Break, Break, Break

The central idea of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "Break, Break, Break" is the dehumanizing effect of uncontrollable grief. The speaker, consumed by sorrow, envies the relentless motion of the sea, which...

Tennyson's poem "Break, Break, Break" employs sea imagery and allegory to convey grief and the inexorable passage of time. The sea, depicted as indifferent and perpetual, contrasts with the speaker's...

"Break, Break, Break" by Lord Alfred Tennyson is a lyrical elegy that uses various literary devices to convey the poet's lament. The poem is structured in four quatrain stanzas with a meter varying...

Tennyson's "Break, Break, Break" is an elegiac poem marked by a mournful tone that reflects on the finality of loss, likely inspired by the death of his friend Arthur Hallam. The poem's mood is...

The title "Break, Break, Break" is indeed fitting for the poem. It serves as a double entendre, referring to both the waves crashing onto the shore and the speaker's persistent heartbreak. The...

The poet repeats the word "Break" in "Break, Break, Break" to emphasize the relentless and continuous crashing of the waves, symbolizing the unending grief and heartache he feels over the loss of his...

"Foot of thy crags" in "Break, Break, Break" refers to the base of the cliffs where the sea crashes. Tennyson uses this imagery to symbolize the speaker's grief and the harshness of life after losing...

The sea symbolizes the contrast between nature's power and the speaker's emotional vulnerability in "Break, Break, Break." The speaker urges the sea to break forcefully, hoping for comfort through...

The poet addresses the sea in the first stanza, using an apostrophe, a figure of speech where an abstract idea or inanimate object is addressed directly. The speaker asks the sea to "break" on the...

In "Break, Break, Break" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the meaning and importance of "the sound of a voice that is still" is in its reference to the poet's friend Arthur Hallam, who died at the age of...

"Break, Break, Break" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson is not considered free verse. Free verse lacks a fixed meter and rhyme, whereas this poem uses "irregular quatrains" with a structured rhyme scheme of...

In the third stanza of this poem, the speaker wishes for "the touch of a vanish'd hand" and the sound of the voice which accompanies that hand. It is safe to assume he is longing for a dead loved one.

The poet in "Break, Break, Break" struggles to express his thoughts due to profound grief over a personal loss. While he articulates his feelings of longing for the "vanish'd hand" and the "sound of...

Tennyson's speaker laments the death of a close friend in the poem "Break, Break, Break."

In "Break, Break, Break," the poet does not ask the sea anything directly. However, he longs for the chance to touch and speak to a dead friend or beloved that he misses greatly. Implicitly, too, he...

In "Break, Break, Break," life and nature persist despite human events, as depicted through the relentless waves breaking on the shore and the fishermen's ongoing activities. These elements symbolize...

The two lines in "Break, Break, Break" that are not trimeter are "But O for the touch of a vanished hand" and "But the tender grace of a day that is dead." These lines contain four metrical feet...

In "Break, Break, Break," the image of the breaking of waves on cold stone conveys the idea of a harsh, pitiless world, which takes no account of human grief.

In "Break, Break, Break," strict anapestic patterns appear in the second and fourth lines of the second stanza: "That he shouts with his sister at play!" and "That he sings in his boat on the bay!"...

In "Break, Break, Break," the poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, contemplates the waves breaking on the shore and reflects on the loss of a loved one, mourning the death of his close friend Arthur Henry...

In "Break, Break, Break," the sight that makes the poet feel pensive is the crashing of the waves. This makes him perceive a contrast between himself and the natural world. Whereas he can't get over...

The speaker's demand that the sea "break" upon the shore relates to his personal sense of loss in that he feels broken by the death of his friend. Like the perpetual breaking of the waves on the...

Nature in the poem is depicted as the external world, while the lyrical ego represents the speaker's internal emotions. Their relationship is one of reflection, with nature mirroring the speaker's...

"Break, Break, Break" by Tennyson reflects the narrator's profound grief over the death of his best friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. The poem contrasts the unending continuity of nature, symbolized by...

The sea's image in stanza 4 mirrors stanza 1, emphasizing the relentless and ceaseless nature of the waves, symbolizing the unstoppable passage of time. In both stanzas, the sea's continuous movement...

In “Break, Break, Break,” the “tender grace” will not come back, due to the death of the speaker's love one. The speaker laments for the loss of his friend, someone who meant so much to him. But ever...

"Break, Break, Break" by Tennyson suggests that deep sorrow intensifies reactions to trivial things by reflecting the speaker’s profound grief through natural imagery. The relentless breaking of...