts from November 1868 to February 1869, the

poem was a success both commercially and critically, and finally brought Browning the

renown he had sought for nearly forty years. The Robert Browning Society was formed in

1881 and his work was recognized as belonging within the British literary canon.

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Last years and death

In the remaining years of his life Browning travelled extensively. After a series of

long poems published in the early 1870s, of which Balaustion's Adventure and Red

Cotton Night-Cap Country were the best-received, the volume Pacchiarotto, and How He

Worked in Distemper included an attack against Browning's critics, especially Alfred

Austin, who was later to become Poet Laureate. According to some reports Browning

became romantically involved with Louisa, Lady Ashburton, but he refused her proposal

of marriage, and did not remarry. In 1878, he revisited Italy for the first time in the

seventeen years since Elizabeth's death, and returned there on several further occasions.

In 1887, Browning produced the major work of his later years, Parleyings with Certain

People of Importance in Their Day. It finally presented the poet speaking in his own

voice, engaging in a series of dialogues with long-forgotten figures of literary, artistic,

and philosophic history. The Victorian public was baffled by this, and Browning returned

to the brief, concise lyric for his last volume, Asolando (1889), published on the day of

his death.Browning died at his son's home Ca' Rezzonico in Venice on 12 December

1889. He was buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey; his grave now lies

immediately adjacent to that of Alfred Tennyson.

During his life Browning was awarded many distinctions. He was made LL.D. of

Edinburgh, a life Governor of London University, and had the offer of the Lord

Rectorship of Glasgow. But he turned down anything that involved public speaking.

History of sound recording

At a dinner party on 7 April 1889, at the home of Browning's friend the artist

Rudolf Lehmann, an Edison cylinder phonograph recording was made on a white wax

cylinder by Edison's British representative, George Gouraud. In the recording, which still

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exists, Browning recites part of How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix

(and can be heard apologising when he forgets the words).When the recording was played

in 1890 on the anniversary of his death, at a gathering of his admirers, it was said to be

the first time anyone's voice "had been heard from beyond the grave."

Legacy

Browning is now popularly known for such poems as Porphyria's Lover, My Last

Duchess, How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, and The Pied Piper of

Hamelin, and also for certain famous lines: "Grow old along with me!" (Rabbi Ben Ezra),

"A man's reach should exceed his grasp" and "Less is more" (Andrea Del Sarto), "It was

roses, roses all the way" (The Patriot), and "Gods in His heavenAlls right with the

world!" (Pippa Passes).

His critical reputation rests mainly on his dramatic monologues, in which the words not

only convey setting and action but reveal the speaker's character. In a Browning

monologue, unlike a soliloquy, the meaning is not what the speaker voluntarily reveals

but what he inadvertently gives away, usually while rationalising past actions or special

pleading his case to a silent auditor. These monologues have been influential, and today

the best of them are often treated by teachers and lecturers as paradigm cases of the

monologue form. Ian Jack, in his introduction to the Oxford University Press edition of

Browning's poems 18331864, comments that Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Ezra

Pound and T. S. Eliot "all learned from Browning's exploration of the possibilities of

dramatic poetry and of colloquial idiom".

In Oscar Wilde's dialogue The Critic as Artist, Browning is given a famously ironical

assessment: "He is the most Shakespearian creature since Shakespeare. If Shakespeare

could sing with myriad lips, Browning could stammer through a thousand mouths. Yes,

Browning was great. And as what will he be remembered? As a poet? Ah, not as a poet!

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He will be remembered as a writer of fiction, as the most supreme writer of fiction, it may

be, that we have ever had. His sense of dramatic situation was unrivalled, and, if he could

not answer his own problems, he could at least put problems forth, and what more should

an artist do? Considered from the point of view of a creator of character he ranks next to

him who made Hamlet. Had he been articulate, he might have sat beside him. The only

man who can touch the hem of his garment is George Meredith. Meredith is a prose

Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose."

Probably the most adulatory judgment of Browning by a modern critic comes from

Harold Bloom: "Browning is the most considerable poet in English since the major

Romantics, surpassing his great contemporary rival Tennyson and the principal twentieth-

century poets, including even Yeats, Hardy, and Wallace Stevens. But Browning is a very

difficult poet, notoriously badly served by criticism, and ill-served also by his own

accounts of what he was doing as a poet. Yet when you read your way into his world,

precisely his largest gift to you is his involuntary unfolding of one of the largest, most

enigmatic, and most multipersoned literary and human selves you can hope to encounter."

His work has nevertheless had many detractors, and most of his voluminous output is not

widely read. In a largely hostile essay Anthony Burgess wrote: "We all want to like

Browning, but we find it very hard." Gerard Manley Hopkins and George Santayana were

also critical. The latter expressed his views in the essay "The Poetry of Barbarism," which

attacks Browning and Walt Whitman for what he regarded as their embrace of

irrationality.

Cultural references

A memorial plaque for a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment, engraved with a quotation

from the Epilogue to Browning's Asolando. The inscription reads: "In Loving Memory of Louisa

A. M. McGrigor Commandant V.A.D. Cornwall 22. Who died on service, March 31, 1917.

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Erected by her fellow workers in the British Red Cross Society, Women Unionist Association,

Boy Scouts, Girl Guides and Friends. One who never turned her back but marched breast forward,

Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would

triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake."

In 1914 American modernist composer Charles Ives created the Robert Browning

Overture, a dense and darkly dramatic piece with gloomy overtones reminiscent of the

Second Viennese School.

In 1930 the story of Browning and his wife was made into the play The Barretts of

Wimpole Street, by Rudolph Besier. It was a success and brought popular fame to the

couple in the United States. The role of Elizabeth became a signature role for the actress

Katharine Cornell. It was twice adapted into film. It was also the basis of the stage

musical Robert and Elizabeth, with music by Ron Grainer and book and lyrics by Ronald

Millar.

In The Browning Version (Terence Rattigan's 1948 play or one of several film

adaptations), a pupil makes a parting present to his teacher of an inscribed copy of

Browning's translation of the Agamemnon.Stephen King's The Dark Tower was chiefly

inspired by Browning's Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, whose full text was

included in the final volume's appendix.

Michael Dibdin's 1986 crime novel "A Rich Full Death" features Robert Browning as one

of the lead characters.Gabrielle Kimm's 2010 novel His Last Duchess is inspired by My

Last Duchess.

A memorial plaque on the site of Browning's London home, in Warwick Crescent, Maida

Vale, was unveiled on 11 December 1993.Browning Close in Royston, Hertfordshire, is

named after Robert Browning.

Browning Street in Berkeley, California, is located in an area known as Poets' Corner and

is also named after him.

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Browning Street in Yokine, Western Australia, is named after him, in an area likewise

known as Poets' Corner.

Browning Street and Robert Browning School in Walworth, London, near to his

birthplace in Camberwell, are named after him.

Two of a group of three culs-de-sac in Little Venice, London, are named Browning Close

and Robert Close after him; the third, Elizabeth Close, is named after his wife.

List of works

This section lists the plays and volumes of poetry Browning published in his lifetime.

Some individually notable poems are also listed, under the volumes in which they were

published. (His only notable prose work, with the exception of his letters, is his Essay on

Shelley.)

The Pied Piper leads the children out of Hamelin. Illustration by Kate Greenaway to the Robert

Browning version of the tale.

Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession (1833)

Paracelsus (1835)[32]

Strafford (play) (1837)

Sordello (1840)

Bells and Pomegranates No. I: Pippa Passes (play) (1841)

o The Year's at the Spring

Bells and Pomegranates No. II: King Victor and King Charles (play) (1842)

Bells and Pomegranates No. III: Dramatic Lyrics (1842)

o Porphyria's Lover

o Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister

o My Last Duchess

o The Pied Piper of Hamelin

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 o Count Gismond

o Johannes Agricola in Meditation

Bells and Pomegranates No. IV: The Return of the Druses (play) (1843)

Bells and Pomegranates No. V: A Blot in the 'Scutcheon (play) (1843)

Bells and Pomegranates No. VI: Colombe's Birthday (play) (1844)

Bells and Pomegranates No. VII: Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845)

o The Laboratory

o How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix

o The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church

o The Lost Leader

o Home Thoughts from Abroad

o Meeting at Night

Bells and Pomegranates No. VIII: Luria and A Soul's Tragedy (plays) (1846)

Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850)

Men and Women (1855)

o Love Among the Ruins

o A Toccata of Galuppi's

o Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came

o Fra Lippo Lippi

o Andrea Del Sarto

o The Patriot

o The Last Ride Together

o Memorabilia

o Cleon

o How It Strikes a Contemporary

o The Statue and the Bust

o A Grammarian's Funeral

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 o An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab

Physician

o Bishop Blougrams Apology

o Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha

o By the Fire-side

Dramatis Personae (1864)

o Caliban upon Setebos

o Rabbi Ben Ezra

o AbtVogler

o Mr. Sludge, "The Medium"

o Prospice

o A Death in the Desert

The Ring and the Book (186869)

Balaustion's Adventure (1871)

Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society (1871)

Fifine at the Fair (1872)

Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, or, Turf and Towers (1873)

Aristophanes' Apology (1875)

o Thamuris Marching

The Inn Album (1875)

Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper (1876)

o Numpholeptos

The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1877)

La Saisiaz and The Two Poets of Croisic (1878)

Dramatic Idylls (1879)

Dramatic Idylls: Second Series (1880)

o Pan and Luna

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 Jocoseria (1883)

Ferishtah's Fancies (1884)

arleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day (1887)

solando (1889)

o Prologue

o Flute-Music, with an Accompaniment

o Bad Dreams III

o Epilogue

Alfred Tennyson:

Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, FRS (6 August 1809 6 October 1892) was Poet

Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains

one of the most popular British poets.

Tennyson excelled at penning short lyrics, such as "Break, Break, Break", "The Charge of

the Light Brigade", "Tears, Idle Tears", and "Crossing the Bar". Much of his verse was

based on classical mythological themes, such as Ulysses, although In Memoriam A.H.H.

was written to commemorate his friend Arthur Hallam, a fellow poet and student at

Trinity College, Cambridge, after he died of a stroke at the age of 22. Tennyson also

wrote some notable blank verse including Idylls of the King, "Ulysses", and "Tithonus".

During his career, Tennyson attempted drama, but his plays enjoyed little success. A

number of phrases from Tennyson's work have become commonplaces of the English

language, including "Nature, red in tooth and claw" (In Memoriam A.H.H.), "Its better to

have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all", "Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs

but to do and die", "My strength is as the strength of ten, / Because my heart is pure", "To

strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield", "Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers", and

19 | P a g e
"The old order changed, yielding place to new". He is the ninth most frequently quoted

writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

Early life

Tennyson was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, England. He was born into a middle-class

line of Tennysons, but also had a noble and royal ancestry.His father, George Clayton

Tennyson (17781831), was rector of Somersby (18071831), also rector of Benniworth

(18021831) and Bag Enderby, and vicar of Grimsby (1815). Rev. George Clayton

Tennyson raised a large family and "was a man of superior abilities and varied

attainments, who tried his hand with fair success in architecture, painting, music, and

poetry. He was comfortably well off for a country clergyman and his shrewd money

management enabled the family to spend summers at Mablethorpe and Skegness on the

eastern coast of England". Alfred Tennyson's mother, Elizabeth Fytche (17811865), was

the daughter of Stephen Fytche (17341799), vicar of St. James Church, Louth (1764)

and rector of Withcall (1780), a small village between Horncastle and Louth. Tennyson's

father "carefully attended to the education and training of his children".

Tennyson and two of his elder brothers were writing poetry in their teens and a collection

of poems by all three was published locally when Alfred was only 17. One of those

brothers, Charles Tennyson Turner, later married Louisa Sellwood, the younger sister of

Alfred's future wife; the other was Frederick Tennyson. Another of Tennyson's brothers,

Edward Tennyson, was institutionalised at a private asylum.

