Tennyson's Nonsense As A Poet

Delirious Bulldogs and Nasty Crockery: Tennyson as Nonsense Poet
Author(s): Anna Barton

Source: Victorian Poetry, Vol. 47, No. 1, Tennyson at Two Hundred (Spring, 2009), pp. 313-
330
Published by: West Virginia University Press
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Delirious Bulldogs and Nasty
Crockery: Tennyson as Nonsense
Poet
ANNA BARTON
concluding his 1833 essay "The Two Kinds of Poetry," John Stuart Mill
turns to the role of the critic and suggests that, just as a person must be
possessed of a certain amount of feeling and philosophy to be poet, so a critic
must be possessed of those same qualities to be able to recognize poetry:
When, . . . after reading or hearing one or two passages [of writing], we

instinctively and without hesitation cry out, This is a poet! the prob-
ability is that the passages are strongly marked with this peculiar quality.
And we may add that in such a case a critic who, not having sufficient
feeling to respond to the poetry, is also without sufficient philosophy
to understand it though he feel it not, will be apt to pronounce, not
"this is prose," but "this is exaggeration," "this is mysticism," or "this
is nonsense."1
Mill's remark about how an ill-equipped critic is likely to respond to poetry is

a return to his essay "What is Poetry?," published earlier that year, in which
he agrees with Wordsworth's "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads that the opposite
of poetry is "not prose, but matter of fact or science."2 In both instances,
Mill's explicit exclusion of prose from his discussion of poetry bespeaks his
conviction that poetry is not a form or a genre, but a mode of knowledge.
By replacing prose with science as poetry's opposite Mill admits the same-
ness of poetry and science as well as their difference: they are polar extremes
of a common spectrum. In the same way, by suggesting that poetry is most
likely to be mistaken for exaggeration, mysticism, or nonsense, Mill implies,
perhaps unwittingly, the common life of poetry and nonsense. To say that
nonsense is poetry that has not been recognized, or that poetry is nonsense
with a sympathetic readership, would be wilfully to misread Mill. However,
Mill's belief that, on first encountering a piece of writing, a reader might
recognize its poetry before being fully confident of its meaning does suggest
that poetry stands at a certain remove from sense, that a poem might make
313
314 / VICTORIAN POETRY
nonsense before it makes sense. This article seeks to explore the relationship
suggested by Mill between poetry and nonsense through a discussion of Ed-
ward Lear's reading of Tennyson. When Lear, after reading the poem that
Tennyson dedicated to him, wrote a parody of it that pronounced "This is
nonsense," he was accurately identifying in Tennyson the want of sense that
makes room for poetry.
In reviewing Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1833), Mill takes
up the role of the feeling and judicious critic that he describes in "The Two
Kinds of Poetry." After pouring scorn on reviews of Tennyson published in
Blackwoods and the Quarterly, he makes a claim for Tennyson's considerable,
though not yet fully realized, poetic talent and writes that "of all the capacities
of a poet, that which seems to have arisen earliest in Mr. Tennyson, and in
which he most excels, is that of scene painting."3 He goes on to qualify this
assertion, writing that Tennyson's power lies, not in mere landscape descrip-
tion, but in "creating scenery" (p. 86). Mill's example of choice is "Mariana."
Perhaps the first of many critics to address the question of Tennyson's epigraph
to this poem, Mill writes:
The subject is Mariana, the Mariana of Measure for Measure, living

deserted and in solitude in the "moated grange." The ideas which
these two words suggest, impregnated with the feelings of the sup-
posed inhabitant, have given rise to the following picture
ourselves at the right point of view, we must drop the

Shakespeare's Mariana, and retain only that of a "moate
the solitary dweller within it, forgotten by mankind, (
Mill places Shakespeare's words at the generative hear

requires that the reader empty these words, already mo
from Measure for Measure by brief (mis)quotation, of the m
its original context, so that the moated grange may hous
which these two words suggest" (Critical Heritage, p. 87).4 M
on the image of the moated grange, but it leaves room fo
ideas suggested by the pattern of sound that makes up the
first stanza of the poem, where "moated grange" is the fi
refrain, the scene that precedes it echoes its stressed/uns
labic pattern and reaches towards its "m," "o," "a," and
moss," "flower-plots," "rusted nails," "gable-wall," "sad an
ing latch." Abstracted even from the image that noun an
"moated grange" perpetuates a landscape of signs and so
with the poem's visual landscape, threatening to transfo
into nothing more than a languid incantation from w
rescued. Like her celebrated nonsense sister Alice, Tenny
herself looking out over a Wonderlandscape, where meanin
ANNA BARTON/ 315
saying what one means are "not the same thing a bit"5 and where Tennyson's
saying (or text), like that of Carroll, Lear, and all nonsense writers, precedes,
precludes, and remakes meaning.
A significant body of nonsense criticism that has emerged over the past
few decades has addressed both the semantics of nonsense and its relationship
with poetry. Roderick McGillis has remarked on the playfulness of meaning-
making that characterizes both poetry and nonsense: "Nonsense is all ludic.
The play's the thing in which to catch the portentousness of poetry";6 and
Hugh Haughton sums up the views of a number of critics when he writes:
Far from being a very special case of poetry, nonsense represents

what makes poetry itself a special case. I suspect there is a pleasure in
nonsense at the core of all poetry, a pleasure ultimately rooted in the
child's free play with sounds, words, rhythms and patterns of repeti-
tion-experiments with meaning which are made in defiance of the
obligation to make sense.7
Haughton's suspicions, I argue, take us right to the heart of the Tennysonian

