Essays Literary, Critical and Historical — A Closer Reading

blind his soul with clay.”

As to the characters of the two kings, they are well conceived and drawn. Ida’s father has an easy, loving disposition, and it is very evident that she inherits her strength of character from her mother. The Northern King is of a rough and violent type, which recalls the time when marriage was a capture:

“Look you—Sir! Man is the hunter; woman is the game; The sleek and shining creatures of the chase, We hunt them for the beauty of their skins; They love us for it and we ride them down.”

While the character of Florian is vague and indefinite, that of Cyril is well and clearly conceived. The latter is a wholesome, jovial and honest-hearted fellow. He is no dreamer and can always tell the substance from the shadow. He is not at all impressed by stately women, and so he tells the Princess that Love and Nature are more terrible than she.

The two widows, Lady Psyche and Lady Blanche, are in sharp contrast to each other. The former remains womanly under every circumstance. Even when discoursing on the nebular hypothesis in the lecture-room, we find that her babe, sweet Agläea, is by her side, and when she has lost it she bitterly reproaches herself for having left it behind.

Lady Blanche is the most unlovely woman in the whole gallery of Tennyson’s women. She has no thought but for herself, and even asperses the memory of her dead husband. She is full of envy and jealousy, nor has she even the affection of a mother for her sunny-hearted and winsome daughter, Melissa. She is a type of not a few who identify themselves with the Woman’s Rights movement of to-day, ostensibly to better the social and intellectual position of woman, but virtually to blow a bubble before the eyes of the world and gather about them an atmosphere of notoriety.

Having analyzed the poem as to its motive and plot, and shown the part which each character contributes to the development of the plot, we will now consider the purpose and import of the songs or ballads which the young ladies sing during the pauses or interludes in the poem. The songs did not appear at first, but were added by the poet to the third edition, which appeared in 1850. It will be noticed that they nearly all relate to children, and serve as choruses to guide and interpret the sympathies of the reader in the progress of the poem. Let us take them in their order, one by one. The first tells of a quarrel between a man and his wife, and of the reconciliation caused by the memory of their dead child:

“As thro’ the land at eve we went, And pluck’d the ripen’d ears, We fell out, my wife and I, O we fell out I know not why, And kiss’d again with tears. And blessings on the falling out That all the more endears, When we fall out with those we love And kiss again with tears! For when we came where lies the child We lost in other years, There above the little grave, O there above the little grave, We kiss’d again with tears.”

Here we have the abiding influence of the child reaching back from the grave and uniting by its memory the tearful and desolate hearts of the estranged parents.

The second represents how the toil and labor of the father are ennobled and lightened amid the perils of the deep through the memory of the little babe for whose life and love he fondly braves every danger:

“Sweet and low, sweet and low, Wind of the western sea, Low, low, breathe and blow, Wind of the western sea! Over the rolling waters go, Come from the dying moon, and blow, Blow him again to me, While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps.

“Sleep and rest, sleep and rest, Father will come to thee soon; Rest, rest, on mother’s breast, Father will come to thee soon; Father will come to his babe in the nest, Silver sails all out of the west Under the silver moon: Sleep, my little one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep.”

Sweet influence, indeed, this of the babe which reaches across the ocean and unites loving hearts.