Alfred Tennyson

Tears, Idle Tears

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

divine despair

Not religious grief—'divine' means inexplicable, beyond rational cause. The tears have no object, no reason he can name.

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,

from the underworld

Classical reference to the dead. Ships bringing friends back = resurrection fantasy. The metaphor is about memory retrieving the lost.

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.

dark summer dawns

Oxymoron—summer dawns aren't dark. He's describing perception from a deathbed: the world growing dim while life goes on outside.

  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,

lips that are for others

Not the dead—the living who belong to someone else. Lost love and dead love are equally unreachable.

Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;

Death in Life

The paradox named: being alive but haunted by the past is a form of death. Memory kills the present moment.

O Death in Life, the days that are no more!
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Structure of Inexplicable Grief

Tennyson wrote this in 1847 while visiting Tintern Abbey, the same ruins Wordsworth made famous. But where Wordsworth found consolation in memory, Tennyson finds only loss. The poem's opening confession—"I know not what they mean"—is crucial. These aren't tears for a specific dead person or lost love. They're causeless grief, triggered by beauty (those "happy Autumn-fields") rather than tragedy.

The poem works through four stanzas of comparison, each trying to define the indefinable through metaphor. Tennyson uses "so sad, so fresh" and "so sad, so strange" as refrains, building a pattern of paradoxes. The past is both fresh and dead, near and far, sweet and agonizing.

Notice the temporal movement: dawn (first beam on a sail), sunset (last light), pre-dawn (half-awakened birds), and finally the timeless moment of "remembered kisses after death." He's circling around mortality from every angle, trying to trap the feeling in language. The poem is from *The Princess* (1847), sung by a character, but it's deeply autobiographical—Tennyson spent seventeen years grieving his friend Arthur Hallam, who died at 22.

What "the days that are no more" Actually Means

The refrain isn't about specific memories—it's about the experience of having a past. Tennyson is describing what we'd now call nostalgia (the word didn't exist in English until 1920), but he's complicating it. The past isn't better than the present; it's unreachable, which makes it unbearable.

Look at the underworld metaphor in stanza two. Ships bringing friends back from the dead = memories retrieving lost people. But the same image reverses: the ship sinking "with all we love below the verge" = memories themselves dying, the past receding further. Memory both saves and destroys.

The final stanza's "lips that are for others" is devastating because it equalizes all loss. Dead lovers and living lovers who chose someone else are both gone. The phrase "Death in Life" names the poem's central paradox: being alive but so possessed by the past that you're functionally dead to the present. This is acedia, medieval spiritual despair, but secularized—grief without God, without purpose, without cure.