Selected Poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

‘And the sound of a voice that is still!’ – The word ‘still’ carries two meanings here: Hallam’s voice is ‘still’ as he is dead, but there is also a subtext in which his voice ‘still’ haunts Tennyson.

‘Break, break, break,/At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!’ – The final recapitulation includes a variation – a common song structure and technique. The ‘crags’ are a harsher image of division (land separated from the sea and death from life).

‘But the tender grace of a day that is dead’ – ‘grace’ is a richly applicable word; immediate is the gracious experience of Hallam’s presence, but there is also a sense of God’s Grace coming through their friendship.

‘Will never come back to me.’ – This is one of many poems that mourn the death of Arthur Hallam – a gifted friend of Tennyson’s who died young. Tennyson’s most famous poem long poem, In Memoriam , was written for him. Queen Victoria became close to Tennyson after reading it, because of her own grief at the death of Prince Albert.

LOCKSLEY HALL

‘Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet 'tis early morn:/Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle-horn.’ – The opening takes the speaker out of his social group so that he can soliloquize. The ‘bugle-horn’ presumably indicates they are going out hunting, though that seems slightly surprising considering the speaker’s socialist views as expressed later on in the poem.

‘'Tis the place, and all around it, as of old, the curlews call,’ – The curlew is a heathland bird with a mournful call.

‘Dreary gleams about the moorland flying over Locksley Hall;’ – Patches of lighter colour, though still ‘dreary,’ are caused by breaks in the fast moving cloud.

‘Locksley Hall, that in the distance overlooks the sandy tracts,’ – The location is by a beach.