Skip to main content

This auction has ended. View lot details

You may also be interested in

Own a similar item?

Submit your item online for a free auction estimate.

Lot 47

TENNYSON (ALFRED)
Autograph manuscript of his poem 'The Daisy', beginning "Oh love, what hours were thine & mine...", Edinburgh, [1851-1852] (2)

24 June 2015, 11:00 BST
London, Knightsbridge

Sold for £12,500 inc. premium

Own a similar item?

Submit your item online for a free auction estimate.

How to sell

Looking for a similar item?

Our Books & Manuscripts specialists can help you find a similar item at an auction or via a private sale.

Find your local specialist

Ask about this lot

TENNYSON (ALFRED)

Autograph manuscript of his poem 'The Daisy', beginning "Oh love, what hours were thine & mine...", titled "The Daisy, written at Edinburgh" at the head in pencil, 120 lines with deletions, revisions and insertions in pencil and pen and ink, 4 leaves, written on rectos with some amendments on 2 verso pages, 8vo; with a printed copy of the poem, olive green morocco binding by Riviere, bookplates of Lucy Wharton Drexel and Boies Penrose II, Edinburgh, [1851-1852] (2)

Footnotes

'OH LOVE, WHAT HOURS WERE THINE AND MINE, IN LANDS OF PALM AND SOUTHERN PINE...'. Written by Tennyson in 1853, 'The Daisy' is a verse epistle addressed to his wife Emily, remembering their Italian tour of 1851: the "lands of palm, of orange-blossom", and remembering fondly their time in Florence ("...what golden hours, In those long galleries, were ours...") and Lombardy. The daisy, which he found in her book when in Edinburgh recovering from two surgical operations, had been picked by him near the highest point of the Splugen Pass in Switzerland and placed in the book by his wife - "But 'ere we reached the highest summit/I pluck'd a daisy, I gave it you./It told of England then to me/And now it tells of Italy. O love, we two shall go no longer/To lands of summer beyond the sea...".

'It sings and rings at once with the reciprocity of love...It is the poem in which Tennyson most deeply expressed all that he owed to Emily, and there is no sentimentality in our feeling gratitude to her as well as to him for one of the great poetic evocations of gratitude.' (Christopher Ricks, Tennyson, 1989). This manuscript was not known to Christopher Ricks, who records no other in either Tennyson or Tennyson Archive, and neither the reconsidered readings nor the many differences in accidentals are recorded in his definitive edition of Tennyson's poems. The printed version is presented in four-line stanzas and comprises 108 lines. Reconsidered readings in the manuscript include some 17 lines, mostly with trial versions of some lines and a final version on the verso of the first leaf, which became a stanza for the printed text.

Additional information

Bid now on these items

A Presentation Copy of Kennedy's First Book to Spencer Tracy. Kennedy, John F. 1917-1963. Why England Slept. New York: Wilfred Funk, Inc., 1940.

Signed to Spencer Tracy 1952 Hemingway, Ernest. 1899-1961. The Old Man and the Sea, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1952.

CORNELIUS, MATTHEWS, editor. 1817-1889. The Enchanted Moccasins and Other Legends of the American Indians.

CALEPINO, AMBROGIO. 1435-1511. [Dictionarium.] Calepinus Ad librum. Mos est putidas.... Venice: Peter Liechtenstein, January 3, 1509.

HEARN, LAFCADIO. 1850-1904. [Japanese Fairy Tales.] Philadelphia: Macrae-Smith, [But Tokyo: T. Hasegawa,] [c.1931].

HEMINGWAY, ERNEST. 1899-1961. PUTNAM, SAMUEL, translator. Kiki's Memoirs. Paris: Sign of the Black Manikin, 1930.