Tennyson: Draft Version
Break, break, break is a poem written by
Alfred Tennyson in 1842 that belongs to his work called Poems,
from the two- volume Edition of Poems published in 1842. The author
belongs to the Victorian period that is characterized by the hypocrisy, because
the Victorians wanted to respect the old traditions and correct forms, they had
an strict attitude and a puritan conduct respect the sex, but this strict
morality drove continually to the hypocrisy. But Tennyson involved no hypocrisy
in his poems, and the poem I am going to translate presents “ the usual
impossible case of irony” ( www.victorianweb.org).
When I read the title I had the
impression that the writer wanted to break with something that injured him, I though
that Tennyson was shouting that he wanted to stop that thing but he could not,
and he used the repetition in the title to emphasize the necessity he had to
stop with his pain. And when I read the poem the first time I though that the
author felt himself alone, that he wanted to express his feelings but nobody
and nothing listened to him.
I think the poem is too easy to
understand and it has a very easy vocabulary, the author used very simple words
and he used too a very easy distribution. The poem has four paragraphs of four
lines each one and it can be divided into three parts, the first one is the
first paragraph that starts like the title with break, break, break, and
here the author compares his feeling of expressing his thoughts with the how
the sea breaks on the stones, and I think that this means that the author knows
that nobody will listen his thoughts, like the sea, no matter how much beat to
the rocks, the rocks will ever be there. It is an impossible thing that people
will understand him, and it is impossible that the sea will win the battle
against the stones. The second part has two paragraphs where the author does
not talk about the sea, but he talks about people and things related with the
sea. In the second paragraph of the poem ( 1st paragraph of the
second part), the author talks about the son of the fisherman that can shout
with his sister, and he talks too about the sailor that can sing in his boat,
and I think that Tennyson envies the liberty this people have to express their
feelings, and he cannot shout his thoughts because nobody will understand him.
We can also think that the author scorns this type of liberty, because the kids
and the sailor shout and sing because they have no important thoughts, I say,
Tennyson had intellectual thoughts, that people could not understand, because
in the Victorian period, like in the Romanticism, the intellectuals were
misunderstood and they were not accepted by society, but Victorians accepted
this fact and they felt superior to the normal people, because this, I think
that Tennyson scorns them because they say no important things, and he must
keep his thoughts because people do not understand intellectual things. But I
think that the real feeling of Tennyson is envy and not scorn, because he wants
to shout his thoughts. In the third paragraph the author compares when a ship
is in his haven with the persistence of the sound of a voice under the touch of
a vanished hand. And I think that the author wants to say us that although
people want to forbid him to talk, his voice will sound for ever, I say, in the
Victorian period poets were misunderstood but they fought to gain the liberty
to express themselves. Last paragraph, the third part, ends the poem like it
started, with the repetition and emphasize of break, break, break.
Another time he refers to the sea breaking at the rocks, but this time he makes
a contradiction and not a comparison ( like in the first paragraph), here he
says that the sea time after time breaks on the rocks, but the day that ends
will never come back again. I supposed that the author remember one day when he
could shout his thoughts but that day ended, and now it will never happen
again.
It is important to underline the used
of repetition that emphasize the need of the author to express himself. We
found repetition in the first and the last paragraph, where we can read break,
break, break and the exclamation O Sea! And it is important too the
repetition of “O” in lines 2, 5, 7, 11 and 14, that in my opinion it
makes the poem more dramatic, as it would be a crying. The poet uses too a lot
of exclamations, in lines 2, 6, 8, 12 and 14.
In conclusion I think that it is a very
nice poem that using metaphors explains the deepest feelings of a poet that was
not understand in his period, because the Victorian age, as I have said at the
top of the text, was a period of hypocrisy and poets like Tennyson or Browning
were misunderstood because they wanted to fight against this hypocrisy, and a
lot of times they felt oppressed and this poem is a clear example of Tennyson’s
oppression, and it shows how the author feels because he cannot say that he
feels.
