142-510: The Homeric Hymns ( Ancient Greek : Ὁμηρικοὶ ὕμνοι , romanised : Homērikoì húmnoi ) are a collection of thirty-three ancient Greek hymns and one epigram . The hymns praise deities of the Greek pantheon and retell mythological stories, often involving a deity's birth, their acceptance among the gods on Mount Olympus , or the establishment of their cult . In antiquity, the hymns were generally, though not universally, attributed to
284-555: A baronetcy offered him by Disraeli in 1865 and 1868, finally accepting a peerage in 1883 at Gladstone 's earnest solicitation. In 1884 Victoria created him Baron Tennyson , of Aldworth in the County of Sussex and of Freshwater in the Isle of Wight . He took his seat in the House of Lords on 11 March 1884. Tennyson also wrote a substantial quantity of unofficial political verse, from
426-540: A difference of the arms of Thomas Tenison (1636–1715), Archbishop of Canterbury , themselves a difference of the arms of the 13th-century Denys family of Glamorgan and Siston in Gloucestershire, themselves a difference of the arms of Thomas de Cantilupe (c. 1218–1282), Bishop of Hereford , henceforth the arms of the See of Hereford ; the name "Tennyson" signifies "Denys's son", although no connection between
568-543: A pitch accent . In Modern Greek, all vowels and consonants are short. Many vowels and diphthongs once pronounced distinctly are pronounced as /i/ ( iotacism ). Some of the stops and glides in diphthongs have become fricatives , and the pitch accent has changed to a stress accent . Many of the changes took place in the Koine Greek period. The writing system of Modern Greek, however, does not reflect all pronunciation changes. The examples below represent Attic Greek in
710-458: A "surface" to his poetry's "depths, to the abyss of sorrow". Other poets such as W. H. Auden maintained a more critical stance, stating that Tennyson was the "stupidest" of all the English poets, adding that: "There was little about melancholia he didn't know; there was little else that he did." Tennyson's early poetry, with its medievalism and powerful visual imagery, was a major influence on
852-438: A blessed home, And there to wait a little while till you and Effie come, - To lie within the light of God, as I lie upon your breast, - And the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest. From "The May Queen" poem by Alfred Tennyson In 1833 Tennyson published his second book of poetry, which notably included
994-638: A bolder lad 'll woo me any sum- mer day; And I'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I'm to be Queen o' the May. If I can, I'll come again, mother, from out my resting-place; Though you'll not see me, mother, I shall look upon your face; Though I cannot speak a word, I shall hearken what you say, And be often, often with you when you think I'm far away. So now I think my time
1136-476: A characteristically Victorian manner, Tennyson combines a deep interest in contemporary science with an unorthodox, even idiosyncratic, Christian belief. Famously, he wrote in In Memoriam : "There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds." In Maud , 1855, he wrote: "The churches have killed their Christ". In " Locksley Hall Sixty Years After ", Tennyson wrote: "Christian love among
1278-465: A collection of the hymns and considered them Homeric in origin. The first century BCE historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus also quoted from the hymns and referred to them as "Homeric". Diodorus Siculus , another historian writing in the first century BCE, quoted verses of the first Hymn to Dionysus . The Greek philosopher Philodemus , who moved to Italy between around 80 and 70 BCE and died around 40 to 35 BCE, has been suggested as
1420-488: A comfort "In Memoriam A.H.H." had been. As source material for his poetry, Tennyson used a wide range of subject matter ranging from medieval legends to classical myths and from domestic situations to observations of nature. The influence of John Keats and other Romantic poets published before and during his childhood is evident from the richness of his imagery and descriptive writing. He also handled rhythm masterfully. The insistent beat of Break, Break, Break emphasises
1562-539: A corpus probably dates to this period. They were comparatively neglected during the succeeding Byzantine period (that is, until 1453), but continued to be copied in manuscripts of Homeric poetry; all the surviving manuscripts of the hymns date to the fifteenth century. They were also read and emulated widely in fifteenth-century Italy, and indirectly influenced Sandro Botticelli 's painting The Birth of Venus . The Homeric Hymns were first published in print by Demetrios Chalkokondyles in 1488–1489. George Chapman made
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#17327655238421704-401: A deity's iconography and responsibilities, or of aspects of human technology and culture. The hymns have been considered as agalmata , or gifts offered to deities on behalf of a community or social group. In this capacity, Claude Calame has referred to them as "contracts", by which the praise of the deity in the hymn invites reciprocity from that deity in the form of favour or protection for
1846-477: A lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between the divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period. They have the same general outline but differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period is Mycenaean Greek , but its relationship to the historical dialects and
1988-509: A large family and "was a man of superior abilities and varied attainments, who tried his hand with fair success in architecture, painting, music, and poetry. He was comfortably well off for a country clergyman, and his shrewd money management enabled the family to spend summers at Mablethorpe and Skegness on the eastern coast of England". George Clayton Tennyson was elder son of attorney and MP George Tennyson (1749/50-1835), JP , DL , of Bayons Manor and Usselby Hall, who had also inherited
2130-419: A lesser degree. Pamphylian Greek , spoken in a small area on the southwestern coast of Anatolia and little preserved in inscriptions, may be either a fifth major dialect group, or it is Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence. Regarding the speech of the ancient Macedonians diverse theories have been put forward, but the epigraphic activity and the archaeological discoveries in
2272-471: A lost one known by the siglum Ψ ( psi ), which probably dates to the twelfth or thirteenth century. This may be a manuscript mentioned in a letter by the humanist Giovanni Aurispa in 1424, which he stated he had acquired in Constantinople; Aurispa's manuscript has also been suggested as being Ω. As of 2016, a total of twenty-nine manuscripts of the hymns are known. Until the later twentieth century,
2414-603: A monument to him stands on top of Tennyson Down. Lake Tennyson in New Zealand's high country, named by Frederick Weld , is assumed to be named after Lord Tennyson. He was succeeded as 2nd Baron Tennyson by his son, Hallam , who produced an authorised biography of his father in 1897, and was later the second Governor-General of Australia . Although Albert, Prince Consort , was largely responsible for Tennyson's appointment as Laureate, Queen Victoria became an ardent admirer of Tennyson's work, writing in her diary that she
2556-548: A poem composed around 350 CE (possibly by the poet and local politician Andronicus ) in commemoration of the mythical origins of the Egyptian city of Hermopolis Magna . The Homeric Hymns did influence the fourth-century Christian poem The Vision of Dorotheus and a third-century hymn to Jesus transmitted among the Sibylline Oracles . They may also have been a model, alongside the hymns of Callimachus, for
2698-584: A possible originator for the movement of manuscripts of the Homeric Hymns into the Roman world, and consequently for their reception into Latin literature. His own works quoted from the hymns to Demeter and Apollo . In Roman poetry, the opening of Lucretius 's De rerum natura , written around the mid 50s BCE, has correspondences with the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, while Catullus emulated
