I

ALFRED TENNYSON's “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After” was written and published in 1886, as Tennyson's long-time friend and rival William Gladstone was struggling with the first Home Rule Bill that was to split English liberalism in two. As his speech veers around Christ, Imperial Rome and Roman Catholicism, the poem's un-named speaker turns next to the ideals of the French Revolution. Thus he lands on democratic and Catholic Ireland:

The “bluster” of the earlier “Locksley Hall” (1842) has barely died down. The older speaker compresses a century of Irish unrest into a French-inspired “Celtic Demos,” from the atrocities of the rising of the United Irishmen in 1798 up to the Land League and Parnell. Bemoaning the loss of an ancien régime from which he has been disinherited by a progressive liberal age which promises only anarchy and degeneration, a sinking below “the passions of the primal clan,” the speaker is led by his own anarchic and passionate speech. In his excitement he reveals rather more than intended, and Tennyson employs a favored monologue technique, the seemingly passive propulsion of speech through the sonic not semantic association of words. “Celtic Demos rose a Demon”: Demos (from Greek demos, the people) runs into Demon (from Greek, daimon, deity), and the associations are picked up in the false etymology later, “Are we devils? Are we men?”

The effect is unsettling and not entirely accounted for by Tennyson's insistence that the poem was mere prosopopoeia: “The whole thing is a dramatic impersonation … Some of my thought may come into the poem but am I therefore the hero? There is not one touch of autobiography in it from beginning to end” (Poems 3: 149). The later “Locksley Hall” is not quite autobiography, but saying it is an impersonation does not entirely remove from it the views of its English author, and its specific address to the times in which it was written. Tennyson's disinherited aristocratic speaker turns with some disgust to the atrocities of those new Catholic democrats who had been granted representation in the Emancipation won by O'Connell over fifty years previously. The beast-burning Catholicism of more recent Irish political unrest is not the ascetic religion of Saint Francis, whose fraternity was with the animals. Freed by the fiction of monologue, Tennyson allows his speaker to add sectarian bite to the indictment of Irish Catholic degeneration, inhumanity, and impiety. Matthew Bevis has shown that Tennyson's image of the maiming and burning of animals can be traced to an earlier conversation recorded in the diary of the Irish poet William Allingham. In 1880, Tennyson was working on his version of the Irish immram, or medieval Christian journey poem, “The Voyage of Maeldune.” In an entry for August 29, Allingham recorded in his Diary a discussion with Tennyson about Ireland and the Empire, Catholic emancipation, the “glorious constitution,” Afghanistan and India. Ireland was then the subject of much outraged reporting over the violence of the Land League:

Tennyson's consistent ribbing of his Irish guest Allingham here runs the unFranciscan maiming of animals on into something else, the floating of the island of Ireland away from the Western coasts of Europe. Allingham's part in these conversations is to ask questions in ways which are always slightly more knowing than his host may grasp. The amateur antiquarian who innocently asks “Beneath the surface?” would have known of the more extravagant theories of the new Irish ethnography, and one in particular, that the indigenous people of Ireland may have come from the sunken island of Atlantis. So, Colin Graham has introduced Atlantis into his reading of this conversation, invoking a classic of Irish-American fiction, published two years later, Ignatius Donnelly's 1882 Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. In Graham's account, this text makes much fantastical use of earlier Victorian Irish ethnographical research to suggest that Ireland was colonized from the West, by the Atlanteans. Seeking points of origin or identity, an argument for an ethnicity separate from Britain or Europe is based on a call to the reconstruction of a past, whatever the empirical flaws of that reconstruction. But this is the same sort of argument that Tennyson's speaker has made, albeit on slightly safer documentary ground, calling on the Christian example of St Francis to set against that of the latter-day violent Catholic peasant. The present and the uncertain future, by contrast, exchange the imagined chivalry of the tribal or familial allegiances of what “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After” calls “the primal clan” for the modern atrocities which Allingham, for one, knew had French revolutionary associations of “terror,” and would soon be called “terrorism.”²

Where the older Tennyson allows his speaker to imagine a future of an eventual, French, anarchy into which democracy and the ever-extending franchise may fall, other readings might envisage a utopian future. Graham's gloss on Donnelly also looks to the future. For the Irish writer and reader, Tennyson's “a thousand miles away from England” might be the location of the imagined places to the Atlantic West of Ireland: Tir na nOg, Hy Brasil, or even New York. These places all share in filling the problems of origin in the national past with the fullness of a unified future. Graham says,

Graham pictures utopian nationalism as founded on extravagant fictions of origin and desired return. While these fictions may be composed in the conditions of emigration and loss, they also seek the inadequate compensation afforded by a flawed interpretation of the evidence suggested by the acts of retrieval in history, antiquarianism, archaeology, or even geology. The argument asks that the desire for unified or emancipated futures be exposed as based in fictions of the past. Graham thus reverses a critique of imperial claims for an authority based in a settled national agreement about a shared past. He turns it around into a critique of a similar nationalist appeal to a utopian future. So, both past and future are sites of contention, at the level of interpretation as much as fact.

This may be a familiar dilemma in contemporary Irish Studies, caught between the revisionist and the virtual. Nineteenth-century English poems on Irish material, however, did not necessarily seek to expose fictions in the past, but rather to maintain an ambivalence, caught between sounding the echoes of the past through the losses of the present and the desire to forget it altogether. Facing change, the future of the union of the countries within which these poems were written depended on the desire either to forgive or forget. For the poets discussed in this paper, whether English – Tennyson, William Wordsworth, or Matthew Arnold – or Irish – Allingham, Mary Tighe, Thomas Moore, Aubrey de Vere, D. F. McCarthy, T. D. Sullivan, or W. B. Yeats – the complications arise when that country is not just Ireland, but also the state of which it formed a part, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. That United Kingdom was one troubled by its failure fully to integrate with Ireland. It is one thing to expose national or imperial fictions in the past. It is another to call for their oblivion. But through exploring the Irish matter of poems of travel, voyaging, and discovery in the contexts of the integration of the United Kingdom, these poets play between forgetting and hearing the seemingly endless echo of the lost languages, mythologies and beliefs of a shared Celtic and pre-Reformation past.

