Tears, Idle Tearsa poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,Tears from the depth of some divine despairRise 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 oneThat 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 dawnsThe earliest pipe of half-awakened birdsTo dying ears, when unto dying eyesThe 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 feignedOn 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!

Lines 1-5

The poem begins by referring to tears that are “idle,” not in the physical sense of “motionlessness” that we usually use the word for (they do have motion, moving from the heart to the eyes), but in the broader sense. Idle here means useless, creating nothing, causing nothing to happen. This could be what gives the poem its especially tragic mood: the speaker feels tears, and is very observant and clear in describing them, but there is nothing to be done about them. The speaker says that, though their meaning is unknown, the tears originate from a divine despair (“divine” here implies a connection to godliness, to forces beyond our physical world) and travel through the heart into the eyes. The last two lines of this stanza describe the circumstances under which these tears rise. There is a contradiction in line 4 that helps support the idea of idleness in the tears: the reference to “autumn fields” is clear enough, as autumn is a time when plants die and animals begin to migrate or hibernate, and this by itself would be appropriate for a discussion of despair and tears, but Tennyson adds the word “happy,” which cancels out that gloomy effect. Throughout this poem he balances images of hope against images of depression. And so line 5’s reference to “the days that are no more” is not so obviously a negative reference as it may seem upon first

reading. If the author had meant to portray these memories as being awful to the poem’s speaker, he could have strengthened the sense of hopelessness by using the description “days past” or “days gone by,” which would emphasize the fact that they are lost, instead of their simple lack of existence.

Lines 6-10

The “beam” referred to in line 6 is a sunbeam, the first one of the sunrise, an image of newness and beginning that has the opposite implication as the autumn field mentioned in line 4. That this dawn sunbeam is hitting a ship’s sail offers a sense of newness, especially when we find out in the next line that the ship is bringing friends. But then, in line 7, the poem shows its contradictory nature again by saying that these friends are arriving from “the underworld.” Literally, this reference would have referred to the Southern Hemisphere, notated on Victorian era maps with upside down type, as the bottom of the globe: however, there is no way to deny that, going back to Greek mythology and beyond, “the underworld” has referred to the realm of the dead. The only way these friends could return from the underworld would be through memory, but the poet infuses these memories

with life by connecting them to freshness and daybreak.

Line 8 follows the mention of the underworld with sadness, reversing the sunrise imagery with the last beam of sunset that reddens the sky and then sinks, like the same ship departing, below the horizon. While the “underworld” reference in line 7 brought up the idea of memories of loved ones, line 9 implies that the speaker is actually facing death (what else could take away, not just specific loved ones, but “all we love”?). With no future, this speaker talks of exploring the present and the past equally as the same sort of sensations, using “fresh” and “sad” to describe both everyday occurrences of the sun’s motion and also the days that are no more.

Lines 11-15

This stanza expands upon the imagery of the stanza which came before it, but the relationship is brought out more clearly. Since the dawn has already been mentioned in line 6, and the speaker’s approaching death is implied in line 9, this stanza takes the time to consider in detail what sadness the coming dawn would create in a dying person, and in the end relates that sadness to memory. Line 11 repeats the contradiction of line 4’s “happy autumn-fields”

with “dark summer dawns,” since both summer and dawn are associated with brightness, not dark. The song (or “pipe”) of birds before sunrise, so early that the birds themselves are only half awake, is a sound that is seldom heard, but we can infer that dying ears are aware of this sound precisely because they are dying, and are absorbing worldly experiences while they can. This is clearly the case with the dying eyes that focus on the window frame (casement) in the dark and stay on it until the sunrise slowly makes it “glimmer,” or glow. There is a sense of desperation, of hunger, implied in the way the dying person seeks out even the slightest physical experience, and in the last line of this stanza the memories of the dying person are given equal importance with the current experiences.

Lines 16-20

In line 16, the three ideas that Tears, Idle Tears is concerned with — memory, death, and, as implied by “kisses,” life — are brought together. The next three lines use the imagery of romantic love, which has not played a part earlier in the poem. Even hopeless love, symbolized by the imaginary kisses given to someone who belongs to another and is thus unobtainable, is introduced in the poem as sweet. The poem goes on to demonstrate just

how deeply the “days that are no more” extend into a dying person’s existence by comparing those days to first love, which is presented as the deepest experience life has to offer. Tennyson attempts, too, to convey how the loss of the past can evoke wild regret, even as love remembered can. Line 20 compares the days irretrievably lost to “Death in Life,” rendering the poem’s images of idle tears and dying hours relevant to those who have not experienced either.

Summary

The speaker sings of the baseless and inexplicable tears that rise in his heart and pour forth from his eyes when he looks out on the fields in autumn and thinks of the past.

