Selected Poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

‘To yonder shining ground;’ – the snow-covered ground is emblematic of the divine set against the whitish garments which are human.

‘As this pale taper's earthly spark,/To yonder argent round;’ – The nun’s ‘earthly spark’ (her candle) is representative of the human, while the ‘argent round’ (= silver sphere, the moon) is a symbol of the more perfect divine world.

‘So shows my soul before the Lamb,’ – Christ is the Lamb of God; an image here of white, purity and sacrifice.

‘So in mine earthly house I am,/To that I hope to be.’ – There is a complex comparison behind these rather elliptical lines: in her ‘earthly house,’ her body, she is ‘soil’d,’ like the robes and taper; she hopes ‘to be,’ unsullied, like the snow, or the moon.

‘Draw me, thy bride, a glittering star,’ – She wishes to be a shooting star, but going up to heaven, not down to earth.

‘In raiment white and clean.’ – White is the garb of the saints in Revelation and elsewhere, but the idea here is of a white bridal gown.

‘He lifts me to the golden doors;’ – just as the bridegroom traditionally carries the bride across the threshold of their new home.

‘The flashes come and go;/All heaven bursts her starry floors,’ – The images of bright colour and of ‘bursting’ imply an extraordinary moment of fulfilment that draws some of its power from the image of a wedding night.

‘For me the Heavenly Bridegroom waits,’ – This is the fulfilment of the St Agnes’ Eve tradition: she sees her future husband, Christ.

‘The sabbaths of Eternity,’ – A Sabbath is a day of rest in the week; however, the Bible treats the days of creation as endless ages, with the ‘Sabbath rest’ of eternity as the seventh (sometimes eighth) ‘day’ after the end of time.

‘A light upon the shining sea—’ – The light is presumably the moon.