"Tears, Idle Tears" Response

In Alfred Tennyson’s poem, “Tears, Idle Tears,” imagery and figurative language are used to reveal the pain of remembering the past. The narrator is sitting in the “happy Autumn-fields,/ and thinking of the days that are no more” (Tennyson 4,5). This allows the reader to vividly picture the field during the fall where the narrator is thinking about the past. He then describes the past as being as “fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail” (6). This simile compares the freshness of his past to how fresh the sunlight sparkles on the sail of a boat. Tennyson makes it very easy for the reader to visualize the scene he is putting into place. The narrator then moves to the past from being fresh to being sad. He describes how the morning songs of birds sound to the people who are dead. These songs are “so sad, [and] so strange”(15). The similes used in Tennyson’s poem help to reveal the attitude toward loss. Each stanza is concluded with “the days that are no more” (5, 10, 15, 20). This emphasizes the meaning behind a loss and how it can’t be brought back. In Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlett Letter, the protagonist, Hester Prynne, experiences loss. After committing adultery, Hester is forced to wear the letter “A” on her chest for the whole town to see. She loses her dignity and pride because of how much she is degraded in society for her sin. Because she lives in a Puritanical society, Hester loses everything she has worked for all of her life and becomes the very lowest of the lows in society. She is forced to work very hard in order to gain back some of her dignity in the community.