In case you haven't read it lately, the poem consists of ninety-seven couplets of interior monologue by a young soldier who, jilted by his beloved and having failed to take revenge by finding glorious death in battle, tries to figure out what to do with the rest of his life. At one point, he pauses to ponder the wonders that the rising age of progress will bring about. The crucial passage comes about line 119 where the speaker does a little crystal ball-gazing:
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,This passage clearly describes the invention of the airplane ("argosies of magic sails"), commercial air travel ("dropping down with costly bales"), and the whole business of national air forces, dogfights, and bombers ("the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue"). The problem here is that Tennyson purportedly wrote the poem in 1835, publishing it in 1842 in his volume, Poems. But the Wright Brothers did not launch from Kittyhawk until 1903. Jacob Earl Fickel first experimented with shooting a gun from an airplane in 1910 and the first actual application of such technology did not appear until the Italo-Turkish war of 1911. Tennyson died in 1892, far too early to have witnessed or even read about any of these events.
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue.
I dismiss any suggestion that, as a man of unusual intelligence and insight, the poet laureate somehow divined or deduced, by extending the technological developments of his day, these eventual outcomes. After all, in line 182 of this very poem the narrator cries "Not in vain the distance beckons. Forward, forward let us range,/Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change." The imagery here is of rail travel and scholars affirm that Tennyson, who took his first ride on a train in 1830, actually believed that the vehicle ran on grooves instead of rails. It defies credulity to think that a man of such technological ignorance could have prophesied so accurately a development so far superior to the locomotive.
However, one of two explanations suggest themselves. First, textual criticism allows the possibility that Tennyson did not write the poem, or at least this section of the poem, at all. Clearly some later author, doubtless a member of a fanatical band of Tennyson-disciples, wished to make the great writer appear as a prophet, and accordingly inserted the lines after the fact. It is true that no published version of the poem nor any manuscript copy exists without this section, but it is not difficult to believe that such documents were suppressed by the Academy. No doubt a careful linguistic analysis would reveal that either a) the language in these lines differs in vocabulary and syntax from the rest of the poem, clearly suggesting another author, or b) the language in these lines adheres almost exactly to the vocabulary and syntax in the rest of the poem, clearly suggesting an elaborate effort at verisimilitude.
On the other hand, a reading based on comparative mythology would draw the equally plausible conclusion that aviation as a whole simply does not exist but is, instead, the product of accretions based on Tennyson's original myth of air travel. A writer, a poet, no less, dreams up the wild fantasy of vehicles capable of breaking the bounds of gravity - which has been shown, by measurable and replicable experimentation, to be impossible - and later writers continue to embellish the idea until we ultimately arrive at human-made craft capable of flying not only from continent to continent but even out of our own solar system! It does seem a little difficult that all of this could happen so rapidly, within roughly a century and a half of the original legend, but it remains a more acceptable theory than the idea that Tennyson predicted the future with such accuracy.
As absurd as the foregoing sounds, this is exactly the kind of thing one often finds, written with a straight face (and often even a long face) about the documents of the Christian faith. For instance, Jesus' sermon predicting, in considerable detail, the siege and destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman army, is used to date the gospels of Matthew and Mark as later than AD 70 on the basis that the events must already have taken place. What such writers seem reluctant to consider (or incapable of conceiving) is that Jesus, whether or not he was God incarnate, was a highly intelligent individual who, through careful meditation on the political situation in Palestine in the early first century in light of the history of the region as recorded in the Jewish Scriptures, could predict which way things were likely to break and advise his followers on how to act. In fact, I sometimes wonder if such writers are more reluctant to credit Jesus with superior human intelligence than with prophetic foresight.
In the case of the resurrection, writers like Joseph Campbell point to other resurrection stories as proof that the Easter account is just one more myth, concocted by early Christians to bolster their later claims concerning his divinity. As in the example above, this theory runs aground at least on the count of chronology: Stories of Jesus' resurrection abounded within months of the supposed events, which would be a tremendously compressed timeframe for the growth of a folk tale. (I say the theory "at least" founders on this count because it is open to critique from a number of other directions too numerous to deal with here.)
Perhaps it is easier (I didn't say easy; that option seldom exists where reality is concerned) to believe, as philosopher Dallas Willard suggests in his book The Divine Conspiracy, that Jesus is "the best-informed and most intelligent person of all, the smartest person who ever lived," and that he rose from the dead.
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