Tennyson's Natural History
Tennyson really was quite a good poet! This profound dictum follows the search for a quotation that had baffled the memory of a correspondent, to wit: " The music of the moon -
Sleeps in the plain eggs of the nightingale."
The discovery of the passage coincided within a hour or two of the first bout of the nightingale's song in my immediate neighbourhood. Tennyson, of course, though I doubt whether he was himself much of a bird-nester, was very curious about little appearances in nature and liked to pin them down, like moths in a case. Aylmer's Field, where Leolin's unrealised passion is compared to the nightingale's eggs, is peculiarly well dotted with little observations . on _natural history, sometimes so precise as to be comic. "The froth fly op the fescue " has long seemed
to me to lead in this class. is as bad as;' more black than ash-buds in the front of March " is good. As' to the nightingale, did not some ecstatic lady ask the poet if this was the bird that sang " Maud, Maud, Maud," and get the reply, " Rooks, wcimah, rooks," or words to that effect? He did, of course, definitely express his regret that there was no South Kensington Museum in his salad-days, presumably to supply him with little ready-made similes. And how lovely many of these are.
Previous page
