Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning belong to the Victorian age and they occupy a prominent place as a pre-eminent poet of their age. Both the poets apply new techniques and styles in poetry writing. But both these poets adopt their own style in their writing. Browning focuses on the psyche of his frantic characters and tries to look deep inside of such characters in his writings.
Browning tries to understand human nature, religion, and society properly. He Studies the innermost psychology of characters. On the other hand, Tennyson Draws material from external specific realities, ideas, and objects and tries to express it through ornate language.
Another significant difference between poems of Alfred Tennyson's and RobertBrowning is in their nature of expression. Browning's writings are always energetic but in Tennison's tone of expression is generally melancholic where he tends to give touch of nostalgia. Their poetic concerns are hardly related.
Browning systematically depicts the essence of a character whereas Tennyson Gives importance in inducing and endorsing a particular mood.
In terms of the structure of Tennyson’s thoughts on the meaning of poetry, the scholars find a four-part division: poetry as release from emotion, poetry as release from thought, poetry as self-realization, and poetry as mission/prophecy. Canto 95is seen, from this view, as the climax of the poem.
The most conspicuous theme in the poem is, of course, grief. The poet’s emotional
progression from utter despair to hopefulness fits into the structure observed by the scholars. The early poems are incredibly personal and bleak. Tennyson feels abandoned and lost. He cannot sleep and personifies the cruelty of Sorrow, “Priestess in the vaults ofDeath.” He wonders if poetry is capable of expressing his loss. He wanders by his friend's old house, sick with sadness. Memory is oppressive.
Nature herself seems hostile,chaotic. His grief has a concomitant in a lack of religious faith.However, as the poems proceed, the poet begins to grapple with his grief and find ways to move beyond it. He learns, as scholar Joseph Becker writes, to
“experience deeper layers of grief so that he may transcend the limitations of time and space that Hallam’s death represents.” He has learned to love better and embrace his sorrow, which he now personifies as a wife, not a mistress. He learns that Hallam, while once his flesh-and- blood friend whom he misses dearly, is now a transcendent spiritual being, something the human race can aspire to become.
Although Tennyson will never fully recover from the loss of Hallam, he can move forward; the wedding of his other sister establishes this result for him.One of the reasons why the poem is so lauded by critics is its engagement with some contemporary Victorian religious and scientific debates and discourses. Tennyson is dealing not only with his sorrow over Hallam’s death, but also with the lack of religious faith that came with it. He wonders what the point of life is if man’s individual soul is not immortal after death. His emotions vacillate between doubt and faith. He eventually comes to terms with the fact that Hallam may be gone in bodily form, but that he is a perfect spiritual being whose consciousness endures past his death. Becker writes that Tennyson experiences “renewed faith ... that both individual and human survival are predicated on spiritual rather than physical terms.”
Also, significantly, he ruminates over the new scientific findings of the age, which are forerunners of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. In particular, Charles Lyell’s
Principles of Geology (1846) undermined the biblical story of creation. Several of the
cantos deal with the ideas of the randomness and brutality of Nature towards man. Canto LVI has the poet anguishing, “So careful of the type? But no. / From scraped cliff and quarried stone / She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone: / I care for nothing, all shall go.’”One of the most famous lines in the English language, “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” is also in this canto.Tennyson grapples with what all of this means in terms of his religious faith as well as in the context of his loss; death is very, very long. The critic William Flesch observes, “Tennyson feels the utter oppressiveness of the emptiness and vacuity of time that Lyell has so devastatingly demonstrated. Within that, he feels the pain of his mourning forHallam, a pain that may be sometimes intermittent but is always at the core of his being.”
Ultimately, though, the fact that love prevails and persists in the vastness of Nature givesTennyson the hope he needs to place his faith in transcendence and salvation once more.The poet never rejected the actual findings of Lyell and others, but he certainly saw themas only partial answers to the mysteries of the universe and believed God still cared very much for human beings and that there was hope for such humans to attain a higher state.
Locksley Hall
This poem is a wonderful creation of Tennyson which was published in 1842.
In the "Locksley Hall" the speaker shows "Locksley Hall" as young life and it also embodies the moral aspect, lackness and thirst of new blood. This beautiful piece is nothing but a piece of fancy in which we get the idea about life of the author of the poem.
This dramatic monologue poem starts with sadness because of the loss of his much loved cousin Amy.In fact, beyond the surface meaning, the poem contains notions of VictorianAge in which the poet lived. The speaker compares his loss of his cousin with the loss ofVictorian age which has lost its own artistic capability.