lyric. There can be no doubt that Tennyson means what he says: as Mill rec-
ognizes, Tennyson's early lyrics create scenery that is laden with meaning. But
his reading of those lyrics suggests that the semantic content- the meaning
that they make- is non-referential (non-sense). Tennyson does not say what he
means because, before he says (before he writes), he scarcely means at all.
McGillis also points out the tendency of nonsense to "overdetermine
meaning" as well as deconstruct it (p. 157). He argues that the comedy of
nonsense is based on a too-literal use of language, blind to figures of speech
and, as Jean-Jacques Lecercle points out, to the implications of metaphor (pp.
62-65). Lewis Carroll, whose flowers are sleepy because their beds are too soft
and whose dormouse tells the story of three sisters who sit at the bottom of
a well, drawing pictures of muchness, is the master of this kind of nonsense.
However, Tennyson's poetry has less in common with Carroll than with the
nonsense of Edward Lear, whose work G. K. Chesterton judged superior,
because, whereas Lewis Carroll's nonsense was "intellectual," Lear's was "poeti-
cal and even emotional."8 Carroll's nonsense, like the back-to-front reflection
behind the looking glass, relies paras itically for its humor on a self-conscious
awareness of the meanings that it disrupts; Lear's nonsense, more sublimely
autonomous, reflects nothing and is without referent beyond its own sounds
and forms. It is made, argues Chesterton, echoing Mill on Tennyson, out of
"rich hues and haunting rhythms" (Chesterton, p. 67).
For Carroll, Tennyson was part of the real world in front of the looking
glass. His description of Alice's conversation with a group of sharp-to ngued,
gossipy flowers in an early chapter of Through the Looking Glass famously takes
aim at the high romance of "Come into the Garden, Maud," robbing the song
of a sense of its own lunacy in order to make fun of it.9 Lear, on the other
hand, understood that Tennyson's apparent mimesis of the real was only ap-
parent, though he came by that understanding the hard way. For initially Lear
sought to realize the landscapes of Tennyson's poetry as a means of escape from
Victorian England, with which he felt so often out of joint, into more exotic
realities such as travel might disclose. In an 1852 letter to Emily Tennyson,
Edward Lear included "The lonely moated grange" in a list of scenes, taken
from Tennyson's poems, that he planned to illustrate, explaining:
My desire has been to shew that Alfred Tennyson's poetry (with regard
to scenes-) is as real &. exquisite as it is relatively to higher & deeper
matters:- that his descriptions of certain spots are as positively true as
if drawn from the places themselves, & and that his words have the
power of calling up images as distinct & correct as if they were written
from those images, instead of giving rise to them.10
Like Mill, Lear appreciates the creative power of Tennyson's scene painting,
insisting that the poet does indeed mean what he says: that his language
calls up and gives rise to images that are "real" and "true." Yet Lear's desire
to show the reality of the Tennysonian landscape, to find the images from
which Tennyson's descriptions might have been written, was never fulfilled.
Although he worked on the Tennyson series intermittently throughout the
second half of his life, producing a significant number of paintings and
sketches and continuing to refer to them in letters to Emily and others, he
never completed the series. The difficulty that Lear experienced in rendering
Tennyson's landscapes as pictures suggests something about the sort of truth
that they offer: truth that cannot be easily separated from the texts that create
it. Lear's own artistic practice demonstrates that the travel writer might have
had some sympathy for poetry that failed to draw a firm line between image
and text. As Ruth Pitman points out in her excellent commentary on Lear's
Tennyson illustrations, Lear had a habit of writing on his sketches in such
a way that "his very writing often became part of his drawing."11 He wrote
"rox" on rocks, "flox" on sketches of sheep, and "river" to form a ripple on
the water, playful annotations that call our attention to the visual properties
of text (p. 21).
Despite Lear's suggesting to Emily at first that his profession as travel
writer and landscape painter best qualified him to illustrate poetic land-
scapes-he possesses "a very remarkable collection of sketches from Nature
in such widely separated districts of Europe" (in Noakes, p. 117)- later letters
show Lear responding more confidently to Tennyson's scene painting in the
guise of a nonsense poet shaping forth an alternative, self-contained world.
In a letter to Mrs. Richard Ward in 1873, Lear gives a list of the Tennyson
paintings he plans to include in his series, but translates their titles into non-
ANNA BARTON/ 317
sense. "And the crag that fronts the Even, / All along the shadowing shore"
("Eleanore") becomes "Like the wag that jumps at evening,- all along the
sanded floor" and the calm of "To watch the crisping ripples on the beach, /
And tender curving lines of creamy spray" ("The Lotos-Eaters") is disrupted
by "whistling cripples on the beach / With Topsy Turvy signs of screaming
play" (Edward Lear to Mrs. Richard Ward, July 22, 1873, in Noakes, ed., p.
239). These nonsense parodies are achieved by dispensing as fully as possible
with the original meaning of Tennyson's lines, while remaining as faithful as
possible to the sound and rhythm of the words, so that, for example, "crisp-
ing ripples" becomes "whistling cripples" by displacing the "cr" of "crisping"
onto "ripples," replacing it with a "wh" and exchanging "pp" for "tl." In this
way, Lear not only parodies lines from Tennyson, but also makes a nonsense
of the Tennysonian poetic described by Mill and reiterated in his own letter
to Emily. For the Lear who takes these liberties in writing to Mrs. Ward,
Tennyson's descriptions of landscape scenery give rise to the reality, not of
images, but of words.
Lear's off-the-cuff parodies recognize a limerick quality at work (or
rather, at play) in Tennyson's descriptions of place. Almost all Lear's limericks
begin with the name of a place, which over the brief course of the limerick
is dislocated from the place that it names and transformed into a nonsense
location:
There was a young lady of Corsica,

