Locksley Hall - Cultural Influence

Cultural Influence

Though Alfred, Lord Tennyson is one of the most famous poets in English literature, "Locksley Hall" is one of his lesser-known works. This is not without exceptions, of course; the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., writing in the Wall Street Journal, quoted the poem to illustrate "a noble dream" that modern U.S. policy decisions may have been neglecting, and he also stated that Winston Churchill considered it "the most wonderful of modern prophecies" and Harry S. Truman carried the words in his wallet.

Lord Tennyson wrote a sequel to Locksley Hall in 1886, "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After". In the sequel Tennyson describes how the industrialised nature of Britain has failed to fulfil the expectations of the poem of 1842.

A line in "Locksley Hall" would inspire the title of the historian Paul Kennedy's 2006 book on the United Nations, The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations.

Locksley Hall was parodied, not without beauty, to the foxhunter at least, by the Victorian English foxhunting MP William Bromley Davenport (1821–1884) in his poem "Lowesby Hall", named after a famous hunting seat in Leicestershire, the pre-eminent fox-hunting county. It describes the revived emotion in a jaded and spend-thrift city MP as he recalls the excitement of his youth foxhunting in Leicestershire, and foresees the end of his Victorian aristocratic society:

Can I but regain my credit can I spend spent cash again

Hide me from my deep emotion O thou wonderful champagne

Make me feel the wild pulsation I have often felt before

When my horse went on before me and my hack was at the door

later:

Saw the landlords yield their acres after centuries of wrongs

To the Cotton Lords to whom it's proved all property belongs

Queen Religion State abandoned and all flags of party furled

In the government of Cobden and the dotage of the world.

In a scene from the American film Marathon Man, graduate student Thomas "Babe" Levy (portrayed by actor Dustin Hoffman) attends an exclusive seminar at Columbia University. During the seminar, his irritable professor, played by Fritz Weaver, quotes the line "Let us hush this cry of ‘Forward’ till ten thousand years have gone" from "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After" and then asks if anyone recognizes it. Hoffman's character is the only one who does (he writes down the title in his notes) but does not reveal this to the class. The professor calls him out on this after dismissing the other students.

In the television programme Star Trek: Voyager, the dedication plaque of the U.S.S. Voyager quotes from the poem: "For I dipt in to the future, far as human eye could see; Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be."

"Locksley Hall" is also the source of the title of Colum McCann's 2009 novel, Let the Great World Spin.

Also, it includes one of the most famous lines in all of English poetry, the last of the following four, albeit very few are aware of whence it came, and it is often, perhaps usually, misquoted:

In the spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin's breast

In the spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest

In the spring a livelier iris changes on the burnished dove

In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

James Thurber illustrated this poem for Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated.