1. Introduction
To do my second paper, I thought it will be great to
analyse a poem of a Victorian poet who had influences from the author of
my first paper. I was looking for this poet and I found that the most important
one, Lord Alfred Tennyson, fulfilled my expectations.
Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), English poet often regarded
as the chief representative of the Victorian age in poetry. Tennyson succeeded
Wordsworth as Poet Laureate in 1850. Alfred, Lord Tennyson was born on August
5, 1809 in Somersby, Lincolnshire. His father, George Clayton Tennyson, a
clergyman and rector, suffered from depression and was notoriously absentminded.
Alfred began to write poetry at an early age in the style of Lord Byron. After
spending four unhappy years in school he was tutored at home. Tennyson then
studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he joined the literary club
'The Apostles' and met Arthur Hallam, who became his closest friend. Tennyson
published Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, in 1830. Later, he was writing a lot of
poems like "Mariana", "In Memoriam", "The Lady of Shalott", "The Lotus-eaters"
"Morte d'Arthur", "Ulysses" "Charge of the Light Brigade" “Idylls Of The
King”, which made him the most important poet of that time. Tennyson died
at Aldwort on October 6, 1892 and was buried in the Poets' Corner in Westminster
Abbey.
Like I said before, as I child, Tennyson was influenced
profoundly by the poetry of Byron, so his earliest poems reflect the lyric
intensity and meditative expressiveness of his Romantic forebears. These early
poems demonstrate his ability to link external scenery to interior states
of mind. However, unlike the Romantics, whose nature poems present a scene
that raises an emotional or psychological problem, Tennyson uses nature as
a psychological category. Not only is Tennyson a poet of the natural and
psychological landscape, he also attends frequently to the past, historical
events, and mythological pasts as repositories for his poetry.
But I was not looking for a very important poem, since
his best known poems frequently deal with the past and historical events,
and I wanted to do my work with a poem about Tennyson’s life, concerns or
feelings, so I was reading all the titles of his poems, and doing this I saw
one poem that I did not know what it was going to be about, its name was
“Crossing the bar” so I read it and I decided to do my paper about this poem.
2. The poem: Crossing the bar.
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for
me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and
foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For through from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the
bar.
["Crossing the Bar" was initially published in Demeter and Other Poems.
By Alfred, Lord Tennyson.London & New York: Macmillan & Co.,. 13
December 1889. pp. vi, 175.] >The text of the poem has been checked against
that in Poetry of the Victorian Period, ed. Jerome H. Buckley and George
B. Woods (Boston: Riverside, 1965) 176.
“Tennyson wrote “Crossing the bar” in 1889, three years
before he died. The poem describes his placid and accepting attitude toward
death. Although he followed this work with subsequent poems, he requested
that “Crossing the bar” appear as the final poem in all collections of his
work”.
3. Analysis of the poem
3.1 Title
The title of this poem is very important when you have
already read it, because I think that all people can think the same than me
when I saw it the first time, I mean, that you do not know exactly what the
poem is going to talk about. But once you have read it, the title is meaningful.
Tennyson uses the metaphor of a sand bar to describe
the barrier between life and death. A sandbar is a ridge of sand built up
by currents along a shore. In order to reach the shore, the waves must crash
against the sandbar, creating a sound that Tennyson describes as the "moaning
of the bar." The bar is one of several images of liminality in Tennyson's
poetry: in "Ulysses," the hero desires "to sail beyond the sunset"; in "Tithonus",
the main character finds himself at the "quiet limit of the world," and regrets
that he has asked to "pass beyond the goal of ordinance."
The other important image in the poem is one of "crossing," suggesting Christian
connotations: "crossing" refers both to "crossing over" into the next world,
and to the act of "crossing" oneself in the classic Catholic gesture of religious
faith and devotion.
3.2 Theme
I think the most important idea of this poem is how Tennyson
feels about death, and that he wants nobody to cry for him. He sees how death
is going to call him through the sea, and how the dark appears reaching his
last moments in the life. But he talks about this because he wants no sadness
in anyone.
3.3 Structure
The poem is divided into four stanzas, each one with
four lines. And the rhyme is A-B-A-B. This is related with the fact that
the first and third stanzas are linked to one another, and the second and
fourth too, being always the first and third line of every stanza longer
than the other two.
• The first stanza:
Tennyson starts locating what is going to happen, I mean,
he talks about “the sunset”, “the evening”… and that he has a call (of the
death), so he doesn’t want any “moaning” for him when he will die.
• The second stanza:
The author describes the environment and tries to make
us understand that this death will mean for him only a new life.
• The third stanza:
Here he shows us that in this moment (and as it is happening
during the poem as we see in the first and this third stanza with the repetition
of the word “evening”), it is not the night for him, the night, I mean, the
dark will come when he dies, and when it will happen, he wants “no sadness
of farewell” (line 11) from the people.
• The fourth stanza:
He says that when he will die he will see "his Pilot".
3.4 Communicative structure
Since we know something about Tennyson’s life and when
he wrote the poem, we can properly say that he is the speaker in the poem,
and that signs like “for me” (line 2), and “I put out” (line 4) show us that
he is referring to himself as the person who is going to die.
It seems like he feels near the moment in which he will
leave the world since he uses the present simple tense to refer to the fact
that it is going to happen, and he also uses “may” in the first, second and
third stanza to refer to the future (which is not far for him, or at least
he thinks so) in: “and may be no sadness of farewell” (third stanza).
3.5 Cohesion
This work is well structured from the beginning to the
end. Tennyson uses a lot of connectors, qualifiers…
- He links the first and third stanzas with for example
the connector “and” (beginning of the line 3 respectively in each stanza).
- The use of two qualifiers: “But” (starting the second
stanza), “For through” (starting the fourth stanza).
- The second lines of the first and third stanzas are
ended with an exclamation point. “Here the poet expresses alarm at realizing
what death will entail”.
- In the first, third, and fourth stanzas he situates
that all this will happen when he will die. He does it using the word “when”
at the beginning of these stanzas.
- As I said before, he talks in the poem as if everything
is going to happen in the evening, so, he uses this word in the first lines
of the first and third stanzas.
- The whole poem is connected since he uses commas in
all the lines except in the end of the second and fourth stanzas
3.6 Lexis and semantics
As I said before, Tennyson uses the metaphor of a sand
bar to describe the barrier between life and death. And he uses this
metaphor during the whole poem to describe that he sees death as this environment,
and that everything that is going to happen to him has an explanation from
this point of view.
In other words: Tennyson wrote this poem as his own elegy,
as the poem has a tone of finality about it. Tennyson uses an EXTENDED METAPHOR
to compare death to crossing the “sandbar” between the harbour of life and
the ocean of death.
But the poem has another meaning as well analyzing the
word “crossing”:
The religious significance of crossing was clearly familiar
to Tennyson, for in an earlier poem of his, the knights and lords of Camelot
"crossed themselves for fear" when they saw the Lady of Shalott lying dead
in her boat. The cross was also where Jesus died; now as Tennyson himself
dies, he evokes the image again. So, too, does he hope to complement this
metaphorical link with a spiritual one: he hopes that he will "see [his] Pilot
face to face".
Leaving this two images, we can too analyze the rest
of the poem:
Both the first and third stanzas begin with two symbols
of the onset of night: "sunset and evening star" and "twilight and evening
bell." The second line of each of these stanzas begins with "and," conjoining
another item that does not fit together as straightforwardly as the first
two: "one clear call for me" and "after that the dark!" These stanzas then
conclude with a wish that is stated metaphorically in the first stanza: "may
there be no moaning of the bar / When I put out to sea"; and more literally
in the third stanza: "And may there be no sadness of farewell / When I embark."
Yet the wish is the same in both stanzas: the poet does not want his relatives
and friends to cry for him after he dies. Neither of these stanzas concludes
with a period, suggesting that each is intimately linked to the one that follows.
3.7 Personal interpretation
The first time I read this poem was just to see if I
liked it to do a paper, and now, I can say that I am happy to have found
it.
On one hand I thought that this man maybe had only poems about mythology
or history about his epoch, and now I know that I was really wrong, he wrote
a lot of kind of poems, (in his times they started to question everything,
even religion).
As I was saying, I was looking for a different poem, then I saw that this
poem was written when he was 80 more or less, so I wanted to know what this
poem was to be about (because of his feelings: he was old, and because the
name of the poem was strange for me).
When I started to understand what “Crossing the bar”
was, and its main idea, I could not see any other poem. It was a brilliant
poet expressing his feeligs, writing about what he hopes to everybody.
I did not explain the summary of the poem (I only did
it stanza by stanza), so I would like to do it now:
Tennyson’s work talks about the nature, the sand bar,
which is used for him to express that he is going to die one day, and that
he wants that nobody will cry for him.
I liked it because I think that he wrote this because
he knew what was to be sad because the death of the others, and he was suffering
during his life since he had a miserable childhood, alcoholic father, sorrow…
So he did not want the same for his friends and family and nothing to say
if he was the reason of this sadness.
This is an inevitable thing, but the fact that he wanted
to avert or avoid this is nice to me.
4. Importance of the poem in Tennyson’s life and works.
As I was explaining before, I think Tennyson wrote this
poem as result of his life.
In this essay I should talk about one theme in the poetry
of an author, so I chose the death as a theme, not because he was writing
in all his works about it, but his feelings, I mean, this was a feeling he
had before he died and I think this is a result of all his life (and works),
and to demonstrate it I can show you poems Tennyson wrote in commemoration
of his dead friend. (Only one stanza after the next two paragraphs).
I think this way because we can see that he suffered
a lot with the death of his friend Arthur Hallam and he wrote “In Memoriam”
dedicated to him. This is a very extense masterpiece which demonstrates that
he was a very sensible poet, and he felt very sorry about this fact. So we
can say that when he started to write he had influences of Romanticism, but
he also had these characteristics before his death. He was not always writing
about it, but we can see that he felt it.
In Memoriam A.H.H. is a long poem by the English poet Alfred,
Lord Tennyson, and completed in 1849. It is a requiem for the poet's Cambridge
friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage in
Vienna in 1833, but it is also much more. Written over a period of 17 years,
it can be seen as reflective of Victorian society at the time, and the poem
discusses many of the issues that were beginning to be questioned. The original
title of the poem was "The Way of the Soul", and this might give an idea
of how the poem is an account of all Tennyson's thoughts and feelings as
he copes with his grief over such a long period - including wrestling with
the big scientific-philosophical questions of his day. It is perhaps because
of this that the poem is still popular with and of interest to modern readers.
Due to its length and its arguable breadth of focus, the poem might not be
thought an elegy or a dirge in the strictest formal sense.
The most oft-quoted lines in the poem are perhaps:
I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
The last two lines are usually taken, out of context,
as offering advice on the dissolution of a romantic relationship. However
the lines actually refer to the death of a beloved friend.
Throughout In Memoriam, Tennyson, as an evolving narrator, struggles in
his efforts to cope with Hallam's death. He considers thoroughly how he will
be affected by different modes of mourning, and he worries deeply about the
effects these will have on him. He is acutely concerned that in mourning Hallam,
he will somehow ease his own suffering; although he is urgently searching
for divine meaning behind Hallam's death, his conscience continuously discourages
him from mourning in any way that consoles him, and this makes his mourning
process even more difficult and painful.
He contemplates the morality of writing about his friend's death, fearing
that the action of writing, which may mitigate his pain — "Like dull narcotics,
numbing pain" (5, line 8, p. 208), is unethical. The act of forming words
out of his pain, he fears, will misrepresent his feelings because it is impossible
to perfectly capture the state of his soul (5, lines 1-4, p. 208).
Thus, in his mourning, the narrator is aiming not only to grapple with Hallam's
death, but to create a worthy memorial for him.
Although the narrator calls for an end to mournful singing, he expresses
the belief that he will always be haunted by sounds reminding him of the death
of Hallam. He notes that until his hearing fails him or until he himself dies,
he shall hear a slow, constant bell announcing the death of his friend repeatedly
in his own ears. He also describes hearing the repeated farewells said to
those who are dead.
This is a very good example to show how he suffered,
it is so deep that everybody can use nowadays this expression to explain
how their sorrow is.
So, in the poem we analyzed, on one hand he wanted that
nobody cry or feel grief for him, because he suffered as well as we can see
in “In Memoriam”, so “Crossing the bar” would be like a conclusion of his
desires (in this case).
But on the other hand we can analyze too that he was a
very sentimental poet in other aspects, as we can see as well in his work
“Mariana” that he felt sorry for her situation and he decided to write the
poem.
5. Bibliography
• Lord Alfred Tennyson. – Biography and Works. 8 Feb 2007.
<http://www.online-literature.com/tennyson/>
• Sparknotes: Tennyson’s Poetry: Analysis and Themes.
5 Feb 2007. <http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/tennyson/analysis.html>
• “Alfred Lord Tennyson: Crossing the Bar (1889)”. VictoianWeb.com.
8 Jan 2005. 3 Feb 2007. <http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/crossing.html>
• Sparknotes: Crossing the bar: Commentary. 3 Feb. 2007.
<http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/tennyson/section10.rhtml>
• “Crossing the bar”. Wikipedia: The Free Enciclopedia.
8 Feb 2007. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Bar>
• “In Memoriam A. H. H”. Wikipedia: The Free Enciclopedia.
11 Feb. 2007 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Memoriam_A.H.H.>
• Newman, Abigail. Victorian Mourning: The significance
of sound in Poems of death. 17 Dec. 2003. 11 Feb. 2007. <http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/ebb/newman14.html>