This past, (“the days that are no more”) is described as fresh and strange. It is as fresh as the first beam of sunlight that sparkles on the sail of a boat bringing the dead back from the underworld, and it is sad as the last red beam of sunlight that shines on a boat that carries the dead down to this underworld.

The speaker then refers to the past as not “fresh,” but “sad” and strange. As such, it resembles the song of the birds on early summer mornings as it sounds to a dead person, who lies watching the “glimmering square” of sunlight as it appears through a square window.

In the final stanza, the speaker declares the past to be dear, sweet, deep, and wild. It is as dear as the memory of the kisses of one who is now dead, and it is as sweet as those kisses that we imagine ourselves bestowing on lovers who actually have loyalties to others. So, too, is the past as deep as “first love” and as wild as the regret that usually follows this experience. The speaker concludes that the past is a “Death in Life.”

Form

This poem is written in blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter. It consists of four five-line stanzas, each of which closes with the words “the days that are no more.”

Commentary

“Tears, Idle Tears” is part of a larger poem called “The Princess,” published in 1847. Tennyson wrote “The Princess” to discuss the relationship between the sexes and to provide an argument for women’s rights in higher education. However, the work as a whole does not present a single argument or tell a coherent story. Rather, like so much of Tennyson’s poetry, it evokes complex emotions and moods through a mastery of language. “Tears, Idle Tears,” a particularly evocative section, is one of several interludes of song in the midst of the poem.

In the opening stanza, the poet describes his tears as “idle,” suggesting that they are caused by no immediate,

identifiable grief. However, his tears are simultaneously the product of a “divine despair,” suggesting that they do indeed have a source: they “rise in the heart” and stem from a profoundly deep and universal cause. This paradox is complicated by the difficulty of understanding the phrase “divine despair”: Is it God who is despairing, or is the despair itself divine? And how can despair be divine if Christian doctrine considers it a sin?

The speaker states that he cries these tears while “looking on the happy autumn-fields.” At first, it seems strange that looking at something happy would elicit tears, but the fact that these are fields of autumn suggests that they bear the memories of a spring and summer that have vanished, leaving the poet with nothing to look forward to except the dark and cold of winter. Tennyson explained that the idea for this poem came to him when he was at Tintern Abbey, not far from Hallam’s burial place. “Tintern Abbey” is also the title and subject of a famous poem by William Wordsworth. (See the “Tintern Abbey” section in the SparkNote on Wordsworth’s Poetry.) Wordsworth’s poem, too, reflects on the passage of time and the loss of the joys of youth. However, whereas Tennyson laments “the days that are no more” and describes the past as a “Death in Life,” Wordsworth explicitly states that although the past is no more, he has been compensated for its loss with “other gifts”:

That time is past,And all its aching joys are now no more

And all its dizzy raptures. Not for thisFaint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other giftsHave followed; for such loss, I would believe,Abundant recompense. 

Thus, although both Wordsworth and Tennyson write poems set at Tintern Abbey about the passage of time, Wordsworth’s poem takes on a tone of contentment, whereas Tennyson’s languishes in a tone of lament.

“Tears, Idle Tears” is structured by a pattern of unusual adjectives used to describe the memory of the past. In the second stanza, these adjectives are a chiastic “fresh...sad...sad...fresh”; the memory of the birth of friendship is “fresh,” whereas the loss of these friends is “sad”; thus when the “days that are no more” are described as both “sad” and “fresh,” these words have been preemptively loaded with meaning and connotation: our sense of the “sad” and “fresh” past evokes these blossomed and withered friendships. This stanza’s image of the boat sailing to and from the underworld recalls Virgil’s image of the boatman Charon, who ferries the dead to Hades.

In the third stanza, the memory of the past is described as “sad...strange...sad...strange.” The “sad” adjective is introduced in the image of a man on his deathbed who is awake for his very last morning. However, “strangeness” enters in, too, for it is strange to the dying man that as his life is ending, a new day is beginning. To a person hearing the birds’ song and knowing he will never hear it again, the twittering will be imbued with an unprecedented significance—the dying man will hear

certain melancholy tones for the first time, although, strangely and paradoxically, it is his last.

The final stanza contains a wave of adjectives that rush over us—now no longer confined within a neat chiasmic structure—as the poem reaches its last, climactic lament: “dear...sweet...deep...deep...wild.” The repetition of the word “deep” recalls the “depth of some divine despair,” which is the source of the tears in the first stanza. However, the speaker is also “wild with all regret” in thinking of the irreclaimable days gone by. The image of a “Death in Life” recalls the dead friends of the second stanza who are like submerged memories that rise to the surface only to sink down once again. This “Death in Life” also recalls the experience of dying in the midst of the rebirth of life in the morning, described in the third stanza. The poet’s climactic exclamation in the final line thus represents a culmination of the images developed in the previous stanzas

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

"Tears, Idle Tears" is a lyric poem written in 1847 by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), the noted Victorian-era English poet. Published as one of the "songs" in his The Princess (1847), it is regarded for the quality of its lyrics. A Tennyson anthology describes the poem as "one of the most Virgilian of Tennyson's poems and perhaps his most famous lyric".[1] Readers often overlook the poem's blank verse [1] [2] —the poem does not rhyme.