2840-550: A prefix /e-/, called the augment . This was probably originally a separate word, meaning something like "then", added because tenses in PIE had primarily aspectual meaning. The augment is added to the indicative of the aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect, but not to any of the other forms of the aorist (no other forms of the imperfect and pluperfect exist). The two kinds of augment in Greek are syllabic and quantitative. The syllabic augment
2982-608: A separate historical stage, though its earliest form closely resembles Attic Greek , and its latest form approaches Medieval Greek . There were several regional dialects of Ancient Greek; Attic Greek developed into Koine. Ancient Greek was a pluricentric language , divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic , Aeolic , Arcadocypriot , and Doric , many of them with several subdivisions. Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms in literature , while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are also several historical forms. Homeric Greek
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#17327655238423124-628: A series of four articles in The Journal of Hellenic Studies on textual problems in the Homeric Hymns , which became the basis of the 1904 edition of the hymns he co-produced with Edward Ernest Sikes. In 1912, Allen published an edition of the hymns in the Oxford Classical Texts series. He published an updated version of his 1904 edition in 1936, co-edited with William Reginald Halliday ; Sikes refused to collaborate on it, but remained credited as an editor. The first commentary on
3266-456: A sharp distinction between oral and written composition, seeing the poems as traditional texts originating in a strongly oral culture. The name "Homeric Hymns" derives from the attribution, in antiquity, of the hymns to Homer , then believed to be the poet of the Iliad and Odyssey . The Hymn to Apollo was attributed to Homer by Pindar and Thucydides , who wrote around the beginning and
3408-547: A single hymn was that of Nicholas Richardson on the Hymn to Demeter in 1974. In his Loeb Classical Library edition of 2003, Martin West rejected the adiaphoroi argument of Gentili, choosing instead to posit a correct reading for each known alternation. Ancient Greek language Ancient Greek ( Ἑλληνῐκή , Hellēnikḗ ; [hellɛːnikɛ́ː] ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and
3550-424: A small village between Horncastle and Louth . Tennyson's father "carefully attended to the education and training of his children". Tennyson and two of his elder brothers were writing poetry in their teens and a collection of poems by all three was published locally when Alfred was only 17. One of those brothers, Charles Tennyson Turner , later married Louisa Sellwood, the younger sister of Alfred's future wife ;
3692-510: A staff. The Hymn to Apollo makes reference to a chorus of maidens on the island of Delos , the Deliades, who sang hymns to Apollo, Leto and Artemis . References to instruments of the lyre family (known interchangeably as phorminx ) occur throughout the Homeric Hymns and other archaic texts, such as the Iliad and Odyssey . These lyres generally had four strings in the early period of
3834-630: A standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance . This article primarily contains information about the Epic and Classical periods of the language, which are the best-attested periods and considered most typical of Ancient Greek. From the Hellenistic period ( c. 300 BC ), Ancient Greek was followed by Koine Greek , which is regarded as
3976-841: A strong poetic power, which his early readers often attributed to his "Englishness" and his masculinity. Well-known among his longer works are Maud and Idylls of the King , the latter arguably the most famous Victorian adaptation of the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table . A common thread of grief, melancholy, and loss connects much of his poetry (including Mariana , The Lotos Eaters , Tears, Idle Tears , In Memoriam ), possibly reflecting Tennyson's lifelong struggle with debilitating depression. T. S. Eliot famously described Tennyson as "the saddest of all English poets", whose technical mastery of verse and language provided
4118-834: A substantial, Romantic song-cycle". Charles Villiers Stanford set "Crossing the Bar" for high voice and piano in April 1880, a year after the poem has been first published. Maude Valérie White (four songs, 1885) and Liza Lehmann (10 songs, 1899) both composed song cycles selecting passages from In Memoriam . Roger Quilter set "Now sleeps the crimson petal" (from The Princess ) for voice and orchestra in 1905. "The splendour falls on castle walls" (also from The Princess ), has been set by many composers, including Arnold Bax , Benjamin Britten , Cecil Armstrong Gibbs , Gustav Holst , Stanford, Vaughan Williams and Charles Wood . Tennyson deplored
4260-481: A translation of some of the shorter Homeric Hymns into heroic couplets; in July 1820, he translated the Hymn to Hermes into ottava rima . Of Shelley's own poems, The Witch of Atlas , written in 1820, and With a Guitar, to Jane , written in 1822, were most closely influenced by the Homeric Hymns , particularly the Hymn to Hermes . The 1889 poem "Demeter and Persephone" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson , reinterprets
4402-527: A variety of styles with such an exact understanding of metre ; like many Victorian poets, he experimented in adapting the quantitative metres of Greek and Latin poetry to English. He reflects the Victorian period of his maturity in his feeling for order and his tendency towards moralising. He also reflects a concern common among Victorian writers in being troubled by the conflict between religious faith and expanding scientific knowledge. Tennyson possessed
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4544-510: A vowel or /n s r/ ; final stops were lost, as in γάλα "milk", compared with γάλακτος "of milk" (genitive). Ancient Greek of the classical period also differed in both the inventory and distribution of original PIE phonemes due to numerous sound changes, notably the following: The pronunciation of Ancient Greek was very different from that of Modern Greek . Ancient Greek had long and short vowels ; many diphthongs ; double and single consonants; voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops ; and
4686-520: Is a literary form of Archaic Greek (derived primarily from Ionic and Aeolic) used in the epic poems , the Iliad and the Odyssey , and in later poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic and other Classical-era dialects. The origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of
4828-418: Is added to stems beginning with consonants, and simply prefixes e (stems beginning with r , however, add er ). The quantitative augment is added to stems beginning with vowels, and involves lengthening the vowel: Some verbs augment irregularly; the most common variation is e → ei . The irregularity can be explained diachronically by the loss of s between vowels, or that of the letter w , which affected
4970-666: Is called 'East Greek'. Arcadocypriot apparently descended more closely from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age. Boeotian Greek had come under a strong Northwest Greek influence, and can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect, as exemplified in the poems of the Boeotian poet Pindar who wrote in Doric with a small Aeolic admixture. Thessalian likewise had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to
5112-448: Is considered by some linguists to have been closely related to Greek . Among Indo-European branches with living descendants, Greek is often argued to have the closest genetic ties with Armenian (see also Graeco-Armenian ) and Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ). Ancient Greek differs from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and other Indo-European languages in certain ways. In phonotactics , ancient Greek words could end only in
