Circumstance
Circumstance - meaning Summary
Pairs in Life’s Circle
Tennyson's short lyric compresses life into repeated pairs and rural moments. Through images of children, strangers, lovers, shared lives and adjacent graves, the poem presents existence as a continuous, cyclical procession where beginnings and endings mirror one another. Ordinary scenes—play, courtship, domestic union, burial—are linked to suggest communal rhythms, inevitable mortality, and a calm acceptance of how individual stories recur within a larger, unbroken pattern.
Read Complete AnalysesTwo children in two neighbour villages Playing mad pranks along the healthy leas; Two strangers meeting at a festival; Two lovers whispering by an orchard wall; Two lives bound fast in one with golden ease; Two graves grass-green beside a gray church-tower, Wash’d with still rains and daisy-blossomed; Two children in one hamlet born and bred; So runs the round of life from hour to hour.
First published in 1830.
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