‘Tears, Idle Tears’ – Lord Alfred Tennyson
Summary
Lost love is at the heart of ‘Tears, Idle Tears:’ the speaker, through a series of extended similes, meditates at length about the days he spent in the company of his lover, and the way memory itself has affected his understanding of those days. Although he frames his tears as idle, it in fact becomes clear that they are more fittingly described as idol: they are, after all, induced by his idolisation of a lost lover.
The poem is unrhymed, and comprised of four stanzas. Tennyson claimed that the poem was in fact inspired by a visit to Tintern Abbey in Monmouthshire. However, given the clear romantic undertones, many have suggested that it was inspired also by Tennyson’s neighbour, Rosa Baring: Tennyson was briefly entangled with Baring romantically, but she severed their relationship due to her family’s disapproval.
Commentary
The opening words – which are identical to the poem’s title – present a quandary: ‘tears’ are usually associated with extremes of emotions, whereas idling means to simply while away the time, and not only lacks the emotional connotations associated with tears, but also implies that the tears are either motivated by no discernible cause, or, alternatively, serve no purpose. The idea that they have no discernible cause is immediately pursued in the second half of the opening line, in which the speaker contends that he ‘know[s] not what they mean.’ Given that the poem is a meditation on the meaning of these tears, this assertion is either disingenuous – merely a rhetorical device, opening up space to discuss them further – or a sincere invitation to oneself to try and investigate their meaning.
Although the opening line conjures mystery, the fact that ‘idle’ is a homophone of ‘idol’ hints at some answers. It suggests that the tears are motivated by a thing, or individual, the speaker idolises, and this does indeed transpire to be the case.
The reader is told in the second line that his tears emanate from ‘the depth of some divine despair.’ ‘Divine despair’ is oxymoronic: emotions traditionally associated with divinity are the polar opposite to despair – hope, love, faith, and so forth. This indicates that the speaker is undergoing a complex mixture of emotions: the tears are inspired by something – or someone – that the speaker perceives as transcendent, and yet has somehow induced in him a profound nihilism. The fact this something might be a lover is nodded to in the third line: his tears ‘Rise in the heart,’ an organ usually associated with romantic love.
The fourth line asserts that the immediate stimulus for the speaker’s tears was the act of ‘looking on the happy Autumn-fields, / And thinking of the days that are no more.’ The idea of the ‘happy Autumn-fields’ is again somewhat paradoxical: autumn is symbolically associated with the closing stages of life, and thus usually with a bleaker range of emotions: regret, sadness, fear. One might infer that the speaker spent joyful time with his lover in these fields. However, it is only now that those days ‘are no more’ – that is, in hindsight – that the speaker realises that those days had in fact been some of his last with his lover.
The phrase ‘days that are no more’ is emphatic, and goes further than simply locating these ‘days’ in the past. Rather, by asserting that they are ‘no more,’ the speaker is almost suggesting that the passage of time has effaced them altogether; has all but wiped them from the history books. Perhaps this is a comment on the insubstantiality of memory.
The second stanza is an extended meditation on ‘the days that are no more;’ however, the reader must wait to the end of the stanza to discover that this is the case. By deferring this clarity, the speaker is perhaps emphasising his painful severance from those days.
In the opening line of the second stanza, the speaker asserts that those days are ‘Fresh.’ The most obvious reading of this is that the days spent with his lover are still exceedingly clear in his mind. But fresh not only implies clarity: it also suggests that the days themselves were characterised by a freshness: their love was new, live-affirming, regenerative.
To quantify just how fresh those days seem, the speaker deploys a simile: they are as fresh ‘as the first beam glittering on a sail / That brings our friends up from the underworld.’ The fact the freshness is likened to a ‘beam’ of light reinforces the interpretation that ‘fresh’ refers to clarity. Moreover, this first light is almost certainly the result of a sunrise: a natural phenomenon often used to symbolise new beginnings and hope. The simile as a whole creates a visual tableau of a ship on the water, and fish swimming to the surface in response to the rising sun. However, ‘the underworld’ could also be an allusion to the afterlife in Greek myth, a kind of Hades, which may be where the speaker’s lover now resides. This undertone functions to elevate the romance to the epic.
