WRITE AN ESSAY ON THE MUSICAL QUALITY OF TENNYSON’S POETRY WITH
ILLUSTRATIVE REFERENCES. /ESTIMATE TENNYSON AS A LYRIC POET WITH REFERENCE TO
THE POEMS PRESCRIBED FOR YOUR STUDY.
Lyric is a spontaneous outflow of human emotion. In the original Greek
sense the word ‘lyric’ is associated with ‘lyre’, the musical instrument. In
its wider but equally legitimate sense it means a poem of personal emotion,
thoughts and sentiments, having a musical quality. Its power lies, says a
critic, less in playing over ideas than in playing with the logic of feeling in
the analysis of grief and hope of memory and vision.
Tennyson too like Coleridge is a poet “not so much of passion and
passionate thinking as of moods, subtle and luxurious and somber, moods in
which it is not always easy to discern the line that separates waking from dreaming.
The moods to which Tennyson has given expression are as varied as his meters,
and include a rare feeling for the beauty of English scenery, the
interpretation of classical legend.”
Tennyson is a great painter of landscape. The wealth as well as the
beauty of Tennyson’s lyrical compositions places him in the foremost rank of
noted lyricists.
A lover of simplicity and restraint he is. Therefore, most of his
poetic work is marked by a certain simplicity and scholarly self- restraint. He
does not like to paint the complex motives of human character or the wild
excesses of emotion. He is a master in the art of harmonizing the sense and the
sound. However, Tennyson’s lyrical quality is somewhat uneven. The slightest of
his pieces like The Splendour Falls are musical and attractive but on the
whole, his nature was too self- conscious and perhaps his life too regular and
prosperous to provide a background for the true lyrical intensity of emotion.
