Tennyson’s Suppressed Poems

XLI

Cambridge

This poem is written in pencil on the fly-leaf of a copy of Poems 1833 in the Dyce Collection in South Kensington Museum. Reprinted with many alterations in Life, vol. I, p. 67

Alfred Tennyson


THEREFORE your halls, your ancient colleges,
    Your portals statued with old kings and queens,
Your bridges and your busted libraries,
    Wax-lighted chapels and rich carved screens,
    Your doctors and your proctors and your deans
Shall not avail you when the day-beam sports
    New-risen o’er awakened Albion—No,
    Nor yet your solemn organ-pipes that blow
Melodious thunders through your vacant courts
At morn and even; for your manner sorts
    Not with this age, nor with the thoughts that roll,
Because the words of little children preach
Against you,—ye that did profess to teach
    And have taught nothing, feeding on the soul.


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