Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, Now the White

ca. 1849

Originally appeared in The Princess (1847-1853). Appears in several places on the net, including http://www.bartleby.com/42/629.html.

Remarks:

While this poem is only roughly a sonnet, defying the sonnet form in its variation, in a typically Tennysonian way it is also a masterpiece of the form. The “couplet” here is radically revised, taking the form of a grammatical unit of two lines finishing with the rhyming word “me”, and rather than simply turning after an octave, the sonnet folds onto itself: rhetorically a seven-seven would work as well as a four-six-four, the poem turning on the dazzling phrase (with its internal rhyme) “Danaë to the stars / And all thy heart lies open”. In this view, the poem's phantasmagoric representation of beauty in confusion, as identities fuse, the “thou”, “she” and “me” all in the air, begins to exert its own intimate attraction. The gender of the speaker is ambiguous and irrelevant, as we are suspended by the vacillation of images between active and passive, and find ourselves wondering how much of this ambiguity is deliberate. The confusion is further energized by the mirroring of frame-narratives in which this lyric appears, in Tennyson's little-read, brilliant and politically incorrect faux-epic, The Princess: a male author (Tennyson) has published a long poem encapsulating a story told by a man to a group of friends, including a particular woman who punctuates the story with exclamations and commentary; in this story-within-a-story, a female character (the Princess of the frame's title) reads this lyric from a book to a male character (a suitor whom she finally accepts).