Sounding such echoes in the English Victorian poem, the achievement is never quite what might be imagined in the circumstances, the colonist's quelling of the echoes of an insurrectionary history through the rewriting of the colonized's culture. The very forms of the English poem begin to sound the echoes of the past again, finding new form for the English poet in the Irish poem, just as the Irish poem finds new form in the English language. In conventional accounts this is now known as a process of hybridity, the result of which will be a merging of different cultural registers, languages or genres into a unity of form. In another account, though, it resulted in Victorian poems which sound ambiguity within themselves, the persistence of their various sources. This is not quite hybridity, just as it is not quite translation. These poems never quite achieved those outcomes, and they may thus tell us much about the unraveling of union, just as their forms sought to weave it together.

II

IN SEPTEMBER 1849, Tennyson concluded a series of journeys round the fringes of the United Kingdom which had taken in Cornwall and Ireland, by visiting the Highlands of Scotland. Returning, he visited Kirk Alloway and the Burns monument. There, he told Edward Fitzgerald, he sat down “by the banks of Doon” and “not thinking of Burns (but of the lapsing of the Ages) … all of a sudden I gave way to a passion of tears.” (Hallam Tennyson, 1911: 143) In more guarded mood, Tennyson wrote to his friend the Irish poet Aubrey de Vere that, “I made a pilgrimage thither out of love for the great peasant; they were gathering in the wheat and the spirit of the man mingled or seemed to mingle with all I saw.” (Hallam Tennyson, 1899: 234). This is a complex emotional event, but also a giving in to a very literary sort of nostalgia. It is redolent of the circumstances of the composition and the sentiments of “Tears, idle tears,” in which the tears had come when thinking of “the lapsing of the Ages.” That poem of the “passion of the past” (Tennyson, Poems 2: 232) was written on the Welsh border at Tintern Abbey, and is like a lyric continuation of Wordsworth's blank verse ode on the passing of time.

Tennyson's literary tourism by the banks of Doon is reminiscent too of Wordsworth's Scottish touring poems, particularly those on the grave of Burns,³

or on the river Yarrow, a place which was as rich in literary or folkloric association as it was famed for its natural beauty. The poems carry echoes of the ballad inheritance of the river, the most famous being John Logan's “The Braes of Yarrow.” These are echoes of the sentiment of place. Throughout their twenty-eight year process of composition, they tell of the future (the unconsummated anticipation of “Yarrow Unvisited,” 1803), the present (initial disappointment turns to knowledge and appreciation in “Yarrow Visited,” 1814) and the passing of time and change in “Yarrow Revisited” (written 1831 and published in 1835). For both Tennyson and Wordsworth, there is a mixture of at-homeness and foreignness beside these Scottish rivers, of recognizable feelings in locations within their own state which are nevertheless available to them only through literary tourism. The sentiment of place – or “localized Romance,” as “Yarrow Revisited” puts it – should not be an object of suspicion or bad faith. More than just “sport/For fanciful dejections” (89–92), it provides a means of registering change, both across a personal history and across the historical and geographical differences of the United Kingdom. The third Yarrow poem is a tribute to the hospitality of his host, Walter Scott, and as such can claim friendship and kindred between Scottish and English. To do so, however, Wordsworth must acknowledge “our changeful Life” (95). The “Celtic” matter of Wordsworth and Tennyson's tourism is rustic and spiritual and acquaints both of them with the loss of poems, poets, and past time. It tells of the “lapsing of the Ages” through a modernizing United Kingdom which is leaving behind the customs and traditions that the conservatism of both poets cherished.

Both Wordsworth and Tennyson record their experience in border or liminal places, and these do tend to have a knack of upsetting the center. Among other readers of Celticism, Joep Leersen has placed a Celtic epic foremost in the literary history of the liminal, James Macpherson's Ossian. In prose as well as poetry, what Leerssen terms “Ossianic liminality” (1–26) is written in such transitional places, not only places through which the traveller passes, but also places where an apocalypse may occur. As in the eventual defeat of King Arthur by the Cornish sea in the Great Battle of the West in ‘The Passing of Arthur’ (revised for Idylls of the King in 1869), such epics remember Ilion rather than Ithaca, battle and eventual defeat rather than quest and homecoming.⁴

From the mid- to late-nineteenth century, Celtic revival writers recolonized, as it were, these liminal locations. In his classic poem, William Allingham sited “The Fairies” (1850) on rocky shores and in lake reeds, and Allingham's follower, W. B. Yeats, placed his fairies there too, in “The Stolen Child” (1886). The places in which the self-consciously Celtic imagination can find remnants of beliefs which are both unsettling and liberating, and imaginatively connected with liminal space, are also places where the imperial imagination – that of the English Victorian poet like Tennyson – can find the forgotten and obscure doing battle with the history and geography of place and culture. The Victorian poetry of these places can mark long geological time as well as the more temporally-compacted specifics of a passing language and culture. For all Tennyson's deliberate medievalism, these are places of change, modernity even, a challenge to the late-Victorian writer of empire, and the United Kingdom.

