The Brook by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Imagery in “The Brook” (Alfred Lord Tennyson)

Our assignment for the course English Literature was to examine the imagery in a Victorian poem, written by a poet discussed in class. I have decided to discuss “The Brook”, a poem by Lord Tennyson, published in Panorama: A collection of poems. I have to be honest by admitting that, in most cases, a poem does not have any effect on me at all. This one, on the contrary, is one of the few poems in which I can recognize myself, a poem which enables me to identify with the story. The beauty and wilderness of nature described in “The Brook” convinced me to discuss this particular poem.

As I already mentioned, “The Brook” is a poem in which nature is described. As a consequence, the imagery used in the poem is related to nature at its best. At its best, because Tennyson does not describe a domesticated type of nature. He describes nature in its original, pure and powerful form, with a high precision of detail. As the critic Beach says: “Tennyson is a notable landscape painter”.[1]

In the poem, Tennyson describes the “life” of a brook. As a matter of fact, it is the brook itself (constantly making use of “I”) that tells the story to the reader. “A first-person figure with whom we readily identify the poet engages in a dialectic encounter with the object world, commonly a landscape or a figure of nature”, says Peltason.[2] The poem describes the evolution in the existence of a brook. What started out as a raindrop (“I make a sudden sally, and sparkle out among the fern”’(1.2-3)), ends as an enormous river (“And out again I curve and flow, to join the brimming river”(13.1-2)). The image of the brook and the elements in nature which are described during the journey of the brook refer to the life of a human being. The comparison Tennyson draws between the brook and the reader (a human being), becomes clear in the lines “For men may come and men may go, but I go on for ever”(3.3-4). These lines occur four times in the...