The Princess Part Z Conclusion - Analysis

A frame that admits it can’t quite frame

This conclusion makes its central claim almost as a confession: the story can’t be forced into a single “right” tone without losing the way it actually happened. The speaker says he gives the tale as wildly as it rose, and then immediately exposes the pressure to “fix” it—Walter wishing the princess had not yielded, the group asking to drest it up poetically. What follows isn’t only an epilogue; it’s Tennyson (through this narrator) staging the problem of telling: should the poem be a joke, a romance, a political parable, a sermon? The narrator’s answer is that he moved as in a strange diagonal, trying to please competing demands and maybe neither pleased anyone—not even himself. That diagonal becomes a moral stance: the poem refuses purity (pure satire, pure idealism) in favor of a mixed, living account.

The feud between mockery and “something real”

The poem sharpens into a small domestic debate: the men want mock-heroic gigantesque, the same bantering energy used on little Lilia, while the women insist they hated banter and want a gallant fight, a noble princess, true-heroic—true-sublime. The tension isn’t just taste; it’s a fight over what kind of seriousness counts. Even the women’s influence is described paradoxically: their ballads and their silent influence have wrestle[d] with burlesque and forced the poem last, to quite a solemn close. That phrasing implies the poem’s seriousness is not the opposite of comedy but something that must win its way through it.

Lilia: the one who doesn’t argue, but feels the sequel

Against the debate, Lilia becomes a quiet measure of truth. She took no part, because the sequel has touched her: she sits, plucked the grass, flung it from her, thinking. That tiny repeated action—taking and throwing away—looks like a child’s fidget, but it also reads as an embodied uncertainty: she can’t keep hold of what she’s just heard. When she finally speaks, it’s an urgent request—You—tell us what we are—directed at an aunt crammed with theories out of books. The poem sets lived feeling against imported systems, then interrupts the moment with the practical world: the gates were closed / At sunset, the crowd swarming to leave. The private question is real, but it has to survive being jostled by ordinary time.

The “narrow sea”: a patriotic wish and a fearful caricature

The landscape vista—happy valleys, Trim hamlets, breadths of wheat, A red sail, or a white, and France Imagined more than seen—is so calm it tempts the Tory friend into a blunt political moral. He blesses the narrow sea for keeping Britain whole within herself, with Some sense of duty and reverence for the laws ourselves have made. But his picture of France is a fever-dream: a sudden heat, citizens losing their heads, boys who shoot and stab, a kingdom toppling with a shriek / Like an old woman. The comparison is deliberately ugly and theatrical—revolution as farce and hysteria—yet he also admits it’s Too comic for the serious things they are, Too solemn for the comic touches. Even his contempt can’t keep the categories straight. In that muddle, the poem links the princess’s “wise dream” to political upheaval: both are unstable mixtures of comedy and danger.

A calmer counter-claim: dreams as preludes, the world as a child

The narrator answers with a different kind of patience, refusing both complacency and panic. ourselves are full / Of social wrong, he says; Britain isn’t the finished alternative to France. His most important line reframes idealism: wildest dreams / Are but the needful preludes of the truth. It’s not that dreams are accurate; it’s that without them, truth won’t arrive. The metaphor that follows—This fine old world of ours is but a child / Yet in the go-cart—keeps the poem from collapsing into either Tory self-satisfaction or revolutionary romance. A child is hopeful, clumsy, prone to falls, and also growing. And the final assurance, there is a hand that guides, adds a providential tone that doesn’t erase struggle so much as place it inside time.

Public shout, then wordless night

The close stages a last tonal turn: from political talk to communal celebration to cosmic silence. Sir Walter appears in richly physical detail—broad-shouldered, a genial Englishman, raiser of huge melons, a pamphleteer on guano and on grain—a comic inventory that nonetheless honors his grounded usefulness. The crowd’s shout is described as More joyful than the city-roar for Premier or king, and the poem even asks, practically, why these great Sirs shouldn’t open their parks so the people breathe. Then the poem withdraws from civic energy into near-mysticism: back at the Abbey, they sit and spoke not, while walls / Blackened, bats wheeled, owls whooped, and night’s powers break outward Beyond all thought into the Heaven of Heavens. After all the arguing over style—mock-heroic or sublime—the ending chooses a third mode: not a tone but an experience of scale, where human disputes feel small without being mocked.

What does it mean that the last act is undressing a statue?

The final gesture is Lilia’s again: she Disrobed the glimmering statue of Sir Ralph From those rich silks. It’s tender, domestic, and faintly symbolic—stripping away costume, pageantry, the “dressed up” story itself. After a poem worried about whether it should be ornamented or earnest, the closing image quietly suggests that what lasts is not the costume but the care that removes it at day’s end. The group goes home well-pleased not because everything is solved, but because the poem has found a way to live with its own mixture: laughter and seriousness, public life and private feeling, theory and grass in a child’s hands.