5254-523: Is in some ways mine", in 1892. Tennyson continued writing into his eighties. He died on 6 October 1892 at Aldworth, aged 83. He was buried at Westminster Abbey . A memorial was erected in All Saints' Church, Freshwater . His last words were, "Oh that press will have me now!". He left an estate of £57,206. Tennyson Down and the Tennyson Trail on the Isle of Wight are named after him, and
5396-707: Is near; I trust it is. I know The blessed music went that way my soul will have to go. And for myself, indeed, I care not if I go to-day; But Effie, you must comfort her when I am past away. And say to Robin a kind word, and tell him not to fret; There's many worthier than I, would make him happy yet. If I had lived - I cannot tell - I might have been his wife; But all these things have ceased to be, with my desire of life. Forever and forever, all in
5538-691: Is the ninth most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations . Tennyson was born on 6 August 1809 in Somersby, Lincolnshire , England. He was born into a successful middle-class family of minor landowning status distantly descended from John Savage, 2nd Earl Rivers , and Francis Leke, 1st Earl of Scarsdale . His father, George Clayton Tennyson (1778–1831), was an Anglican clergyman who served as rector of Somersby (1807–1831), also rector of Benniworth (1802–1831) and Bag Enderby , and vicar of Grimsby (1815). He raised
5680-431: Is unclear how far writing, as opposed to oral composition , was involved in their creation. They may initially have served as preludes to the recitation of longer poems, and have been performed, at least originally, by singers accompanying themselves on a lyre or another stringed instrument. Performances of the hymns may have taken place at sympotic banquets, religious festivals and royal courts. There are references to
5822-457: The hazel-tree? He thought of that sharp look, mother, I gave him yesterday, - But I'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I'm to be Queen o' the May. They say he's dying all for love, - but that can never be; They say his heart is breaking, mother, - what is that to me? There's many
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5964-524: The Cambridge Apostles . A portrait of Tennyson by George Frederic Watts is in Trinity's collection. At Cambridge, Tennyson met Arthur Hallam and William Henry Brookfield , who became his closest friends. His first publication was a collection of "his boyish rhymes and those of his elder brother Charles" entitled Poems by Two Brothers , published in 1827. In 1829, Tennyson was awarded
6106-579: The Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his first pieces, "Timbuktu". Reportedly, "it was thought to be no slight honour for a young man of twenty to win the chancellor's gold medal". He published his first solo collection of poems, Poems Chiefly Lyrical in 1830. " Claribel " and " Mariana ", which later took their place among Tennyson's most celebrated poems, were included in this volume. Although decried by some critics as overly sentimental, his verse soon proved popular and brought Tennyson to
6248-708: The Greek region of Macedonia during the last decades has brought to light documents, among which the first texts written in Macedonian , such as the Pella curse tablet , as Hatzopoulos and other scholars note. Based on the conclusions drawn by several studies and findings such as Pella curse tablet , Emilio Crespo and other scholars suggest that ancient Macedonian was a Northwest Doric dialect , which shares isoglosses with its neighboring Thessalian dialects spoken in northeastern Thessaly . Some have also suggested an Aeolic Greek classification. The Lesbian dialect
6390-527: The Homeric Hymn to Demeter in Neil Gaiman 's 2002 children's novel Coraline and its 2009 film adaptation , arguing that the allusions in the novel's text are "subliminal" but become explicit in the film. Only a few ancient papyrus copies of the Homeric Hymns are known. An Attic vase painted around 470 BCE shows a youth, seated, holding a scroll with the first two words of the second Homeric Hymn to Hermes : this has been used to suggest that
6532-413: The Homeric Hymns for his own hymns, and is the earliest-known poet to use them as inspiration for multiple works. The hymns were also used by Theocritus , Callimachus's approximate contemporary, in his Idylls 17 , 22 and 24 , and by the similarly contemporary Apollonius of Rhodes in his Argonautica . The mythographer Apollodorus , who wrote in the second century BCE, may have had access to
6674-825: The Homeric Hymns generally place greater focus on single events than the Homeric epics, and cover a shorter span of time, resulting in what he calls a comparatively "slow" narration. Of Pallas Athena , guardian of the city, I begin to sing. Dread is she, and with Ares she loves deeds of war, the sack of cities and the shouting and the battle. It is she who saves the people as they go out to war and come back. Hail, goddess, and give us good fortune with happiness! —Hymn 11, "To Athena", translated by Hugh Evelyn-White The hymns vary considerably in length, between 3 and 580 surviving lines. They are generally considered to have originally functioned as preludes ( prooimia ) to recitations of longer works, such as epic poems . Many of
6816-509: The Homeric Hymns in his epyllion on the wedding of Peleus and Thetis . Virgil drew upon the Homeric Hymns in his Aeneid , composed between 29 and 19 BCE. The encounter in Book 1 of the Aeneid between Aeneas and his mother Venus references the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite , in which Venus's Greek counterpart seduces Aeneas's father, Anchises . Later in the Aeneid , the account of
6958-709: The Homeric Hymns in Greek poetry from around 600 BCE; they appear to have been used as educational texts by the early fifth century BCE, and to have been collected into a single corpus after the third century CE. Their influence on Greek literature and art was relatively small until the third century BCE, when they were used extensively by Alexandrian poets including Callimachus , Theocritus and Apollonius of Rhodes . They were also an influence on Roman poets, such as Lucretius , Catullus , Virgil , Horace and Ovid . In late antiquity ( c. 200 – c. 600 CE ), they influenced both pagan and Christian literature, and their collection as
7100-503: The Homeric Hymns received relatively little attention from classical scholars or translators. No collation of the hymns' manuscripts was made between that of Chalkokondyles in 1488 and 1749. Joshua Barnes published an edition of the hymns in 1711, which was the first to attempt to explain textual issues by citing parallels in other texts considered to be Homeric. Friedrich August Wolf published two editions, as part of larger editions of Homer, in 1794 and 1807. The first modern edition of
7242-518: The Homeric Hymns , particularly the five longer poems. In the second century CE, the Greek-speaking authors Lucian and Aelius Aristides drew on the hymns: Aristides used them in his orations, while Lucian parodied them in his satirical Dialogues of the Gods . In late antiquity (that is, from around the third to the sixth centuries CE), the direct influence of the Homeric Hymns
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#17327655238427384-495: The Homeric Hymns : Canto I concludes with parts of the hymns to Aphrodite, in both Latin and English. In modern Greek poetry, the 1901 "Interruption" by Constantine P. Cavafy references the myth of Demophon as told in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter . The first Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite has also been cited as an influence on Alfred Hitchcock 's 1954 film Rear Window , particularly for the character of Lisa Freemont, played by Grace Kelly . Judith Fletcher has traced allusions to
7526-499: The Hymn to Aphrodite and the second Hymn to Dionysus . Ovid's account of the abduction of Persephone in his Fasti , written and revised between 2 and around 14 CE, likewise references the Hymn to Demeter . Ovid further makes use of the Hymn to Aphrodite in Heroides 16, in which Paris adapts a section of the hymn to convince Helen of his worthiness for her. The Odes of Ovid's contemporary Horace also make use of
