ABSTRACT
The claim that the English Idylls of the 1830s 'attracted Tennyson's mild bourgeois reading public' needs to be balanced by a consideration of their moment of production and by a reading of the 'political unconscious' of these texts. The collocation of funereal and marital bells offers a hint of the poem's narrative trajectory, whilst the scenario as a whole pictures retreat within the dark leaves to counterbalance the inexorability of time marked by the minster clock and flowing stream. The passage may in particular be read off against the debatable role of the artist in early-Victorian England. Homi Bhabha has suggested that there are 'culturally unassimilable words and scenes', such as Forster's caves, that serve to 'suture the colonial text in a hybrid time and truth that survives and subverts the generalisations of literature and history'.
