LOCKSLEY HALL. Termyson's (Locks ley Hall' is perhaps not only the best known among his shorter poems but is also one of the most widely read poems in the language. It is a lyrical monologue, 194 lines in length, in eight-stress trochaic couplets. Published in 1842, when the poet himself was only 33 years of age, it is pre-eminently the poem of youth with both its weakness and its strength. Its boy hero is passionate, both in his love and his disappointment ; fretful, moody and unsure, unreasonable in his general attitude toward life, yet aglow with humanitarian enthusiasm, on fire with his own splendid vision of the future of the race. He is not an altogether likable and wholesome person, and rather un pleasantly suggests the hectic hero of *Mane but he has in him so much of essential and universal youth as to engage the unseen lis tener of his tale of disappointed love, of pas sionate upbraiding, of altruistic hopes and dreams. Though the coast setting is that of Lincolnshire, both hero and hall are entirely imaginary. The idea of the setting Tennyson gained from an Arabic poem of the 7th cen tury, which shows a lover, traveling with com panions, asking that he be left alone for a time s he stands before the tent of his be love ; the Arabic poem even ends with the co of a storm, as does (Locksley Hall.'
ennyson's subject-matter, replete with a ions to the latest discoveries in electricity, astronomy and engineering, and the latest social movements, is 'aggressively modern." His hero, even in the midst of his complaint, is very much taken up with the events of his time. Yet with all this the poem is highly per sonal and romantic. The structure is plain, when one notes that the monologue presents the thoughts that pass naturally, and discon nectedly, through the hero's mind as he recalls the past and newly resolves for the future. Remarkable in the light of later events are the famous couplets foretelling aerial commerce and warfare, and those prophesying universal peace by means of a league of nations. The poem is striking even among Tennyson's in the beauty of its figures of speech. One of these, °Love took up the harp of life," the poet considered his best. Owing to its tropical quality, to the youth that beats through it, and to its spirited verse, eLocksley is one of the most quoted of English poems," and some of its lines and phrases, such as °In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love ,° have passed into the common speech.