Note 2 — Early Poems (continued 3)

“Gleams,” it appears, is a Lincolnshire word for the cry of the curlew, and so by removing the comma after call we get an interpretation which perhaps improves the sense and certainly gets rid of a very un-Tennysonian cumbrousness in the second line. But Tennyson had never, he said, heard of that meaning of “gleams,” adding he wished he had. He meant nothing more in the passage than “to express the flying gleams of light across a dreary moorland when looking at it under peculiarly dreary circumstances”. See for this, Life, iii., 82.