"The Deserted House" is a poem written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in 1830, as part of his collection Poems, Chiefly Lyrical . The poem is characterised by its reliance on short lines which alternate in rhyme and meter to prevent a felicitous feel. In the poem, Tennyson uses the image of a dark house as a metaphor for a dead body.
"The Deserted House" was printed along with other poems of Tennyson's juvenilia in his collection, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical of 1830. The poem was printed alongside works that included "The Dying Swan", "The Mystic", "Ode to Memory", "The Sleeping Beauty", and the later suppressed poem, "The Grasshopper". [1]
The poem exhibits lyrical economy with its reliance on short lines. The lines themselves alternate in rhyme and meter in a manner that keeps the poem from having a felicitous feel to it. [2] The first four stanzas of the poem describe the emptiness of a house, while the fifth, final stanza reveals that the empty house is a metaphor for a dead body after the soul has left. [3]
Tennyson's use of allegory in "The Deserted House" established a method that he later developed into "parabolic drift", the term he used to describe his metaphoric style in Idylls of the King. The specific allegory, the use of a dark house as a metaphor for a dead body, reappears in the seventh part of Tennyson's In Memoriam; the Hallam house represents the narrator's dead friend, Arthur. Throughout Tennyson's poetry, the mood of a poem is transmitted through the scenery. To Tennyson, empty space represented the remoteness of an individual, and this theme appears in many of his works including The Lady of Shalott in the form of a quiet island and in Oenone as a quiet valley. In Mariana, the landscape is isolated and brooding, which reflects on her solitude, but the noises of the scene fill it with the life that is lacking in "The Deserted House". [4]
In many of Tennyson's works, he connected the idea of God to a dying civilisation. Before "The Deserted House", the image appears in "Babylon", "The Fall of Jerusalem", "Persia", and "Timbuctoo". Although the theme is different in "The Deserted House", the poem still describes a decaying body that is present with the narrator while an incorruptible house exists in a distant location. [5]
Out of a possible response to Tennyson's death, Evelyn De Morgan painted Life and Thought Have Gone Away, a work that is based on "The Deserted House". With the painting, she excerpted part of the poem dealing with "Life" and "Thought", two ideas that she personified in her artwork. Her depiction of Life is one that is in action, wearing armour, and carries a spear, while Thought is a female in thought, wearing a robe and carrying a book. The actual house, in De Morgan's interpretation, was a sepulcher. In the background of her work is a depiction of a city with angels along a path that leads towards it. Another aspect of the painting is the depiction of the soul leaving the body and travelling to the afterlife. She added a fig tree as a possible representation of original sin or as a representation of a path towards paradise. [6]
An anonymous review in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine for May 1832 argues, "Mr Tennyson, when he chooses, can say much in few words. A fine example of that is shewn in five few-syllabled four-lined stanzas on a Deserted House. Every word tells; and the short whole is most pathetic in its completeness-let us say perfection-like some old Scottish air sung by maiden at her wheel-or shepherd in the wilderness." [7] Walt Whitman characterises Tennyson's works saying, "There is such a latent charm in mere words, cunning collocutions, and in the voice ringing them, which he has caught, and brought out beyond all others [...] evidenced in The Lady of Shalott, The Deserted House, and many other pieces." [8]
In describing the poem, an anonymous review in the 1884 Sunday Magazine says "Beautiful it was in art, music, and imagination; but there was something more than a general expression of awe about it." William Dawson, in his 1890 review of English poets, included "The Deserted House" in poems of Tennyson that represented his "fineness of workmanship and depth of feeling". [9] Later in 1899, Stephen Gwynn argues, "Even among the Juvenilia, The Deserted House is not easy to forget". [10]
Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson was an English poet. He was the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign. In 1829, Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his first pieces, "Timbuktu". He published his first solo collection of poems, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, in 1830. "Claribel" and "Mariana", which remain some of Tennyson's most celebrated poems, were included in this volume. Although described 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. Tennyson's early poetry, with its medievalism and powerful visual imagery, was a major influence on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
"To Autumn" is a poem by English Romantic poet John Keats. The work was composed on 19 September 1819 and published in 1820 in a volume of Keats's poetry that included Lamia and The Eve of St. Agnes. "To Autumn" is the final work in a group of poems known as Keats's "1819 odes". Although personal problems left him little time to devote to poetry in 1819, he composed "To Autumn" after a walk near Winchester one autumnal evening. The work marks the end of his poetic career, as he needed to earn money and could no longer devote himself to the lifestyle of a poet. A little over a year after the publication of "To Autumn", Keats died in Rome.
"The Lady of Shalott" is a lyrical ballad by the 19th-century English poet Alfred Tennyson and one of his best-known works. Inspired by the 13th-century Italian short prose text Donna di Scalotta, the poem tells the tragic story of Elaine of Astolat, a young noblewoman stranded in a tower up the river from Camelot. Tennyson wrote two versions of the poem, one published in 1832, of 20 stanzas, the other in 1842, of 19 stanzas, and returned to the story in "Lancelot and Elaine". The vivid medieval romanticism and enigmatic symbolism of "The Lady of Shalott" inspired many painters, especially the Pre-Raphaelites and their followers, as well as other authors and artists.
