"The Palace of Art" is an 1832 (revised 1842)

poem Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in ...

Alfred Tennyson Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson (6 August 1809 – 6 October 1892) was an English poet. He was the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign. In 1829, Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his ...

. In the poem a man constructs a palace of art for his soul with any amount of art. The art of the palace and its gardens deals with sacred, secular and irreligious themes, the moral value appears irrelevant and only the artistic value matters. The builder converses figuratively with his soul, referred to as she from the

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

anima. The builder's soul at first likes the palace but later tires of it and asks for a cottage where she can purge her guilt.

External links

The Palace of Art, Alfred Lord Tennyson
(An online text with commentary) * {{DEFAULTSORT:Palace of Art 1832 poems 1842 poems Poetry by Alfred, Lord Tennyson British poems