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Reading It Properly: The Poetics of Performance and Tennyson’s “Merlin and Vivien”

ions, wryly subverting proposed laws with his own “specimens” to the contrary. Tennyson’s metrical choices and changes were precise (noting them in letters as being specifically “on account of the meter”3), and his corrections of others’ mistakes non-negotiable, but they are also steadfastly subjective, backed up by ear-impressions and affective understanding, rather than the logic of a system. Critics have gone far in reconjuring the ignis fatuus of Victorian metrical laws—seductive in the period for their tentative absolutes and seductive to current scholars for the very eccentricities, “wars,” and logical snares they occasioned, as well as their historical contingencies.4 Yet this technical and historical understanding of meter’s significance has limited application for a poet whose rigor was based in a scrupulously sensual subjectivity. The aim of this essay, rather than relegating Tennyson’s faith in his ear to eccentricity or merely biographical interest, or trying to find a latent system in his recitational practice, is to inquire into the nature of his subjective seriousness about reading “properly”—what it meant and why it mattered to a critical understanding of his dramatic poems in particular. Reading Tennyson’s poetry with an ear toward performing accentuates (as his own listeners experienced) the relationship between affective and dramatic content in his poems, opening up a new way of thinking about the imaginative response to his prosody. For while the visual register of Tennyson’s poetry has been chiefly discussed in terms of images—the “luxuriance of imagination” first described by Arthur Hallam in 1831 that we associate with vividness, texture, contour—the imagination of movement, and of intentional movement in particular, has received less attention. I argue that, particularly in the case of Tennyson’s dramatic and dramatic narrative poems, passages that require deep prosodic attention are closely associated with the imagining of physical movements and gestures, an association that results in their high affective impact. Because it is instigated by rhythm, by the production and channeling of tension and expansion in the lines, dramatic or what we might even think of as a choreographical imagining is different from images linked to diction and descriptive specificity. Dramatic imagining begins in the reader or listener’s muscles: as much felt as (and necessarily before) it is seen. In what she called her “meditation on the ear” in 2009, Angela Leighton adopted Robert Frost’s notion of the “imagining ear” to call attention to the specifically dynamic, deliberately aural kind of reading emphasized by what she calls “ear-minded poets.” Leighton demonstrates how such poets (among whom Tennyson figures) activate the “imagining ear” in passages “which call on a complexity of listening—a complexity, written into the text, which forces on the reader that difficult, double attention of reading with the ears” (Leighton 100). Leighton describes a productive discipline of engaging with difficulty that I build upon in this essay, of227 The Poetics of Performance and Tennyson fering Tennyson’s understanding of performative rigor as an alternative to the emphasis on Victorian prosodic laws that have dominated recent criticism.5 The first part of this essay looks at Tennyson’s concern for and conception of performative accuracy in biographical documents, offering a reassessment of how the poet’s concern for metrical precision and for the dramatic life of poetry met and expressed themselves significantly in recitation, a practice that was equally relevant to both compositional and performative habits. This dual function can help us to think of even silent but dramatically informed reading of formal verse as a dramatic experience, one that invokes the intense visualization of moving bodies as an embodied response to a poem’s affective content. Building upon this suggestion, I look to a particularly relevant example from Tennyson’s work to demonstrate how strategic difficulty in his prosody calls attention to this activation of dramatic imagining through the challenge of hearing it accurately. “Merlin and Vivien” (1855–56) is a poem that not only dramatizes drama in the action of Vivien’s performances but also showcases the activation of dramatic imagining in readers through its performative difficulty. Reading this work, I demonstrate the kind of performative self-consciousness that Tennyson builds into his lines and how it requires an engagement that is both serious and subjective, attuned to the precise prosodic choices, but answering with a just-as-seriously responsive imagining of what they connote. This uncanny dualism of serious subjectivity, of remaining obedient to rhythm, but actively imaginative, becomes, as I show, important to understanding one of the most critically difficult aspects of the idyll—the “half-state” that finally, and for many readers inexplicably, allows Merlin to succumb to Vivien’s wiles. Here, I show how that poem’s preoccupation with “half-states” of consciousness mirrors the kind of consciousness— half vigilant precision, half dreamy oblivion—that Tennyson associated with the ability to critically approach poetry through an investment in performing it. Hearing It Properly: Incantation, Intention, Entrainment The legend of Tennyson’s vocal ingenuity was well established during his lifetime. Yet the reverence (or at least deference) of many of his listeners tends to obscure particularized audience observations with general adjectives like “grand” or “powerful,” and accounts of who cried (including, sometimes, Tennyson himself).6 The poet’s attunement to the performative choices and artistic self-consciousness of stage actors, however, can help to bring forth cannier aspects of his readings than are usually emphasized. Hallam Tennyson’s notes on his father’s remarks on Shakespeare (edited and assembled by James Hoge in 1976) reveal a primary interest in line delivery and the dramatic attitude of performers.7 Hallam quotes Anne