Who purchased a little brown saucy-cur;
Which she fed upon ham, and hot raspberry jam,
That expensive young lady of Corsica.12
Here the expectation the verse sets up is that the behavior of the limerick pro-
tagonist, "a young lady of Corsica," may in some way explain, or be explained
by, the geographical location. The absolute refusal of this or any Lear limerick
to meet this expectation works to close each place-name off from significance:
the behavior of the young lady of Corsica is not Corsican, the behavior of
the old man of Peru is not Peruvian, etc. What remains is rhyme and meter,
and it is this formal element that determines the history of the young lady.
Her purchase of the "little brown saucy-cur" relies, not on any topographical,
geographical, or anthropological fact of place, or zoological origin of canine
species, but purely on the formal composition of the place-name- she buys a
"saucy-cur" because that phrase is a dactyl that also rhymes with "Corsica."
By refusing to act as a referent for a location that means anything, the name
becomes its own referent; and this loss of geographical sense leaves room for
new (non)sense to be made within the different space of the text.13
Meanwhile, however, in his profession as travel writer, Lear is strictly
no-nonsense. He sets out expressly to disabuse his reader of any nonsensical
notions conjured up by the appealing rhythms of foreign place names. In the

introduction to Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania, &c (1851), he offers
advice to travellers about the necessary provisions for travelling through
Albania: "Arms and ammunition, fine raiment, presents for natives, are all
nonsense; simplicity should be your aim."14 Lear's travel writing is full of com-
edy, but it is a comedy achieved when the comfortable rhythms of travel are
interrupted by the a-rhythmical bumps and clatters of reality. On a couple of
occasions these interruptions are provided by local fauna- "All the khan sleeps,
save two cats, which indulge in festive bouncings, and save a sleepless donkey,
which rolls too contiguously to my head" (Lear, p. 183); "The great flocks on
these beautiful quiet tracts would inspire the stranger with a complete idea
of peace, were they not always attended by huge guardian dogs, who rush out
like enraged demons at the horses, and threaten the riders' legs" (Lear, pp.
210-211). On other occasions Lear suffers a variety of accidents: "The basket
containing the canteen was smitten by a sharp rock, and all my plates and
dishes, knives, forks and pewter pans . . . went spinning down from crag to
crag till they lodged in the infernal stream below" (Lear, pp. 360-361). The
language that Lear uses to describe his misfortunes- the pomposity of "too
contiguously," the exaggeration of "infernal stream"- provides comic effect,
but the humor of these scenes ultimately depends on the reality that the words
signify. Throughout the Journals his meticulous descriptions of the Albanian
landscape are tempered by self-conscious references to the inadequacy of
words to describe what he has seen: "The vast lines of Thessaly have a wild
and dream-like charm of poetry about them, of which it is impossible for
pen or pencil to give a fully adequate idea" (Lear, p. 417). By adopting this
familiar professional trope, Lear the travel-writer insists that we read his text
as an (inadequate) substitute for authentic experience- an insistence that
presupposes that experience's independent reality.
Lear sent a copy of Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania, &c to Far-
ringford. In response to this gift, Tennyson composed "To E.L., on His Travels
in Greece" (1853). In doing so, Tennyson generously implicated Lear in a
textual exchange between two professional artists, and his poem expressed a
genuine appreciation of Lear's work. It was also a markedly inaccurate reading
of Lear's Albanian journals. The title of the poem strangely refuses the loca-
tions named in the journals' title and replaces them with "Greece" (a decision
as inaccurate as it is perverse, considering Lear's travels took him through
countries that were to remain under Turkish rule until 1881); and the second
stanza of the poem refers to Mount Athos, a place that Lear never visited. But
these mistakes are only the most obvious misread ings made by Tennyson in
a poem that bears the scantiest possible resemblance to the volume by which
it claims to have been inspired.
Although Lear loved the poem and was flattered by the tribute paid to
ANNA BARTON/ 319
him by his esteemed friend, he was aware of its inaccuracy and, in his own
oblique way, did something about it. His letters contain a parody of the first
two stanzas of "To E.L.":15
Illyrian woodlands, echoing falls Delirious Bulldogs;-echoing, calls

Of water, sheets of summer glass, My daughter,-green as summer grass;-
The long divine Pene'ian pass, The long supine Plebian ass,
The vast Akrokeraunian walls, The nasty crockery boring falls;-
Tomohrit, Athos, all things fair, Tom-Moory Pathos; all things bare,-
With such a pencil, such a pen, With such a turkey! such a hen!
You shadow forth to distant men, And scrambling forms of distant men,
I read and felt that I was there.16 O!- ain't you glad you were not there!
These throwaway lines are at once a self-effacing refusal to accept the compli-
ment paid by Tennyson's poem and an arch critique of it. Like Lear's limericks
and other parodies, these two stanzas transform or demolish the semantic
content of Tennyson's poem, but remain absurdly faithful to its sound and
rhythm. In most other instances of this kind of impulsive nonsense the
resulting words and phrases are freed from meaning to become objects of
play; and Lear's parody does create playfully comic images out of Tennyson's
reserved sublime. But here the parodic words and phrases do more: they
hold on to a semblance of sense that in turn discovers a want of sense within
their model.
The parody in fact provides a more accurate reading of the Albanian
travel journals than Tennyson's poem had been: Lear resupplies the mocked
text with all the things it had left out. The delirious bulldogs, turkeys, and
hens reinstate the menagerie of creatures that populate Journals of a Landscape
Painter; the "long supine Plebian ass" recalls the donkey that interrupted
Lear's sleep and "the nasty crockery boring falls" is a neat retelling of the loss
of Lear's canteen as he was travelling up a particularly steep crag. "Tom-Moory
Pathos" suggests that Tennyson's Greece is influenced by the work of a poet
well-known for the Asiatic setting of his bestselling Lalla Rookh}1 The change
from "all things fair" to "all things bare" is a reference to the bare peak of
Athos, but it might also be understood to imply that Tennyson has reduced the
authentic, original accounts that make up Lear's journals to the bare pathos
of well-worn literary formula: the reader is made aware that Tennyson has
replaced physical with metrical geography, reducing the 6,700 feet of Mount
Athos to a single metrical foot.18 With the last line- "O!- ain't you glad you
were not there!"- Lear the traveller gently teases Tennyson the non-traveller,
suggesting that in spite of his Romantic fascination with classical landscapes,
Tennyson is much happier at home.
With this piece of nonsense that is not nonsense, Lear reveals Tennyson
320/ VICTORIAN POETRY
himself to be something of a nonsense poet. The opportunity for Lear's word

