IX
Fair ship, that from the Italian shore
Sailest the placid ocean-plains
With my lost Arthur's loved remains,
Spread thy full wings, and waft him o'er.
So draw him home to those that mourn
In vain; a favourable speed
Ruffle thy mirror'd mast, and lead
Thro' prosperous floods his holy urn.
All night no ruder air perplex
Thy sliding keel, till Phosphor, bright
As our pure love, thro' early light
Shall glimmer on the dewy decks.
Sphere all your lights around, above;
Sleep, gentle heavens, before the prow;
Sleep, gentle winds, as he sleeps now,
My friend, the brother of my love;
My Arthur, whom I shall not see
Till all my widow'd race be run;
Dear as the mother to the son,
More than my brothers are to me.
The penultimate stanza pleads the weather to be calm and still and then Tennyson uses some extraordinary language to describe loss in the context of two men whose friendship was platonic:
My friend, the brother of my love;
My Arthur, whom I shall not see
Till all my widow'd race be run;
Dear as the mother to the son,
More than my brothers are to me.
“The brother of my love”, “My Arthur”, “my widow’d race”, and then those final comparisons to his mother and brothers: Tennyson views himself as a wife who has lost her husband, the repetition of “my” from line to line building the intensity. It still seems extraordinary 200 years later and I guess it must have seemed extraordinary at the time. I wonder, when he first wrote “till all my widow’d race be run” or "more than my brothers are to me", if he ever thought, ‘I can’t write that!’ because that’s often the moment that lifts a poem out of the ordinary and soon-to-be-forgotten. As long as the poet doesn’t score it out which I suspect often happens.
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