Today is the birthday of Alfred Lord Tennyson, one of the most famous and popular poets ever. The Steven King of 19th century English letters. Well, I guess Dickens was King, but old Alfred was up there. Poets were treated differently then; Tennyson was given a Lordship for his efforts, and was a personal friend of Queen Victoria.

I’m not a fan of Victorian poetry, generally. I prefer American flavors, and the 20th century, if you please. (Robert Frost, William Stafford, Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, James Wright, Mark Strand … and a few of you reading this blog. Oh dear, all men. OK, Sharon Olds.) So usually I look at something like Tennyson’s work as sentimental, shallow, overwrought. But I’m getting older, and when he wrote this following poem, Tennyson was an old man. He was writing about his own impending death. Now, if I read it slowly, picture a man like me but dressed differently and with a long beard, with his little leather notebook and fountain pen, on a boat sailing to his home on the Isle of White … well wait. Behind the rhyme and the contrived metaphor, there’s a real sense of commonality, of generations moving with the tide.

Crossing the Bar

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.