Break, Break, Break by Tennyson

Break, Break, Break

BY ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Break, break, break,

         On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter

         The thoughts that arise in me.

 

O, well for the fisherman's boy,

         That he shouts with his sister at play!

O, well for the sailor lad,

         That he sings in his boat on the bay!

 

And the stately ships go on

         To their haven under the hill;

But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand,

         And the sound of a voice that is still!

 

Break, break, break

         At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead

         Will never come back to me.

 

The poem was written by Tennyson in 1835, two years after the death of his close friend and fellow poet, Arthur Henry Hallam. Because the poem's speaker laments the death of a close acquaintance, most readers read "Break, Break, Break" as an elegy to Hallam, though the poem stands on its own as a more general meditation on mortality and loss. The poem was published in 1842.

“Break, Break, Break” Summary

The poet addresses the sea waves and tell them to smash against the rocky shore again and again. He is also yearning for the ability to express the thoughts that are troubling his mind and would not go away.

He wishes good luck to the fisherman’s son who is yelling out while playing with his sister as well as for the young sailor who is singing happily in his boat.

While watching the huge impressive ships sailing through the bay, the speaker imagines them travelling to somewhat heavenly destinations. But watching all these things standing on the shore, the speaker’s mind still regrets over the loss of the touch of a hand and voice which will be never felt and heard by him again.

Once again, the speaker asks the waves to crash against the rocky mountains along the shore again and again. He is nostalgic and feels that the happiness which was associated with the lost loved one will never come back.

“Break, Break, Break” Themes

Loss and Impermanence

For the speaker of “Break, Break, Break,” the fleeting nature of life is deeply troubling. The poem implies that the speaker is mourning someone’s death and being forced to face the fact that this person will never return. Although the poem doesn’t clarify the circumstances of the speaker’s loss, it’s clear that it has thoroughly unsettled the speaker, who can’t even stare out at the ocean without feeling tormented by the knowledge that everything in life eventually comes to an end.

Everything around the speaker serves as a reminder that life is fleeting. Even the waves crashing against the shoreline represent this idea of impermanence, since these waves no longer exist in their original form once they’ve broken over the rocks. This reinforces the idea that nothing in the natural world lasts forever. And because people obviously exist in the natural world, this also holds true for everyone who has ever lived.

With this in mind, the speaker watches two children playing happily together and knows that someday their youth will be a thing of the past. Similarly, the young sailor singing nearby will someday be an old man, and the speaker will soon lose sight of the grand boats in the bay as they disappear from the horizon on their way to some unknown destination. Affronted by all of these ideas of change and transition, the speaker is unable to deny the impermanence of all things. This thought process is made evident by the fact that the speaker goes from considering the retreating ships to wistfully remembering the “touch of a vanish’d hand”—a phrase that underscores the speaker’s dismay that humans effectively “vanish” through death. In the same way that the ships fade into the distance, humans also drift away from life.

Of course, most people are well aware that nothing lasts, but not everyone finds this so troubling. It is, after all, a fact of existence, something many people simply accept. The speaker, however, is particularly unnerved by this because a close acquaintance has recently died, making it difficult for the speaker to stop thinking about the relentless passage of time—there is, the speaker knows, no way to revisit the past to spend more time with this friend, and this greatly upsets the speaker. In this way, loss changes the way the speaker sees the world, suddenly making it harder to accept the reality that all things come to an end.

Ironically enough, though, the only kind of permanence in the speaker’s life is loss itself, since nothing will ever reverse the death of this friend. No matter what happens, this person will “never come back” to the speaker. In turn, loss actually emerges as the only dependable thing in life, even if it forces people like the speaker to recognize that everything else about existence is impermanent.

The Difficulty of Moving On

Stricken by grief, the speaker can hardly imagine a world in which it might be possible to embrace happiness and undertake normal activities like sailing in the bay. However, the speaker doesn’t need to imagine a world like this, since this kind of carefree joy is playing out directly before the speaker’s eyes. Despite the speaker’s grief, the world carries on like normal.

This dynamic emphasizes the fact that what the speaker feels in this moment is at odds with the simple reality that the rest of the world is proceeding unbothered. The anguish that feels so debilitating to the speaker doesn’t even register for other people, and this juxtaposition only heightens the speaker’s sorrow and makes it even harder to move on. Put another way, the speaker’s pain has to do with the fact that life has gone on even though the speaker has been immobilized by grief.

To illustrate the tension between the speaker and the external world, “Break, Break, Break” plays with contrasts. For instance, the first stanza presents a bleak setting, calling the stones on the shoreline “cold” and “gray,” and pairing this somber image with the speaker’s inability to “utter” the troubling thoughts that continue to “arise.” This clearly establishes the speaker’s unhappiness, but the second stanza veers away from this gloomy tone as the speaker watches children playing nearby and a sailor singing in the bay. Suddenly, the “cold” and “gray” landscape of the poem transforms into a more lighthearted setting, one in which people go about their lives in a carefree manner. This illustrates just how little others are affected by the speaker’s grief—indeed, what the speaker sees as an irrecoverable loss, the outside world doesn’t even notice.

The speaker, of course, is well aware that life won’t stop to accommodate a person’s individual sadness. With this in mind, the speaker uses a somewhat bitter tone when considering the happy people in the bay. By beginning the first and third lines of the second stanza with, “O, well for […],” the speaker frames their happiness as an affront, as if sarcastically saying, “Oh, how nice for them.” This demonstrates that it is painful for the speaker to witness such joy, making the process of moving on—the process of coping with loss—especially hard.

To make matters worse, the speaker is not only unable to move on, but also conscious that the past is “dead” and will “never come back.” Consequently, the speaker is frozen in place, stuck between a longing for the irretrievable past and an inability to engage with the present. In turn, readers see just how difficult it is to move on in moments of sorrow, especially when the surrounding world seems so indifferent to a person’s pain and emotional suffering.