Tennyson was inspired to write "Tears, Idle Tears" upon a visit to Tintern Abbey in Monmouthshire, an abbey that was abandoned in 1536. He said the convent was "full for me of its bygone memories", and that the poem was about "the passion of the past, the abiding in the transient."[1] William Wordsworth also wrote a poem inspired by this location in 1798, "Tintern Abbey", which develops a similar theme.

"Tears, Idle Tears" is noted for its lyric richness, and for its tones of paradox and ambiguity—especially as Tennyson did not often bring his doubts into the grammar and symbolism of his works.[3] The ambiguity occurs in the contrasting descriptions of the tears: they are "idle", yet come from deep within the narrator; the "happy autumn-fields" inspire sadness. Literary critic Cleanth Brooks writes, "[W]hen the poet is able, as in 'Tears, Idle Tears', to analyze his experience, and in the full light of the disparity and even apparent contradiction of the various elements,

bring them into a new unity, he secures not only richness and depth but dramatic power as well."[4]

Critic Graham Hough in a 1951 essay asks why the poem is unrhymed, and suggests that something must be "very skillfully put in [rhyme's] place" if many readers do not notice its absence. He concludes that "Tears, Idle Tears" does not rhyme "[b]ecause it is not about a specific situation, or an emotion with clear boundaries; it is about the great reservoir of undifferentiated regret and sorrow, which you can brush away…but which nevertheless continues to exist."[2] Readers tend not to notice the lack of rhyme because of the richness and variety of the vowel sounds Tennyson employs. (T. S. Eliot considered Tennyson an unequaled master in handling vowel sounds; see, for example, Tennyson's "Ulysses".) Each line's end-sound—except for the second-last line's "regret"—is an open vowel or a consonant or consonant group that can be drawn out in reading. Each line "trails away, suggesting a passage into some infinite beyond: just as each image is clear and precise, yet is only any instance" of something more universal.[5]

The poem, one of the "songs" of The Princess, has been set to music a number of times. Edward Lear put the lyric to music in the nineteenth century, and Ralph Vaughan Williams' pianistic setting of 1903 was described by The Times as "one of the most beautiful settings in existence of Tennyson's splendid lyric.

Criticism

Chris Semansky

Chris Semansky teaches writing and literature at Portland Community College in Portland, Oregon, and is a frequent contributor of poems and essays to literary journals. In the following essay, Semansky derides “Tears, Idle Tears” as cliche and banal.

Many critics have praised Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem, “Tears, Idle Tears,” a song from his long narrative poem, The Princess.Cleanth Brooks, for example, one of the most well-known and well-respected critics of the twentieth century, claims in his The Well Wrought Urn that the poem’s success lies in its capacity to use paradox and ambiguity to represent the conflicting and complex inner life of its speaker. Claiming that critics who oppose emotion to intellect in poetry have done not only a disservice to poetry, but to Tennyson’s poem as well, Brooks wrote, “The opposition is not only merely superficial; it falsifies the real relationships. For the lyric quality, if it be genuine, is not the result of some transparent and ‘simple’ reduction of a theme or a situation that is somehow poetic in itself; it is, rather, the result of an imaginative grasp of diverse materials — but an imaginative grasp so sure

that it may show itself to the reader as unstudied and unpredictable without for a moment relaxing its hold on the intricate and complex stuff which it carries.” To understand Brooks’s comment about Tennyson’s poem we must first understand what the critic means by “lyric quality.”

A lyric is usually a short poem consisting of the words of a single speaker. Employing the first person “I,” the lyric most often revolves around or expresses the feeling or state of mind of the speaker. Matthew Arnold’s popular poem, “Dover Beach,” for example, expresses the speaker’s attempt, through observation and meditation, to resolve an emotional problem. Though the genre of the lyric includes many kinds of utterances (the love lyric, dramatic lyric, and ode among them), most critical attention has been aimed at understanding the emotional content of the lyric, to interpreting the speaker’s feeling. So, when Brooks argues that “lyric quality” not be simplified, he means that in reading lyric poems we should take into consideration the head as well as the heart of the speaker and recognize that feeling consists of perception, thought, observation, and other variables.

