.

outside, it softly snows (again)
while inside, I find shelter in dusty books
and absolutely love how the victorian nonsense poets
(Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, for example) wrote
tennysonian pastiche into their verses of affection
and regret, taking a tongue-in-cheek stab at the
style of the age, at alfred's perpetual mourning
and morbid genius. but after a successful eighty-year
run, modernism is fully exhausted (isn't it?). and
the black rif of tennysonian parody is finally over.

or is it? just read tennyson in the light of today's
glocal complexities to rediscover the relevance of his
compelling daemons, revisit all of his deliciously unhealthy
poems that pine for the one who will never come, allthewhile
serving to exhault his daemon-driven voices so-fiercly-enamored-
with-themselves-and-oh-so-highly-charged-with-erotic-self-sufficiency.
Bloom asks,

"where is the edge between sublime passion and sublime nonsense?"

a man in charge of his daemons, indeed.
o lyric genius, historically hailed with eloquence,
portraitist of women-in-no-ultimate-need-of-the-lovers- they-supposedly-await-but-instead-finding-surrogate-reprieve-
in-poetry-itself. tennyson's women. their dangerous melancholia
filled to overflowing with 'my-heart-is-a-handful-of-dust-ness.'
and tennyson self-described as the embodiment of

"the morbid, poetic soul under the blighting influence
of a recklessly speculative age...an hier of madness,
an egoist with the makings of a cynic, raised to a pure
and holy love which elevates his whole nature, passing
from the height of triumph to the lowest depth of misery,
driven into madness by the loss of her whom he has
loved, and, when he has at length passed through the
fiery furnace, and has recovered his reason, giving
himself up to work for the good of mankind through the
unselfishness of a great passion."

it is t/his blatant exhaltation of his own daemon-driven mind
that raises him to the canonic level of Bloomian-prescribed genius.

and so...

o splendid tear, my fate, my dear,
my perfect pearl of praise obscured
by softly falling snow outside
as if to hide the fires dousing sleep,
blanketing this long unlovely street
as if to break my april blank of day
with bold and boundless deep.