pleasure derived from rhyme when a poem has all the logical and orderly sequence of prose. Perhaps no poet has ever been more happy in his rhymes than Tennyson. He has no startling or unlooked-for rhymes, like those of the author of "Hudibras," or Robert Browning; nor does he ever fall into the monotonous jingle of the pseudo-Pope school. Take the Song of the Brook as a fine but not solitary instance.
Like Homer, and like the Old Testament writers, he has a great love of repetition. All readers of Tennyson will immediately call to mind several beautiful examples of this art in the "Morte d'Arthur," in "The Brook," in the "Idylls of the King," and in "In Memoriam."
The Sonnet he has rarely attempted except in his earlier volumes, and it does not seem to be a form suited to his genius.[1] His two most successful early efforts, the Sonnets on Poland, are, after all, mere echoes of
- ↑ "Alfred Tennyson never seems to have cared much for the Sonnet; at least, he has very rarely clothed his own thoughts in this form. One sonnet of his, of moderate merit, I can remember; another, found in the earlier editions of his Lyrical Poems, has dropt out of the later."—Archbishop Trench, Afternoon Lectures on Literature and Art (Lond. 1867), p. 163.
