Ode to Memory
Lord
Alfred
Tennyson
Tennyson, Alfred
Metadata research and editing
DVPP Project Team
Kaitlyn
Fralick
University of Victoria Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry Project
Victoria, BC, Canada
In the public domain
Poem included in the unsigned Tennyson’s Poems
(721-41) (KF2), by John Wilson (Wellesley Index) (AC).
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
31
194
732–733
Come forth, I charge thee, arise,
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Ode to Memory
.
Come forth, I charge thee, arise,
Thou of the many tongues, the myriad eyes !
Though comest not with shows of flaunting
vines
Unto mine inner eye,
Divinest memory !
Thou wert not nursed by the waterfall,
Which ever sounds and shines
A pillar of white light upon the wall
Of purple cliffs, aloof descried,
Come from the woods that belt the gray
hillside,
The seven elms, the poplars four
That stand beside my father’s door,
And chiefly from the brook that loves
To purl o’er matted cress and ribbed sand,
Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves,
Drawing into his narrow earthen urn,
In every elbow and turn,
The filter’d tribute of the rough woodland.
O ! hither lead thy feet !
Pour round mine ears the livelong bleat
Of the thick-fleeced sheep from wattled folds,
Upon the ridged wolds,
When the first matin-song hath waked loud
Over the dark dewy earth forlorn,
What time the amber morn
Forth gushes from beneath a lowhung cloud.
Large doweries doth the raptured eye
To the young spirit present
When first she is wed ;
And like a bride of old
In triumph led,
With music and sweet showers
Of festal flowers,
Unto the dwelling she must sway.
Well hast thou done, great artist Memory,
In setting round thy first experiment
With royal framework of wrought gold ;
Needs must thou dearly love thy first essay,
And foremost in thy various gallery
Place it, where sweetest sunlight falls
Upon the storied walls,
For the discovery
And newness of thine art so pleased thee,
That all which thou hast drawn of fairest
Or boldest since, but lightly weighs
With thee unto the love thou bearest
The firstborn of thy genius. Artist-like,
Ever retiring thou dost gaze
On the prime labour of thine early days :
No matter what the sketch might be ;
Whether the high field on the bushless Pike,
Or even a sandbuilt ridge
Of heaped hills that mound the sea,
Overblown with murmurs harsh,
Or even a lowly cottage, whence we see
Sketch’d wide and wild the waste enormous
marsh,
Where from the frequent bridge,
Emblems or glimpses of eternity,
The trenched waters run from sky to sky ;
Or a garden bower’d close
With pleached alleys of the trailing rose,
Long alleys falling down to twilight grots,
Or opening upon level plots
Of crowned lilies, standing near
Purplespiked lavender :
Whither in after life retired
From brawling storms,
From weary wind,
With youthful fancy reinspired,
We may hold converse with all forms
Of the many-sided mind,
The few whom passion hath not blinded,
Subtle-thoughted, myriad-minded.
My friend, with thee to live alone,
Methinks were better than to own
A crown, a sceptre, and a throne.
O strengthen me, enlighten me !
I faint in this obscurity,
Thou dewy dawn of memory.