The fifth mood-room in “The Palace of Art” places the pastoral landscape in the context of human scale, productivity and consumption. Whereas the previous stanza all but removes humanity from the meditation on the land and sky, the description of “reapers at their sultry toil” folds in not only the reapers as characters in the scene but also the implied pressures and demands of industrialized civilization on the landscape and urban residents. The “upland, prodigal in oil” looms large over the fertile fields and introduces an anticipated conflict between urbanity and the pastoral.
The farmer at work in the fields or tending to a flock is a staple of Romantic literature and artwork. John Dawson Watson's 1862 sketch Oft did the Harvest to the Sickle yield illustrates a line from Thomas Gray's 1751 poem “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” and closely reflects the scene described in “The Palace of Art.” Gray's poem represents the beginnings of Romanticism in the 18th century; Tennyson and Watson's works were published 80 and over 100 years later, respectively, yet the scene endures.
The stanza in “The Palace of Art” begins with a straightforward description of a pastoral scene, “The reapers at their sultry toil./ In front they bound the sheaves. Behind/ Were realms of upland,” that could pass as an honest Romantic passage. The scene is complicated, however, by the parenthetical description of the uplands as “prodigal in oil.” The pastoral lifestyle represented in the foreground suddenly faces its imminent takeover by the industrialization that lurks under the very hills that surround the farm. One can imagine the hills in Oft did the Harvest to the Sickle yield being filled with oil and the implications that oil holds for the horse that currently collects the hand-cut sheaves.
A viewer of Watson's sketch cannot know whether the hills in the background are “prodigal in oil” as the ones in “The Palace of Art” are described. The speaker in “The Palace of Art” contributes an exclusive knowledge of the landscape that cannot be known to the casual observer. Yet the knowledge of the hills' oil provides the critical turning point in an otherwise unremarkable pastoral scene. It is that information that shatters the fantasy of the pastoral and places the scene, which is otherwise frozen in an idealized time, in the context of social and technological changes—specifically, the Industrial Revolution and subsequent modernization in society.
“The Palace of Art” was written and published at a time between Romanticism and the Victorian era in England. The environments described in its rooms reflect a sympathy for the Romantics' appreciation of nature but the descriptions of the world also moderate admiration of the natural world with constant reminders of industrialized modern society and the tensions between the industrial world and the natural world.
The mention of the oil below the hills, and the transformative effect that the passing mention has on the tone and meaning of the scene, shows the self-conscious involvement of the artist in the scene he describes. An otherwise superficial and aesthetic reproduction of the environment takes on an entirely different significance once the literally underlying substance is known to the reader—in much the same way the superficially isolated stanzas that describe the palace's rooms take on new meaning when read in context of their references and influences.
