Tennyson: Final Version

Break, break, break is a poem written by Alfred Tennyson that belongs to his work called Poems, from the two- volume Edition of Poems published in 1842. The poems that belong to the first volume were written between 1830 and 1832, this poem belongs to the second volume and it was written in 1833. 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 a strict attitude and a puritan conduct respect sex, but this strict morality drove them continually to hypocrisy. But Tennyson involved no hypocrisy in his poems, and the poem I am going to translate presents “ the usual impossible case of irony”.

         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 thought 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 a very easy distribution too. 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 how the sea breaks on the stones, and I think that this means that the author knows that nobody will listen to his thoughts, like the sea, no matter how much the waves beat against the rocks, the rocks will always 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 ( 1^st 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 normal people, because of this, I think, that Tennyson scorns them because they say no important things, and he must keep his thoughts to himself 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 tell 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 emphasized 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 remembers 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! the repetition of “O” in lines 2, 5, 7, 11 and 14, is important too, and in my opinion makes the poem more dramatic, as it would be crying. The poet uses a lot of exclamations, in lines 2, 6, 8, 12 and 14 too.

         In conclusion I think that it is a very nice poem that uses metaphors and explains the deepest feelings of a poet that was not understood 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 what he feels.