Saturday Snippet: One of the legends of the Victorian era

Following last Saturday’s look at Jingoism and the poetry of Sir Henry Newbolt, I’ve had several requests from readers for more from that period.  I’m happy to oblige.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson was one of the greatest poets of the Victorian era and the entire 19th century.  He was Poet Laureate of Britain for most of Queen Victoria’s reign.  Many of his poems became national classics and are still commonly read to this day, such as “The Charge of the Light Brigade“.  I’ve chosen two of his poems that I’m sure will be familiar to many readers, perhaps not as a whole, but because of some well-known excerpts that have become almost idiomatic in the English language.

To begin, here’s “The Revenge:  A Ballad of the Fleet“.  It refers to the first ship of that name in what became the Royal Navy, which was lost in an unequal fight with a much larger Spanish fleet during the Battle of Flores in 1591.  At the time, Revenge was under the command of Vice-Admiral of the Fleet Sir Richard Grenville.

At Flores in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay,
And a pinnace, like a flutter’d bird, came flying from far away.
‘Spanish ships of war at sea! We have sighted fifty three!’
Then sware Lord Thomas Howard: ‘’Fore God I am no coward;
But I cannot meet them here, for my ships are out of gear,
And half my men are sick. I must fly, but follow quick.
We are six ships of the line; can we fight with fifty three?’

Then spake Sir Richard Grenville: ‘I know you are no coward;
You fly them for a moment to fight with them again.
But I’ve ninety men and more that are lying sick ashore.
I should count myself the coward if I left them, my Lord Howard,
To those Inquisition dogs and the devildoms of Spain.’

So Lord Howard past away with five ships of war that day,
Till he melted like a cloud in the silent summer heaven;
But Sir Richard bore in hand all his sick men from the land
Very carefully and slow,
Men of Bideford in Devon,
And we laid them on the ballast down below;
For we brought them all aboard,
And they blest him in their pain, that they were not left to Spain,
To the thumbscrew and the stake, for the glory of the Lord.

He had only a hundred seamen to work the ship and to fight,
And he sail’d away from Flores till the Spaniard came in sight,
With his huge sea-castles heaving upon the weather bow.
‘Shall we fight or shall we fly?
Good Sir Richard, tell us now,
For to fight is but to die!
There’ll be little of us left by the time this sun be set.’
And Sir Richard said again: ‘We be all good English men,
Let us bang these dogs of Seville, the children of the devil,
For I never turned my back on Don or devil yet.’

Sir Richard spoke and he laugh’d, and we roar’d a hurrah, and so
The little ‘Revenge’ ran on, sheer into the heart of the foe,
With her hundred fighters on deck, and her ninety sick below;
For half of their fleet to the right and half to the left were seen,
And the little ‘Revenge’ ran on thro’ the long sea-lane between.

Thousands of their soldiers look’d down from their decks and laugh’d,
Thousands of their seamen made mock at the mad little craft
Running on and on, till delay’d
By their mountain-like ‘San Philip’ that, of fifteen hundred tons,
And up-shadowing high above us with her yawning tiers of guns,
Took the breath from our sails, and we stay’d.

And while now the great ‘San Philip’ hung above us like a cloud
Whence the thunderbolt will fall
Long and loud,
Four galleons drew away
From the Spanish fleet that day,
And two upon the larboard and two upon the starboard lay,
And the battle-thunder broke from them all.

But anon the great ‘San Philip,’ she bethought herself and went
Having that within her womb that had left her ill content;
And the rest they came aboard us, and they fought us hand to hand,
For a dozen times they came with their pikes and their musketeers,
And a dozen time we shook ‘em off as a dog that shakes its ears
When he leaps from the water to the land.

And the sun went down, and the stars came out far over the summer seas,
But never a moment ceased the fight of the one and the fifty-three.
Ship after ship, the whole night long, their high-built galleons came,
Ship after ship, the whole night long, with her battle-thunder and flame;
Ship after ship, the whole night long, drew back with her dead and her shame.
For some were sunk and many were shatter’d, and so could fight us no more–
God of battles, was ever a battle like this in the world before?

For he said ‘Fight on! Fight on!’
Tho’ his vessel was all but a wreck;
And it chanced that, when half of the short summer night was gone,
With a grisly wound to be dressed he had left the deck,
But a bullet struck him that was dressing it suddenly dead,
And himself he was wounded again in the side and the head,
And he said ‘Fight on! Fight on!’

And the night went down, and the sun smiled out from over the summer sea,
And the Spanish fleet with broken sides lay around us all in a ring;
But they dared not touch us again, for they fear’d that we still could sting,
So they watch’d what the end would be.
And we had not fought them in vain,
But in perilous plight were we,
Seeing forty of our poor hundred were slain,
And half of the rest of us maim’d for life
In the crash of the cannonades and the desperate strife;
And the sick men down in the hold were most of them stark and cold,
And the pikes were all broken or bent, and the powder was all of it spent;
And the masts and the rigging were lying over the side;
But Sir Richard cried in his English pride,
‘We have fought such a fight for a day and a night
As may never be fought again!
We have won great glory. my men!
And a day less or more
At sea or ashore,
We die–does it matter when?
Sink me the ship, Master Gunner–sink her, split her in twain!
Fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of Spain!’

And the gunner said ‘Ay, ay’, but the seamen made reply:
‘We have children, we have wives,
And the Lord hath spared our lives.
We will make the Spaniard promise, if we yield, to let us go;
We shall live to fight again and to strike another blow.’
And the lion there lay dying, and they yielded to the foe.

And the stately Spanish men to their flagship bore him then,
Where they laid him by the mast, old Sir Richard caught at last,
And they praised him to his face with their courtly foreign grace.
But he rose upon their decks and he cried:
‘I have fought for Queen and Faith like a valiant man and true;
I have only done my duty as a man is bound to do:
With a joyful spirit I Sir Richard Grenville die!’
And he fell upon their decks and he died.

And they stared at the dead that had been so valiant and true,
And had holden the power and the glory of Spain so cheap
That he dared her with one little ship and his English few;
Was he devil or man? He was devil for aught they knew,
But they sank his body with honour down into the deep,
And they mann’d the ‘Revenge’ with a swarthier alien crew,
And away she sail’d with her loss and long’d for her own;
When a wind from the lands they had ruin’d awoke from sleep,
And the water began to heave and the weather to moan,
And or ever that evening ended a great gale blew,
And a wave like a wave that is raised by an earthquake grew,
Till it smote on their hulls and their sails and their masts and their flags,
And the whole sea plunged and fell on the shot-shatter’d navy of Spain,
And the little ‘Revenge’ herself went down by the island crags
To be lost evermore in the main.

I remember reading that poem in primary school in South Africa, and the impression it made upon me.  “Sink me the ship, Master Gunner” found an echo in me somewhere, and I’ve never forgotten those two lines.

Another very famous Tennyson poem is “Ulysses“, in which the legendary Greek hero of that name reflects on his life now that he is an old man.  He is determined not to sink into his dotage, but to go adventuring one last time, to die as a man rather than enfeebled by age.

Again, this was a standard schoolroom text (although for older children), and I absorbed it eagerly.  The last fifteen lines have been quoted almost endlessly ever since they were written, and some have become mottoes and slogans for countless individuals.

Tennyson’s poetry has been said to be too florid and emotional for modern tastes (such as they are), but I still enjoy his work very much.  I hope you do, too.  He left us a rich legacy of poems that will reward investigation.

Peter