who eat the plants become lazy, apathetic, and melancholy like the locals. They lose all desire to continue on their journey and would rather stay in this land, relax, and eat the lotos plant until they die.

The mariners want to remain in the land of the lotos eaters because they have been drugged. The lotos is some sort of powerful narcotic that causes them to lose their motivation to do anything except lay around and consume more of the plant. In such a short time they have become addicted to it, and they are powerless to resist its influence despite the memories of their "wedded lives," their wives' embraces, and their "household hearths."

The sufferings of the mariners have to do with the hardships that they have encountered during their voyage home from the Trojan War. After they have eaten the lotos, plying the oars upon the sea seems wearying to them. Sailing the ocean no longer thrills them. They are tired of the continual danger and the constant need to combat evil. Since death is the ultimate end of it all in any case, they prefer to relax in this land and consume lotos until they die rather than sail the seas and fight the monsters of the deep.

We see, then, that the narcotic effects of the lotos plants that the mariners eat cause them to fall into a melancholic torpor. In this state, they forsake their ambitions of returning safely to their homelands, their wives, and their children. They see their difficult and dangerous voyage as nothing but suffering, and they want only to remain where they are and consume more of the drug.

There is no joy but calm!

to hear and see the far-off sparkling brine

Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil

The poem "The Lotos-Eaters" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson is based upon a passage in book IX of the Odyssey by Homer. Odysseus and his men come upon the land of the lotus-eaters, and Odysseus sends some men ashore to scout. The inhabitants of the land give the mariners some lotus plant to eat; as a result, the mariners lose interest in returning home and only want to stay and eat more of the plant. Odysseus has to forcibly bring the men back to the ship and tie them to the rowing benches.

"The Lotos-Eaters" is written in two parts. In the first part, Odysseus urges his mariners to have courage. They soon reach a beautiful verdant land. The Lotos-eaters appear and offer an "enchanted stem, laden with flower and fruit" to each of the men. The men who eat it dream of their homeland but decide to "return no more." They are content to remain in the land and "no longer roam."

The second part of the poem, identified as a "choric song," is an explanation by the men of why they have made their choice. The suffering that the men refer to concerns what they went through in their past lives before they ate the lotos plant. They were "weigh'd upon with heaviness" and "consumed with sharp distress." They describe the gods watching dispassionately as humans suffer from "wasted lands, blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands, clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands." Most men work hard their entire lives only to "suffer endless anguish" in hell after death.

The lotos plant is a powerful drug, and the stupor it brings on causes the mariners to see all of human life as an endless drudgery of toil and suffering, which is not relieved even by death. They want to escape their tedious lives by withdrawing from them and observing the lives of humans from a distance, "like Gods together, careless of mankind." It is basically addiction to the drug in the lotos plant that causes the mariners to say "we will return no more."

The mariners in this poem have suffered a great deal. The narrator says, "Most weary seem'd the sea, weary the oar, / Weary the wandering fields of barren foam." They have been away from home for a very long time, and they have borne many a hardship as a result of the fact that they are at the mercy of the seas (and the gods). They must row and row and row, hard work, with little hope that they will ever reach their home. They feel that they "toil along" and "make perpetual moan"—that they, alone, suffer as they do—and they do not want to suffer more. They are "thrown," they cry, "from one sorrow" to the next without ever having a chance to really rest or find any joy. They just want some "calm," some respite from work and worry, and for this reason, they declare that they "will return no more" to their homes. The risk they run if they continue to try to reach home is that they will die before they get there, never having known the peace of rest and calm that they so desire. However, if they remain here, with the lotus-eaters, they can partake of the lotus fruit and feel the peace for which they have been longing. They ask "why / Should life all labour be?" They know that time moves fast and that "in a little while [their] lips are dumb"—in other words, that they will die—and they want the joy of calm first.

In “The Lotos-Eaters,” Alfred, Lord Tennyson expands on an episode in Homer’s Odyssey. The Greek hero Odysseus and the mariners on the ship with him have been struggling to avoid being capsized by a huge wave. The poet implies that they worked hard to keep the ship afloat, which left them exhausted. Fortunately, there is a nearby island where they can safely go ashore.

On the island, they can take a much-needed break, allowing them to recover their strength before embarking on their homeward voyage. The people of the island share with them the lotos plant’s fruit and flower, which contain a drug. What seems like an ideal situation—relaxing under the pleasant effects of this drug—turns out to create a different kind of suffering. They are powerless to resist its attraction. Although they do not feel unhappy, the absence of desire to mobilize and head homeward is a different kind of suffering.

