Back home at night, he would sort out what he had written and try to compose complete poems. Whenever inspired, he would immediately jot down a few lines at random, to be thrown into the bag. Each morning he would go out on a horse, followed by a boy carrying a bag on his shoulder. His poetic style was bizarre and quite out of the ordinary, savouring very much of the ghostly world hence his nick-name, "Poet-Ghost". LI HO (790 - 816) Li Ho was of royal blood and began to write poetry in his seventh year. The sense of place, and of absolute loyalty to place both in returning there so often and in the most important memories of his life, of his brothers and Hallam, are a key to understanding Tennyson.Translated Chinese Poetry: Poems by Li Ho His feelings about this brook, and its central role in his life, were expressed in ‘A Farewell’, published in 1842 when the family left Somersby. Make absolute sense when we see the bridge and brook where Tennyson loved to spend time as a youth. Still makes a hoary eyebrow for the gleam In the extended version, the lines:īy that old bridge which, half in ruins then, 'The Brook' may have been too, at least in part, because using that brief period in Somerby they must have spent time at Tennyson’s favourite spot, just down the road from the rectory. Other poems were written with Hallam in mind. Perhaps his greatest poem, ‘In Memoriam’, written twenty years after that first meeting, was in memory of Hallam he named his son Hallam. But just three years later Arthur died while travelling in Europe, at the age of 22. They travelled together, and wrote together. His new friend came to stay in Somersby, and fell in love with Tennyson’s sister. He went to Trinity College in Cambridge, where in 1829 he met the much wealthier student and poet Hallam. It was not an auspicious start on the road to laureateship and peerage compared to the rich and semi-aristocratic Byron and Shelley - or even his friend Arthur Hallam, who had been to Eton like Shelley. They spent summers on the Lincolnshire coast, at Mablethorpe where they rented a cottage near the broad sandy beach, and he went to school in nearby Louth. His father was the rector of Somersby and also two other parishes - all with minuscule population. Yet this is also an important poem, for he remained a deep and loyal friend to those he loved, and to the places he loved. This is best understood in the small villages of east Lincolnshire, where he was born. These are the first four stanzas, which will give an idea of the musicality and apparent simplicity: There are no obvious problems apart from a few rural or archaic words such as "coot", "hern" "bicker" and "thorpes", meaning a kind of duck, a heron, to flow and a village or town respectively. It is often described as a metaphor for human life, as a personification of a stream and as a simple poem. However he did write celebrated poems that are remembered today: ‘In Memoriam’, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ and ‘Break, Break, Break'. He also wrote the apparently light lyric 'The Brook'. He became a grand old man of letters. My Globe Edition of Poetical Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson (1908) runs to 650 pages, much of which is unreadable today. He was a favourite of Queen Victoria, was made Poet Laureate in 1850 and was given a peerage in 1884 as Baron Tennyson. Tennyson, born Alfred but now known from his title as Alfred Lord Tennyson, was a prolific and popular poet.
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