Love Pride And Forgetfulness - Analysis

Brief impression

This short lyric conveys a swift fall from tenderness to bitterness. Its tone shifts from pastoral sweetness to chill cruelty and final desolation. The language is direct and fable-like, compressing moral change into vivid, personified figures.

Historical and authorial context

Written by Alfred Lord Tennyson, a leading Victorian poet, the poem reflects Victorian interest in moral instruction and emotional restraint. Tennyson often used allegory and personification to explore inner life; here those techniques condense a private psychological event into a brief moral tale.

Main themes: Love, Pride, and Memory

Love is introduced as productive and sweet—"Love laboured honey busily"—suggesting creativity and nourishment. Pride intrudes violently: it "came beneath and held a light," an image of exposure and undermining that destroys Love's vitality. Memory is affected secondarily; once fed by Pride, it "did wax so thin on gall," indicating a corrupted remembrance that ultimately dies. The poem traces causality: Pride corrupts Love, and corrupted Love corrupts Memory.

Imagery and symbolism

The hive/honey/bee cluster symbols present Love as both worker and product—intimate, communal, sweet. Pride is dark and chilly yet holds a light, an ironic illumination that reveals and robs rather than enlightens. Gall functions as a concentrated symbol of bitterness; the transformation "into gall" compresses emotional change into a bodily, poisonous substance. Memory personified and malnourished shows how internal habits inherit the damage done to feeling.

Tone shifts and moral stance

The poem moves from warmth ("honey," "hive") to coldness ("very dark and chilly night," "cruel vapours"), ending in death. This tonal slide supports a cautionary moral: an invasive, self-regarding force (Pride) can annihilate tenderness and leave only toxic recollection. The voice remains cool and observant, like a parable reporting cause and effect.

Open question and ambiguity

One ambiguity is Pride's light: does it represent false clarity, self-justification, or merely exposure that invites ruin? The poem invites readers to consider whether the light that reveals can also be the instrument of destruction.

Conclusion

Tennyson compresses an emotional catastrophe into a concise allegory: Love's sweetness is both vulnerable and consumable, Pride arrives under the guise of illumination and turns sweetness to poison, and Memory, once nourished by genuine feeling, withers into oblivion. The poem thus warns of how interior forces can transform and erase what once sustained us.