Enotes on Crossing The Bar – Alfred Tennyson

Brief Idea

The religious faith expressed in this poem is extremely strong. The poet,
comparing his dying to the departure of a ship on a voyage into unknown
seas, feels no fear and no reluctance at the prospect of leaving life; he has
completely surrendered his will to the force which will carry him away.
He knows that his soul may be taken far from all he has ever known, but
trusts that he will, at last, see the God whose nature and will he has been
able only to infer while on earth.
Tennyson asked that this poem be placed at the end of all editions of his
poetry, for this simple, muted lyric is his final thought on death. The tone
is one of quiet acceptance and of faith undisturbed. He compares his
journey into death with the passage of a ship away from the land and
beyond the bar of sand at the entrance to the harbor, and hopes that his
end will come quietly and without turmoil, his soul returning to eternity
as a tide returns to the depths of the ocean, silently, with no turbulence
and strife where the water flows by the bar.

Themes and Meanings

The enduring popularity of this short, meditative lyric lies in its ability to
appeal to many people on many levels, despite attempts to limit it to one
interpretation. The poem’s themes of death and dying have made it a
popular selection for memorial services over the years, including
Tennyson’s own. The poem, however, has significance for all readers.
Daily life, a journey in itself, requires individuals to travel regularly from
the safety of home, across a threshold, and into the unknown. Like the
world of Tennyson’s traveler, the world beyond the safe region is dark
and mysterious, yet at day’s end, people return home.
In this way, “Crossing the Bar” draws parallels between familiar and
repeated patterns of ordinary, daily routine with nature’s daily cycles,
such as night and day and the flow and ebb of the tide. Similarly,
Tennyson includes the “evening star” and the Pilot as reminders of
sources that guide individuals. These elements eloquently diminish the
horror of death by drawing attention to the fact that the journey into
death is merely part of a cycle: The going out is also a return home to
“the boundless deep,” from which this traveler, like all people, came.
The themes of sea and death recur frequently in Tennyson’s life and
work. As a child, Tennyson first saw the sea on a family vacation at
Mablethorpe on the Lincolnshire coast, a place he revisited often for
comfort and solitude when an adult. One critic posits that the poet
somehow mentally linked the sea at Mablethorpe with the
Mediterranean and the Aegean. This seems to be the case in works like
“Ulysses”(1842), a poem about the famous epic hero’s final voyage at the
end of his life. Like the traveler in “Crossing the Bar,” Ulysses, now an
old man, sails off into the Mediterranean for one final adventure rather
than simply yielding to death at home. In “The Passing of Arthur”
(1869), Tennyson again connects voyage and death, giving readers the
enduring picture of King Arthur’s bier floating out on the dark lake into
the unknown. In each case, as in this simple lyric, the final voyage is
majestic and dignified.
Even with its strong Christian overtones, “Crossing the Bar” appeals to a
universal audience of all faiths and even nonbelievers. Everyone can
respond to the image of the journey into the unknown. Tennyson
carefully avoids using the words “heaven” and “hell,” “reward” and
“punishment.” In Tennyson’s view the final crossing includes no
judgment. Dying, then, is simply a stage, and the afterlife, a return home
to the same unknown place from which individuals emerge. The Pilot,
perhaps the clearest reference to God, is, in the poet’s own words, “the
Divine Presence”—God and yet not necessarily the Christian God, but all
the same some greater power that controls and guides human activity.