Three years before Tennyson had placed the unraveling of the Arthurian epoch at the Great Battle of the West, Matthew Arnold had begun his lectures on the Study of Celtic Literature at a similarly western fringe. Arnold's lectures quite self-consciously ape and demur from some of the conclusions of Ernest Renan's 1854 essay, “La poésie des races celtique.” Renan had begun his essay traveling through victorious Normandy to his defeated native Brittany. He then seems to pass through time, backwards to a pre-Norman and primal, geologically stubborn landscape, where “A cold wind arises full of vague sadness, and carries the soul to other thoughts” and “a sea that is almost always sombre girdles the horizon with eternal moaning” (Renan 1). Of course, then, 1854, Brittany was a mere province, which, along with Galicia, held the last Celts of mainland Europe.

By contrast, Arnold's lectures begin on his holidays. He is in North Wales, in Llandudno, looking North to the austere and arid English coast around Liverpool (from whence the modern-day Saxon invaders, the city-dwelling tourists, come). He then looks West to the sublime mountain- and sea-scape of Snowdonia and Anglesea. Arnold is caught between the bourgeois – Victorian holiday-makers – and the sublime – the seemingly uncontainable memories of the place, history, and culture of a land brought to submission by England's first fully successful war of conquest. Consequently he strolls up and down Llandudno's liminal Victorian promenade, and hears a recognizable language through the Welsh which is spoken by the voices which surround him. It is that of a French nursery-maid. For Arnold she is incontrovertibly “Gaulish,” unknowingly a representative of the Celts who thrived – the French – in the midst of those who are facing extinction – the Welsh. The nursery-maid is partly a riposte to Renan and France, either to separatist republicanism or to the revival of a French Empire under a new Napoleon. But it also leads to a conception of the modernity of a Europe which promises to swallow up the languages of those at its Celtic fringe:

Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Gaelic, Irish: Arnold hears only echoes of speech, and where it has distinction it is only as “the badge of the beaten race.” He echoes, too, Shylock, who had expressed deracinated and persecuted identity thus: “suffrance is the badge of all our tribe” (The Merchant of Venice I.iii.107). Next, Arnold tells us that he attended that year's Llandudno Eisteddfod, which had only been revived as recently as 1860. It is, needless to say, a damp affair, dominated by the Methodism which is as much at odds with Arnold's conception of culture as the philistinism of the Liverpudlian middle classes. For Arnold, Celtic revivals cannot take place alone, and his lectures go on to posit their famous, some might say notorious, conception of the culture of the United Kingdom thriving only when the Celt and Saxon marry, as it were, their respective feminine and masculine racial virtues.⁵

In its best light, Arnold's is an argument about the need to complete the cultural union of the modern Victorian state, the yet-to-be-settled Union of England and those Celtic nations which fringe it. It sees the loss of distinct cultures as inevitable, and views the triumph of Victoria's newly assimilated, fused, United Kingdom. Here, the Celtic past can rest securely as a subject of dispassionate aesthetic or academic study in a new British culture powerful and enlightened enough to enjoy the many cultural treasures of its past. Alfred Tennyson was Poet Laureate of this state, but was long opposed to what he saw as Arnold's Olympian idealism.⁶

Tennyson had a much more pessimistic view of culture than Arnold, as well as a longer experience of the destabilizing effects of such forgotten peoples and their demands that they be heard across the Union. Always on the conservative, anti-Gladstonian wing of the Liberal party which ennobled him in 1883, Tennyson feared that the clinging of a defeated Celtic culture to past practice (like the Irish language, “the property of the vanquished”) threatened catastrophe for the United Kingdom and the Empire. And that threat of catastrophe came from Tennyson's own experience of Ireland.

In 1848, Tennyson stayed with Aubrey de Vere at his home at Curragh Chase, outside Limerick. Ireland was in the midst of Famine, and Tennyson's visit was a mixture of tourism to recuperate after depression, and sublimated response to the horrors around him. Visiting Killarney, the echoes over the Lakes were demonstrated by the sounding of a bugle and the poet subsequently composed the lyric beginning “The splendour falls on castle walls,” also known as “The Bugle Song.” The poem was composed in the library of de Vere's house and later introduced into the 1850 edition of The Princess. The experience of listening to the echoes over the Lakes had for at least fifty years been a subject for Irish lyric, in poems by Mary Tighe and Thomas Moore. Tighe wrote three sonnets on the subject, and her “Written at Killarney” (published in 1811, but dated in the first year of the century, “July, 29 1800”), for instance, finds the experience of pausing to listen to echo matched by that of the reflection of moonlight in water:

The sonic contrast of echo and silence mingles with the contrasts of moonlight and shadow, establishing a pulsing image of the synaesthetic workings of perception and memory. In the most daring line in the poem, Tighe works this up to such sibilant excess that the reading voice needs to take care in order to avoid the vocal slur which might match an indistinctness in the scene: “the dark woods night's deepest shades embrown.” If Tennyson's version of this experience faces a similar indistinctness, it also suggests extinction. His is a lyric of history and the fading of memory, suited to a land where in 1848, the people may have appeared to be fading into immortality before his eyes and ears: “Our echoes roll from soul to soul,/And grow for ever and for ever.”