7668-434: The Iliad and Odyssey , the hymns are composed in the rhythmic form known as dactylic hexameter and make use of formulae : short, set phrases with particular metrical characteristics that could be repeated as a compositional aid. The attribution to Homer was sometimes questioned in antiquity, such as by the rhetorician Athenaeus , who expressed his doubts about it around 200 CE. Other hypotheses in ancient times included
7810-579: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood . In 1848, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt made a list of "Immortals", artistic heroes whom they admired, especially from literature, notably including Keats and Tennyson, whose work would form subjects for PRB paintings. The Lady of Shalott alone was a subject for Rossetti, Hunt, John William Waterhouse (three versions), and Elizabeth Siddall . A heraldic achievement of Alfred, Lord Tennyson exists in an 1884 stained-glass window in
7952-610: The ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek ( c. 1400–1200 BC ), Dark Ages ( c. 1200–800 BC ), the Archaic or Epic period ( c. 800–500 BC ), and the Classical period ( c. 500–300 BC ). Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers . It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been
8094-501: The present , future , and imperfect are imperfective in aspect; the aorist , present perfect , pluperfect and future perfect are perfective in aspect. Most tenses display all four moods and three voices, although there is no future subjunctive or imperative. Also, there is no imperfect subjunctive, optative or imperative. The infinitives and participles correspond to the finite combinations of tense, aspect, and voice. The indicative of past tenses adds (conceptually, at least)
8236-1031: The 5th century BC. Ancient pronunciation cannot be reconstructed with certainty, but Greek from the period is well documented, and there is little disagreement among linguists as to the general nature of the sounds that the letters represent. /oː/ raised to [uː] , probably by the 4th century BC. Greek, like all of the older Indo-European languages , is highly inflected. It is highly archaic in its preservation of Proto-Indo-European forms. In ancient Greek, nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases ( nominative , genitive , dative , accusative , and vocative ), three genders ( masculine , feminine , and neuter ), and three numbers (singular, dual , and plural ). Verbs have four moods ( indicative , imperative , subjunctive , and optative ) and three voices (active, middle, and passive ), as well as three persons (first, second, and third) and various other forms. Verbs are conjugated through seven combinations of tenses and aspect (generally simply called "tenses"):
8378-495: The Archaic period of ancient Greek (see Homeric Greek for more details): Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί' Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε' ἔθηκε, πολλὰς δ' ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι· Διὸς δ' ἐτελείετο βουλή· ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς. The beginning of Apology by Plato exemplifies Attic Greek from
8520-499: The Byzantine period. The surviving medieval manuscripts of the poems date to the fifteenth century and are drawn primarily from the late-antique compilation of the Homeric Hymns along with Orphic and other hymnic poetry. They all descend from a single, now-lost manuscript, known in scholarship by the siglum Ω ( omega ) and possibly written in minuscule . In fifteenth-century Italy, the hymns were copied widely. A manuscript known by
8662-560: The Classical period of ancient Greek. (The second line is the IPA , the third is transliterated into the Latin alphabet using a modern version of the Erasmian scheme .) Ὅτι [hóti Hóti μὲν men mèn ὑμεῖς, hyːmêːs hūmeîs, Alfred, Lord Tennyson Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson , FRS ( / ˈ t ɛ n ɪ s ən / ; 6 August 1809 – 6 October 1892),
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#17327655238428804-428: The English language, including "Nature, red in tooth and claw" ("In Memoriam A.H.H."), "'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all", "Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die", "My strength is as the strength of ten, / Because my heart is pure", "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield", "Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers", and "The old order changeth, yielding place to new". He
8946-530: The Hall of Trinity College, Cambridge , showing arms: Gules, a bend nebuly or thereon a chaplet vert between three leopard's faces jessant-de-lys of the second ; Crest : A dexter arm in armour the hand in a gauntlet or grasping a broken tilting spear enfiled with a garland of laurel ; Supporters : Two leopards rampant guardant gules semée de lys and ducally crowned or ; Motto: Respiciens Prospiciens ("Looking backwards (is) looking forwards"). These are
9088-483: The Hellenistic scholiasts of Alexandria, though they were used and adapted by Alexandrian poets, particularly of the third century BCE. Eratosthenes , the chief librarian at Alexandria, adapted the Homeric Hymn to Hermes for his own Hermes , an account of the god's birth and invention of the lyre. Phainomena , a didactic poem about the heavens by Aratus , drew on the same poem. Callimachus drew on
9230-638: The Joust'), written in the 1470s by Angelo Poliziano , paraphrase the second Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite , and were in turn an inspiration for Sandro Botticelli 's The Birth of Venus , painted in the 1480s. Georgius Dartona made the first translation of the Homeric Hymns into Latin, which was published in Paris by Chrétien Wechel [ fr ] in 1538. Around 1570, the French humanist Jean Daurat gave lectures in which he advanced an allegorical reading of
9372-539: The Light Brigade", and excerpts from "The splendour falls" (from The Princess), "Come into the garden" (from Maud ), "Ask me no more", "Ode on the death of the Duke of Wellington" and "Lancelot and Elaine". The sound quality is poor, as wax cylinder recordings usually are. Towards the end of his life Tennyson revealed that his "religious beliefs also defied convention, leaning towards agnosticism and pandeism ": In
9514-565: The Valley of Cauteretz" and " In Memoriam A.H.H. ", a long poem detailing the "Way of the Soul". Tennyson and his family were allowed to stay in the rectory for some time, but later moved to Beech Hill Park, High Beach , deep within Epping Forest , Essex , about 1837. Tennyson's son recalled: "there was a pond in the park on which in winter my father might be seen skating, sailing about on
9656-550: The aorist. Following Homer 's practice, the augment is sometimes not made in poetry , especially epic poetry. The augment sometimes substitutes for reduplication; see below. Almost all forms of the perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect reduplicate the initial syllable of the verb stem. (A few irregular forms of perfect do not reduplicate, whereas a handful of irregular aorists reduplicate.) The three types of reduplication are: Irregular duplication can be understood diachronically. For example, lambanō (root lab ) has
9798-598: The attention of well-known writers of the day, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge . In the spring of 1831, Tennyson's father died, requiring him to leave Cambridge before taking his degree. He returned to the rectory, where he was permitted to live for another six years and shared responsibility for his widowed mother and the family. Arthur Hallam came to stay with his family during the summer and became engaged to Tennyson's sister, Emilia Tennyson. The May Queen YOU must wake and call me early, call me early, mother dear; To-morrow 'll be
9940-486: The attention of well-known writers of the day, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge . Tennyson's early poetry, with its medievalism and powerful visual imagery, was a major influence on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood . Tennyson also focused on short lyrics, such as " Break, Break, Break ", " The Charge of the Light Brigade ", " Tears, Idle Tears ", and " Crossing the Bar ". Much of his verse was based on classical mythological themes, such as " Ulysses ". " In Memoriam A.H.H. "
