"TIMBUCTOO."
23
Arthur Hallam entered at Trinity College in October, 1828, being then in his eighteenth year.
In 1829 Hallam and Tennyson both competed for the Chancellor's gold medal for a poem on Timbuctoo, That of Hallam is written in the terza rima of Dante.[1]
That of Tennyson, which is in blank verse, obtained the prize,[2] and was published in the same year, being the first production to which he set his name.
It is curious that three lines of this poem appear also in the "Ode to Memory," published in the volume of 1830, but as that Ode is stated by the author to have been "written very early in life," its composition may have preceded that of the prize poem.
Here are the passages:
- ↑ Printed separately at the time, and afterwards in his "Remains in Verse and Prose" (London, 1834).
- ↑ "On Saturday last the Chancellor's gold medal for the best English poem by a resident undergraduate was adjudged to Alfred Tennyson, of Trinity College."—Cambridge Chronicle and Journal, Friday, June 12, 1829. The poems were sent in in the month of April. In Thackeray's juvenile publication, "The Snob" (Cambridge, 1829), pp. 18-21, is a curious little burlesque on the subject, with a mock poem on Timbuctoo, which the writer pretends was finished too late to be sent in.