Tennyson portrays the limited self-awareness that the mariners are able to apply to their situation. They have not forgotten their home and their former intention to return there. However, the drug has interfered with their ability to act. They understand that there is “sorrow” in their sensation that “toil” should be avoided. They ask themselves why life should consist only of labor. Feeling that everything has been taken from them but their memories, the mariners welcome the numbness and are even ready for death.

The mariners in Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters” endure great strife on the sea. The depiction of the life of a mariner is laden with distressing words: “heaviness,” “toil,” “sorrow.” The mariners face danger every day in the form of storms, which forces them to labor intensively and to face their own mortality. They have tired of the constant hard work and danger of being thrown about the ship in the midst of torrential storms. They are tired, both physically and mentally, of fighting the tempests of nature.

They discover an “enchanted” land, where the lotus helps them to forget the brutal lives they have endured in the past. Here, life is gentler, happier, and dreamier, compelling the men to wonder why they have allowed themselves to continue the perpetual toil of a life of adventure. They wish to put this difficult life behind them and bask in the comfort of the lotus, which makes them feel like gods.

Real life has its evils—famine, plagues, ships succumbing to storms, fights, brutal work—all of which ultimately lead to death; the mariners feel that the gods watch these evils from a place of comfort, and they believe they should now have that same kind of comfort. The sky and sea reflect a dark hatred that they no longer wish to battle:

Is there any peace
In ever climbing up the climbing wave?

Now, they can sleep peacefully under the influence of the hypnotic lotus and watch the waves crash in the sea at a distance. They no longer need to struggle against those waves.

According to the mariners, if they must die ultimately, they should enjoy what is left of their lives: “Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil.”

Tennyson's "The Lotos-Eaters" is a retelling of the episode in the Odyssey in which Odysseus and his crew land on a beautiful island and are greeted by the locals offering them Lotos nectar to drink, which turns out to make them all so relaxed and happy that they forget they were trying to get home to Ithaca.

Tennyson's version starts with a long description of the lovely island and its inhabitants. It's not until the fifth stanza that the reader hears from the mariners themselves. Nevertheless, the first four stanzas do give clues as to why the mariners might decide to stay on the island.

The first two lines feature Odysseus speaking to his crew:

"Courage!" he said, and pointed toward the land,
"This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon."

Although the mariners don't respond, the reader can guess that they're already pretty tired of being on the ocean. If they weren't, their leader wouldn't feel the need to exhort them to have courage or to remind them that soon they'll be on land again.

When they land, the second and third stanzas include descriptions of lush vegetation, vivid colors, and mountains in the distance—all things that sailors at sea don't experience and which make a strong contrast to the monotony of water and waves on the open sea.

In the fourth stanza, the Lotos-eaters offer the mariners "flower and fruit," which the mariners taste. When they do, "the gushing of the wave / Far far away did seem to mourn and rave / On alien shores."

In other words, the taste of the Lotos itself is enough to make the mariners feel as if the ocean—and the need to cross it to get home to their families—is a million miles away.

In the fifth stanza, we're told that "sweet it was to dream of Fatherland, / Of child, and wife." The mariners still miss their families, but the work of getting back to them seems utterly exhausting. In stanza 2 of the Choric Song, the mariners expound on this feeling by saying, "Why should we toil alone, / We only toil, who are the first of things."

Indeed, why work at all? The Lotos-eaters' island is beautiful and comfortable, and sailing is exhausting, back-breaking labor. The mariners are enchanted by the idea of rest. In stanza 4, they point out that sailing feels futile: the only reward for getting the ship over one wave is to face another wave, just like the first.

The mariners want a break from the monotony and toil of sailing. The Lotos-eaters' island offers it, which makes them want to stay.

In short, the mariners depicted in the poem are weary of travel and toil. Although they find it "sweet" to dream of their home, the "Fatherland," and their families, "Most weary seem'd the sea, weary the oar, / Weary the wandering fields of barren foam." They do not want to return to their life of work and wandering, and so they declare that their home is simply too far away and that they will "no longer roam" the seas in search of it.

This island is beautiful, full of "sweet music" and "charmed" sunsets. The men have "tir'd eyes," and they find that they are able to sleep quite peacefully in this place. They question why they should continue to be "utterly consumed with sharp distress" when they are so weary, going from "one sorrow to another," never allowed to stop and find some peace. The mariners contrast the abundant fruits and flowers and beauty of the island with the "dark-blue sky" that seems to weigh heavily over the "dark-blue sea," and they seem to speculate that, if they continue in their search for their home, their entire life will be consumed by labor. They know that it will not be long before they die, and their "lips are dumb," so they will find some pleasure now while they still can.

The mariners reason that life at home has moved on without them, that their sons have taken their places now, and that they would be strangers to their very families. In the end, they would rather rest and be contented than leave and risk more years of "toil" and "anguish."