10082-419: The augment when it was word-initial. In verbs with a preposition as a prefix, the augment is placed not at the start of the word, but between the preposition and the original verb. For example, προσ(-)βάλλω (I attack) goes to προσ έ βαλoν in the aorist. However compound verbs consisting of a prefix that is not a preposition retain the augment at the start of the word: αὐτο(-)μολῶ goes to ηὐ τομόλησα in
10224-578: The belief that the Hymn to Apollo was the work of Kynaithos of Chios , one of the Homeridae , a circle of poets claiming descent from Homer. Some ancient biographies of Homer denied his authorship of the Homeric Hymns , and the hymns' comparative absence, relative to the Iliad and Odyssey , from the work of scholars based in Hellenistic (323–30 BCE) Alexandria may suggest that they were no longer considered to be his work by this period. However, few direct statements denying Homer's authorship of
10366-787: The bellicose "Form, Riflemen, Form", on the French crisis of 1859 and the Creation of the Volunteer Force , to "Steersman, be not precipitate in thine act/of steering", deploring Gladstone's Home Rule Bill . Tennyson's family were Whigs by tradition and Tennyson's own politics fitted the Whig mould, although he would also vote for the Liberal Party after the Whigs dissolved. Tennyson believed that society should progress through gradual and steady reform, not revolution, and this attitude
10508-438: The center of Greek scholarship, this division of people and language is quite similar to the results of modern archaeological-linguistic investigation. One standard formulation for the dialects is: West vs. non-West Greek is the strongest-marked and earliest division, with non-West in subsets of Ionic-Attic (or Attic-Ionic) and Aeolic vs. Arcadocypriot, or Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot vs. Ionic-Attic. Often non-West
10650-542: The churches look'd the twin of heathen hate." In his play, Becket , he wrote: "We are self-uncertain creatures, and we may, Yea, even when we know not, mix our spites and private hates with our defence of Heaven". Tennyson recorded in his Diary (p. 127): "I believe in Pantheism of a sort". His son's biography confirms that Tennyson was an unorthodox Christian, noting that Tennyson praised Giordano Bruno and Spinoza on his deathbed, saying of Bruno, "His view of God
10792-615: The dialect of Sparta ), and Northern Peloponnesus Doric (including Corinthian ). All the groups were represented by colonies beyond Greece proper as well, and these colonies generally developed local characteristics, often under the influence of settlers or neighbors speaking different Greek dialects. After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BC, a new international dialect known as Koine or Common Greek developed, largely based on Attic Greek , but with influence from other dialects. This dialect slowly replaced most of
10934-453: The end of the fifth century BCE respectively. This attribution may have reflected the high esteem in which the hymns were held, as well as their stylistic similarities with the Homeric poems. The dialect of the hymns, an artificial literary language ( Kunstsprache ) derived largely from the Aeolic and Ionic dialects of Greek, is similar to that used in the Iliad and Odyssey . Like
11076-525: The estates of his mother's family, the Claytons, and married Mary, daughter and heiress of John Turner, of Caistor , Lincolnshire. George Clayton Tennyson was however pushed into a career in the church and passed over as heir in favour of his younger brother, Charles Tennyson d'Eyncourt . Alfred Tennyson's mother, Elizabeth (1781–1865), was the daughter of Stephen Fytche (1734–1799), vicar of St. James Church, Louth (1764) and rector of Withcall (1780),
11218-483: The first English translation of them in 1624. Part of their text was incorporated, via a 1710 translation by William Congreve , into George Frideric Handel 's 1744 musical drama Semele . The rediscovery of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter in 1777 led to a resurgence of European interest in the hymns. In the arts, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe used the Hymn to Demeter as an inspiration for his 1778 melodrama Proserpina . Their textual criticism progressed considerably over
11360-422: The first half of the eighteenth century, Jacques Philippe d’Orville [ de ] wrote a book of notes on the text of the Homeric Hymns , in which he condemned Barnes's then-standard 1711 edition and the 1722 edition of Michel Maittaire . The first modern textual criticism of the hymns dates to 1749, when David Ruhnken published his readings of two medieval manuscripts, known as A and C. The hymns' text
11502-473: The first half of the fifteenth century, possibly in Constantinople or Italy. This manuscript preserved both the first Hymn to Dionysus and the Hymn to Demeter , but both were lost at some point after its creation and remained unknown until 1777, when the philologist Christian Frederick Matthaei discovered Μ in a barn outside Moscow. All surviving manuscripts, apart from Μ, have among their sources
11644-457: The first version of " The Lady of Shalott ". The volume met heavy criticism, which so discouraged Tennyson that he did not publish again for ten years, although he did continue to write. That same year, Hallam died suddenly and unexpectedly after suffering a cerebral haemorrhage while on a holiday in Vienna . Hallam's death had a profound effect on Tennyson and inspired several poems, including "In
11786-425: The fourth century BCE, few compositions appear to have been intended for repeat performance or long-term transmission. The Homeric Hymns may have been composed to be recited at religious festivals, perhaps at singing contests: several directly or indirectly ask the god's support in competition. Some allude to the deity's cult at a specific place and may have been composed for performance within that cult, though
11928-565: The fourth-century Christian hymns known as the Poemata Arcana , written by Gregory of Nazianzus . In the fifth century, the Greek-speaking poet Nonnus quoted and adapted the hymns; from that time onwards, other poets, such as Musaeus Grammaticus and Coluthus , made use of them. Although the Homeric Hymns were known and transmitted in the Byzantine period, they were only rarely referenced, and never quoted, in Byzantine literature. The sixth-century poet Paul Silentiarius celebrated
12070-741: The future King Edward VII . In 1855, Tennyson produced one of his best-known works, " The Charge of the Light Brigade ", a dramatic tribute to the British cavalrymen involved in an ill-advised charge on 25 October 1854, during the Crimean War . Other esteemed works written in the post of Poet Laureate include "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington" and "Ode Sung at the Opening of the International Exhibition". Tennyson declined
12212-461: The gods to support the portrayal of human affairs. The poems also make use of different narrative styles: the Homeric Hymns are unlike the Homeric epics in that they employ iterative narration (accounts of events which repeatedly or habitually occur), which is relatively rare in ancient Greek literature, within passages of singulative narration (accounts of specific events related in sequence). René Nünlist [ de ] has also suggested that
12354-408: The happiest time of all the glad new-year, - Of all the glad new-year, mother, the maddest, merriest day; For I'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I'm to be Queen o' the May. As I came up the valley, whom think ye should I see But Robin leaning on the bridge beneath
12496-561: The historical Dorians . The invasion is known to have displaced population to the later Attic-Ionic regions, who regarded themselves as descendants of the population displaced by or contending with the Dorians. The Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people – Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians (including Athenians), each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Allowing for their oversight of Arcadian, an obscure mountain dialect, and Cypriot, far from