Education and first publication

Tennyson was a student of Louth Grammar School for four years (18161820) and then

attended Scaitcliffe School, Englefield Green and King Edward VI Grammar School,

Louth. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1827, where he joined a secret society

20 | P a g e
called the Cambridge Apostles. A portrait of Tennyson by George Frederic Watts is in

Trinity's collection.

At Cambridge, Tennyson met Arthur Henry Hallam and William Henry Brookfield, who

became his closest friends. His first publication was a collection of "his boyish rhymes

and those of his elder brother Charles" entitled Poems by Two Brothers, published in

1827.

In 1829, Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his

first pieces, "Timbuktu".Reportedly, "it was thought to be no slight honour for a young

man of twenty to win the chancellor's gold medal". He published his first solo collection

of poems, Poems Chiefly Lyrical in 1830. "Claribel" and "Mariana", which later took

their place among Tennyson's most celebrated poems, were included in this volume.

Although decried by some critics as overly sentimental, his verse soon proved popular

and brought Tennyson to the attention of well-known writers of the day, including

Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Return to Lincolnshire and second publication

In the spring of 1831, Tennyson's father died, requiring him to leave Cambridge before

taking his degree. He returned to the rectory, where he was permitted to live for another

six years and shared responsibility for his widowed mother and the family. Arthur Hallam

came to stay with his family during the summer and became engaged to Tennyson's sister,

Emilia Tennyson.

In 1833 Tennyson published his second book of poetry, which included his well-known

poem, "The Lady of Shalott". The volume met heavy criticism, which so discouraged

Tennyson that he did not publish again for ten years, although he did continue to write.

That same year, Hallam died suddenly and unexpectedly after suffering a cerebral

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hemorrhage while on vacation in Vienna. Hallam's death had a profound impact on

Tennyson and inspired several poems, including "In the Valley of Cauteretz" and In

Memoriam A.H.H., a long poem detailing the "Way of the Soul".

Tennyson and his family were allowed to stay in the rectory for some time, but later

moved to High Beach, Essex, about 1837, leaving in 1840. An unwise investment in an

ecclesiastical wood-carving enterprise soon led to the loss of much of the family fortune.

Tennyson then moved to London and lived for a time at Chapel House, Twickenham.

Third publication

In 1842, while living modestly in London, Tennyson published the two volume Poems, of

which the first included works already published and the second was made up almost

entirely of new poems. They met with immediate success; poems from this collection,

such as Locksley Hall, "Tithonus", and "Ulysses" have met enduring fame. The Princess:

A Medley, a satire on women's education that came out in 1847, was also popular for its

lyrics. W. S. Gilbert later adapted and parodied the piece twice: in The Princess (1870)

and in Princess Ida (1884).

It was in 1850 that Tennyson reached the pinnacle of his career, finally publishing his

masterpiece, In Memoriam A.H.H., dedicated to Hallam. Later the same year, he was

appointed Poet Laureate, succeeding William Wordsworth. In the same year (on 13 June),

Tennyson married Emily Sellwood, whom he had known since childhood, in the village

of Shiplake. They had two sons, Hallam Tennyson (b. 11 August 1852)named after his

friendand Lionel (b. 16 March 1854).

Tennyson rented Farringford House on the Isle of Wight in 1853, eventually buying it in

1856. He eventually found that there were too many starstruck tourists who pestered him

in Farringford, so he moved to Aldworth, in West Sussex in 1869. However, he retained

Farringford, and regularly returned there to spend the winters.

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Poet Laureate

In 1850, after William Wordsworth's death and Samuel Rogers' refusal, Tennyson was

appointed to the position of Poet Laureate; Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Leigh Hunt

had also been considered.[15] He held the position until his own death in 1892, the longest

tenure of any laureate before or since. Tennyson fulfilled the requirements of this position

by turning out appropriate but often uninspired verse, such as a poem of greeting to

Princess Alexandra of Denmark when she arrived in Britain to marry the future King

Edward VII. In 1855, Tennyson produced one of his best-known works, "The Charge of

the Light Brigade", a dramatic tribute to the British cavalrymen involved in an ill-advised

charge on 25 October 1854, during the Crimean War. Other esteemed works written in

the post of Poet Laureate include Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington and Ode

Sung at the Opening of the International Exhibition.

Tennyson initially declined a baronetcy in 1865 and 1868 (when tendered by Disraeli),

finally accepting a peerage in 1883 at Gladstone's earnest solicitation. In 1884 Victoria

created him Baron Tennyson, of Aldworth in the County of Sussex and of Freshwater in

the Isle of Wight. He took his seat in the House of Lords on 11 March 1884.

Tennyson also wrote a substantial quantity of unofficial political verse, from the bellicose

"Form, Riflemen, Form", on the French crisis of 1859 and the Creation of the Volunteer

Force, to "Steersman, be not precipitate in thine act/of steering", deploring Gladstone's

Home Rule Bill.

Virginia Woolf wrote a play called Freshwater, showing Tennyson as host to his friends

Julia Margaret Cameron and G.F. Watts.

Tennyson was the first to be raised to a British peerage for his writing. A passionate man

with some peculiarities of nature, he was never particularly comfortable as a peer, and it

is widely held that he took the peerage in order to secure a future for his son Hallam.

23 | P a g e
Colonel George Edward Gouraud, Thomas Edison's European agent, made sound

recordings of Tennyson reading his own poetry, late in his life. They include recordings

of The Charge of the Light Brigade, and excerpts from "The splendour falls" (from The

Princess), "Come into the garden" (from Maud), "Ask me no more", "Ode on the death of

the Duke of Wellington" and "Lancelot and Elaine". The sound quality is poor, as wax

cylinder recordings usually are.

Photograph of the cedar tree at Swainston Manor, Isle of Wight. In the late 1890s, Lady Simeon at

Swainston told her nurse (my great aunt) that Tennyson wrote "Maud" under this tree. Note the

similarities in setting between this photo and the arbor above. Photos of the Gardens at Swainston

under the wiki entry for Swainston Manor.

Towards the end of his life Tennyson revealed that his "religious beliefs also defied

convention, leaning towards agnosticism and pan deism": Famously, he wrote in In

Memoriam: "There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds."

In Maud, 1855, he wrote: "The churches have killed their Christ". In "Locksley Hall Sixty

Years After," Tennyson wrote: "Christian love among the churches look'd the twin of

heathen hate." In his play, Becket, he wrote: "We are self-uncertain creatures, and we

may, Yea, even when we know not, mix our spites and private hates with our defense of

Heaven". Tennyson recorded in his Diary (p. 127): "I believe in Pantheism of a sort". His

son's biography confirms that Tennyson was not an orthodox Christian, noting that

Tennyson praised Giordano Bruno and Spinoza on his deathbed, saying of Bruno, "His

view of God is in some ways mine", in 1892.

Tennyson continued writing into his eighties. He died on 6 October 1892 at Aldworth,

aged 83. He was buried at Westminster Abbey. A memorial was erected in All Saints'

Church, Freshwater. His last words were, "Oh that press will have me now!". He left an

estate of 57,206.

24 | P a g e
He was succeeded as 2nd Baron Tennyson by his son, Hallam, who produced an

authorised biography of his father in 1897, and was later the second Governor-General of

Australia.

Tennyson and the Queen

Though Prince Albert was largely responsible for Tennyson's appointment as Laureate,

Queen Victoria became an ardent admirer of Tennyson's work, writing in her diary that

she was "much soothed & pleased" by reading In Memoriam A.H.H. after Albert's death.

The two met twice, first in April 1862, when Victoria wrote in her diary, "very peculiar

looking, tall, dark, with a fine head, long black flowing hair & a beard, oddly dressed, but

there is no affectation about him." Tennyson met her a second time nearly two decades

later, and the Queen told him what a comfort In Memoriam A.H.H. had been.

The art of Tennyson's poetry

As source material for his poetry, Tennyson used a wide range of subject matter ranging

from medieval legends to classical myths and from domestic situations to observations of

nature. The influence of John Keats and other Romantic poets published before and

during his childhood is evident from the richness of his imagery and descriptive writing.

He also handled rhythm masterfully. The insistent beat of Break, Break, Breakemphasises

the relentless sadness of the subject matter. Tennyson's use of the musical qualities of

words to emphasize his rhythms and meanings is sensitive. The language of "I come from

haunts of coot and herm" lilts and ripples like the brook in the poem and the last two lines

of "Come down O maid from yonder mountain height" illustrate his telling combination

of onomatopoeia, alliteration, and assonance:

The moan of doves in immemorial elms

And murmuring of innumerable bees.

25 | P a g e
Tennyson was a craftsman who polished and revised his manuscripts extensively, to the

point where his efforts at self-editing were described by his contemporary Robert

Browning as "insane", symptomatic of "mental infirmity". Few poets have used such a

variety of styles with such an exact understanding of metre; like many Victorian poets, he

experimented in adapting the quantitative metres of Greek and Latin poetry to English.

He reflects the Victorian period of his maturity in his feeling for order and his tendency

towards moralizing. He also reflects a concern common among Victorian writers in being

troubled by the conflict between religious faith and expanding scientific knowledge. Like

many writers who write a great deal over a long time, his poetry is occasionally

uninspired, but his personality rings throughout all his works. Tennyson possessed a

strong poetic power, which his early readers often attributed to his "Englishness" and his

masculinity. Well known among his longer works are Maud and Idylls of the King, the

latter arguably the most famous Victorian adaptation of the legend of King Arthur and the

Knights of the Round Table. A common thread of grief, melancholy, and loss connects

much of his poetry (including Mariana, The Lotos Eaters, Tears, Idle Tears, In

Memoriam), possibly reflecting Tennyson's own lifelong struggle with debilitating

depression. T. S. Eliot famously described Tennyson as "the saddest of all English poets",

whose technical mastery of verse and language provided a "surface" to his poetry's

"depths, to the abyss of sorrow". Other poets such as W. H. Auden maintained a more

critical stance, stating that Tennyson was the "stupidest" of all the English poets, adding

that: "There was little about melancholia he didn't know; there was little else that he did."

Tennyson heraldry

An heraldic achievement of Alfred, Lord Tennyson exists in an 1884 stained glass

window in the Hall of Trinity College, Cambridge, showing arms: Gules, a bend nebuly

or thereon a chapletvert between three leopard's faces jessant-de-lys of the second; Crest:

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A dexter arm in armour the hand in a gauntlet or grasping a broken tilting spear enfiled

with a garland of laurel; Supporters: Two leopards rampant guardant gules seme de lys

and ducally crowned or; Motto: RespiciensProspiciens ("Looking backwards (is) looking

forwards"). These are a difference of the arms of Thomas Tenison (16361715),

Archbishop of Canterbury, themselves a difference of the arms of the 13th century Denys

family of Glamorgan and Siston in Gloucestershire, themselves a difference of the arms

of Thomas de Cantilupe (c. 1218 1282), Bishop of Hereford, thenceforth the arms of the

Sea of Hereford; the name "Tennyson" signifies "Denys's son", although no connection

between the two families is recorded.

Partial list of works

From Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830):

o Nothing Will Die

o All Things Will Die

o The Dying Swan

o The Kraken

o Mariana

Lady Clara Vere de Vere (1832)

From Poems (1833):

o The Lotos-Eaters

o The Lady of Shalott (1832, 1842) three versions painted by J. W. Waterhouse

(1888, 1894, and 1916)

o St. Simeon Stylites (1833)

From Poems (1842):

o Locksley Hall

o Tithonus

o Vision of Sin

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 o The Two Voices (1834)

o "Ulysses" (1833)

From The Princess; A Medley (1847)

o "The Princess"

o Godiva

o Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal it later appeared as a song in the film Vanity

Fair, with musical arrangement by Mychael Danna

o "Tears, Idle Tears"

In Memoriam A.H.H. (1849)

Ring Out, Wild Bells (1850)

The Eagle (1851)

The Sister's Shame

From Maud; A Monodrama (1855/1856)

o Maud

o The Charge of the Light Brigade (1854) an early recording exists of Tennyson

reading this.