play is provided by the foreign place names that litter the first two stanzas of
"To E.L." "Illyria," "Pene'ia," "Akrokeraunia," "Tomohrit," and "Athos" are
the words from which Lear builds his parody, reconfiguring them as a way of
addressing a significant lack in the original By reducing these names to their
sounds, and then filling up these sounds with references to the experiences
that the mimicked names' reality held for him, Lear draws attention to their
emptiness in Tennyson's poem. Read in the context of "To E.L." as a whole
poem, the inaccuracies and omissions that Lear's parody highlights close
down the text of the original journals, creating a space that lets Tennyson's
own response- to text rather than travel- flower into the second half of the
poem. The named locations in stanzas one and two, emptied of the meaning
lent to them by Lear's first-hand accounts, become available for Tennyson's
armchair incantation. As Tennyson states in the final line of the second stanza,
"I read and felt that I was there": through his intentional (mis)readings of
Lear's journals, he is able to make his presence felt, rather than Lear's, in
these newly enclosed sites of metrical experience.
Tennyson digresses from Lear's journals as early as the second stanza,
the last line of which joins with the third stanza to describe the poet's move-
ment into his own locations:
I read and felt that I was there:
And trust me while I turned the page,

And tracked you still on classic ground,
I grew in gladness till I found
My spirits in the golden age. (11. 8-12)
These lines create a tension between Lear's activity and Tennyson's. The trans-
fer of focus, in lines 7-10, from "you" to "I" back to "you," set the work of the
two men in interdependent opposition. Lines 11 and 12 witness Tennyson
breaking away from this binary relationship of reader and writer to establish
an independent work. He writes that his "gladness" moves his spirits into the
"golden age," a gladness that Lear introduces into the last line of his parody,
identifying the delight that sponsors Tennyson's imaginative journey in the
second half of "To E.L." as, what it truly is, a delight in "not being there."
In the last three stanzas of the poem, Tennyson explores the creative
potential of the metrical locations to which he has traveled:
For me the torrent ever poured

And glistened- here and there alone
The broad-limbed Gods at random thrown
By fountain-urns;- and Naiads oared
ANNA BARTON/ 321
A glimmering shoulder under gloom

Of cavern pillars; on the swell
The silver lily heaved and fell;
And many a slope was rich in bloom. (11. 13-20)
Although these lines do make sense as a description of the classical picturesque,

their formal composition makes it hard to chart the geography of Tennyson's
"classic ground" as his focus sweeps enjambed over torrent and fountain,
pillars and slopes, and the ends of lines and stanzas. By contrast, the poem's
strong end rhymes and iambic meter establish a solid textual geography that
overpowers and pulls apart the already weak topographical meaning. The lines
decompose the picturesque compositions into textual compositions, which
are images of nothing more than themselves. Perhaps the most effective of
these is line 19, "The silver lily heaved and fell." The complete image is of a
lily floating on the surface of a river, rising and falling with the ripples, but
the arrangement of the lines encourages a reading whereby the lily heaves and
falls on the ebb and flow of the iambs, chiming vowels, and fricatives.
In the same way that a sequence of limericks presents a series of discrete
locations beginning and ending with the place names that circumscribe their
existence, the final three stanzas of "To E.L." seem to close in and away from
each other and from their joint meaning. Instead, they form three discrete
images of text that capture the picturesque of their own words and replace
topography with typography, real but distant landscapes with the lyrical im-
mediacy of rhyme and meter:
From him that on the mountain lea

By dancing rivulets fed his flocks
To him who sat upon the rocks,
And fluted to the morning sea. (11. 21-24)
These last four lines affect to contain a great geographical expanse, stretching
from mountain lea to morning sea in what almost reads as a complete, sensible
image. However, the stanza's expansive reach actually spans nothing but itself.
The images contained by the two balanced limits of mountain and seashore
have already been described in the previous stanza (already quoted above),
leaving this last stanza to enclose nothing but its own frame and to reach, not
out across, but in on itself. The rhyme between these two distant landmarks
perfects their conflation, and they fall together into the vacuum that the stanza
has created. The two "hims" that mark the limits of Tennyson's imaginary
vista, making their first appearance at this late stage, are not identified for
the reader. Perhaps Tennyson had in mind one or other of his "broad-limbed
Gods," but his sketches of the activities by which they might be recognized are
too brief to be revealing. Instead of two distinct figures that stand at opposite
reaches of a wide horizon, they are rendered indistinguishable by virtue of

the shared pronoun that is their only name. Reaching "from him" "to him,"
Tennyson's poem covers no more ground than that which is occupied by the
single figure who is always already himself.
Lear's parody instructs us that "To E.L.," like "Mariana," is a poem in
which words give rise to images that are at once visual and textual. In both
these poems, nonsense and sense, text and scene, are held in unresolved ten-
sion the one with the other. In some of Tennyson's juvenile compositions,
however, nonsense is made to give way to the sense of the experienced traveller.
"Timbuctoo" (1829) and "Anacaona," written while Tennyson was an under-
graduate at Cambridge, are both poems that offer examples of Tennyson's
fascination with the closed exoticism of foreign names. Anacaona's story is
the reverse of Mariana's: the man that she does not look for nevertheless ar-
rives. The scene she inhabits is created by the lyrical repetition of her name
and the place she comes from. The final word in each line of the refrain is a
name: "Xaraguay," "Anacaona," "Espagnola," "Hayti," which together close
around the rest of the lyric, preserving the island (like, for that matter, the
better known Shalott of 1832) as a space of leisurely play:
All day long with laughing eyes,

