Break, Break, Break is
an elegy by Alfred Lord Tennyson on the death of his friend Arthur Hallam. The
author imagines to be standing near the cliff on the seashore and addressing to
the sea waves which are lashing the rocks repeatedly. The poet finds an analogy
and expresses it implicitly.
He wishes that the
‘waves’ of his grief would break the inarticulateness (inability to speak out)
in his heart, so that he also expresses his grief easily. The speaker
emotionally commands the sea to “break”. He wants the sea waves to break on the
cliffs; but it is also possible to interpret the lines as demanding to ‘break’
the cold gray stones of the cliff. The ‘cold gray stones’ are symbolic of the
hardened heart of his inexpressible grief.
In the first stanza
the poet says that the torment of his heart as the death of his friend is
tremendous. There is a struggle like the struggle of the sea waves on the
stormy shores. The question before him is how he can express adequately the
thoughts which are rushing into his mind. In the second stanza the poet says
that life is full of joy for the fisherman’s son and daughter who are laughing
and shouting merrily. The poet, on the other hand, is entirely in a different
mood. He is restless and grief-stricken at the death of his friend. The poet
admires the innocent joy of these youngsters but he is sorry because he cannot
share it.
The lad of the sailor
is also happy and sings in his boat face to face with the magnificence of the
sea. But such joy is not for the poet. In the third stanza the poet says that
the majestic ships ply on their destination under the hill. The poet however
has no definite plan about his life and he misses his friend Hallam whose voice
and touch were so soft and tender. The grief of the poet is terribly intense.
In the two lines:
But O for the touch of
a vanish’d hand
And the sound of a voice that is still!
And the sound of a voice that is still!
The speaker turns
aside seas and a very different picture of life. Unlike himself (grief-ridden)
and the cold grey stones, the fisherman’s boy who is playing with his sister
looks gay. So does the sailor’s lad singing in his boat on the bay. They're
also the “stately’ ships going ‘on’ to their destinations. They all contrast
with the speaker’s plight. They put the speaker’s grief-stricken situation on a
contrastive prominence. He remembers the touch of his friend’s “vanished hand”,
and the sound of his voice. The friendly voice has become still.
The speaker looks at
the sea again and addresses to it once more. By this time he realizes that even
if he manages to express his grief, the grace of his friend will never come
back to him. The wish to express is itself no solution to the problem.
The poem is remarkable
for the sound symbolism in it. The refrain “Break, Break, Break” that consists
of one word repeated thrice parallels the waves that repeatedly beat the
cliffs. Syntactically (structure of sentence) the line is a broken sentence.
Economically empathic, the idea is further reinforced by the nature of the very
sound the word is made of. The sentence of b-r-k makes a cracking sound; ‘b’
explodes; ‘r’ is harsh and ‘k’ stops before the pause of comma, ‘gray’,
‘stone’, ‘utter’, ‘crag’, ‘dead’ and even ‘tender’ (ironically) reiterate the
same plosive, harsh and heavy sounds. They go together with the ideas of grief
and the wish of breaking wherever they occur. We can also draw a neat
distinction of these features with the absence of such sounds in the second and
third stanza, which draw a picture of carefree children’s life and the ships.
The poem is written in
four stanzas of four lines each: the first four and the last six are about
grief, and the third stanza falls short of giving happy life. The rhyming
scheme is abcb but with the harmony of the children’s life the rhyme also adds
up to aaba. Master of technical and musical perfection, Tennyson seems to carve
each word carefully into perfect form. Our understanding of the real incident
of his friend’s death strikes us the more with the heartrending appeal to the
‘sea’ – a vast image of sorrow of the sad!
Source: www.bachelorandmaster.com/.../break-break-break.html
-24.09.2014
D.N. Aloysius
Lecturer in English
Faculty of Social Scinces and Humanities
Rajarata University of Sri Lanka
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