ABSTRACT
Published 1889, written 26 May (Mat. iv 214). H.Nbk 55 has an epigrammatic version, a draft of ll. 9–12, 15–16; likewise, as Fame, in the Trinity trial edition or proofs. As Fame, it is in a Lincoln trial edition of 1889, where it consisted of ll. 1–4, 7–8. But other Harvard drafts suggest an earlier date. Lpr 165 (A below) is on the back of part of Becket (printed 1879) and The Northern Cobbler (1880); and Lpr 45 (B) is on the back of De Profundis (1880). Both these versions consist of section II only; T. extended and revised this in 1889, as is clear from another Lincoln trial edition of 1889, where ll. 5–8 had the title Fame and where furthermore section III is shown to be a late addition. The poem’s theme is common in T.; cp. the Epilogue to The Charge of the Heavy Brigade (III 96): ‘Old Horace… Earth passes, all is lost… The man remains’. Also Little Aubrey (III 637). Jowett wrote to T., Dec. 1858, suggesting topics for poems: ‘Have not many sciences such as Astronomy or Geology a side of feeling which is poetry?’ (Mem. i 433). Herbert Warren (Tennyson and His Friends, pp. 136–8) compares a letter by FitzGerald to E. B. Cowell in 1847, and remarks on the ‘extraordinarily close’ parallel. Since this letter was published in July 1889 in FitzGerald’s Letters and Literary Remains (ed. W. A. Wright, i 181–2), it may have influenced T. in his final drafting of the poem: ‘Yet, as I often think, it is not the poetical imagination, but bare Science that every day more and more unrolls a greater Epic than the Iliad; the history of the World, the infinitudes of Space and Time! I never take up a book of Geology or Astronomy but this strikes me. And when we think that Man must go on to discover in the same plodding way, one fancies that the Poet of to-day may as well fold his hands, or turn them to dig and delve, considering how soon the march of discovery will distance all his imaginations, [and] dissolve the language in which they are uttered…. It is not only that this vision of Time must wither the Poet’s hope of immortality; but it is in itself more wonderful than all the conceptions of Dante and Milton.’
