Tears, Idle Tears

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Tears, Idle Tears

by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

    Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

    Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

    Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

_____________________________

This is a beautifully sad poem about mourning and loss. The poem’s focus in particular is on the past – because the past is where the things he’s lost now reside. The Speaker is narrating to someone who has died, which adds to the piece an element which presents life as both precious and fleeting.

There is a powerful paradox in the theme of the poem. Though the tears are described as idle, because they are present and the Speaker feels directionless. At the same time, though, the tears are in fact active and moving up from the depths of the Speaker. The paradox imbues the Reader with great sympathy for the Speaker because it creates in him a sense of loss and lostness.

I am a big fan of Tennyson and this is one of my favorites – somber though it may be.

The poem was inspired by a visit to an abbey that had been abandoned for centuries. (via wiki)

Tennyson was inspired to write “Tears, Idle Tears” upon a visit to Tintern Abbey in Monmouthshire, an abbey that was abandoned in 1536. He said the convent was “full for me of its bygone memories”, and that the poem was about “the passion of the past, the abiding in the transient.” William Wordsworth also wrote a poem inspired by this location in 1798, “Tintern Abbey“, which develops a similar theme.

While Tintern Abbey may have prompted the poem, it seems unlikely that its powerful emotion derives only from a generalised feeling for the past. The final stanza in particular strongly suggests Tennyson’s unhappy attachment to the lovely Rosa Baring, whose wealthy family lived in Harrington Hall, a short distance from Tennyson’s Somersby. Rosa’s family evidently disapproved of Rosa’s continued relationship with the son of Somersby’s alcoholic clergyman, and she ultimately severed the connection. The “kisses . . .by hopeless fancy feign’d/on lips that are for others” and the cri de coeur “Deep as first love, and wild with all regret” seem to have little to do with Tintern Abbey, and much to do with a personal disappointment in love.

From a structural standpoint, the poem is twenty lines, broken up into four equal five line stanzas, and is written without a rhyme scheme and without a meter. The power and fame of the piece is derived from its imagery and messaging.

“Tears, Idle Tears” is noted for its lyric richness, and for its tones of paradox and ambiguity—especially as Tennyson did not often bring his doubts into the grammar and symbolism of his works. The ambiguity occurs in the contrasting descriptions of the tears: they are “idle”, yet come from deep within the narrator; the “happy autumn-fields” inspire sadness. Literary critic Cleanth Brooks writes, “When the poet is able, as in ‘Tears, Idle Tears’, to analyze his experience, and in the full light of the disparity and even apparent contradiction of the various elements, bring them into a new unity, he secures not only richness and depth but dramatic power as well.”

Critic Graham Hough in a 1953 essay asks why the poem is unrhymed, and suggests that something must be “very skillfully put in [rhyme’s] place” if many readers do not notice its absence. He concludes that “Tears, Idle Tears” does not rhyme “because it is not about a specific situation, or an emotion with clear boundaries; it is about the great reservoir of undifferentiated regret and sorrow, which you can brush away…but which nevertheless continues to exist”. Readers tend not to notice the lack of rhyme because of the richness and variety of the vowel sounds Tennyson employs into the poem. (T. S. Eliot considered Tennyson an unequalled master in handling vowel sounds; see, for example, Tennyson’s “Ulysses“.) Each line’s end-sound—except for the second-last line’s “regret”—is an open vowel or a consonant or consonant group that can be drawn out in reading. Each line “trails away, suggesting a passage into some infinite beyond: just as each image is clear and precise, yet is only any instance” of something more universal.

For a great reading and analysis of the piece, let me direct you to the following video which does a great job of both:

As the article above mentions, there have been numerous attempts to set this to music. The video below is one of the better operatic efforts, in my opinion.