I have no problem with this statement in general. However, “Tears, Idle, Tears” is not a

sophisticated rendering of complex experience, as Brooks would have us believe; or rather, it is not a poetically sophisticated rendering of experience. It is an exercise in banalities and cliches. A cliche is a phrase or word that has been used so much it becomes hackneyed or trite. Cliched language is language that has lost its capacity to convey a vivid idea or image to the reader. For example, some popular poets — in terms of sales and readership — accused of writing in cliches are branded as trite and amateurish by critics. Tennyson’s poetry, on the other hand, though regularly studied in classrooms, is rarely bought or read for pleasure. The critical apparatus that has been responsible for valorizing Tennyson’s poetry is the same apparatus responsible for ignoring or condemning seemingly similar work by others.

Let us take a look at what Brooks has written about “Tears, Idle Tears” and see if it holds up. In his essay, “The Motivation of Tennyson’s Weeper,” Brooks spends close to a page inquiring into the nature of the tears introduced by the speaker in the first stanza.

   Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,Tears from the depth of some divine despairRise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,And thinking of the days that are no more.

“Are they idle tears?” Brooks asks. “Or are they not rather the most meaningful of tears?” He comes to the conclusion that the speaker is unaware of the exact origin of his tears. Do we as readers, though, really care where they came from? Tennyson’s speaker is distraught; he is crying. He says the tears “rise in the heart.” Historically the heart (even in Tennyson’s time) has been the seat of emotion, so there is no surprise or freshness in using the image of the heart as the (metaphorical) place where the tears begin. Similarly, saying that the tears “gather to the eyes” introduces nothing new to our understanding of how crying happens. Tennyson is belaboring the obvious. Then we are told that the speaker is “looking on the happy Autumn-fields.” “The happy Autumn-fields”? Can there be a more a more vague, more banal, indeed a more vapid image to use than “happy Autumn-fields” to describe what the speaker looks at while thinking about the past?

Brooks concludes that “the first stanza seems, not a meditated observation, but a speech begun impulsively — a statement which the speaker has begun before he knows how he

will end it.” Fair enough, but what kind of a speaker thinks or talks in iambic pentameter? And what kind of a poet would use such generic images to illustrate a (supposedly) complex emotional state?

After spending a good deal of ink and words attempting to make a case for the poem’s use of paradox, ambiguity, and ironic contrast, and hence justify Tennyson’s poem as worthy of being read, Brooks writes that “The last stanza evokes an intense emotional response from the reader.” Not this reader. Tennyson ends the poem with the same kind of banal images and cliches as he started it.

  Dear as remember’d kisses after death,And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign’dOn 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!

Regardless of Brooks’s elaborate attempts to ferret “deep meaning” from these lines by insisting that the poem’s tight organization “represents an organic structure,” he is wrong when he writes that the reader “will probably find himself [sic] in accord with this [his] general estimate of the poem’s value.” It is not the theme of Tennyson’s poem that is unappealing. After all, almost all poets worth

their salt (or metaphors) have written in one way or another about loss: loss of love, loss of life, loss of the past. Arguably, the bulk of poetry from the Romantics to the present deals in some way or another with loss. It is the imagery and figurative language that Tennyson chooses to convey his sense of loss that are unappealing.

For example, calling “the days that are no more. Deep as first love, and wild with all regret” trivializes a very real human response to the passing of time and to the sense that one has missed opportunities in life. The comparison is weak between the items being compared — the past and deep love — because the words he chooses are abstract and vague. We cannot see days or love, and using the adjective “deep” to describe both of them adds nothing new to our understanding of the ideas of time or love.

“Tears, Idle Tears” embodies cliches even as it seeks to transcend them. Its inability to accomplish the latter makes the poem more like a sappy lyric than a complex rendering of human emotion, as Cleanth Brooks would have his readers believe. Tennyson can get away with it because of his place in literary history as a canonical figure. Brooks can “read into” the poem poetic strategies because of Tennyson’s

reputation and the reception of his other poetry. It is comforting to know that academically sanctioned poets such as Tennyson can write poems as bad as some by popular poets. The real irony is that while he crafted a poem that failed to express his emotions, that work was embraced by an audience unable to express its own feelings as well.

"The poem by the Victorian poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson entitled ?Tears, idle tears,? has the unfortunate status of having its become such a common phrase in modern parlance, that the reader finds him or herself bracing his or her ear for more and more clich's as the poem progresses. In other words, one hears that tears are idle so often, one can easily forget, not only that Tennyson said, ?I know not what they mean,? but that the poem attempts to express the seriousness of futility of grief, or outward displays of affection by calling tears idle, in that they do no real work in the world. The use of "idle" in multiple variances of meaning, from impractical and lazy, to idyllic, to idolizing is in fact quite profound and sophisticated, yielding a poem with a compact linguistic and stylistic structure."