The Day Dream Part VI The Departure - Analysis

Introduction

This excerpt from Tennyson’s "The Day-Dream — Part VI — The Departure" conveys a tender, dreamlike farewell as a princess follows her lover into a shifting, liminal world. The tone is at once joyful and wistful, moving between the warmth of love and a sense of passing time. Mood shifts appear in the poem’s movement from golden twilight to darkened night, reflecting both continuity and change.

Contextual note

Written by Alfred Lord Tennyson, a central Victorian poet, the poem reflects his frequent interest in medieval and mythic romance, longing, and psychological states of reverie. The dreamy, allegorical mode aligns with Victorian tastes for moral and emotional exploration through symbolic narrative rather than literal realism.

Main themes: love, time, and transcendence

The poem foregrounds romantic devotion: physical closeness and repeated kisses ("such another kiss," "thy kiss would wake the dead") emphasize intimacy as transformative. Closely linked is time and mortality: phrases like "sleep another hundred years" and the procession of day into night suggest both temporal passing and the desire to suspend time. A third theme, transcendence, appears as the lovers move "across the hills and far away" into a "new world which is the old," implying a journey beyond ordinary boundaries—emotional or metaphysical—toward a realm of greater wonders (the father's court).

Imagery and recurring symbols

Tennyson repeatedly uses light and celestial images—"sliding star," "golden bar," "crescent-bark," "rosy change"—to evoke movement between states (day to morning, twilight to dark). The kiss functions as a potent symbol of revival and agency ("would wake the dead"), suggesting love as a restorative, animating force. The hills and "utmost purple rim" serve as horizons of longing and transition: familiar limits that are nevertheless crossed, pointing to both the romantic quest and the unknown that awaits.

Form and its effect

Brief, songlike stanzas and repeating refrains create a circular, lullaby quality that supports the poem’s dream logic: repetition reinforces emotional intensity and the sense of continual movement without final resolution.

Conclusion

The poem frames love as a power that carries the beloved beyond ordinary time and space, blending joy with a gentle melancholy. Through luminous imagery and recurrent motifs of sleep, kiss, and horizon, Tennyson presents a departure that feels less like loss and more like passage into a perpetually renewing, if ambiguous, realm.