Idylls of the King (18591885)

From Enoch Arden and Other Poems (1862/1864)

o Enoch Arden

o The Brook contains the line "For men may come and men may go, But I go on

forever" which inspired the naming of a men's club in New York City.

Flower in the crannied wall (1869)

The Window Song cycle with Arthur Sullivan. (1871)

Harold (1876) began a revival of interest in King Harold

Idylls of the King (composed 18331874)

Montenegro (1877)

"Becket" (1884)

28 | P a g e
 Crossing the Bar (1889)

The Foresters a play with incidental music by Arthur Sullivan (1891)

Kapiolani (published after his death by Hallam Tennyson)

29 | P a g e
 Chapter Three

Victorian Poet: Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning

The Victorian age is especially remarkable because of its rapid progress in all the arts and science

and in Mechanical inventions. Victorian as is also known for the age of the Newspapers, the

Magazine, and the modern novel. The first two being the story of the worlds daily life and the

last our pleasantest form of literary entertainment as well as our most successful method of

presenting modern problems and modern ideas.

Victorian age is emphatically an age of realism rather than of romance not the realism of Zola and

Ibsen but a deeper realism which strives to tell the whole truth, showing moral and physical

diseases as they are, but holding up health and hope as the normal condition of humanity. The two

main poet are Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning.

Among its treasures are still read with delight The Lotus, Palace of art, A dream of fair women,

The millers daughters, and The Lady of Shallot. Tennyson was plunged into a period of gloom

and sorrow. The sorrow may be read in the exquisite little poem beginning Break,break, break,

on thy cold gray stones, o sea! which was his first published Elegy for his friend.

Tennysons life is a remarkable one in this respect, that from beginning to end he seems to have

been dominated by a single impulse, the impulse of poetry. Tennyson was naturally shy, retiring,

indifferent to men , hating noise and publicity, loving to be alone with nature.

Tennyson was not only a man and a poet, he was a voice, the voice of a whole people , expressing

in exquisite melody their doubts and their faith, their griefs and their triumphs. In the wonderful

variety of his verse he suggests all the qualities of Englandsgreeds poets the dreaminess of

Spenser. The majesty of Milton, Wordsworth, the fantasy of Black and Coleridge, the Melody of

Keats, and Shelly. The narrative vigor of Scott and Byron. All these striking qualities are evident

on successive pages of Tennysons poetry.

Tennysons Immature work, like that of the minor poets, is sometimes in a doubtful of despairing

strain but his in memoriam is like the rainbow after storm, and Browning seems better to express

30 | P a g e
the spirit of his age in the strong manly faith of Rabbi Ben Ezra. And in the courageous

optimism of all his poetry.

It may be well to record two things, by way to suggestion , First , Tennysons poetry is not so

much to be studied as to be read and appreciated; he is a poet to have open on ones table , and to

enjoy as oneenjoys his daily exercise. Andsecond we should by all means begin to get

acquainted, with Tennyson in get days of our youth.

Tennyson had publishing poetry .since 1827, his first poems appearing almost simultaneously

with the last work of Byron, Shelly and Keats. In 1842- The Princes and Maud, In 1847- The

Princess, a medley, A long poem of over there thousand lines of blank verse. Tears, Idle, tears,

Bugle song and sweet and law. In 1855- Maud; this is called in literature a monodrama,

telling the story of a lover who passes from horridness to ecstasy, then to anger and murder,

followed by insanity and recovery.

The most loved of all Tennysons works is Lin Memoriam. The Idylls of the king is among

the greatest of Tennysons later works. His another collection of poems called English Idylls in

1842, In this collection there Dora, The Gardeners Daughter, Ulysses , Locksley and Sir

Galahad. One of the most famous of this series is Enoch Arden .

Tennysons later volumes, like the Ballads and Demeter Other poems like The change of

the light Brigade wages and The Higher pantheism.

We find that it has many sources:i.e. Robert Browning (1812 1889) The poets thought is often

obscure or else so extremely subtle that language expresses it imperfectly.Browning is led from

one thing to another by his own mental associations and forgets that readers associations may be

an entirely different kind.Browning is careless in his English and frequently clips in hisspeech,

giving us a He does not like so many other an entertainingseries of ejaculation. poet, one cannot

read himafter dinner or whom settled in a comfortable easy-chair, one must sit up andthink and be

alert when he reads Browning.

In the end we can say that Brownings place in our literature will be better appreciated by

comparison with his friend Tennyson.Whom we just studied in one respect, especially in their

methodsof approaching the truth, the two men are the exact oppositesTennyson is the first artist

31 | P a g e
and then the teacher, but with Browningthe message is always the important thing, and he is

careless, toocareless, of the form in which it is expressed.

The Age of Tennyson And Browning

Poets, said Shelley, "not otherwise than philosophers, painters, sculptors

andmusicians, are in one sense the creators and in another, the creations of their ages/

Contemporary conventions and inherited traditions do matter. This utterance of Shelley

holds good in the case of Tennyson: he is a creator as well as a creation of the Victorian

Age in the true sense of the words. Whereas Robert Browning is an exception, he stands

free from the literary conventions and the socio-economicconditions of his age, rather

he, in the words of R. S. Sharma, is a significant precursor of the modems. Almost the

Victorian as well as moderncritics and reviewers agree that Tennyson is the most

representative literary man of his age. There is an obvious correspondence between his

work and his world while Brownings poetry does not show the essential co-relation

between the environment and its product. To highlight out this difference it is inevitable

to have a look upon the salient features of the Victorian Era.

Broadly speaking the year 1832 marks the beginning of this period, although the

reign of Victoria expands from1837 to 1901. When Victoria became the queen, the

Romantic Movement had spent its force, because the three leading lights of it were

swallowed up by the damp darkness of death. Dyke states this situation thus: the brief,

bright light of Keats went out at Rome,... the waters of Spezzias treacherous bay closed

over the head of Shelley;... the wild flame of Byrons heart burned away at Missolonghi.

The new leaders were dead; the old leaders were silent. ^ Wordsworth, Coleridge and

Southey were alive and still writing poetry but as a matter of fact, they had done their

best works already. And it seemed as if there was no great writer in England. About this

32 | P a g e
time English poetry had relapsed into one of those intervals of depression that preceSe a

fresh rise.... A new impulse was needed to lift it, and to break in upon the dullness ... This

flat and open space gave Tennyson a fair start upon the course. His first poems appeared

in 1827. Browning started writing earlier but itwas not until 1833 that he published his

Pauline. Their works marked the beginning ofthe literary glory of a new age,Historically

the period is remarkable for the growth of democracy following the Reform Bill of 1832;

for the spread of education among all classes as a result of the establishment of a national

system of schools; for important mechanical inventions ranging vastly from spinning

loom to steam-boat and from matches to electric lights; for the rapid development of the

arts and sciences and for the extension of the bounds of human knowledge by the

discoveries of science.

Economically the era is a veiy prosperous one. With the inventions in steel and

machinery, England had become 'the workshop of the worid. ^ The rise in wealth gave

rise to materialism. Though the age is very practical and materialistic, .it is an age of

comparative peace too; The reason being that with the increase in wealth, grov^h of trade

and of friendly foreign relations, it became evident that question of justice is never settled

by fighting. The English people began to think more of their moral evils and less of false

glitter of fighting.

Tennyson belittled the tendency of materialism and exalted the ideal of peace in the

following lines of In Memoriam:

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;

Ring out the narrowing lust of gold,

Ring out the thousand wars of old,

Ring in the thousand years of peace.

33 | P a g e
While Tennyson was busy in combining the Victorian ideals with the metric form of

expression, Browning popularised the Renaissance ideal of the world. Towards the end

of his famous poem Fra Lippo Lippi, he said :

This worlds no blot for us.

Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:

To find its meaning is my meat and drink.

Politically it is an age of democracy. Because the primitive dream of personalliberty,

seen by the nglo-Saxons, materialized into reality in the form of great Reform Bill of

1832. The right to vote was given to every individual regardless of caste, creedand

colour yet women were still straggling for it. The whole body of people electedtheir

representatives who were accountable for their actions before the authority

ofParliament. Thus the doctrine of the Divine Right of King was of no avail and

theHouse of Commons became the ruling power in England. A series of new reformthe

prevention of child labour; the freedom of the press; the establishment ofhundreds of

schools; the abolition of restrictions against Catholics in Parliament; theemancipation of

all slaves in all English colonies proclaimed the progress ofcivilisation in a single half

century.Tennyson expressed his political faith and praisedhis country in the following

lines:

A land of settled government;

A Land ofjust and old renown;

Where Freedom slowly broadens down

From precedent to precedent:

Tho Power should make from land to land

The name of Britain trebly great__

Tho every channel of the State

34 | P a g e
 Should fill and choke with golden sand_

On the other hand. Browning, who has chosen to make his dwelling in Italy,

wasthoroughly.in love with his adopted country

Sociologically the question of equal rights for both the sexes gained ground.In the

Victorian times a womans world was limited to her home and the sole purposeof her life

was thought to look after her family members. With the passage of time andadvance of

democracy women were given political rights.The movement for womensemancipation

took strength and the problems of sex and married life received increasing attention from

scholars and writers of the day. Hardys Tess o f the d Urbervilles, Ibsens A Doll's

House and Ruskins lecture, Of Queens Gordons areglaring examples of it. Tennyson

pondered over this social question and gave answer in the shape of his long poem, The

Princess, a Medley,Lyall comments upon it thus; there is a romantic tale, with the Idea

of a Female University for its theme and plot, and for its moral the sure triumph of the

natural affections over any feminine attempt to ignore them, or to work out womens

independence by a kind of revolt from the established intellectual dominion of man/

Tennysons findings agreed with the social convictions of his age:

Man for the field and woman for the hearth,

Man for the sword and for the needle she,

Man with the head and woman vAth the heart

Man to command and woman to obey.

35 | P a g e
In The Encyclopaedia Briiannica this poem is mentioned as a singular anti-feminist

fantasia. Whether Tennysons statement about womans cause is right or wrong, is a

separate issue. The point to note is that this burning issue is made the groundwork of

some very fine poetry by Tennyson. In Brownings poetiy there are many female

characters__ the Duchess in My Last Duchess , the lady in 'The Last RideTogethef'\

Lucrezia in Andrea del Sorto; Pompilia in The Ring and the Book andPippa in Pippa

Passesbut they never indulge in such a debate, which was then strongly agitating the

public mind.

Spiritually the encroachments of agnostic science created a state of crisis for the

age. It was a time which was acutely time-conscious: a great many things seemed to be

happening, railways were being built, discoveries were being made, the face of the world

was changing. That was a time busy in keeping up to date. It had, for the most part, no

hold on permanent things, on permanent truths about man and God and life and death.

Science overturned many old conceptions yielding place to new ones: the

mechanistic view of the universe and the theory of Evolution were propounded. They not

only revolutionized the conceptions of physical science and natural historybut also cast

doubts about Christian dogmas regarding the creation of man and constitution of the

world. Man was no longer a divine creature and cosmos the holy plan of God.

This skepticism took strong hold of Tennysons imaginative mind. In a hyponotic

state he started obstinate questioning: Is man subject to general law of mutability, mere

clay in the mounding hands that are darkly seen in the creation of worlds? He asked:

Shall man

Who loved, who suffered countless ills,

36 | P a g e
 Who battled for the Truth, the just,

Be blown about the desert dust.

Or seald within the iron hills?

{InMemoriam}

On the other hand, there was calm and serenity on the mental horizon of Browning. He

believed unquestionably in the existence of God controlling the manifold energies of the

world. I build my faith on God ! Thou art Love that / God is the sustaining and

perfecting power. According to Browning, the imperfections of mans world are

evidence of the perfection of God . He believed that Man is more akin to God than to

dogsand apes. And Mans soul is immortal:

Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure:

What entered into thee.

That was, is , and shall be Times

wheel runs back or stops: Potter

and clay endure.

{Rabbi Ben Ezra}

The people in the Victorian period were in a spiritual dilemma: whether to follow

blindly Christian theology or to believe what Darwin, Huxley and other scientists said.

