Tears, Idle Tears Flashcards
Tears Idle Tears
Alfred Lord Tennyson 1847
Alfred Lord Tennyson 1809-1892
Greatly affect by the death of his good friend Arthur Hallam who died of a stroke aged 22, named his son Hallam Tennyson
Other notable works: Charging of the light brigade and In Memoriam written for Arthur Hallam
Genre / Themes
An elegy
Loss and Longing
Form
Blank verse, four quatrains, iambic meter built around the repetition of a refrain line
The refrain line
The various kinds of repetition in the poem, help to convey the idea of the speaker trapped by, or obsessively focusing on the days that are no more
“Tears, idle tears”
Unprompted, unbidden, without apparent purpose
The speaker questions why he should be moved to tears as he contemplates a ‘happy’ scene: confused by his seemingly unprompted tears
“I know not what they mean”
The Speaker’s state of confusion
“Depth of some divine despair”
Sense of powerful overwhelming emotions conveyed by the alliterations and the connotations of ‘depth’ (strength) and ‘divine’ (powerful, deeply felt and unknowable)
“Happy Autumn-fields”
Happy because of the annotations with harvest and the bustling human activity and company (from which the speaker is detached, and an onlooker)
Autumn is a season of change pointing towards winter and the ideas of closure and death
Stanza 2
The metaphor of sunrise and sunset, and of a voyage and of the seas
This is a very common 19th century metaphor for loss and grief
"Fresh ... ... Sad.. ... So sad, so fresh the days that are no more"
The repetition intensifies the speakers sense grief
“The days that are no more” strike the speaker as being fresh and sad, he explains these sensations in this stanza
“Ah” beginning of the third stanza
Emotions have escaped the speaker
“Dark summer dawns”
A rather paradoxical image which further hints at the speakers depressed state; the conflict between the ideas of ‘dawn’ and the symbolism of the ‘darkness’
Proves there is no consolation to be found in nature and it only further promotes his grief
“Half-awakened birds”
Another idea of struggle and uncertainty
“The casement slowly grows a glimmering square”
Idea of a struggle; slow audacious transitions from darkness to faint ‘glimmering’ light. Light is a symbolism to reflect the speaker’s state of mind and also represents the faint traces of the past/memories which now feel lost to the speaker