The speaker traces parental authority in the poem. The consequence of parental authority is uttered through pitiful misconception by making of irritable scenery which replicates the anguish. For example-The speaker displays his depression without expecting offspring. Imagery used, with the reference of Orion and Pleiades, which shine in spring and winter are omitted by speakers' depressed mood.
The images which hold the poem are the brutality of time and its rapidity and according to the poet , these elements destroy the relationship between lovers and lovers' creative capability. Here, the symbol, harp which creates harmony is devastated. The loss of love makes comprehend and doubt the speaker about his fate when the father of Amy forces her to marry a guy, whom her father seems perfect.
The speaker states that suicide is the only solution to escape from depressive condition.The speaker states that suicide is the only solution to escape from depressive condition.His thoughtfulness drives from individual to society. To him the harm of the effect indicates one aspect of social injustice. The speaker's consciousness over the social awareness offers him a new dream of the future.
At the end of the poem, the speaker's mind remains with psychological problems through self-confidence which also indicates social progress that means spring is not so far away.
Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning belong to the Victorian age and they occupy a prominent place as a pre-eminent poet of their age. Both the poets apply new techniques and styles in poetry writing. But both these poets adopt their own style in their writing. Browning focuses on the psyche of his frantic characters and tries to look deep inside of such characters in his writings.
Browning tries to understand human nature, religion, and society properly. He Studies the innermost psychology of characters. On the other hand, Tennyson Draws material from external specific realities, ideas, and objects and tries to express it through ornate language.
Another significant difference between poems of Alfred Tennyson's and RobertBrowning is in their nature of expression. Browning's writings are always energetic but in Tennison's tone of expression is generally melancholic where he tends to give touch of nostalgia. Their poetic concerns are hardly related.
Browning systematically depicts the essence of a character whereas Tennyson Gives importance in inducing and endorsing a particular mood.
Tennyson’s poetry is essentially lyrical; thereby his dramatic monologues seem
half-
hearted attempts when compared to Browning’s.
In Tennyson we see the dramatic monologues used quite differently and the same characteristics found in his lyrical poetry are present in his dramatic monologues.
“St. Simeon Stylites” is Tennyson’s most Browningesque poem in
the sense of irony.
We can easily perceive that Simeon is eluding himself as being the martyr who suffers to achieve sainthood but his suffering is self-inflicted and he is trying to convince us with false humility while his spiritual pride is clearly evident in his words.
Nevertheless, St. Simon Stylites is character
er who is very similar to Tennyson’s
other characters. Like Marianna he is an isolated figure in a confined space leading a life which is no life. The poem is again about the penultimate moment ofSt. Simeon who is sitting on a pillar waiting for his reward of sainthood. In Contrast, we do not find these sorts of similarities in Browning.
Likewise, the dramatic situations of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” and “Tithonus”although fascinating in their own right do not exhibit Browning’s ability to inhabit
different personas and refine himself out of existence.
Browning’s poetry is his attempt to understand human nature, religion, and
society. In all his dramatic monologues we encounter different personas that provide us with different points of views and the reader is ultimately asked to elicit his own conclusion
s. For example, in “Fra Lippo Lippi” Browning
satirizes the essentially corrupt relationship between the Italian Renaissance tradition of art.
Tennyson and browning are important Victorian poets, they differ in background and Style. Browning is considered the more innovative of the two poeta due to his often unusual syntax, but actually under his mellifluous and fluid surface style, Tennyson is perhaps even more radically innovative. Both poets wrote dramatic monologues.
Comparative study between Charles Dickens and George Eliot :
Charles Dickens and George Eliot both are great Victorian writer. They both famous for their writing. In the novel , Oliver Twist and Middlemarch, Charles Dickens and George Eliot have presented the Victorian Society by one or another way. Both novel were written in the Victorian age. In Oliver Twist, major themes is a poverty, orphanhood, starvation, child labouring where as in the middlemarch major themes is a marriage, vocation ,desire for own identity, severity of the society. These are themes of both texts which govern the narrative of both novels.
We can see that the autobiographical element in works of Eliot and Dickens. Oliver Twist and middlemarch both autobiographical novel. In Oliver Twist Charles Dickens describe the wretched condition of children who work in the work house. It is Dickens 's own experience of working in the shoe-polish factory. In middlemarch Eliot presented her novel in a new way rather than stereotypical fantasies of the conventional romance fiction.
Both novelist have depicted the Victorian society in their novels.