Tennyson gave intensity of expression to the prevailing doubt in the following

paradoxical lines of In Memoriam\ There lives more faith in honest doubt,/ Believe me,

than in h^f the creeds. Whereas the poetic mind of Browning evolved against the

37 | P a g e
background of Victorian skepticism, change and conflict. He presented an optimistic

vision of the world, which was very opposite to the state of affairs.

Generally, the literature of the period revealed the following characteristics:

Firstly, it became very close to common life, reflecting its practical problems and

interests. Tennyson felt that the artists responsibility is to speak out on the problems of

his contemporary world. His poem, Locksley Hall, deals with the facts and feelings of

everyday life and in just two hundred lines nearly every public issue of the day is

mentioned: the increased importance of money and social position, the progress of

science and popular education, the commercial competition among nations, opportunity

in an expanding British empire, a hungry people at home whereas London lights up the

night sky like a dreary dawn.^* His famous poem Enoch Arden is esteemed as

Odyssey of humble mariners by Lyall due to its revelation of vigour and heroism in

common people. Whereas Browning showed a preference for historical subjects and finds

his materials for poetry firm the annals of history.

All great writers Tennyson, Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin, Dickens were the teachers of

England. Quite astonishingly Browning affirmed this feature of his age. He was so

completely, so consciously, so magnificently a teacher of man and had always a moral

ready. His Andrea expresses his belief in the Next World where man can fulfill his

unrealized desires and aspirations thus:

Ah, but a mans reach should exceed his grasp,

Or whats a heaven for?

(Andrea del Sarto)

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 Comparatively, when we analyze Tennyson and Browning who came of the same

age, the influence of contemporary world is grater on the former. For nearly half a

century he was not only a man and poet; he was a voice, the voice of a whole people. In

reflecting the restless spirit of his progressive age he is as remarkable as Pope was in

voicing the artificialities of the early eighteenth century. While Browning is entirely a

different case, he mostly reflected the middle ages and his poetry is said to be steeped in

the atmosphere of Italian Renaissance. Whereas his grotesque style, irritating parentheses,

faulty grammar, bad punctuation, broken threads of thought brought him closer to the

modem poets. Amid a plurality of writers Tennyson, Arnold, Clough who were strongly

anguished by moral and spiritual crises of the time, he maintained his individuality by

keeping himself aloof from the zeiigeist. And it is a sufficient eulogy for Browning.

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 Chapter Four

Brief summary of some major poems of Browning:

Rabbi Ben Ezra

The poem is narrated by Rabbi Ben Ezra, a real 12th-century scholar. The piece does not

have a clearly identified audience or dramatic situation. The Rabbi begs his audience to

"grow old along with [him]" (line 1). He stresses that age is where the best of life is

realized, whereas "youth shows but half" (line 6). He acknowledges that youth lacks

insight into life, since it is characteristically so concerned with living in the moment that

it is unable to consider the deeper questions.

Though youth will fade, what replaces it is the wisdom and insight of age, which

recognizes that pain is a part of life, but which learns to appreciate joy more because of

the pain. "Be our joys three parts pain!" (line 34). All the while, one should appreciate

what comes, since all adds to our growth towards God, and embrace the "paradox" that

life's failure brings success. He notes how, when we are young and our bodies are strong,

we aspire to impossible greatness, and he explains that this type of action makes man into

a "brute" (line 44).

With age comes acceptance and love of the flesh, even though it pulls us "ever to the

earth" (line 63), while some yearn to reach a higher plane. A wise, older man realizes that

all things are gifts from God, and the flesh's limitations are to be appreciated even as we

recognize them as limitations.

His reason for begging patience is that our life on Earth is but one step of our soul's

experience, and so our journey will continue. Whereas youth is inclined to "rage" (line

100), age is inclined to await death patiently. Both are acceptable and wonderful, and

each compliments the other.

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What complicates the philosophy is that we are wont to disagree with each other, to have

different values and loves. However, the Rabbi begs that we not give too much credence

to the earthly concerns that engender argument and dissention, and trust instead that we

are given by God and hence are fit for this struggle. The transience of time does not

matter, since this is only one phase of our existence; we need not grow anxious about

disagreements and unrealized goals, since the ultimate truth is out of our reach anyway.

Again, failure breeds success. He warns against being distracted by the "plastic

circumstance" (line 164) of the present moment.

He ends by stressing that all is part of a unified whole, even if we cannot glimpse the

whole. At the same time that age should approve of youth and embrace the present

moment, it must also be constantly looking upwards towards a heaven to come and hence

simultaneously willing to renounce the present.

Fra Lippo Lippi

The poem begins as the painter and monk Lippo Lippi, also the poem's narrator, is caught

by some authority figures while roving his town's red light district. As he begins, he is

being physically accosted by one of the police. He accuses them of being overzealous and

that he need not be punished. It is not until he name-drops "Cosimo of the Medici" (from

the ruling family of Florence) as a nearby friend that he is released.

He then addresses himself specifically to the band's leader, identifying himself as the

famous painter and then suggesting that they are all, himself included, too quick to bow

down to what authority figures suggest. Now free, he suggests that the listener allow his

subordinates to wander off to their own devices. Then he tells how he had been busy the

past three weeks shut up in his room, until he heard a band of merry revelers passing by

and used a ladder to climb down to the streets to pursue his own fun. It was while

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engaged in that fun that he was caught, and he defends himself to the judgmental listener,

asking "what am I a beast for?" if not to pursue his beastly appetites.

It is then that Lippo begins to tell his life story. He was orphaned while still a baby and

starved until his aunt gave him over to a convent. When the monks there asked if he was

willing to renounce the world in service of monk-hood, Lippo was quick to agree since

renouncing the world meant a steady supply of food in the convent. He quickly took to

the "idleness" of a monk's life, even at eight years old, but was undistinguished in any of

the studies they had him attempt.

His one talent was the ability to recreate the faces of individuals through drawings,

partially because as a starving child he was given great insight into the details that

distinguished one face from another and the way those faces illustrated different

characteristics. Instead of studying in the convent, he devoted himself to doodles and

drawings, until the Prior noticed his talent and assigned him to be the convent's artist.

As the convent's artist, Lippo proceeded to paint a myriad of situations, all drawn from

the real world. The common monks loved his work since in his artistry they could

recognize images from their everyday lives. However, "the Prior and the learned" do not

admire Lippo's focus on realistic subjects, instead insisting that the artist's job is not to

pay "homage to the perishable clay" of flesh and body, but to transcend the body and

attempt to reveal the soul. They insist that he paint more saintly images, focusing on

representations of praise and saintliness instead of everyday reality.

Lippo protests to his listener that a painter can reveal the soul through representations of

the body, since "simple beauty" is "about the best thing God invents." Lippo identifies

this as the main conflict of his otherwise-privileged life: where he wants to paint things as

they are, his masters insist he paint life from a moral perspective. As much as he hates it,

he must acquiesce to their wishes in order to stay successful, and hence he must go after

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prostitutes and other unsavory activity, like the one he was caught involved in at poem's

beginning. As a boy brought up poor and in love with life, he cannot so easily forget his

artistic impulse to represent life as he sees it to be.

He then speaks to the listener about what generations of artists owe one another and how

an artist who breaks new ground must always flaunt the conventions. He mentions a

painter named Hulking Tom who studies under him, who Lippo believes will further

reinvent artistic practice in the way he himself has done through pursuing realism.

He poses to his listener the basic question whether it is better to "paint [things] just as

they are," or to try to improve upon God's creations. He suggests that even in reproducing

nature, the artist has the power to help people to see objects that they have taken for

granted in a new light. He grows angry thinking of how his masters ruin the purpose of

art, but quickly apologies before he might anger the policeman.

He then tells his listener about his plan to please both his masters and himself. He is

planning to paint a great piece of religious art that will show God, the Madonna, and "of

course a saint or two." However, in the corner of the painting, he will include a picture of

himself watching the scene. He then fantasizes aloud how a "sweet angelic slip of a thing"

will address him in the painting, praising his talent and authorship, until the "hothead

husband" comes and forces Lippi to hide away in the painting. Lippo bids goodbye to his

listener and heads back home.

Andrea del Sarto

This dramatic monologue is narrated by Renaissance painter Andrea del Sarto to his wife

Lucrezia. They live in Florence. Andrea begs Lucrezia that they end a quarrel over

whether the painter should sell his paintings to a friend of his wife's. He acquiesces to her

wish and promises he will give her the money if she will only hold his hand and sit with

him by the window from which they can survey Florence.

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He admits to feeling a deep melancholy, in which "a common grayness silvers

everything" (line 35), and hopes she can pull him from it. He tells her that if she were to

smile for him, he would be able to pull himself from such sadness. Andrea considers

himself a failure as an artist, both because Lucrezia has lost her "first pride" (line 37) in

him and because he has only one talent: the ability to create faultless paintings. Though

many praise him for creating flawless reproductions, which he admits he does easily, with

"no sketches first, no studies" (line 68), Andrea is aware that his work lacks the spirit and

soul that bless his contemporaries Rafael and Michel Agnolo (Michelangelo).

Considering himself only a "craftsman" (line 82), he knows they are able to glimpse

heaven whereas he is stuck with earthly inspirations.

He surveys a painting that has been sent to him and notes how it has imperfections he

could easily fix, but a "soul" (line 108) he could never capture. He begins to blame

Lucrezia for denying him the soul that could have made him great, and while he forgives

her for her beauty, he accuses her of not having brought a "mind" (line 126) that could

have inspired him. He wonders whether what makes his contemporaries great is their lack

of a wife.

Andrea then reminisces on their past. Long before, he had painted for a year in France for

the royal court, producing work of which both he and Lucrezia were proud. But when she

grew "restless" (line 165), they set off for Italy, where they bought a nice house with the

money and he became a less inspired artist. However, he contemplates that it could have

gone no other way, since fate intended him to be with Lucrezia, and he hopes future

generations will forgive him his choices.

As evidence of his talent, he recalls how Michelangelo once complimented his talent to

Rafael, but quickly loses that excitement as he focuses on the imperfections of the

painting in front of him and his own failings. He begs Lucrezia to stay with him more

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often, sure that her love will inspire him to greater achievements, and he could thereby

"earn more, give [her] more" (line 207).

Lucrezia is called from outside, by her cousin, who is implicitly her lover, and Andrea

begs her to stay. He notes that the cousin has "loans" (line 221) that need paying, and says

he will pay those if she stays. She seems to decline the offer and to insist she will leave.

In the poem's final section, Andrea grows melancholy again and insists he does "regret

little would change still less" (line 245). He justifies having fled France and sold out

his artistic integrity and praises himself for his prolific faultless paintings. He notes again

that Lucrezia is a part of his failure, but insists that she was his choice. Finally, he gives

her leave to go to her cousin.

My Last Duchess

"My Last Duchess" is narrated by the duke of Ferrara to an envoy (representative) of

another nobleman, whose daughter the duke is soon to marry. These details are revealed

throughout the poem, but understanding them from the opening helps to illustrate the

irony that Browning employs.

At the poem's opening, the duke has just pulled back a curtain to reveal to the envoy a

portrait of his previous duchess. The portrait was painted by Fra Pandolf, a monk and

painter whom the duke believes captured the singularity of the duchess's glance.

However, the duke insists to the envoy that his former wifes deep, passionate glance was

not reserved solely for her husband. As he puts it, she was "too easily impressed" into

sharing her affable nature.

His tone grows harsh as he recollects how both human and nature could impress her,

which insulted him since she did not give special favor to the "gift" of his "nine-hundred-

years-old" family name and lineage. Refusing to deign to "lesson" her on her

unacceptable love of everything, he instead "gave commands" to have her killed.

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The duke then ends his story and asks the envoy to rise and accompany him back to the

count, the father of the duke's impending bride and the envoy's employer. He mentions

that he expects a high dowry, though he is happy enough with the daughter herself. He

insists that the envoy walk with him "together" a lapse of the usual social expectation,

where the higher ranked person would walk separately and on their descent he points

out a bronze bust of the god Neptune in his collection.

