Aylmers Field - Analysis

Introduction and overall tone

“Aylmer’s Field” presents a tragic rural romance told in a moral, elegiac voice. The tone shifts from leisurely nostalgia for a sleepy country life to indignation and finally to grief and desolation as family pride and social prejudice destroy innocent love. The poem moves from warm, vivid description of people and place to a sustained moral indictment and a lament for ruined lives.

Authorial and social context

Written by Alfred Lord Tennyson, the poem reflects Victorian anxieties about class, inheritance, and social reputation. The setting of an English county gentry and its intimate social network echoes Victorian concern with lineage and the moral responsibilities of the privileged toward the poor.

Main theme: Class, pride, and social destruction

A central theme is how landed pride and concern for name and property corrupt human feeling. Sir Aylmer’s repeated injunctions about the family name and his fury at the perceived misalliance show pride supplanting compassion. The elders’ maneuvers to sell Edith into a socially suitable marriage and their ruthless surveillance exemplify how class anxieties produce ruin: Edith’s illness and death, Leolin’s exile and Averill’s collapse all follow from that social tyranny.

Main theme: Love, sacrifice, and thwarted potential

The poem develops a second theme of pure, mutual love crushed by external forces. Leolin and Edith grow together from childhood into a love that is intimate and sacrificial: their shared play, letters, and final promises emphasize sincerity. Leolin’s study, vows, and the dagger kissed in oath dramatize his willingness to transform himself, while Edith’s tenderness for the poor and constancy underline the tragedy of their thwarted potential.

Main theme: Moral judgment and prophetic denunciation

Tennyson inserts a prophetic moral voice—Averill’s funeral sermon—that indicts idolatries of wealth and local idolatry of rank. The sermon broadens the private tragedy into a social moral: those who worship property and name become spiritually barren. This moralizing passage reframes individual loss as consequence of communal sin.

Symbols and images

Recurring images sharpen the themes. The Hall and family tree symbolize hereditary pride and stagnation; the wyvern and shields evoke anachronistic heraldry. The dagger—given by the Indian kinsman, later found with Leolin—serves as a charged emblem: exotic gift, misread intimacy, and the instrument associated with suicide. Nature imagery (the brook, pines, village gardens) contrasts human malice with simple goodness—Edith’s floral ministrations mark her moral warmth, making her death feel like a violation of natural order.

Ambiguity and open question

The poem leaves ambiguous moral culpability between deliberate cruelty and ignorant misguidedness: the parents are depicted as both mean and convinced they act for her good. This raises the open question whether social evil is always malicious or sometimes tragically blind—Tennyson suggests both.

Conclusion and final insight

“Aylmer’s Field” is a cautionary tragedy: vivid rural life and genuine love are undone by hereditary pride and social calculation. Tennyson transforms a local drama into a wider moral parable about how idolatry of name and wealth devastates human bonds, leaving the great house and its name literally and figuratively desolate.