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The “High-Born Maiden” Symbol in Tennyson

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Lionel Stevenson
Lionel Stevenson*
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
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Extract

In spite of the wide range of topics and techniques in the poetry of Tennyson, a reader is apt to become aware of certain recurrences which eventually assume an air of familiarity. The present study deals with one of the most persistent of these recurrences, which is especially significant because of a process of change that affected it over a period of years, symptomatic of a gradual shift in the poet's outlook.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 63 , Issue 1: Issue 1 part 1 , March 1948 , pp. 234 - 243
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1948

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References

1 “Tennyson, Browning, and a Romantic Fallacy,” Univ. of Toronto Quarterly, xiii (Jan., 1944), 175–195.

Note 1a in page 234 The reclusive poet and the unattainable maiden appear also in Alastor. Conflicting theories as to what they signify are discussed by Evan K. Gibson : “Alastor: a Reconsideration,” PMLA, lxii (Dec, 1947), 1022–45.

2 Of The Lover's Tale, composed when he was eighteen, Tennyson said, “that was written before I had ever seen a Shelley, though it is called Shelleyan.” Hallam, Lord Tennyson, Tennyson, a Memoir (London: Macmillan & Co., 1897), ii, 285, 498.

3 Tennyson in Egypt (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press, 1942).

4 F. T. Palgrave said that the poem was based upon an “Italian romance.” This has been convincingly identified by L. S. Potwin, “The Source of Tennyson's The Lady of Shalott,” MLN, xvii (Dec, 1902), 237–239.

5 Tennyson stated positively to Alfred Ainger that “the new-born love for something, for some one in the wide world from which she has been so long secluded, takes her out of the region of shadows into that of realities.” Tennyson, a Memoir, i, 117.

6 Tennyson, a Memoir, I, 118.

7 After the present study had been written, this particular parallel was pointed out by Professor Hoxie N. Fairchild in a letter to The Times Literary Supplement (January 11, 1947), p. 23.

8 Carl Gustav Jung, The Integration of the Personality (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1939), pp. 78–79. See also Psychological Types (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1923), pp. 588–599, and Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1928), pt. ii, ch. ii. The same archetypal symbol as it figures in the work of two other poets is discussed by S. W. Holmes, “Browning's Sordello and Jung,” PMLA, LVI (Sept., 1941), 774–777, and by G. W. Foster, “The Archetypal Imagery of T. S. Eliot,” PMLA, LX (June, 1945), 580–582.