Tennyson's Gift by Lynne Truss Read Free Book Online Page A

sailors succumbing to a lifetime of postprandial snooze, ‘propt on beds of amaranth and moly’ (whatever that was).
    Let us alone. What pleasure can we have
    To war with evil? Is there any peace
    In ever climbing up the climbing wave?
    All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave
    In silence; ripen, fall and cease:
    Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.
    It was the line about ever climbing up the climbing wave that particularly appealed to Il Signor. He felt he knew the sensation, and that he had learned to ride waves not fight them. Also, ‘There is no joy but calm’ had always been his personal motto until Little Miss Act Five Scene Two Terry had kicked the ottoman from under him.
The Lotos-Eaters
was a great poem, all right. Besides which, on train journeys it always helped lull him to sleep.
    In his dream, however, things were less reassuring. He was still in a railway carriage, butEllen was dressed prettily in a red coat and feathered hat like the child in John Everett Millais’s painting ‘My First Sermon’. This seemed perfectly natural. Outside the window, the landscape (which should have been Hampshire) was all cliffs and wind and wild flowers, alternating with long stretches of blue coastal sea. Another of the passengers was the dead painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, who studied Watts through the wrong end of a telescope and whispered ‘Remember Westminster’. It was very unsettling. Meanwhile the sound of the carriage wheels was saying, over and over, a passage from
Maud:
    â€˜Rosy is the West, Rosy is the South,
    Roses are her cheeks, And a rose her mouth.’
    â€˜Rosy is the West, Rosy is the South,
    Roses are her cheeks, And a rose her mouth.’
    Ellen watched him as he twitched in his seat, merely remarking to herself that it was the most animated she had seen him in a considerable time. She returned to her own reading matter, but could not concentrate. Watts had given her a book of proverbs to digest on the journey, bought at Waterloo for the knockdown price of threepence. Watts did not notice that a knockdown present gave his wife very little gratification; he always loved to tell her how little his presents had cost. It was another area in which they would never see entirely eye to eye.
    She flicked through the book of proverbs idly.
    â€˜It is a silly fish that is caught twice by the same bait.’
    â€˜Northamptonshire stands on other men’s legs.’
    â€˜Cheese digests everything but itself.’
    So many picture opportunities for her dear husband! How
would
he manage Northamptonshire’s borrowed legs, she wondered. The section on Gratitude included the interesting commandment, ‘Throw no gift again at the giver’s head’ – which was a precept which came just in time for Ellen, since the ungrateful young woman was just about to hurl this ghastly book straight at her nodding spouse.
    What is the point of a book without pictures or conversation? Ellen tried to read Tennyson’s latest poem
Enoch Arden
(Watts knew better than to turn up at Freshwater without it). But she had trouble with that as well. Its story was the usual cheerless Tennyson stuff, but with slightly more event than one had learned to expect. It concerned a fisherman who undertakes a voyage, leaving his family, and stays away for umpteen years because shipwrecked on a desert island. Back at home,his wife waits and waits (years pass), and keeps putting off another suitor, but finally concedes that Arden will not return. And then, what do you know? Arden is rescued! He comes home, learns that his wife has remarried, and dies in grief alone. But he makes a friendly landlady promise to tell the whole story after his death, so that everybody can feel really guilty and morbid, including the kiddies.
    Ellen huffed, and put the book back in her bag. The whole thing seemed bizarre to her. If she were shipwrecked abroad and returned to find