Sunset and Evening Star

As always, we return to Tennyson. The title is from the opening line of his poem Crossing the Bar, and the epigram is actually from one of the songs he intersperses throughout his mock epic, The Princess; A Medley, which also happens to be very good as well by the way. I do recommend reading both. However the poem that most influences this most recent one of mine is another of Tennyson’s songs from The Princess, titled Tears, Idle Tears.

One of the notable things about the latter song is that it is famed for its immense musicality and lyricism, despite not at all incorporating rhyme into its structure,- not even internal rhyme. The difficulty of achieving this cannot be overstated. The musicality arises purely as a consequence of Tennyson’s word choice and his arrangement of those words, and indeed this hardly expresses how nuanced, complex and incredibly elegant the versification of the poem is.

Let’s look at the second stanza of his poem, which even a cursory glance will show how much mine own above owes to the inestimable laureate:


      Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.


You have, indeed, no easy patterns that offer themselves for ready analysis. The usual tools,- assonance, alliteration, consonance, etc.,- are all to be, but appear so scatter-gun in their use that one could reasonably assume, at a first glance, that their appearance in the stanza lacks both reason and,- ha,- rhyme. Reading the aloud, on the other hand, suggests that there is something at work that appears to defy this initial assessment. I do recommend this by the way,- poems have their sense, but also their sound. The former offers itself most easily to the eyes. The latter, on the other hand, offers itself best to the ears.

Having heard the sound of the poem and re-reading the words on the page, one can see that the structure now reveals itself more readily. You have, first, three sections:


Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,

=====

Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;

=====

So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.


The first two sections are paired against one another, and rhythmically match, but not precisely mirror, one another:


Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
   -     u    u    -       -      -   u  u   x   u  -

Sad as the last which reddens over one
  -    u   u    -       u      -    u    -  u    -


The most important part is the opening dactyl, which establishes a rhythmic link between the two lines to the ear. This rhythmic foundation is used to support syntactic parallelism, which we can reduce grammatically to:


[adj.]     ‘as the’     ‘first/last’     ||     [verb]     [prep.]     [noun/pronoun]


Neither lines contain main clauses in themselves, and indeed their first lines contain multiple subordinate clauses in almost exactly the same places, albeit of slightly different types,- a gerund clause in the first, and a relative ‘wh-’ clause in the second. A similar technique is at work in the second lines of each section:


That brings our friends up from the underworld,

That sinks with all we love below the verge;

[conj.]     [verb: third-person; active]     [noun/noun clause]     ‘up/below’     [noun]


So there we can see the syntactic similarities between the two sections. To the ear and indeed to the mind, which understands language according to its structures, the pairing of these sections instantly suggests a highly rhythmical and sensible,- as in pertaining to sense, as opposed to sound,- form of musicality. The opposition between words such as ‘first’ and ‘last’, and ‘up’ and below’, only serve to strengthen the sensible parallelism at work.

However, this does not altogether explain what makes these sections musically compelling. Perhaps we should move from sense to sound. Stress, as we’ve shown above is not mirrored between the sections. However, stress, unlike syntax, can be a far more locally intense phenomenon. What I mean by this is that the stress of a word exists in a moment in itself, and its effects, unless repeated into regular meter, are most powerfully transmitted to the ear within their immediate moment in the poem. I do realize it sound excessively complicated, but an example makes this much more straightforward.


Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
   -     u    u    -       -      -   u  u   x   u  -


You have a dactyl,- ‘fresh as the’,- which is followed immediately by three long stresses, which themselves are followed by two short stresses. The line ends in an iamb, but preceded by a sound that is ambiguous,- the ‘x’. I've classed it as ambiguous as it entirely depends on a reader: some may make the ‘on’ a short stress; others may makes it stronger. Both a perfectly valid, and both can work within the aural context of the line. I've tried both, believe me. Both work.

The three long stresses though have a local effect,- they slow the pace through their length, but simultaneous hammer out a rhythm through sheer aural strength alone. The effect does not extend beyond the line within which they occur. Supporting this is the word choice,- there are very few short or closed vowels used at all within the stanza, and the combination of long vowels and the varied rhythm,- which alternates between regular iambs, and highly Tennysonian combinations of multiple strong stresses,- serves to create patterns within the lines that manifest themselves as the intense lyricism and musicality.

The last line of the stanza illustrates this perhaps best of all:


So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.
 -    -  |  -     -   |  u     -      u     -    -     -


Just look at how many strong stresses are in that line. It is incredible. The ‘so’s, which normally could be read as short stresses can only be read as long due to the punctuation,- and yes, punctuation also plays a significant part in this. Consonance, i.e. the sibilant ‘s’s, and the assonance of the long ‘o’s further enhance the effect of the strong stresses. Altogether they serve to create a sense of musical and rhythmical musicality that is both indisputable and supremely elegant.

A poet need not use rhyme to make music, as Tennyson so masterfully demonstrates. It’s things like these that keep me reading his works again and again. Hopefully I’ll get there too someday.