Principal motifs: shipwreck, sleep, sorrow
Notes
shaken into frost: Tennyson notes about this passage: "Water can be brought below freezing- point and not turn into ice — if it be kept still; but if it be moved suddenly it turns into ice and may break the vase" (Eversley 547).
Elaine Jordan (Notes and Queries, Nov. 1968) notes that Tennyson's source in this case is Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit. Goethe states: 'While my thoughts were thus employed, the death of young Jerusalem took place. The most minute and circumstantial details of the event were immediately circulated. The plan of Werther was instantly conceived. The elements of that composition seemed now to amalgamate, to form a whole, just as water, on the point of freezing in vase, receives from the slightest concussion the form of a compact piece of ice' (Memoirs, 1824, tr., 44-5).
See Turner (122-23) for the importance of Goethe to the poem including the fact that Goethe 'was an authority for linking spiritual with physical, or scientific evolution.' [Laura M. Hendrickson, English 264, Brown University, 1988]
morning wakes the will:
Ricks 867 compares l. 15 to Shakespeare's Othello I iii 123: "I do confess the vices of my blood."
What happens to Othello and the person he loves? Why should Tennyson cite such an apparently inappropriate example of guilt? [GPL]
Directions: (1) Links on single words take the reader to documents containing lists
of those and related words in other sections of the poem. (2) Links to phrases
contain explanatory com- mentary, which, depending upon the length of the section,
appears in the left-hand column or below the poem (3) Longer commentaries and
discussion questions appear as separate linked documents.
To Sleep I give my powers away;
My will is bondsman to the dark;
I sit within a helmless bark,
And with my heart I muse and say:
O heart, how fares it with thee now,
That thou should'st fail from thy desire,
Who scarcely darest to inquire,
"What is it makes me beat so low?"
Something it is which thou hast lost,
Some pleasure from thine early years.
Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears,
That grief hath shaken into frost!
Such clouds of nameless trouble cross
All night below the darken'd eyes;
With morning wakes the will, and cries,
"Thou shalt not be the fool of loss."
Victorian
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Authors
Alfred Lord
Tennyson
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Last modified 11 February 2010