Tennyson's “Bugle Song” is a poem about immortality: it views the eternity of both the soul and memory. Yet, to borrow from Wordsworth, its “localised Romance” is of a place subliminally aware of its immediate context (Famine) and its geology, history and politics (“The splendour falls on castle walls/And snowy summits old in story,” my emphasis). As a poem about echoes, these echoes are sounded in the present, invoke the past, but also look into the future. One of Tennyson's so-called “English Idyls” of 1842, “The Golden Year,” is a poem which frames a song of progress within a walking tour in Wales. It ends with the sound of the blasting of a slate-quarry through the Llanberis Pass, as the reverberations of “the great echo flap/And buffet round the hills from bluff to bluff.” Roger Ebbatson has said that this echo matches “a loss of voice by the local workforce” which is “answered by the literally unreadable counterblast from the slate quarry, rendered with supreme rhythmic, assonantal and alliterative virtuosity.” (Ebbatson: 24) As in “The Bugle Song,” Tennyson holds the ending in balance, since “the great echO” can be both Arnold's faint remaining sounds of the English tourist's Welsh kindred, and an echo which sounds into an enlightened future.

Yet the predominant echo through “The Bugle Song” is of the past, of specific Irish antecedents. While echoing Tighe, the most pointed allusion is to three of Moore's Irish Melodies, “At the Mid Hour of Night” (1813), “EchO” (1821) and, “’;Twas one of those dreams” (1824). The latter, coming at a rather late and thus fairly optimistic phase of the composition of the Melodies, is about the poet hearing his own work (or at least “The wild notes …/He had taught to sing Erin's dark bondage and woes,” 5–6) played by the bugle over the Eagle's Nest. Like many of the Melodies, it is a lyric about history and time, but also about time passing into the future of a culturally recovered land. Moore imagines the immortality of literary fame, as the national poet of Ireland:

Moore was writing at the height of a fully consolidated fame, but the conceit – in both senses of the word – in the poem is typical of him. It turns the expected into the novel: the echo is not just of the past, but an anticipation of the future. The lyric plays with end-rhyme and internal rhyme around its subject, the “fame” of the “name” of the poet. “Name … proclaim … Fame … name,” the echoes cluster in close semantic as well as sonic association around the poet's afterlife. Moore also borrows effects of internal rhyme from Irish language prosody to represent the persistence of his subject, the re-created Irish lyric. And in the four line wait for the final internal rhyme, the repetition of the word “name,” the delay suggests the faintness of the echo of the immortal poet himself. Echo thus becomes a figure for the consolations of belief, both of the Irish poet's fame and of Irish music's rescued immortality.

Tennyson's “Bugle Song,” however, echoes other echoes of the past. At Tennyson's request, Francis Turner Palgrave included Moore's “EchO” and “At the mid hour of night” in the first edition of his Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrics in the English Language (1861). That famous anthology's full title does more than gesture in the direction of a language spoken by more than just the English. Christopher Ricks has told us that the Golden Treasury was inspired by William Allingham's 1860 anthology of English language lyric, Nightingale Valley (Palgrave, 1991: 437–28). While Wordsworth and Tennyson, as might be expected, are presiding geniuses of Allingham's anthology, the tradition of Robert Burns and Walter Scott is strong too, since from its eighteenth century section on, it is filled full of ballads and lyrics from Scotland, Ireland and the USA.⁷

Palgrave, as well, felt that it was the Scottish ballad which had invigorated the English-language lyrical tradition in anticipation of the innovations of Wordsworth and Coleridge. In the second part of his two-part critical history of English poetry in the Quarterly Review (1861–62), he had credited Allen Ramsey with publishing before 1720, “the earliest published collections of truly national songs.” No matter how Ramsey's Miscellany and Evergreen had their synthetic inauthenticities (“much dross mingled with purer metal, and not a few ancient poems alloyed with modern matter”), they were attuned to the needs of their time: “an age already prepared to turn an ear to ancient melodies, and a race alive with just sensitiveness to their national glories” (Palgrave 1862: 173–74). Over a century after Ramsey, while acknowledging the contribution of Burns, Palgrave's Golden Treasury could present the antecedents of that revival of English-language lyric at the beginning of the nineteenth century in which Moore occupied such an important place.

Palgrave said Tennyson chose Moore's “Mid hour of night” because he “much admired its long drawn music” (Palgrave 1991: 499). The second stanza suggests just which Celtic source Tennyson used for his image of echo as intimation of immortality in the “Bugle Song”:

For a critic like Arnold, literary history participates in a sort of innovatory or modernizing process, where a number of differing cultural forms fuse (to use an Arnoldian word) into new literary forms. This is because an old literary language dies, leaving a linguistic culture in need of compensation, since, according to Arnold, “the echo of all its kindred in other lands is growing fainter and more feeble.” Moore's echoes bear a nationalist weight, since they are of the Irish melodies which prompt the “long drawn music” of the poem's meter. The English lyric carries echoes of the recovered Irish music which in turn has lent to the English poem its meter. It thus attempts to recuperate in meter and symbol the imagined cultural and legislative freedom of the past. Tennyson echoes Moore's echoes, drawn to them by this element of loss and recuperation, the elegiac subject of lost love reunited in immortality. Yet history is not to be emptied out of the music of the poems, even given that there is a long tradition of dismissing both Tennyson and Moore, in Britain as in Ireland, as mere facile metrists. Given the violent history of the fusion of the four nations of the United Kingdom, in which the imposition of the English language was but one result of centuries of cultural assimilation and coercion, Victorian poetry often shows that the writing which attempts to commemorate such fusion carries with it conflicting formal echoes of conflict and rebellion.

