The Tide of Sorrow: Alfred, Lord Tennyson

In Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Break, Break, Break,” he begins and ends with the image of the sea, breaking on cold unfeeling stones, while he misses a dearly departed friend. Two distinct ideas permeate this short poem: in one, Tennyson describes his surroundings; in the other, meanwhile, he describes his own sorrow at the loss of a close one. These two developing strains in his short poem do not meld together; they remain separate entities. The first stanza of Tennyson’s poem evinces this trend perfectly: “Break, break, break, / On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! / And I would that my tongue could utter / The thoughts that arise in me” (lines 1-4). The first two lines fit with one another, but clearly do not logically lead to the next two lines. Tennyson seems to go from a description of a gray beach scene to a one of his own frustration with his emotions.

Tennyson’s poem captures this divergence especially in the third stanza: “And the stately ships go on / To their haven under the hill; / But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand, / And the sound of a voice that is still!” (lines 9-12). Again, the last two lines seem oddly inserted, especially coming as they do after images of a fisherman’s boy, a sailor lad, and stately ships. The grammatical structure of the stanza (including the fact that it is all written to be one sentence) would seem to indicate that it contains one idea, though clearly two distinct ideas are present within it. This inconsistency is characteristic of the human mind when it is consumed by something: by fear, by anxiety, or especially by sorrow. Tennyson’s words, which come across as a failed attempt to escape his grief, actually express the nature of that grief better than a poem devoted solely to a description of it; there is something undeniably tragic about a person surrounded by the joy of one boy who “shouts with his sister at play” (line 6) and another who “sings in his boat on the bat” (line 8), but he cannot focus for more than a fleeting moment on the joys of life, when he is so consumed by its sorrows.

The structure of the poem itself mirrors the waves: the beginning and ending, with their similar images of waves breaking on a cold shore, are sharply contrasted with the jubilant images in the middle. All the while, the poem similarly undulates between setting and feeling as it does between joyful and sorrowful images. The sea can be as cold and insistent as it is warm and enfolding. The fisherman’s boy and the sailor lad are helped and loved by the sea, and the stately ships that “go on / To their haven under the hill” float serenely above the sea, admiring of its sparkle. But for Tennyson, his experience at the sea is all “cold gray stones” (line 2) in an unfeeling, indifferent world. Tennyson knows that the world moves on without him, just as the waves rise and fall with the tide, and he is left with the sorrow of loss.