We can imagine the poet in such a lyric saluting the
setting sun and prophesying the sun's resurrection. There is something
extraordinarily typical of Tennyson's scientific faith in the fact that
this, one of the most sentimental and elemental of his poems, opens with
the two lines:
"Move eastward, happy earth, and leave
Yon orange sunset waning slow."
Rivers had often been commanded to flow by poets, and flowers to blossom
in their season, and both were doubtless grateful for the permission.
But the terrestrial globe of science has only twice, so far as we know,
been encouraged in poetry to continue its course, one instance being
that of this poem, and the other the incomparable "Address to the
Terrestrial Globe" in the "Bab Ballads."
There was, again, another poetic element entirely peculiar to Tennyson,
which his critics have, in many cases, ridiculously confused with a
fault. This was the fact that Tennyson stood alone among modern poets
in the attempt to give a poetic character to the conception of Liberal
Conservatism, of splendid compromise. The carping critics who have
abused Tennyson for this do not see that it was far more daring and
original for a poet to defend conventionality than to defend a cart-load
of revolutions. His really sound and essential conception of Liberty,
"Turning to scorn with lips divine
The falsehood of extremes,"
is as good a definition of Liberalism as has been uttered in poetry in
the Liberal century.
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