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Workshopping Tennyson
This "workshopping" of Tennyson is the first of a new series where the Poetry Revolt will look at flawed classics and how to unmar them.
Here is the revised version of Blow, Bugle, Blow:
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Blow, Bugle Blow, Revised
The splendour falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story:
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,
The wilder echoes farther going!
O sweet and far from cliff and scar
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, Bugle Blow - Original text as Tennyson wrote it
Please click on link: the original text will open in a separate window:
http://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/Classic%20Poems/Tennyson/blow,_bugle,_blow.htm
I have always thought that this poem had some of Tennyson's most beautiful lines with the wonderful "long light shakes" and the wild cataract that "leaps." These set up the idea of unrestrained "wild" movement that bridges distances, whether lakes or cliffs or the normally unbridgeable divide between ordinary life and Elfland. Distances, and how nature and the imagination can bridge them, is at the core of the poem.
Tennyson clutters up these themes and intoxicating images with the klunky refrain, made worse by its tedious repetitions of "Blow, bugle, blow" and "answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying." The refrain and the final stanza weigh the poem down with sentimental themes of fading and dying and the clichéd touristy "purple glens". The pall of VIctorian sentiment clashes with the leaping away from restraints vividly enacted by the wild cataracts and the distant horns of Elfland.
When we remove the refrain and the final stanza (including the sickly sweet "Our echoes roll from soul to soul,/And grow for ever and for ever") we have Tennyson's bewitching poem about the liberating power of the imagination,--how the glories of nature and the power of myth enable us to "hear" voices from a wilder, stranger realm.
The title needs to be changed to better fit the new version, but I have maintained the old title for clarity's sake.
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