Alfred Tennyson is usually referred to as “Alfred, Lord Tennyson”. He was Poet Laureate of England from 1850 to 1892, the longest stretch anyone occupied the position before or since. He wrote The Charge of the Light Brigade, which is pretty well known, but not very much of his other work is still read. He did, though, enjoy resurrecting archaic and obsolete words in the hope that they’d come back into use.
His son Hallem Tennyson (who was the second Lord Tennyson, a title created especially for Alfred by Queen Victoria) wrote a biography after his father’s death in which he revealed that Alfred regretted never having managed to reintroduce the old word “yarely.”
“Yarely” hadn’t been obsolete for all that long in Tennyson’s day. It’s quite an old word, dating from Old English — although in Old English it looked a bit different: “gearolíce.” “Yarely” meant “quickly,” and it seems to have been fairly commonly used in Old English all the way through the late 1700s. Tennyson lived from 1809 to 1892, so he just missed it.
You can find “yarely” in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “Fall too’t, yarely, or we run our selues a ground.” He included it in “Anthony and Cleopatra” as well. Those were written in 1616, and the word appears in quite a few other publications over the decades after that.
A version of “yarely” was — and is, since it’s still sometimes used — “yare.” “Yare” is a term applied to a boat that’s easy to steer. It was still current enough in 1940 to be mentioned by Katherine Hepburn in the film The Philadelphia Story: “My, she was yar. Easy to handle, quick to the helm, fast, bright … everything a boat should be.” “Yar” is just a variant of “yare.”
But although you can still apply “yare” to a boat and expect at least people who know about boats to know what you’re talking about, nobody has tried to pick up where the first Lord Tennyson left off and reintroduce “yarely.” Other than the mention of the word in Hallem Tennyson’s 1897 biography, the most recent mention of the word that anybody knows about was in 1827.
In spite of his abject failure with “yarely,” Alfred Tennyson was quite a success as Poet Laureate. Queen Victoria reportedly enjoyed his work, and told him so herself, even though they only met in person twice. After their first meeting she wrote in her diary that he was “very peculiar looking”, but that didn’t stop her from making him the first person in England to be given a noble title (he was a Baron) on the basis of his writing. He lived on the Isle of Wight in a house substantial enough that it had a name (“Farringford”), but eventually he moved to Sussex because he was tired of being mobbed by all the fans who came to Farringford to try to catch a glimpse of him (maybe he really did look peculiar). Luckily for him, he acted yarely enough that he was able to get away.
