Tears, Idle Tears (Alfred Tennyson)

Tears, Idle Tears is the most moving and finely wrought lyric Tennyson ever wrote. Its melody, its vision and its passionate wail lays an instantaneous hold on the heart and mind of the reader. It seems to be well-forth from the poet’s heart: ‘A passion of the past’, Tennyson calls it. Vain yearnings and wild regrets for the days that no more find here a superb expression in a series of sharp, vivid natural imageries. “Tennyson likens” remarks Hutton, the mixed freshness and sadness with which we contemplate the days that are no more, as they flash upon our memory, to a mixture of the feelings with which we see the light upon an approaching sail that brings us friends from the other hemisphere and the light upon a retreating sail which takes them away hither; for does not the memory of those days both bring and take away? Does it restore us to the vivid joy of the past only to make us feel that it is vanished? No poet had ever had a greater mastery than Tennyson’s over the power of real things to express evanescent emotions that almost defy expression. The third stanza with its picture of dying man’s strange and experience in the early summer dawn in an instance of the poet’s same consummate skill. The sense of the apparent nearness and intimate presence of what is irrevocably beyond reach is strikingly expressed in :

“Dear as remembered kisses after death,

And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned

On lips that are for others, peep as love

Deep as first love and wild with all regret;

O Death in life, the days that are no more”.

The days-that are no more are beyond recall,

Yet alive-tantalisingly vivid and near.

There is a structural unity, an organic growth in the poem. The poet here not simply expresses his experience, but explores and analyses it in the full light of the disparity and apparent contradiction and brings them into a new unity. He thus secures not only richness and depth but dramatic power as well.

This lyric is also a remarkable instance of Tennyson’s wonderful mastery in the management of metre. “Few know” he remarked long afterwards to his son “that this is a blank verse lyric”. It is divided into stanzas by the recurring cadence of each final line.

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