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Perhaps unsurprisingly for a poem concerned with resting from one’s toils, “lethargic” is the overriding tone of “The Lotos-Eaters.” Tennyson tips us off to the lethargic quality of the poem from the very beginning, when the first rhyme in the opening stanza pairs “land” with “land” (lines 1 and 3). Whereas a working draft of the poem paired “land” with “strand,” Tennyson himself commented that he changed the latter to “land” because he preferred the “lazier” effect of the “no rhyme.” Tennyson uses repetition in a similar way throughout the poem, frequently repeating words in ways that emphasize the mariners’ growing lethargy. For instance, as the end of the poem’s first section approaches, repetition is used to reflect how the mariners have become increasingly wearied by the idea of returning to the sea (lines 41–43):

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"

Another, even more obvious sign of the poem’s lethargic tone is the general move toward longer lines. The stanza form of the poem’s first part suggests this movement, consisting as it does of eight pentameter lines followed by a hexameter line. Then, in the Choric Song, the lines grow to six, seven, and eight feet, creating a drowsy effect that mirrors the sleepiness of the mariners.

Tennyson further amplifies the lethargic tone in the dreamlike imagery and lush language that also characterize the poem. To take just one example, consider the speaker’s description of the streams running from the island’s mountain peaks down to the ocean (lines 10–13):

A land of streams! some, like a downward smoke,
Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go;
And some thro’ wavering lights and shadows broke,
Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below.

This description has an eerie, almost surreal quality in the way the speaker likens the falling streams to the slow pouring of smoke. Both the slowness of the movement and its downward direction contribute to the image’s dreamlike nature. After all, smoke tends to float up rather than stream down. Also dreamlike is the flickering of light and shadow that interferes with the sightline down to the ocean, which the speaker describes as “a slumbrous sheet of foam.” Even the sea is sleepy! Tennyson further emphasizes the dreamy lethargy of this image on a sonic level through sibilance. The predominance of S and SH sounds has a slowing and hushing effect that again conjure a drowsy sensation.

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