Song: Tears, Idle Tears Lyrics
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.
About
Tears, Idle Tears is a song within a larger story poem called The Princess, in which a Princess defies the world of male dominance and forms a female-only university but eventually falls in love with a Prince. This section has been identified and admired by critics as particularly beautiful.
The essence is a longing for a happier past, expressed in terms of the emotions and memories that are brought to the poet’s mind by gazing on ‘Autumn-fields’ and the sound of birds at dawn.
A number of musicians such as Edward Lear and Ralph Vaughan Williams have set the song to music, and the latter’s in particular received critical acclaim.
Structure
The song comrpises four stanzas of five lines each, known as quintains. is written in free verse or blank verse. The metrical rhythm is unrhymed iambic pentameter, that is five iambs or metrical feet per line, where a iamb is one unstressed followed by one stressed syllable. This gives it regularity, with a refrain ‘the days that are no more’ repeated at the end of each stanza to emphasise the narrator’s longing for his happier past.
Language and Imagery
The voice is that of a first person speaker, probably the poet, using the first person pronoun ‘I’. The tone is nostalgic and sad.
The pace of the lines and the language are elegent, with a regular, dignified tread. The imagery of the autumn fields, sunbeams and birds singing is powerful. Tennyson, by evoking the natural world, taps a common trait in humans that responds with emotion to natural beauty.
Q&A
Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning
