“A
land where all things always seem'd the same!” – A study of setting
in the poetry of Tennyson.
Imagine Alice without her
Wonderland. Doesn’t really work, does
it? This text is inextricably bound up with its setting: the story’s meaning is reinforced or
crystallised by geographic location, and other examples are too numerous to
list. However, even though setting is
listed in AQA textbooks as a key ‘Aspect of Narrative’, it can be quite
difficult to find criticism examining how authors consciously utilise it to
bolster the meaning of their tales. Hopefully, more support material will
emerge as the specification matures. In
the meantime, though, here are some scribblings examining two poems by Alfred,
Lord Tennyson, taken from the AQA Anthology.
I hope that they are of some use to students and teachers alike.
‘Always Afternoon’
As an example, Alice’s Wonderland
has been argued to represent or symbolise many things: the mysterious world of
adult activity, or the shift from childhood innocence to teenage angst and
awareness. Any reader of the original
text could see how either of these two readings could be argued (or both, in
order to get that AO3 mark) and it
is purely in the representation of the story’s setting, its world, that this
symbolism occurs; be it the sinister and possibly even sexual imagery of
painting white roses red, or the obvious ‘growing-up’ metaphor of the beautiful,
yet unreachable, garden beyond the tiny locked door. Tennyson’s worlds tell similar stories. Like those of Carroll, they reinforce and
embody the themes and preoccupations of his tales, giving them a visual
representation that we, the readers, can enjoy.
‘The Lotos Eaters and Choric Song’ was written after a trip with his
friend Arthur Hallam (the one who died) to the Pyrenees in Northern Spain[1]. It is about Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s
‘Odyssey’, and his experiences on the shore of the Lotos Eaters. The lotos is
an “enchanted stem” that has the same hazy effect as opium or heroin, causing
the “pale and melancholy” inhabitants of the region to lose all sense of
ambition and desire, and in doing so, as the quotation shows, their health and
happiness. The land itself emphasises the focus of the narrative – the effects
of absolute lethargy and despair – in a series of linguistic manoeuvrings by
Tennyson. The air is “languid”,
“swoon[ing]” in the damp heat of a summer afternoon: an eternal afternoon,
where the moon flies “full-faced”. This
creates a bizarre yet effective opposition: it is neither day nor night in the
land of the Lotos Eaters, in just the same way as the eaters themselves are
neither dead, nor alive.
This ‘living death’ is amplified
by Tennyson’s clever depictions of the passing of time; a time that isn’t quite
the same as ours. It is hesitant and
shy, popping in and out of existence throughout the whole poem. A waterfall, “like a downward smoke”, seems
to “pause” in its fall, implying that time is not a constant here; this
reflects the uneven nature of consciousness in the land. On the other hand time does paradoxically give
the impression of moving onward. The
sailors, in their low chant, sing of an apple in “the middle of the wood” and
chart its growth and eventual fall.
Whether this apple is simply a rhetorical device in their argument or an
account of an actual apple in the land of the lotos is difficult to say, but
nevertheless it helps give us a sense of ages of time passing as the sailors
lie drugged and helpless.
‘Cool mosses deep’
It is very definitely a land of
plants. Throughout the poem Tennyson
makes reference to a host of flowers and herbs, from the sleeping poppies and
weeping flowers of stanza six, to the “beds of amaranth (a plant that symbolises
eternity) and moly (a magic herb found in Homer’s legends)” in stanza twelve. These plants, and their associations,
certainly add further weight to the main theme of sleep and “dreamlike ease” of
the poem, but could add something further.
Tennyson was writing at the time of a great acceleration of the
industrialisation of Britain . Railways were snaking over the whole of
England, and the long procession of hopeful country folk to the slums of the
cities was continuing as it had for the last fifty years. Tennyson’s beautiful, endless and slothful
land is one without the iron shackles of industry: it is a land where the idea
of being industrious is alien and the beauty and timelessness of pure nature is
allowed to survive, untouched by the “toil” of humanity. Tennyson could have been contemplating a
better world of the past, a bit like the way the Romanic poets (including Keats
and Wordsworth) longed for the idyllic world of the agricultural
mediaeval. Thus, we could argue that
‘setting’ in this poem is used to highlight contextual concerns (AO4).
