Poem of the Day: ‘Vivien’s Song’

Yeah, yeah. For Valentine’s Day, there’s always “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s classic sonnet. Or Shakespeare’s much-quoted Sonnet 116, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments.” Or perhaps any of a half dozen other poems. The truth is that we don’t have much good Valentine’s Day’s poetry that hasn’t worn a little thin. No matter how good these love poems started out as, they’ve picked up some patina of the hackneyed over the long years.But maybe we might allow a portion of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), to cover Valentine’s Day for us this year. Between 1859 and 1885, Tennyson published “Idylls of the King,” a series of twelve narrative poems that retell for a Victorian audience the legends of the knights and maidens, wizards and kings, of Arthurian legend. Though mostly in blank verse — the unrhymed pentameter that also dominates Shakespeare’s plays — there are some passages that add rhyme. Mostly these are songs, as in the song that Vivien, “like the tenderest-hearted maid / That ever bided tryst at village stile,” sings to Merlin in “Merlin and Vivien,” the seventh narrative in Tennyson’s Arthurian cycle.Claiming to have learned the song from Sir Lancelot, Vivien develops the metaphor of “the little rift within the lute” that grows large enough to silence the instrument, to explain how even the smallest lack of faith between lovers can ruin their love. Through the three-line stanzas, each ending with the word “all,” Vivien concludes, “trust me not at all or all in all.”Vivien’s Songby Alfred, Lord Tennyson ‘In Love, if Love be Love, if Love be ours,Faith and unfaith can ne’er be equal powers:Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all. ‘It is the little rift within the lute,That by and by will make the music mute,And ever widening slowly silence all. ‘The little rift within the lover’s luteOr little pitted speck in garnered fruit,That rotting inward slowly moulders all. ‘It is not worth the keeping: let it go:But shall it? answer, darling, answer, no.And trust me not at all or all in all.’___________________________________________ With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘Vivien’s Song’

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