1The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
2The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
3Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
4And after many a summer dies the swan.
5Me only cruel immortality
6Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
7Here at the quiet limit of the world,
8A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream
9The ever-silent spaces of the East,
10Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.
11 Alas! for this gray shadow, once a man—
12So glorious in his beauty and thy choice,
13Who madest him thy chosen, that he seem'd
14To his great heart none other than a God!
15I ask'd thee, 'Give me immortality.'
16Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile,
17Like wealthy men, who care not how they give.
18But thy strong Hours indignant work'd their wills,
19And beat me down and marr'd and wasted me,
20And tho' they could not end me, left me maim'd
21To dwell in presence of immortal youth,
22Immortal age beside immortal youth,
23And all I was, in ashes. Can thy love,
24Thy beauty, make amends, tho' even now,
25Close over us, the silver star, thy guide,
26Shines in those tremulous eyes that fill with tears
27To hear me? Let me go: take back thy gift:
28Why should a man desire in any way
29To vary from the kindly race of men
30Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance
31Where all should pause, as is most meet for all?
32 A soft air fans the cloud apart; there comes
33A glimpse of that dark world where I was born.
34Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals
35From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure,
36And bosom beating with a heart renew'd.
37Thy cheek begins to redden thro' the gloom,
38Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine,
39Ere yet they blind the stars, and the wild team
40Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise,
41And shake the darkness from their loosen'd manes,
42And beat the twilight into flakes of fire.
43 Lo! ever thus thou growest beautiful
44In silence, then before thine answer given
45Departest, and thy tears are on my cheek.
46 Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears,
47And make me tremble lest a saying learnt,
48In days far-off, on that dark earth, be true?
49'The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.'
50 Ay me! ay me! with what another heart
51In days far-off, and with what other eyes
52I used to watch—if I be he that watch'd—
53The lucid outline forming round thee; saw
54The dim curls kindle into sunny rings;
55Changed with thy mystic change, and felt my blood
56Glow with the glow that slowly crimson'd all
57Thy presence and thy portals, while I lay,
58Mouth, forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm
59With kisses balmier than half-opening buds
60Of April, and could hear the lips that kiss'd
61Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet,
62Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing,
63While Ilion like a mist rose into towers.
64 Yet hold me not for ever in thine East:
65How can my nature longer mix with thine?
66Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold
67Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet
68Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam
69Floats up from those dim fields about the homes
70Of happy men that have the power to die,
71And grassy barrows of the happier dead.
72Release me, and restore me to the ground;
73Thou seëst all things, thou wilt see my grave:
74Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;
75I earth in earth forget these empty courts,
76And thee returning on thy silver wheels.
"Tithonus" is Alfred, Lord Tennyson's haunting retelling of a Greek myth. The poem's speaker is Tithonus himself: a legendary prince of Troy who fell in love with Eos (a.k.a. Aurora), goddess of the dawn. Wanting to be with his lover forever, Tithonus begs her to make him immortal, which she does. Alas, she neglects to make him immortally youthful. When this poem takes place, Tithonus has grown unspeakably ancient, and longs for the ordinary, humble mortal fate that he earlier rejected: death becomes almost his only desire. Tennyson first drafted the poem in 1833, shortly after the death of his close friend Arthur Henry Hallam. He published a substantially revised version of the poem in the February 1860 edition of the Cornhill Magazine, and later collected it in his 1864 book Enoch Arden.
The woods rot away; the woods rot away and fall. The mists drizzle their burden of water on the ground. Human beings are born and farm the fields and are buried beneath them; after long lives, swans die. But I am endlessly devoured by immortality: I lie in your arms, Eos, and wither away. Here in the silence of the world's farthest limits, I resemble a white-haired shadow; like a dream, I wander the silent palaces of the East, their mists upon mists, the shining halls of the morning.
Pity me, a shadowy figure who was once a man—a man so gloriously beautiful and so gloriously lucky to be chosen by you that he felt, in his puffed-up heart, that he must be a god himself. I asked you, Eos, to make me immortal. Smiling, you granted my wish, as casually as a wealthy man hands out money. But your servants the Hours, offended, worked away on me: they battered me and spoiled me and withered me. Though they couldn't kill me, they left me disfigured and aged, forced to live alongside you and your immortal youth—age that can't die next to youth that will never grow old. And everything that I once was lay destroyed. Can your love for me, your beauty, make up for this suffering?—even now, as the silver star that guides you hangs right over our heads and reflects in your eyes, which tremble with tears at my words? Please let me die. Take back the gift of immortality. Why should any man want to be set apart from the rest of the gentle human race, or trespass beyond the reasonable limits of human life—the boundary where everyone should stop, as is right and fitting?
