Tears, Idle Tears is a famous poem written by Tennyson.
Table of Contents
Summary
In the poem “tears, idle tears”, the speaker wonders why her eyes are crying up as she gazes out the window at the fall meadows. They appear to be divine in origin. She recognizes her tears are caused by remembering “the days that are no more,” but why?
The days are as new as sunbeams on a sail bringing friends up from the underworld, and as sorrowful as the last beam putting them back. As a result, the lost days seem “so sad, so fresh.”
The days are also “sad and strange,” such as dawn in the summer when birds chirp so early that a dying man hears them with grief, or a window expanding into a “glimmering square” that dying eyes stare upon in the shift from dark to another dawn.
The wasted days are as precious as the kisses of a loved one who has died, and they are as lovely as the desire to kiss someone whose lips are meant for others. The lost days were “deep as love,” and they had both the exhilaration of “first love” and the “wild… regret” that comes with unfulfilled dreams. These are the days of “Death in Life.”
Structure
Alfred Tennyson’s poem ‘Tears, Idle Tears’ has four stanzas. Each stanza has five lines. The poem, therefore, has a total of 20 lines. The poem does not follow any rhyme system. It’s a poem in free verse. Only the final line of each verse contains the word “more.”
The first three lines of the third verse feature an incomplete rhyme. Those lines share a similar type of consonant sound at the conclusion. Despite the absence of a rhyme pattern, the poem is infused with the poet’s feelings. As a result, the poem has an underlying rhythm that makes it more engaging to read.
Tears, Idle Tears: Literary Devices
Alfred Tennyson’s ‘Tears, Idle Tears’ is full of literary methods that make the poet’s thoughts interesting to the audience.
“Idle tears” is an example of a Metaphor in the first sentence. The first two lines of the opening verse share a word. Anaphora is the term for this. Tennyson employs a sea image in “deep of some divine anguish.”
The last sentence, “the days that are no more,” repeated at the conclusion of each verse, creates a Refrain.
The opening line of the second stanza contains a Simile. The word “underworld” contains a religious connection in the poem. In the second verse, the poet uses the word “reddens” figuratively. In this case, the poet employs another literary trick known as Personification. This poem has Alliteration in the words “So sad” and “So strange.”
The poet employs Metonymy in the third verse using the term “pipe.” It refers to bird twittering. The coffin’s metonym is the “glimmering square.” The poet personifies “death” in the final line and uses an Apostrophe to summon it to hear his mourning.
Tears, Idle Tears: Detailed Analysis
“Tears, Idle Tears” is one of Tennyson’s most renowned poems, and it has received extensive critical attention. It is a “song” contained inside the greater poem The Princess, which was released in 1847. It is a song that the Princess of the poem instructs one of her maids to sing to pass the time while she and her women take a break from their tough studies.
The speaker is lost in his or her thoughts and recollections. The broader poem is often seen as a commentary on the gender relations in contemporary culture, as well as a plea for more women’s rights, notably in higher education.
Tennyson wrote “Tears, Idle Tears” on a visit to Tintern Abbey in Monmouthshire, which was also the subject of a poem by another great English poet, William Wordsworth. Tennyson stated that the poem was about “the emotion of the past, lingering in the fleeting,” which might explain the closing line about “Death in Life.”
The poem is famous for its lyric richness and the numerous sentences that are riddled with contradiction and ambiguity. “Tears, Idle Tears” is written in four blank verse stanzas of five lines each. One can think that the final sound of each sentence falls away, representing the speaker’s need for more meaning as she recalls the past.
Nonetheless, the stanzas are linked by the dreamlike recurrence of the line “the days that are no more,” which finishes each stanza. The poetry does not require a defined interpretation; after all, the speaker begins the song without knowing what her tears symbolize.
She creates terms to describe how the lost days are sorrowful, new, and weird, and she refers to them as Death in Life. But why the sobs? Are they pleasant tears of reminiscence, sad tears of loss, tears of bewilderment or irritation, or a combination of these?
The tears in the opening verse are a paradox: they are “idle,” but they look to be very important. This paradox prompts the speaker to investigate her emotion, attempting to comprehend whatever “divine sadness” appears to be producing her bodily response. The tears are caused by staring at the “lovely Autumn-fields” and remembering gone days, but how is this linked to anything divine?
The second verse implies that the spiritual loss is related to death. Like a daybreak (“first beam glittering”), dear friends emerge from the underworld, delivering a pleasant and new recollection. However, the recollection fades as painfully as a sunset (the beam “reddens” and “sinks… below the verge,” and certainly “all we love” sinks in the speaker’s opinion.
Nature appears to be impacted by her melancholia in the third verse, as the “dark summer dawns” appear “sad and strange” when filled with sleeping bird noises so early in the morning. Although the birds are waking to sing, the hearer is a dying person, possibly noting the folly of another day of a such song when death is so close—for the birds, not just the hearer, in the end.
Similarly, the dying person witnesses yet another sunrise changing the hues of the sky through the window and appears to despair at the bizarre waste of one’s days. A person who is immersed in life’s delights hears the birds and sees the morning with a different spirit than someone who is concerned with the past.
Remembering is a strange and painful experience. What is recalled is paradoxically both present and absent, with the latter being more absent than the former. As time passes, more and more of life becomes a memory, with the loss of friends and loved ones who once lived and breathed. A man is the accumulation of his memories.
The word that describes the guy who has become wild with remorse may also be applied to those memories with his passion, or is it the memories that give him emotion?” The deep and wild days linger in the mind, ready to bubble to the surface at any time.
In the fourth stanza, the speaker reminisces about unpleasant kisses. “Time exerts a tyranny that none can escape,” writes Bloom, “and in this final stanza is Tennyson’s conscious and deliberate acknowledgement that time is a necessary fiction, a story we must invent through the medium of language, in order to come to terms with that which is otherwise invisible and unfathomable.
” One does not need to be a philosopher to understand the sorrow of a woman who remembers kisses that will never happen, whether because the beloved has died or because the beloved loves another.
What is important is that the days of love and loving feelings, as well as the regrets of lost love, have passed. The woman is alive, but without her love, she considers herself to be dead, prompting her to lament, “O Death in Life.”
The text does not reveal whether the poem is written in the voice of a man or a woman. The motifs in the poem, such as fall meadows and early sunrises, are typical literary tropes that everyone may use. As a result, the poem appears to be designed as a universal reflection on loss, time, and remembrance that anybody may sing.
FAQs
What is the meaning of ‘Tears, Idle Tears‘?
The poem opens by alluding to “idle” tears, not in the physical sense of “motionlessness” that we typically associate with the word (they do have motion, travelling from the heart to the eyes), but in a larger meaning. Idle here refers to doing nothing and causing nothing to happen.
What is the source of the poet’s tears in the poem ‘tears idle tears‘?
The word “deep” is repeated to evoke the “depth of some heavenly anguish,” which is the source of the tears in the first verse. However, the speaker is also “wild with all regret” while recalling irreversible days gone past.
What is the main idea of the poem ‘Tears, Idle Tears‘?
Alfred Tennyson’s poem ‘Tears, Idle Tears’ deals with death, love, and melancholy. The poem’s main topic is death. In the poem, the author laments the death of a cherished companion and describes his mental state. Death, according to the poet, is a negative component of life.