Note 25 — Early Poems

1833. I wish I were the girdle Buckled about her dainty waist, That her heart might beat against me, In sorrow and in rest. I should know well if it beat right, I’d clasp it round so close and tight. This stanza bears so close a resemblance to a stanza in Joshua Sylvester’s Woodman’s Bear (see Sylvester’s Works, ed. 1641, p. 616) that a correspondent asked Tennyson whether Sylvester had suggested it. Tennyson replied that he had never seen Sylvester’s lines (Life of Tennyson, iii., 51). The lines are:— But her slender virgin waste Made mee beare her girdle spight Which the same by day imbrac’t Though it were cast off by night That I wisht, I dare not say, To be girdle night and day. For other parallels see the present Editor’s Illustrations of Tennyson, p. 39.