A Grammarian's Funeral

The speaker of this poem is a disciple of an accomplished grammarian who has recently

died. It begins with the speaker instructing others to help him "carry up this corpse" (line

1) so they can bury him high "on a tall mountain crowded with culture" (lines 15-16),

far above normal human life down on "the unlettered plain with its herd and crop" (line

13).

The speaker gives a eulogy for their master, telling how "he lived nameless" (line 35) in

pursuit of mastering his studies, which focused on Greek grammar. He was willing to

sacrifice his youth and ruin his body, aging extremely quickly, in the process ignoring

"men's pity" over his choice (line 44). The grammarian put off "actual life" (line 57) until

he could know everything there was to know about his field, believing such mastery

would give him a true understanding of life.

As the funeral party reaches the gates of the town where they wish to bury him, the

narrator again praises his master for a life that had "no end to learning" (line 78) and that

was willing to forgo the "NOW" (line 83) of life for the "forever" (line 84) of true

understanding. Even as his health continued to decline, the grammarian remained

ambitious towards mastering his field, until he finally died. The party reaches its spot, and

the speaker commends the grammarian's body as one "loftier than the world suspects" as

the world continues "living and dying" (lines 147-148).

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Brief summary of some major poems of Tennyson:

Ulysses

Ulysses complains that he is idle as a king, home with his elderly wife, stuck passing

enlightened laws for a savage race that sleeps and eats but does not know him. He does

not want to cease his travels; he has made the most of his life, having suffered and

experienced pleasure both with others and alone and both at sea and on the shore. He is a

famous name; he has seen the world and has been honored everywhere. He also has

enjoyed battling at Troy with his fellow warriors.

He is a part of all that I have met, but this is not the end, for his experience is an

archway to new experiences, with the horizon always beyond reach. It is boring to stop

and wither away and be useless in his old age; simply breathing is not life. Multiple lives

would be too little to get the most out of existence, and little of his one life remains, but at

least he is alive and there is time for something more. It would be a shame to do

nothing for even three days; he does not want to store himself away. His gray spirit

yearns to attain knowledge and follow it like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound

of human thought.

In contrast, his son Telemachus, who will succeed him as king, seems content to stay put

and simply rule the people. Ulysses loves him and knows that he will use his prudence to

govern wisely, turning the rugged people mild, and he is blameless and decent in

his common duties. He honors the familys gods. Yet, Telemachus does not have his

fathers energy; He works his work, I mine.

Ulysses looks at the port and the sea beyond, calling to him. He recalls the thunder and

the sunshine of his mariners exciting travels together, their free hearts and free minds,

and understands that he and they are old now. Yet, they still can do something noble and

suited to their greatness, especially as they are men who once fought with gods.

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Light fades, and the day wanes. Ulysses calls out that it is not too late to discover a

newer world. They can leave this shore and sail beyond the sunset, exploring until he

dies. Perhaps they even will reach the Happy Isles and meet Achilles. Although they are

weak in age, much vigor remains; they still have heroic hearts which are strong in

will and want to persevere, to explore and discover and never give up.

Morte d'Arthur

First, a poem frames Morte dArthur, entitled The Epic. The speaker says he is

gathered at the home of Francis Allen on Christmas Eve. Also there are the parson,

Holmes; the poet, Everard Hall; and the host. They gather around the wassail-bowl (hot

mulled cider) and discuss how the honor seems gone from Christmas. The speaker is tired

from his day of ice-skating and falling, and he dozes off, waking to the parson lamenting

the general lack of faith throughout the world. Francis jokes and says he holds faith in

Everard, and Everard responds by saying he has faith in the cider. The speaker asks

Everard what became of his great gift of poetry that was so evident in college, and

Francis says that Everard had been working on twelve books about King Arthur but threw

them into the fire. It seems that Everard thought nothing new was said and the books

were mere Homeric echoes, nothing-worth. Francis says he has saved one book from

the fire. The speakers ears prick up, and he remembers the talent of his friend. After

some urging, the poet begins to read.

The noise of battle goes on all day. All of the men of the Round Table have fallen in

Lyonesse. King Arthur has also been wounded, and his last knight, Sir Bedivere, brings

him to a chapel near the field in the barren land. The King speaks to Bedivere about the

severing of the company of knights, the men he loved, and how they will never talk again

of lordly deeds in Camelot. He tells Bedivere to take his sword Excalibur, which he had

received from a white arm clothed in samite reaching up from the waters of the lake, and

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fling it back into the middle of the water. Bedivere is to watch what happened and then

return.

Bedivere hesitates at leaving his lord, but obeys him. He passes by the place of the tombs

of ancient men illuminated by moonlight and draws near the lake. He unsheathes

Excalibur and gazes long at the sparkling, jeweled hilt. He finds he cannot throw it in the

water and hides it in the waterflags about the marge. When he returns Arthur asks him if

he performed the mission and what he saw. Bedivere replies, I heard the ripple washing

in the reeds, / And the wild water lapping on the crag. Arthur is angry because he knows

Bedivere did not do what he asked. He tells him that he has betrayed his nature and his

name and that he must go back and try again.

Bedivere returns to the waters edge. He wonders aloud how he could throw away

something so precious and worthy; what good would come from this? He knows it is

wrong to disobey, but he thinks that Arthur may not be in his right mind because he is ill.

The sword should be kept in a treasure-house and be shown off at a joust of arms.

Bedivere, clouded with his own conceit, hides Excalibur and returns to Arthur. When

asked the same question as before, Bedivere gives the same answer.

Arthur, filled with wrath, calls him miserable and unkind, untrue, / Unknightly, traitor-

hearted! He excoriates Bedivere for betraying him for a precious hilt and lust of

gold and threatens to slay him if he does not follow his orders. This time Bedivere

returns to the lake and immediately throws the sword out into the center of the lake. An

arm, clad in white samite, reaches up mysteriously and catches the sword by the hilt,

drawing it below the surface of the water. Bedivere is astonished.

When he returns, Arthur knows by his eyes that the task is completed and asks what the

knight saw. Bedivere replies that he saw a great miracle he shall never forget, and he

describes the arm. The King begins to breathe more laboriously and says he knows his

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death is near. He asks Bedivere to shoulder him, and the knight helps prop him up. The

King looks about wistfully. Bedivere wants to speak to him but is too sad and does not

have the words. He bears the King to the place of tombs.

As the King walks he pants hard from the duress. Bedivere tries as hard as he can to take

the King to his resting place before he perishes. They finally arrive at the shore and see a

dusky barge, dark and mournful. Three elegant Queens with gold crowns wait onboard

and cry in one voice a moan of agony. This lamentation is like the wind that shrills / All

night in a waste land. Arthur asks to be placed in the barge, and Bedivere complies.

Arthur lays his head in the lap of the fairest Queen, and she loosens his casque (helmet)

and calls him by his name. Her tears drop on his bloody pale face. He lies like a shatterd

column, very much unlike the heroic figure he once cut.

Sir Bedivere calls out in despair, Whither shall I go? The whole Round Table is

dissolved, and the old times are dead; he is the last one left, companionless and

unmoored. Arthur answers slowly from the barge that, indeed, the old order changeth,

yielding place to new, yet Bedivere should not place his comfort only in Arthur, as he is

departing from this world. Bedivere ought to pray for Arthurs soul, since More things

are wrought by prayer / Than this world dreams of. Arthur is going a long way to the

island-valley of Avilion, which is free of rain and snow and full of flowers and peaceful

fields. There he will heal from his grievous wound. The barge pushes off, and Bedivere

stands on the shore, filled with memories. The ship sails into the horizon.

The Epic resumes. Hall ends his tale, and the men sit, rapt with attention. The speaker

wonders if the works modern touches were what made it so memorable, or maybe it was

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just that they loved the poet himself. The cock crows in the night, mistaking the hour for

dawn. When they all go to bed the speaker in dreams seemd / To sail with Arthur under

looming shores. He hears people cry out that Arthur was come again and that he cannot

die. In the dreams the speaker hears bells, and he wakes to hear the real church bells

signaling Christmas morning.

The Lotos-Eaters

Ulysses tells his men to have courage, for they will get to land soon. It seems like it is

always afternoon there, and the languid air breathes like a dream. A slender stream

trickles off a cliff. Other streams (this is a land of streams) roll throughout the land. Three

snow-topped peaks gleam in the sunset, covered with pine trees topped with dew. As the

sun sets, they see a dale and meadow far inland.

Here everything seems always to be the same. Dark but pale faces are set against a

backdrop of rosy flame; they possess melancholy smiles and mild eyes. They are the

Lotos-Eaters. They carry branches heavy with flower and stem and give them to the men.

When the men taste these flowers and fruits they hear a rushing of waves, and if their

companion speaks, their voice sounds far away, as if from the grave.

The men sit on the sand between the sun and moon. It is pleasant to think of ones

home and ones family, but every one of them is weary of the sea and the oar and the

fields of foam. One of them says that they will never return, and all of them sing together,

our island home / Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam.

In the Choric Song, sweet music falls, softer than petals dropping or night dew resting

on walls of granite. It is gentle on the sprit and brings gentle sleep. In this place are soft

beds of mosses and flowers floating on streams.

A speaker asks why they are weighed upon with a feeling of heaviness and why they must

be consumed with distress when it is natural for all things to have rest. He wonders why

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they should toil alone when they are the first of things. They go from one sorrow to

another and wander ceaselessly, without listening to their inner spirit that tells them,

There is no joy but calm!

In the middle of the wood a folded leaf is coaxed out from a bud by the wind; it grows

green in the sun and is moistened by the night dew before it turns yellow and falls to the

ground. An apple is sweetend in the summer light and drops to the ground. When its

time is up, a flower ripens and falls. It never experiences toil.

The dark blue sky is hateful. Death is the end of a life, but why should life be only

labor? Time will continue on, but they want to be left alone. They want to have peace and

do as other things do, to ripen and go to the grave. They want long rest or death, dark

death, or dreamful ease.

It is sweet to dream on and on, listening to the whispers of others and eating the Lotos

every day. They watch the rippling sea and let their minds wholly turn to mild-mannered

melancholy. The faces of their past are buried as in urns. Memories of their wedded lives

are dear to them, but by now changes must have occurred. The hearths are cold, and their

sons are now the masters. They would look strange and come like ghosts to trouble joy.

Other island princes may have taken their places while minstrels sing of the great deeds

of those at Troy. If things are broken, they should remain that way. It is more difficult to

bring order back and impart confusion, which is worse than death. Their hearts are weary,

and their eyes grow dim.

Here, however, they are lying on soft earthen beds with sweet warm air blowing on them;

they watch rivers moving slowly and hear echoes from cave to cave. The Lotos blooms

by the peak and blows by the creek, and their spicy dust blows about. The men have had

enough action and enough motion. They want to swear an oath to live forever in the

Lotos-land and recline like Gods together, careless of mankind.

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Like Gods they can look over wasted lands and see the trials and travails of men: blight

and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery / sands, but here they smile

and listen to the music of lamentation from the ill-used race of men who labor and

suffer and die. The men in the Lotos-land rest their tired limbs and find sleep more

pleasant than work or toil at sea or the wind and waves. The speaker tells his fellow

mariners to rest because they will wander no more.

The Palace of Art

This poem has a great deal to do with the theme of identity, and in particular with the

desire of the speaker of this poem to isolate himself in a world of art, private sensation

and stasis. The poem focuses on the conflict that is present in many of Tennyson's works,

the conflict between art and statis and life and society. The speaker at the beginning of the

poem desires to create a "lordly pleasure house" for his soul so it can dwell in a make-

believe world of aesthetic beauty and where art can rival nature in terms of its

presentation. This is an egotistical wish, as the soul is depicted as only being able to

thrive when it is separated from social forces and demands. The identity of the speaker is

defined by how socially isolated he is, but this means that his variouis social needs are not

being met. Ironically, focusing so greatly on the soul and establishing the "Palace of Art"

means that the soul is ultimately not satisfied but is only impoverished. Note how this is

signalled towards the end of the poem: So when four years were wholly finishd,

She threw her royal robes away. 'Make me a cottage in the vale,' she said,

'Where I may mourn and pray.'

