Autumn Leaves

Autumn Leaves – acrylic, colaj, pictori prerafaeliți – (my work)

Tears, Idle Tears

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awaken’d birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign’d
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

– Alfred Tennyson

Tears, Idle Tears is a lyric poem written in 1847 by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809 – 1892), the Victorian-era English poet. Published as one of the ,,songs” in his The Princess (1847), it is regarded for the quality of its lyrics. A Tennyson anthology describes the poem as ,,one of the most Virgilian of Tennyson’s poems and perhaps his most famous lyric”. Readers often overlook the poem’s black verse – the poem does not rhyme.

Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, by George Frederic Watts (died 1904), given to the National Portrait Gallery, London in 1895 – sursa

Tennyson was inspired to write ,,Tears, Idle Tears” upon a visit to Tintern Abbey in Monmouthshire, an abbey that was abandoned in 1536.

Tintern Abbey inspired the poem

He said the convent was ,,full for me of its bygone memories”, and that the poem was about „the passion of the past, the abiding in the transient.”
,,Tears, Idle Tears” is noted for its lyric richness, and for its tones of paradox and ambiguity – especially as Tennyson did not often bring his doubts into the grammar and symbolism of his works. The ambiguity occurs in the contrasting descriptions of the tears: they are ,,idle”, yet come from deep within the narrator; the ,,happy autumn-fields” inspire sadness. – sursa