1Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
2Tears from the depth of some divine despair
3Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
4In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
5And thinking of the days that are no more.
6 Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
7That brings our friends up from the underworld,
8Sad as the last which reddens over one
9That sinks with all we love below the verge;
10So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.
11 Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
12The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds
13To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
14The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
15So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.
16 Dear as remember'd kisses after death,
17And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd
18On lips that are for others; deep as love,
19Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
20O Death in Life, the days that are no more!
"Tears, Idle Tears" is a lyric poem by the Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. It was originally embedded in his 1847 narrative poem The Princess, where it is sung by a court maiden. The poem is an emotionally intense meditation on the passing of time and the loss of friends and loved ones. This subject matter might be partly explained by the fact that Tennyson wrote the poem after a visit to the destitute Tintern Abbey, near the grave of a dear friend.
I'm crying and crying and I don't know why. The tears seem to come from a deep sadness, which feels at the same time like it's something heavenly. This sadness begins in the heart before making its way to the eyes, as I look at the happy sight of these Autumn fields and think about the past.
These tears are as invigorating as the first sunbeam hitting the sail of a ship that carries our dead friends back up from the underworld. But these tears are also as sad as the last sunbeam reflecting off the sail of another ship, which carries everyone we love away over the horizon. It's so sad but also so invigorating to think about the past.
Really, it's as sad and strange as a dark summer morning when the first birds, still just half awake themselves, begin singing their song for someone who's on their deathbed, who can see the rising sunlight slowly filter through a window. It's so sad but also so strange to think about the past.
These tears are as rare and treasured as the memory of a dead lover's kisses. And they're as sweet as the kisses pictured by a hopeless imagination, hopeless because these imaginary kisses are with someone already romantically tied to somebody else. These tears are as deep as love itself, especially first love, and utterly consumed with regret. Oh, it's like bringing the dead to life again to think about the past!
In “Tears, Idle Tears” the speaker wonders at the source of her “divine despair,” a deep but vague sadness brought about by looking at the autumn landscape and thinking about her past. Her tears are “idle” (meaning without a clear purpose or cause), but also linked throughout the poem to the death of friends, the memory of past love, and changes in nature. The lack of specific detail (such as the names of those friends or lovers) however, makes the poem a more general meditation on the bittersweet nature of memory, focused on the grief that arises when considering all that has been lost to the passage of time. The poem doesn’t seek to explain this grief, instead focusing on the poignant contrast of recalling "happy days"—which nonetheless makes the speaker sad because they "are no more."
The poem clearly connects the speaker's "divine despair" to a consideration of the nature of memory. For one thing she repeatedly returns to the refrain "the days that are no more," emphasizing that her grief is rooted in thinking about days that have come and gone. She's also notably "looking on the happy Autumn-fields." Autumn is a season associated with change and reflection, as the abundance of summer wanes and the metaphorical death of winter approaches. The fact that these fields are "happy," meanwhile, complicates the speaker's grief by underscoring the ability of memory to make people both joyful and sad at once.
This sense of contradiction extends throughout the poem, as the speaker’s tears become not simply "sad" but also "strange." This strangeness refers to the poignancy of the speaker’s grief, given that it arises from thinking about happy things. The oxymoron "divine despair" further hints at the paradoxical nature of memory: usually the word "divine" describes things that are unambiguously positive (it refers to God after all!), whereas "despair" suggests a complete loss of hope. The combination of two words with such opposite meanings demonstrates just how conflicted and confused—how "strange"—the speaker’s emotions are.
The speaker repeatedly returns to this idea, noting how her tears are both as "fresh" as the first sunbeam hitting the ship that brings up friends "from the underworld" and as "sad" as the last sunset which falls on another ship taking "all we love" down to the underworld. Her grief, then, is linked both to new life and to death, to beginnings and endings. It is again inextricable from a consideration of the passage of time.
The speaker echoes this idea when she connects her tears to “dark summer dawns” (since when were dawns, especially in summer, dark?) during which early birdsong is heard by "dying ears." Birds typically represent renewal and new life, but here are associated with death.
The confused state of the speaker’s mind demonstrates the paradoxical power of memory, which is used to revive temporarily that which has been irretrievably lost. In other words, thinking about happy memories makes the speaker sad, because doing so is also a reminder of things that are over. The poem’s closing refrain then declares that everything in the past is a form of "Death in Life." This final paradox can be interpreted in two ways: on the one hand, the past is as lost as the dead; on the other, death is contained "in Life," meaning that just like sunrise enlightens the night, memory can be used to enlighten the past. This gives the poem a bittersweet conclusion: the past is granted "fresh" life in the speaker’s mind through her memories, yet those memories themselves are a reminder that the past is "no more."