A gentle breeze parts the clouds, and I see below me a glimpse of the dark world I came from. Once again I see that old mysterious shimmer on your lovely forehead and on your lovely shoulders, and feel your heart beating with fresh strength. Your cheek starts to blush through the darkness; your beautiful eyes, looking into mine, slowly brighten—though they have not yet grown so bright as they will be when they put out the light of the stars, when the wild band of horses who love you will rise up, eager for you to hitch them to your chariot—when they will shake off the dark of night from their manes and charge through the twilight, fanning its faded coals into the fresh flames of sunrise.
Oh! You always begin shining this way, without speaking, and before you give me any answer, you leave me, your tears still wet on my face.
Why must you always frighten me with your crying? You make me shake, fearing that a saying I heard long ago on earth is true: "Even the gods can't take back their gifts."
Alas, alas: how differently I felt, long ago, and how differently I saw—if that long-lost self was even the same person as me—the shimmering light beginning to gather around you, and your dark hair beginning to catch fire and glow with sunlight. As I watched you make this magical transformation, I changed, too: I felt my blood glow with the same sunrise warmth that slowly flushed your body and your palace, while I lay there with my mouth, my forehead, my eyelids all warm and dampened with your kisses, sweeter than newly opened spring flowers. I could hear the very lips that kissed me whispering mysterious, wild, sweet words—like the song I once heard Apollo singing above Troy, whose towers rose up as pale and ethereal as mists.
Please don't keep me here forever in your eastern domain. How can my deathless age carry on next to your immortal youth? Your warm, glowing shadows feel cold to me, your rosy light feels cold to me, and my withered feet feel cold as I pass through the shimmering doorways of your palace, while (far below) the morning mists rise from the fields and homes of the lucky people who are able to die, and from the grassy tombs of the even luckier people who are already dead. Let me go; give me back to the earth. You can see everything: you'll see my grave, too. Your beauty will arise afresh over and over, morning by morning. And I, nothing more than dirt in dirt, will forget this hollow palace, and forget the sight of you returning home in your silver-wheeled chariot.
In “Tithonus,” Tennyson examines the legendary figure of that same name: a prince of Troy who became the lover of the dawn goddess Eos (a.k.a. Aurora). Eos made Tithonus immortal so that the two could be together forever; sadly, she forgot to specify that he should be immortally young. Tithonus thus became impossibly ancient. The miserable Tithonus is this poem’s speaker, and his reflections capture the dreadful pain of old age—and the mercy of death. Death, in this poem, is kindly: humanity simply wasn’t meant to live forever, and to one day become “earth in earth” is no terrible doom, but a natural relief.
The aged Tithonus feels horribly out of place in the “gleaming halls of morn”—the celestial palaces he shares with his lover Eos. “Marr’d” (or disfigured) and “wasted” (or shrivelled) by the long, merciless passage of time, he’s a “shadow” of his youthful self. He can no longer enjoy the pleasures of love in his broken old body. Where once he used to share in Eos’s mysterious “change” as she glowed and renewed every morning (like the dawn of which she is the goddess), now he feels alienated from that gorgeous eternal youth; the only embrace he shares with his one-time lover these days is one that leaves his face wet with Eos’s guilty tears. His impossible, endless old age, in other words, has robbed him of all life’s pleasures, leaving him marooned in a world that can no longer make him happy.
Most mortals escape the pains of their later years the old-fashioned way: by dying. For the immortal Tithonus, however, that simply isn’t an option. Though he begs Eos to “take back [her] gift” and let him die, she doesn’t seem able to do so. Tithonus is thus robbed of his only possible release. His longing for death and envy of “those happy men that have the power to die” reminds readers that death, so often imagined as a terror to be fled, is in fact a necessary, natural, even merciful part of human life. Old age, with its frailty and loss, is far more unkind.
Perhaps the poem even suggests that this embrace of death is a kind of wisdom that only comes with age. The arrogant young Tithonus could never have imagined wanting his glorious life to be over. The elderly Tithonus wants nothing more than to be among the “happier dead.”
