"Maybe it was the M train rattling the windows of your bedroom as it hurtled past your apartment six times an hour. Maybe it was the crunch of gravel in the driveway when your mother returned home from the night shift. Maybe it was your PlayStation starting up. Maybe it was your parents screaming at each other. Maybe it was the brassy, braggart shriek of roosters at four in the morning. Noise is like water: it will enter everywhere it can, by seep or by surge, and change the shape of things."
"Tennyson spent the rest of his life returning to that desolate seascape, literally but also literarily. You can hear it, first of all, in his impeccable sense of rhythm. These days, he is widely regarded as having the finest facility with metrical forms of any poet of his generation-a grasp of prosody both perfect and unpredictable, as if the complex metronome of that turbulent coastline ticked on within him."
His poetry reckoned with the immensities of reality, time, and grief, while confronting new scientific and cosmological truths about the earth and the heavens. Childhood sounds shape sensibility, from urban trains to rural roosters, and noise permeates environments like water. The surf at Mablethorpe became a recurring formative influence, producing a sense of rhythm and a metrical facility that mirrors the sea's ceaseless rush and retreat. He repeatedly returned to that desolate coast, and the wild weather there—flattened dune grasses, fleeing light, and waves like rockfall—infused his lines with both perfect prosody and unpredictable pulse.
Read at The New Yorker
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