See what a lovely shell...
FROM MAUD
See what a lovely shell... - context Summary
Published 1855 in Maud
This short lyric appears within Tennyson's 1855 dramatic monologue cycle Maud. It stages a speaker’s close inspection of a tiny shell and uses that image amid the longer poem’s concerns. Maud interrogates love, grief, and fragile sanity; this moment offers a quiet, contemplative pause that reflects the larger work’s melancholy and the poet’s own struggles with depression and loss, without resolving those larger tensions here.
Read Complete AnalysesSee what a lovely shell, Small and pure as a pearl, Lying close to my foot, Frail, but a work divine, Made so fairily well With delicate spire and whorl, How exquisitely minute, A miracle of design! What is it? a learned man Could give it a clumsy name. Let him name it who can, The beauty would be the same. The tiny cell is forlorn, Void of the little living will That made it stir on the shore. Did he stand at the diamond door Of his house in a rainbow frill? Did he push, when he was uncurl'd, A golden foot or a fairy horn Thro' his dim water-world. Slight, to be crushed with a tap Of my finger-nail on the sand, Small, but a work divine, Frail, but of force to withstand, Year upon year, the shock Of cataract seas that snap The three-decker's oaken spine Athwart the ledges of rock, Here on the Breton strand!
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