Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) 

Tennyson is not the last Romantic, but he is the last poet of the nineteenth-century to fully capture, in his early poems, the lyrical spirit of his great predecessors. A poem like "Timbuctoo" echoes the naturalistic cadences of Byron and Wordsworth while also resonating with the voice of the Victorian bard-sage to be. Tennyson's attitude toward nature, like that of his strong precursors, is hard to represent in singular or unified terms. Whatever consolations nature offers in Tennyson are almost always overshadowed by a sense that nature does not care about human beings or that nature swallows up petty human concerns in its vastness and impersonal timelessness. 
     Tennyson's "The Kraken" is one of the great images of Romantic natural history. The poet imagines a mythological sea-beast, derived from various Norse legends, in terms that present an almost scientifically accurate description of an actual creature, the giant squid:

              Below the thunders of the upper deep;
               Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
               His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
               The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
               About his shadowy sides: above him swell
               Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
               And far away into the sickly light,
               From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
               Unnumber’d and enormous polypi
               Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
               There hath he lain for ages and will lie
               Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
               Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
               Then once by man and angels to be seen,
               In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.   (1830)

By the time Tennyson finally agrees to publish his masterpiece In Memoriam (1850) (after years of delay and revision), he has become as much the producer as the recorder of numerous widespread Victorian sentiments. This poem offers clear indications of the powerful cultural influences produced by the catastrophism of Cuvier, the geological speculations of Lyell, and the proto-Darwinian thinking of  Lamarck, von Humboldt, and St. Hilaire, among others.  (A.N.)

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