Like the tragic Greek figure that he is, this poem’s Tithonus (the immortal, impossibly ancient lover of the dawn goddess Eos) has a fatal flaw: pride. Smug about being chosen as a goddess's lover, he asks her to make him immortal, and in so doing transgresses a grave boundary, the law that says all mortals must one day die. Now, he suffers the consequences. “Immortal age beside immortal youth,” he discovers, is no fun at all. His hubris (or fatal arrogance) destroys him. Enticing as it might seem to go beyond the “goal of ordinance” (that is, the natural limits of human life), this poem suggests that the wise mortal accepts their nature rather than trying to escape it.
In the happier days when Tithonus asked Eos to “’give [him] immortality,’” he remembers, he felt like he was a special person, singled out for greatness. Inflated with the pleasure of being “chosen” by a gorgeous goddess, Tithonus saw himself as better and different than other people—in fact, as “none other than a God!”
But Grecian grandiosity, famously, never leads to good things. Eos responds to Tithonus’s hubris with her own careless exercise of power: she grants his wish for immortality as casually as “wealthy men, who care not what they give.” But she seems to have forgotten Tithonus's mortal nature as much as he has. It’s a real god-mistake to forget to make one’s lover immortally young, not just immortal; Eos's omission is a reminder that gods, unlike mortals, never need to worry about aging! In short, both Eos and Tithonus ignore what Tithonus really is: an ordinary mortal man, no matter how handsome he is, no matter whom he’s dating.
Tithonus’s hubristic belief that he should live forever transgresses the bounds not just of his own nature, but of human nature. As the sadder, wiser, older Tithonus laments, it’s only a fool who wishes to “vary from the kindly race of men”: it is “meet for all” (that is, fitting for everyone) to die one day. Any attempt to go past the place where “all should pause,” the poem suggests, invites bitterly ironic doom.
The story of “Tithonus” can be read, not just as a haunting tale of a wish gone bad, but as an extended metaphor for the experience of grief. The juxtaposition of the eternally aging Tithonus with the eternally youthful Eos mirrors the experience of a person mourning a loved one who died too young. The survivor keeps getting older, but the lost one seems trapped in amber, never aging. (This was an experience all too familiar to Tennyson: he drafted this poem shortly after his beloved friend Arthur Henry Hallam died at the age of only 22.) Part of the pain of grief, the poem suggests, is the sense that a happier, more beautiful time remains frozen in one’s memory: always present, but just out of reach. Perhaps such memories, no matter how lovely, can even start to feel like a prison.
Every day, the withered Tithonus is confronted with the sight of his beloved Eos lighting up with the sunrise. Like the dawn of which she is the goddess, she shines brighter as night turns into morning: her eyes “brighten,” her cheek “redden[s],” and her “bosom beat[s] with a heart renew’d.” In other words, she’s the very picture of fresh and glowing youth, always as beautiful as she was when Tithonus first loved her. Her “renew[al]” only keeps her the same: she’s an eternal vision of “immortal youth.” Tithonus, meanwhile, gets older and older, sadder and sadder, wasting away into a tragic “shadow” of his former self.
Eos’s youth and beauty thus become an inescapable torment to Tithonus—just as the unchanging memory of dead loved ones might torment those who survive them. Trapped in Eos’s "gleaming halls of morn," unable even to escape his suffering through his own death, Tithonus can be read as an image of a mourner paralyzed by changeless images of the person they’ve lost. Perhaps only the mourner's own death can free them from the prison of memory.
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes:
“Tithonus” begins with a bird’s-eye view of a withering world. The poem’s speaker looks out from a great height over vast stretches of space and time. As he watches, “the woods decay and fall”; clouds gather and rain descends; generations of people are born, farm the land, and die; and the long-lived “swan” at last dies, too.
These melancholy visions are seen through the eyes of Tithonus, the legendary figure after whom the poem is titled. In Greek mythology, Tithonus was a Trojan prince who fell in love with Eos, the goddess of the dawn. Wanting to prolong their joy infinitely, Tithonus begged his divine lover to immortalize him. She did so—but forgot to specify that he should be immortally young. Tithonus thus became unimaginably old: eternally wasting away, unable to die.
Tithonus’s first words suggest that he’s already deep into his terrible, endless old age. The weary epizeuxis of “the woods decay, the woods decay and fall” suggests that he’s seen forest after forest rise and rot away, frail as flowers, while epochs pass. And the polysyndeton of "man comes and tills the fields and lies beneath" captures the one-thing-after-another circle of life ticking ceaselessly away beneath Tithonus’s gaze.
His other images suggest that his broad, immortal view of the world has only saddened him. Looking on the heavy “vapours” that gather before rainfall, he personifies them, imagining that when the rain comes, they mournfully “weep.” And his allusion to the swan, which lives “many a summer” before it dies, raises echoes of a poignant old legend: swans were said to be astonishingly long-lived, and to be silent until the moment of their deaths, when they sang lovely, unearthly songs.
These are visions of release as much as sorrow and death. The “vapours weep their burthen to the ground”; in other words, as they cry, a burden falls from them, and they’re freed. Readers might imagine those soft clouds melting away not long after their tearful showers. And the swan’s death hints at a climactic, transcendent beauty, a moment of glory that comes just before it's all over—and because it’s all over.
Such releases are not for the immortal Tithonus. In this dramatic monologue (a poem spoken in the voice of a particular character), Tithonus will lament that, while he knows the circle of life and death more intimately than any other human being ever could, he can’t participate in it himself. As he puts it, “Me only cruel immortality / Consumes.” Death devours everyone else; for him, it’s eternal life that, like Prometheus’s vulture, gnaws away at him endlessly without ever releasing him into oblivion. The divine gift of immortality has become, for Tithonus, an ironic and nightmarish curse.
Tennyson tells this haunting tale in blank verse—that is, unrhymed iambic pentameter. That means that each of the poem’s lines uses five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm (with occasional variations for flavor). Here’s how that sounds in line 1:
The woods | decay, | the woods | decay | and fall,
This is the grand rhythm of Shakespearean tragedy and Miltonic epic, and it lends Tithonus’s story a sorrowful weight.
I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.
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Get LitCharts A+ Alas! for this gray shadow, once a man—
So glorious in his beauty and thy choice,
Who madest him thy chosen, that he seem'd
To his great heart none other than a God!
I ask'd thee, 'Give me immortality.'
Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile,
Like wealthy men, who care not how they give.
But thy strong Hours indignant work'd their wills,
And beat me down and marr'd and wasted me,
And tho' they could not end me, left me maim'd
To dwell in presence of immortal youth,
Immortal age beside immortal youth,
And all I was, in ashes.
Can thy love,
Thy beauty, make amends, tho' even now,
Close over us, the silver star, thy guide,
Shines in those tremulous eyes that fill with tears
To hear me? Let me go: take back thy gift:
Why should a man desire in any way
To vary from the kindly race of men
Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance
Where all should pause, as is most meet for all?
A soft air fans the cloud apart; there comes
A glimpse of that dark world where I was born.
Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals
From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure,
And bosom beating with a heart renew'd.
Thy cheek begins to redden thro' the gloom,
Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine,
Ere yet they blind the stars, and the wild team
Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise,
And shake the darkness from their loosen'd manes,
And beat the twilight into flakes of fire.
Lo! ever thus thou growest beautiful
In silence, then before thine answer given
Departest, and thy tears are on my cheek.
Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears,
And make me tremble lest a saying learnt,
In days far-off, on that dark earth, be true?
'The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.'
Ay me! ay me! with what another heart
In days far-off, and with what other eyes
I used to watch—if I be he that watch'd—
The lucid outline forming round thee; saw
The dim curls kindle into sunny rings;
Changed with thy mystic change, and felt my blood
Glow with the glow that slowly crimson'd all
Thy presence and thy portals,
while I lay,
Mouth, forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm
With kisses balmier than half-opening buds
Of April, and could hear the lips that kiss'd
Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet,
Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing,
While Ilion like a mist rose into towers.
Yet hold me not for ever in thine East:
How can my nature longer mix with thine?
Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet
Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes
Of happy men that have the power to die,
And grassy barrows of the happier dead.
Release me, and restore me to the ground;
Thou seëst all things, thou wilt see my grave:
Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;
I earth in earth forget these empty courts,
And thee returning on thy silver wheels.
"Tithonus" alludes to an episode from classical mythology:
The Tithonus of this poem has a subtly different story. Here, Zeus doesn't enter into it. Rather, it's Eos herself who immortalizes her lover, then realizes her mistake—and is apparently powerless to do anything about it. As Tithonus remembers once hearing someone say: "'The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.'"
