ABSTRACT
When Charles Tennyson's Sonnets and Fugitive Pieces appeared in 1830 they were well received. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge preferred them to Alfred's work, and Leigh Hunt offered his imprimatur in The Tatler, though he was to claim later that he already discerned in them 'a want of active poetic faith'. The 'balmy-sweet' influence of the twilight is subtly modified by the unusual use of 'fraught', which introduces a faint note of tension and prepares for the direct and haunting statement of human isolation in the garden, the synecdoche throwing emphasis upon the loneliness of the poet. This sonnet is from the 1864 volume, but it would be misleading to suggest that Tennyson Turner's later poetry is universally marked by this sombre tone. The sonnets, rather like a diary, reflect the flux and reflux in the poet's daily life, and the 1868 volume contains several celebratory nature poems which do not suggest a confirmed melancholia.