The speaker thus rejects the Palace of Art and seeks a place where she can repent and re-

engage with life as it really is, rather than having to surround the soul with foms of art

that only imitate reality. The poem then is concerned with identity in relation to society,

and whether it is possible to pursue an identity or a conception of self which is defined by

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its isolation to society or whether identity is something that is inextricably intertwined

with society. It is interesting that the speaker at the end of the poem, whilst she expresses

the wish to leave her life in the Palace of Art, she does state that she does not want it

destroyed, in case she chooses to return their later on. This indicates an ambiguity in

Tennyson's argument about identity: he does not come down on either side, suggesting

perhaps, that the soul might need its time of isolation and separation from society at large.

In Memoriam

In Memoriam is often considered Tennysons greatest poetic achievement. It is a

stunning and profoundly moving long poem consisting of a prologue, 131 cantos/stanzas,

and an epilogue. It was published in 1850, but Tennyson began writing the individual

poems in 1833 after learning that his closest friend, the young Cambridge poet Arthur

Henry Hallam, had suddenly died at age 22 of a cerebral hemorrhage. Over the course of

seventeen years Tennyson worked on and revised the poems, but he did not initially

intend to publish them as one long work.

When he prepared In Memoriam (initially planning on calling it The Way of the

Soul) for publication, Tennyson placed the poems in an order to suit the major thematic

progressions of the work; thus, the poems as published are not in the order in which they

were written. Even with the reordering of the poems, there is no single unified theme.

Grief, loss and renewal of faith, survival, and other themes compete with one another.

The work is notoriously difficult, and it is unclear how much other poets have appreciated

it. T.S. Eliot stated that it is the most unapproachable of all [Tennysons] poems.

Charlotte Bronte commented that she closed it halfway through, and that it is beautiful;

it is mournful; it is monotonous. The poem has also brought tremendous comfort to

those who seek within its lines a way to assuage and eventually come out of their grief.

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Queen Victoria famously told Tennyson that it was much comfort to her after her

husband, Prince Albert, passed away.

The poem partly belongs to the genre of elegy, which is a poem occasioned by the death

of a person. The standard elegy includes ceremonial mourning for the deceased, extolling

his virtues, and seeking consolation for his death. Other famous elegies, to which In

Memoriam is often compared, include John Miltons Lycidas, Shelleys Adonais, and

Wordsworths When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomd. The epilogue is also an

epithalamion, or a classical wedding celebration poem. The stanzas of the poems have

uneven lengths but have a very regular poetic meter. The style, which Tennyson used to

such great effect that it is now called the In Memoriam stanza, consists of tetrameter

quatrains rhymed abba. The lines are short, and the rhythm is strict, which imparts a sense

of stasis as well as labor to move from one line to the next.

In terms of structure, Tennyson once remarked that the poem was organized around the

three celebrations of Christmas that occur. Other scholars point to different forms of

structure. According to scholars A.C. Bradley and E.D.H. Johnson, cantos 1-27 are poems

of despair/ungoverned sense/subjective; cantos 28-77 are poems of mind governing

sense/despair/objective; cantos 78-102 are poems of spirit governing

mind/doubt/subjective; and cantos 103-31 are spirit harmonizing sense and

spirit/objective. In terms of the structure of Tennysons thoughts on the meaning of

poetry, the scholars find a four-part division: poetry as release from emotion, poetry as

release from thought, poetry as self-realization, and poetry as mission/prophecy. Canto 95

is seen, from this view, as the climax of the poem.

The most conspicuous theme in the poem is, of course, grief. The poets emotional

progression from utter despair to hopefulness fits into the structure observed by the

scholars. The early poems are incredibly personal and bleak. Tennyson feels abandoned

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and lost. He cannot sleep and personifies the cruelty of Sorrow, Priestess in the vaults of

Death. He wonders if poetry is capable of expressing his loss. He wanders by his

friends old house, sick with sadness. Memory is oppressive. Nature herself seems hostile,

chaotic. His grief has a concomitant in a lack of religious faith.

However, as the poems proceed, the poet begins to grapple with his grief and find ways to

move beyond it. He learns, as scholar Joseph Becker writes, to experience deeper layers

of grief so that he may transcend the limitations of time and space that Hallams death

represents. He has learned to love better and embrace his sorrow, which he now

personifies as a wife, not a mistress. He learns that Hallam, while once his flesh-and-

blood friend whom he misses dearly, is now a transcendent spiritual being, something the

human race can aspire to become. Although Tennyson will never fully recover from the

loss of Hallam, he can move forward; the wedding of his other sister establishes this

result for him.

One of the reasons why the poem is so lauded by critics is its engagement with some

contemporary Victorian religious and scientific debates and discourses. Tennyson is

dealing not only with his sorrow over Hallams death, but also with the lack of religious

faith that came with it. He wonders what the point of life is if mans individual soul is not

immortal after death. His emotions vacillate between doubt and faith. He eventually

comes to terms with the fact that Hallam may be gone in bodily form, but that he is a

perfect spiritual being whose consciousness endures past his death. Becker writes that

Tennyson experiences renewed faith ... that both individual and human survival are

predicated on spiritual rather than physical terms.

Also, significantly, he ruminates over the new scientific findings of the age, which are

forerunners of Charles Darwins theory of evolution. In particular, Charles Lyells

Principles of Geology (1846) undermined the biblical story of creation. Several of the

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cantos deal with the ideas of the randomness and brutality of Nature towards man. Canto

LVI has the poet anguishing, So careful of the type? But no. / From scarped cliff and

quarried stone / She cries, A thousand types are gone: / I care for nothing, all shall go.

One of the most famous lines in the English language, Nature, red in tooth and claw, is

also in this canto.

Tennyson grapples with what all of this means in terms of his religious faith as well as in

the context of his loss; death is very, very long. The critic William Flesch observes,

Tennyson feels the utter oppressiveness of the emptiness and vacuity of time that Lyell

has so devastatingly demonstrated. Within that, he feels the pain of his mourning for

Hallam, a pain that may be sometimes intermittent but is always at the core of his being.

Ultimately, though, the fact that love prevails and persists in the vastness of Nature gives

Tennyson the hope he needs to place his faith in transcendence and salvation once more.

The poet never rejected the actual findings of Lyell and others, but he certainly saw them

as only partial answers to the mysteries of the universe and believed God still cared very

much for human beings and that there was hope for such humans to attain a higher state.

Locksley Hall

This poem is a wonderful creation of Tennyson which was published in 1842.

In the "Locksley Hall" the speaker shows "Locksley Hall" as young life and it also

embodies moral aspect, lackness and thirst of new blood. This beautiful piece is nothing

but a piece of fancy in which we get the idea about life of the author of the poem.

This dramatic monologue poem starts with sad because of the loss of his much loved

cousin Amy.In fact, beyond the surface meaning, the poem contains notions of Victorian

Age in which the poet lived. The speaker compares his loss of cousin with the loss of

Victorian age which has lost his own artistic capability.

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The speaker traces parental authority in the poem. The consequence of parental authority

is uttered through pitiful misconception by making of irritable scenery which replicates

the anguish. For example-The speaker displays his depression without expectation of

spring. Imagery used, with the reference of Orion and Pleiades, which shine in spring and

winter are omitted by speakers depressed mood.

The images which hold the poem are the brutality of time and its rapidity and according

to the poet , these elements destroy the relationship between lovers and lovers creative

capability. Here, the symbol, harp which creates harmony is devastated. The loss of love

makes comprehend and doubt the speaker about his fate when father of Amy forces her to

marry a guy, whom her father seems perfect.

The speaker states that suicide is the only solution to escape from depressive condition.

The speaker states that suicide is the only solution to escape from depressive condition.

His thoughtfulness drives from individual to society. To him the harm of the effect

indicates one aspect of social injustice. The speaker's consciousness over the social

awareness offer him a new dream of future.

At the end of the poem, the speaker's mind remains with psychological problem through

self-confidence which also indicate social progress that means spring is not so far away.

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 Chapter Five:

Comparative Study between Browning and Tennyson:

Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning belong to the Victorian age and they

occupy a prominent place as a pre-eminent poet of their age. Both the poets apply

new techniques and styles in poetry writing. But both these poets adopt their own

style in their writing. Browning focuses on the psyche of his frantic characters and

tries to look into deep inside of such characters in his writings.

Browning tries to understand human nature, religion, and society properly. He

studies the innermost psychology of characters. On the other hand, Tennyson

draws material from external specific realities, ideas, and objects and tries to

express it through ornate language.

Another significant difference between poems of Alfred Tennyson's and Robert

Browning is in their nature of expression. Browning's writings are always

energetic but in Tennison's tone of expression is generally melancholic where he

tends to give touch of nostalgia. Their poetic concerns are hardly related.

Browning systematically depicts the essence of a character whereas Tennyson

gives importance in inducing and endorsing a particular mood.

Tennysons poetry is essentially lyrical; thereby his dramatic monologues seem

half-hearted attempts when compared to Brownings.

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 In Tennyson we see the dramatic monologues used quite differently and the same

characteristics found in his lyrical poetry are present in his dramatic monologues.

St. Simeon Stylites is Tennysons most Browningesque poem in the sense of

irony.

We can easily perceive that Simeon is eluding himself as being the martyr who

suffers to achieve sainthood but his suffering is self-inflicted and he is trying to

convince us with false humility while his spiritual pride is clearly evident in his

words.

Nevertheless, St. Simon Stylites is character who is very similar to Tennysons

other characters. Like Marianna he is an isolated figure in a confined space

leading a lifewhich is no life. The poem is again about the penultimate moment of

St. Simeon who is sitting on a pillar waiting for his reward of sainthood. In

contrast, we do not find these sorts of similarities in Browning.

Likewise, the dramatic situations of Tennysons Ulysses and Tithonus

although fascinating in theirown right do not exhibit Brownings ability to inhabit

different personas and refine himself out of existence.

Brownings poetry is his attempt to understand human nature, religion, and

society. In all his dramatic monologues we encounter different personas that

provide us with different points of viewsand the reader is ultimately asked to elicit

his own conclusions. For example, in Fra Lippo Lippi Browning satirizes the

essentially corrupt relationship between the Italian Renaissance tradition of art

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 patronage and the Roman Catholic Church and the type of irony between the

narrator, the creator, and the reader found in the poem is present in all Brownings

dramatic monologues irrespective of the chosen subject matter. Whereas

Tennyson evokes an atmosphere through ornate language, Brownings dramatic

monologues are delivered in colloquial speech that fits the personas of his

dramatic monologues. It is thus difficult to find points of contact between

Browning and Tennyson.

Their poetic concerns are scarcely similar; Browning analytically exposes the

essence of a character while Tennyson is interested in evoking and enacting a

particular mood.

Sir Edward Clarke, K. C., addressing a London Workingmens Club on Victorian

literature, thus expressed his opinion of the comparative merit of Tennyson and

Browning: The two great poets were Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning. The

first named would always stand at the head of the literature of the Victorian

period.

It was difficult to overrate the enormous influence for good that his splendid

intellect and true and clear conscience exercised over this country. There was no

poet in the whole course of our history whose works were more likely to live as a

complete whole than he, and there was not a line which his friends would wish to

see blotted out.

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 Robert Browning was a poet of strange inequality and of extraordinary and

fantastic methods in his composition. However much one could enjoy some of his

works, one could only hope that two-thirds of them would be as promptly as

possible forgottennot,however, from any moral objection to what he wrote. He

was the Carlyle of poetry.

It is easy to laugh at Sir Edwards boneheaded prejudice, mastery of clich, and

preposterous attempt to reverse Ben Jonsons quip about Shakespeare (the

players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that in his writing he

never blotted out line. My answer hath been, Would he have blotted a

thousand). Yet Sir Edward has hold of something true.

