Pondering on McConvillian Synthesis

** McConville's essay (not available) is an interpretation of "The Lotos-Eaters" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

McConville’s interpreation of Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters” as a possible biblically referenced piece of work is impressive because too often the second voice in the poem is neglected.

In his essay, “Genesis and ‘The Lotos-Eaters,’” McConville states: “the lines allow the reader to believe that the poem is transferring from waking-life to a dream,” referencing the poem’s “Along the cliff to fall and pause did seem” (Tennyson 10). The earlier assertion of the word “courage” molds with the stated lines above with its unequivocally placed accent, providing a trochaic response to the unfaltering iambics of the mariners’ mourning. Such rejoinder indeed triggers the dream vision; furthermore, the author here treats the aesthetic experience in its imaginative rather than its observable qualities. The symbolic landscape, reminiscent of Eden, as McConville states: “A return to Eden, perhaps?” emerges as the imagination’s own kingdom, something that grants form to the inner life of the aesthetic. This biblically ornamented version of reality for which the mariners relinquish their collective life is found not only in the elevated awareness drawn from the splendor of the external world, but exists merely with the volitions laid asleep and the grip of the external world upon consciousness broken. The mind can move in liberation, through unbounded space amidst that chimerical order produced by dream which forms the poem’s major analogue.