Although the speaker never confirms exactly what is causing her despair, she focuses her memories mostly on lost love—of both the romantic and platonic variety. Through this, the poem elevates the importance and power of loving relationships, comparing their ending to a kind of death in itself.
The poem first focuses on platonic love, the kind of love between friends. In the second stanza, the speaker compares the bittersweet nature of memory to the freshness of seeing dead friends returning from the underworld, but also to the sadness of seeing them journeying down there. This image is an implicit classical allusion: in Greek mythology, a man named Orpheus tries to bring his wife Eurydice back from the world of the dead; in doing so, however, he disobeys a command not to look behind him, causing her to vanish forever. The speaker’s act of remembering lost friends is analogous to Orpheus’s looking back; the memory of lost friends serves to highlight the fact that they’re gone.
Such finality is reinforced by the image in the third stanza of an isolated person on their deathbed. There are no beloved friends around to say comforting words to "dying ears" or gather in front of "dying eyes." Only the birdsong outside can be heard, and the only sight is the sun rising in the window. This is a profoundly sad image, which nevertheless pays tribute to the power of love; isolation from the love of others becomes analogous to a kind of death.
This despair is then tempered by the joyous beginning of the final stanza, which moves onto romantic love. This love the poem describes ecstatically as "dear" and "sweet." Indeed, the speaker remembers the "Dear ... kisses" of a lover or spouse who has died. The adjective "dear" carries two meanings here: firstly, the more familiar idea of beloved, but also the secondary meaning of rare or costly. This implies that a successful, deeply felt love is rare in life, and irretrievably lost after the beloved’s death. The tears the speaker cries are thus even more "dear" (valuable), because they are the only physical record of this lost love.
The speaker's intense joy continues even as she discusses unrequited love, or love that goes in only one direction. Her tears are now described as "sweet" as kisses "by hopeless fancy feign’d"; this gives readers an image of a lover imitating (feigning) kissing in their imagination ("fancy"), because the person they actually desire is already in a relationship with someone else (their lips are "for others"). Thus the chance to actually fulfill these romantic desires is "hopeless."
This word is the first hint that the early joy of the stanza is not without paradox, and from this point onward, the speaker's emotions toward love become more conflicted and unstable. They reach a peak of intensity in the last two lines; the final adjective used to describe her tears is "wild," which indicates her loss of control and a climax to the grieving process. It is appropriate that this extreme emotional instability is related to "first love," traditionally the most intense form of romantic love. This upward progression in intensity then helps explain the hyperbole of the statement that all days past are a form of "Death in life." It is hard to imagine anything but the extreme emotional state of someone wildly in love as being able to elicit such a strong comparison. But the point of the poem seems to be that love is so intense an emotion that it is equal to the force of life itself, therefore the loss or failure of love is as powerful as death.
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
The first line of the poem establishes the speaker's confusion about her own grief: she is crying, but does not understand exactly why. This tension is reinforced by the fact that the speaker addresses her tears at a distance: she omits the possessive pronoun, refusing to call them "my" tears. This suggests that she is concerned not only with her personal sadness, but also with grief in general.
One of the poem's frequent techniques is diacope, the first example of which takes place immediately. The repetition of "tears" is separated by the adjective "idle," which suggests that the speaker is in the process of constantly redefining her grief. This inability to land on a solid assessment of her emotions (which will continue throughout the poem) is hinted at in the word "idle," which carries two similar but ultimately different meanings here:
These lines also establish that the poem is written in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter, meaning there are five iambs—poetic feet with a da DUM pattern—per line; more on that in our section on Meter). However, this meter is not rigidly followed, as even this first line contains some variation:
Tears, i- | dle tears, | I know | not what | they mean,
The poem actually begins with a stressed beat (creating a poetic foot called a spondee); the initial stress of "Tears" decisively indicates the poem's main subject. This line also contains two caesuras, setting up a halting rhythm right from the get-go as the speaker tries to work through her emotions.
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
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Get LitCharts A+In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.
Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds
To dying ears,
when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.
Dear as remember'd kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd
On lips that are for others;
deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more!
Sunrise and sunset separate night from day, and light from darkness: they each form a sort of boundary. In "Tears, Idle Tears," both sunrise and sunset are fittingly associated with the boundary between life and death, and between the present and the past.
The logic behind this association is the fact that death, in the poem, is analogous to darkness, and life to light. In lines 6-7, the "first beam" of sunrise falls on a ship bringing up friends "from the underworld." In returning from death, the crew of this ship imitates the action of sunrise, which dispels the darkness of the night. This first reference to sunrise is filled with "fresh" optimism. However the poem's next reference to it, in lines 11 and 14, is far more pessimistic. Instead of dispelling the darkness of death, the "dawn" itself is now "dark." This stanza also imagines a tragic figure "dying" without friends or loved ones, whom sunrise cannot save. Not only that, but dawn itself has become associated with death: in line 14 the "slowly glimmering square" that the dying figure sees through his casement window may be a reference to the bright light reported by those who have had near-death experiences. One might also note the fact that it is a "square," which is an abstract shape, not something definite like the ships in stanza 2 or the "half-awaken'd birds" heard in line 12. Perhaps this is because death is itself abstract: no one knows what happens when you die.
The pessimism of the sunrise symbolism in stanza 3 is prompted by the intervention of sunset earlier in the poem, in line 8. Sunset, which sees the day turn to night, represents the movement from life to death. It is "sad," an emotion that carries into stanza 3, and mixes with the "fresh" optimism to create an ambiguous "strange" feeling in the speaker's heart. This coming together of emotions usually considered opposites represents the speaker's confusion of the boundaries between past and present, as well as between life and death. Throughout the poem she is remembering, an action that temporarily revives the past, including dead friends; "Death in Life" is thus a paradox demonstrating the confusion of the boundaries represented by sunrise and sunset.
The refrain of "Tears, Idle Tears" changes slightly between each stanza, though it is constantly focused on "the days that are no more" (or, in other words, the past). The first refrain, in line 5, prompts the reflections that make up the next two stanzas, because it is the start of the speaker's "thinking." The rest of the poem then goes on to detail these thoughts—to elaborate on what the speaker is actually "thinking" about.
The second refrain, in line 10, then summarizes the speaker's emotions towards the past at this stage of the poem: the past is both "sad" and "fresh." These two adjectives are used to describe contradictory ideas, hinting at the speaker's paradoxical emotions (which will heighten as the poem moves through each refrain).
The next time the refrain appears, in line 15, the speaker swaps in the word "strange" for "fresh." This implies that not much progress has been made towards resolving the speaker's contradictory assessment of the past. In fact, her stance is getting ever stranger, even less logical or coherent.
The final refrain then sums up the speaker's mindset in a paradox: "O Death in Life, the days that are no more!" Instead of resolving her contradictory attitude, the speaker exclaims that the past itself is a paradox when accessed through memories, ending the poem at a sort of midpoint between joy and sadness.
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"Idle" has two meanings here: without a clear purpose, and without a clear cause. This establishes the fact that the speaker cannot settle on one interpretation of her grief.
"Tears, Idle Tears" is an elegy, however it is not written according to any particular form. It has four stanzas of five lines each, making them quintains, each of which ends with a variation on the poem's refrain.
Because the poem does not follow any strict form, Tennyson is not obliged to follow any traditions in terms of how he organizes the poem (as he would be in a sonnet, for instance). However, by using the same length stanza four times in a row he is able to return again and again to the same ideas, subtly reassessing them in each new stanza. The whole poem is an interpretation of the speaker's "tears" from line 1, and the repetition of the quintain shows that even in focusing on this limited subject matter, there are a huge range of emotions that can emerge.
"Tears, Idle Tears" is written in blank verse, meaning it is made up of unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter: five poetic feet per line, each of which follows an unstressed stressed pattern of accented syllables. This is considered the natural rhythm of English speech, making it an appropriate meter for a poem in which the speaker talks to herself. Its gentle, familiar rhythms could also be said to be sleepy, echoing the dreamlike quality of the imagery in stanzas 2 and 3.
However there are several lines where the meter varies, including the very first, where the stress falls on both the first syllable and the second, creating a spondee:
Tears, i- | dle tears, | I know | not what | they mean,
This immediately establishes the speaker's grief as the focus of the poem. Depending on how you read it, though, it is also possible to interpret the first foot as a trochee: "Tears i- | dle tears"—the lack of stress on "idle" mimicking the sense of purposelessness that its definition conveys. Several other lines also have the stress falling on the first syllable, again creating trochees:
Line 6:
Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail
Line 8:
Sad as the last which reddens over one
Line 16:
Dear as remember'd kisses after death,
Line 19:
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
In each case the initial stressed syllable is an adjective describing the speaker's tears, highlighting the importance of the fact that she constantly reconsiders how best to define her grief. Within these lines there are further, more radical changes to the meter. Line 6 is the most unusual, with its triple stresses on "first beam glittering." This accelerating rhythm imitates the speaker's quickening heart and unstable emotions, which then slow on line 8 as she becomes "sad" and the meter returns to its regular pattern, ending with three iambs.
Line 19 also stands out. Its structure is as follows: trochee, spondee, iamb, iamb, iamb:
Deep as | first love, | and wild | with all | regret;
The metrical disruption that takes place before the caesura mimics the emotional disruption of "first love," traditionally considered the most intense and unpredictable form of romantic love.