III

ENGLISH AND IRISH POETS writing in English were drawn to one of the most remarkable literary genres of early Irish Christianity, the immram or voyage tale. In these texts, written in Latin or Irish, voyages of conversion, pilgrimage, and absolution bring their sailors across the Atlantic, through adventures and visions on imaginary islands, and then back to Ireland or Europe. The Navigatio Sancti Brendani, for instance, discovers an Edenic land of plenty far to the West, thought in legend to be Hy Brasil. For the Victorian Irish, seeking a prophetic typology to account for the emigration of thousands from post-Famine Ireland, this land could also be America. The best-known Victorian poetic version is by an English poet, Tennyson. “The Voyage of Maeldune” was published in Ballads and Other Poems in 1880, the year in which Allingham recorded Tennyson's suggestion about floating the island of Ireland far to the West. Tennyson's version of the story is taken many removes from its source, Patrick Weston Joyce's 1879 translation of the Latin Immram Curaig Máele Dúin. More than translating a translation, Tennyson does what he was accustomed to doing with classical myth, take a third person epic narrative and cast it into the genre of prosopopoeia or dramatic monologue. However, this was an established Irish translating practice, since earlier English poetic versions of immrama, Denis Florence MacCarthy's 1848 “The Voyage of St Brendan” and T. D. Sullivan's “The Voyage of the O'Corras” (which Joyce recommends in his introduction), are told in the first person (Joyce xiii). Tennyson also follows Irish poets such as James Clarence Mangan or Aubrey de Vere in experimenting with Irish matter in English hexameter.

The form was adaptable: W. B. Yeats adapted prosody and genre for lyric purposes in “The White Birds,” (1893) adding the imagery of the Maelduin immram to Tennyson's English experimental meter. Its final stanza runs:

The loss of time is also the loss of memory, where the unusual lyrical use of the hexameter exchanges strife on land for a directionless bobbing about at sea. The lover in the lyric seeks the transformation of himself and the loved one into birds in order to secure eternity. But he also asks for forgetfulness of “the fret of the flames” of the land left behind. In a typical ’nineties move, Yeats adopts the conventions of the voyage poem to suggest both the unavoidable conflicts of the land that echo through the past and the desire for an oblivious escape from them. The desire is that the patterns of voyaging and return in the immram be exchanged for perpetual forgetting, from which there will be no return.

Nevertheless, Victorian English language versions of the immram sought to establish contemporary forms for the remembering of the medieval material contained in the originals. P. W. Joyce, for instance, says that his intention was to translate the romances in his collection into “simple, plain, homely English,” (viii) and in Tennyson's hands, the predominant anapests of the rhythm of the synthetic Celtic lyric are carried in monosyllabic English couplets which tend to the archaic:

In this first stanza, the syntactic and prosodic units close together at the end of the sentence. Yet, the prosodic success in achieving these difficult hexameter couplets is also won by retaining an echo of an anapaestic alternately-rhyming ballad or English common measure within the long lines. Caesural or phrasal pauses are emphasized or hinted. We can hear this ballad meter more strongly if we imagine the first four lines lineated thus: The formal trace of a three-stress English-language ballad line sounds within the classical hexameter. In the prosodic experiments in the 1840s of Longfellow (Evangeline) and Clough (The Bothie, Amours de Voyage), the hexameter is either a synthetic meter adapted from Greek for the purposes of an artificial regularity (Longfellow), or a loose and irregularly scanned line which lends itself so well to narrative and speech that many readers heard little distinction between it and prose (Clough). Tennyson himself uses an eight beat trochaic meter for his Locksley Hall poems. In those poems, the distinctive music of the meter retains a sonic trace of an indigenous oral British tradition. Take the lines on St Francis in “Locksey Hall Sixty Years After,” discussed earlier: The trochees are allowed to settle into their medieval matter, perhaps a hint at the speaker's Tory nostalgia for Catholic spirituality, one nostalgia in which Tennyson himself did not share. The form of “The Voyage of Maeldune” also implies tradition and experiment, a conservative attachment to the old as well as an innovatory concern with the new. The form assists in the portrayal of a dilemma about the past which faces the mariners in his poem. Allegiances to tribe or brotherhood are evidence of a loyalty beyond reason, a loyalty which boasts itself as coming from “the oldest race upon earth.” The boasts are carried in the language of forefathers: they “liefer had died” than contemplate betrayal and change. The etymologies are those of the English language (for instance, OED traces the archaism “lief” back to Old Saxon, High German, and Norse), while the hurt is a long-standing Irish one.

In The Realms of Verse, Matthew Reynolds has written about Tennyson's early involvement with the Victorian interest in etymologies, and the older poet's preference for an “English,” as opposed to Latin or French diction. So, the poem for which “The Bugle Song” was written, from the mid-point of the poet's career, The Princess, contains rival Northern and Southern armies, and in Reynolds's delicate phrasing, “southern and northern phraseology” in which “the distinction between them might, on particular occasions, take on expressive salience.” (Reynolds 238–40) Reynolds's suggestions are valuable for a poem like “The Voyage of Maeldune,” since Tennyson takes the translator Joyce's lead, “simple, plain, homely English,” and imports an Anglo-Saxon lexis into his version in order to recreate a medieval tone. The invention is synthetic and for at least one reader, was just too successful. According to one of Tennyson's best early critics, Stopford Brooke, the fault with the poem is that it makes its Irish monastic mariners too English. Tennyson's monologue takes quite extraordinary liberties with its source, by turning its voyagers into violent and drunken buffoons. Allingham records that in another argument with Tennyson over Ireland, he had the temerity to suggest that England leave the Irish to themselves. “Civil War!” was the Laureate's considered response (Allingham 325). It was perhaps in the spirit of such opinions that Tennyson originally planned that the sailors in the poem kill each other, and that Maeldune return alone.

Such English caricatures of a supposed Irish propensity to violence prompted the Anglo-Irish Brooke to return the compliment:

Brooke's objection however, is not to the meter or diction of the poem:rather, it is to the translation of the Irish into the English character, a travesty in which the Anglo-Saxon behavior of enlisted men is “imposed” on selflessly-questing mystical Celtic warriors. Thus, rather than translation, “The Voyage of Maeldune” carries a number of unaccommodated formal echoes of etymologies or poetic forms, matched by the attempted translation into one another of two of the imagined sets of national characteristics of two nationalities within its contemporary United Kingdom.

