Tears, Idle Tears

a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

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.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,

That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns

The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,

And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

Lines 1-5
The poem begins by referring to tears that are
“idle,” not in the physical sense of
“motionlessness” that we usually use the word
for (they do have motion, moving from the
heart to the eyes), but in the broader sense.
Idle here means useless, creating nothing,
causing nothing to happen. This could be what
gives the poem its especially tragic mood: the
speaker feels tears, and is very observant and
clear in describing them, but there is nothing
to be done about them. The speaker says that,
though their meaning is unknown, the tears
originate from a divine despair (“divine” here
implies a connection to godliness, to forces
beyond our physical world) and travel through
the heart into the eyes. The last two lines of
this stanza describe the circumstances under
which these tears rise. There is a contradiction
in line 4 that helps support the idea of idleness
in the tears: the reference to “autumn fields” is
clear enough, as autumn is a time when plants
die and animals begin to migrate or hibernate,
and this by itself would be appropriate for a
discussion of despair and tears, but Tennyson
adds the word “happy,” which cancels out that
gloomy effect. Throughout this poem he
balances images of hope against images of
depression. And so line 5’s reference to “the
days that are no more” is not so obviously a
negative reference as it may seem upon first
reading. If the author had meant to portray
these memories as being awful to the poem’s
speaker, he could have strengthened the sense
of hopelessness by using the description “days
past” or “days gone by,” which would
emphasize the fact that they are lost, instead
of their simple lack of existence.
Lines 6-10
The “beam” referred to in line 6 is a sunbeam,
the first one of the sunrise, an image of
newness and beginning that has the opposite
implication as the autumn field mentioned in
line 4. That this dawn sunbeam is hitting a
ship’s sail offers a sense of newness, especially
when we find out in the next line that the ship
is bringing friends. But then, in line 7, the
poem shows its contradictory nature again by
saying that these friends are arriving from “the
underworld.” Literally, this reference would
have referred to the Southern Hemisphere,
notated on Victorian era maps with upside
down type, as the bottom of the globe:
however, there is no way to deny that, going
back to Greek mythology and beyond, “the
underworld” has referred to the realm of the
dead. The only way these friends could return
from the underworld would be through
memory, but the poet infuses these memories
with life by connecting them to freshness and
daybreak.
Line 8 follows the mention of the underworld
with sadness, reversing the sunrise imagery
with the last beam of sunset that reddens the
sky and then sinks, like the same ship
departing, below the horizon. While the
“underworld” reference in line 7 brought up the
idea of memories of loved ones, line 9 implies
that the speaker is actually facing death (what
else could take away, not just specific loved
ones, but “all we love”?). With no future, this
speaker talks of exploring the present and the
past equally as the same sort of sensations,
using “fresh” and “sad” to describe both
everyday occurrences of the sun’s motion and
also the days that are no more.
Lines 11-15
This stanza expands upon the imagery of the
stanza which came before it, but the
relationship is brought out more clearly. Since
the dawn has already been mentioned in line
6, and the speaker’s approaching death is
implied in line 9, this stanza takes the time to
consider in detail what sadness the coming
dawn would create in a dying person, and in
the end relates that sadness to memory. Line
11 repeats the contradiction of line 4’s “happy
autumn-fields” with “dark summer dawns,”
since both summer and dawn are associated
with brightness, not dark. The song (or “pipe”)
of birds before sunrise, so early that the birds
themselves are only half awake, is a sound
that is seldom heard, but we can infer that
dying ears are aware of this sound precisely
because they are dying, and are absorbing
worldly experiences while they can. This is
clearly the case with the dying eyes that focus
on the window frame (casement) in the dark
and stay on it until the sunrise slowly makes it
“glimmer,” or glow. There is a sense of
desperation, of hunger, implied in the way the
dying person seeks out even the slightest
physical experience, and in the last line of this
stanza the memories of the dying person are
given equal importance with the current
experiences.
Lines 16-20
In line 16, the three ideas that Tears, Idle
Tears is concerned with — memory, death,
and, as implied by “kisses,” life — are brought
together. The next three lines use the imagery
of romantic love, which has not played a part
earlier in the poem. Even hopeless love,
symbolized by the imaginary kisses given to
someone who belongs to another and is thus
unobtainable, is introduced in the poem as
sweet. The poem goes on to demonstrate just
how deeply the “days that are no more” extend
into a dying person’s existence by comparing
those days to first love, which is presented as
the deepest experience life has to offer.
Tennyson attempts, too, to convey how the
loss of the past can evoke wild regret, even as
love remembered can. Line 20 compares the
days irretrievably lost to “Death in Life,”
rendering the poem’s images of idle tears and
dying hours relevant to those who have not
experienced either.
Summary
The speaker sings of the baseless and inexplicable tears
that rise in his heart and pour forth from his eyes when
he looks out on the fields in autumn and thinks of the
past.

