Charles Tennyson Turner: Lyricism and Modernity

Abstract

Charles Tennyson Turner is virtually unique in English poetry as a writer who restricted himself to the sonnet form, and at several places in his work he reflects upon this aesthetic ‘confinement’. For instance, in a dream-state he feels capable of writing an heroic ode but, on waking, he ‘murmur’d o’er a humbler strain,/A sonnet’, modestly contrasting his ‘weak words’ with the ‘rolling chords’ of epic.¹ Elsewhere, commencing a ‘soaring ode’, Tennyson Turner, with characteristic self-effacement, feels ‘Like some poor sparrow, captured by a hawk,/And borne on alien wings from his abode/Beneath the sheltering eaves’. Like Hopkins, he fears ‘I shall grow faint at heart/To see a falcon tower’, and concludes, ‘tis best for me/To house and peep, lest I be swoop’d away’ (‘My First and Last Strophe’, CXLVIII, Sonnets, 183). Joseph Phelan has justly noted that Tennyson Turner ‘seems to have been unique in absorbing so completely [the sonnet’s] language of retirement, restriction and voluntary self-imprisonment’, in consequently cultivating an aesthetic shaped by ‘a disabling fear of stepping beyond self-imposed limits’.² Similarly, in ‘Resuscitation of Fancy’, the poet finds that his thoughts are ‘blunted by the stress/Of the hard world’ and his fancy has ‘wax’d dull’, and yet the arrival of the dawn, with ‘one sole star’ and a ‘wild-rose odour’, restoreshis poeticpower (CX, Sonnets, 145).