Tears Idle

This poem is a blank verse because it unrhymed iambic pentameter. It is a 4 stanza quintet."Tears, Idle Tears" is structured by a pattern of unusual adjectives used to describe the memory of the past. In the second stanza, these adjectives are a chiastic x the memory of the birth of friendship is "fresh," whereas the loss of these friends is "sad"; thus when the "days that are no more" are described as both "sad" and "fresh," these words have been preemptively loaded with meaning and connotation: our sense of the "sad" and "fresh" past evokes these blossomed and withered friendships. This stanza's image of the boat sailing to and from the underworld recalls Virgil's image of the boatman Charon, who ferries the dead to Hades.

In the third stanza, the memory of the past is described as x The "sad" adjective is introduced in the image of a man on his deathbed who is awake for his very last morning. However, "strangeness" enters in, too, for it is strange to the dying man that as his life is ending, a new day is beginning. To a person hearing the birds' song and knowing he will never hear it again, the twittering will be imbued with an unprecedented significance--the dying man will hear certain melancholy tones for the first time, although, strangely and paradoxically, it is his last.

The final stanza contains a wave of adjectives that rush over us--now no longer confined within a neat chiasmic structure--as the poem reaches its last, climactic lament: x The repetition of the word "deep" recalls the "depth of some divine despair," which is the source of the tears in the first stanza. However, the speaker is also "wild with all regret" in thinking of the irreclaimable days gone by. The image of a "Death in Life" recalls the dead friends of the second stanza who are like submerged memories that rise to the surface only to sink down once again. This "Death in Life" also recalls the experience of dying in the midst of the rebirth of life in the morning, described in the third stanza. The poet's climactic exclamation in the final line thus represents a culmination of the images developed in the previous stanzas.