Author: Roderick C. Tennyson

LibriVox volunteers ring in the new year with nineteen recordings of <em>Ring Out, Wild Bells</em> by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. This was the weekly poetry project for the week of December 31st, 2006.

In Memoriam is Tennyson's elegiac tribute to his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died in 1833 at the age of 22. Tennyson wrote this long poem over 17 years as a chronicle of his mourning process. The poem became a favorite of Queen Victoria when she was grieving for her husband, and was one of the most popular and artistically influential poems of the Victorian period. (Summary by gloriana).

LibriVox volunteers bring you 11 different recordings of <em>The Kraken</em> by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. This was the weekly poetry project for the week of October 28th, 2007.

LibriVox volunteers bring you 19 different recordings of <em>The Miller's Daughter</em> by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. This was the weekly poetry project for the week of July 13th, 2008.

5Beauties of Tennyson

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson

A collection of Tennyson's poetry :<br/> 1 The Brook - 00:16 <br/> 2 Song from "Maud" - 1:20 <br/> 3 A Farewell - 2:34 <br/> 4 Song from “Maud” - 3:26 <br/> 5 Break, Break, Break - 4:53 <br/> 6 From “Locksley Hall”- 5:43 <br/> 7 Song from “Maud” - 6:43 <br/> 8 Song from “The Princess” - 7:43 <br/> 9 Lillian - 8:37 <br/> 10 Ring out, Wild Bells - 9:52 <br/> 11 From “The Princess” - 11:27 <br/> 12 Song From “The Princess” - 12:43 <br/> 13 From “Enoch Arden” - 13:58 <br/> 14 From “Enoch Arden” - 15:36 <br/> 15 The Charge of the Light Brigade- 16:56 <br/> 16 From “The May Queen” - 18:51 <br/> 17 Song from “The Princess” - 19:36 <br/> 18 From “Harold” - 20:14 <br/> 19 From “The Revenge” - 21:28 <br /><br />(From Sam Stinsson)

6To...As when with downcast eyes

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson

LibriVox volunteers bring you 10 recordings of To...As when with downcast eyes by Alfred Lord Tennyson. This was the Weekly Poetry project for August 15th, 2010.

LibriVox volunteers bring you 13 recordings of The Higher Pantheism by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. This was the Weekly Poetry project for September 18, 2011.<br><br>Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, FRS was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular poets in the English language. ( Summary by Wikipedia )

8Idylls of the King

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Idylls of the King, published between 1856 and 1885, is a cycle of twelve narrative poems by the English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson which retells the legend of King Arthur, his knights, his love for Guinevere and her tragic betrayal of him, and the rise and fall of Arthur's kingdom. The whole work recounts Arthur's attempt and failure to lift up mankind and create a perfect kingdom, from his coming to power to his death at the hands of the traitor Mordred. Individual poems detail the deeds of various knights, including Lancelot, Geraint, Galahad, and Balin and Balan, and also Merlin and the Lady of the Lake. (Summary by Wikipedia)

9Princess

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The Princess is a serio-comic blank verse narrative poem, written by Alfred Tennyson, published in 1847. The poem tells the story of an heroic princess who forswears the world of men and founds a women's university where men are forbidden to enter. The prince to whom she was betrothed in infancy enters the university with two friends, disguised as women students. They are discovered and flee, but eventually they fight a battle for the princess's hand. (Summary by Wikipedia)

10Maud, and Other Poems

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson

A collection of poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, his first book of poetry after having become poet laureate in 1850. Among the "other poems" is <i>The Charge of the Light Brigade</i>, the most well-known poem in this collection. However, the bulk of the text is the poem <i>Maud</i>, which explores love, courtship, loss, grief, and purpose through the eyes of the emotionally unstable poet narrator. (Summary by TriciaG)

This poem was published just six weeks after the event, its lines emphasize the valour of the cavalry in bravely carrying out their orders, regardless of the obvious outcome. <br /> The Charge of the Light Brigade was a charge of British light cavalry led by Lord Cardigan against Russian forces during the Battle of Balaclava on 25 October 1854 in the Crimean War. Lord Raglan, overall commander of the British forces, had intended to send the Light Brigade to pursue and harry a retreating Russian artillery battery, a task well-suited to light cavalry. Due to miscommunication in the chain of command, the Light Brigade was instead sent on a frontal assault against a different artillery battery, one well-prepared with excellent fields of defensive fire.(Summary from Wikipedia)

12Tithonus

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, FRS was Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular British poets. "Tithonus" doesn't mean a whole lot without the knowledge that the speaker is a mythological character who was loved by a goddess and was granted immortality, but not immortal youth. Since the gods could not take back their gifts, he was doomed to slowly suffer the extremes of decay as he grew ever older and older. (Summary by Leonard Wilson)

13Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson

To those unacquainted with Tennyson's conscientious methods, it may seem strange that a volume of 160 pages is necessary to contain those poems written and published by him during his active literary career, and ultimately rejected as unsatisfactory. Of this considerable body of verse, a great part was written, not in youth or old age, but while Tennyson's powers were at their greatest. Whatever reasons may once have existed for suppressing the poems that follow, the student of English literature is entitled to demand that the whole body of Tennyson's work should now be open, without restriction or impediment, to the critical study to which the works of his compeers are subjected. - Summary by Editor's Note

In the poem "Enoch Arden," Tennyson's epic narrative of the enduring power of love in the face of insurmountable odds, is found a classic example of the determination of the human spirit to triumph in circumstances that address the true meaning of the power of love itself. Wanting only the very best for his impoverished wife and family, seaman Enoch Arden undertakes precarious work which leaves him marooned and presumed lost at sea. On his return home Enoch finds his family well and prospering but his wife remarried. Faced with a love for his family deeper than the oceans he sailed, Enoch must decide whether to intrude into this idyllic scene of domestic happiness or meet old age and death alone and in obscurity. - Summary by Bruce Kachuk

15Maud, and Other Poems (Version 2)

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Surely everyone knows “Maud”? Isn’t that the Victorian love song, where the man waits by the garden gate for his lover to appear for a secret rendezvous? Well, that may be the song, but Tennyson’s poem is longer and very much darker. It deals not with love but with the obsession of an unstable young man with the seventeen-year-old Maud, and his gradual descent into madness. The poem’s narrator has been excluded from an evening ball being held at Maud’s home, The Hall, and has climbed into her garden uninvited, convincing himself by a misreading the Language of Flowers that she has sent him a love-token in the form of a rose blossom. After the guests have left, Maud and her brother step out into the dawn, and soon the brother is lying mortally wounded at the narrator’s hand. He flees abroad, and later loses his reason after hearing of Maud’s own death. Finally, the narrator insists that he has at last recovered from his “old hysterical mock-disease” and has awakened to a better mind, fighting for his country in the Crimean War. But can he be believed? Many early reviewers took the narrator as stating the poet's own views on war, but Tennyson himself responded that he would hardly have chosen a narrator with an "hereditary vein of insanity" to represent his personal opinions. The collection includes several other well-known Tennyson poems, including “The Brook, an Idyl”, and “The Charge of the Light Brigade”. (Summary by Michael Maggs)

This is Tennyson at his best. This is Tennyson, the master poet at his most descriptive, his most insightful, his most enlightening. This set of four poems has been carefully selected to depict life and life journeys - journeys that encompass timelessness and tragedy, fragility and hope - in ways that illuminate the constant cloud of wonder surrounding the ephemeral quality of existence. <br><br> These are four magnificent poems that speak of life, its tragedies, its loneliness, its dangers and its brevity in a superb juxtaposition with the enduring and unchanging character of the natural world. This unchanging character is illustrated by the endlessness of the flowing water of a brook, the ability of the "Wind of the western sea" to unite a family, or indeed the solace of callous indifference the sea can provide to someone experiencing a tragedy. <br><br> These are poems that depict relationships between mankind and the natural world in contrast but also in a marked and intricate interdependency. The essential theme of this collection - the permanence of nature over the transience of mankind's corporeal reality - is best summarized by Tennyson's memorable lines from "The Brook": "For men may come and men may go / But I go on for ever."<br> - Summary by Bruce Kachuk

17Eagle

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson

LibriVox volunteers bring you 21 recordings of The eagle by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.<br> This was the Weekly Poetry project for September 18, 2022. <br> ------<br> "A single line, nay, a single word, and a scene is by magic before us, as here where the sea is looked down upon from an immense height:— The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls. (from the Introduction to The Early Poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson by John Churton Collins)

This amazing collection of some of Tennyson's best and most capricious poems takes us on a whimsical voyage, an allegorical voyage like no other - and we will be in good hands for at the tiller is Lord Tennyson himself. We will be guided by this master poet through a fantastic imaginary world of things that may exist, things that are, and those that may lie ahead. Our explorations will be wide-ranging as we consider with the poet, other life forms and existences and go on to explore diverse reactions to the events and pathos of lives extended to their fullest and the passion involved when the weight of lives lived as victims are realized to be wanting, melancholy and dismal. <br> <br> And as we, all of us, continue our individual voyages through this phenomenon we collectively call life and as we face the tribulations intrinsic to daily existence, we can't help but pose questions similar to those Tennyson addresses in this selection of superlative and prescient poems. And as we age and more cogently realize, "The night comes on that knows not morn," the poet attempts to provide solace in his assertion that, "Nothing was born; / Nothing will die; / All things will change."<br> <br> Change, it could be said, is the common thread that unites this superb collection of works created by a master poet - change, with an underlying current of the continuity that unites us all as we each proceed toward the time when we shall, "cease to be all alone."<br> - Summary by Bruce Kachuk<br>