The Poet’s Song
The Poet’s Song - meaning Summary
Poetry Reshapes the World
Tennyson's short lyric depicts a poet whose song stills and gathers the natural world. As birds and beasts pause to listen, the poem suggests that art can alter perception and evoke a future beyond ordinary time. The speaker’s melody is both enchanting and prophetic: it makes creatures attentive and imagines how the world might be when transient years have passed, asserting poetry's quiet, shaping power over nature and fate.
Read Complete AnalysesThe rain had fallen, the Poet arose, He pass’d by the town and out of the street, A light wind blew from the gates of the sun, And waves of shadow went over the wheat, And he sat him down in a lonely place, And chanted a melody loud and sweet, That made the wild-swan pause in her cloud, And the lark drop down at his feet. The swallow stopt as he hunted the bee, The snake slipt under a spray, The wild hawk stood with the down on his beak, And stared, with his foot on the prey, And the nightingale thought, “I have sung many songs, But never a one so gay, For he sings of what the world will be When the years have died away”.
First published in 1842.
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