This past, (“the days that are no more”) is described as

fresh and strange. It is as fresh as the first beam of
sunlight that sparkles on the sail of a boat bringing the
dead back from the underworld, and it is sad as the last
red beam of sunlight that shines on a boat that carries
the dead down to this underworld.
The speaker then refers to the past as not “fresh,” but
“sad” and strange. As such, it resembles the song of the
birds on early summer mornings as it sounds to a dead
person, who lies watching the “glimmering square” of
sunlight as it appears through a square window.
In the final stanza, the speaker declares the past to be
dear, sweet, deep, and wild. It is as dear as the memory
of the kisses of one who is now dead, and it is as sweet as
those kisses that we imagine ourselves bestowing on
lovers who actually have loyalties to others. So, too, is
the past as deep as “first love” and as wild as the regret
that usually follows this experience. The speaker
concludes that the past is a “Death in Life.”
Form
This poem is written in blank verse, or unrhymed
iambic pentameter. It consists of four five-line stanzas,
each of which closes with the words “the days that are
no more.”
Commentary
“Tears, Idle Tears” is part of a larger poem called “The
Princess,” published in 1847. Tennyson wrote “The
Princess” to discuss the relationship between the sexes
and to provide an argument for women’s rights in
higher education. However, the work as a whole does
not present a single argument or tell a coherent story.
Rather, like so much of Tennyson’s poetry, it evokes
complex emotions and moods through a mastery of
language. “Tears, Idle Tears,” a particularly evocative
section, is one of several interludes of song in the midst
of the poem.

