Benutzer:Edith Wahr/T

Tears, Idle Tears ist ein Gedicht des englischen Schriftstellers Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892). Es zählt zu den bekanntesten und am häufigsten anthologisierten Gedichten der viktorianischen Literatur.

Text

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

  Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

  Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

  Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

Interpretationen

Überblick

Poe, Taine

Lewis, Brooks

Sekundärliteratur

• Cleanth Brooks: The Motivation of Tennyson's Weeper. In: Cleanth Brooks: The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. Reynal and Hitchcock, New York 1947, S. 167-177.
• Eric Griffiths: Tennyson's Idle Tears. In: Phillip Collins (Hrsg.): Tennyson: Seven Essays. Macmillan, Basingstoke: Macmillan 1992, S. 36-60.
• Graham Hough: Tears, Idle Tears. In: Hopkins Review 4:3, 1951, S. 31—36.
• Henry Kozicki: Tennyson's "Tears, Idle Tears": The Case for Violet. In: Victorian Poetry 24:2, 1986, S. 99-113.
• Leo Spitzer: Tears, Idle Tears Again. In: Hopkins Review 5, 1952, S. 71-80.

Weblinks

• Simon Calder: ‘Tears, idle tears’: An Introduction to Reading Tennyson - Lektüreschlüssel auf den Seiten der anglistischen Fakultät der University of Cambridge.