Selected Poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

‘Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;/I earth in earth forget these empty courts,’ – the parallel construction – ‘morn by morn;/I earth in earth’ – is particularly evocative of the separation Tithonus hopes for.

‘And thee returning on thy silver wheels.’ - The wheels are perhaps suggestive of a sense of eternal process; he can never escape from the endless cycle of day, night, day… The ‘silver wheels’ seem rather inhuman, as does much of the immortal world of the goddess.


ST AGNES’ EVE

John Keats wrote the famous poem The Eve of St Agnes in 1819, and Tennyson is writing a variation on the theme established in the earlier work. Keats’s poem is a lush, romantic piece, in which the central female character lies on her bed on the saint’s eve, hoping, as tradition holds, to see a vision of her future husband. The young man who loves her has crept into her bedroom, and she awakens from her dream of him to see his real face. Tennyson has produced a spiritualised version, in which the central female character is a nun.

‘Deep on the convent-roof the snows/Are sparkling to the moon:’ – Note all the images of whiteness and purity.

‘My breath to heaven like vapour goes;/May my soul follow soon!’ – She desires death – often an issue with Tennyson’s characters. These lines are a variation on some found in the first stanza of Keats’ poem (see Introduction).

‘The shadows of the convent-towers/Slant down the snowy sward,’ – Note Tennyson’s use of sibilance, suggestive of quiet and stillness.

‘Or this first snowdrop of the year’ – more purity and white.

‘As these white robes are soil'd and dark,’ – Set against snow, human attempts at white (such as the nun’s habit) seem discoloured by comparison.