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Alfred, Lord Tennyson
(1809-1892 / Lincolnshire / England)
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Bhaskar Banerjee (2/29/2008 5:26:00 AM)
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Written in 1889 three years before his death, these lines had come to him in a flash of inspiration during a ferry crossing (from Lymington to Yarnmouth) of the strait Solent.
Tennyson had been very near to death in the past few months and his recovery had seemed miraculous. In this poem, by way of thanksgiving, he solemnly aspires to see his ‘Pilot face to face’. Time for him, he believed, was running out.
The poem has a simple dignity, yet it harmonizes with a subtle variety. The third line of the first three stanzas, longer than the preceding lines swells with feeling, but there is the immediate curbing effect of the stanzas, with a short concluding line, reining and subduing the feeling. The poem is a journey outward which is yet a circling home. Six times the poem speaks of “I” or “me” and yet the poem is nowhere self-absorbed. And it is the single occurrence of the word ‘our’ (line 13) which vindicates Tennyson’s claim to the central claim of a great poet.
The poem consists of four quatrains, alternate lines rhyming abab. The metre is iambic, but the number varies extensively from stanza to stanza.
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