In the opening stanza, the poet describes his tears as

“idle,” suggesting that they are caused by no immediate,
identifiable grief. However, his tears are simultaneously
the product of a “divine despair,” suggesting that they
do indeed have a source: they “rise in the heart” and
stem from a profoundly deep and universal cause. This
paradox is complicated by the difficulty of
understanding the phrase “divine despair”: Is it God
who is despairing, or is the despair itself divine? And
how can despair be divine if Christian doctrine
considers it a sin?
The speaker states that he cries these tears while
“looking on the happy autumn-fields.” At first, it seems
strange that looking at something happy would elicit
tears, but the fact that these are fields of autumn
suggests that they bear the memories of a spring and
summer that have vanished, leaving the poet with
nothing to look forward to except the dark and cold of
winter. Tennyson explained that the idea for this poem
came to him when he was at Tintern Abbey, not far
from Hallam’s burial place. “Tintern Abbey” is also the
title and subject of a famous poem by William
Wordsworth. (See the “Tintern Abbey” section in the
SparkNote on Wordsworth’s Poetry.) Wordsworth’s
poem, too, reflects on the passage of time and the loss of
the joys of youth. However, whereas Tennyson laments
“the days that are no more” and describes the past as a
“Death in Life,” Wordsworth explicitly states that
although the past is no more, he has been compensated
for its loss with “other gifts”:
That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense.
Thus, although both Wordsworth and Tennyson write
poems set at Tintern Abbey about the passage of time,
Wordsworth’s poem takes on a tone of contentment,
whereas Tennyson’s languishes in a tone of lament.
“Tears, Idle Tears” is structured by a pattern of
unusual adjectives used to describe the memory of the
past. In the second stanza, these adjectives are a chiastic
“fresh...sad...sad...fresh”; the memory of the birth of
friendship is “fresh,” whereas the loss of these friends is
“sad”; thus when the “days that are no more” are
described as both “sad” and “fresh,” these words have
been preemptively loaded with meaning and
connotation: our sense of the “sad” and “fresh” past
evokes these blossomed and withered friendships. This
stanza’s image of the boat sailing to and from the
underworld recalls Virgil’s image of the boatman
Charon, who ferries the dead to Hades.
In the third stanza, the memory of the past is described
as “sad...strange...sad...strange.” The “sad” adjective is
introduced in the image of a man on his deathbed who
is awake for his very last morning. However,
“strangeness” enters in, too, for it is strange to the dying
man that as his life is ending, a new day is beginning. To
a person hearing the birds’ song and knowing he will
never hear it again, the twittering will be imbued with
an unprecedented significance—the dying man will hear
certain melancholy tones for the first time, although,
strangely and paradoxically, it is his last.
The final stanza contains a wave of adjectives that rush
over us—now no longer confined within a neat chiasmic
structure—as the poem reaches its last, climactic
lament: “dear...sweet...deep...deep...wild.” The
repetition of the word “deep” recalls the “depth of some
divine despair,” which is the source of the tears in the
first stanza. However, the speaker is also “wild with all
regret” in thinking of the irreclaimable days gone by.
The image of a “Death in Life” recalls the dead friends
of the second stanza who are like submerged memories
that rise to the surface only to sink down once again.
This “Death in Life” also recalls the experience of dying
in the midst of the rebirth of life in the morning,
described in the third stanza. The poet’s climactic
exclamation in the final line thus represents a
culmination of the images developed in the previous
stanzas
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"Tears, Idle Tears" is a lyric poem written in 1847
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), the
noted Victorian-era English poet. Published as one of
the "songs" in his The Princess (1847), it is regarded
for the quality of its lyrics. A Tennyson anthology
describes the poem as "one of the most Virgilian of
Tennyson's poems and perhaps his most famous
lyric".[1] Readers often overlook the poem's blank
verse[1][2]—the poem does not rhyme.
Tennyson was inspired to write "Tears, Idle Tears"
upon a visit to Tintern Abbey in Monmouthshire,
an abbey that was abandoned in 1536. He said the
convent was "full for me of its bygone memories", and
that the poem was about "the passion of the past, the
abiding in the transient."[1] William Wordsworth also
wrote a poem inspired by this location in 1798,
"Tintern Abbey", which develops a similar theme.
"Tears, Idle Tears" is noted for its lyric richness, and
for its tones of paradox and ambiguity—especially as
Tennyson did not often bring his doubts into the
grammar and symbolism of his works.[3] The ambiguity
