ABSTRACT
Published 1832, revised subsequently. Written 1831–2. Hallam wrote to W. B. Donne, 13 Feb. 1831: ‘It is observable in the mighty models of art, left for the worship of ages by the Greeks, & those too rare specimens of Roman production which breathe a Greek spirit, that their way of imaging a mood of the human heart in a group of circumstances, each of which reciprocally affects & is affected by the unity of that mood, resembles much Alfred’s manner of delineation, and should therefore give additional sanction to the confidence of our praise. I believe you will find instances in all the Greek poems of the highest order, at present I can only call into distinct recollection the divine passage about the sacrifice of Iphigenia in Lucretius, the desolation of Ariadne in Catullus, and the fragments of Sappho, in which I see much congeniality to Alfred’s peculiar power.’ Hallam then transcribed The Southern Mariana (AHH,pp. 401–2). She, and the other women, Iphigenia (for Lucretius’s passage, see l. 107n.), Ariadne, and Sappho, perhaps constitute an early grouping of ‘fair women’. In Allen MS, it is entitled The Legend of Fair Women; all variants are below. T. comments on l. 3: ‘Chaucer, the first great English poet, wrote the Legend of Good Women. From among these Cleopatra alone appears in my poem.’ J. F. A. Pyre points out that T.’s stanza form is used in Vaughan’s Psalm 104 (The Formation of Tennyson’s Style, 1921,p. 44). Cp. the stanza of The Poet (I 243), and of The Palace of Art (p. 50).
