Who Can Say - Analysis

Introduction and tone

This short lyric poses a gentle mystery about memory and time. Its tone is contemplative and wistful, moving from a question about time to a personal sensory memory. There is a subtle shift from abstract wonder—Who can say?—to a specific, intimate recollection of youth through scent.

Authorial context

Alfred Lord Tennyson, a leading Victorian poet, often explored memory, loss, and the passage of time. While the poem is brief, it reflects Victorian unease with change and a Romantic interest in nature as a trigger for inner feeling.

Main themes: time and memory

The dominant theme is the elusive nature of time: the opening question—Who can say / Why To-day / To-morrow will be yesterday?—frames time as puzzling and irreversible. Memory is the second theme: the smell of a violet does not reproduce time but recalls the dewy prime / Of youth and buried time, showing how sensory experience summons the past.

Theme development: sensation and loss

Sensory imagery drives the poem's emotional movement. The violet's odor acts as the trigger that connects present perception to a vanished past, producing a feeling of loss rather than explanation. The concluding line—The cause is nowhere found in rhyme—suggests that language, or ordered explanation, cannot locate the origin of these involuntary recollections.

Symbols and imagery

The violet functions as a compact symbol: delicate, fragrant, and linked to spring and renewal. It stands for involuntary memory—like Proust's madeleine—where scent bypasses reason and evokes the dewy prime of youth. Time itself is personified only by shifting tense, reinforcing unpredictability and impermanence.

Concluding insight

Tennyson's poem compresses a philosophical observation into a sensory moment: human language and reason fail to account for why simple perceptions can suddenly restore a vanished self. The result is a quiet meditation on how memory inhabits the present without offering explanation.