The Day Dream Part II The Sleeping Palace - Analysis

Introduction and overall tone

This poem creates a quiet, suspended atmosphere: a sleeping palace where life is arrested yet vividly present. The tone is dreamlike, reverent, and slightly melancholic, with a gentle shift toward hope and expectation in the closing stanza. Images move from sensory detail to a forward-looking appeal for renewal.

Historical and authorial setting

Written by Alfred Lord Tennyson, a leading Victorian poet, the poem reflects 19th-century preoccupations with memory, continuity, and the tension between tradition and progress. The elegiac calm and courtly setting suit Tennyson’s interest in medievalized landscapes and moral contemplation.

Main theme: stasis versus renewal

The dominant concern is the suspension of time: rooms, people, and rituals are described as if paused—“The mantles from the golden pegs / Droop sleepily,” “Each baron at the banquet sleeps.” This stasis is repeatedly anchored by the phrase hundred summers, a temporal measure that freezes the scene until a promised rebirth: “When will the hundred summers die, / And thought and time be born again.”

Main theme: the interplay of appearance and reality

Many images suggest likeness without action: the scene is “More like a picture,” portraits “That watch the sleepers.” Reflections and prisms—“beams…make prisms in every carven glass”—emphasize surface beauty and refracted light, raising the question whether the palace’s splendour conceals moral or spiritual dormancy.

Main theme: longing for a restorative figure

The final stanza invites transformative forces—“Come, Care and Pleasure, Hope and Pain”—and explicitly asks for “the fated fairy Prince.” The poem thus frames renewal as both communal (Care and Pleasure) and personal (a princely agent), blending mythic rescue with an almost ritual hope for historical rejuvenation.

Symbols and vivid images

The palace is a microcosm of arrested civilization: banners droop, festal fires are stilled, and the king “reposing keeps” his state. The garden hedge—thorns, ivy, misletoe, grapes—forms a green wall that both conceals and protects, suggesting growth that is both alive and enclosure. The recurring measure of hundred summers functions as a symbolic deadline, a cyclical marker that both preserves memory and promises an eventual breaking of the spell.

Concluding insight

The poem balances fond, sensory description with a moral impatience: beauty preserved in sleep is insufficient without renewal. Tennyson casts the palace as an exquisite but static ideal that awaits the moral and temporal rebirth embodied by the “fated fairy Prince,” turning a domestic tableau into a larger meditation on history, memory, and hope.