Tennyson spent the rest of his life returning to that desolate seascape, literally but also literarily. You can hear it, first of all, in his impeccable sense of rhythm. These days, he is widely regarded as having the finest facility with metrical forms of any poet of his generation—a grasp of prosody both perfect and unpredictable, as if the complex metronome of that turbulent coastline ticked on within him. Consider these lines from “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” perhaps his most famous poem: