Tennyson’s Beautiful Articulation of Grief: ‘Break, Break, Break’
Alfred, Lord Tennyson channeled grief over his friend’s death into poetry that spans generations and situations.
In 1833, sudden tragedy struck the Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. His close friend Arthur Henry Hallam died of a stroke at the age of just 22. Tennyson and Hallam met at Cambridge and formed a deep bond, in part through their shared love of poetry, politics, and philosophy. Tennyson wrote a lament for Hallam around the year 1834 that runs as follows:
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
O, well for the fisherman’s boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!
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!
Break, break, break
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.
The work is an intense expression of grief and the difficulty of moving past a tragedy. Tennyson wrote another, much longer poem about Hallam’s death called “In Memoriam, A.H.H.” It takes up some of the same threads of thought as this one, but this brief lyric is a concentrated form of a sorrow, a sorrow the speaker can’t restrain. It bursts from his lips with the word “break.”
How the Poem Works
The poem begins in an unexpected way, with the repeated words, “Break, break, break,” followed by an apostrophe addressed to the ocean. This opening accomplishes several things. The repeated words, with their harsh consonants, mimic the crashing of waves on rocks. Second, the repeated word “break” breaks the expected meter of the poem with three accented syllables. The poem begins suddenly, unexpectedly—like Hallam’s death. The poem doesn’t settle into its regular meter—iambic trimeter with some tetrameter—until the second line. Finally, the word “break” refers not just to the sea but to the speaker’s own heart, introducing the poem’s central theme.
The poem’s energy derives from its internal tensions, centered around grief. These tensions take the form of a pair of key contrasts. The first exists between the poet and the sea: The sea is in a state of constant movement with the waves repeatedly smashing against the rocks, while the speaker is in a static state, almost paralyzed with grief. The speaker of the poem struggles to grieve properly, to even articulate what’s inside him: “would that tongue could utter/ The thoughts that arise in me.”
In the words of literature professor Oliver Tearle, we see Tennyson “addressing the waves of the sea, and drawing a comparison—indeed, a contrast—between the powerful action of the sea’s waves and the relative inaction, or stasis, of Tennyson’s own feelings. He cannot break the paralysis of grief.”
Tearle noted that this contrast of sea/speaker and motion/immobility is highlighted by the rhyming of “Sea/Me.” That critical rhyme appears again in the final stanza, highlighting Tennyson’s difficulty in moving forward. Tearle wrote: “The fact that Tennyson repeats the Sea/me rhyme (and the ‘Break, break, break’ command) in the final stanza reinforces his sense of paralysis: He’s still where he was at the start of the poem.”
The poem’s second central contrast, which relates to the first, exists between outward, ordinary everyday life and the poet’s interior, sorrowful state as he remembers the past. The poet notices others going about their daily lives—children playing, fishermen working, ships sailing—as though nothing has changed. But for the one who has experienced tragedy, nothing feels the same anymore; the very sunlight has a new twinge to it.
The poet observes the people around him and the world moving forward in its course, but his mind remains locked on “the touch of a vanish’d hand,” “the sound of a voice that is still,” and “the tender grace of a day that is dead.” Thus, within the third stanza we see a juxtaposition between the inexorable present and the inaccessible past.
All this incites in the poet’s irritation at the everydayness, what poet and professor Carol Rumens referred to as the speaker’s “compellingly angry resistance to the ordinary business of living.” Rumens continued, “One of the thoughts ... is that the poet’s own life still stretches wearily ahead of him.” Anyone who has experienced tragedy likely knows how odd it feels for life’s regular affairs to carry on, the regular details that need to be addressed, while it seems that something so significant as the loss of a loved one ought to overshadow all that.
The poet W.H. Auden expressed the same sentiment in his 1940 poem “Musée des Beaux Arts.”
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along
The satisfaction and catharsis involved in reading “Break, Break, Break” derives from its ability to articulate these aspects of grief that are so hard to put words to: the difficulty moving on from the past, the difficulty attending to the seemingly trivial matters of daily life going forward, and the difficulty of expressing what the heart is undergoing.
While this poem doesn’t end on a particularly hopeful note, it’s worth mentioning that Tennyson’s more complete lament for Hallam, “In Memoriam,” which in many ways echoes “Break, Break, Break,” does end hopefully. The final canto of this 133-canto poem concludes,
I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; ‘Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.
Indeed, the sorrow of grief is simply the flip-side of the joy of love and friendship. Pain proves love. They’re inseparable, and the cost is worth the reward.
It’s fitting to read these works together; “In Memoriam” seems to reflect a more measured response to tragedy that finds its way to a kind of acceptance, while “Break, Break, Break” erupts from the tempest of emotions that immediately following a deep loss. Both poems can be cathartic for those of us who have experienced grief because they put words to the wordless movements of the heart. We find our own experience reflected in them. Such is the power of a timeless and universal piece of art.
This article originally appeared on The Epoch Times. https://www.theepochtimes.com/bright/tennysons-beautiful-articulation-of-grief-break-break-break-5762417
Delighted to see Tennyson's poetry written about. He could make anything beautiful.