We should have learned from history by now that those who are silent in the face of violence bear part of the guilt; and those who preach hatred are not blameless when someone transforms their words into actions.
However, the adjectives used to describe Telemachus—"blameless", "discerning", and "decent"—are words with positive connotations in other of Tennyson's poetry and within the classical tradition, where "blameless" is an attribute of gods and heroes.
"My one tasted of cwaziness and, like, the fings in the world," asserts some git in a headband, mouthing the words of a child whose blameless pancreas is undergoing a colossal glucose bombardment.
Which begged other questions: if it was just bad wording why then cancel the otherwise blameless Operation Fortitude?
The source of all corruption, in Webster's eyes, was the court -- a truth confirmed in the dying words of the Duchess of Malfi's blameless second husband, Antonio, but also in those of the wicked Vittoria.
Finally, the words from Thessalonians 1 5:23, "kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ".
But news organisations aren't blameless.
If ever we need to invoke it again against vigilantes and mobs, the word will still be there, powerful, imbued with all the righteous wrath and blameless blood that it took to get it on the books in the first place.
Yet it is often said that poetry is what's lost in translation, to the point where Coleridge proposed "untranslatableness in words of the same language without injury to the meaning" as "the infallible test of a blameless style" (Biographia Literaria, chap. 22).