Tennyson and Browning divides the age, and Tennyson is always the first

named. Browning resented Tennysons priority, and friends of Tennyson, in turn,

resented Brownings pretensions.

Browning wrote to Isabella Blagden in 1865, following the success of Dramatis

Personae: There were always a few people who had a certain opinion of my

poems, but nobody cared to speak what he thought . . . but at last a new set of men

arrive who dont mind the conventionalities of ignoring one and seeing everything

in another.

It is obvious who another is. Edward FitzGerald, on the other hand, viewed

Brownings rising reputation in the 1860s and 70s as evidence of the decline of

civilization and common sense.

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 He said so to Tennyson himself whom he called, by way of mock-depreciation,

the paltry Poet -elizabeth

To compare Browning with my own paltry Poet is to compare an old Jews

Curiosity Shop with the Phidian Marbles. They talk of Brownings metaphysical

Depth and Subtlety: pray is there none in ThePalace of Art, The Vision of Sin

(which last touches on the limits of Disgust without ever falling in) Locksley Hall

also, with some little Passion, I thinkonly that all these being clear to the bottom,

as well as beautiful, do not seem to Cockney eyes so deep as Brownings muddy

Waters.

FitzGeralds an old Jews Curiosity Shop links Brownings vulgarity with that of

Dickens, and also helpsto explain the rumors which circulated later in the century

that Browning had Jewish ancestry.

It may overstep our limits of disgust but it, too, has a tang of truth. Lovers of

Browning relish what nauseates FitzGerald, and lovers of Tennyson have

continued to protest at the charge that there is nothing to him but surface. The

charge of anti-intellectualism has stuck, most memorably in Carlyles mordant

summation: Browning has far more ideas than Tennyson, but is not so truthful.

Tennyson means what he says, poor fellow!

Tennysons status as a gentleman, which gave him so clear an advantage over

Browning in FitzGeralds eyes, has probably, in the long run, done him more

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 harm than good. I propose to revisit the Tennyson Browning pairing, but not with

the aim of confirming or reversing such judgments. Instead, I shall juxtapose their

parleying (to use Brownings term) with Virgil, because each illuminates and

utilizes the others. I shall concentrate on two poems: Tennysons To Virgil

(R394) and Brownings Pan and Luna. These are both late works that

triumphantly resist belatedness, though they do this by radically different means.

I wish Brownings poem had been written after Tennysons: it could so clearly be

read as a reply to it. Even so, the juxtaposition suggests the revisionary impulse

which, in their relation, came almost always from Brownings side.

Virgil marks a fault line in Victorian aesthetics, not between high and low culture

but between two kinds of high culture, the polished, and the rough.

There are many ways of framing this division Classic and Gothic, music and

speech, soul and body (or soul and mind)and the division itself is linked to other

oppositions, notably those of religion and class. It may be unjust, but it is

undeniable, that Virgil has been read as a poet of the ruling class, and of the ruling

class of poets: Poet Laureate to Augustus, a favourite of Englands first Poet

Laureate, Dryden, and, before him, two other court poets, Spenser and Chaucer.

Tennysons love of Virgil was not the product of his having been born a

gentleman, baptized into the Church of England, educated at Cambridge, and

awarded the laureateship by favour of Prince Albert, but it is not separable from

those contexts, just as Brownings upbringing in suburban Dissenting Camberwell

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 ensured that his classical learning would be a personal choice, not a social given.

Brownings account of this process, in one of his last poems, Development,

begins My father was a scholar, and knew Greek. Knowledge and love begin in

the family circle, but even in this poem, written in the last year of his life when his

fame was secure, there is also a touch of prickliness, of one-upmanship. Latin was

still ubiquitous in the education of boys, and Virgil, together with Horace, ruled

the kingdom; but Greek was a much rarer accomplishment, and had the prestige of

being both harder in itself and anterior to Latin. Development is about Homer,

who takes precedence over Virgil, and who is greaterbecause both grander and

more primitive.

Tennyson crowns To Virgil with a declaration of love: I that loved thee since

my day began (l. 19). He cannot mean since birth even as a hyperbole that

would be absurdand must mean something like ever since I knew anything about

poetry, with the further implication ever since the dawn of my own creative life.

Browning could not have said the same. He did not love Virgil; Development is

typical of Brownings classical poems, all of which (with the exception of Pan

and Luna) are on Greek subjects and refer to, or translate, Greek authors. Virgil is

mellifluous even (or especially) in his moments of greatest seriousness and pathos,

and the unresolved conflicts in what he says about love, or empire, or mortality

are easy to miss, or gloss over; he is a gifted phrase-maker, and left an involuntary

legacy of clich for the support of impoverished orators. An early draft of To

Virgil acknowledges that he is Quoted in the halls of Council, speaking yet in

every schoolboys home.

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 Tennyson wisely cut this two-edged compliment. Browning, as we shall see,
heartlessly tagged Virgil as a fount of condescension (though not in Pan and

Luna; that is what makes the poem so interesting), but it would be quite wrong to

imply that ToVirgil is Virgilian in this sense. The case is exactly the opposite:

Tennysons poem is Virgilian because its poise, its finish, is threatened by forces

it barely holds in check.

Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning belong to the Victorian age and they

occupy a prominent place as a pre-eminent poet of their age. Both the poets apply

new techniques and styles in poetry writing. But both these poets adopt their own

style in their writing.

Browning focuses on the psyche of his frantic characters and tries to look into

deep inside of such characters in his writings. Browning tries to understand human

nature, religion, and society properly.

He studies the innermost psychology of characters. On the other hand, Tennyson

draws material from external specific realities, ideas, and objects and tries to

express it through ornate language.

Another significant difference between poems of Alfred Tennyson's and Robert

Browning is in their nature of expression. Browning's writings are always

energetic but in Tennison's tone of expression is generally melancholic where he

tends to give touch of nostalgia.

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 Their poetic concerns are hardly related. Browning systematically depicts the

essence of a character whereas Tennyson gives importance in inducing and

endorsing a particular mood.

Robert browning and Alfred Tennyson were two main Victorian poets. They were

also famous in Dramatic monologue. It is difficult to find difference between

Browning and Tennyson. Their poetic concerns are quiet similar.

Browning logically reveals the essence of a person whereas, Tennyson induce and

plays a particular mood.

Browning in his poetry tries to realize human nature, society and religion.

Whereas, Tennyson recall the conscious mind an environment through ornate

language.

Tennyson as a source for his poetry, used many subjects from domestic conditions

to observation of atmosphere. Whereas, Browning takes an immoral character and

challenges us to find out the moral excellence.

Tennyson and Browning are the two literary titans of the Victorian age who

towered over all other poets of the period for about help a century. However, as

poets they have very little in common. While Tennyson was completely a

representative of his age who glorified the greatness of England, its democracy

and freedom, and dreamed of The Parliament of Man, The Federation of the

World, Browning kept apart from all the political and religious turmoil of the

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 age. In fact, Browning lived and wrote as if such things as Reform Bills, Catholic

Emancipation, The Crimean War, The Indian Mutiny that never been.

The only evidence we have of Brownings patriotism is furnished

by two little poems, Home Thoughts from Abroad and Home thoughts from

sea. It is true that he lived in Italy after his marriage, and so had no interest in the

tendencies and movements in Victorian England. But he was quite unresponsive

to the Italian freedom struggle also even when Mrs. Browning was so-sympathetic

to it. It means that Browning had no interest in contemporary history. His main

interest was in the remote part, especially in the Italy of the Renaissance.

Being a poet of the 19th century, Tennyson could not escape the influences of

Romanticism. In his poetry Nature always predominates. In fact, it is nicely said

that if Byron is the poet of the mountains and oceans, Shelley of cloud and air,

Keats of the perfume of evening, Wordsworth of the meaning and mysteries of

Nature as a whole, Tennyson is the poet of flowers, trees and birds. In the words

of Harrison, Of flowers and trees, he must be held to be the supreme master,

above all who have written in English, perhaps indeed in any poetry.

Moreover, he is a perfect painter of Nature because he has portrayed it not only as

benevolent, but also as cruel, red in tooth and claw. Just like a scientist he has

penetrated through the nature. No doubt, Browning also loved Nature and also

shows a keen appreciation of her beauties is such poems as Home Thoughts from

Abroad, Soul etc., but Nature was nothing special to him. In fact, Nature

except for a brief period in the 18th century has been a perennial element of

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 English poetry and especially after Wordsworth it is inconceivable that any poet

could do with it, to which Browning is no exception. Browning interest in Nature

is neither prominent, nor persistent as in the case of Tennyson

Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning belong to the Victorian age and they

occupy a prominent place as a pre-eminent poet of their age. Both the poets apply

new techniques and styles in poetry writing. But both these poets adopt their own

style in their writing. Browning focuses on the psyche of his frantic characters and

tries to look into deep inside of such characters in his writings.

Browning tries to understand human nature, religion, and society properly. He

studies the innermost psychology of characters. On the other hand, Tennyson

draws material from external specific realities, ideas, and objects and tries to

express it through ornate language.

Another significant difference between poems of Alfred Tennyson's and Robert

Browning is in their nature of expression. Browning's writings are always

energetic but in Tennysons tone of expression is generally melancholic where he

tends to give touch of nostalgia. Their poetic concerns are hardly related.

Browning systematically depicts the essence of a character whereas Tennyson

gives importance in inducing and endorsing a particular mood.

Alfred Tennyson sometimes made allusion in his poetry to the social and scientific

issues that were so distressing to many Victorians, including Tennyson, related to

the discoveries of geological and astronomical time and Darwinian theory. As a

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 devout Christian, he added references in his poetry about how one might keep

faith in God and yet acknowledge the "progress" of sciences understanding.

Additionally, he would use some poetic works to express opinion about social

issues like fair treatment of women and women's right to attain higher education.

Robert Browning, on the other hand, often took a psychological approach to

addressing the ills of society. His poetry, often composed as dramatic

monologues, told stories through various characters. Since Browning was

therefore writing in a character voice and not his own, he was free to create

characters that were capable of as much evil as good.

In this way Browning could explore the psychology of crime and brutality as

easily as he could explore goodness and beauty. He exposed the inner mind

behind some of the situations of society and used his poetic stories to discuss

philosophical points relevant to issues from art and beauty to materialism.

Contrast between Ulysses and My Last Duchess

Ulysses of Alfred, Lord Tennyson and My Last Duchess of Robert Browning

are two good examples of Dramatic monologues written during the Victorian age.

So, naturally there are some similarities from structural point of view between the

two poems.

However, I think that there are many differences between them and in this term

paper I want to focus on the differences between these two poems.

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 The first thing that comes to our mind by reading the two poems is that Ulysses

is a poem about seeking knowledge and physical journey, while My Last

Duchess is mainly about power and pride. The duke is very powerful and he

always reminds others of his power and authority. He expects others to be humble

in front of him and obey his every command. The Duchess did not listen to him

and he became very angry and killed her.

There is no doubt that Ulysses was a very powerful man of ancient Greece. If we

read Iliad of Homer, then it is very clear that he was one of the top generals in

Greek army and was very clever. More than everything, Ulysses was the king of

Ithaca and he was the all in all in his own kingdom.

Undoubtedly, he was the most powerful man of Ithaca. On the other hand, the

Duke was the Duke of a small area and naturally, there was a king above him.

Still, Ulysses acted with politeness to others. We understand this matter from his

speech to the sailors:..My mariners,Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and

thought with me,--That ever with a frolic welcome took The thunder and the

sunshine, and opposed Free hearts, free foreheads,-- you and I are old;Old age

hath yet his honor and his toil.

As for knowledge, Ulysses was always dedicated for gaining knowledge and

experience. During his time, most people did not give value to this matter and that

is why, Ulysses was not satisfied with his countrymen.

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 He said in the openings stanza of the poem that people of his country only knew

about eating and sleeping and did not understand him. The Duke showed off to

others all the time that he was a man of high culture, but the reality was that he did

not have any interest about knowledge.

In My Last Duchess, we find a lot of description about renaissance art. It was

clear that the Duke was a fan of art and painting. But, I got the feeling by reading

the poem that he was interested about painting only to show off to others that he

came from an aristocratic family. He knew how to spend money smartly and

collect quality paintings and statues, but he did not appreciate art for arts sake.

Art was a device for him to show his authority. He always felt that he was

different from others and he had high taste.

On the other hand, in Ulysses, we can not find any description of any painting

or statues but it seems to me that Ulysses himself was an artist of life. He wanted

to find true meaning of life and how to live happily. His art was to teach others

about the value of knowledge and wisdom.

My Last Duchess is a poem about renaissance time and we know that humanity,

individualism and freedom are the important features of renaissance age. The

Duke is always eager to show that he is a renaissance man and he appreciates art

and painting. However, in his heart, he did not have any respect towards

humanity, individualism, and freedom. Instead, he was power-hungry just like

many people during the time of Ulysses. On the other hand, Ulysses had some

kinds of renaissance spirit in him and that is why, he gave value to knowledge and

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 experience, although he spent most of his time in fighting. He understood that

knowledge is higher than authority. Thus, we find a paradox in these two poems.

The Duke is very possessive. He wanted that his wife only smiles at him and he

can enjoy the beauty of his wife alone. However, in return, he was not ready to

give any love or emotion to his wife. He only cared for his own pleasure and he

was a very selfish husband and a very selfish man in his personal life. He is not

ready to sacrifice anything for anyone, but he feels that because he was born in a

900-year-old family, others must obey him without any question.

On the other hand, it is clear that Ulysses had sacrificed a lot for his soldiers. That

is why, even in old age, they are ready to accompany him in his adventure. There

is a strong possibility that all of them would die but still, they are ready to

accompany Ulysses in his last voyage. Thus, Ulysses won the loyalty and respect

of his fellow sailors by respecting them first.

The idea of civilization is very important in both of these two poems. Ulysses was

unhappy with his people because he thought that his countrymen were savage.

Even he was not so satisfied with his wife and son. He could easily decide to leave

them even at old age.

Ulysses believes that he is more civilized and higher than the people around him.

However, this kind of feeling did not destroy his politeness. He knows that he has

earned this higher status with his own personal efforts. On the other hand, the

Duke had done nothing to have this feeling of civilization in himself. He was only

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 born in a rich and powerful family. He could spend freely for art and

entertainment. For him, civilization was nothing more than possessing a pretty

wife, being the Duke of an area and managing some beautiful paintings.

Ulysses was a spiritual person and he had depth in his personality. On the other

hand, the Duke was a surface person. He did not have any spirituality. He did not

care to go deep any matter. He did not even try to think which way he could make

his wife listen to his wanted. He just knew that his wife must listen to her or she

would be punished. Thus, it is natural his wife suffered a lot in married life and

death saved her from more torture.

The Duke was a very good example of materialism. He only cared for his own

benefit and own consumption. He liked a painting and he must have it. He liked a

beautiful woman (The Duchess) and he must have it. He cannot think of any other

way. He does not care for any good idea. From this matter, Ulysses was just the

opposite. He spent all his life not just for his own glory, but also for his ideas. He

is the symbol of idealism. Ulysses has some goals in life. He is not satisfied with

just ruling his countrymen. He does not like to control other people that much but

he wants to bring good things for everyone. He believed that knowledge is

supreme and for this matter he is again going out on a sea voyage.

What I feel is that although the two main characters of these two poems are

exactly opposite, the two poets had the same goals with their poems. They are

both idealists in their message. Tennyson has showed the positive side of human

characteristics. His hero Ulysses is full of good qualities. Ulysses is not an

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 ordinary person. He is attractive to many readers and it is true that most of us can

not become like Ulysses but still we like his ideas. We know that he is an extra-

ordinary man and if possible, we should try to be like him. On the other hand,

Browning has created the character of Duke in his poem and the Duke is narrating

the whole story. However, Browning does not like the character of the Duke.

Browning has used subtle ironies to show his displeasure about the Duke.

Although he is the main character in My Last Duchess, the readers know very

well that the Duke is not a person that we like to follow.

May be, many of us in our personal life are somehow similar to Duke but in the

end, we are not proud of this matter. Browning has given us the feeling that the

Duke is everything opposite to goodness and idealism. So, Browning has also

made the readers aware about idealism and spirituality in life. I feel that Browning

has been more successful in giving his message of idealism because he could

create a lot of reactions in the mind of the readers. When we read My Last

Duchess, we know that the Duke is showing off a lot and he is a very bad person.

He is all the time saying bad words about the Duchess but the more he says the

more readers realize thatthe Duchess was a noble lady. The readers also

understand that the way of the Duke was very bad.

In conclusion, I like to say that with all the contrasting ideas presented in

Ulysses and My Last Duchess, they have almost similar message.

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Similarities and contrasts between Andrea Del Sarto and My Last

Duchess:

It is interesting how to poems from the same author can present the same themes

in such different ways. We will be comparing, Brownings Andrea Del Sarto

and My Last Duchess. There are two topics that have important roles in both

poems; these are art and the role of woman. Browning shows us women in very

different roles in these two poems. He also presents art in both poems from

different points of view. In My Last Duchess womens role is of a free person;

the king treats his duchess as a possession and when he thinks he cant control her

he simply kills her.

We see that the duchess is kind of a free spirit and that she gets killed just because

she is independent from the duke, which made him jealous and made him think

she was cheating on him. On Andrea Del Sarto we have a complete different

attitude from man towards woman.

Lucrezia is the one in control of the situation and Andrea seems to accept

whatever she decides. In this poem man takes the traditional role of woman in the

sense that man is usually the one that gives the orders but in this poem man does

whatever his wife tells. We also see that Andrea is the one who has to put up with

his wifes infidelity and not the other way around like the situation is usually

portrayed.

We can see this in the following quote: Love, does that please you? Ah, but what

does he, The Cousin! what does he to please you more?I am grown peaceful as old

age to-night. I regret little, I would change still less. (Browning, "Andrea Del

Sarto") In both poems the female character is liberal and this bothers the male

figures the most fundamental difference is the way man reacts to this attitude.

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 We can see that Andrea is really tolerating also in the past quote. In contrast we

can see how the Duke treated the Duchess like a possession: Much the same

smile?

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 Chapter Seven

Findings of the Study

Fra Lippo Lippi

The poem begins as the painter and monk Lippo Lippi, also the poem's narrator, is caught

by some authority figures while roving his town's red light district. As he begins, he is

being physically accosted by one of the police

Andrea del Sarto

This dramatic monologue is narrated by Renaissance painter Andrea del Sarto to his wife

Lucrezia. They live in Florence. Andrea begs Lucrezia that they end a quarrel over

whether the painter should sell his paintings to a friend of his wife's

My Last Duchess

"My Last Duchess" is narrated by the duke of Ferrara to an envoy (representative) of

another nobleman, whose daughter the duke is soon to marry. These details are revealed

throughout the poem, but understanding them from the opening helps to illustrate the

irony that Browning employs.

A Grammarian's Funeral

The speaker of this poem is a disciple of an accomplished grammarian who has recently

died. It begins with the speaker instructing others to help him "carry up this corpse" (line

1) so they can bury him high "on a tall mountain crowded with culture" (lines 15-16),

far above normal human life down on "the unlettered plain with its herd and crop" (line

Ulysses

Ulysses complains that he is idle as a king, home with his elderly wife, stuck passing

enlightened laws for a savage race that sleeps and eats but does not know him. He does

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not want to cease his travels; he has made the most of his life, having suffered and

experienced pleasure both with others and alone and both at sea and on the shore

Morte d'Arthur

First, a poem frames Morte dArthur, entitled The Epic. The speaker says he is

gathered at the home of Francis Allen on Christmas Eve. Also there are the parson,

Holmes; the poet, Everard Hall; and the host.

The Lotos-Eaters

Ulysses tells his men to have courage, for they will get to land soon. It seems like it is

always afternoon there, and the languid air breathes like a dream. A slender stream

trickles off a cliff. Other streams (this is a land of streams) roll throughout the land. Three

snow-topped peaks gleam in the sunset, covered with pine trees topped with dew. As the

sun sets, they see a dale and meadow far inland.

The Palace of Art

This poem has a great deal to do with the theme of identity, and in particular with the

desire of the speaker of this poem to isolate himself in a world of art, private sensation

and stasis. The poem focuses on the conflict that is present in many of Tennyson's works,

the conflict between art and statis and life and society.

In Memoriam

In Memoriam is often considered Tennysons greatest poetic achievement. It is a

stunning and profoundly moving long poem consisting of a prologue, 131 cantos/stanzas,

and an epilogue.

Locksley Hall

This poem is a wonderful creation of Tennyson which was published in 1842.

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In the "Locksley Hall" the speaker shows "Locksley Hall" as young life and it also

embodies moral aspect, lackness and thirst of new blood. This beautiful piece is nothing

but a piece of fancy in which we get the idea about life of the author of the poem.

Conclusion:

Although both Tennyson and Browning are important Victorian poets, they differ in

background and style.First, Tennyson was a member of the British upper classes with

wealthy grandparents, but due to an odd inheritance arrangement, his father was a

relatively poor clergyman. The contrast between his own circumstances and wealth of

other members of his family was something he felt acutely. He was educated at Trinity

College, Cambridge and had a solid knowledge of Greek and Latin, as was common with

members of the upper classes in his period. His work reflects a deep engagement with

classical culture. He became immensely popular, was appointed Poet Laureate, and

granted a peerage. By contrast, Robert Browning came from a family of middle class

dissenters and although admired by a small circle of intellectuals, he never achieved

Tennyson's immense popularity.

Often Browning is considered the more innovative of the two poets due to his often

unusual syntax, but actually under his mellifluous and fluid surface style, Tennyson is

perhaps even more radically innovative. Both poets wrote dramatic monologues, but

while many of Browning's narrators prove completely evil, Tennyson's often demonstrate

a sort of moral ambiguity. Both poets experimented with writing in dialect and using

nonlinear or complex narrative structures. While Tennyson often explores classical and

medieval themes, many of Browning's best known poems are set in the Renaissance.

While Browning's poems reflect a wide range of emotional tones, Tennyson is best

known for his evocation of melancholy, although he also could write entertaining poems

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in dialect.In the and we can say that brownings place in our literature will be better

appreciated by comparison with his friend Tennyson. Whom we just studied in our

respect, especially in their methods of approaching the truth, the two man are the exact

opposites. Tennyson is the first artist and then the teacher, but with browning the

message is always the important thing and he careless, too careless, of the form in which

it is expressed

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References :

1. "Person Details for Robert Browning, "England Births and Christenings, 1538-

1975" FamilySearch.org".

2. Browning, Robert. Ed. Karlin, Daniel (2004) Selected Poems Penguin p9

3. "Robert Browning Biography". bookrags.com.

4. John Maynard, Browning's Youth"Ebony".

5. The dramatic imagination of Robert Browning: a literary life (2007) Richard S.

Kennedy, Donald S. Hair, University of Missouri Press p7 ISBN 0-8262-1691-9

6. Chesterton, G K (1903). Robert Browning (1951 edition). London: Macmillan

Interactive Publishing. ISBN 978-0-333-02118-7..

7. Stevenson, Sarah. "Robert Browning". Retrieved 26 August 2012.

8. "Introduction and Chronology". Browning Poetical Works 18331864. Oxford

University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-254165-9. OCLC 108532

9. Browning, Robert. Ed. Karlin, Daniel (2004) Selected Poems Penguin

10. Browning, Robert. Ed. Karlin, Daniel (2004) Selected Poems Penguin p10

11. Peterson, William S. Sonnets From The Portuguese. Massachusetts: Barre

Publishing, 1977.

12. Browning (1970). "Introduction". In Ian Jack. Browning Poetical Works 1833

1864. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-254165-9. OCLC 108532.

13. Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Brief Biography, Glenn Everett, Associate Professor of

English, University of Tennessee at Martin

14. "Tennyson, Alfred (TNY827A)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of

Cambridge.

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