Dancing by a palmy bay,
In the wooded paradise,
The cedar-wooded paradise
Of still Xaraguay. (11.17-21)
The second half of the poem charts the intrusion of the explorer into this
insular tropical fantasy. The "white man's white sail" (1. 49) breaks into the
first line of stanza five, disrupting the mellifluous lyricism and exotic colors
of Hayti with a hard metrical blank. What follows is Anacaona's doomed
attempt to accommodate the white men (as a later band of Lotos-Eaters will
do in 1832) by singing lyrical nonsenses to them- "Carolling 'Happy, happy
Hayti!'/ She gave the white men welcome all" (11. 64-5)- and feeding them on
nonsense food- "Then she brought the guava fruit, / With her maidens to
the bay; / She gave to them the yuccaroot" (11. 53-55)- the exoticism of which,
to the mouths of these eighteenth-century Western explorers, is emphasized
by the use of the definite article ("the guava fruit," "the yuccaroot"), which
has an alienating effect, inviting the reader to chew over each word as one
might a foreign delicacy.
As if to block a rising awareness that things do not end happily for Ana-
caona, the end of the poem defends itself against her inevitable colonization.
It refuses to relate the white men's victory and instead makes circumspect
references to the death of Anacaona, which effects her preservation if only
in name:
ANNA BARTON/ 323
But never more upon the shore

Dancing at the break of day,
In the deep wood no more,-
By the deep sea no more,-
No more in Xaraguay
Wandered happy Anacaona,
The beauty of Espagnola,
The golden flower of Hayti! (11 77-84)
By failing to conclude her history in any detail, the poem successfully resists
the intrusion of the reader and so leaves its textual paradise unspoilt. The
"never more," "no more" colonial consequences that inform of Anacaona's
demise are absorbed into the lyric, so that their sense is almost lost in the
defiant exclamation of the refrain. Washington Irving's Life of Columbus (1828)
provided a genuine textual source for "Anacaona" (Ricks, 1:308-309). Even so,
at this early stage in his career Tennyson was unwilling to publish a poem so
far removed from his own experience. Edward FitzGerald reports Tennyson
as having said that the poem would be "confuted by some Midshipman who
had been in Hayti latitudes and knew better about Tropical Vegetable and
Animal" (in Ricks, 1:308). In confessing his own ignorance of the flora and
fauna he names, Tennyson admits them to be nonsensical, but- although
we can detect a hint of scorn for the predicted pedantry of "some Midship-
man"- he remains too aware of their extra-textual, sensible existence to assert
their nonsense as a value in itself.
"Timbuctoo" again addresses the subject of an unknown land on the
brink of discovery:
the time is well-nigh come

When I must render up this glorious home
To keen Discovery: soon yon brilliant towers
Shall darken with the waving of her wand;
Darken, and shrink and shiver into huts,
Black specks amid a waste of dreary sand. (11. 238-243)
As in "Anacaona," the poem forms its own defence against this discovery. By
predicting the time when he must render up his home, the Spirit of Fable
ensures that such a time will not arrive as long as he speaks. Fable departs and
the poem ends on the cusp of Timbuctoo's discovery: "and the Moon/ Had
fallen from the night, and all was dark!" (11. 247-248). However, the darkness
that the spirit predicts will usher in discovery has the opposite effect for read-
ers of the poem. It closes Timbuctoo from the reader's further ken, shutting
it up within the appealingly nonsensical name that makes up its title.
That name furthermore made up the poem's occasion for being. The
title "Timbuctoo" was announced at Cambridge for the Chancellor's Gold

