Abstract
Alfred Tennyson's poem “The Palace of Art” (1832/1842) is liable to strike the modern reader as all too clear in its meanings. Yet the author evidently feels the need to gloss the theme of the workandto elaborately preview its narrative in a brief poem that he includes with the piece when he sends it to his friend Richard Trench. “I send you here a sort of allegory (For you will understand it),” Tennyson writes in a peculiar formulation that muddies several issues about the aspirations of the work even while expressing certainty about the poem's clarity. The suggestion is that Trench will have access to a particular insight (“you will understand” being something we say when others may not). Or does Tennyson mean that the allegory is so clear that its tendency is unmissable? That would certainly be a reasonable construal of the claim about a poem with few apparent mysteries.
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