12638-476: The historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups already existed in some form. Scholars assume that major Ancient Greek period dialect groups developed not later than 1120 BC, at the time of the Dorian invasions —and that their first appearances as precise alphabetic writing began in the 8th century BC. The invasion would not be "Dorian" unless the invaders had some cultural relationship to
12780-711: The hymn at length in The Golden Bough , his influential 1890 work of comparative mythology and religion. James Joyce made use of the same hymn, and possibly Frazer's work, in his 1922 novel Ulysses , in which the character Stephen Dedalus references "an old hymn to Demeter" while undergoing a journey reminiscent of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Joyce also drew upon the Hymn to Hermes in the characterisation of both Dedalus and his companion Buck Mulligan . The Cantos by Joyce's friend and mentor Ezra Pound , written between 1915 and 1960, also draw on
12922-515: The hymns as a separate text, without the Homeric epics, was made in 1796 by Karl David Ilgen and followed by editions by August Mattiae in 1805 and Gottfried Hermann in 1806. In 1886, Albert Gemoll [ de ] published a German edition of the hymns: this was both the first modern edition in a vernacular language (that is, not in Latin) and the only edition to date that has printed digammas in their text. The present conventional order of
13064-555: The hymns can be dated to the fourth century BCE, though the Thebaid of Antimachus may contain allusions to the hymns to Aphrodite, Dionysus and Hermes. A few fifth-century painted vases show myths depicted in the Homeric Hymns and may have been inspired by the poems, but it is difficult to be certain whether the correspondences reflect direct contact with the hymns or simply the commonplace nature of their underlying mythic narratives. The hymns do not appear to have been studied by
13206-442: The hymns end with a verse indicating that another song will follow, sometimes specifically a work of heroic epic. Over time, however, at least some may have lengthened and been recited independently of other works. The hymns which currently survive as shorter works may equally be abridgements of longer works, retaining the introduction and conclusion of a poem whose central narrative has been lost. The first known sources referring to
13348-433: The hymns survive from antiquity: in the second century CE, the Greek geographer Pausanias maintained their attribution to Homer. Irene de Jong has contrasted the narrative focus of the Homeric Hymns with that of the Homeric epics, writing that the gods are the primary focus of the hymns, with mortals serving primarily to witness the gods' actions, whereas the epics focus primarily on their mortal characters and use
13490-508: The hymns was established by the Oxford edition of Alfred Goodwin in 1893, following that employed by the manuscript M: previously, the Hymn to Apollo had been placed first. Reviewing Goodwin's work in 1894, Edward Ernest Sikes judged that most of the important work on the Homeric Hymns had previously been done by German scholars, and that "little of importance" had recently been written, apart from Goodwin's edition, on them in English. In
13632-421: The hymns were used as educational texts by this period. At least the longer hymns seem to have been collected into a single edition at some point during the Hellenistic period (323–30 BCE). Alexander Hall has argued that Hymns 1–26, except 6 (the Hymn to Aphrodite ) and 8 (the Hymn to Ares ), were initially collected into what he calls a "proto-collection", probably no earlier than the Hellenistic period, with
13774-497: The hymns' composition, though seven-stringed versions became more common during the seventh century BCE. A paean , probably written in 138 BCE, mentions the accompaniment of hymnic singing with a kithara (a seven-stringed instrument of the lyre family), and contrasts this style of music with that of the aulos , a reeded wind instrument. It is unlikely that early Greek music was written down; instead, compositions were transmitted aurally and passed on through tradition. Until
13916-484: The ice in his long blue cloak. He liked the nearness of London, whither he resorted to see his friends, but he could not stay in town even for a night, his mother being in such a nervous state that he did not like to leave her...". Tennyson befriended a Dr Allen, who ran a nearby asylum whose patients then included the poet John Clare . An unwise investment in Dr Allen's ecclesiastical wood-carving enterprise soon led to
14058-590: The identity of the speaker. This made the hymns suitable for recitation by different speakers and for different audiences. Jenny Strauss Clay has suggested that the Homeric Hymns played a role in the establishment of a panhellenic conception of the Olympian pantheon, with Zeus as its head, and therefore in promoting the cultural unity of Greeks from different polities . The Homeric Hymns are quoted comparatively rarely in ancient literature. There are sporadic references to them in early Greek lyric poetry , such as
14200-404: The intensity of the consciousness of individuality, individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this was not a confused state but the clearest, the surest of the sure, utterly beyond words…" Tennyson was a student of King Edward VI Grammar School, Louth from 1816 to 1820. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge , in 1827, where he joined a secret society called
14342-631: The latter did not necessarily follow from the former. They seem likely to have been performed frequently in various contexts throughout antiquity, such as at banquets or symposia . It has been suggested that the fifth hymn, to Aphrodite , could have been composed for performance at a royal or aristocratic court, perhaps of a family in the Troad claiming descent from Aphrodite via her son Aeneas . The hymns' narrative voice has been described by Marco Fantuzzi and Richard Hunter as "communal", usually making only generalised reference to their place of composition or
14484-504: The libretto in 1710; in 1744, George Frideric Handel released a version of the opera with his own music and alterations to the libretto made by an unknown collaborator, including a newly-added passage quoting Congreve's translation of the Hymn to Aphrodite . The rediscovery of the Hymn to Demeter in 1777 sparked a series of scholarly editions of the poem in Germany, and its first translations into German (in 1780) and Latin (in 1782). It
14626-552: The loss of much of the family fortune, and led to a bout of serious depression. According to Tennyson's grandson Sir Charles Tennyson , Tennyson met Thomas Carlyle in 1839, if not earlier. The pair began a lifelong friendship, and were famous smoking companions. Some of Tennyson's work even bears the influence of Carlyle and his ideas. Tennyson moved to London in 1840 and lived for a time at Chapel House, Twickenham . On 14 May 1842, while living modestly in London, Tennyson published
14768-504: The narrative of the Hymn to Demeter as an allegory for the coming of Christ . The Hymn to Demeter was particularly influential as one of the few sources, and the earliest source, for the religious rituals known as the Eleusinian Mysteries . It became an important nexus of the debate as to the nature of early Greek religion in early-nineteenth-century German scholarship. The anthropologist James George Frazer discussed
14910-579: The nineteenth century, particularly in German scholarship, though the text continued to present substantial difficulties into the twentieth. The Homeric Hymns were also influential on the English Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century, particularly Leigh Hunt , Thomas Love Peacock and Percy Bysshe Shelley . Later poets to adapt the hymns included Alfred, Lord Tennyson , and Constantine P. Cavafy . Their influence has also been traced in
15052-508: The older dialects, although the Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language , which is spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek . By about the 6th century AD, the Koine had slowly metamorphosed into Medieval Greek . Phrygian is an extinct Indo-European language of West and Central Anatolia , which
