Kind hearts are more than coronets
Tennyson’s “Lady Clara Vere de Vere” reconsidered for this 21st century
Lady Billie, vogue of vogue,
Of me you shall not win renown:
You thought to break a young man’s heart
For social points made him your clown.
At me you smiled, then you once filed
Restraint orders, so I withdrew,
The author of a hundred hits
Should know rejecting fans is cruel.
Lady Billie, vogue of vogue
I know you bear your pretty name
Your pride is yet no match for mine,
Too proud to care much if I came
Or if I went, or once I’m spent.
Kind hearts are more than horny brats
Or salivating maiden morsels —
We own your sounds, your sharps and flats
Your smiles, your hair, your lips, your torsos.
Lady Billie, vogue of vogue
You do injustice through haughty airs
Inflict we strong smart men with Siren song
Then inject us with such deep despairs
It’s all your fault, and each assault
Mere response to your deprivation
How dare you deny our world was real?
We saw it stream across one station.
Lady Billie, vogue of vogue
You put strange memories in my head.
Not thrice your Grammy wins have blown
Since I beheld young [victim] dead.
Oh your sweet eyes, your low replies:
A great enchantress you may be;
But there was that across his throat
Which you put there for his mom to see
And which she shared online when done
To prove how evil you’ve become
which earned a hundred thousand like
to punish you for all your spite.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Lady Clara Vere de Vere” ranks high among his lesser works, and “kind hearts are more than coronets” is surely among his 50 greatest immortal nuggets, the highlights of which include—
- “Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” from In Memoriam
- “Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers” from Locksley Hall
- “Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die” from The Charge of the Light Brigade (previously parodied here)
So far as I’m concerned, Lewis Carroll improved upon the original “Lady Clara” immensely by rendering the heartbreaking femme fatale as an 8-year-old girl who outwitted an inspector hunting for “boys who know not two and two are four” by tossing Tennyson’s line at him, “Kind words are more than coronets!”
Absurd? Well, no more so than Tennyson’s original suggestion that a proud noble woman compelled a poor, common man to kill himself because he was incapable of winning her fancy.
The absurdity is that anyone took Tennyson seriously in the 19th century. After all, his poetry proposed that the best options for men who suffered a romantic rejection might be suicide or enlisting in the British Navy and fighting overseas.
Our friends at Wikipedia assembled two quips on the master quipper:
- T. S. Eliot famously described Tennyson as “the saddest of all English poets”, whose technical mastery of verse and language provided a “surface” to his poetry’s “depths, to the abyss of sorrow”.
- W. H. Auden described Tennyson as the “stupidest” of all the English poets, adding that: “There was little about melancholia he didn’t know; there was little else that he did.”
Maybe something of Tennyson’s poetry persists somewhere in between.
My ‘ballad’ presents something of a 21st century tableau built in response to Tennysonian ingredients.
Men (boys) believe themselves ‘entitled’ to women — particularly celebrity women they deem desirable, whom they’ve only ‘met’ through images, videos, and a few quotes here and there. Sexual entitlement ‘trollery’ might manifest as “involuntarily celibate” boys taking guns and shooting themselves or other people.
Tennyson judged the woman to be a proud ‘enchantress’ causing a good man’s ruin — a vile Victorian virulence that mutates and persists today.
Yet for some reason, I hear Billie Eillish’s voice answering as Lady Clara, challenging Tennyson’s begrudging judgment:
“I’m not your friend or anything, damn
You think that you’re the man
I think, therefore, I am.”
What teenager invokes Renee Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum” as a sexual weapon? Sly beats of a Spartan shield to bludgeon some boy who thought himself entitled to her body, image, name. Mere adolescent arrogance? Or is this antivenom to a masculine toxicity?
Tennyson’s fragile boy-man cut his own throat. Today’s fragile boy-men would probably pull a gun, shoot themselves or others…ugh, did I just repeat those words? How I wish I could erase all the shooters as easily as I might edit a sentence!
Such incidents today beget other graphic imagery — whereas a Tennysonian mother’s expression of “the passions of her kind” (frown) might have one meaning then, today, such a person might share a picture on Instagram and channel blame or guilt towards some random celebrity, “Look what YOU’VE done to my son, you bitch!” (This isn’t my fault…it’s not my fault…)
In a social media universe, faulty misjudgments like the old Tennyson verses can become bandwagons, and none of the participants will even see what path they tread. One sick incel judges conduct by some other sick incel, reads a few words, and determines that some poor girl or woman caused a man to do some terrible thing — resurrecting the ugliest aspects of Tennyson’s logic through new media, without grasping alternatives.
The nasty tableau plays out. But words endure regardless.
