A Day with the Poet Tennyson

A tender time capsule from 1905, this imagined day with Alfred Lord Tennyson invites readers into the poet's private world at Farringford, his estate on the Isle of Wight. We rise with him to morning letters, follow him into the garden where he tended his beloved flowers, sit through afternoon conversations where the great man discusses society and the cosmos, and gather close as evening falls and he recites legend and verse. The text interweaves his poetry throughout, so that a walk through the orchard becomes an occasion for 'The Lotos-Eaters' and twilight summons 'Ulysses.' What emerges is neither strict biography nor novel but something rarer: a sustained reverie about how genius inhabits ordinary time. The color illustrations render the Victorian country house as a kind of Eden. For readers enchanted by the Victorians, for those who wonder what it was like to be in the presence of the man who gave voice to England's melancholy, this small book offers an hour of luminous stillness.