Popularly known for its representation of the Victorian Compromise, the poem voices the poet’s sense of loss of his friend Henry Hallam and the lost moments of emotional recovery that the thing lost is never regained as Tennyson concludes that “that is dead/Will never come back to me”. The poem is a kind of break from the Romantic traditions as the poem is set in natural settings but the sense of connection with the external world that was experienced by the Romantic poets is now lost. At the same time, it is a continuation of the Romantic traditions as it enjoys the active presence of nature in the setting, imagery, and a place of recluse or escape.
The poem is rich in picturesque details that are very specific use of black, gray, and white colours as the whole poem uses words and phrases like “cold gray stones”, “boat on the bay”, “hill” and “crags” that suggest these said colours that symbolize gloomy, unpleasant, melancholic and elegiac tone. The frequent repetition of the jarring letters or sounds like “r” and “t” in words such as “break”, “gray”, “stones”, and “crags” again arouse sad and painful effects. The poem already uses quatrain which is the standard stanza form for most of the traditional elegiac poems.
The excellent use of pun and ambiguity with “haven” in the second verse of the third stanza of the poem juxtaposes two ideas simultaneously— first, that all the “stately” ships that are majestic, impressive in size and appearance would go on to their haven under the hill at the same time the soul of his friend Henry Hallam that is also majestic, pure and “tender” would also go to “h[e]aven” and Tennyson would neither be able to touch the “vanish’d hand” of his friend nor would he be able to feel “the tender grace of the day” that he lived with Hallam any more. Perhaps that is why the poet seems to be jealous of the shoutings of the fisherman’s boy (with his sister) and the signings of the sailor’s lad on the same shore where he sits dejected, mournful, and lost.
© Dr. Sanjeev Vishwakarma
Literary Latitude 