Bill Gates

The speaker wonders why her eyes are tearing up as she looks on autumn fields. They seem to come from a divine source. She realizes the tears come from thinking about “the days that are no more,” but why?

The days are fresh like sunbeams on a sail that is bringing friends up from the underworld, and sad like the last beam taking them back again. Thus the lost days are “so sad, so fresh.”

The days also are “sad and strange,” like dawn in the summer when birds are singing so early and a dying person hears them with sadness, or like a window growing into a “glimmering square” that dying eyes gaze upon in the transition from dark to one more dawn. The lost days are thus “so sad, so strange.”

The lost days, too, are dear as the kisses of a loved one who has died, and they are as sweet as the hopes that one has to kiss someone who has lips meant for others. The lost days are as “deep as love,” and they had the excitement of “first love” as well as the “wild … regret” that goes with frustrated hopes. These days are a kind of “Death in Life.”

Analysis

“Tears, Idle Tears” is one of Tennyson’s most famous works, and it has garnered a large amount of critical analysis. It is a “song” within the larger poem The Princess, published in 1847. In context, it is a song that the poem's Princess commands one of her maids to sing to pass the time while she and her women take a break from their difficult studies. The speaker is caught up in his or her mind and memories. (Some critics, such as Cleanth Brooks, suggest that the poem, though sung by a woman, is from a male speaker’s point of view.) The larger poem is generally seen to be a commentary on the relation of the sexes in contemporary culture and a call for greater women’s rights, particularly in higher education.

“Tears, Idle Tears” was composed on a visit by Tennyson to Tintern Abbey in Monmouthshire, a locale also taken as subject for a poem by another famous English poet, William Wordsworth. Tennyson said the poem was...