But while those days are ‘Fresh’ – a word usually associated with positive feeling – the speaker, in the next line, states that they are also, paradoxically, as sad ‘as the last which reddens over one / That sinks with all we love below the verge.’ Whereas the previous simile compared the days spent with his lover to a sunrise, this seems to suggest that those days were also like a sunset: arguably this is what the speaker is talking about when he refers to ‘the last [beam of light] which reddens over one’ which ‘sinks with all we love below the verge.’ If sunrises are associated with hope, then sunsets – while perhaps also beautiful – are usually associated with finality, sorrow, and death. The reader is reminded of the earlier phrase ‘divine despair:’ once again, the speaker is using powerful opposites to express his emotions. His feelings about his love are distinctly bittersweet. Moreover, if it is indeed the sun that the speaker is referring to, then his lover is transcendentally conflated with cosmic phenomenon: the sun is ‘sink[ing] with all we love.’
The use of the word ‘one’ – instead of ‘me’ – in the phrase ‘reddens over one’ is also interesting. It insists on reminding the reader of the speaker’s solitary status: his lover is no more; only one of them remains. Furthermore, it subtly implies that, through his heartbreak, he has suffered an alienation from himself.
Although the most obvious reading of the following line – ‘That sinks with all we love below the verge’ – would assume that the ‘that’ here refers to the last beam of light, it could arguably also refer to the speaker himself: the ‘one’ at the end of the previous line. Is the speaker also sinking below a metaphorical, emotional verge as he harbours the bittersweet memories of what he has lost?
The third stanza again meditates on the ‘days that are no more,’ and again only makes this explicit at the stanza’s end. This time, they are described as being as ‘sad and strange’ as ‘The earliest pipe of half-awaken’d birds’ during ‘dark summer dawns.’ This is another liminal time: not quite day, not quite night; though this particular window of time, due to the altogether absence of sun, seems more uncanny and unnerving. The ‘pipe of half-awaken'd birds’ could hint at some tragedy that might have befallen the speaker’s lover: it is reminiscent of the cock that crows in the Bible upon Peter’s betrayal of Jesus.1 While dawn is arguably a time of new beginnings, it is undercut by the frailty of the beholder: the pipe of the bird falls on ‘dying ears,’ and the eventual light of the new day manifests to this beholder in the form of a ‘casement slowly grow[ing] a glimmering square.’ Indeed, this imagery is more reminiscent of traditional portrayals of death, and the trope of the light at the end of the tunnel, than it is of a new start.
In many ways, the final line of the third stanza – ‘So sad, so strange, the days that are no more’ – is, due to its relative lack of paradox, easier to digest than the final line of the previous stanza. That his reminisces about his lost love might be both sad and strange is more straightforward to reconcile.
The final stanza, up to a point, follows a similar formula: yet again, though it only becomes explicit at the end, the speaker is characterising the days spent with his lover. This time, he describes them as being as ‘dear as remember’d kisses after death.’ The word dear both implies value, but also functions as an affectionate nickname for his lost lover: ‘my dear.’
That the speaker likens those ‘days that are no more’ to ‘remember’d kisses after death’ is curious: he is not saying he experienced kisses that he now remembers after the advent of a death, only that those ‘days’ were as dear as kisses of that kind. However, one might reasonably assume that the speaker is using a simile to put himself at an emotive remove, and that those days did also literally contain such kisses. After talking almost exclusively in similes, the speaker is getting closer to explicitly commenting on his plight. The word ‘remember’d’ confirms what the reader will have already deduced: the speaker is entrapped in his reminisces about his lover.
The extent of his entrapment is communicated in the next line, in which the speaker now describes those long past days as being as ‘sweet as those [kisses] by hopeless fancy feign’d / On lips that are for others.’ While he is once again deploying a simile to put himself at a remove, one might reasonably guess that his lips have also literally been forced to make do with kissing those belonging to others (‘that are for others’) while he had ‘feign’d’ to himself, using ‘hopeless fancy,’ that they are the lips of his lost lover. If this is so, the implication is that the speaker is no longer able to properly experience the present, because it is so thoroughly mediated through his painful past. This foreshadows the sentiment in the final line: that he is experiencing a kind of ‘Death in life.’
The next two lines, although phrased again in the form of a simile, are the most explicit yet: it is clear that the speaker is suffering from the loss of his ‘first love’ and is ‘wild with all regret.’
The final line, as mentioned, captures the degree to which the speaker, trapped in the memories of ‘those days that are no more,’ is experiencing a kind of ‘Death in Life.’ It could also be taken more literally: perhaps his lover literally died while he remained (painfully) alive.