Break, break, break on thy cold gray stones, O sea.
And I would that my tongue could utter the thoughts that arise in me.
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.
And the stately ships go on to their haven under the hill.
But oh for the touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still
Break break, break at the foot of thy crags O sea.
But the tender grace of a day that is dead will never come back to me.
Alfred Lord Tennyson is the great English poet of grief, which is the kind of title that nobody really wants.
I mean, to write insightfully about loss, you unfortunately need to experience it.
The loss that changed the course of Tennyson's life and poetry was that of his dear friend Arthur Henry Hallam.
And I'd wager that, given the power, Tennyson would have traded all his memorial verses and the acclaim they brought him for just a little more time with his friend.
Tennyson met Hallam in 1828 at Cambridge, and they rapidly developed a deep bond.
The two young men loved to discuss literature and society.
They traveled through Europe together, and Hallam often visited Tennyson at his home in the village of Somersby, where he met and eventually became engaged to Tennyson's sister, Amelia.
Both men wanted to be poets, but Hallam quickly realized that Tennyson was the genius of the two.
And so he worked hard to get his friend's work published and into the hands of influential people in Victorian England.
Before Tennyson had much of a reputation at all, Hallam predicted with confidence his friend's future prestige, as he writes in an 1831 letter to Amelia.
Many years perhaps, or shall I say many ages, after we've all been laid in dust, young lovers of the beautiful and the true may seek in faithful pilgrimage the spot where Alfred's mind was molded in silent sympathy with the everlasting forms of nature.
Critic after critic will track the wanderings of the brook or mark the groupings of elm and poplar in order to verify the ode to memory in its minutest particulars.
In September 1833, Hallam was traveling with his father in Vienna when a blood vessel suddenly burst in his brain and he died while his dad was taking an evening walk.
He was 22.
The poem I read before was written in early 1835, a little over a year after Hallam died.
It's one of many examples of Tennyson trying to process and explore his grief.
His greatest expression of mourning is an elegy of almost 3000 lines called In Memoriam A H H for Hallam, which took him 17 years to compose and is arguably his best work.
Break, Break.
Break, on the other hand, is only 16 lines, but its shortness isn't a fault.
Its brevity is its power.
The first stanza sets the scene and, as biographer Michael Thorne notes, the scene is almost cinematically clear.
We have the speaker standing on the shore of the sea watching the waves break on stone as he thinks about someone who is gone.
The second two lines here are ambiguous.
They suggest either that the speaker is too sad to speak his thoughts, as in, he literally can't get the words out over his tears, or that his thoughts are too big, too strong, too recent to be adequately captured in words.
In Articulate.
These feelings emanate from him like waves breaking over and over on cold gray stones which had put us in mind of gravestones.
Of course, the irony is that this account of inarticulateness is highly articulate.
In the second and third stanzas, the speaker turns away from the waves and observes a world that's indifferent to his desolation.
In fact, it's a particularly happy world, which provides the starkest contrast to his grief.
He sees young siblings at play, a young man singing in his boat and grand ships sailing off into the horizon.
But why these three images?
If at first they seem random, a closer look shows that they've been deliberately chosen and deliberately ordered.
What you have is first a child, second a youth, and third stately ships representing adulthood.
Sailing away to a far haven, which means port or harbor as well as a safe place or refuge.
If the word puts you in mind of heaven, that's no coincidence.
What we're seeing here is the full progress of a life into death.
Now for Tennyson the writer.
That was deliberate, but for the speaker it may be that he was just looking around and that his grief reaching out for some articulation finds a pattern in his surroundings.
Regardless, by the end of stanza three, he's brought back to himself.
His loved one may be at peace in their haven, but he's left behind and can feel nothing but absence, a vanished hand, a still voice.
In the final stanza, the speaker returns his focus to the waves breaking against the crags and inarticulate grief still pulsating within him.
And then we get this bleak final sentence.
But the tender grace of a day that is dead will never come back to me.
You know he's thinking about the past, but this phrase, day that is dead.
It casts a shadow back over the rest of the poem.
Now we can't help but see these happy people as future vanished hands and still voices, this happy scene as a future dead day, its tender grace irrecoverable by those who will grieve it.
In a sense, having read beyond these verses in the poem, that scene is already gone.
Break, Break, Break imagines grief as an incessant reaching for something that's not there.
As Tennyson puts it in another poem, God gives us love.
Something to love he lends us.
But when love is grown to ripeness, that on which it throve falls off. and love is left alone.
When Hallam died, Tennyson's love for his friend was left alone.
But despite what Break Break Break says, he was able to transform that feeling into poetry, giving form to the thoughts that arise in all who grieve.
In the end, Hallam was right about his friend.
Tennyson's reputation is enduring, and it will endure for ages to come.
If only it were for a different reason.
Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching.
I love doing these poetry videos.
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