15194-564: The opening of the first Hymn to Aphrodite . The first English translation of the hymns was made by George Chapman in 1624, as part of his complete translation of Homer's works. Although they received relatively little attention in English poetry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the playwright and poet William Congreve published a version of the first Hymn to Aphrodite , written in heroic couplets , in 1710. Congreve also wrote an operatic libretto , Semele , set to music by John Eccles in 1707 but never performed. Congreve published
15336-498: The other was Frederick Tennyson . Another of Tennyson's brothers, Edward Tennyson, was institutionalised at a private asylum. The noted psychologist William James , in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience , quoted Tennyson concerning a type of experience with which Tennyson was familiar: "A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has often come upon me through repeating my own name. All at once, as it were out of
15478-487: The perfect stem eilēpha (not * lelēpha ) because it was originally slambanō , with perfect seslēpha , becoming eilēpha through compensatory lengthening. Reduplication is also visible in the present tense stems of certain verbs. These stems add a syllable consisting of the root's initial consonant followed by i . A nasal stop appears after the reduplication in some verbs. The earliest extant examples of ancient Greek writing ( c. 1450 BC ) are in
15620-487: The poems as "hymns" ( hymnoi ) date from the first century BCE. In concept, an ancient hymn was an invocation of a deity, often connected with a specific cult or sanctuary associated with that deity. The hymns often cover the deity's birth, arrival on Olympus , and dealings with human beings. Several discuss the origins of the god's cult or the founding of a major sanctuary dedicated to them. Some are aetiological accounts of religious cults, specific rituals, aspects of
15762-534: The poet Homer : modern scholarship has established that most date to the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, though some are more recent and the latest, the Hymn to Ares , may have been composed as late as the fifth century CE. The Homeric Hymns share compositional similarities with the Iliad and the Odyssey , also traditionally attributed to Homer. They share the same artificial literary dialect of Greek, are composed in dactylic hexameter , and make use of short, repeated phrases known as formulae . It
15904-461: The practice of marking these with a dotted antisigma (ↄ), evidence of which can be found in surviving manuscripts of the Hymn to Apollo . The grouping of the hymns into their current corpus may date to late antiquity. References to the shorter poems as being within the corpus begin to be found in sources dating from the second and third centuries CE. The assemblage of the thirty-three hymns listed today as "Homeric" dates to no earlier than
16046-492: The relentless sadness of the subject matter. Tennyson's use of the musical qualities of words to emphasise his rhythms and meanings is sensitive. The language of "I come from haunts of coot and hern" lilts and ripples like the brook in the poem and the last two lines of "Come down O maid from yonder mountain height" illustrate his telling combination of onomatopoeia , alliteration , and assonance : The moan of doves in immemorial elms And murmuring of innumerable bees. Tennyson
16188-441: The remaining hymns later added as an appendix . Unlike those of the Iliad and Odyssey , the text of the Homeric Hymns was comparatively little edited by the Hellenistic scholars of Alexandria. Franco Ferrari [ it ] has suggested that, throughout antiquity, manuscripts of the text may have circulated which intentionally included two different versions ("doublets") of the same word: Alexandrian scholars developed
16330-402: The restoration of Hagia Sophia by the emperor Justinian I in a poem which borrowed from the Homeric Hymn to Hermes . Later authors, such as the eleventh-century Michael Psellos , may have drawn upon them, but it is often unclear whether their allusions are drawn directly from the Homeric Hymns or from other works narrating the same myths. The hymns have also been cited as an inspiration for
16472-572: The siglum V, commissioned by the Byzantine-born Catholic cardinal Bessarion probably in the 1460s, published the hymns at the end of a collection of the other works then considered Homeric. This arrangement became standard in subsequent editions of Homer's works, and played an important role in establishing the perceived relationship between the hymns, the Iliad and the Odyssey . The first printed edition ( editio princeps ) of
16614-454: The singer or their community. Little is known about the musical settings of the Homeric Hymns . The earliest surviving ancient Greek musical compositions date to the end of the fifth century BCE, after the composition of nearly all of the hymns. Originally, the hymns appear to have been performed by singers accompanying themselves on a stringed instrument, such as a lyre ; later, they may have been recited, rather than sung, by an orator holding
16756-517: The syllabic script Linear B . Beginning in the 8th century BC, however, the Greek alphabet became standard, albeit with some variation among dialects. Early texts are written in boustrophedon style, but left-to-right became standard during the classic period. Modern editions of ancient Greek texts are usually written with accents and breathing marks , interword spacing , modern punctuation , and sometimes mixed case , but these were all introduced later. The beginning of Homer 's Iliad exemplifies
16898-539: The theft of Hercules 's cattle by the monster Cacus is based upon that of the theft of Apollo's cattle by Hermes in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes . The Roman poet Ovid made extensive use of the Homeric Hymns : his account of Apollo and Daphne in the Metamorphoses , published in 8 CE, references the Hymn to Apollo , while other parts of the Metamorphoses make reference to the Hymn to Demeter ,
17040-586: The third century CE. Between the fourth and the thirteenth centuries CE, the Homeric Hymns were generally transcribed in an edition which also contained the Hymns of Callimachus, the Orphic Hymns , the hymns of Proclus and the Orphic Argonautica . Manuscripts of the Homeric Hymns , often bundling them with other works such as the hymns of Callimachus, continued to be made during
17182-422: The twelfth-century poetry of Theodore Prodromos . The Homeric Hymns were copied and adapted widely in fifteenth-century Italy, for example by the poets Michael Marullus and Francesco Filelfo . Marsilio Ficino made a translation of them around 1462; Giovanni Tortelli used them for examples in his 1478 grammatical treatise De Orthographia . The Stanze per la giostra [ it ] ('Stanzas for
17324-500: The two families is recorded. A list of works by Tennyson follows: Michael William Balfe 's setting of "Come Into the Garden, Maud" was a popular success in 1857, as sung by the celebrated tenor Sims Reeves . Arthur Somervell 's Maud (1898) used thirteen poems (not all of them complete) for his song cycle, enough "to retain a cogent narrative". Stephen Banfield believes it is "the nearest an English composer ever came to writing
17466-415: The two volume Poems , of which the first included works already published and the second was made up almost entirely of new poems. They met with immediate success; poems from this collection, such as " Locksley Hall ", " Break, Break, Break ", and " Ulysses ", and a new version of " The Lady of Shalott ", have met enduring fame. " The Princess: A Medley ", a satire on women's education that came out in 1847,
17608-400: The use of unauthorised repetition in song settings, a device used by many composers, and so tried to circumvent this by supplying his own, as in "Break, Break, Break" (set by Sidney Lanier in 1871 and Cyril Rootham in 1906), and the repetition of "dying" in "The splendour falls", which as Trevor Hold points out, "has been a god-send to every composer who has set it". Tennyson's "Ulysses"
