The Lotos-Eaters (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Alfred, Lord Tennyson
- First Published: 1832
- Type of Work: Lyric
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry
- Subjects: Mythology or myths, Dreams, Legends, Gods or goddesses, Drugs, Sea or seafaring life, Greek or Roman times, Greece or Greek people, Trojan War, Sleep
The Poem
“The Lotos-Eaters” in its final form is 173 lines long. The first forty-five lines, the proem, are an imitation of the Spenserian stanza, a form used in Edmund Spenser’s gigantic Christian allegorical epic, The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596). It is made up of eight even lines of iambic pentameter, plus a ninth line an extra iamb long. The rhyme pattern is abab, bcbc, c.
The proem describes a scene from the Odyssey (c. 800 b.c.e.) in which Odysseus and his men, after a terrible storm, arrive on the shores of the land of the...
[The entire page is 1799 words long]
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