Sometimes I get asked the question why do I write.  The answer is usually just because I always have.  Recently I’ve given more thought to it and I think that perhaps it is because (apart from having something to say) I like the way words look as much as the way they sound when arranged on a page. You can almost play games with them, juggling the written and the spoken so that both the emphasis and flow change.  Nowhere is that more pronounced than with poetry.

To be honest, I struggle a bit with poetry.  I feel I ought to like it more.  There are some that I love because they remind me of childhood although having to learn and recite, The Lady of Shallott didn’t excite me at the time.  Having to read a poem at the front of the class must have destroyed any potential to love poetry for many a generation of children.  I adore some of Christina Rosetti’s poems but mostly poetry is for me rather like jazz or wine – I know what I like and, sometimes, I discover a new one that is to my taste.

The quote in the photo is from Tennyson’s Maud.  Of course, I knew the old song, Come Into The Garden, Maud that quickly rose to popularity as a parlour song.  Because of this I assumed, like so many others, that Maud must be a love poem.  Certainly, my quote above which comes earlier in the poem would make you think so.

Maud is one of Tennyson’s epic poems; a tale of hatred, infatuation, of death and destruction and the decline into insanity and, later, of war.  The poem certainly wasn’t loved by the public when it was first published in 1855.  So why do I find it so fascinating?

Many readers of my blog share an interest in genealogy and family history.  I have been researching mine for many years and have shared some of my ‘finds’ and stories here.  One such discovery was the long friendship between Tennyson and my ancestral cousin, George Granville Bradley.  Bradley was first the Headmaster of both Rugby and Marlborough Schools before becoming the Dean of Westminster Abbey.  Both he and Tennyson shared a love of geology, then in its early days of understanding.  They would roam the hills of the Isle of Wight together where they both lived geologising and reciting poetry.  The discovery of correspondence between them on the merits of Maud and how it may be altered before publication both excited and intrigued me.  Here was one of Britain’s greatest poets, a Poet Laureate, seeking advice from a cousin of mine!  I purchased an old copy of Tennyson to read it with a renewed interest and the rest – as they say – is (family) history.