Medal in December 1828. Tennyson thereupon constructed his Timbuctoo out
of the landscape descriptions in an earlier poem, "Armageddon," speaking of
his composition as "the turning of an old poem on Armageddon into Timbuctoo
by a little alteration of the beginning and the end,"19 In turning one poem
into another, he also turned one place into another. Armageddon, while it
may name an existing site of ancient Israel, figures for Tennyson as the name
of the site of the battle at the end of the world; it is thus a place that has not
yet come into being and so is always already a no-place. By turning Armaged-
don into Timbuctoo, Tennyson confers this geographical impossibility- and
imaginative immunity- on a city in Africa, denying it its meaning.20 Tennyson's
mistaken reference to Eldorado in line 24 of "Timbuctoo" provides another
example of the carelessness about factual accuracy that manifests itself again
in his poem to Lear. Tennyson did research the history and geography of
Timbuctoo, but he is less concerned with the information gathered from his
background reading than with the fact of reading itself. Like Shakespeare's
moated grange, the poem's epigraph, attributed to Chapman, indicates that
Tennyson's Timbuctoo is a textual place, a locus classicus suggested by words
rather than images. The source of the epigraph having never been found, in
this case the reader is spared the task of removing from these few words the
meaning of their original literary context.
In the later part of his career Tennyson wrote a second poem inspired
by the experience of reading travel literature. "To Ulysses" is his response to
Ulysses, or Scenes and Studies in Many Lands (1887) by William Gifford Palgrave.
As with Journals of a Landscape Painter, Tennyson was presented with a copy of
Palgrave's book, and, as with "To E.L.," we can read his poem as participat-
ing in a generous gift exchange. "To Ulysses" is a more assured rendition of
"To E.L." Tennyson changed the title of the earlier poem into a tribute to
the traveller and his travels rather than to the text that was Tennyson's real
concern;21 but he dedicates this later poem directly to Palgrave's book. The
poem goes on to address Palgrave as "Ulysses," absorbing the traveller into
his writing and limiting his identity to the literary. Since Tennyson must also
have had his earlier "Ulysses" in mind, the title of this second Ulysses poem
also speaks back to his own poetry. Not only is Palgrave enclosed within a
textual world, but that world is further enclosed, through self-reference, within
Tennyson's own body of work.
Whereas "To E.L." stretches two sentences over six stanzas, "To Ulysses"
divides a single sentence into eleven of its twelve stanzas, achieving the same
formal end with greater accomplishment. The enclosed stanzas break up the
poem's sense and create an alternative series of textual senses, their indepen-
dence from each other made more visible by the roman numeral before each.
The poem does not so much as feign to describe the poet being transported
ANNA BARTON/ 325
to distant lands by the pencil and pen of the travel writer. Instead it describes
the poet's not being transported and easily accommodates the names of
unknown locations to a staunchly un-traveled poetic. The first three stanzas
emphasize the distance between the two men and their occupation of very
different spaces. They resemble the central stanzas of "To E.L" in shuttling
between traveller and poet, but on this occasion the tension created by two
different but interdependent sorts of work is replaced by the easier exchange
of two men whose work is comfortably separated by distance and time:
I
Ulysses, much-experienced man,
Whose eyes have known this globe of ours,
Her tribes of men, and trees, and flowers,
From Corrientes to Japan,
II
To you that bask below the Line,
I soaking here in winter wet-
The century's three strong eights have met
To drag me down to seventy-nine
III
In summer if I reach my day-
To you, yet young, who breathe the balm
Of summer-winters by the palm
And orange grove of Paraguay. (11. 1-12)
By establishing Ulysses as a man of experience, Tennyson implicitly denies

himself that identity and establishes his own work in opposition to it. Palgrave's
travel writing does not inspire Tennyson imaginatively to occupy a foreign
location; rather it moves him into a newly domestic space that is his own. In
one (non)sense, then, Tennyson is Mariana, although more confident and
happy than she in his housekeeping. Lines 6-9, which are presented as an aside,
a capitulation to that very British impulse to complain about the weather,
become the subject of the rest of the poem. In lines 10-12, Tennyson returns
briefly to the original subject of his address, but it is now this that has become
the aside: consideration of the "summer-winters" of Paraguay originates with
his contemplation of the approaching English summer. Whereas Tennyson
devoted nearly half of "To E.L. " to a review of Lear's journals, here he is much
more exclusively, and candidly, concerned with his own surroundings.
The next four stanzas are devoted to the landscape of his little experi-
ence. The forest-scape that he describes does not sweep over great expanses of
land; it is seen on a vertical rather than a horizontal plane. The lines do not
describe a man travelling forward, but a man standing still and looking up:
IV
I tolerant of the colder time,
Who love the winter woods, to trace
On paler heavens the branching grace
Of leafless elm, or naked lime. (11. 1346)
The second and third lines achieve this alteration beautifully. By inserting
a comma after "woods" Tennyson transforms his loved activity from tracing
the winter woods (i.e. tracking or travelling through them) to tracing with his
eye the branches of the trees against the sky. Inasmuch as tracing branches
on a pale sky is reminiscent of reading lines on a white page, the experience
seems as textual as it is natural. The wood is a wood of words as much as it
is a wood of trees, and the established English poet delights now in the com-
mon names of native trees much as he played long ago with the unfamiliar
flora of Haiti. The difference is that now the "elm," "lime," "cedar," "ilex,"
and "yucca" are housed within his own garden, which by extension may stand
for the Chaucerian, Spenserian, Shakespearean garden that is England. More
than that, these names belong to him: "my cedar green" (1. 17), "my giant ilex"
(1.18), "my yucca" (1.21).
An anecdote in stanza seven further accommodates those foreign names
that his earlier poems constantly reach out towards:
VII
Or watch the waving pine which here
The warrior of Caprera set,
A name that earth will not forget
Till earth has rolled her latest year. (11. 25-28)
The warrior of Caprera is Garibaldi, who visited Farringford in 1864 and

