"Tears, Idle Tears" by Lord Alfred 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-awaken'd 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 remember'd kisses after death,

And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd

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!

We have touched Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poetry before, and each time we read on of his poems I was captivated by his lyricism. I absolutely adore rhyme in poetry, and since it seemed like Tennyson often incorporated rhyme in his works, I decided to explore more of his poetry. “Tears, Idle Tears”  from The Princess instantly drew me in; but when I re-read it, I was astonished to find that it had no rhyme, the first aspect of a poem that I usually notice. This is the first poem without rhyme of any sort that has stuck with me; therefore, I just had to dig deeper into it.

Each stanza describes a different aspect of the days that have passed: first sad and fresh, then sad and strange, then dear and sweet and deep. The most striking of each pairing is the description in the second stanza. Here, I feel that the poem takes a turn to the unusual, and yet it remains completely relatable. Our dearest memories of past days resurrect friends who have left us, and we remember these moments fondly. However, once we awaken from the reverie of remembering, we are left with a sense of emptiness as we recall that all those friends, that all those memories of glittering bliss and comfort are only memories.

The last line of the second stanza says describes the lost days as “so sad, so fresh.”   I love how Tennyson describes the days that have long passed as fresh. Other poets usually choose to discuss the past as incorrigibly lost in the seas of time, but Tennyson perfectly present the delicate nature of precious times in the past. He presents the best times of the past as fresh as the rising sun, but sadly disappearing along with the setting sun. This ties into the larger meaning of the poem: that the past can remain fresh with us, that friends who have left us can live within us through memories, and that even in the pure felicity of life there is the inevitable figure of death and the ghosts of the past standing beside us. The delicacy with which Tennyson describes the dull pain of nostalgia is completely relatable, and beautifully done.