Note 8 — Early Poems (continued 4)

In Professor Tyndall’s reminiscences of Tennyson, inserted in Tennyson’s Life, he says he once asked him for some explanation of this line, and the poet’s reply was: “The power of explaining such concentrated expressions of the imagination was very different from that of writing them”. And on another occasion he said very happily: “Poetry is like shot silk with many glancing colours. Every reader must find his own interpretation, according to his ability, and according to his sympathy with the poet”. Poetry in its essential forms always suggests infinitely more than it expresses, and at once inspires and kindles the intelligence which is to comprehend it; if that intelligence, which is perhaps only another name for sympathy, does not exist, then, in Byron’s happy sarcasm:— “The gentle readers wax unkind, And, not so studious for the poet’s ease, Insist on knowing what he means, a hard And hapless situation for a bard”. Possibly Tennyson may have had in his mind Keats’s line:— “There was an awful rainbow once in heaven”