Is it, then, regret for buried time
That keenlier in sweet April wakes,
And meets the year, and gives and takes
The colours of the crescent prime?
Not all: the songs, the stirring air,
The life re-orient out of dust,
Cry thro' the sense to hearten trust
In that which made the world so fair.
Not all regret: the face will shine
Upon me, while I muse alone;
And that dear voice, I once have known,
Still speak to me of me and mine:
Yet less of sorrow lives in me
For days of happy commune dead;
Less yearning for the friendship fled,
Than some strong bond which is to be.
Notes
NOTES
Form:
abba
1.
First published anonymously in the volume with this title in
1850, though the 131 sections or separate poems that compose it were
written and rewritten from 1833 to the time of publication. Two of the
131 sections were added in later editions: LIX in 1851, and XXXIX in
1872. The poem is in memory of Tennyson's friend Arthur Henry Hallam,
son of the eminent historian. Hallam was engaged to marry Tennyson's
sister Emily, when he died suddenly of a stroke in Vienna on September
15, 1833, at the age of twenty-two. Although written without any plan
at first, the parts of the poem were finally arranged in a pattern to cover
the period of about three years following Hallam's death. Tennyson himself
insisted that it is "a poem, not a biography .... The different moods of sorrow
as in a drama are dramatically given, and my conviction that fear, doubts,
and suffering will find answer and relief only through Faith in a God of
Love. `I' is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the
human race speaking through him."
OBIIT MDCCCXXXIIII: he died in 1833.
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Comments
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IN MEMORIAM
Poignant poem;Would like to read the rest,esp, 'Ring oh bell, Ring out the old,ring inthe new'(something like that-I have forgotten the exact words.Please publish it.Tehnnyson was a great poet!
Nuggehalli Pankaja -
seems like he never said goodbye to A.H.H
deep emotions... in vivid words
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