Love and Death
Love and Death - meaning Summary
Life's Triumph Over Death
Tennyson stages a nighttime encounter in Paradise between personified Love and Death. Death demands possession of the walks, but Love reframes Death as a shadow cast by life. Rather than deny mortality, Love accepts a temporary retreat while insisting that life—and love as its expression—creates and outlasts that shadow. The poem contrasts transient death with enduring life, presenting death as dependent and subordinate to love’s permanence.
Read Complete AnalysesWhat time the mighty moon was gathering light Love paced the thymy plots of Paradise, And all about him roll’d his lustrous eyes; When, turning round a cassia, full in view Death, walking all alone beneath a yew, And talking to himself, first met his sight: “You must begone,” said Death, “these walks are mine”. Love wept and spread his sheeny vans for flight; Yet ere he parted said, “This hour is thine; Thou art the shadow of life, and as the tree Stands in the sun and shadows all beneath, So in the light of great eternity Life eminent creates the shade of death; The shadow passeth when the tree shall fall, But I shall reign for ever over all”.
First printed in 1830.
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