Crossing the Bar

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1889

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Related Poems

“Break, Break, Break” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1842)

A young man’s poem, “Break, Break, Break,” juxtaposed with “Crossing the Bar,” reveals Tennyson’s evolution. The earlier poem, written about the death of Arthur Hallam, a close college friend, reveals exactly the energy of grief and mourning that the poet later in life will dismiss as a waste of time. Here, in fact, the poet indulges the “sadness of farewell.” Like “Crossing the Bar,” “Break, Break, Break” draws its master-metaphor from the motion and energy of the sea.

“Song (When I Am Dead, My Dearest)” by Christina Rossetti (1862)

Written by one of Victorian England’s most influential female poets, this song parallels Tennyson’s in that the poet chides those who still mourn her after her death. She casually dismisses such sadness and blithely says remember me if you want; don’t, if you don’t. It is like Tennyson’s poem without his reassuring sense of the dead having a journey to undertake. Uninformed by Christianity, Rossetti’s gentle, elegant little poem leaves death as its own form of closure.

“The To-Be Forgotten” by Thomas Hardy (1903)

A representative voice of the generation after Tennyson, Hardy here expounds on the absoluteness of death, unavailable to Tennyson’s Pilot-God. The poem can be compared to “Crossing the Bar” in that this poem reveals what happens when the poet’s hope to meet the Pilot is lost. This poem reveals what happens if Tennyson’s poem lacked that crucial final stanza. Hardy stands in a cemetery surrounded by the gravestones of those dead not forgotten and struggles against the despair of realizing that all too soon he will be among those to be forgotten.

Further Literary Resources

“‘Crossing the Bar’” by Dr. Charles F. Reynolds (2020)

Originally published in the medical journal Geriatric Psychology, the article offers a fascinating perspective on how Tennyson, more than a century before psychologists would begin to study how older people face death, captured the complex hope/despair paradigm that informs the process of moving toward death and how for older people death and dying are two very different emotional events.

“The Imperceptible Complexity of ‘Crossing the Bar’” by Joseph P. Jordan (2018)

This article explores line by line the complexity of Tennyson’s grappling with the approach of his death, taking issue with the long-held critical assumption that generations of readers have mistaken an unpacking of Tennyson’s nautical metaphor for analysis. Using the poem’s unorthodox (and irregular) form and meter, the article argues that Tennyson uses the vehicle of the poem to reveal his doubt over the Christian reassurances of an afterlife.

“Grace Note: The Manuscript Evidence for a Christological ‘Crossing the Bar’” by Robert F. Fleissner (1996)

The article presents a thorough reading of the poem as a Christian celebration charting the journey of dying into the mysteries of Christ’s love. The article works with the idea of the cross, with the symbolism of the Christian Cross as well as a number of other glosses to Christian gospels (the ark, the flood, the resurrection, Jesus walking on water, and the return of Lazarus). In the end, the poem affirms Christian death as a threshold event, a movement through and toward rather than to.

Listen to Poem

Jasper Britton Reads “Crossing the Bar”

Not entirely surprising, given that Tennyson’s poem is among the most recited at Christian funerals, there are more than three dozen recordings of the short poem on YouTube alone. There are also several musical transcriptions of the poem, most successfully by the Southampton (UK) University Chamber Choir. Perhaps the most impressive recording is, in the end, the simplest, one that dispenses with the backdrops of elaborate seascapes or the deconstructed and haunting piano chords: actor Jasper Britton’s 2011 recording. He works the long vowels with a simple sincerity and rallies in the closing stanza to suggest the poet’s hope that he will see his Pilot.