TrinityCollegeChoir

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

1809-92.  Poet of world renown. As a student at Trinity he won the Chancellor’s Medal for a poem, but left Cambridge without taking a degree.  He succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate and held the position from 1850 until his death - far longer than anyone before or since.

In the bas-relief of the statue a pipe bowl lies half-hidden among the laurel wreaths.  It was put there by a secret conspiracy between the sculptor Thornycroft and the donor Harry Yates Thompson, a life-long friend of the then Master Montagu Butler, who was well aware of the Master’s dislike of smoking. 

The much-quoted Tennyson was the author of The Charge of the Light Brigade, Crossing the Bar, The Lady of Shalott (see picture below), and In Memoriam, which he wrote to commemorate his friend Arthur Hallam, another Trinity poet, and which contains the immortal lines “’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.”  Verse 87 is a nostalgic sketch of life at Trinity:

I passed beside the reverend walls
     In which of old I wore the gown;
     I roved at random thro’ the town,
And saw the tumult of the halls;

And heard once more in college fanes
      The storm their high-built organs make,
      And thunder-music, rolling, shake
The prophet blazon’d on the panes;

And caught once more the distant shout,
      The measured pulse of racing oars
      Among the willows; paced the shores
And many a bridge, and all about

The same gray flats again, and felt
      The same, but not the same; and last
      Up that long walk of limes I passed
To see the rooms in which he dwelt.

Another name was on the door:
      I linger’d; all within was noise
      Of songs, and clapping hands, and boys
That crash’d the glass and beat the floor;

Where once we held debate, a band
      Of youthful friends, on mind and art,
      And labour, and the changing mart,
And all the framework of the land…