Tennyson, Trench, Tholuck and the 'Oriental' Metre of Locksley Hall

Abstract

'Mr [Henry] Hallam said to me that the English people liked verse in trochaics, so I wrote the poem in this metre.'1 Perhaps English people do like trochaics, but the decision, rather defensively described here, is now usually reckoned unfortunate. The fault is not so much with the trochaics as with the length of the line: eight stresses are too many. Ruskin argues that even trochaic pentameter is 'helplessly prosaic and unreadable'; and while it is clearly not the case that Locksley Hall is metrically incoherent in this way, its coherence is bought at a price.2 Read with the rhythm emphatically marked, the line splits into two manageable halves of four stresses each. These primitive 'gusty heroics' have always been open to parody.3 If the strictly trochaic pattern is allowed to dominate in Tennyson's poem, the tripping rhythm exaggerates what is most banal in the sentiment. Hopkins's friend Dixon complains that the metre 'had the effect of being artificial and light: most unfit for intense passion'.4 The customary reading may, however, be wrongly based. Hallam Tennyson quotes from Emerson the opinion that ''Locksley Hall and The Two Voices are meditative poems, which were slowly written to be read slowly'; and indeed, when Henry James heard Tennyson read Locksley Hall, he talked of its 'organ roll', its 'monotonous majesty', its 'long echo', but of its being, as it were, drained of everything he might have expected of it.5 And the likely consequence of mitigating the insistence of the trochees is that the rhythm collapses altogether into something close to prose. Pleading for a slow reading Dwight Culler complains that 'we do not know how to read trochaics any more'.6 In effect, no one knows how the line should be read. No one knows with what recognizable metre 'this figment of trochaic tetrameter' can profitably be identified.7