The Poet's Song

Literary Commentary

Alfred Lord Tennyson's 'The Poet's Song,' first published in his 1842 Poems, is a sixteen-line lyric in which a poet leaves the town, sits down in a lonely place, and sings. Birds, predators, and even a hunting snake stop where they are. At the close, the nightingale gives a verdict: the poet has sung of a world the present cannot yet see.

The poem moves quickly. Two octaves carry the whole event. The poet rises after rain, walks out past the streets, finds open ground, and begins. A wild swan pauses in flight. A lark drops down at his feet. A swallow breaks off mid-hunt. A snake slides under cover. The hawk freezes with the down still on its beak and its foot on the prey. Only after this catalog of arrested motion does the nightingale speak, and what it says is not envy (the standard Romantic note when bird and poet share a page) but concession. The bird hands the laurel over.

Where it sits in Tennyson's career sharpens the reading. The 1842 Poems was his comeback volume, issued by Edward Moxon in two volumes on 14 May 1842 after a decade of public quiet. Arthur Henry Hallam, his closest friend, had died in 1833, and the years between were spent revising old work and drafting much of what would become 'In Memoriam A.H.H.' 'The Poet's Song' closes Volume II, which contained the new compositions. Eight years before he succeeded William Wordsworth as Poet Laureate in November 1850, Tennyson placed at the end of his book a quiet ars poetica, a poem about what poems do.

Key themes

• the vocation of the poet
• song as power over nature
• solitude and creative withdrawal
• prophecy and the future
• poetic voice against the voices of the natural world

Notable craft elements

• Two octaves, with the indented even-numbered lines bearing the rhyme (street/wheat/sweet/feet; spray/prey/gay/away)
• Loose anapestic four-stress in the long lines and three-stress in the short lines, with iambic and trochaic substitutions giving the poem its sung pulse
• A catalog of arrested creatures, each frozen at a characteristic action, builds the central effect by accumulation
• Direct speech enters only at the close, in the nightingale's quoted verdict; the rest of the poem is description

Reread prompt

The nightingale alone is given a speaking voice in this poem. Why does Tennyson place the central claim about what poetry does in the bird's mouth rather than the poet's?

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