One of the synonyms for “Celtic” for the English Victorian poet and critic is “poetic.” In an earlier conversation with Allingham, in the same year as the publication of “The Voyage of Maeldune,” Tennyson had contrasted the acquiescence of the English to Norman rule with the recalcitrant Irish, who are “raging and foaming to this hour.” Allingham points out that only in the previous century Ireland had to suffer “the penal laws, and the deliberate destruction” of Irish industry by the English. “What do you say to that?” he asked, and the Laureate replied: “That was brutal! Our ancestors were horrible brutes! And the Kelts are very charming and sweet and poetic. I love their Ossians and their Finns and so forth – but they are most damnably unreasonable!” (Allingham 297–98). The Irish Question, as intemperately elucidated by Tennyson, was both political and cultural, where the “charming and sweet and poetic” was offset by centuries of “raging and foaming.” While nineteenth-century Irish poems in English after Moore frequently seek recompense for traumatic loss in the past, an English poet like Tennyson also explores the corollary of such recompense, the seeming impossibility of forgiveness. What could not be resolved for the English was that the past carried great cultural richness but also seemed unable to give consolation for its losses, as shown by an apparently ungovernable and irreconcilably divided latter-day “Celtic” country like Ireland.

The other side of poetic mysticism was held to be the political fanaticism which cultural commentators with a more metropolitan cast of mind than Tennyson felt it was their duty to attempt to understand. So Matthew Arnold's 1860 “Saint Brandan” – perhaps more “Ancient Mariner” than immram – opens with a spirituality which takes little note of personal safety or of the decorum which is appropriate even for saints:

One source for Arnold's use of the St Brendan material was Renan's account of the pacifying influence of Christianity on the Irish, an influence which had resulted in the surrender of self: The result is exotically un-English and definitely un-Protestant: both “Celtic naturalism” and “Christian spiritualism” appeal to a Romantic and Victorian medievalism drawn both to the evidences of textual or ethnographical research and a nostalgia for a pre-Reformation Christian unity.

While attracted to the mystical alliance of naturalism and spiritualism, Arnold is also taken by one episode in the story of Brendan's voyage, which toys with the heterodox notion of momentary relief from eternal damnation. Saint Brandan is granted a meeting with Judas, who appears to be out of hell. In the Latin Navigatio Sancti Brendani, an act of kindness to a leper has enabled Judas to be granted both weekly and seasonal respite – every Sunday and all through Christmas and Easter (Webb 239–40). Arnold gives him one hour every Christmas. “St Brandan” becomes a lyrical ballad of eternal suffering and small forgiveness:

By contrast, in a later poem like “The Voyage of Maeldune” spiritualism appears only grudgingly to be allowed to overcome fanaticism, as Tennyson strives to make his Irish characters forgive and forget the past. The final meeting of Tennyson's mariners with a three hundred year old relic of the earlier voyages of St Brendan acquaints them with more than the usual lessons of shore leave. The Saint asks,

Of all the English poets, Tennyson is the supreme elegist, drawn to “the passion of the past” (Poems 2: 232). The atavistic Irish sailors here are given counsel of deliberate forgetfulness, asked to “suffer the Past to be Past.” There is no penance or special pleading, and certainly not the admonition of the hermit in Joyce's version: “As God has delivered you from the many dangers you have passed through, though you were very guilty, and well deserved death at His hands; so you forgive your enemy the crime he committed against you” (171). Even the immram which might appear closest to Tennyson's contribution to the genre, Immram Ua Corra, the tale of three sons who have been given to childless parents after they asked help of the devil, can only find absolution for violence and wanton destruction in repentance, pilgrimage, and a voyage of conversion.⁹

In these early Christian tales, forgiveness is rather harder to earn than the Protestant English conception of the sacrament of confession as a matter of swift absolution after a sudden change of mind. Yet in Tennyson's contribution to these tales, the moment of reciprocal forgiveness, which may in other versions be partial or complete, needs to be accompanied by a disavowal of the past. Asking that the past be suffered to be past is a phrase not used without irony elsewhere in Tennyson's work. A version of it appears in The Princess, when Princess Ida castigates one of her maids for singing that great blank verse lyric of the passion of the past, “Tears, idle tears.” The feminist progressive Ida asks “let old bygones be,” and repudiates lyric nostalgia as she looks forward to “that great year of equal mights and rights.” She adds, “Nor would I fight with iron laws, in the end/Found golden: let past be past” (iv, 51–58). The patriarchy which was formerly held to be historical and social necessity will be replaced by social and scientific progress, if not evolution: this section of the narrative of The Princess takes place on a geological field-trip.

Tennyson's phrase, “let past be past,” commonplace as it has become, may only have hardened into cliché throughout the nineteenth century.¹⁰

The sentiment might not have been much recognized in an eighteenth-century culture concerned to found its constitution on claims of tradition and antiquity. Its import is that forgetting will be accompanied by forgiving, and all the better to stave off tragedy. Published along with “The Voyage of Maeldune,” in Ballads and Other Poems, “The First Quarrel” is another monologue about islands and sea journeys, this time written in the dialect of the Isle of Wight. It is spoken by a widow whose last memory of her husband is of a row over a pre-marital love affair. The chastised husband pleads that his wife forgive and forget: “‘Let bygones be!”’ he asks. “‘By-gones ma’ be come-agains”’ she retorts (67–69). The poem ends with the unforgiven husband leaving for farm work on the mainland, and the magnificent flatness of its precipitate final line: “An' the boat went down that night – the boat went down that night” (92). Conversely, in the final version of “The Voyage of Maeldune” forgiveness is granted, and the saint administers absolution since the mariners have allowed the past to be past. Maeldune can meet again, “The man that had slain my father. I saw him and let him be” (128).

