Crossing the Bar

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1889

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form

There is a regal kind of elegance to “Crossing the Bar,” that is appropriate given the subject matter. The form draws on the traditional construct of an elegy, dating back to the Greeks, appropriate as Tennyson is writing his own elegy fit, like all elegies, for recitation at a funeral, in this case his own.

Thus, Tennyson conforms to the formal expectations of the elegy that date back to ancient Greece where verses were recited as part of the burial rituals. Tennyson’s elegy maintains the expectations of four-line stanzas, or quatrains, that each maintain a tight and anticipated rhyme scheme, ABAB CDCD EFEF GAGA. Harking back to the elegy tradition, Tennyson sustains the rhyming pattern because traditionally rhyming schemes aided in memorization for recitation.

Of course, there is an anomaly in that formal pattern. The rhyme scheme, although traditional, does close with a telling irregularity. In the closing stanza the rhyming scheme returns to the rhyming pattern of the first stanza. The words “far” and “bar” echo “star” and “bar” from the opening stanza. In this, Tennyson uses the form to thematically suggest how death as the end of life nevertheless returns us to the mysterious possibilities of beginnings. In the end, he celebrates, in death itself, we find our beginnings.

Meter

Given that the reputation and accomplishment of Tennyson at this point in his career, there seems to be a noticeable flaw in the metrical construction of the poem. Meter traditionally provides verse with a predictable kind of regularity, a metronomic sensation that reveals in turn the poet’s clever and often inventive use of language to create and sustain tempo for the entire poem. In maintaining metrical regularity, the poem in turn becomes reader-friendly. The pattern reassures and invites.

Here, however, the meter is uneven, confusing, and ever changing. Some lines are iambic trimeter, that is lines of six syllables with three units of unstressed and then stressed beats. In the opening, for instance:

Sunset and evening star

And one clear call for me

The beat is tidy, clear, sustained. But the next line scans to ten syllables, that is iambic petameter. But Line 4 changes to six beats. Scanning the rest of the poem reveals similar alterations. Despite its brief length, lines resist confirming a steady beat. Some lines (for instance, are iambic dimeter (four syllables in the line), other iambic pentamter (ten syllables per line).

In shifting the metrical pattern of the poem, Tennyson suggests the crazy antic play of the open sea, mirroring waves that are somewhat regular but somewhat not. The poem then in its metrical pattern becomes nothing less than the open sea itself. Dramatic recitation captures that rise and fall feeling. That ebb and flow pattern of the ocean waves is further enhanced by the end-punctuations. The poem cannot settle into a singsong regularity. Some sentences close with an end-mark (an exclamation point or a semi-colon or a period); others flow freely into the next line with a comma or no punctuation at all (a poetic device known as enjambment). In this varying metrics, the poem captures the energy of the ocean, the rise and fall, the to and fro of the open sea.

Voice

The voice here is at once subjective and objective, at once painfully personal and at the same time elegant and impersonal. Tennyson is at once sharing how he will die (he is 80 and has just survived a traumatic scare) and providing us with his own elegy that can be read not only at his inevitable funeral service but that could be read (and has been read) at the funeral service for any Christian who goes into death like a voyager ready now, in the hands of pilot-God, to discover the new world of the afterlife.

The poem speaks in the first-person to personalize the elegy. The poet could have easily used second person—but the use of “you” would create the feeling of moral instruction, of the poet as a repository of wisdom handing down from a height an insight into how to live or, in this case, how to die. The first-person creates immediacy (a dynamic that Tennyson rarely investigated; he was a public figure delivering public poetry). And for all the poem’s comforting, even inspirational advice on how to approach death, that impersonal and objective tone is mediated by Tennyson the man, the Tennyson who will die like the rest of us, hopeful but uncertain, intrigued but terrified.

That complex dual voice is achieved by the phrase in Line 15, the penultimate line, the point at which we have committed our faith and trust in this public voice. The phrase “I hope” fuses the impersonal and the personal, the objective and the subjective. Tennyson becomes at that moment not a Poet Laureate, but a man and a mortal human being who happens to be a poet.