Tennyson And Stillicide

OED Stillicide 1. A falling of water, etc. in drops; a succession of drops. Now rare

"Wee see it also in the Stillicides of water, which if ther be water enough to follow, will Drawe themselues into a small thredd, because they will not discontinue." Francis Bacon

".although there is an allegorical or perhaps parabolic drift in the poem." Alfred Tennyson

Stories and voyages alike must always, somehow, end. Perhaps it is this surety of cessation, the incontrovertible fact of death, which lends each such explanatory power before the flux of human experience. Stories impose a contingent but necessary shape upon the inchoate mess of life lived to death, and the metaphoric potency of the voyage often replicate that shape at the level of image. Yet, "Turn to Mr Tennyson and what do you see? Still life - almost uniform still life. There is a motion of a kind - but of what kind?" Throughout his career Tennyson converts a refusal of ends into an art of suspension. Poems time and again evoke a voyage only to leave its hypothetical end stretching hazily beyond the limit of the narrative, incomplete or never begun at all. Vergins and margins, whether spatial, aural, or ontological, fade and blur, and things and people do not end how and when they should. Voices of the dead hover between sound and suggestion in In Memoriam, never dying down and never truly present either; with incremental, cyclical despair the mariners in 'The Voyage' are "dashed into the dawn" again and "again", a predicament familiar to the speaker of 'Remorse', whose soul possesses too much conscience to have rest, Too little to be ever blest To yon vast world of endless woe Unlighted by the cheerful day, My soul shall wing her weary way (ll.23-27) Concerns with beginnings, endings and a world of shadowy structures in-between suffuse Idylls of the King which eschews epic coherence for essays in kinds of persistence. From the King who always would 'come again'; to Merlin who embarks upon one death-haunted voyage only to end 'em-barked' in another kind of wooden 'vessel', not a boat but the container of the hollow oak tree; to the small vessel by which Elaine sails into death and the permanence of symbolic inscri ption, the poem moves in its 'phantom circles' (PA. 88), like Sir Percivale, pursuing the Grail, 'Expectant of the wonder that would be' (HG. 133). The small vessel tossed along on the stream of Time is a paradigm for Tennyson's self-reflexive poetic craft but it is a precarious one. Figuring forth a little boat in storm-tossed seas and the throbbing veins of the living body, Tennyson encompasses within its metaphoric bark the agony of existential vacillation and a crucial sense of doubt about aesthetic forms and ends.

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