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The Wearisome Toil of Existence

One of the key themes of Tennyson poems relates to the wearisome toil that characterizes much of everyday existence. Tennyson develops this theme through the imaginative expansion of an otherwise brief episode from Homer’s Odyssey. Generally speaking, the Odyssey is a poem that follows Odysseus and his fellow Greeks as they sail home to Ithaca after fighting for ten years in the Trojan War. However, their toils don’t cease with the end of that protracted conflict. Odysseus accidentally angers Poseidon, the sea god, who then causes the Greeks immense trouble and causes their trip home to take 10 years. This is the broader context within which we meet Odysseus and his mariners as they land on the remote island of the lotos-eaters. Once they eat the lotos fruit and feel overcome by weariness, the mariners begin to reflect on how hard they’ve had it (lines 57–59):

Why are we weigh’d upon with heaviness,
And utterly consumed with sharp distress,
While all things else have rest from weariness?

Having previously been unable to “cease from [their] wanderings” (line 65), the mariners grow increasingly frustrated with the dreary toil of existence. They ultimately decide that “slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore [more sweet] / Than labour in the deep mid-ocean” (lines 171–72). Hence their conclusion: “we will not wander more” (line 173).

The (Melancholy) Pleasure of Rest

Though life may be full of weariness and toil, resting from one’s labors brings feelings of pleasure. This is precisely what the mariners discover after landing on the island of the lotos-eaters and sampling their signature fruit. As the drowsy effects of the lotos set in, the mariners are pervaded with sensations of sweetness (lines 37–40):

They sat them down upon the yellow sand,
Between the sun and moon upon the shore;
And sweet it was to dream of Fatherland,
Of child, and wife, and slave

Yet however “sweet” it is to think of home, this sweetness comes with a tinge of melancholy as the mariners, succumbing to their weariness, also recognize that they will never see home again (lines 40–45):

but evermore
Most weary seem’d the sea, weary the oar,
Weary the wandering fields of barren foam.
Then some one said, “We will return no more”;
And all at once they sang, “Our island home
Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam.”

The intermingling of pleasure and melancholy introduced here is threaded throughout the Choric Song that makes up the poem’s second half. There, the mariners sing a song that alternates between celebrating the sweetness of rest and complaining about the bitterness of toil. This antiphonal structure testifies to the way the pleasure of rest depends on weariness. In letting go of their physical and mental struggles, the mariners can now fully appreciate the sensual pleasures of the world around them. Most tellingly, they can now laze about on the shore, “eating the Lotos day by day” (line 105) and contemplating the aesthetic qualities of the violent sea that had otherwise caused them such suffering: “To watch the crisping ripples on the beach, / And tender curving lines of creamy spray” (lines 106–107).

The Relief of Death

The mariners’ lengthy meditation on rest isn’t simply about how good it feels to find an opportunity for leisure after time spent laboring. It’s also about how death provides relief from the existential exhaustion of life itself. Tennyson first introduces the notion of death in the final stanza of the poem’s first section. After eating the lotos fruit, the mariners sit down on the shore and look out over the ocean. They initially take pleasure in their thoughts of home, but as their weariness takes over, the island of Ithaca begins to seem impossibly far away: “Our island home / Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam” (lines 44–45). The phrase “beyond the wave” conjures the image of the horizon. By definition, nothing can cross the horizon line, since the horizon retreats into the distance as one attempts to approach it. This line, which even the imagination seems unable to cross, could be understood as a metaphor for death.

At this point in the poem death is tinged with melancholy, though later, in their Choric Song, the mariners come to frame death as the ultimate relief from life’s toils (lines 86–87 and 93–98):

Death is the end of life; ah, why
Should life all labour be?
. . .
Let us alone. What pleasure can we have
To war with evil? Is there any peace
In ever climbing up the climbing wave?
All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave
In silence; ripen, fall and cease:
Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.

Here, the mariners acknowledge the inevitability of death. However, they make this acknowledgment with acceptance rather than fear. Asking to be left alone, they imply that they seek “pleasure” and “peace” by rejecting “war” and refusing the kind of heroic achievement associated with “climbing up the climbing wave.” As the mariners put it elsewhere in the Choric Song, “There is no joy but calm!” (line 68). And death, it would seem, is the ultimate calm. In making this point, the mariners reference a common poetic trope that equates death with sleep, such that dying becomes a matter of “dreamful ease.” This trope returns at the poem’s end, where the mariners again opt for sleep over toil (lines 171–73):

Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore
Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;
O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.

By this point in the poem, it should be clear that the sweetness associated with “slumber” is metaphorically tied to the relief that comes with death.

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