Break Break Break With Details

"Break, break, break"
by Alfred Tennyson
Dr. Faisal A. Hayder Al-Doori
Summary
The speaker is watching the sea whose waves are breaking on the “cold
grey stones”. He is sad because "he cannot give voice to his thoughts."
He hears the shouting of the fisherman’s boy with his sister while they
play, and the young sailor sings in his boat, but the speaker is in different
mood. Other ships move silently to their “haven under the hill,” and this
scene seems to remind him of the absence of a dear friend he cared for.
He cannot feel "the person’s touch or hear the person’s voice". The
speaker compares between the recurrent voice of the colliding waves on
the rocks and the “tender grace” of the bygone days with his friend that
will never return to him.
Analysis
The poem conveys the feelings of a person toward his lost friend. It was
written in 1834 right after the sudden death of Tennyson’s friend Arthur
Henry Hallam, the poem was published in 1842. Although some have
interpreted the speaker’s sorrow as sadness over a lost lover, it probably
reveals the feeling at any loss of a beloved person in death, like
Tennyson’s depression over losing Hallam.
Apparently, the poem seems relatively simple and straightforward,

and the feeling is easy to distinguish: the problem of the speaker is that
he could not express his sad thoughts and his memories, compared with
the vitality of the sea with its waves and ships. The people around him
don't care about his sadness and his great loss. The poem’s deeper
attention is "in the series of comparisons between the external world and
the poet’s internal world". The outer world represents real life, or the real
field where the speaker used to play. The inner world is what reflects on
his mind according to the influence of the outer world. The example in
this poem is the loss of his friend and his memories with him.
In the first stanza, the sea is beating the stones, and the speaker looks sad
that the sea is vital and moving while he is unable to express his sadness.
In addition, the sea does not care of what happens to his friend and does
not share him his sadness. The recurrence of “break” appropriately bears
the incessant movement of the waves, and these waves emphasize his
disability to act. Another interpretation for the recurrence of the word
'break' is that the speaker's inner wish is to crash everything in order to
express his feelings of sorrow.
In the second stanza, the poet correspondingly distances between himself

and the cheerful people around him. They have happiness and
completion, but he does not. The brother and sister; the sailor and his
boat; the speaker has no friend. They have reason to be happy, but he has
no reason to be alike. The sense of envy might be valid here, but it is
usually to suggest that these unconcerned young people have fatalities
yet to come.
In the third stanza the speaker watches the “stately ships” proceeding to
their “haven under the hill,” and they seem satisfied with their ends. But
the grave is not a pleasurable haven, in contrast, which means, "there is
no more hand to touch, no more voice to hear". The speaker is obsessed
by his sad feelings, his memory of his deceased friend overwhelming
what the speaker watches around him. The critic H. Sopher comments on
the discrepancy in this stanza as such: “The stateliness of the ships
contrasts with the poet’s emotional imbalance; and the ships
move forward to an attainable goal ... while the poet looks back to a
‘vanish’d hand’ and a ‘voice that is still.’”
In the fourth stanza, the speaker watches the waves which break on the
steep rock faces, with their useless efforts to go beyond. Also, for the
speaker, there is no way to get the dead back. Sopher comments on this
image that “the poet’s realization of the fruitlessness of action draws the
reader’s attention to the fact that the sea’s action is, seemingly, fruitless
too—for all its efforts [it] can no more get beyond the rocks than the poet
can restore the past.” Yet, both the sea and the speaker keep their fruitless
efforts since they have no other choice.
Form
The poem is four stanzas of four lines each, each quatrain in irregular
iambic tetrameter. The irregularity in the number of syllables in each line
might convey the instability of the sea or the broken, sharp edges of the
speaker’s grief. Meanwhile, the ABCB rhyme scheme in each stanza may
express the regularity of the waves when they collide with the rocks.
http://www.gradesaver.com/tennysons-poems/study-guide/summary-
break-break-break

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"Break, break, break"

Dr. Faisal A. Hayder Al-Doori

Apparently, the poem seems relatively simple and straightforward,

In the second stanza, the poet correspondingly distances between himself

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