Crossing the Bar

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1889

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context

Victorian England’s morbid fascination with death was nothing new. Since Antiquity, poets have meditated on death in reflections that have become a genre: the elegy. The earliest elegies date to 700 BCE. In its own way, “Crossing the Bar” is a skewed elegy. Typically, an elegy is a meditation on the death of someone close. The event occasions sobering reflections on the reality of death and the dynamics of grief. Tennyson skews that template. In this case, it is his death that occasions the poem, or at least his symbolic death. In this, Tennyson is not only the one dying, he is the commentator demonstrating how he wants his own death to be mourned.

Tennyson repurposes the elegy. For him, death was strikingly, deeply personal—but it was no cause for sorrow. The elegy becomes less a melancholy public poem and more an uplifting, even inspirational private celebration of the wonder of the transition into the afterlife. It is no wonder that “Crossing the Bar” is among the English-language poems most often read at funerals and memorial services. By providing the elegy to read at his own funeral (although, curiously enough, it wasn’t), Tennyson offers his life as a model for how to die. Because his life was grounded in the tenets of Christianity, he heads out to sea without a heavy heart, without anxieties, without trepidation. Tennyson replaces sorrow and grief with anticipation and curiosity. In death, in crossing the bar, Tennyson anticipates confirming at last the secrets of the universe, specifically the reality of his God. The poem closes without resolving that mystery. Much has been conjectured about that unsettling caveat “I hope” in Line 15. The elegy does not end with an affirmation; Tennyson’s elegy closes in joyous hope.

Historic Context

“Crossing the Bar” is an atypical poem of a Poet Laureate. It is a deeply personal poem for a poet who, in his capacity as England’s beloved and respected Poet Laureate, had for more than 40 years penned some of the most popular and most often-quoted verses on the grand historic events of the Victorian Era and of Britain’s glorious history. It is deeply universal and yet deeply personal—the poet’s response to his own brush with death at the age of 80.

To be sure, meditations on death were part of the Laureate’s work as a public poet.

But death would be the grand and consequential deaths of generals, kings, and gods. Tennyson rejects that historic context and offers a radical re-conception of the elegy as a private expression of his own experience of death. In this, the poem deliberately skirts the public historic context that defines much of Tennyson’s work during his long laureateship. If there is a historic element to Tennyson’s brave and decidedly un-ironic endorsement of the viability of the Christian God, it is only that Tennyson declares his faith in an era in which the sciences were determined to render that same Christian God irrelevant.

Historic records do not agree on the nature of the specific illness that nearly killed Tennyson, most likely some virulent stomach flu, during a trip to his second home on the Isle of Wight, an enchanting getaway in the English Channel. At 80, wracked by a fever and far from his doctors in London, Tennyson felt the alarming nearness of death itself and sought in the months after to articulate his own experience.

Tennyson was no fool. He was 80 in an era in which the life expectancy for men in England was about 40 years. In his dramatic experience of death not as a noun but rather as a verb, a far more frightening and immediate experience, Tennyson testifies to how he will go: calmly, peacefully, heading out into an immeasurable vastness wherein he hopes awaits his Pilot, his God. The hope, rather than the affirmation, reflects Tennyson’s historic context, a generation of scientists—botanists, geologists, archeologists, naturalists—earnestly exposing as scientific impossibilities the pleasant poetry of the Bible and leaving behind only a kind of faith uncomplicated by facts. In crafting his own elegy, Tennyson affirms God’s position the only way he can: through his own near-experience of death, his own aborted crossing of the bar.