Next

“The Lotos-Eaters” takes place on a fictional island somewhere in the Aegean Sea. We can infer the poem’s location from its connection to Homer’s Odyssey, in which Odysseus and his mariners sail the Aegean Sea, attempting to reach the island of Ithaca after fighting in the Trojan War. “The Lotos-Eaters” is based on a brief episode from Homer’s epic in which the mariners land on an unknown island where they are offered lotos fruit by the native inhabitants. This fruit causes those who eat it to grow weary and lose interest in continuing their journey home. Whereas Homer’s narrative devotes very little space to this episode, Tennyson develops it in a way that centers on the island’s topography as well as its flourishing botanicals. The poem’s initial speaker describes the island in dreamy and even surreal terms that reflect the mariners’ desire to stay put and rest. As an example, consider the language the speaker uses to describe the island’s lush mountain terrain (lines 19–24):

The charmed sunset linger’d low adown
In the red West: thro’ mountain clefts the dale
Was seen far inland, and the yellow down
Border’d with palm, and many a winding vale
And meadow, set with slender galingale;
A land where all things always seem’d the same!

Every “dale” and “vale” is covered with botanicals—“border’d with palm” and “set with slender galingale.” Countering this lush vitality, however, is an insistence on the sun setting in the “red West,” an image of lowering that Tennyson emphasizes through near-identical rhyme of “adown” and “down.” The island of the lotos-eaters is thus a place of tremendous lethargy and ultimately, oblivion.

Next section Themes

Take a Study Break