The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, And after many a summer dies the swan. Me only cruel immortality Consumes; I wither slowly in thine arms, Here at the quiet limit of the world, A white-hair’d shadow roaming like a dream The ever-silent spaces of the East, Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn. Alas! for this gray shadow, once a man— So glorious in his beauty and thy choice, Who madest him thy chosen, that he seem’d To his great heart none other than a God! I ask’d thee, “Give me immortality.” Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile, Like wealthy men who care not how they give. But thy strong Hours indignant work’d their wills, And beat me down and marr’d and wasted me, And tho’ they could not end me left me maim’d To dwell in presence of immortal youth, Immortal age beside immortal youth, And all I was in ashes. Can thy love, Thy beauty, make amends, tho’ even now, Close over us, the silver star, thy guide, Shines in those tremulous eyes that fill with tears To hear me? Let me go: take back thy gift: Why should a man desire in any way To vary from the kindly race of men, Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance Where all should pause, as is most meet for all? A soft air fans the cloud apart; there comes A glimpse of that dark world where I was born. Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure, And bosom beating with a heart renew’d. Thy cheek begins to redden thro’ the gloom, Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine, Ere yet they blind the stars, and the wild team Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise, And shake the darkness from their loosen’d manes, And beat the twilight into flakes of fire. Lo! ever thus thou growest beautiful In silence, then before thine answer given Departest, and thy tears are on my cheek. Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears, And make me tremble lest a saying learnt, In days far-off, on that dark earth, be true? “The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.” Ay me! ay me! with what another heart In days far-off, and with what other eyes I used to watch (if I be he that watch’d) The lucid outline forming round thee; saw The dim curls kindle into sunny rings; Changed with thy mystic change, and felt my blood Glow with the glow that slowly crimson’d all Thy presence and thy portals, while I lay, Mouth, forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm With kisses balmier than half-opening buds Of April, and could hear the lips that kiss’d Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet, Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing, While Ilion like a mist rose into towers. Yet hold me not for ever in thine East; How can my nature longer mix with thine? Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam Floats up from those dim fields about the homes Of happy men that have the power to die, And grassy barrows of the happier dead. Release me, and restore me to the ground; Thou seest all things, thou wilt see my grave: Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn; I earth in earth forget these empty courts, And thee returning on thy silver wheels.
On This Page: Summary · Background · Analysis and Themes · Form and Technique · Notable Lines · Glossary · Related Poems
Summary
Tithonus, a mortal man once loved by the goddess of the dawn, speaks to her at daybreak. Long ago she granted his wish for immortality — but neither of them thought to ask for eternal youth, and so he has aged endlessly, withering into a “gray shadow” who cannot die. All around him the natural world lives and dies in its proper season; he alone is denied that release. He remembers the glory of his youth and their early love, when her dawn-light kindled his blood, but now her ever-renewing beauty only makes his decay more unbearable. He begs her to take back her gift and let him die, to release him from her cold, immortal world and “restore me to the ground” — to give him the grave that ordinary mortals are blessed to receive. The poem is a sustained plea for death from a man condemned to live.
Background
Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892), the great Victorian Poet Laureate, drew the poem from Greek myth. Tithonus was a prince of Troy so beautiful that Eos (Aurora), goddess of the dawn, fell in love with him and carried him off. She asked Zeus to make him immortal, but forgot to ask also for eternal youth — and so Tithonus could never die, yet aged and shrivelled without end, until (in the older versions of the myth) he had dwindled into a withered, ceaseless voice. Tennyson takes that horror and gives it an inner life, letting the aged Tithonus speak his own anguish directly to the goddess who can no longer help him.
The crucial fact about the poem is when it was written. Tennyson first drafted it, as a piece called “Tithon,” around 1833 — in the same shattering period, just after the sudden death of his closest friend Arthur Hallam, that produced “Ulysses” and the long grief of In Memoriam. He set it aside for nearly thirty years, reworked it, and finally published it as “Tithonus” in 1860. That shared origin matters, because “Tithonus” is best understood as the companion and the opposite of “Ulysses”: two poems about age and death, born of the same loss, pulling in exactly contrary directions.
Analysis and Themes
“Tithonus” is one of the most beautiful and most disturbing poems Tennyson ever wrote, because it takes the thing human beings fear most — death — and argues, with terrible tenderness, that it is a gift. Three things are worth following: the way the poem mirrors and reverses “Ulysses,” the case it builds that immortality is a curse, and the unbearable situation of a man decaying beside a lover who is reborn every morning.
The Dark Twin of Ulysses
Read “Tithonus” beside “Ulysses” and the two poems lock together like a key and its mould. Both are dramatic monologues spoken by aged figures out of Greek legend; both were written in the same grief-struck months of 1833; both confront the end of life. But Ulysses rages to keep living — “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” — straining against death, hungry for one more voyage. Tithonus has been granted exactly what Ulysses seems to crave, life without end, and has discovered it to be a nightmare. Where Ulysses says never let me stop, Tithonus pleads let me stop at last. Together they are Tennyson’s two honest faces of mortal grief: the defiant refusal to die, and the weary longing to be allowed to. “Ulysses” is the more famous and the more quoted; “Tithonus” is the more unsettling, because it tests the other poem’s bravado and finds that endless life is not a triumph but a sentence.
