"Break, Break, Break" : a sea elegy written by Lord Tennyson on the death of his university friend Arthur Henry Hallum
Break, Break, Break is a sea elegy written by Lord Tennyson on the death of his university friend Arthur Henry Hallum. Here, the ever-breaking sea, the fisherman's boy, the stately ships, etc. all show the permanence of the world around and yet they remain unaffected by the poet's personal grief. However, the thoughts contained in this elegy are not so elaborate and high as in In Memorium but the current of thoughts is not less pathetic.
In this short lyric, Nature serves as a mirror of poet’s intense feelings of sorrow. The poem has reference to a watering place on the Bristol Channel where his friend is buried. Simple and lucid, the poem regards the poet’s intense grief which is shared by Nature. In the opening lines, the impression of an unpleasant face is being hammered into the poet’s consciousness. The poet wishes, he could give his voices to his humbled and anguished feelings just as sea breaks on the story surface. Farther, the cold gray stones could be interpreted as gravestones, as well as the cliff walls.
“Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.”
In the next stanza, the dead past and sea both create a feeling of soft melancholy. The friendship between the children and the contentment of the sailor boy make him feel the loss of his friend more acutely:
“ O well for the fisherman's boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!”
Lord Tennyson |
“ And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But o for the touch of a vanished hand
And the sound of a voice that is still”
Life flows on uniformly in Nature, only the poet will not be able to recover the joy of his early life when Hallum was alive. The melancholy notes of breaking the sea waves remain Sophoclean eternity in the concluding lines:
“But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me”.
excellent
ReplyDelete