In asking that the Irish should suffer the past to be past, Tennyson may also be alluding to the weight the phrase is made to bear in two poems written by Aubrey de Vere. The first is from de Vere's best-known poem, “The Year of Sorrow; Ireland 1849.” Its composition and publication were contemporaneous with the publication and revision of The Princess, and it is preoccupied in its own way with Victorian notions of “progress” and “necessity.” In the “Autumn” section, the Tory landlord de Vere blames a political economy which allowed only acquiescence in the return of famine:

De Vere's internal rhyming and repetition (“fall … hall … fall … falling … all,” “one fate … one fate,” “circles hour by hour more,” “past be past”), slight modulations in sound and syllable (“wills the Law that willed a lie”), and the half-rhyme of effect with its cause (“waste”/“past?”), move with some skill around the monotonous force of the iron laws of liberal economics that have held that nothing can be done to interfere with such catastrophe. It is all that de Vere can do in such apocalyptic circumstances to hold off accusations of genocide: after these stanzas he turns to God that He might offer consolation to the Irish dead, who are “the afflicted race,/Whom Man, not God, abolished.” Needless to say, de Vere shows little patience with the providential justifications of Famine prevalent in the British defense of their part in administering Ireland during this time.¹¹

The power of the past in de Vere's poem causes Ireland and its governors to cling on to old practices, places and beliefs in the face of a stern economics which cannot conceive how in their turn contemporary conditions demanded interference. The responsibilities are shared within the “Dread power of man!” between the Law and the wasted people: to adapt the title of de Vere's 1848 economic and political contribution to the aftermath of the Great Famine, the fault lies both with English Misrule and Irish Misdeeds. This was not only Ireland's but the Victorian United Kingdom's greatest catastrophe, the result of a brush with modernity which resulted in wholesale depopulation and the creation of a landscape and society forever changed from what it was in the “past.” De Vere's solutions were not just government economic intervention, but a sort of conservative modernizing which would benefit from the establishment of exclusively Irish emigrant colonies in Canada or Australia, in which the uprooted culture could be replicated in conditions of plenty. Whether the Irish were voluntarily willing to contemplate such a drastic solution, it might be said that something similar occurred anyway. The prospect of mass emigration has a brief counterpart in Denis Florence MacCarthy's 1848 immram, his version of “The Voyage of St Brendan,” which ends with an angel from a far Western land telling Brendan to go home to saintly, scholarly Ireland. In the future though, this place will provide help to the Irish again:

The America to which the Victorian Irish voyaged in their millions is prophesied in Brendan's voyage and carried through these voyage poems. Tir na nOg or Hy Brasil are found again in conditions of necessity.

De Vere said that his sequence Inisfail (1861) was “a National Chronicle cast in a poetic form.” It has the dubious distinction, according to Chris Morash, of being “the longest single poem by an Irish writer in English” (Morash 1994: 46). In the Preface to the poem, first added in 1877, but subsequently much revised, de Vere stops short of suggesting emigration as the solution to Ireland's problems. However, he does counsel the forgiveness which, if does not come through forgetting, might come when memory gains from the “long run” of history:

In its way, this is the perfectly conventional plea that history itself will provide the temporal distance from the past which will enable its violent disruptions to be understood. The individual, party or sect will in time – that is viewing past time from a time looking to a peaceful future – leave off their desire for vengeance. Like a latter-day revisionist historian, De Vere looks to “times gone by” with “manly prudence” and “justice,” and sees that “Truth is a peacemaker.” The long run of “Historical Studies” will salve the hatreds of the past, not through forgetting, but certainly through forgiveness. Thus the impartial study of history itself, as a detachment from the hatreds of the past, might allow the Catholic saint in the Protestant Tennyson's poem to absolve the vengeance-driven Maeldune.

Inisfail was first published in 1861, and in the same volume, de Vere's The Sisters; or Weal in Woe,¹²

a blank verse narrative, had also requested that the past be allowed to be past. There, however, he looked to a future for Ireland. Between “The Year of Sorrow” and the Inisfail volume, de Vere had converted to Catholicism (in 1851), and as a consequence The Sisters tells a contemporary tale of famine, emigration, return, and death all transcended by ascetic self-sacrifice. The narrative is framed within a condition-of-Ireland debate between the narrator and a young Oxford visitor, “A man of tender nerve though stubborn thought,” (Inisfail 192) who is impatient about the lack of material progress in the countryside around him. Sitting in an ancient churchyard, the Englishman is courteously corrected by a retelling of the brutal history of Ireland by the narrator who speaks, “Words few but plain, grim rubric traced in blood” (Inisfail 194). The visitor then presses the narrator for the significance of one of the graves.

Frame and tale together give us a poem about sympathies shared through a story of poverty, emigration, and unnecessary early death. As such The Sisters bears the influence of another English Laureate, William Wordsworth. The poem is strongly reminiscent of the tale of the Wanderer in the first book of The Excursion, where the story of Margaret and her ruined cottage effects sympathy in its poet-listener for suffering which has distinct economic causes: rural unemployment, European war, and abandonment.¹³

Margaret pines and dies because she cannot allow herself to get over her abandonment, she cannot let the past be past (Wordsworth 591–602). In de Vere's poem, the Wordsworthian mode enables the narrative to work on the sympathies of an English listener, one who is not so alien that he cannot be brought to a better understanding of the reasons for the seeming lack of progress of England's poorer neighbor. His dialogue turns from the failure of Ireland's rulers of the previous seven hundred years, and the lack of affection felt for them by their supposed imperial partners, to a possible future. The narrator states, The two paths are those of the spiritual and the secular, and de Vere goes on to counsel the theme of his later years, that Ireland's contribution to the history of the world has been and will continue to be spiritual, Catholic, and quiescent. The “phantom image of my country,/Vanquished yet victor, in her weal and woe” (Inisfail 197) is an image of solace given only by a belief in immortality as illustrated by the story of the ascetic surviving sister, Mary.