The poem does not have a rhyme scheme, relying instead on assonance and alliteration to create a sense of lyricism and melody effects. There is, however, one example of an internal rhyme: "Rise" and "eyes" in line 3. Perhaps Tennyson chose to include the one and only rhyme so early in the poem in order to frustrate the reader's expectations; one might expect the poem to answer the query posed in the first line: what do these tears mean? But it doesn't, just as one might expect further instances of rhyme after this early example, but there aren't.
Taken on its own, the poem does not have a defined speaker; there are no indications of the speaker's age, gender, or occupation. This helps the poem's discussion of memory and grief feel universal and relatable.
It is a different story, however, if readers understand the poem in context. Because "Tears, Idle Tears" originally appeared embedded within Tennyson's narrative poem The Princess, its speaker has a definitive identity. She is a maid in the court of Princess Ida, who comes into a dome where the narrator and Ida are resting, in order to sing to them. Her song is the poem, an account of her grief about lost friends, and the mixed happiness and sadness she feels when thinking about the past.
She is confused over the source of her tears, and goes on to detail several conflicting emotions: happiness at the idea of friends returning from the dead, sadness at their dying, "dear ... deep" love, and regret. She ends by considering the past itself (as distinct from her own personal history) a form of "Death in Life," a paradox that could be interpreted both optimistically and pessimistically: on the one hand the past is as lost as the dead, but on the other, death is contained “in Life,” meaning that just like sunrise enlightens the night, memory can be used to enlighten the past.
"Tears, Idle Tears" does not take place in a particular location or at a particular time. This helps its ideas about sadness and memory feel universal, like they could apply to a number of circumstances.
Zooming out to the broader context of Tennyson'sThe Princess, the maid sings this poem in a pleasure-dome where the main characters are relaxing. This is not mentioned in the poem itself, however, where the only definitive setting is the "happy Autumn-fields" at which the speaker is looking. Other settings, including a vague view of ships sailing the sea in stanza 2, and a similarly vague room with a casement window in stanza 3, are all embedded within similes, and are therefore likely to be either imaginary or memories. The setting for the poem, then, could be considered to be the speaker's mind.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) was one of the most famous British Victorian poets and served as England's Poet Laureate from 1850 until his death. "Tears, Idle Tears" is a lyric elegy, often referred to as a song because it was originally published as part of the narrative poem The Princess (1847). This work tells the story of Princess Ida, who founds a women's university that excludes men. It is narrated by an unnamed prince who was betrothed to Ida when they were children, and who sneaks into the university in disguise in order to win her love, eventually succeeding.
The song itself is performed by a maid in the fourth canto; its melancholy tone and obsession with the past annoys the headstrong Ida, who says to "trim our sails, and let old bygones be." Such criticisms were frequently leveled at Tennyson's work by his critics, who thought his use of medieval legends outdated, and his thinking simplistic. However many of his poems that deal with similar themes, such as "Crossing the Bar," In Memoriam A.H.H., "Ulysses," "Morte d'Arthur" and "Tithonus" have become classics of English literature.
The last four of this group have a particular relationship with "Tears, Idle Tears": they were all written shortly after the death of Arthur Hallam, a dear friend of the poet, and share a melancholic tone and an interest in life, death, and memory.
Tennyson wrote the poem independently from the main narrative of The Princess, inserting it later. He had been inspired by a visit to the destitute but beautiful medieval Tintern Abbey, which he described as "full of its bygone memories. It is the sense of abiding in the transient." By "abiding in the transient" he means things from the past enduring into the present, despite the destructiveness of time.
Tennyson's friend Arthur Hallam was also buried near Tintern Abbey, leading some to link the poem's sense of loss to his death. However Tennyson himself denied this, writing later to another friend that the sadness he felt on his visit “was not real woe” but rather “the yearning that young people occasionally experience for that which seems to have passed away from them forever.” In another letter he further denied the link to Hallam, explaining that since he was a boy he had felt "what I called the passion of the past." Although it is impossible to be definite either way, Tennyson's explanations do echo the poem's own sense of vagueness and generality about grief.
Another Introduction to the Poem — Read an introduction to some aspects of the poem, written by Cambridge University English professors.
Tennyson's Manuscripts — See high definition images of Cambridge University's collection of Tennyson's manuscripts.
"Tears, Idle Tears" Read Aloud — Listen to a recording of the poem.
"In Memoriam A.H.H." — Read Tennyson's most famous poem, which was dedicated to his friend Arthur Henry Hallam (whose initials are in the title), and who may also have partly inspired "Tears, Idle Tears."
The Poem Sung to Music — Listen to the poem performed to music, as by the maid in The Princess.
Full Text of "The Princess" — Read "The Princess," the narrative poem in which "Tears, Idle Tears" was originally published.