The following notes appear in a slightly edited form on the sleeve of the Tennyson album.

INTRODUCTION

As a reflection of their innate lyricism, Tennyson’s poems have been much set to music:  his wife Emily, the nonsense poet Edward Lear and Sir  Arthur Sullivan all performed their brave attempts in the drawing room at Farringford on Emily’s white upright piano.  When Jenny Lind came to sing one night, Mrs Cameron sent servants with her grand piano from Dimbola to aid the performance (a loan neither solicited or greatly appreciated.  Richard Strauss set Enoch Arden as a dramatic rendition to florid piano (dramatically performed at Farringford by Michael York a few years back), and Crossing the Bar became a very popular hymn, set to a sonorous tune.

WH Auden reckoned that “if England had only possessed in the nineteenth century an operatic composer of the rank of Verdi or Wagner, Tennyson might have found in the libretto a medium at once lyrical and dramatic.   He is one of the few poets who has been able to write poetry which is meaningful in itself and at the same time settable to music”.

So Paul Armfield is in good company as he assays his own settings of some of Tennyson’s poems, drawing out their inner music and adding his own voice, thus renewing their power.  The deep tones both of his vocals and his double bass make for a fascinating comparison with Alfred’s own voice, captured on a wax cylinder by Thomas Edison,  It was all the more appropriate that Paul should have premiered some of these songs at Farringford, as part of the poet’s bi-centenary, in front of an audience which included the former Poet Laureate, and great Tennyson enthusiast, Sir Andrew Motion.

There are other points of contact.  Paul has an international reputation as a singer-songwriter, living and working as a bookseller on the Isle of Wight, but frequently touring abroad.  Tennyson in turn was a rock star of his day, the first poet to benefit from mass popular editions of his work.  He delighted in reading his work aloud, and giving it a dramatic twist: his poems are often song-like in their mastery of rhyme and rhythm, and Alfred has perhaps the greatest sound-technician of any English poet.  He also has profound connections with the Isle of Wight, having moved to Freshwater in 1853 with Emily, to bring up his young family, and in poems like Maud and Crossing the Bar, are suffused with Island landscape which Paul too responds to in his own songs.  Poet and singer are thus a perfect match, and somewhere the ghost of Alfred is hopefully tapping a toe and putting this CD on his celestial gramophone.

From Sea Dreams

First published in 1860, with the subtitle  An Idyll ( a pictured story).  Written three years earlier.  Sea Dreams is based on Tennyson’s disastrous investing in 1840 of his whole fortune of £3000 in a wood carving scheme floated by Dr Matthew Allen.  By 1843 it was all lost, which precipitated Alfred’s intense depression.  In 1845 Allen died, his life having been insured in Alfred’s favour. Hence perhaps the lines in this poem, not included here,  “We must forgive the dead”.  Not so difficult when, as with Alfred, you eventually get all your money back.

Tennyson wrote of his own poem that it foregrounded“the glorification of honest labour, whether or head or hand, no hasting to be rich, no bowing down to any idol”.  The lyric which Paul has selected is almost a stand alone piece, ‘What does little birdie say’, which comes near the end of this long poem, a lullabye even if here the outside world is a little crueller –as the following lines “she sleeps, let us too, let all evil, sleep”. In its baby language, and its sense of release and flight at the end, this poem prefigures JM Barrie’s Peter Pan.

This version features whistling, and fiddle from Donal, to aid the playful nature of Paul’s arrangement.

The Spiteful Letter

Published in 1868: Alfred wrote “it is no particular letter that I meant.  I have had dozens of them from one quarter and another’’  His son Hallam added that “for forty two years my father had an anonymous, abusive letter, evidently from the same writer, on the appearance of every new volume”.  A notebook draft includes two extra verses.

O little bard, is your lot so hard?
Do they send you millions of verses?
Send you millions of realms of rhyme?
Have you my millions of curses.

O little bard with your scroffs and scorns!
Call me wealthy as Crassus!
You foolish fellow, the Devil’s two horns
Are the peaks of your Parnassus.

Such things are designed for the sense of paranoia it begins to inflict on one’s soul.  Especially as you have no idea quite who is writing these things (which chime in with one’s own inner doubts) and why.  You begin to suspect everyone.  At least bad reviews are usually signed.

Paul sings with tendererness, and a hint of menace – woe betide the poison pen writer if the large and bear-like Mr Armfield ever catches up with him, even though – like the poet – he or she is long dead.

The Splendour Falls on Castle Walls (from ‘The Princess’)

This lyric was one of those added to embroider Tennyson’s book length poem The Princess (first published in 1847) three years later, greatly to its advantage.   It was written after Alfred heard the echoes at Killarney durign a walking tour in Ireland in 1848. “When I was there I heard a bugle blown beneath the ‘Eagles’ Nest’ and eight distinct echoes”.   But the poem takes us from legend and folklore to current times, and then from a soundscape to metaphysics, echoes which resound “from soul to soul”.

The echo on Paul’s voice, and his multi-tracked guitar and double bass set up a spell on the listener, just as this famous lyric does on a silent reader.

The Poet’s Song

The Poet’s Song was written at the time that his old friend Edmund Lushington married Alfred’s sister Cecilia.  Perhaps it was even a wedding gift.  This was a time of happiness, though also stirring up painful memories (and Tennyson himself remained unwed until 1850, since his engagement to Emily had been broken off due to his lack of prospects).

This wedding is memorably celebrated towards the end of In Memoriam, when the poet is finally starting to come to terms with his intense grief at the early death of his best friend Arthur Hallam.  A marriage always trumps a funeral.  ‘Gay’ of course is used in its original sense, even if contemporary critics like Alan Sinfield suggest that Alfred’s relationship with Arthur was essentially homosexual.

Here we see Tennyson’s precise evocations of the natural world – how a field of wheat moves in the breeze – and his unmatched use of alliteration,:the s’s  of ‘swallow stopt’’ and the snake slipt under a spray’.  Paul’s diction ennunciates every syllable, and drives the song along, with a touch of melancholy at the end.

Maud

Tennyson wrote Maud at Farringford, working “night and day”, and it was published in 1855.  The genesis of the poem followed a chance remark from his friend Sir John Simeon – who lived some 8 miles away at Swainston Manor – who “years after begged me to weave a story” around some lines dating back to the loss of Hallam.

Reviewers were largely hostile – describing the title as containing one letter too many, so that it should really be entitled ‘mad’ or mud’.   It proved a huge popular success, and enabled Tennyson to buy Farringford and its attendant estates and farms outright.  It remains an emotionally overwrought experience, influenced by ‘spasmodic’ poets like Alexander Smith, and its mix of anger and melancholy draws together strands of the poet’s life, including his being rejected by Rosa Baring, and time he spent at the asylum at High Beech, where the poet John Clare was also a patient.

Section XXII, ‘Come into the garden, Maud’, was often extracted as a poem in its own right, and became a popular parlour ballad.  It makes an interesting parallel with a passage in Emily’s Journal from November 1853, when they first crossed the Solent to their new home, and she noted that “one dark heron flew over the sea, backed by a daffodil sky”.

Paul’s version draws on the scene which sparked off the poet’s imagination, music heard through open windows, and dancing in the moonlight.

The Charge of the Light Brigade

This famous poem was first published in newsprint form by the Examiner on  9^th December 1854, signed AT.  The Crimean charge took place on 25^th October 1854, and the poem which immortalised it written on 2^nd December – first chanted out on what has since been renamed Tennyson Down, then later written out back in his study -  “in a few minutes after reading the Times in which occurred the phrase ‘some one had blundered’. The editorial in fact spoke of ‘some hideous blunder’.  The Times’ report also quoted soldiers as calling the place of their slaughter “the valley of death”.  Tennyson also drew on the report when – as he says – “607 sabres are mentioned”.  As he wrote in a letter to Forster, “six is much better than seven hundred (as I think) metrically, so keep it”.

For the poem’s first book publication, in 1855, Alfred censored himself and omitted the line “someone had blundered’:  the poem closed feebly.  In later printings he reverted to the original and more savage wording.  It was “not a poem in which I pique myself’ and he almost omitted it from publication in Maud and Other Poems.

Extracts from Tennyson’s original reading on wax cylinder interleave this recording to dramatic effect, so that Paul sings a duet with him, across the years.  Alfred puts an emphasis on the word “knew” in ‘the soldier knew/some one had blundered’ “with an emphasis at once awed, exasperated and half incredulous at the folly”.

In 1855, Tennyson had a request from Scutari to send specially printed copies to the troops in the Crimea, which he did, and it proved very popular at the front.

This rendition features Doug on Bodhran, and has a fire and dramatic tension which matches the original poem, and the crackle of the wax cylinder – stored for many years by a radiator at Farringford, and thus partly erased – provides a suitably ghostly end to the recording.

Sweet and Low/Cradle Song

This short poem – esssentially a lullabye – was written in 1849 for incorporation into augmented ‘The Princess’, and published a year later.

You could indeed rock a baby to sleep with this charming and lyrical piece, full of repetitions and simple but archetypal things:  sea, sails, sleep, the moon, a gentle breeze. Tennyson cunningly varies the line lengths, and fills his poem with mellifluous sounds. Hallam, Alfred’s first child, was born three years later.

Those of a cynical bent could compare this with Richard Thompson’s ‘Nothing At The End of the Rainbow’, addressed to his own baby in the cradle, listing all those who would harm or rob her, and telling her that there is “nothing to grow up for anymore”

Paul’s tender arrangement features Mari Persen  on lead vocals.

The Sailor’s Song

Called ‘The Sailor Boy’ in Tennyson’s Collected Poems,  this brief and almost sinister lyric was first written in 1849, with the idea of it being interpolated into The Princess, but not then used.  It first saw print in a popular anthology, The Victoria Regia, and later collected in Enoch Arden and other poems.

Adelaide Proctor, who had solicited the poem from Alfred, used the intercession of their mutual friend Julia Margaret Cameron to give this poem a title.  The phrase “harbour bar” looks forward to the last song here, but this is far from a throwaway jeu-d’esprit.  A mermaid warns the sailor boy about death by drowning – a theme which looks back to The Tempest and ahead to The Waste Land; TS Eliot was greatly influenced by Tennyson.  But the sailor boy finds matching dangers if he were to stay at home, and face the ‘devil’ of failing to grow up.

The Voyage

The poem was published 1864, shortly after Alfred took possession of  Farringford.  Tennyson himself comments “Life is the search after the ideal”. There is something of the Ancient Mariner about this piece, though without its opium haunted visions.

Crossing the Bar

This elegiac poem was published in 1889, when Tennyson was eighty.  It was written that same year when the venerable poet was crossing the Solent from Lymington to Yarmouth  – for the last time – and watched waves breaking on the sand bank to the west, which surfaces at very low tides .  There is even a tradition of playing a quick game of cricket on it, before it once again descends beneath the waves.  More pertinently, the bar stands for the divide between life and death, that “bourne from which no man can return” as Shakespeare put it.  Alfred had just been extremely ill, and at one point doubted that he would ever see Farringford or the Isle of Wight again.

Hallam later wrote that “when repeated to me in the evening I said ‘that is the crown of your life’s work’.  He answered ‘It came in a moment’.  He later said “Mind you put my ‘Crossing the Bar’ at the end of all editions of my poems”.

Arthur Hallam had once written that rhyme was the “recurrence of termination”.   The phrase here ‘face to face” takes us to memories of his long dead friend, and Tennyson’s own phrase in In Memoriam “and come to look on those we loved/And that which made us, face to face”.  And then further back in time to Arthur Hallam’s poem to his fiancee Alfred’s sister Emily ‘til our souls see each other face to face”.

 

Dr Brian Hinton is the author of many books on popular music, including two devoted to ‘alt country’, as well as co-editing Emily Tennyson’s Farringford Journal.  He is President of the Farringford Tennyson Society.