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Tennyson's lyrical musicality has been acknowledged by scholars as 'one of [the] most memorable, sensuous, aestheticist voices' of the nineteenth century (Leighton, 2002, 65). This mnemonic and affective quality of Tennyson's verbal artistry is closely associated with an 'unrelenting fascination with ideas of recurrence and return in life' 'inherited' from the great Romantic poets (Perry, 2005, 16), or a 'sense of grasping at memory through language' 'borrowed' from Wordsworth (Thomas, 2019, 93). While Wordsworth's poetics of remembering does offer a structure and means for Tennyson to articulate his loss and locate his own form of consolation, this essay does not aim to set up Tennyson's rich auditory aesthetics as a derivation from his predecessor, but rather, to show how the poets are united in the expressiveness and indefiniteness of lyrical musicality to communicate their representations of the role of memory in relation to grief and suffering. In this essay, I present a fresh comparative reading of Tennyson's 'Tears, Idle Tears' and Wordsworth's 'Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood' to examine the poets' respective approach to grief and the idea of a possible consolation through the retrospective quality and mnemonic function of the lyric. My essay reveals how the poems' musical qualities and auditory poetics shape a paradoxical tension between idleness and progression, remembering and forgetting, loss and recompense in the 'depth' of tears.
Tennyson and Wordsworth create the experience of their poems as a musical performance or event, voicing or enunciating experience by retaining aspects of aurality and performativity in their language and poetics. 'Tears, Idle Tears', as a song embedded within a narrative poem, establishes itself explicitly as a form of musical performance accompanied by the harp: "'Let some one sing to us: lightlier move / The minutes fledged with music:' and a maid, / Of those beside her, smote her harp, and sang" (Ricks, 1987, II, 232). As for Wordsworth, he alludes in his lyrical poem to musical tradition and practice by composing in the form of an ode. Suggested by its meaning of 'song' in Greek, ф8р (Side), the ode has a special role for moral contemplation that fits with my concern about memory and retrospection (see Fogle and Fry, 2012; Ousby, 2000).
By conceiving their work as a...