Literary Analysis Of 'Tears, Idle Tears'

As the millennia pass, the one recurring theme in all recorded literature within every culture and creed and can be witnessed in the animal kingdom at times, is the pursuit of love. A search for this unrequited passion taps into some of the most primal of urges and manifests itself biologically into a chemical high in the brain as a reward if it can be found. The lack of this natural intoxication can induce depression, amongst other side effects commonly found in substance abuse. When Lord Tennyson Alfred wrote “Tears, Idle Tears”, he composed a series of metaphors indicative of the aforementioned withdraw symptoms suffered by love. The poem suggests that he found a love that moved on through either death, or by estrangement of another means and the depressing struggle of reminiscing about those days that are no more.

The first stanza begins to set the mood. The first line uses the adjective idle to describe his tears. The

He states that they come from a deep place of despair. The word divine paints the image that the place of origin couldn’t have been helped by man, seeing as divine is typically viewed as emanating from a higher power. Tennyson clarifies that the source of these tears from emotion of the heart. This signifies that he is likely suffering from some heartache that has caused him to cry.

“In looking on the happy autumn-fields,

And thinking of the days that are no more.” (Tennyson, 427)

The last two lines of the first stanza steer away from the theme of the first three, but continue to portray a distressing feeling of loss. The text takes a self-described happy scene and even that becomes warped into a presumably sad thought process. This referral the days past still gives the impression of having lost something