Tennyson, the man (continued)
• Published his first major poetry in 1832. --- its melancholy themes were a weak imitation of Keats’ language. • Even when his physical and mental health suffered, Tennyson never considered any career but poetry. • He published nothing in his “ten years’ silence” 1832-1842.
Rereading/Analyzing the Text
eread the first stanza. From whom do you think the speaker receives this “one clear call” The first stanza establishes the two controlling metaphors of the poem: Crossing the bar represents dying and the sea represents the mystery of whatever comes after death. What might the auditory image. What could the famous image “moaning of the bar” suggest? What does the speaker wish in the first stanza?
Rereading/Analyzing the Text
• What does Tennyson want to do after crossing the bar? • What is the literal voyage described? • What DOESN’T the speaker want others to do? • What is the speaker’s overall mood?
Crossing the Bar
By Lord Alfred Tennyson
Tennyson, the man
• Practiced dramatic/poetic gestures from an early age. He knew he would be a poet. • His father, a clergyman, encouraged his interest in poetry. • Studied at Cambridge University. There he joined the Apostles. • His father’s death in 1831 brought about harsh times.
Tennyson, the poet
• Was/Is immensely popular. • Assured his readers that his own experience of sadness and disorder had taught him that everything was part of a benevolent plan in which eventually all losses would be made good
Evaulations about the earlier masters
• We still look to the earlier masters for supreme excellence in particular directions: to Wordsworth for sublime philosophy, to Coleridge for ethereal magic, to Byron for passion, to Shelley for lyric intensity, to Keats for richness.
Tennyson, the poet
• He published nearly a dozls of the King: published between 1856 and 1885,
is a cycle of twelve narrative poems by the English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson(1809–1892; Poet Laureate from 1850) which retells the legend of King Arthur, his knights, his love for Guinevere and her tragic betrayal of him, and the rise and fall of Arthur's kingdom. The whole work recounts Arthur's attempt and failure to lift up mankind and create a perfect kingdom, from his coming to power to his death at the hands of the traitor Modred. – read as an allegory of the societal conflicts in Britain during the mid-Victorian era.
The Eagle
• • • • • • He clasps the crag with crookè hands; d Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ring'd with the azure world, he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.
Tennyson, the man (continued)
• That year, he was named poet laureate, and finally married. • He settled into the long, successful career that had been expected. • He was considered the greatest living poet for the rest of his life.
Questions for Crossing the Bar
What do you predict the images of harbor, bar (sandbar), and sea in this poem will symbolize? A bar is a sandbar at the mouth of a harbor. Beyond the bar is deep sea.
Reread the final stanza • How would you describe the speaker’s outlook? • What might “the flood” (14) symbolize? • Who might the “Pilot” be in line 15?
Introducing Key Vocabulary
1. Bar: Sandbar 2. Pilot: a person who knows the local waters and guides a ship as it enters or leaves a harbor.
First Reading of the Poem
Discussion
• 1.What feelings arise in the speaker as he looks out at the sea breaking endlessly against the shore? • 2. How does the speaker’s mental state compare to that of “the fisherman’s boy” and “the sailor lad” • 3. How does the setting intensify the speaker’s mood?
Break, Break, Break by Lord Alfred Tennyson
• Notes • 1. I would---I wish. • 2. a vanished hand--referring to the hand of the poet’s dead friend Arthur Hallam • 3. a voice that is still---referring to the voice of the poet’s dead friend Arthur Hallam.
Background for
Crossing the Bar
Tennyson wrote this poem in 1889, at the age of eighty, while crossing the channel that separates England from the Isle of Wight. Before his death, in 1892, he directed that the poem be printed at the end of all editions of his collected verse.
He was imitating the ebb and flow of the tides; he wished to surprise his readers and thereby hold the interests..