Break, break, break -- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

(Poem #31) Break, break, break Break, break, break, On thy cold gray stones, O sea! And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me. O, well for the fisherman's boy, That he shouts with his sister at play! O, well for the sailor lad, That he sings in his boat on the bay! And the stately ships go on To their haven under the hill; But O for the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still! Break, break, break, At the foot of thy crags, O sea! But the tender grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me. -- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Another nice poem by Tennyson, in which the moods, images and rhythms blend
perfectly. Note the heavy, melancholy feel of 'break, break, break',
contrasted with the lighter 'that he sings in his boat on the bay', and in
general the way the various moods of the sea are evoked, from dancing,
rippling waves and gentle swells, to the mealncholy, insistent breaking upon
a cold and lonely shore.

Criticism:

  Great ages are fortunate which find the one voice that can turn to music
  their otherwise mute beliefs and endeavors, their joy and pain. Such was
  Chaucer for his time; such were Shakespeare and Spenser for theirs, Pope for
  his, and preeminently Alfred, Lord Tennyson, for the time of Victoria. Our
  present disparagement of Tennyson is only our impatience with everything
  Victorian; for his poetry peculiarly expresses the ideas and the enthusiasms
  of the vast reading middle class of his day. He reasons like the middle-
  -class liberal who keeps to the Christian faith and forms, at least in the
  via media or middle course, with a mind open to the new difficulties rising
  from the new science, and the prevailing evolutionary enthusiasm for
  progress and some good time coming.
  [..]
  His poetry sings the virtues and enthusiasms of his day, domestic and
  social, the patriotism, the humanitarian impulses, the utilitarian
  prosperity, the fascination of death, the sombre religion or scepticism, and
  the New Empire. At the same time he is nourishing and refining his age with
  the beauty which it had lost, and which he shapes for its needs out of many
  a corner of "the antique world." If he seems at times to be an aristocrat,
  he is such with the middle-class conservatism and faith in the old English
  order. He has as much of the body and fibre of English life in him as
  Dickens--perhaps more--not its lusty humors so much as its peculiar and
  irresistible charm mellowed by time.
  [..]
  He was first of all a careful, patient workman, and no man ever toiled
  harder or more soberly to perfect himself in his craft. He kept it up all
  his long life, revising and editing early poems, reading, observing,
  travelling, scrutinizing the work of his many masters, inventing short
  snatches and cadences which he saved for later use. With his minute care he
  joined extraordinary range and variety--of metre, subject and material, and
  final effect.
  [..]
  Like that otber great Alexandrian, Theocritus, Tennyson was essentially an
  idyllist, a fashioner of small and highly finished pictures. Hundreds of
  them are strewn from end to end of his work, from his Lady of Shalott, one
  of the most idyllic, through his classical poems, his pageants of the Palace
  of Art, and The Dream of Fair Women, his poems of English life, his
  Princess, Maud, In Memoriam. Of this he seems to have been aware in his very
  fondness for the word, "idyll"--"a small, sweet idyll," "English Idylls,"
  and Idylls of the King.
  [..]
  But he has far greater gifts than fine minute craftsmanship. One is the
  poet's supreme gift of making the language sing a new song, verse set to its
  own indigenous tune, the gift of Burns, or Byron, and the Elizabethans. And
  though it is usually peculiar to the youthful poet, it never wholly left
  Tennyson from "Break, break, break" to Crossing the Bar.

      -- Excerpts from Charles Grosvenor Osgood, 'The Voice of England',
      read the whole essay at
      <http://www.britishliterature.com/era/victoria-tennyson.html>

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