Idling in Gardens of the Queen: Tennyson's Boys, Princes, and Kings

Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poems 'The Princess' and 'Idylls of the King' are strong illustrations of his experimentation with gender and the security of an age before gender is separated. The poems explore the relationship between mother and child in the development through adolescence into manhood. His characters are unable to recapture the safety of pre-gendered identities through relationships with adult women and can only seek that state through death. Tennyson's male characters want to avoid adult responsibility by returning to a second infancy.