By reshaping the myth along these lines, Tennyson heightens the drama. Eos has reason to feel even more guilty that she's consigned her lover to this awful fate; every morning, Tithonus says, she leaves her "tears [...] on [his] cheek," perhaps in remorse as much as grief. And Tithonus has cause for anger—though he doesn't express much. This poem's Tithonus mostly seems torn between a longing for his lost youth and a longing for sweet death.
The poem also alludes to some of Tennyson's deepest poetic influences:
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Mists, thin clouds.
"Tithonus" is a dramatic monologue: a poem spoken in the voice of a particular character, like a speech in a play. The speaker here is Tithonus himself, a Trojan prince from Greek mythology who fell in love with Eos (a.k.a. Aurora), the goddess of the dawn. Tithonus asks his beloved to make him immortal so he can be with her forever. She grants his wish—but fails to specify that Tithonus should also remain eternally young. Tithonus thus lives forever, but gets older and older, more and more withered.
Tithonus tells his haunting story over the course of 76 lines of blank verse (that is, unrhymed iambic pentameter—more on that in the Meter section of this guide). Those lines are divided into seven irregular stanzas, the breaks between them marking shifts in Tithonus's mood or thought.
This is a form inspired by Milton's Paradise Lost and Shakespearean tragedy. In choosing blank verse, Tennyson gives Tithonus's speech (and the questions it raises about aging and mortality) a melancholy grandeur.
"Tithonus" is written in blank verse—that is, unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter. Each line is built from five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, like this:
The woods | decay, | the woods | decay | and fall,
This is the grand rhythm of high tragedy, the same meter in which Satan spurs on rebel angels and Hamlet contemplates death.
Most long works written in iambic pentameter introduce metrical variations for the sake of emphasis and naturalism. "Tithonus" is no exception. Listen, for instance, to lines 55-56, in which Tithonus recounts a half-agonized, half-awestruck memory of how he used to feel as he watched his beloved Eos glowing brighter and brighter at dawn:
Changed with | thy myst- | ic change, | and felt | my blood
Glow with | the glow | that slow- | ly crim- | son'd all
Both of these lines start with a trochee (the opposite foot to an iamb, with a DUM-da rhythm). By moving a strong stress to the front of the line, Tennyson makes Tithonus sound urgent and emotional; as the old, old man remembers those long-lost days of shared youth and beauty, his voice gains a new pained energy.
Written in blank verse, "Tithonus" doesn't use a rhyme scheme. Instead, the poem makes music in other, subtler ways—for instance, through internal rhyme, as in line 56's "glow with the glow that slowly crimson'd all," or through other echoing sounds, as in in lines 8-10:
A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.
The soft /sh/, /s/, and /z/ sibilance here captures the hush of dawn's "ever-silent" palace and the scuff of Tithonus's limping footsteps, evoking a scene at once peaceful and hauntingly lonely.
The poem's speaker is the titular Tithonus himself: an impossibly old immortal begging his lover (the dawn goddess Eos) for death. In becoming immortal, Tithonus feels he's committed a terrible, transgressive act of hubris, attempting to reach beyond the "goal of ordinance" (that is, the appropriate boundaries of human life). Now, he's suffering the consequences.
Readers can understand, though, why he might have found himself in this predicament. Tithonus's lyrical reminiscences of the days when he and his beloved Eos were young and happy together paint a picture of the kind of overflowing bliss one would naturally long to enjoy forever. But where Tithonus once shared his beloved's "mystic change" as she took on her morning "glow," rejoicing in her eternally renewed beauty, now he can only watch from a sad distance, knowing that his unimaginable age has carried him far, far away from that sweet freshness.
In his lamentations over his own hubris, Tithonus is a mirror image of another Tennyson hero: Ulysses, who's just raring to surpass human limitations. (Tennyson's "Ulysses" was in turn inspired by Dante, whose Ulysses is condemned to Hell for his hubristic ambition: though his words are stirring, his goals are as prideful and fatally flawed as the young Tithonus's.) Critics often treat Tennyson's "Tithonus" and "Ulysses" as a matched pair; both poems reflect on transgressions beyond the "goal of ordinance," the natural limits of human life.
Tithonus might also be read as a voice for Tennyson himself. Tennyson first drafted both "Ulysses" and "Tithonus" while grieving his young friend Arthur Henry Hallam. Tithonus's sense of himself as a helplessly aging man still in love with an eternally youthful goddess mirrors Tennyson's struggle. Hallam, here, is the beautiful beloved who will never get any older, frozen in amber as a poignantly young man. Tennyson is the aging lover, looking back on a sweet and vanished time.
