21 pages • 42 minutes read
Crossing the Bar
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Themes
The Approach of Death
It is, to put it mildly, a narrow genre of literature: first-person accounts of someone who has survived death but is old enough to know it is quickly approaching. With the possible exception of love and the dynamics of the smitten heart, death is one of the foremost preoccupation of poets. The idea of mortality at a certain age suggests that perhaps every day should be relished, every opportunity for meaningful experiences embraced. But Tennyson is no young man. This poem is wisdom literature for those old enough to understand that the Death that is always approaching is your death; the lower case making the event yours, particular and pedestrian and remarkably unremarkable.
It is one thing to ruminate on death as an abstract and ponder the transition into whatever we believe is an afterlife but something entirely different when your body says it is time and directs the intellect to consider what is approaching. It is an intriguing concept. Does death announce itself? Do you feel in your heart, in your bones, in your very fiber that your death is coming to undo all of that? This is not a poem about death as a surprise. Death calls the poet in the opening stanza in a single “clear call” (Line 2).
Although this is hardly a poem about dying in the conventional sense, it is a poem about how to live in those last weeks, knowing for sure in that place in your heart that will not allow denial any longer that now is the time to die. But the poem is not a mere fantasy or a fingers-crossed expression of hope. The approach of death for a grounded Christian is cause not for curiosity, not for joy, not for terror. Rather the poem argues the imminence of death occasions no more emotional urgencies than passing through a doorway or moving through a tunnel. The approach of death focuses not on the business of death (that would be for the faithless) but rather that which is summoning him on the other side.
The Comfort of the Christian God
Tennyson’s poem, with its explicit affirmation of God as the source of the speaker’s emotional tranquility, reads more like a prayer with that genre’s resilient confidence, hushed reassurance, and calm anticipation. Remove the Pilot (capitalized by Tennyson to elevate the navigational metaphor into the sublime and to suggest a supreme figure) and the poem becomes a depiction of a boat without guidance heading blindingly into whatever awaits across the harbor sandbar. The move becomes random; uncertainty becomes the only certainty; and hope is at best useless, at worst ironic.
“I hope,” the speaker intones, once I move beyond the sandbar, once I move out into the mysterious openness of a space beyond the only metrics I have ever known—Time and Place—that I will see my Pilot “face to face” (Line 15). The entire poem hinges on that single word: hope. It is not blind or desperate hope-against-the-odds. Hope is the essence of faith. Tennyson understands that the assertion of faith, that hope, is alone what makes the crossing to the open ocean a quiet and comforting voyage. Imagine the poem says in all but words how an atheist would die? In fact, the poem reveals that lonely and sorrowful scenario. If the poem had ended at the third stanza, the sole consolation, the sole justification for acquiescing to death’s powerful call, would be the mock-heroic and entirely sentimental gesture of the dying man to tell those who love him, those he leaves behind, not to cry for him after he “embarks."
Written at a time when British culture wrestled with the implications of the new science with its implicit suspicions that the cosmos was less a miracle of creation and more a stunning clockwork that ran by its own logic and its own intricacy, Tennyson’s poem reminds that culture of what it is giving up and what it was embracing: the disturbing implications of life and death as a pilot-less ocean voyage.
The Irrelevance of Death, The Beauty of Dying
The perception and narrative surrounding death can become a grand theatrical event fraught with many projections. With the care and precision (and ego) of an auteur filmmaker, we set up what we imagine will be our grand and sumptuous death, our departure marked by the mourning of family and friends summoned to our bedside and anticipated by the appropriate drop of angels or the proverbial light at the end of a tunnel. Death becomes the end-all of dying, the summa moment of our lives and a satisfying dramatic moment of closure.
Tennyson, ever the Christian, is too old and too smart to put that much stock in death. Death is what terrifies and creating such a carefully choreographed moment inflates the importance of death and denies the wonder of what lies on the other side.
Thus, for Tennyson the grand moment of death is little more than one of those sandbars, the result of uncertain currents that deposit sand at the point where open sea is narrowed into a harbor or a channel. A sandbar, from a navigational perspective, is little more than an temporary detour. Once mapped, once it is known and its presence accepted, the sandbar is a small and unimpressive nuisance. Once passed over, the sandbar diminishes into nothing. That, the poet says, is the death you so obsess over. Keep the word lower case, a common noun as impactful as celery or chair. The focus should not be on death but rather the world that opens up once the sandbar is crossed. Not surprisingly, Tennyson’s poem with the dismissal of death and its celebration of dying is a favorite poem to recite at funerals. The sandbar has passed; enjoy your voyage.
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Related Titles
By Alfred, Lord Tennyson
