with the purchase of two classic books: an 1869 illustrated “Locksley Hall” by Tennyson and a Folio version of Browning’s Dramatic Monologues with “My Last Duchess”, “Fra Lippo Lippi”, “The Bishop Orders His Tomb” and others.
These were poems that introduced me to human psychology and memorable characters who revealed their whole lives in poems. Poems which gave me a larger, deeper perspective–often with ironic humor–about human nature, human motives, human psychology, and major conflicts in life.
In the case of Tennyson’s long rhyming couplet poem–an olde favorite, now considered sexist and racist–one encounters a powerful narrative about youthful dreams, romantic love, betrayal, escapism, science and technology, and an optimistic view of the world coupled with personal life-experience pessimism.
In the illustration above, the artist W.J. Hennessy captures the following lines:
“Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,
Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.
Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro’ the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.”
When I read those lines and the ones that followed,
“When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see:/Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.–”
those sentiments deeply struck home in 1967, for a 17-year-old boy about to embark on a long literary journey and future voyages of the imagination.
Yeah, starting out, inspired by Shakespeare, Keats, Frost, Tennyson, Browning, and Wordsworth. Marked for education, career, and life overall at/by 17.
The Road Taken: Hooked by poetry, literature, and books at 17.