occurs in the contrasting descriptions of the tears:
they are "idle", yet come from deep within the
narrator; the "happy autumn-fields" inspire sadness.
Literary critic Cleanth Brooks writes, "[W]hen the poet
is able, as in 'Tears, Idle Tears', to analyze his
experience, and in the full light of the disparity and
even apparent contradiction of the various elements,
bring them into a new unity, he secures not only
richness and depth but dramatic power as well."[4]
Critic Graham Hough in a 1951 essay asks why the
poem is unrhymed, and suggests that something
must be "very skillfully put in [rhyme's] place" if many
readers do not notice its absence. He concludes that
"Tears, Idle Tears" does not rhyme "[b]ecause it is not
about a specific situation, or an emotion with clear
boundaries; it is about the great reservoir of
undifferentiated regret and sorrow, which you can
brush away…but which nevertheless continues to
exist."[2] Readers tend not to notice the lack of rhyme
because of the richness and variety of
the vowel sounds Tennyson employs. (T. S.
Eliot considered Tennyson an unequaled master in
handling vowel sounds; see, for example, Tennyson's
"Ulysses".) Each line's end-sound—except for the
second-last line's "regret"—is an open vowel or
a consonant or consonant group that can be drawn
out in reading. Each line "trails away, suggesting a
passage into some infinite beyond: just as each
image is clear and precise, yet is only any instance" of
something more universal.[5]
The poem, one of the "songs" of The Princess, has
been set to music a number of times. Edward
Lear put the lyric to music in the nineteenth century,
and Ralph Vaughan Williams' pianistic setting of 1903
was described by The Times as "one of the most
beautiful settings in existence of Tennyson's splendid
lyric.
Criticism
Chris Semansky
Chris Semansky teaches writing and literature
at Portland Community College in Portland,
Oregon, and is a frequent contributor of poems
and essays to literary journals. In the following
essay, Semansky derides “Tears, Idle Tears”
as cliche and banal.
Many critics have praised Alfred, Lord
Tennyson’s poem, “Tears, Idle Tears,” a song
from his long narrative poem, The
Princess.Cleanth Brooks, for example, one of
the most well-known and well-respected critics
of the twentieth century, claims in his The Well
Wrought Urn that the poem’s success lies in its
capacity to use paradox and ambiguity to
represent the conflicting and complex inner life
of its speaker. Claiming that critics who oppose
emotion to intellect in poetry have done not
only a disservice to poetry, but to Tennyson’s
poem as well, Brooks wrote, “The opposition is
not only merely superficial; it falsifies the real
relationships. For the lyric quality, if it be
genuine, is not the result of some transparent
and ‘simple’ reduction of a theme or a situation
that is somehow poetic in itself; it is, rather,
the result of an imaginative grasp of diverse
materials — but an imaginative grasp so sure
that it may show itself to the reader as
unstudied and unpredictable without for a
moment relaxing its hold on the intricate and
complex stuff which it carries.” To understand
Brooks’s comment about Tennyson’s poem we
must first understand what the critic means by
“lyric quality.”
A lyric is usually a short poem consisting of the
words of a single speaker. Employing the first
person “I,” the lyric most often revolves
around or expresses the feeling or state of
mind of the speaker. Matthew Arnold’s popular
poem, “Dover Beach,” for example, expresses
the speaker’s attempt, through observation
and meditation, to resolve an emotional
problem. Though the genre of the lyric includes
many kinds of utterances (the love lyric,
dramatic lyric, and ode among them), most
critical attention has been aimed at
understanding the emotional content of the
lyric, to interpreting the speaker’s feeling. So,
when Brooks argues that “lyric quality” not be
simplified, he means that in reading lyric
poems we should take into consideration the
head as well as the heart of the speaker and
recognize that feeling consists of perception,
thought, observation, and other variables.
I have no problem with this statement in
general. However, “Tears, Idle, Tears” is not a
sophisticated rendering of complex experience,
as Brooks would have us believe; or rather, it
is not a poetically sophisticated rendering of
experience. It is an exercise in banalities and
cliches. A cliche is a phrase or word that has
been used so much it becomes hackneyed or
trite. Cliched language is language that has
lost its capacity to convey a vivid idea or image
to the reader. For example, some popular
poets — in terms of sales and readership —
accused of writing in cliches are branded as
trite and amateurish by critics. Tennyson’s
poetry, on the other hand, though regularly
studied in classrooms, is rarely bought or read
for pleasure. The critical apparatus that has
been responsible for valorizing Tennyson’s
poetry is the same apparatus responsible for
