Note 14 — Early Poems (continued 2)

From 1833 till 1853 this stanza ran:— “The tall masts quivered as they lay afloat, The temples and the people and the shore, One drew a sharp knife thro’ my tender throat Slowly,—and nothing more”. It is curious that Tennyson should have allowed the last line to stand so long; possibly it may have been to defy Lockhart’s sarcastic commentary: “What touching simplicity, what pathetic resignation—he cut my throat, nothing more!” With Tennyson’s picture should be compared Æschylus, Agamem., 225-49, and Lucretius, i., 85-100. For the bold and picturesque substitution of the effect for the cause in the “bright death quiver’d” cf. Sophocles, Electra, 1395, νεακόνητον αἷμα χειροῖν ἔχων, “with the newly-whetted blood on his hands”. So “vulnus” is frequently used by Virgil, and cf. Silius Italicus, Punica, ix., 368-9:— Per pectora sævas Exceptat mortes.