This chapter is about the resourcefulness with which Tennyson said things and then returned to say them again. Poets and critics have often thought repetition fundamental to the way that poetry normally gets about its business; but its presence in Tennyson is more than exemplary. For Tennyson was peculiarly preoccupied, in mutually complicating ways, by the ideas of change (its dreadful inescapability, its redemptive progressiveness) and of changelessness (its stultifying paralysis, its wonderful immutability); and that involved preoccupation led him to find in repetitiveness one of his richest poetical resources. Of all kinds of verbalism, repetition surely feels the most purely verbal, most innocently lyrical: ‘But my kisses bring again, bring again, | Seals of love, but seal'd in vain, seal'd in vain.’ At the furthest remove from a normal semantic act, such repeats appear the hall-mark, rather, of what Auden once called the ‘absolute gift’ of music. But (as I tried to say in the Introduction), music and meaning are always crossing paths in Tennyson poems. Repeating something might, for example, evoke a claustrophic inability to move on; but equally it might create a luxuriant sense of dwelling ease; and, at its most peculiarly Tennysonian, it might manage to do both at once.

Of course, imagining styles of changelessness hardly exiles the thought of change: the stayings-still of repetition are always likely to incite the question that stirs in so much Tennyson, ‘Is this the end? Is this the end?’ (IM xii. 16). With each repeat in a succession of repetitions, your anticipation of its ending grows stronger, while your suspicion that it might yet continue grows tenser: imagine the first audience of King Lear listening to the old man cry, ‘Never, never, never, never, never’. Tennyson's studies in reiterative immobility typically brace themselves for alteration, often occupying a suspended moment just before kinds of catastrophe, ‘Deep in forethought of dark calamities, | Sick of the coming time and coming woe’ (‘Pierced through with knotted thorns of barren pain’, R. (i). 190, ll. 2–3).