Crossing the Bar

“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.