ignoring or condemning seemingly similar work
by others.
Let us take a look at what Brooks has written
about “Tears, Idle Tears” and see if it holds up.
In his essay, “The Motivation of Tennyson’s
Weeper,” Brooks spends close to a page
inquiring into the nature of the tears
introduced by the speaker in the first stanza.
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.
“Are they idle tears?” Brooks asks. “Or are
they not rather the most meaningful of tears?”
He comes to the conclusion that the speaker is
unaware of the exact origin of his tears. Do we
as readers, though, really care where they
came from? Tennyson’s speaker is distraught;
he is crying. He says the tears “rise in the
heart.” Historically the heart (even in
Tennyson’s time) has been the seat of
emotion, so there is no surprise or freshness in
using the image of the heart as the
(metaphorical) place where the tears begin.
Similarly, saying that the tears “gather to the
eyes” introduces nothing new to our
understanding of how crying happens.
Tennyson is belaboring the obvious. Then we
are told that the speaker is “looking on the
happy Autumn-fields.” “The happy Autumn-
fields”? Can there be a more a more vague,
more banal, indeed a more vapid image to use
than “happy Autumn-fields” to describe what
the speaker looks at while thinking about the
past?
Brooks concludes that “the first stanza seems,
not a meditated observation, but a speech
begun impulsively — a statement which the
speaker has begun before he knows how he
will end it.” Fair enough, but what kind of a
speaker thinks or talks in iambic pentameter?
And what kind of a poet would use such
generic images to illustrate a (supposedly)
complex emotional state?
After spending a good deal of ink and words
attempting to make a case for the poem’s use
of paradox, ambiguity, and ironic contrast, and
hence justify Tennyson’s poem as worthy of
being read, Brooks writes that “The last stanza
evokes an intense emotional response from the
reader.” Not this reader. Tennyson ends the
poem with the same kind of banal images and
cliches as he started it.
Dear as remember’d kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign’d
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more!
Regardless of Brooks’s elaborate attempts to
ferret “deep meaning” from these lines by
insisting that the poem’s tight organization
“represents an organic structure,” he is wrong
when he writes that the reader “will probably
find himself [sic] in accord with this [his]
general estimate of the poem’s value.” It is not
the theme of Tennyson’s poem that is
unappealing. After all, almost all poets worth
their salt (or metaphors) have written in one
way or another about loss: loss of love, loss of
life, loss of the past. Arguably, the bulk of
poetry from the Romantics to the present deals
in some way or another with loss. It is the
imagery and figurative language that Tennyson
chooses to convey his sense of loss that are
unappealing.
For example, calling “the days that are no
more. Deep as first love, and wild with all
regret” trivializes a very real human response
to the passing of time and to the sense that
one has missed opportunities in life. The
comparison is weak between the items being
compared — the past and deep love — because
the words he chooses are abstract and vague.
We cannot see days or love, and using the
adjective “deep” to describe both of them adds
nothing new to our understanding of the ideas
of time or love.
“Tears, Idle Tears” embodies cliches even as it
seeks to transcend them. Its inability to
accomplish the latter makes the poem more
like a sappy lyric than a complex rendering of
human emotion, as Cleanth Brooks would have
his readers believe. Tennyson can get away
with it because of his place in literary history
as a canonical figure. Brooks can “read into”
the poem poetic strategies because of
Tennyson’s reputation and the reception of his
other poetry. It is comforting to know that
academically sanctioned poets such as
Tennyson can write poems as bad as some by
popular poets. The real irony is that while he
crafted a poem that failed to express his
emotions, that work was embraced by an
audience unable to express its own feelings as
well.
"The poem by the Victorian poet laureate
Alfred Lord Tennyson entitled ?Tears, idle
tears,? has the unfortunate status of having its
become such a common phrase in modern
parlance, that the reader finds him or herself
bracing his or her ear for more and more
clich's as the poem progresses. In other words,
one hears that tears are idle so often, one can
easily forget, not only that Tennyson said, ?I
know not what they mean,? but that the poem
attempts to express the seriousness of futility
of grief, or outward displays of affection by
calling tears idle, in that they do no real work
in the world. The use of "idle" in multiple
variances of meaning, from impractical and
lazy, to idyllic, to idolizing is in fact quite
profound and sophisticated, yielding a poem
with a compact linguistic and stylistic
structure."