Margaret - Analysis

Introduction

Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Margaret" addresses a pale, melancholy figure with a voice that is tender, admiring, and gently persuasive. The tone is elegiac and contemplative, occasionally shifting toward entreaty as the speaker urges Margaret to engage with life. Throughout the poem a persistent bittersweet mood balances admiration for Margaret's sorrowful grace with a wish for her to return to the world of light and action.

Historical and biographical context

Written in the Victorian era, Tennyson's poetry often explores refined sensibility, social constraints, and interior feeling. While no specific historical event anchors this short lyric, references to figures like Plantagenet and Chatelet evoke a sense of historical or legendary echoes that heighten the poem's interplay between personal sorrow and larger human narratives.

Main themes: melancholic beauty and withdrawal

The poem develops the theme of melancholic beauty by repeatedly pairing Margaret's pallor and tears with delicate, luminous images: "moonlight on a falling shower", "tender amber", and "evening star". These images make her sorrow aesthetically attractive yet fragile. A second theme, withdrawal from active life, appears in lines that describe Margaret as loving to hear "the murmur of the strife" but not entering "the toil of life," and as a "calmed sea" laid by tumult—suggesting a passive refuge from engagement rather than moral failure.

Imagery and symbolic figures

Tennyson uses recurrent light-and-weather imagery—moonlight, evening, rainbow, sun—to place Margaret in a liminal, twilight domain: "Between the rainbow and the sun" and "remaining betwixt dark and bright." This boundary symbolism suggests both protection and stasis. Historical names (Plantagenet, Chatelet) function as symbolic echoes of courage, sacrifice, and final thought, implying that Margaret's inner life contains the same tragic dignity as famous sufferers, even if she never enters conspicuous action.

Character contrast and humanizing detail

The poet contrasts Margaret with a "twin-sister, Adeline," noting subtle physical differences—darker hair and less aerial blue eyes—that make Margaret "more human in your moods." This comparison grounds her ethereal sorrow in specific, mortal traits and emphasizes empathy: her "dainty-woeful sympathies" make her sorrow relational rather than merely ornamental.

Form and voice supporting meaning

The lyric's steady address and refrains ("O sweet pale Margaret") create an intimate, hymnlike quality that reinforces both admiration and plea. The speaker's alternating descriptions and invitations mirror the poem's central tension between reverent distance and desire for return to life.

Conclusion

Margaret emerges as a haunted, luminous figure whose sorrow is both protective and isolating. Tennyson celebrates her melancholic grace while gently urging reengagement, leaving the reader with a final image of hope—a request that her "blue eyes dawn" upon the speaker—so that beauty rooted in sorrow might rejoin the living world.