Tears, Idle Tears

"Tears, Idle Tears" is a lyric poem written in 1847 by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), the Victorian-era English poet. Published as one of the "songs" in his The Princess (1847), it is regarded for the quality of its lyrics. A Tennyson anthology describes the poem as "one of the most Virgilian of Tennyson's poems and perhaps his most famous lyric". Readers often overlook the poem's blank verse—the poem does not rhyme.

Tennyson was inspired to write "Tears, Idle Tears" upon a visit to Tintern Abbey in Monmouthshire, an abbey that was abandoned in 1536. He said the convent was "full for me of its bygone memories", and that the poem was about "the passion of the past, the abiding in the transient."William Wordsworth also wrote a poem inspired by this location in 1798, "Tintern Abbey", which develops a similar theme.

While Tintern Abbey may have prompted the poem, it seems unlikely that its powerful emotion derives only from a generalised feeling for the past. The final stanza in particular strongly suggests Tennyson's unhappy attachment to the lovely Rosa Baring, whose wealthy family lived in Harrington Hall, a short distance from Tennyson's Somersby. Rosa's family evidently disapproved of Rosa's continued relationship with the son of Somersby's alcoholic clergyman, and she ultimately severed the connection. The "kisses . . .by hopeless fancy feign'd/on lips that are for others" and the cri de coeur "Deep as first love, and wild with all regret" seem to have little to do with Tintern Abbey, and much to do with a personal disappointment in love. (Ralph Wilson Rader, Tennyson's Maud: The Biographical Genesis, 1963)

"Tears, Idle Tears" is noted for its lyric richness, and for its tones of paradox and ambiguity—especially as Tennyson did not often bring his doubts into the grammar and symbolism of his works. The ambiguity occurs in the contrasting descriptions of the tears: they are "idle", yet come from deep within the narrator; the "happy autumn-fields" inspire sadness. Literary critic Cleanth Brooks writes, "[W]hen the poet is able, as in 'Tears, Idle Tears', to analyze his experience, and in the full light of the disparity and even apparent contradiction of the various elements, bring them into a new unity, he secures not only richness and depth but dramatic power as well."

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