However, to turn this argument on
its head, Tennyson’s description of this world becomes quite sinister at
times. The “yellow lotos-dust” that
blows around this “hollow” (meaningless?) land chokes and fills the landscape
with its own, perfectly natural pollutant; the land, though beautiful, is
ultimately a land of living-death, offering the lotos as a means of keeping
humanity docile and still. It is a
vengeful, controlling world that fits fascinatingly with modern contexts and
the environment, as well as issues concerning drug addiction, such as the
dangerous effects of the Opium poppy, from which heroin is derived. Tennyson was to face accusations of being
addicted to this for much of his life[2]. So,
like Alice’s Wonderland, Tennyson’s land of the lotos hides meanings above and
beyond the need to give a story a geographical location.
‘The island of Shalott’
Let’s move away from the
Lotos-land before we fall asleep, and travel to Shalott. Rather like Tennyson’s home of the
Lincolnshire Wolds, Camelot’s country is one of “long fields of barley and of
rye”, filled with willows, lilies and flowers: another idyllic mediaeval
world. It is this beautiful, unspoilt
world that the Lady inhabits. But no; ‘inhabit’
is the wrong word. The Lady of Shalott
is not of this land at all. She is
somehow beyond it, enclosed by “four grey walls and four grey towers” and
hidden from view. The only hint that she
exists at all, beyond our narrator’s omniscience, is the song that “echoes
cheerly” through the land. Furthermore, she
is forced to view the world through “a mirror clear”; she doesn’t see reality,
rather a manipulated and twisted version of it.
In fact, she is punished when she attempts to view the world and an
attractive man riding through it, and then eventually dies. The feminist
connotations are strong, but I’ll leave that here as you’ll discover more about
that in A2 English Literature. What is
very interesting for our purposes is her seeing “the water lily bloom” just
before the curse crashes down on her. Not
only are white lilies associated with death and funerals; one species of water
lily is known as the Nymphaea Lotus
and many other lilies have lotus-like properties. Now, admittedly these lotus plants are real
and do not share quite the same properties as Tennyson’s lotos, but the point
is there: once again we see a reference to the seductive and dangerous side of
nature. Did the lotos charm the Lady to
make an error just as it charmed the sailors of Odysseus? Perhaps, and as an
idea it is a good candidate for some AO3
marks.
‘In the stormy east-wind straining’
Finally, remember how Alice’s Wonderland
could be argued to be a symbol of loss of innocence? Shalott could hold the same meaning. The Lady dares to gaze down on Lancelot and
the curse falls on her as the mirror cracks “from side to side”. After
the curse takes hold and the Lady is aware of her impending death, the setting
also changes. With a touch of pathetic
fallacy the landscape reflects the mood change and goes from a colourful idyll
to a dark and sombre land. The “stormy
east wind” blows around the “pale yellow woods”, with rainfall adding further
tears to the occasion. The destruction
of her chaste innocence is a cause for mourning, as even the clouds join in the
grief. Whereas Carroll celebrated the
shift into knowing adulthood with his bizarre and ultimately beneficial landscape,
Tennyson seems to condemn it, using the setting as his judgement. Hopeful and glorious summer turns to
depressed and brooding autumn...all because a woman looked at a man. This is only one reading of the situation,
and as you know AO3 is all about accepting that there are different ways of
looking at these issues, so you should also consider the more ‘positive’ view
that the landscape is mourning the death of the Lady herself. But then, why is she robed in that most
symbolic of colours, white?
There isn’t space here to delve
any deeper into the mysteries of setting.
Perhaps the fairy-tale nature of both poems’ setting could be examined,
as could the use of the townscape at the end of ‘Shalott’. But these are for you to think about. Setting is a fascinating focus of study in
Literature; combined with a close textual analysis and a bit of contextual
knowledge, some really intriguing theories can be explored.
[1] The Poetry Foundation ‘Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809 - 1892), biography’ at
www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=81472, (accessed 18th
April 2010)
[2]
Platizky, R (2002) ‘"Like Dull Narcotics, Numbing Pain":
Speculations on Tennyson and Opium’ in ‘Victorian Poetry’ (Morgantown: West
Virginia University Press)
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