Eleanore - Analysis

Overview and tone

This lyric addresses Eleänore with sustained, admiring intensity. The tone is reverent, sensual, and dreamlike, shifting occasionally from distant adoration to intimate physical longing. Moments of calm contemplation alternate with surges of overpowering desire, producing a steady oscillation between serenity and ecstatic overwhelm.

Context and authorial note

Alfred Lord Tennyson, a central Victorian poet, often explored idealized beauty, introspective emotion, and classical or medievalized imagery. The poem’s elevated diction, exotic touches, and emphasis on refined sensibility reflect Victorian tastes for devotional love and aestheticized femininity.

Main themes: idealized beauty, contemplative passion, and mortality of delight

The poem chiefly develops idealized beauty: Eleänore is presented as almost otherworldly—born "a mile beneath the cedar-wood" and cradled with "jewel or shell, or starry ore." Vivid sensory catalogues (honey, grapes, golden fruit) construct an image of luxurious perfection. A second theme is contemplative passion: the speaker repeatedly frames love as rapt meditation—"Thought and motion mingle" and passion becomes "a silent meditation." Finally, the mortality of delight appears in the final stanzas where overwhelming pleasure is linked to a kind of dying—"I die with my delight"—suggesting that ecstatic love borders on self-negation.

Key images and symbols

Recurring images—oriental fairy gifts, bees and honey, sunset glow, and flowing water—signal abundance, sweetness, and natural harmony. The eyes are a sustained symbol: Eleänore’s "large eyes" are sites where "Thought folded over thought" awakens, acting as small worlds that both reveal and create the beloved. Incense, censer, and musical metaphors (unheard melody, full-sail’d verse) frame her presence as ritual and art, implying that the speaker’s language and devotion are forms of worship. The final motif of death-as-delight complicates the adoration, raising the question whether such idealization consumes the lover’s self.

Form and its support of meaning

While the poem is lyrical and repetitive rather than formally constrained, its recurring refrains of the name Eleänore and rhythmic, image-rich stanzas reinforce the meditative, cyclical quality of admiration—the speaker returns again and again to the same ecstatic gaze.

Conclusion

“Eleanore” is a portrait of love as exalted contemplation: Tennyson crafts an image of a beloved who is at once natural and supernatural, whose beauty transforms passion into serene worship and whose intoxicating presence verges on annihilation. The poem celebrates aesthetic and emotional excess while hinting at the cost of absolute devotion.