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





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