Alfred Lord Tennyson

[Sigrun Christianson]

[This is an excerpt someone sent to me - I thought it was too beautiful not to share. -Sig]

Deep in the night I woke: she, near me, held
A volume of the Poets of her land:
There to herself, all in low tones she read:


'Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:
The fire-fly wakens: waken thou with me.


Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.


Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me.


Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.


Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake:
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.'

[Scáthach]

i like Tennyson, thanks for sharing - there are only about 3 or 4 poets i really have time for (Shelley, Keats, Laurence Hope and Yeats)

[Frans_Jozef]

http://charon.sfsu.edu/TENNYSON/tennyson.html

We still look to the earlier masters for supreme excellence in particular directions: to Wordsworth for sublime philosophy, to Coleridge for ethereal magic, to Byron for passion, to Shelley for lyric intensity, to Keats for richness. Tennyson does not excel each of these in his own special field, but he is often nearer to the particular man in his particular mastery than anyone else can be said to be, and he has in addition his own special field of supremacy. What this is cannot be easily defined; it consists, perhaps, in the beauty of the atmosphere which Tennyson contrives to cast around his work, molding it in the blue mystery of twilight, in the opaline haze of sunset: this atmosphere, suffused over his poetry with inestimable skill and with a tact rarely at fault, produces an almost unfailing illusion or mirage of lovelines.

-- Edmond Gosse, "Tennyson," in the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica