Sappho and the making of Tennysonian lyric. (Alfred Tennyson's 'Mariana of the South')

In 1830, on a summer tour in southern France and the Pyrenees, Alfred Tennyson wrote the poem now known as "Mariana in the South." When Arthur Henry Hallam, Tennyson's travelling companion on that tour, sent a copy of the poem to their mutual friend W. B. Donne, he included a paragraph of critical commentary that has since become part of Tennyson studies--although, as I shall argue, in a strangely half-acknowledged way. Hallam noted that the poem was a "pendant to his |Tennyson's~ former poem of Mariana, the idea of both being the expression of desolate loneliness"; that the southern Mariana required "a greater lingering on the outward circumstances, and a less palpable transition of the poet into Mariana's feelings"; that this lingering on the external was appropriate, for "when the object of poetic power happens to be an object of sensuous perception it is the business of the poetic language to paint"; and that Tennyson's technique was sanctioned by "the mighty models of art, left for the worship of ages by the Greeks, & those too rare specimens of Roman production which breathe a Greek spirit." Hallam's commentary ends with a comparison of Tennyson's poetry to "the fragments of Sappho, in which I see much congeniality to Alfred's peculiar power."(1)

What has come down in critical studies--as, for example, in the great Ricks edition of Tennyson's poetry--is the association of "Mariana in the South" with Sappho's fragment 1:

The Moon has set And the Pleiades It is midnight The time is going by And I sleep alone.(2)

This certainly was, for the nineteenth century, the great Sapphic fragment of "desolate loneliness" and unquestionably an influence on Tennyson's lyric. But, following Hallam's lead, I want to associate Sappho's fragments not only with "Mariana in the South," but also with the original "Mariana" and, more generally, with Tennyson's early lyrics. I pursue this association not so much to trace Tennyson's debt to Sappho or his interest in archaic Greek poetry, though these are important matters, but rather to suggest how a conception of Sappho and Greek lyric poetry--a conception Tennyson shared and worked out with Hallam--helped him understand his role as a poet and his place in the English poetic tradition.

Tennyson's interest in Sappho began early in his career and lasted long. In the 1827 volume, Poems by Two Brothers, he quoted a line from the Ovidian ode, "Sappho to the absent Phaon"--"Te somnia nostra reducunt |You my dreams bring back to me~"--as an epigraph to his own lyric, "And ask ye why these sad tears stream." Very late in his career, in the 1886 Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, Tennyson referred to Sappho simply (and supremely) as "the poet," alluding to her fragment on Hesperus, "Fespere, pavta ferov, osa faivolic, eskedhas' auoc, / fereic, oiv, feres aiya, fereis apu materi paidha," in the line "Hesper, whom the poet call'd the Bringer home of all good things" (185). And, throughout his work, he regularly quoted or praised Sappho--as, for example, in The Princess, where Lady Psyche cites Sappho as one who "vied with any man" in "arts of grace" (2.147-48), or in the Idylls of the King, where Elaine's lament echoes the bitter-sweet antithesis of Sappho's fragment, "Eros dhaute m' o lusimelic, dhovei, / ylukupikrov amakhavov orpetov": "Love, art thou sweet? Then bitter death must be: / Love, thou art bitter; sweet is death to me."(3)

Tennyson seems also to have had a lifelong obsession with the technicalities of Greek poetry, including Sapphics and Anacreontics. In December, 1863, William Allingham witnessed a dinner conversation, continued for three nights running, in which Tennyson discoursed on "Classic Metres." ("Mrs. T.," Allingham reports, "confessed herself tired of hearing" about the subject).(4) Another friend, Mrs. Montagu Butler, recorded in her 1892 diary that Tennyson had told her that the Sapphics of Horace were "uninteresting and monotonous," whereas "the metre was beautiful under |Sappho's~ treatment"; "the discovery for which he always hoped the most," Mrs. Butler added, "was of some further writings of Sappho."(5)

It was in the early 1830s, however, during his time at Cambridge and his friendship with Hallam, that Tennyson showed the most concentrated interest in Sappho's poetry, and this interest marks the short lyrics of his 1830 Poems Chiefly Lyrical and the 1832 Poems. In the 1830 volume Tennyson paraphrases (and disagrees with) Sappho's fragment on Hesperus in his "Leonine Elegiacs":