Tennyson and The Lady of Shallot

[med_cat]

Many happy returns of the day to Alfred Lord Tennyson, born today in 1809, Somersby, Lincolnshire, England.

Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland during much of Queen Victoria's reign, in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Tennyson is the 9th most quoted writer.

Do you have a favorite Tennyson quote?

Comments

[elenbarathi]

Happy birthday Tennyson! I wrote him a sonnet once; long ago; let's see if I can still remember it...

Tennyson, you've been dead a hundred years,
Yet I, a lesser bard, take pen to sing
Your praises, for today you brought me tears
With one brief line from Idylls of the King.
Not for the knights and nobles did I weep,
But for the old dumb servitor who bore
Elaine of Astolat in her last sleep
Down the long river to the palace door,
"Winking his eyes, and twisted all his face"
Although he had no tongue to cry aloud.
Tennyson, countless years could not erase
The sorrow in that line. You should be proud.
There is no thing endures like poetry;
You touched my heart across a century.

c. Jessadriel Darkmountain

[med_cat]

A fitting tribute; I rather think he would have liked it :)

[elenbarathi]

Thanks! I hope he would have.

[black_queen]

(Kind of )thanks to him, there is a nice flick with a very young Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland about "The Charge of the Light Brigade", where large parts of the poem are quoted. :) But I do not have a favorite, no.

[med_cat]

Ah, I see; thanks for the recommendation, I shall have to watch that film sometime :)

[petrusplancius]

Break, break, break,
On thy cold grey stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.

O well for the fisherman's boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead,
Will never come back to me.

[med_cat]

Ah yes, that one is good.

I especially like the "Locksley Hall" and much more so, the "Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After".