Amphion - Analysis

Introduction and tone

Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Amphion" presents a wistful, imaginative speaker who contrasts an inherited, neglected garden with the legendary power of song to animate nature. The tone shifts from rueful and longing in the opening lines to exuberant mythic fantasy in the middle, then falls back to ironic disappointment and finally to resigned, patient hope by the close.

Contextual note

Tennyson, a leading Victorian poet, often balanced classical allusion with contemporary concerns. Invoking Amphion — the mythic musician who moved stones and trees — lets Tennyson critique modernity, cultivated taste, and mechanized or bookish approaches to nature versus an older, almost magical relationship between art and the natural world.

Main theme: Art versus modernity

The poem contrasts creative, vital song with a "brassy age" of technical know-how and horticultural manuals. Amphion's music causes trees to dance and form plantations, while modern "Muses reading" produce botanic treatises and transplanted trees that look artificial. Imagery of living motion (pirouetting ashes, rivers gallopaded) opposes static, contrived garden-rooms, showing Tennyson's belief that true art animates life, whereas modernity often sterilizes it.

Main theme: Nature and authenticity

Tennyson values wildness and native growth over cultivated neatness. The speaker prefers "the meanest weed / That blows upon its mountain" to spindling plants "fed with careful dirt." Vivid images of spontaneous movement and "drunken leaves" emphasize authenticity and organic vitality as morally and aesthetically superior to contrived prettiness.

Main theme: Loss, longing, and creative impotence

The speaker expresses longing for a golden age ("O had I lived when song was great") and laments his present inability to produce Amphion's wonders: "’Tis vain! in such a brassy age / I could not move a thistle." The comic, plaintive images (jackass heehaws, passive oxen) underline the speaker's recognition of his own creative limits within his historical moment.

Symbols and vivid imagery

Amphion functions as a central symbol of transformative art; trees that "pirouetted down" and "flounder into hornpipes" make music literalized as motion. Gardens and bookish Muses symbolize cultivated, artificial culture; the "garden-squirt" and "alleys, faded places" suggest aesthetic sterility. The closing image of a small, patiently tended garden becomes a personal emblem of modest, honest creation rather than grand mythic triumph.

Conclusion and final insight

The poem ultimately reconciles desire and reality: after fantasizing about Amphion's miraculous sway, the speaker accepts slow cultivation—"I must work thro' months of toil"—and finds dignity in nurturing a modest, authentic plot. Tennyson thus honors art's imaginative power while recognizing that in modern times meaningful creation may be humble, patient, and rooted in care.