Many Glancing Colours

Poetry, wrote Tennyson is like shot-silk with many glancing colours. Taking this statement as a key to Tennysons art and meaning, Kenneth McKay explores in detail the maturing poems from Tennysons earliest efforts as a boy under his fathers eye at Somersby, through Timbuctoo and The Lovers Tale, through the great poems published between 1830 and 1847, to their culmination in In Memoriam, that complex, various, and subtle expression of Tennysons achieved maturity. Rooted in close analyses of individual poems, Many Glancing Colours becomes a study of the development and character of Tennysons liberal artistic imagination. Though closely aligned with Coleridges idea of multeity in unity, Tennysons sense of poetry as shot-silk is different, MacKay suggests, chiefly by its resistance to and subversion of a faith in the efficacy of the rational, ordering consciousness. Tennyson rejected Coleridges Germany idealism, recognizing in the words of Arthur Hallam, that Pain is the deepest thing we have in our nature, and union through pain has always seemed more real and more holy than any other. With this, he saw, again with Hallam, that the Godhead of the Son has not been a fixed, invariable thing from the beginning: he is more God now than he was once; and will be perfectly united to God hereafter. From this position, McKay argues, Tennyson wrote his great poems between 1830 and 1850, apprehending reality in a body of work which is distinct in a voice, technique, and imaginative grasp. First in Mariana (1830) and then in the major poems which follow, Tennyson projects a world in which meaning and love come only as one submits, beyond any hope for or presumption of knowledge, to suffering and ignorance as the very condition of both vision and life. A poetry of shot-silk, in its intelligence, range, variety, and ambiguity, became Tennysons natural instrument, one fundamental to his liberal artistic imagination and a study of which makes for a new understanding of the development and character of the Victorian period generally.