The events remembered in “The Voyage of Maeldune” are linked quite specifically not only with de Vere's Irish poems of the previous three decades, but also with the position of Ireland within the United Kingdom at the time of its writing. In the 1880s, Tennyson's poem might even have been intended as a direct allegorical intervention, as Victoria's Laureate turned his attention to that part of her kingdom which was convulsed by the activities of the Land League, the rise of Parnell and the first parliamentary test of the UK itself in the increased agitation for Home Rule. Indeed in the sections of The Realms of Verse which deal with the poetry of the United Kingdom, Matthew Reynolds reads Tennyson's Irish poems allegorically, and De Vere's The Sisters as an allegory of Catholic Ireland and Protestant England (Reynolds: 261–62).¹⁴

IV

WHATEVER HE felt about his Catholicism, Tennyson would have seen in de Vere's mysticism a more general concern with a spiritual belief in the future of an immortal self, or at least the coming historical conditions in which spirituality might have a future. This was tempered only by a reactionary concern that the coming times might lose all that a glorious imperial past had gained for an imperial present which was intent on putting its material prosperity before its spiritual responsibilities. These are responsibilities to church, state, constitution, and past. The 1852 version of Tennyson's great funeral ode for Wellington momentarily allowed its grief to overcome its public responsibilities as it foresaw an end to Empire and Union: “a darkening future yields/Some reverse from worse to worse” (Poems 2: 487n). Even if for the individual – Alfred Tennyson, say – the future did contain an eternity illuminated by the prospect of an immortal continuation of the identity of self, then for his country the future also promises chaos and the dissolution of Union, Empire, and all.

Given such a prospect, forgiving, and forgetting not only suffer the past to be past but also bring about the forgetting of identity – spiritual as well as cultural – in the future. Even in his dealings with the unforgiving Irish, Tennyson could not do that. The central tale of his Irish dialect monologue “Tomorrow” (1884) is about a woman, Molly Magee, whose inability to get over the disappearance of a long-lost love is ended only by the discovery of the loved one preserved youthful and intact in a bog for forty years. It is when the English poet turns to the past, then, that his borrowing – from himself as well as De Vere or Irish epic – connects the mythic advice to forget with events that cannot be absolved, as it were, from his own memory. These are events which are linked generally with the Celticism that Tennyson knew was well accustomed to remembering the losses of the past, indeed for which the past frequently seemed only to be loss. The echoes of that loss, though heard through the losses of vanquished nations, Tennyson could hear sounding through eternity.

If we cannot grasp eternity as a movement forwards or backwards, we might think of it as circular or repetitive. Such eternal repetition of self-perpetuating revenge, whatever the power of eventual absolution, is implicit not only in the Maelduin story, but throughout those parts of the immram genre which see that deliverance from seemingly eternal journeying comes not just through personal repentance but, crucially, through sacramental absolution. Just as Arnold allows his Judas out of hell once a year, the Navigatio Sancti Brendani gives structure to its seemingly directionless voyaging by a miraculous annual return to the same island for Easter. Without compass or map, these early Christian legendary voyagers find their way only with supernatural intervention, and never solely through their own efforts. It is just this Christian redemptive aspect of the genre from which Yeats later sought to be delivered. He suggests to the loved one in “The White Birds” a future in a place “where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no more.” Another poetic version of the myth, published a century later, Paul Muldoon's “Immram” (1980), lends critical as well as poetic distance from what had attracted Renan and Arnold to this material, the combination of Celtic naturalism and Christian spiritualism. These had become alternatives: “Celtic naturalism” is manifest in Yeats's lovers as wandering birds; “Christian spiritualism” is found in the absolution and personal immortality which preoccupies the versions by Tennyson, Arnold, and MacCarthy. Muldoon's poem ends in a hotel penthouse confronting a figure who is part hippy-mystic, part Howard Hughes: “‘I forgive you,’ he croaked, ‘And I forget.”’ The images of the final stanza are images of repetition and circularity. The narrator (Maelduin/Muldoon) leaves the hotel behind two of the characters in the poem, “Mr and Mrs Alfred Tennyson.” Tennyson had circulated through this material before, and as the characters flow through revolving doors, the poem ends up back in “Fosters pool room”, where it had begun (Muldoon, Poems 102).¹⁵

Forgiveness granted, eternity is still manifest as repetition.

Tennyson, along with Arnold before him and Yeats after him, participates in the nostalgia of a peculiarly Victorian form of British poetic Celticism. The diction and prosody of English poetry is implicated in personal loss, and through that the large cultural losses of the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish languages and their attendant literary and musical traditions. Drawn to what remains of those traditions, the personal inability to let the past be past places the nostalgia of such poetry unrepentantly in the present as it appears stubbornly determined to echo through the future of its increasingly disunited kingdom. As English poets skirt around the fringes of the matter of the United Kingdom, poetic form itself is transformed in the contact of margin with center. The artistic gains, we can suggest with hindsight, are substantial. But the gain is grounded in loss, no matter that it is a loss which cannot be forgotten.