"All things will die" by Alfred Tennyson, is telling us from the beginning, from the title, from the first part of a text that we encounter as a reader, how of a pessimist/depressed poem it is going to be. By reading only the title the first thing that comes to my mind is that he is going to describe a process of how everything necessarily has to end. Through a hyperbole he is trying to portray the idea that can be true but not in every aspect of what we call life or more than life (because it ends), reality. It is also important to recognize that Tennyson doesn't only write "All things die" but "All things WILL die" maybe trying to tell us something about the present, of how we should live it.
Firstly the poem starts describing an utopic and beautiful landscape, through a lyric speaker (seems to be omnipresent), using a lot of imagery with verses like "clearly the blue river chimes in its flowing" then the lyric speaker kind of makes a switch with the verse "Yet all things must die" and starts a whole apocalyptic scenario in which everything stops, everything ends, everything dies.
In a poem like this one, specific words or keywords have a very important role, these words through connotation can symbolize a fundamental idea or refer to a specific situation. In the second verse "Under my eye" I understand that Tennyson tries to explain how this potential ending of everything is happening right now or that how everything we know is posible victim, is vulnerable. Again this idea is present in the verse 18th " See! our friends are all forsaking" with the word friends he highlights the close relation and understanding that we have with the things that end or leave, that ending will have a big impact on us. There is also other 2 words that have a big connotation, the are vanity on verse 16th " O, vanity!" and misery on verse 27th "O, misery!", these two words have the important and key role to express the downsides of life, the quality of something being worthless (probably living) and the extreme suffering or wretchedness of the circumstances of the end.
When reading the poem it is undoubtable to identify a pessimist tone, verses like "for all thing must die", "death waits at the door" and "laid low, very low" clearly emphasize how death is inevitable and all of us have basically no power against such a destiny, we are condemned. Obviously writing a poem with a pessimist tone when talking about life will create a sad mood on the readers, and sadness leads to a word that describes better how someone can feel after reading the poem, that word is depressed.
All things will die, can be, as any other poem, split into different shifts. This particular poem has 3 different parts, the first one goes from verse 1 to verse 7, the second one goes from verse 8 to verse 36, an the third one goes from verse 37 to the verse 40. The first shift is the description of the utopic or ideal reality, using imagery and describing a beautiful landscape Tennyson prepares the reader and makes him realize that also the good parts of life can be included in a poem with such a title. The second shift is the ending of everything that he previously mentioned and the metaphoric entrance of death to the scene. Finally the third shift is a reflective statement by Tennyson, it portrays how the time had to come for humanity and everything else on this planet.
The predominant theme of this poem is the inevitable ending of everything, it creates chaos. It is clearly demonstrated in verses like "For all things must die", "Spring will come nevermore", "Yet all things must die". When analyzing this poem apart from being able to immediately understand the main theme, it is also possible to have a certain interpretation of it, in this case the interpretation is that Tennyson implicitly portrays an important concept or idea, live your life to the fullest because nothing ever lasts, this idea has to be with the fact previously mentioned that the title of the poem is "All thins WILL die" not only "All things die", there is time.
The metre of this poem has doesn't have a lot of variety, for example it starts in the first verse with a trochaic hexameter, merged in by the structure of 6 feet, with the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables.
"Clearly the blue river chimes in its flowing"
In the middle part of the text, more specifically in the 18th verse we can find again a trochaic tetrameter.
"See! our friends are all forsaking."
And finally in the last part of the poem, in its last verse (40th) the trochaic form and structure repeats but in this case only with one feet.
"Long ago."
This usage of the trochaic in most parts of the poem was used by Alfred Tennyson to maintain the fluency of the literary text itself, so to generate a better effect when being read, or performed.
Moving on to the rhythm pattern of the poem, and not doing an isolated analysis of it, it possible to have a direct relation with the theme, and the feelings that the poet tries to transfer to the readers. With the theme being the inevitable ending of everything it obviously creates a sensation of chaos which is fully reflected in the rhythm pattern as it doesn't have any pattern throughout the poem, except the initial part of the poem when Tennyson describes a calm and beautiful landscape and when he describes the ceasing of the elements of the landscape. In the first part it is possible to see an ababaa pattern:
"Clearly the blue river chimes in its flowing
Under my eye;
Warmly and broadly the south winds are blowing
Over the sky.
One after another the white clouds are fleeting;
Every hart this may morning in joyance is beating"
But also, in the part of the poem when Tennyson starts describing how all the elements mentioned in the initial verses end or cease, he includes a rhyme pattern, but a different one, to generate a big contrast with both states, life and death. In this part he puts a ddeebb pattern:
"The stream will cease to flow;
The wind will cease to blow;
The clouds will cease to fleet;
The heart will cease to beat;
For all things must die.
All things must die."
Finally in terms of the rhetorical devices used in this poem in is possible to recognise plenty of them. In the first and second verses there is a enjambment.
"Clearly the blue river chimes in its flowing
Under my eye"
he finishes the "sentence" in the next verse to highlight the idea that it is under his and our vision.
In the 6th verse Tennyson includes a Hyperbaton.
"Every heart this may morning in joyance is beating"
There is a disorder in the syntax of the verse creating an effect which transfers the feeling of joyance. The normal order should be "This may morning every heart is beating in joyance"
In the verses that go from the 9th to the 12th the poet wants to create a sound effect through the rhetoric device of repetition, more specifically an anaphora.
"The stream will cease to flow;
The wind will cease to blow;
The clouds will cease to fleet;
The Heart will cease to beat;"
The repetition of the same word at the beginning of the verses creates an anaphora. This is done by Tennyson to give emphasis to the idea of everything ending because all the things he mentioned before in a good and calm way, are now disappearing.
In the verse 28th it is possible to read a personification, Tennyson gives a human characteristic to a inanimate object or substantive.
"Hark! death is calling"
Death cannot or doesn't have the ability to call someone to "kill" him, that is something that a human being would be capable of. This was done with the intention of demonstrating in a poetic way, the real power that death has.
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