Though initially inspired by a trip Tennyson took to the Spanish Pyrenees with his close friend Arthur Hallam, “The Lotos-Eaters” takes Homer’s great epic, the Odyssey, as its main point of departure. During their protracted journey home to Ithaca after 10 years of war in Troy, Odysseus and his fellow Greeks stop at an unknown island. There, the company samples the mysterious local fruit and, growing weary and forgetful, longs to abandon their dangerous sea journey and retire on the island. Tennyson takes what is in fact a quite brief episode in the Odyssey and develops the material into a powerful meditation on existential toil, the pleasures of rest, and the longing for death. Though Tennyson isn’t generally known as a forward-thinking poet, the two-part structure of “The Lotos-Eaters” demonstrates surprising inventiveness. The poem’s first part uses an anonymous third-person speaker to detail the mariners’ arrival on the island. In the second part, labeled as a “Choric Song,” the mariners join their voices, singing in the first-person plural “we.” The formal regularity of the first part contrasts sharply with the irregularity of meter and rhyme in the second part. What results is a formally daring work that nonetheless retains the lush, symphonic language that is Tennyson’s signature.

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