Jeff Duntemann's ContraPositive Diary

I was pulling down books earlier today, looking for interesting page layouts, and happened upon my 1882 edition of Tennyson's Poems (Illustrated). The book is huge, but I had tucked a business card into "Locksley Hall" 20-odd years ago, and sat back to read it again. It's always been my favorite of Tennyson's many works, and if you've never read it, I recommend it, even if it's the only Tennyson you ever read. It's a literary form that you may recognize: A great, crazed, hysterical, raving Victorian rant, all done in brilliant, rhyming fifteeners—a 15-syllable poetic meter I don't think I remember seeing anywhere else.

It's also spoken in first person by a true nerd, a man who would find himself absolutely at home in modern SF fan culture. Consider the following portion of the poem:

Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,
Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.

Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro’ the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.

Here about the beach I wander’d, nourishing a youth sublime
With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time;

When the centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed;
When I clung to all the present for the promise that it closed:

When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see;
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.—

Damn, do I get that or what?

The speaker is a soldier who recalls his youth while marching past his childhood home, particularly his rejection by a girl named Amy, whom he considers to have married down by not marrying him. The guy is still half nuts about it (we're not sure how far in his past the experience was) and he pulls out all the control rods while insulting her and his rival:

As the husband is, the wife is: thou art mated with a clown,
And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down.

He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force,
Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.

Ouch!

But what is perhaps most startling about "Locksley Hall" is the narrator's vision (remember, this was written in 1835!) of the future:

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunder-storm;

Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

Verne and Wells were not the only ones with that vision, though it took another thirty-odd years to break into mass-market novels.

The first time I read the poem, I was struck by how many good book titles were lying around loose in there. The one I first noticed was "the long result," and I discovered soon after that John Brunner had used it for a novel in 1965. Brunner's The Long Result alludes in spots to the human impulse toward colonialism, which appears in other places in Tennyson's poem. "Pilots of the purple twilight" has been used in more than one book and a play. "In this march of mind" is yet another, and I don't think anyone's used that one yet.

Anyway. I've gone on long enough, and have plenty of other things to do today. If all you've read is modern poetry, "Locksley Hall" may sound odd to you, but remarkably enough, poetry used to rhyme and have regular meter. If this were still what we consider good poetry I might even write it, but those days are long past, alas.