Immortality as Curse
The poem opens not with Tithonus but with the world, and the choice is deliberate. The woods decay and fall, the mist returns its moisture to the earth, man tills the field and is buried in it, and even the long-lived swan dies at last. Everything completes its cycle and is released into death — and against that universal, “kindly” order stands the one terrible exception: “Me only cruel immortality / Consumes.” The horror of the poem is that Tithonus has been lifted out of the natural law that grants every other living thing an ending. From there Tennyson builds a quiet, devastating argument: death is not the enemy of life but its mercy, the appointed limit (“the goal of ordinance”) at which “all should pause, as is most meet for all.” To be exempt from death is to be exempt from being human. Tithonus does not want to escape mortality; he has escaped it, and the whole poem is his prayer to have it back. It is one of literature’s great reversals — the case that what we dread is in fact the gift, and deathlessness the curse.
Trapped Beside the Dawn
Tennyson sharpens the agony by giving Tithonus the cruellest possible companion: the dawn itself. Aurora is the goddess of daybreak, and so she is reborn fresh, rosy, and young every single morning, her beauty renewed “morn by morn,” while the man who loves her withers at her side, “immortal age beside immortal youth.” Each sunrise that renews her measures out his decay. He can still remember being her glorious chosen one, when her light “crimson’d” his blood and her kisses were “balmier than half-opening buds / Of April” — and that memory of warmth makes the present cold unbearable: now her rosy shadows only “bathe me, cold.” Their love has curdled into torment, and not even the goddess can undo it, for “The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.” So the poem ends turned toward the earth and toward ordinary mortals, whom Tithonus now envies with his whole heart: the “happy men that have the power to die, / And grassy barrows of the happier dead.” His final wish is the humblest and most human imaginable — not glory, not love, but a grave: “Release me, and restore me to the ground.”
Form and Technique
Like “Ulysses,” the poem is a dramatic monologue in blank verse — unrhymed iambic pentameter — and Tennyson uses the form to extraordinary, mournful effect. There is no rhyme to chime or console; the lines simply unfold in a slow, weighted, speech-like flow that suits an old man talking himself toward his one request. The famous opening shows the technique at once: “The woods decay, the woods decay and fall” repeats and sinks like something settling into the ground, the long vowels and heavy stresses tolling out the rhythm of inevitable death before Tithonus has even named himself.
The whole poem is organized as a contrast between cold and warmth, decay and renewal, and the imagery keeps that opposition alive in every passage. Tithonus is a “white-hair’d shadow,” a “gray shadow,” with “wrinkled feet,” surrounded by “cold” light; Aurora is all redness, brightening cheeks, “flakes of fire,” the warm crimson of dawn. The setting is itself the central symbol — the daybreak that renews her and excludes him. And throughout, Tennyson does what he and Browning had pioneered: he takes a fixed figure from myth and turns it into a living consciousness, so that an ancient legend becomes a startlingly modern study of suffering, memory, and the longing for an end. Even the poem’s wandering, looping movement — from the present, back to the radiant past, forward again to the plea for release — mimics the drifting mind of someone who has lived far too long.
Notable Lines
Three moments carry the poem from the order of nature to Tithonus’s curse to his envy of the mortal dead.
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
Lines 1–4
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
One of the most admired openings in English. Before the speaker appears, the poem lays out the whole natural order of death — woods, mist, man, even the long-lived swan, each living its span and then released into the ground. That universal cycle is the calm against which Tithonus’s exemption will sound like horror.
Me only cruel immortality
Lines 5–6
Consumes; I wither slowly in thine arms,
The turn, and the heart of the poem. “Me only” sets Tithonus apart from all of creation, and the paradox of immortality that “consumes” — a deathlessness that destroys — names the curse exactly. To wither in the arms of the goddess who granted the gift makes the cruelty intimate.
Of happy men that have the power to die,
Lines 70–71
And grassy barrows of the happier dead.
The emotional summit, and the poem’s great reversal in two lines. Mortals are “happy” because they can die; the buried dead are “happier” still. Everything we usually fear has been turned inside out, so that the grave becomes the object of longing and envy.
Glossary
A few terms and names that carry the poem:
- Tithonus (title) — in Greek myth, a prince of Troy loved by the dawn goddess, granted immortality but not eternal youth, so that he aged without ever being able to die; the silent listener he addresses throughout is that goddess (Eos, or Aurora), the dawn.
- burthen (line 2) — burden, an old spelling; here the load of moisture the mists “weep” back to the earth as dew or rain.
- ordinance (line 30) — an established order or decree; “the goal of ordinance” is the appointed limit set for all living things, namely death.
- barrows (line 71) — ancient burial mounds; the grass-covered graves of the mortal dead Tithonus envies.
- silver wheels (line 76) — the wheels of the dawn goddess’s chariot, on which she rides up into the sky each morning, renewed.
Related Poems
If this poem stays with you, these three turn on the same knot of age, death, and the wish to escape or accept it.
- Ulysses by Alfred Tennyson: The indispensable companion — Tennyson’s twin monologue from the same year, where an aging hero craves more life and refuses to yield, the exact mirror image of Tithonus, who has too much life and begs to be released from it.
- Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats: Keats’s great meditation on a frozen world of eternal youth that can never change, age, or be fulfilled — the same paradox that the deathless and unchanging is its own kind of living death.
- Sailing to Byzantium by W. B. Yeats: An old man’s longing to be gathered out of his dying body into something deathless and unaging — the opposite impulse to Tithonus’s, and a searching companion on age and what we would trade to escape the flesh.