Tennyson: an educational compendium of misquotation

One of my literary pet peeves is misquotation, and particularly the misquotations that get into the educational system, often via its urge to reduce complex commentary to short easy-read soundbites suitable for sprinkling into essays, like raisins into a pudding mix. I just ran into this set of quotations about Alfred, Lord Tennyson, coming from a worksheet for teachers, on the educational resource site teachit.co.uk. Compare and contrast the worksheet quotes and the reality.

Keats at Dawlish

Wayland Wordsmith just featured a nice poem - The Rosy bosom'd Hours - by the little-known Coventry Patmore, which tells of the rail journey of the newly-wed Patmore his second wife from somewhere in southern England (probably from East Grinstead, where Patmore had an estate) via Havant, Salisbury and Dawlish, down to Penzance.

Crossing the bar

The Lympstone-based Wayland Wordsmith blog ("discourser on the Exe estuary") wrote yesterday of "Going out over" [the bar], a rite of passage for Lympstone boys described in Devon Life in 1979 by Cyril G Tuckfield: