Читать книгу A House of Air - Hermione Lee - Страница 25

I think of Tennyson as one of the greatest of the English-rectory-bred wild creatures. In matters of theology, love, doubt, grief, and loss he is usually felt to have said what most people wanted to hear, but when he was in the grip of his daemon, as he surely was in ‘Break, Break, Break,’ or ‘Tears, Idle Tears,’ with its strange series of comparisons, or ‘In the Valley of Cauterez,’ or the last five verses of ‘To the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava,’ he is not definable and not resistible. He was a superb metrist, who scarcely needed to care for the opinions of Indolent Reviewers, but did care, and he was someone who could hear the authentic voice of the English language. By this I don’t mean onomatopoeia (in any case many of his subjects for this—immemorial elms, church bells, steam trains—have unfortunately almost disappeared), but the sound of the language talking to itself. Take his round ‘o’s, which can be heard as he pronounced them himself in his recorded reading of ‘The Ballad of Oriana’: ‘When the long dun wolds are ribbed with snow…’ When my grandfather, as Bishop of Lincoln, preached the centenary sermon at Somersby, he quoted ‘Who loves not knowledge?’ and was told afterwards ‘You should have said know-ledge. Lord Tennyson always pronounced it so.’ Every round ‘o’ had its weight and its considered position. ‘Row us out from Desenzano, to your Sirmione row!’—‘Naay, noä mander o’ use to be callin’ him Roä, Roä, Roä [Rover]/For the dog’s stoän deaf, and ’e’s blind, ’e can neither stan’ nor goä.’ That is the Spilsby variation, of course. At times Tennyson seems to me to be listening, rather as Pavarotti does, in apparent amazement simply to the beauty of the sound s that he is inexplicably able, as a great professional, to produce.

Times Literary Supplement, 1992