Notes on Tennyson’s Conversation

Abstract

I believe that in the early days of our acquaintance the poet, seeing me with what appeared to be a notebook under my arm, suspected me of Boswellising,¹ but I was duly warned and reassured him of my innocence. I simply recorded very briefly in my diary a few of his ‘dicta’ which I wished to have for the benefit of my children, one of whom was a frequent and delighted listener to the Laureate’s reading of his own poems. Mary Coleridge, at that time a shy, timid girl, was more than once asked to dictate the particular poems she wanted him to recite. I can hear him saying, ‘Give me my seven-and-sixpenny’ (meaning the single volume edition), and then we listened to the ‘high Orphic chant’, rather than the conventional reading of many of our favourite poems. I often asked for the ‘Ode on the Duke of Wellington’, and on one occasion, in the presence of Sir Charles Stanford²—then organist of Trinity College, Cambridge—the poet, lowering his voice at the words, ‘God accept him, Christ receive him’, added, ‘It’s a mighty anthem, that’s what it is.’ Stanford’s music to The Voyage of Maeldune’ was written at Freshwater, and four of us visitors sang a lovely quartet in that work for the first time in the poet’s presence. It was rather nervous work, for the composer and ourselves were anxious to satisfy the poet in a work intended as a novelty for the Leeds Festival. The verdict was rather enigmatical: ‘I like the ripple of your music.’…

‘Fragmentary Notes of Tennyson’s Talk’, Tennyson and his Friends, pp. 256–7, 259, 262–9.