Crossing the Bar

What is it like to die? Tennyson is not celebrating death. Nor is he encouraging others to do so. Death is mysterious, and humanity is cursed/blessed with the awareness of its reality. But because we have no first-hand accounts of what death is, we have to approach it through metaphor. What might death be like?

But Tennyson converts death, the noun, into dying, a verb. Christians do not want to die any more than anyone else. It is not that the speaker in Tennyson’s poem looks forward to death or rushes to embrace it. Because of the nature of the experience of death, no one has ever returned from it, survived it, and provided any idea of what exactly it means to transition from “is” to “was”. Literature is far more comfortable with the before and after of death than that actual moment. The poem then anatomizes what that transition might feel like for a Christian who is not so much at the end of anything but rather at the beginning of something transcendent.

Literature since Antiquity has conjured, often with elaborate, imaginative detailing, the afterlife as a real place with dimension and textures, peopled by an assortment of fetching fantasy figures, star-dusted angels and radiant gods.