|"Crossing the Bar", 1889 |
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|[pic] |
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|We are going to analyse a poem written by Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892). It is called “Crossing the bar” and it was written in 1889, three years before |
|Tennyson's death [ “Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature”, Encyclopedia Britannica - Literary Criticism - 1995 – page 286]. It deals with the |
|topic of “death”. |
|The poem is composed by four quatrain stanzas. All of the quatrains have the same rhyme structure: ABAB, so the poem's structure would be: ABAB CDCD |
|EFEF GHGH. We can say, as well, the poem has true rhyme: “star”/ “bar”; “me”/ “sea”; “asleep”/ “deep”; “foam”/ “home”; “bell”/ “farewell”; “dark”/ |
|“embark”; “place”/ “face”; “far”/ “bar”. |
|The first stanza is linked with the third one, while the second is linked with the fourth one. As we can observe the first line of stanzas 1 and 3 |
|deals with the image of the nightfall: “sunset and evening star” / “twilight and evening bell”. In both cases, the poet is talking about the end of |
|his days, the closeness of the death. So, in the poem, “death” is the “night”....