planted a tree in the grounds. The stanza is expressly concerned with names,
but omits the warrior's own name in favor of the name of his home, so that
it is this place name that is effectively transplanted and memorialized in
Tennyson's garden. Perhaps the name Garibaldi was too powerful to be reduced
to a textual fragment and was therefore replaced by a name that could more
easily be emptied of experience. It also holds echoes of Lear's limericks: "the
warrior of Caprera" could easily join the "Young Lady of Corsica" in Lear's
cast of nonsense protagonists. The admission of this first foreign name into
the garden is followed by a collection of other names of plants and places,
not present in Tennyson's garden, but easily accommodated by the rhyme
and meter of the poem: the poet's experience of garden as metaphorical text
in stanzas 4-7 becomes an experience of text alone. His poem is able to hold
what his garden cannot. Starting with the names of foreign trees- "Your cane,
your palm, tree-fern, bamboo" (1. 36)- he goes on to list a wealth of names so
ANNA BARTON/ 327
obscure that they are unlikely to hold any meaning for the reader:
XI
Phra-Chai, the Shadow of the Best,
Phra-bat the step; your Pontic coast;
Crag-cloister, Anatolian Ghost;
Hong-Kong, Karnac, and all the rest. (11. 4144)
The brief glosses given for "Phra-Chai" and "Phra-bat" are so unsatisfactory
as to compound the meaninglessness of each word, while at the same time
fitting each into the meter of the line.22
In the final stanza Tennyson wholeheartedly acknowledges the value
that Palgrave's book possesses as his significant textual other. No longer led
as by Lear to feel "that I was there," he now confines his travels to the page,
"Through which I followed line by line." He arrives at an appreciation, not
of a foreign land, but of this one book: "and came, my friend, / To prize your
various book" (11. 4647)- a gift for which the aptest gesture of gratitude is this
poem itself: the poet will "send / A gift of slenderer value, mine" (11. 4748).
Tennyson delegates the activity of travel to his poetry. While he remains at
home in Freshwater, his poem will literally travel to his friend, secure enough
in the space it commands to retain its domesticity, despite being far from
home. It hardly matters that Tennyson's security was, as a matter of fact,
false, Palgrave having died at Monte Video on September 30, 1888, before
ever reading Tennyson's poem. Its actual recipient, the English reader, was
the intended recipient all along.
"To Ulysses" was published in 1889. Published alongside it was a
poem (for music) entitled "Far-Far-Away," a phrase that Tennyson recalled
as having held, since his childhood "a strange charm for me" (Ricks, 3:197).
The poem is concerned with the limits of the known and the unknown: a
lifelong Tennysonian theme whose epistemological borders were marauded by
his shadow poetics of nonsense. In the first stanza, speaking of his boyhood
in the third person, Tennyson recalls being lured through the fields by the
sight of the horizon, "where earth's green stole into heaven's own hue" (1. 2).
The second stanza juxtaposes this site with the sound of church bells: "the
mellow lin-lan-lone of evening bells" (1. 5), an inarticulate sound that is at
once familiar and meaningless.23 The third stanza again invites comparison
between these two experiences and the three words of the poem's title. In the
same way that the peal of the bells is teased almost into sense by its familiar-
ity, we might understand that "far-far-away" is charmed almost out of sense
by the de-familiarizing act of repetition, so that both sounds occupy the same
alluringly withdrawn horizon.
The poem asks why these words held such charm for the young Tenny-
son- "What charm in words, a charm no words could give?" (1. 16)- but it has
already answered its own question. The childhood phrase forms the words of
the lyric refrain, making the impossibly distant location of "Far-far-away " into
a place of recognition and return. Tennyson deprives the words of their literal,
referential meaning, replacing it with a force of textual embodiment that, for
the reader as for himself, is more powerful. The way an elderly Tennyson,
recovering from serious illness, looks back in this poem to a childhood self
looking forward to "some fair dawn beyond the doors of death" (1. 11) shows
us both a child's instinct for poetry and a poet's instinct for nonsense as the
stuff of imaginative life. The impossible location that it names, like Mariana's
grange, like Anacaona, Timbuctoo, Corrientes, Akrokeraunia, is both attained
and kept at bay by Tennyson's words that make sense in refusing it.
Notes
1 John Stuart Mill, "The Two Kinds of Poetry," Monthly Repository (October 1833): 60-70;
repr. in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. John M. Robson and Jack Stillinger
(Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1981), 1:362-363.
2 John Stuart Mill, "What is Poetry?," Monthly Repository (January 1833); repr. in The
Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, 1:344.
3 John Stuart Mill, Review of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical and Poems, London Review 1 (July
1835): 402-424; repr. in Tennyson: The Critical Heritage, ed. John D. Jump (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), p. 86.
4 Herbert F. Tucker recognizes Tennyson as a pun-maker, generating his version of
Shakespeare's heroine from the sound of her name: "He plucked Mariana and her
grange from the Duke's declarative sentence, isolated them in a grammatical fragment,
condensed Shakespeare's phrasing, and substituted 'in' for 'at.' This revision immures
Mariana yet further in a murmur of m's and n's that, seeming to proceed from her
own name, implies a theme less Shakespearean than Romantic: the tyranny of Mariana
over herself (Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press,
1988], p. 28). Matthew Rowlinson describes the name as a sort of contextual pun, a
play on literary association rather than on sound: "Mariana's name, which seems to
give an authorizing context for the poem's refrain, is itself a quotation- or misquota-
tion-out of context" (Tennyson's Fixations: Psychoanalysis and the Topics of the Early Poetry
[Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1994], p. 100). Whereas both Rowlinson and
Tucker come close to acknowledging the nonsense of the poem's epigraph, Christopher
Ricks argues that "a reader must make some decision about the known outcome in
Shakespeare" and suggests that the epigraph's allusion to the ending of Measure for
Measure is "profoundly equivocal- optimistic and a cause for hope, in that Mariana
is not to pine forever (they will come to her moated grange); pessimistic, in that the
tragicomic world of Measure for Measure is patently not the real vulnerable world,
whereas the world of 'Mariana' tragically may be" (Tennyson [London: Macmillan,
1989], p. 46).
5 I refer here to Alice's conversation with the Mad Hatter and the March Hare: "'Then
you should say what you mean,' the March Hare went on. 'I do,' Alice hastily replied;
'at least- at least I mean what I say- that's the same thing, you know.' 'Not the same
thing a bit!' said the Hatter. 'Why, you might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is
the same thing as "I eat what I see"!'" (Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
ANNA BARTON/ 329
in The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988], p. 69). For
a discussion of the philosophical implications of this conversation see Jean-Jacques
Lecercle, The Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature (Lon-
don: Routledge, 1994), pp. 119-122.
6 Roderick McGillis, "Nonsense," in A Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Richard Cronin,
Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 156.
7 Hugh Haughton, "Introduction," The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry (London: Chatto
and Windus, 1988), pp. 6-7.
8 G. K. Chesterton, "A Defence of Nonsense," The Defendant (London: Dent, 1940), p.
66.
9 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, in The Complete
Works of Lewis Carroll (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), pp. 143-148.
10 Edward Lear to Emily Tennyson, October 5, 1852, Edward Lear: Selected Letters, ed.
Vivien Noakes (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), p. 117.
11 Ruth Pitman, Edward Lear's Tennyson (Manchester: Carcanet, 1988), p. 21.
12 The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear, ed. Holbrook Jackson (London: Faber and Faber,
1947), p. 191.
13 Critics have argued that the limerick's brief site of nonsense makes room for the play
of Lear's personal subconscious or of the Victorian social and cultural subconscious
more generally. McGillis and Thomas Dilworth both identify latent expressions of
sexual and imperial anxiety in the often violent actions of "they" against the individual,
foreign other in many of the limericks (Roderick McGillis, "Nonsense," pp. 160-161;
Dilworth, "Society and the Self in the Limericks of Lear," RES 45, no. 177 [1994]:
42-62). Thomas Byrom, on the other hand, suggests that Lear's repetitive sequence
of limericks reaches towards a kind of transcendentalism (Nonsense and Wonder: The
Poems and Cartoons of Edward Lear [New York: Dutton, 1977]).
14 Edward Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania, &c. (London, 1851), p. 8. Lear
is later described in a review in Bentley's as "an artist, an observer and a man of sense"
("Recent Travellers," unsigned, Bentley's Miscellany 30 [1851]: 101).
15 Edward Lear to Chichester Fortescue, 1873, Later Letters of Edward Lear, ed. Lady
Strachey (London: T. Fisher and Unwin, 1911), p. 161.
16 Tennyson, "To E.L., on His Travels in Greece," 11. 1-8, in The Poems of Tennyson, ed.
Christopher Ricks, 3 vols. (Berkeley: Univ. of California, Press, 1987). All further
quotations from Tennyson's poetry are from this edition.
17 The question of Moore's influence on Tennyson was a vexed one for the poet. When
editing the Memoir Hallam erased the following remark from Locke: "I think if, while
reading the Bugle Song you listen attentively, you will detect a very faint echo which
will convince you that Tennyson also admired Moore's very pretty poem called Echo"
(Philip L. Elliott, The Making of the Memoir, [Greenville, South Carolina: Furman
University, 1978], p.28; cited by Ricks [2:230] in his notes to The Princess).
18 In a letter to Emily, Lear provides factual information about Athos: "Do you know
the history of Athos- the ancient Acte?- a long mountain narrow peninsular ridge
standing up in the sea- joined at one end to the main land by a very narrow isthmus
wh: once Xerxes chopped through, & its southern end rising into a pyramid 6700 feet
high, strictly the Mount Athos of geography. This peak alone is bare- all the rest of the
ridge is a dense world of Ilex, beech, oak <Sl pine" (Edward Lear to Emily Tennyson,
330/ VICTORIAN POETRY
October 9, 1856, Selected Letters of Edward Lear, p. 139).

19 Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir (London, 1897), 2:355.
20 The name "Timbuctoo" is now its own defence. Used since the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury as the general name for an impossibly faraway place, it has become the nonsense
location that Tennyson created in 1828.
21 The manuscripts contain a draft of the poem to Lear, which has the title, "To - , on
his book about Greece," The Tennyson Archive, ed. Christopher Ricks and Aidan Day,
31 vols. (New York: Garland, 19874993), 3:264.
22 Tennyson also provides short explanatory notes to these and the other names in the
stanza. Explanation is located outside of the poem itself and even then they are either
quotations from, or references to, Palgrave's text.
23 The nonsense latent in "lin- Ian- lone" may be latent in all onomatopoeia, which always
potentially returns us to the scene of linguistic coinage as a liminal zone between reality
and representation. This particular instance might be compared, anachronistically,
with Spike Milligan's famous nonsense poem, "On the Ning Nang Nong."

Tennyson's Nonsense As A Poet

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Delirious Bulldogs and Nasty Crockery: Tennyson as Nonsense Poet

Author(s): Anna Barton

When, . . . after reading or hearing one or two passages [of writing], we

Mill's remark about how an ill-equipped critic is likely to respond to poetry is

The subject is Mariana, the Mariana of Measure for Measure, living

ourselves at the right point of view, we must drop the

Mill places Shakespeare's words at the generative hear

Far from being a very special case of poetry, nonsense represents

Haughton's suspicions, I argue, take us right to the heart of the Tennysonian

There was a young lady of Corsica,

notions conjured up by the appealing rhythms of foreign place names. In the

Illyrian woodlands, echoing falls Delirious Bulldogs;-echoing, calls

himself to be something of a nonsense poet. The opportunity for Lear's word

I read and felt that I was there:

And trust me while I turned the page,

For me the torrent ever poured

A glimmering shoulder under gloom

Although these lines do make sense as a description of the classical picturesque,

From him that on the mountain lea

reaches of a wide horizon, they are rendered indistinguishable by virtue of

All day long with laughing eyes,

But never more upon the shore

the time is well-nigh come

title "Timbuctoo" was announced at Cambridge for the Chancellor's Gold

By establishing Ulysses as a man of experience, Tennyson implicitly denies

The warrior of Caprera is Garibaldi, who visited Farringford in 1864 and

October 9, 1856, Selected Letters of Edward Lear, p. 139).

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