Alfred (Lord) Tennyson Quotes on Sadness
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In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850)
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Where Claribel low-lieth The breezes pause and die, Letting the rose-leaves fall: But the solemn oak-tree sigheth, Thick-leaved, ambrosial, With an ancient melody Of an inward agony, Where Claribel low-lieth.
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O mother Ida, many-fountain'd Ida, Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. For now the noonday quiet holds the hill: The grasshopper is silent in the grass: The lizard, with his shadow on the stone, Rests like a shadow, and the winds are dead. The purple flower droops: the golden bee Is lily-cradled: I alone awake. My eyes are full of tears, my heart of love, My heart is breaking, and my eyes are dim, And I am all aweary of my life.
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Break, break, break, On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me.
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Break, break, break At the foot of thy crags, O Sea! But the tender grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me.
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Comfort? comfort scorn'd of devils! this is truth the poet sings, That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.
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O eyes long laid in happy sleep! O happy sleep, that lightly fled! O happy kiss, that woke thy sleep! O love, thy kiss would wake the dead!
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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.
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Home they brought her warrior dead: She nor swoon'd, nor utter'd cry: All her maidens, watching, said, 'She must weep or she will die.'
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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!
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Bury the Great Duke With an empire's lamentation; Let us bury the Great Duke To the noise of the mourning of a mighty nation; Mourning when their leaders fall, Warriors carry the warrior's pall, And sorrow darkens hamlet and hall.
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A shadow flits before me, Not thou, but like to thee: Ah Christ, that it were possible For one short hour to see The souls we loved, that they might tell us What and where they be.
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The news came to the village - the dire news which spread across the land, filling men's hearts with consternation - that Byron was dead. Tennyson was then about a boy of fifteen. 'Byron was dead! I thought the whole world was at an end,' he once said, speaking of those bygone days. 'I thought everything was over and finished for everyone - that nothing else mattered. I remembered I walked out alone, and carved 'Byron is dead' into the sandstone.'