Analysis

Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar” is a sixteen-line poem

divided into four four-line stanzas of differing metrical structure. The
predominantly iambic lines vary in length, ranging from four-syllable
lines (dimeters) to ten-syllable, iambic pentameter lines. The stanzas
follow a consistent abab rhyme pattern.
The opening line establishes the poem’s temporal setting, an unspecified
ship that is ready to sail at sunset. As the sun descends, the light of the
evening star, a beacon for mariners, rises. Line 9 again draws attention
to the approaching evening but calls it “twilight” rather than “sunset.”
Once the final rays of light disappear, darkness will cover the world. This
element neatly divides the poem into two sections, each containing 2
stanzas.
On the literal level, Tennyson’s poem begins with the barest elements of
setting. A ship is about to set sail on a long voyage at “Sunset and
evening star.” After a formal announcement, the “one clear call,” the
vessel will sail out of the harbor, across the sandbar at the harbor’s
entrance, and into the sea. The anxious passenger, the poem’s persona,
hopes for a gentle crossing out of the harbor, one without turbulence
associated with “moaning of the bar.” Instead, he hopes for a tide that is
“Too full for sound and foam” because such a gentle tide would be like
the one “which drew [him] out the boundless deep” and into port. This
realization allows the traveler to think of this voyage out as if it were
merely a voyage “again home.”
The second section of the poem (stanzas 3 and 4) echoes the poem’s first
line with a second reference to the approaching night. Instead of the
clear call, the sound of the “evening bell” signals the darkness and the
scheduled sailing. Hoping for a cheerful departure, one with “no sadness
of farewell,” the persona senses the importance of this journey, whose
course will lead far beyond the limits of “Time and Place.” Still, the
persona takes confidence in the hope of seeing the “Pilot face to face”
after crossing the bar that separates the harbor and sea.
Perhaps one of Tennyson’s best-known short poems, “Crossing the Bar”
also has a interesting history. Written in October, 1889, the poem was
conceived as an expression of thanksgiving. Tennyson, then eighty, had
recently recovered from a serious illness. Biographers point out that the
poem was written on the back of an envelope in twenty minutes, the
length of the ferry crossing from Lymington to Yarmouth on the Isle of
Wight. The poem gained immediate popularity and was eventually set to
music. It was one of two anthems sung three years later at the poet
laureate’s funeral in Westminster Abbey on October 12, 1892. At
Tennyson’s request, the poem is included as the final poem in all editions
of his poetry.

Forms and Devices

At first glance, “Crossing the Bar” seems simple and uncomplicated in its
rhyme scheme and metrics. The four-line quatrains resemble ballad
stanzas, with their alternating rhymes that are consistently masculine
and exact. Tennyson, however, carefully manipulated the rhymes,
making “bar” a rhyming word in the first and last stanzas of the poem.
Another skillful variation occurs with the metrics. Rather than
employing the traditional pattern of the ballad, Tennyson extends one
line in each of the first three stanzas into a single, graceful iambic
pentameter line. In the final stanza, the first and third lines are
pentameters. This changes the rhythm and even creates a wavelike
motion. The poem’s rhythm slows down with the final line, “When I have
crossed the bar,” and ends powerfully on a final, accented syllable, the
word “bar.”
The simple language of this poem again recalls the ballad, and like the
ballad the poem uses familiar vocabulary. Most of the words are
common and monosyllabic, such as “star,” “call,” and “home.” In fact,
the poem contains no words of more than two syllables. The word
“bourne,” however, deserves attention. The one-syllable word, an
obsolete term meaning “boundary” or “limit,” stands out. Here it refers
to a geographical boundary between harbor and ocean. At the same time,
it applies equally well a spiritual boundary, one that separates the
temporal world and the limitless regions beyond. In addition, “bourne”
resembles words found in folk ballads, but the word’s simplicity and
eloquence suit the poem perfectly.
The eloquence of “Crossing the Bar” lies in its use of metaphor. Like so
many works dealing with the sea, its central metaphor compares a sea
voyage to the final journey that is part of the human condition, the
journey from life to death. Tennyson’s numerous correspondences raise
the poem beyond the level of mere metaphor to the realm of allegory.
Almost every aspect of the poem works on two levels, literal and
allegorical. Thus the journey across the bar becomes the crossing from
the harbor of life into the dark, unknown sea or the afterlife. The twilight
setting lends a sense of foreboding, for the approach of darkness and the
sun’s setting in the west are traditional references to death. Images such
as the “moaning of the bar” and the “sadness of farewell” enhance the
somber tone and apply aptly to both dying and the voyage. The sandbar
that separates the harbor from the sea becomes the demarcation
between life and death.
Even the tidal motion of the sea has significance. Like the traveler,
everyone hopes for a peaceful crossing of the bar, one whose “moving
seems asleep” because it is “Too full for sound and foam.” No one knows
what the moment of dying will actually be like, so the journey into death
is generally frightening. The traveler finds comfort in the paradoxical
nature of the journey, which is both a departure and a homecoming.
Furthermore, it will allow Tennyson’s traveler to see the Pilot “face to
face” after crossing into to death. In capitalizing “Pilot,” Tennyson
equates the Pilot with God, but God in the guise of a specially qualified
mariner who guides the ship through difficult waters in and out of the
harbor.
The presence of the Pilot, however, has caused considerable controversy.
The poem suggests that the Pilot appears only after the ship has “crossed
the bar” rather than quitting the ship after passing the obstacle.
Tennyson explained that the Pilot had been aboard all along, identifying
him as “that Divine and Unseen Who is always guiding us.”