17750-412: The use of writing, and scholars debate the degree of consistency or "fixity" likely to have existed between early versions of the hymns in performance. The debate is clouded by the impossibility of determining for certain whether a poem with characteristic features of oral poetry was in fact composed orally, or composed using writing but in imitation of an oral-poetic style. Modern scholarship tends to avoid
17892-643: The village of Shiplake . They had two sons, Hallam Tennyson (b. 11 August 1852)—named after his friend—and Lionel (b. 16 March 1854). Tennyson rented Farringford House on the Isle of Wight in 1853, eventually buying it in 1856. He eventually found that there were too many starstruck tourists who pestered him in Farringford, so he moved to Aldworth , in West Sussex in 1869. However, he retained Farringford, and regularly returned there to spend
18034-521: The winters. In 1850, after William Wordsworth's death and Samuel Rogers ' refusal, Tennyson was appointed to the position of Poet Laureate ; Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Leigh Hunt had also been considered. He held the position until his death in 1892, the longest tenure of any laureate. Tennyson fulfilled the requirements of this position, such as by authoring a poem of greeting to Princess Alexandra of Denmark when she arrived in Britain to marry
18176-413: The works of James Joyce , the film Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock , and the novel Coraline by Neil Gaiman . The Homeric Hymns mostly date to the archaic period of Greek history, though they often retell much older stories. The earliest of the hymns date to the seventh century BCE; most were probably composed between that century and the sixth century BCE, though the Hymn to Ares
18318-567: The works of Homer, which included the Homeric Hymns , was made by the Florence-based Greek scholar Demetrios Chalkokondyles in 1488–1489. The 1566 edition, made by Henri Estienne , was the first to include line numbers and a Latin translation. By the end of the eighteenth century, twenty-five Byzantine manuscripts were known. One, known as M or the Codex Mosquensis , was written by the polymath Ioannes Eugenikos in
18460-578: The works of Pindar and Sappho . The lyric poet Alcaeus composed hymns around 600 BCE to Dionysus and to the Dioscuri , which were influenced by the equivalent Homeric hymns, as possibly was Alcaeus's hymn to Hermes . The Homeric Hymn to Hermes also inspired the Ichneutae , a satyr play composed in the fifth century BCE by the Athenian playwright Sophocles . Few definite references to
18602-474: Was "much soothed & pleased" by reading " In Memoriam A.H.H. " after Albert's death. The two met twice, first in April 1862, when Victoria wrote in her diary, "very peculiar looking, tall, dark, with a fine head, long black flowing hair & a beard, oddly dressed, but there is no affectation about him." Tennyson met her a second time just over two decades later, on 7 August 1883, and the Queen told him what
18744-480: Was Aeolic. For example, fragments of the works of the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos are in Aeolian. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions, generally equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, or to an island. Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric (including Cretan Doric ), Southern Peloponnesus Doric (including Laconian ,
18886-421: Was a craftsman who polished and revised his manuscripts extensively, to the point where his efforts at self-editing were described by his contemporary Robert Browning as "insane", symptomatic of "mental infirmity". His complex compositional practice and frequent redrafting also demonstrates a dynamic relationship between images and words, as can be seen in the many notebooks he worked in. Few poets have used such
19028-447: Was a matter of considerable scholarly attention in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. August Baumeister published an edition of the hymns in 1860, which was the first to integrate readings based on the Θ ( theta ) family of manuscripts (a sub-family of those descended from Ψ). Robert Yelverton Tyrrell wrote in 1894 that the text of the Homeric Hymns had been in a "state of chaos" before Baumeister's edition, though their text
19170-514: Was also an influence on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's melodrama Proserpina , first published as a prose work in 1778. The hymns were frequently read, praised and adapted by the English Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century. In 1814, the essayist and poet Leigh Hunt published a translation of the second Hymn to Dionysus . Thomas Love Peacock adapted part of the same hymn in the fifth canto of his Rhododaphne , published posthumously in 1818. In January 1818, Percy Bysshe Shelley made
19312-609: Was also popular for its lyrics. W. S. Gilbert later adapted and parodied the piece twice: in The Princess (1870) and in Princess Ida (1884). It was in 1850 that Tennyson reached the pinnacle of his career, finally publishing his masterpiece, " In Memoriam A.H.H. ", dedicated to Hallam. Later the same year, he was appointed Poet Laureate , succeeding William Wordsworth . In the same year (on 13 June), Tennyson married Emily Sellwood , whom he had known since childhood, in
19454-583: Was an English poet. He was the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria 's reign. In 1829, Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his first pieces, "Timbuktu". He published his first solo collection of poems, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical , in 1830. " Claribel " and " Mariana ", which remain some of Tennyson's most celebrated poems, were included in this volume. Although described by some critics as overly sentimental, his poems ultimately proved popular and brought Tennyson to
19596-456: Was comparatively limited until the fifth century. The Hymn to Hermes was a partial exception, as it was frequently taught in schools. It is possibly alluded to in an anonymous third-century poem praising a gymnasiarch named Theon, preserved by a papyrus fragment found at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt and probably written by a student for a local festival. It also influenced the "Strasbourg Cosmogony",
19738-412: Was composed considerably later and may date from as late as the fifth century CE. Although the individual hymns can rarely be dated with certainty, the longer poems (Hymns 2–5) are generally considered archaic in date. The earliest of the Homeric Hymns were composed in a time period when oral poetry was common in Greek culture. It is unclear how far the hymns were composed orally, as opposed to with
19880-621: Was reflected in his attitude toward universal suffrage, which he did not outright reject, but recommended only after the masses had been properly educated and adjusted to self-government. Upon passage of the 1832 Reform Act , Tennyson broke into a local church to ring the bells in celebration. Virginia Woolf wrote a play called Freshwater , showing Tennyson as host to his friends Julia Margaret Cameron and G. F. Watts . Colonel George Edward Gouraud , Thomas Edison 's European agent, made sound recordings of Tennyson reading his own poetry, late in his life. They include recordings of "The Charge of
20022-558: Was still considered problematic at the turn of the 20th century: Thomas Leyden Agar wrote in 1916 of the "manifold and manifest" errors of tradition in the hymns. In 1984, Bruno Gentili [ it ] suggested that variations found in the manuscript tradition as to the reading of particular passages may have been considered equally-correct alternations ( adiaphoroi ) available to a rhapsode, and therefore that attempts to discriminate between them in modern editions were misguided. Between 1894 and 1897, Thomas William Allen published
20164-417: Was written to commemorate his friend Arthur Hallam , a fellow poet and student at Trinity College, Cambridge , after he died of a stroke at the age of 22. Tennyson also wrote notable blank verse , including Idylls of the King , "Ulysses", and " Tithonus ". During his career, Tennyson attempted drama, but his plays enjoyed little success. A number of phrases from Tennyson's work have become commonplace in
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