ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -"Tears, Idle Tears” is a lyric poem written in 1847 by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), the Victorian-era English poet.

Detailed explanation-2: -"Tears, Idle Tears” is a lyric poem by the Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. It was originally embedded in his 1847 narrative poem The Princess, where it is sung by a court maiden. The poem is an emotionally intense meditation on the passing of time and the loss of friends and loved ones.

Detailed explanation-3: -Literary Devices In the first line, “idle tears” is an example of a personal metaphor. The first two lines of the first stanza begin with the same word. It is called anaphora. In “depth of some divine despair”, Tennyson uses a metaphor of the sea.

Detailed explanation-4: -The tears are idle because they can do nothing to bring the past back; but they are idle, too, because the past does not belong to the world of present business; it belongs to a kind of sublime idleness as well, since there is nothing for the past or its memory to do.

Detailed explanation-5: -“Tears, Idle Tears” is written in blank verse, which means that there is no definite rhyme scheme. It consists of four cinquains (stanzas of five lines each). Each stanza develops its own idea for the first four lines, and then, at the end of the fifth line, returns to the refrain of “the days that are no more.”