Skip to content
The Poet's Craftby Stewart Ferris

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Break, break, break

Irregular ballad quatrains. 1842. The rhyme scheme is ABCB, loosened. What follows is a reading of the pauses, the line-breaks, and the sounds that return — not a life of the poet.

Break, break, break,On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!And I would that my tongue could utterThe 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 onTo their haven under the hill;But O for the touch of a vanish’d 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 deadWill never come back to me.
Break, break, break — Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Public domain.

The first line is three stresses and no unstressed syllables at all. “Break, break, break.” The sea is not described. It is struck, three times, and the commas are caesuras between identical blows. A regular iambic line — “The waters break upon the shore” — would have walked. Tennyson does not want a walk. Grief of this kind has not yet found its syntax, so the metre is not allowed to find its slack syllables either. The second line restores a movement and an address, “O Sea,” so that speech can begin. Blow, then speech. That pair is the poem’s real metre, more important than any count of feet. If you regularise the first line, you have written a better exercise and a worse elegy.

The rhyme is a loosened ballad rhyme, mostly the even lines, and it is quiet on purpose. “Sea / me,” “play / bay,” “hill / still,” “Sea / me” again. The odd lines often do not rhyme. A ballad measure usually carries a story. Here the story is refused for two stanzas: the tongue cannot utter the thoughts. So the scheme gives you the socket of a narrative poem without the narrative. That emptiness is technical. You can hear the place where a plot would go, and what goes there instead is other people’s ease. When you borrow a ballad stanza for a lyric of grief, consider leaving the odd lines unrhymed. The missing chime is part of the missing utterance.

Stanza two is the juxtaposition that saves the poem from being only a mood. The fisherman’s boy shouts with his sister. The sailor lad sings. Neither is called a symbol. The stanza break between their luck and the speaker’s locked tongue is the comparison. “O, well for” is anaphora, a repeated opening that sounds like a blessing and works like an envy. The caesura after “O” is a sigh built into the grammar. If Tennyson had written “This reminds me of my friend who died,” the children would have become props. He lets them keep their game. The reader builds the bridge. That is the whole art of writing about sadness without a caption.

Stanza three finally names the loss, and even then by synecdoche: a hand, a voice, not a person with a biography. “But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand” is the first line that states a desire for the dead, and it is longer, more regular, almost relieved to be a sentence. The ships “go on,” enjambed to their haven, indifferent. The hand is end-stopped in feeling even though the sentence continues to the voice. “Still” rhymes with “hill” and means silent, and also means unmoving. A rhyme that puns on the grief — still as quiet, still as remaining — is worth more than a fresh metaphor. Do not throw that kind of rhyme away in order to seem original.

The last stanza returns to the three blows, which is a refrain, and then refuses the comfort a refrain sometimes brings. The sea is still breaking. The day will not come back. “Dead / me” is not even a rhyme in the strict sense if you came for “Sea / me” again; the sea rhymes with the first stanza, and “dead” sits in the line before, unrhymed and blunt. The structure is circular and the content is not consoled. A refrain can mean the world has not changed, which is sometimes the truest ending an elegy has. Use a repeated line at the end only if you are willing for it to mean that the cry did not work. Tennyson is willing. The tongue still has not uttered the thoughts. The sea has.

The joins

  • Metre. Three stressed syllables and nothing else can be a line. Do not pad them with “the” and “of” just to look metrical. The padding is the feeling leaving.
  • Juxtaposition. The children at play are not explained. A stanza break can be the metaphor. If you add “this made me think of you,” you have replaced the bridge with a signpost.
  • Refrain. Repeating “Break, break, break” does not intensify the description of water. It says the utterance has failed and the sea is still there. A refrain is a structural confession. Know what it is confessing.

More readings are kept in the weekly archive. The craft lesson closest to this poem’s method is Rhythm.