Alfred Tennyson and William Burges

This article focuses on two artefacts from Burges’s eclectic and prolific output: his illustration of Tennyson’s first dramatic monologue, ‘St Simeon Stylites’ (exhibited in 1861) and the bed he designed for his own Tower House bedroom, which features a painted panel illustrating a scene from Tennyson’s ‘Sleeping Beauty’. Considering image and artefact as interpretations of their source texts, I suggest how each points towards what we might call the architectural quality of Tennyson’s poetry: its relationship with materiality, structure, and design; and I observe how Burges’s — often witty — visual renderings of Tennyson’s poetry draw our attention to the physical foundations that ground his dreams

Gloom · Reading aloud · History of Science and Natural History · Legal and Social Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism