Bibliofreakblog

FreeVerse: lxxvii

I was thinking about poetry last night after discussing it a little bit on That’s How I Blog (and if you didn’t listen to it, you can still go back and hear the whole thing), and about my love-hate relationship with poetry.  So that’s probably why this poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (why oh why don’t they just call him Lord Alfred Tennyson?) caught my eye as I was browsing through a collection of his poetry.

It’s simply titled “lxxvii” as all of the poems in that particular collection, In Memoriam A.H.H., which was a requiem for his friend the poet Arthur Henry Hallum.  This is the same collection that has the poem with the lines “I hold it true, whate’er befall; / I feel it when I sorrow most; / ‘Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.”

“lxxvii” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

What hope is here for the moderrhyme
     To him, who turns a musing eye
     On songs, and deeds, and lives, that lie
Foreshorten’d in the tract of time?

These mortal lullabies of pain
     May bind a book, may line a box,
     May serve to curl a maiden’s locks;
Or when a thousand moons shall wane

A man upon a stall may find,
     And, passing, turn the page that tells
     A grief, then changed to something else,
Sung by a long-forgotten mind.

But what of that?  My darken’d ways
     Shall ring with music all the same; 
     To breathe my loss is more than fame,
To utter love more sweet than praise.