Locksley Hall

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Locksley Hall

"Locksley Hall" is a poem written by British Poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson and published in 1842. Though one of his masterworks, it is less well-known than his other literature. While narrating the emotions of a weary soldier come to his childhood home of Locksley Hall, it also furnished interesting predictions about a future world government.

1 Poetic form
2 Plot summary
3 The main character
4 Cultural influence
5 External links

[edit] Poetic form

"Locksley Hall" is written as a set of 97 rhyming couplets. Each line follows a modified version of trochaic octameter where the last unstressed syllable has been eliminated; moreover, there is generally a caesura, whether explicit or implicit, after the first four trochees in the line. Each couplet is separated as its own stanza.

The University of Toronto library identifies this form as "the old 'fifteener' line," quoting Tennyson, who claimed it was written in trochatics because his friend Arthur Hallam prescribed that meter. [1]

[edit] Plot summary

The unnamed protagonist is a soldier traveling with a small military unit. He asks his company to continue ahead as he pauses for sentimental reasons. He then quickly reveals that the place he has stopped is called Locksley Hall, and he spent his childhood there. The rest of the poem, though written as rhymed metered verse, follows the stream of consciousness of its protagonist, as an interior monologue. The protagonist struggles to reach some sort of catharsis on his childhood feelings.

In his monologue, the protagonist begins with fond memories of his childhood and love, but those memories quickly lead to a burst of anger because his love went unrequited. He proceeds to offer a biting criticism of his lover's new husband, interspersed with personal reflection. This criticism is only really interrupted when he reflects that his lover will eventually have a child, and will be more concerned with her child than about the protagonist. The protagonist promptly continues his angry tirade, this time directed at the mother-child relationship.

The protagonist reveals frustration with his present career, which he identifies as an escape from a depression and sense of hopelessness, saying:

What is that which I should turn to, lighting upon days like these?

Every door is barr'd with gold, and opens but to golden keys.

Every gate is throng'd with suitors, all the markets overflow.

I have but an angry fancy; what is that which I should do?

I had been content to perish, falling on the foeman's ground,

When the ranks are roll'd in vapour, and the winds are laid with sound. (lines 99-104)

In order to be free of his depression, the protagonist continues into a grand description of the world to come -- which he views as somewhat utopian, predicting a sort of new world order. He relapses into anger briefly again when he hears a bugle call from his comrades telling him to hurry up.

Much of the remainder of the poem is built up of an odd contrast between the beauty of civilization and the beauty of the noble savage. He recalls the land where he was born (which he only says is somewhere in the Orient), and lovingly notes its lack of civilization, describing it as "Summer isles of Eden" and "knots of Paradise."

In the end, he rejects the ideal of the noble savage, preferring the progress that civilization has made. He also immediately thereafter rejects Locksley Hall, and marches forth to meet his comrades.

[edit] The main character

Tennyson neither identifies the protagonist as a hero nor an anti-hero; the first half of the poem portrays him as a victim, but the second reveals that the protagonist is remarkably racist and sexist; for example:

Weakness to be wroth with weakness! woman’s pleasure, woman’s pain--

Nature made them blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain:

Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions, match’d with mine,

Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine (lines 149-152)

The narrator is also remarkably emotionally volatile through the poem. A good example[2] occurs when he reminisces about his love for a girl; while recalling the wonderful experiences of love, he immediately becomes infuriated with her, even going so far as to throw insults:

Many an evening by the waters did we watch the stately ships,

And our spirits rush’d together at the touching of the lips.

O my cousin, shallow-hearted! O my Amy, mine no more!

O the dreary, dreary moorland! O the barren, barren shore! (lines 37-40)

His anger at losing his love penetrates the poem, and reaches tremendous proportions.

In the narrator, Tennyson captures and displays many strong emotions -- placid insightfulness, wonder, love, jealousy, despair, and eventually a sort of catharsis. In the meantime, Tennyson uses him to convey a prophetic vision of how the world might become in the future; he presents several guesses at the upcoming future, but anticipates some sort of global union. Tennyson's work may well have been one of the first examples to do so.

[edit] Cultural influence

Though Alfred, Lord Tennyson is one of the most famous poets in English literature, "Locksley Hall" is one of his lesser-known works. This is not without exceptions, of course; the Wall Street Journal has quoted it to illustrate "a noble dream" that modern U.S. policy decisions may have been neglecting, and the same article claimed that Winston Churchill considered it "the most wonderful of modern prophecies" and Harry S. Truman carried the words in his wallet.^[1]

Lord Tennyson wrote a sequel to Locksley Hall in 1886, "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After". In the sequel Lord Tennyson describes how the industrialised nature of Britain has failed to fulfill the expectations of the poem of 1842. The poem would raise a famous rebuttal from Tennyson's friend, the Poet Laureate at the time, William Wordsworth.

A line in Locksley Hall would inspire the title of the historian Paul Kennedy's 2006 book on the United Nations, Parliament Of Man: The United Nations and the Quest for World Government