Secondly, and more recently, his verse has turned out to be resistant to modern techniques of literary criticism. It holds no interesting ambiguities, intentional or unintentional; there are no puzzles, no 'levels of meaning' within it, it just is. All the critic can say about most of it comes down to, 'Look at this. Good (or bad), isn't it?' This is as much as a great deal of what passes for criticism is really saying, but with other poets—Donne, for instance, that notable purveyor of mere complication—it is easier to seem to be saying more. Tennyson eludes such attempts.

A reading of his early verse, that written by the time he was twenty-one, say, shows him to have been possessed of stupendous inborn gifts, a child of the Muses who makes the Keats of that age look all fingers and thumbs. We should have to go back to Milton (whom Tennyson greatly admired) to find an English poet of comparable natural endowment, or, since Milton's early efforts smell of ink as well as inspiration, it might be more instructive to go outside literature altogether and invoke the youthful Mozart.

'Mariana' is a very easy poem to like, and, what is rarer, to like for the right reasons. It embodies to perfection that characteristically Tennysonian power which generations of critics have tried to define, but none more successfully than the unknown contributor to Tait's Edinburgh Magazine for August 1842, who praised Tennyson's 'power of making the picturesque delineation of external nature illustrate the mood of mind portrayed'

'Come down, O maid' is a sustained flight of the purely lyrical, a vehicle of excitement and exultation unique in Tennyson, a sound-piece again unique in English.

'Milton' (1863) is a more interesting, not to say fascinating, case in point. It is not only a magnificent piece, deeply romantic and Romantic, unashamedly lyrical and stuffed with the luxuries of poetry; it is also, in its conclusion, shamelessly personal, unedifying, unmoral, exotic and pagan—all qualities the Laureate was pledged to abjure. Or rather, it was not shamelessly, not openly, any of that; Tennyson smuggled it in, in the manner of the Princess lyrics, as an experiment in the use of Latin metres in English. The result is a technical feat unequalled in our language (one of the things that marks Tennyson as a great poet is the tally of his uniquenesses) in that 'Milton' makes metrical sense in English while adhering strictly to the utterly alien prescriptions of the Latin form —a feat appreciable only by those disappearing few who know Latin. But, of course, the point of this performance is that it gave Tennyson sanction to say what he would not have dared to say in his natural voice.