Astronomy in Locksley Hall Sixty Years After
Astronomical References in Alfred Lord Tennyson's Poem
May 11, 2009
Alfred Lord Tennyson was one of the 19th century's leading English language poets and was poet laureate of England. In Tennyson's popular poem, Locksley Hall, the protagonist asks his military comrades to wait while he visits his childhood home to reminisce about his childhood and an unrequited love. The sequel, Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, has the same much older protagonist.
Locksley Hall Sixty Years After
In Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, the protagonist in Locksley Hall is now an old man addressing his grandson. Astronomical references include:
"Warless? War will die out late then. Will it ever? late or soon?
can it, till this outworn earth be dead as yon dead world the moon?
Dead the new astronomy calls her....on this day and at this hour."
"Yet the moonlight is the sunlight, and the sun himself will pass.
Venus near her! smiling downward at this earth of ours,
Closer on the Sun, perhaps a world of never fading flowers."
and
"Hesper-Venus-were we nature to that splendor or in Mars,
We should see the Globe we groan in, fairest of their evening stars."
In addition to the speculations on the warlike nature of the human race, the first passage contains some knowledge of our Moon. Scientifically we know that the Moon is a barren world that is both geologically and biologically dead as in Tennyson's allusion. The Moon also does not emit its own light. Rather it shines by reflected sunlight as suggested when Tennyson states that moonlight is sunlight.
Venus is closer to the Sun than Earth. We now know that Venus has a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead and definitely too hot for flowers or other life. However for Tennyson the speculation that Venus was warm enough for flowers all year long was reasonable given the knowledge of Venus at the time.
Because Venus is closer to the Sun than Earth, it is never seen opposite the Sun from Earth. It is seen as either a morning star low in the east or as an evening star low in the western sky. In Greek mythology Hesper is another name for the evening star. From Mars, Earth would appear as either an evening or morning star, as Venus does from Earth.
19th Century Astronomical Advances
By the 19th century astronomers had learned that the stars were not mere points of light in the sky. The Sun is a star, so other stars could be thought of as suns possibly possessing planets of their own. Tennyson was likely aware of this knowledge as shown by the lines:
"While the silent Heavens roll, and Suns along their fiery way,
All their planets whirling round them, flash a million miles a day."
Earth travels roughly 800,000 miles a day as it orbits the Sun, so Tennyson's million miles a day is a fairly reasonable estimate of how fast planets might travel.
A few lines earlier, Tennyson refers to other possible planets as "every peopled Sphere", suggesting that he considered the possibility that these planets might be teeming with life. Locksley Hall also has lines alluding to this astronomical understanding that stars and the Sun are the same thing.
These astronomical references and the references to evolution in Locksley Hall Sixty Years After show that Tennyson was knowledgeable about 19th century astronomy and science in general.
Further Reading
Tennyson, Locksley Hall Sixty Years After