"Tithonus" is set in the mysterious "gleaming halls of morn"—the celestial palaces where Eos, goddess of the dawn, holds court. High above the earth (which Tithonus can glimpse sometimes when "a soft air fans the cloud apart"), this is a place of "far-folded mists" and subtle, shimmering colors.
It's also a paradoxical place. Outside of time, as immortal as the sunrise, the palaces of the sunrise are also deeply involved in time—for what marks passing time so clearly as the movement of the sun? While Eos's palace itself never changes, it's a place where the helplessly aging Tithonus can't escape change: a place where Eos's servants, the "strong Hours," hold sway.
Looking down on the world of ordinary people who "have the power to die," sadly watching as his lover glows with fresh dawn light day after day after day, Tithonus is stuck in the middle, able neither to die nor to relish his immortality. He's out of tune both with the immortally beautiful "halls of morn" and the "dim fields" of mortal life.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) was one of the most influential and beloved poets of the Victorian era. Poet Laureate to Queen Victoria herself, he became the famous public face of mid-19th-century English poetry.
Tennyson began his poetic career as a student at Cambridge. There he met Arthur Henry Hallam, a friend who would become one of his greatest influences—but not, alas, because of a long and happy life together. Hallam tragically died just before he was to marry Tennyson's sister. Tennyson's overwhelming grief would go on to inspire much of his most powerful verse, "Tithonus" included. He first drafted the poem (under the title "Tithon") in 1833, the year Hallam died. The grandest poetic result of Hallam's death, however, was certainly Tennyson's In Memoriam, a wildly popular book-length elegy that would fuel a Victorian obsession with grief and mourning.
Like his friends Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tennyson was influenced by the Romantic poets, from whom he inherited a taste for mythology, magic, and melancholy. The death of the dashing Lord Byron came as a meaningful shock to him as a young boy (though he admired Byron less as he got older), and echoes of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley run all through his work. But Tennyson also considered himself part of a longer English poetic lineage that reached back to Milton and Shakespeare. One can also see a broader European influence in Tennyson's famous "Ulysses," which retells an episode from Dante's Inferno (and which is often read as a pendant to this poem).
While Tennyson fell out of style among the early-20th-century modernists (who dismissed his work as too quaint, too pretty, and too conservative), recent scholars have given him more credit, praising his deep sense of mystery and wonder. There's no question that he's an important and influential writer: to this day, poems like "The Lady of Shalott" are among the best-known and best-loved in the world.
Tennyson wasn't just a popular poet during his time, but a major public figure. As Poet Laureate to Queen Victoria, Tennyson wrote for the British Empire at its peak.
During Victoria's reign, proverbially, the "sun never set on the British Empire": Britain had colonial holdings across the world, and saw itself as the rightful, "civilized" ruler of all the lands it had conquered. Some of Tennyson's own work reflects the intense British patriotism of the time. His "Charge of the Light Brigade," for instance, is a bombastic celebration of military self-sacrifice. But it's also a tragedy, and reflects another major Victorian preoccupation: mourning.
Queen Victoria's beloved husband Prince Albert died when Tennyson was about a decade into his tenure as Poet Laureate. Victoria went into deep mourning for the rest of her life—and sparked a craze for flamboyant public grief. Victorian mourners would wear black for years, make elaborate wreaths and jewelry out of the hair of the dead, and pose corpses for post-mortem portraits. Tennyson fanned the flames of this obsession with his great elegy "In Memoriam," a long poetic commemoration of a beloved friend, dead too young.
Perhaps the Victorian obsession with death and mourning also speaks to the melancholy of a changing 19th-century world. The burgeoning Industrial Revolution ushered in an era of rapid, dirty, and dangerous change. Britain embraced its new economic might—but also mourned disappearing ways of life and a blighted countryside.
A Brief Biography — Learn more about Tennyson's life and work via the British Library.
The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
Tennyson at the Victorian Web — Visit the Victorian Web to find a wealth of Tennyson resources.
Portraits of Tennyson — See some images of Tennyson via London's National Portrait Gallery.
Tithonus in Art — Learn more about the Tithonus myth and see another artwork inspired by it—this one a painting by Francesco Solimena.