tennyson Tears Idle Tears
"Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tears from the depth of some divine despair Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, In looking on the happy Autumn-fields, And thinking of the days that are no more. ... (32) "Tears, idle tears" was written in the mid 1830s and first published in 1847. In later years, Tennyson made several comments on the poem. ... "(34) This last phrase was glossed in a third comment: "The passion of the past, the abiding in the transient, was expressed in Tears, idle Tears. ... "(39) There is no better example than "Tears, idle tears," which Poe quoted in toto in "The Philosophy of Composition. ... "Every short poem," Tennyson once remarked, "should have a definite shape, like the curve, sometimes a single, sometimes a double one, assumed by a severed tress or the rind of an apple when flung on the floor. ... There is no such movement in "Tears," but rather a back-and-forth, slowly oscillating motion that expresses a condition of being. ... " The conjunction of opposing states has a similar effect: rising tears/happy fall of the year; looking/thinking; rising sun/sinking sun; the light of nature dawning while the light of sense is being extinguished; real kisses/ feigned kisses. And other details similarly suggest a suspension between two states: half-awakened birds; a man hovering between life and death; "idle tears." On the literal level, the tears gather to the eyes but do not fall; they idle there. ... And the waning is that of dying eyes in which the objects of visual perception blur into "a glimmering square" (as if tears have gathered in them). ... Does "Tears, idle tears" end with its speaker in a "wild" frenzy and in utter despair like the speaker of "No More"? ... Since the 1940s, when Cleanth Brooks included a chapter on the poem in The Well-Wrought Urn, "Tears, idle tears" has been the subject of a good deal of excellent commentary. ... Like Miller, most recent commentators regard the poems first line as setting out an interpretative task for both speaker and commentator: the discovery, or the production, of the meaning of the tears. ... what the seemingly inexplicable tears of the opening line mean";(43) and another commentator speaks of "the poets active search for the meaning of the past, his attempt to fill in the absent meaning emblematized by the image of the tears. ... The speaker initially says he does not understand the meaning of the tears, that is, why he is feeling the way he does. But in what follows he does not try to understand the cause (the meaning) of the tears; he is rather concerned to find images and figures to express and communicate his emotional state. ... At the same time, he has also clarified the question of why he feels the way he does (the meaning of the tears). ... That is to say, clarification of the meaning of the tears comes not through thinking or interpreting, but as a result of the creative activity of mind involved in the poems composition. ... In order to understand the speakers tears, the reader has to comprehend the poem aesthetically. ... "(45) For Miller, the tears "signify the non-being of what they represent. ... From an aesthetic point of view, the poem is different from, and less desolating than, his decoding of the tears suggests. ... There is too much circumstantial evidence in the poem, too many images of death and bereavement, to allow one to think the speakers idle tears are unrelated to mortality and temporality. ... Immediately following the maids recital of "Tears," the song is savaged by the progressive Princess Ida, who dismissively refers to its "moans about the retrospect. ... Miller and Joseph both think that the end of the poem is unequivocally negative: "In the hermeneutics of Tennysons melancholy," says the latter, "an idle feeling . ... The last line does indeed contain the most desolating equivalent for the emotion that it is the raison detre of "Tears, idle tears" to express and communicate. ... Coleridge recognized that tears were arbitrary symbols, but insisted they were symbols nonetheless. ... The subject of "Tears, idle tears" is not perpetual loss and absence, but the abiding in the transient. ... According to its author, "Tears, Idle Tears" expresses "[t]he passion of the past, the abiding in the transient" (H. Tennyson 211), which suggests that one might see its speaker as weeping over the little picture (eidullion, idyl) of his self-idolizing or idyllizing. Tennyson refers not to some antique passion for the past but raises the suggestion of a past suffering on in his present: suffering on and being suffered (passus, whence "passion," is the perfect participle of patior, "I suffer"). The speaker of "Tears, Idle Tears" might in this case be heard to recognize that the action in which he is engaged (idyl-making) is potentially "idle"--that his very poetic spinning of wheels prevents the authentic experience of a different, transformed reality which is, at least on one level, desired. If the speaker knows he doesnt know what his tears mean and thus what he himself means and is ("Tears, idle tears, I know not what I mean"), then he is in one way admitting to "idle chatter" in the face of the gospel that "every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give an account thereof in the day of judgment" (Matt. ... That Day, says Revelation, "there should be time no longer" (10:6), or, as Tennyson preferred to translate it, "time should be no more" (H. Tennyson 233). The ultimate dissatisfaction of "Tears, Idle Tears," then, is with "days that are no more" than a meaningless, inauthentic "Death in Life,"--with, finally, itself. ... 1, 3), and despair over such un-pairing seems the source of "Tears, Idle Tears" and much of Tennysons work. ... The holding on to sorrow occurs unconsciously for the most part, following a dynamic Tennyson identified in dedicating his Arthurian cycle to the memory of the Prince Consort: "since he held them dear, / Perchance as finding there unconsciously / Some image of himself" (so, he continues, "I dedicate, I consecrate with tears-- / These Idylls" ["Dedication" 1-5, 3. ... But the last half of "Tears, Idle Tears" offers the possibility of breaking the idle idol-idyl by dying to this world, not necessarily by physical death, since the poet proposes in the first section of In Memoriam that "men may rise on stepping stones / Of their dead selves" (3- 4). The third stanza of "Tears, Idle Tears" calls up mythic imagery to set the scene for this death of the self. ... Here again, In Memoriam, section thirteen, supplies an apposite comment: For now so strange do these things seem, Mine eyes have leisure for their tears; My fancies time to rise on wing, And glance about the approaching sails. ... The "fancies," or phantoms, idols, rise--like tears to the eyes and friends from the underworld--and take wing in bird- form. ... As in Keats, the glimmering threshold--the "square of text," the "arch wherethrough / Gleams that untravelled world" ("Merlin and Vivien," 671; "Ulysses," 19-20)--is no sooner formulated than (and in consequence) the speaker is thrown back to his burden of loss, solitude, desperation, and his attempt to write a passage out of the world rendered idle: There he sat down gazing on all below; There did a thousand memories roll upon him, Unspeakable for sadness. ... 644) The polysemous line which opens the final stanza of "Tears, Idle Tears" establishes the possibility that the speaker himself is among the dead (remembering kisses during life), so confirming the silent presence of the poems "idol" and giving one reason for its tears. "Hopeless fancy" can thus offer an instance of one idols idle idyl hopes. ... Eyes with idle tears are wet. Idle habit links us yet. ... This same speaker as much as confesses to an earlier idle idol-idyl as he remembers lines from his "long and listless" youth which "haunted me, the morning long, / With weary sameness in the rhymes, / The phantom of a silent song" (69- 71, 1. ... Wordsworths Matthew, somewhat similarly, finds My eyes are dim with childish tears, My heart is idly stirred, For the same sound is in my ears As in those days I heard. ("The Fountain," 29-32) But in "Tears, Idle Tears," the speakers wild emotions stem from the realization, as one critic observes of the (again, evidently male) speaker of Tennysons "Break, Break, Break," that "not only will his friend never come back, but he will never be able to recapture his presence in memory" (Rackin 226). In "Tears, Idle Tears," the presence that cannot be recaptured is that of the speaker himself, who in the very act of articulation begins to slip away from, to tear himself from--and so, know more about--the days that are no more.