The poem "In Memoriam A.H.H." (1850) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, is an elegy for his Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died of cerebral haemorrhage at the age of twenty-two years, in Vienna in 1833. As a sustained exercise in tetrametric lyrical verse, Tennyson's poetical reflections extend beyond the meaning of the death of Hallam, thus, "In Memoriam" also explores the random cruelty of Nature seen from the conflicting perspectives of materialist science and declining Christian faith in the Victorian Era (1837–1901), the poem thus is an elegy, a requiem, and a dirge for a friend, a time, and a place.
Thomas Storer was an English poet and mathematician. His major work was the Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey.
Elaine of Astolat, also known as Elayne of Ascolat and other variants of the name, is a figure in Arthurian legend. She is a lady from the castle of Astolat who dies of her unrequited love for Sir Lancelot. Well-known versions of her story appear in Sir Thomas Malory's 1485 book Le Morte d'Arthur, Alfred, Lord Tennyson's mid-19th-century Idylls of the King, and Tennyson's poem "The Lady of Shalott". She should not be confused with Elaine of Corbenic, the mother of Galahad by Lancelot.
"Crossing the Bar" is an 1889 poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. It is considered that Tennyson wrote it in elegy; the narrator uses an extended metaphor to compare death with crossing the "sandbar" between the river of life, with its outgoing "flood", and the ocean that lies beyond death, the "boundless deep", to which we return.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
"Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" is a poem by William Wordsworth, completed in 1804 and published in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807). The poem was completed in two parts, with the first four stanzas written among a series of poems composed in 1802 about childhood. The first part of the poem was completed on 27 March 1802 and a copy was provided to Wordsworth's friend and fellow poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who responded with his own poem, "Dejection: An Ode", in April. The fourth stanza of the ode ends with a question, and Wordsworth was finally able to answer it with seven additional stanzas completed in early 1804. It was first printed as "Ode" in 1807, and it was not until 1815 that it was edited and reworked to the version that is currently known, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality".
"The Eagle (Fragment)" is a short poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, which was first published in 1851.
"The Two Voices" is a poem written by future Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom Alfred, Lord Tennyson between 1833 and 1834. It was included in his 1842 collection of Poems. Tennyson wrote the poem, titled "Thoughts of a Suicide" in manuscript, after the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam in 1833. The poem was autobiographical.
"Tears, Idle Tears" is a lyric poem written in 1847 by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), the Victorian-era English poet. Published as one of the "songs" in his The Princess (1847), it is regarded for the quality of its lyrics. A Tennyson anthology describes the poem as "one of the most Virgilian of Tennyson's poems and perhaps his most famous lyric". Readers often overlook the poem's blank verse—the poem does not rhyme.
The Lady of Shalott is a painting of 1888 by the English painter John William Waterhouse. It is a representation of the ending of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's 1832 poem of the same name. Waterhouse painted three versions of this character, in 1888, 1894 and 1915. It is one of his most famous works, which adopted much of the style of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, though Waterhouse was painting several decades after the Brotherhood split up during his early childhood.
"Mariana" is a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, published in 1830. The poem follows a common theme in much of Tennyson's work—that of despondent isolation. The subject of "Mariana" is a woman who continuously laments her lack of connection with society. The isolation defines her existence, and her longing for a connection leaves her wishing for death at the end of every stanza. The premise of "Mariana" originates in William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, but the poem ends before Mariana's lover returns. Tennyson's version was adapted by others, including John Everett Millais and Elizabeth Gaskell, for use in their own works. The poem was well received by critics, and it is described by critics as an example of Tennyson's skill at poetry.
The Lotos-Eaters is a poem by Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, published in Tennyson's 1832 poetry collection. It was inspired by his trip to Spain with his close friend Arthur Hallam, where they visited the Pyrenees mountains. The poem describes a group of mariners who, upon eating the lotos, are put into an altered state and isolated from the outside world. The title and concept derives from the lotus-eaters in Greek mythology.
William Edward Frank Britten was a British painter and illustrator. It is known that he worked in London, England starting in 1873 and that he stayed in the city until at least 1890. Britten's work ranged in style from to traditional Victorian to Pre-Raphaelite, and his artistic medium ranged from paintings to book illustrations. His paintings have mostly been praised by critics with his illustrations having been treated as either neutral or favourable by reviewers.
Poems, by Alfred Tennyson, was a two-volume 1842 collection in which new poems and reworked older ones were printed in separate volumes. It includes some of Tennyson's finest and best-loved poems, such as Mariana, The Lady of Shalott, The Palace of Art, The Lotos Eaters, Ulysses, Locksley Hall, The Two Voices, Sir Galahad, and Break, Break, Break. It helped to establish his reputation as one of the greatest poets of his time.
"Mariana in the South" is an early poem by Alfred Tennyson, first printed in 1833 and significantly revised in 1842.
Poems, Chiefly Lyrical is a poetry collection by Alfred Tennyson, published in June 1830.
The Deserted House public domain audiobook at LibriVox | Early poetry |  | |
|---|---|---|
| Poetry |
| |
| Late poetry | ||
| Other works | ||
| Related | ||
| People |
| |