There are a few textual variants but I would be careful here. I do know that certain textual variants in Stanford's Tennyson settings are not wilful changes but derive from earlier editions - Tennyson was wont to fidget with the details of his poems. So maybe we should give Somervell the benefit of the doubt here.
Essentially, he arranged a whistle-stop tour through the poem, respecting the original sequence except for "O that 'twere possible" which Tennyson placed a little earlier. I suppose that, short of setting the whole thing as a single-narrator opera, he could have done nothing else, and inevitably the story line gets simplified.
He does leave some loose ends, though, maybe supposing that listeners of his own day would have known the poem anyway. The opening song, though a striking beginning, makes no sense if we don't know why the narrator hates the "dreadful hollow" - it's because his father died there, cast into it with a rock that killed him and spattered the hollow with blood. Accident, suicide (he had just been financially ruined) or foul play? Nobody ever knew. Tennyson's opening sequence then develops the suggestion that a vein of madness ran in the family. If we have read that, then this introduction casts its shadow on the doomed love affair that follows.
From Somervell's cycle, too, you get the idea that Maud was someone the narrator met and fell in love with on the spot, while in fact they had been childhood friends till her family moved away, then came back, by which time Maud was 17 and "tall and stately".
Tennyson himself cuts short "Come into the garden", telling us only at the beginning of the next section what actually happened. Though Somervell does keep the line about a "cry for a brother's blood", this is hardly enough for us to understand that, at the climax of "Come into the garden", Maud did arrive, but so did her brother, who was dead against the match, wishing to marry her off to a local bigwig: The narrator struck him and, believing he had killed him, went into exile in Brittany for many years. Eventually he returns, having learnt that the brother had not died so he is not wanted for murder. But by this time Maud was "dead, long dead".
The upshot is that Somervell certainly cut it all down into a "manageable sequence" and, given that the job was to be done at all, probably it could not have been done better. Musically, it also forms a "logical" and "coherent" sequence, and somebody listening to the songs is not going to ask too many questions about the story outside what he hears, but if he does start asking questions, then he will have to go back to Tennyson to find out what really happened.
As for whether these verses resonate in our own times as they did 150 years ago, the original reception of Tennyson's poem was pretty mixed, hence many preferred to take "Come into the garden" out of context (or even to mock its flower imagery as Lewis Carroll did in the Looking Glass garden) and forget the rest. It is a strange precursor of expressionism and maybe Schoenberg, rather than Somervell, would have been the ideal composer to tackle it.
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