Theme
9 poems
Tennyson spent seventeen years mourning his friend Arthur Hallam, and the result is the greatest elegy in English. These selected cantos trace its journey — from the desolate empty house, through “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” to a faith made, as Eliot said, of doubt.
One of the most musical lyrics in English — and it doesn’t rhyme. Tennyson names a grief with no cause, the objectless ache that wells up at the thought of “the days that are no more,” building through four deepening images to “O Death in Life.”
Granted immortality but not eternal youth, Tithonus ages forever beside the ever-young dawn goddess who loves him — and begs to be allowed to die. Tennyson’s dark twin to “Ulysses” argues that death is not life’s enemy but its mercy.
Just six lines, built like a coiled spring. Tennyson sets his eagle atop the world in monumental stillness — the sea far below merely “crawls” — then releases everything in one final plunge, on a verb that may mean a strike, or a death.
Tennyson’s chosen last word — the poem he asked be placed last in every edition of his work. Death becomes a ship crossing the harbour bar into the open sea, faced not with rage but with calm, hard-won hope.
Everyone reads it as the artist sealed off from life. But the 1842 revision strips away the explanation and leaves something stranger and crueler: a death received by the world as a pretty corpse.
Tennyson’s famous cavalry poem is not only a tribute to courage. Its rhythm keeps the riders moving long after the poem has admitted that “some one had blunder’d.”
“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” gets quoted as pure uplift. The poem around it is the speech of an old king walking out on his kingdom, his wife, and his son — and Tennyson never tells you whether to cheer.
The defining poet of the Victorian age and its Poet Laureate for over forty years, Tennyson turned private grief and public occasion alike into some of the most musical, most quoted verse in English.