The Day Dream Part V The Revival - Analysis

Introduction

This excerpt from Alfred Lord Tennyson's "The Day-Dream - Part V - The Revival" shifts abruptly from an intimate moment to chaotic wakefulness, producing a tone that moves from enchantment to comic disorientation. The revival scene is lively, noisy, and slightly satirical, with a brisk reversal of dreamlike suspension into ordinary, bustling life. The mood changes quickly and Tennyson balances vivid sensory detail with ironic distance.

Authorial and Historical Context

Tennyson, a leading Victorian poet, often explored the tension between imagination and social order. Written in an era concerned with duty, monarchy, and public ritual, the poem reflects Victorian interest in the interplay between private feeling and public responsibility, and it gently satirizes courtly formality and the performative aspects of power.

Main Themes

Return to ordinary life: The poem emphasizes the abrupt collapse of a dream or spell into everyday noise—clocks, doors, dogs, cocks—showing how the miraculous is swept away by routine. Authority and ritual: The king's awakening and concern about a bill highlight governance as a recurring, bureaucratic duty that intrudes on personal or fantastic moments. Comic disillusionment: The mismatch between the earlier charm and the later comic domestic hubbub creates gentle irony, exposing human vanity and the anticlimax of grandeur.

Imagery and Symbolic Details

The cascade of sounds and movements—the striking clocks, barking dogs, peacock squall—functions as a sensory overthrow that dismantles enchantment. The fountain leaping and the "long-pent stream of life" released as a "cataract" suggests pent-up vitality suddenly liberated, yet the effect is more boisterous than sublime. The king's beard "grown into my lap" and his concern about a bill inject bodily humor and civic responsibility, turning regal mystery into domestic absurdity.

Tone and Irony

Tennyson keeps the tone lively and observational, using enumerations and onomatopoeic verbs like clapt, clackt, and squall'd to produce comic energy. The barons' attempt to minimize the event as "an after-dinner's nap" and the chancellor's politeness while delaying the bill add layers of social irony: public figures restoring normalcy by rhetorical diversion rather than confronting the strange.

Conclusion

Part V compresses a return from enchantment into social reality, using vivid sensory detail and gentle satire to show how ritual, bureaucracy, and everyday noise reclaim significance from the imaginative. The passage thus underscores Tennyson's interest in the uneasy coexistence of the marvelous and the mundane, leaving the reader amused by the collapse of the sublime into the comic.