Topic 4

To explore assessment objective 4 – ‘Personal Response’ - we will be looking at Tennyson’s poem ‘Song: Tears, Idle Tears’

Tennyson himself tells us that this poem came to him one Autumn on a visit to Tintern Abbey.

Personal response is not just about your own memories or experiences. Even if you had been to Tintern Abbey, it would not influence your critical reaction to Tenyson’s poem.

AO4 communicate a sensitive and informed personal response.

‘Communicate’ suggests that a personal response involves writing as well as reading skills. You need to shape your writing in a way which communicates your sensitive engagement with the text.

AO4 asks for your appreciation and evaluation of the poem.

This requires at least two readings. An initial overview identifies the overall emotions communicated by the poem, but a deeper appreciation of the mood it creates in the reader, depends on analysing the tone of the writing.

A personal response begins with an overview of the poem. The poem is called a song which tells you this poem is someone speaking or singing directly to you: a lyric.

They are singing about a feeling of sadness or nostalgia for the past, which they can’t quite pinpoint or define.

In stanza 1 where are the emotive words, which appeal to your emotions and call out for a personal response?

The image of tears rising in the heart makes no sense literally or scientifically, but it appeals to us emotionally because we metaphorically see the heart as the source of emotions. Stanza 2 is based around contrasting images of sails and sun: the ‘fresh’ image of arrival and the ‘sad’ image of the sinking sun and of departure.

Does the painting here illustrate an arrival or a departure? What do these contrasting ideas have in common? The emotive heart of stanza 2 is obvious: ‘friends’ and ‘all we love’.

Notice how the images are coloured by golds and reds, and by contrasting rising and falling vocabulary and rhythms.

We can also see that stanza 2 has a refrain, a repeated phrase from the end of the first stanza which is repeated in later stanzas: ‘the days that are no more’.

We now feel the poem is provoking a complex set of emotions in response to memories of the past, with images of both joy and sadness.

The patterns of the poem suggest that it is full of comparisons, and the poet chooses similes to compare this experience to other experiences and perhaps encourages you to think of similar experiences of your own, whether in real life or in your reading.

Stanza 3 appears to be an extended metaphor and seems to tell a particular story or memory. The poem is full of patterns of repetition and small variations - compare ‘so strange’ here with ‘so fresh’ in the previous stanza.

In stanza 4 we have moved back from a particular idea to a series of more general similes. All of these comparisons try to define the ‘tears’ and link them to experiences, and finally we have a mysterious final line -’ ‘O Death in Life, the days that are not more’ - in which the abstract ideas of life and death are personified in order for you to picture what the speaker is weeping over.

The days that have passed are a reminder of death in life, and an indication of mortality.

The poem seems to be a memento mori, in other words a reminder of our own mortality.

This is very gloomy subject and a first personal response might be that the poem is morbid, or depressing.

However, poets use images and sounds in more complex ways than this, and the poem makes its sad and dark images appealing and not just gloomy. For example, the image of autumn could be seen as beautiful and happy rather than sad and depressing.

We have so far focused on the ‘sensitive’ more than the informed part of AO4.

We are sensitive to imagery and sound, and informed by the words of the texts. Is any other information needed for an ‘informed personal response?

How helpful is it to know what a poet said his poem was about?

How helpful is it to know that:

Tennyson told friends that the poem was about feelings he often had as a young boy and it was not about ‘real woe’.

Tennyson’s poem ‘In Memoriam’, responded to the death of his friend who was buried south of Tintern.

The song was set to music many times, and was a ‘hit’ in Victorian times.

By the time the poem was published, Tennyson was an established poet and Poet Laureate.

All this information is interesting, but it does not replace your own personal response, and it shows you that the mood of the reader is more significant than the mood of the writer.

Comments and information about their lives might help to reinforce your own interpretation, but they don’t replace it.

AO4 teaches us to trust our instincts, informed by the language and imagery of the text.

You should think your own response is valid as long as it is firmly grounded in analysis and interpretation of the text.