Performing "The Solitary Reaper" and "Tears, Idle Tears." - interpretive versus aesthetic literary criticism

"Every short poem," Tennyson once remarked, "should have a definite shape, like the curve, sometimes a single, sometimes a double one, assumed by a severed tress or the rind of an apple when flung on the floor."(40) In many lyric poems there is a movement of thought, the configuration of which is the shape of the poem. There is no such movement in "Tears," but rather a back-and-forth, slowly oscillating motion that expresses a condition of being. The dominant figures and locutions are oxymoronic: "divine despair"; "sad and fresh"; "sad and strange"; "dark . . . dawns"; "Death in Life." The conjunction of opposing states has a similar effect: rising tears/happy fall of the year; looking/thinking; rising sun/sinking sun; the light of nature dawning while the light of sense is being extinguished; real kisses/ feigned kisses. And other details similarly suggest a suspension between two states: half-awakened birds; a man hovering between life and death; "idle tears." On the literal level, the tears gather to the eyes but do not fall; they idle there. The phrase may be equally taken as a transferred epithet suggesting the suspended state of the speaker's consciousness.

A simultaneous centripetal, downward-and-inward movement gives the poem a double shape. There is a gradual deepening and intensifying of emotion as the contrasting images and conditions become more and more intervolved. This can be traced by noting the changes in the dominant or focusing sense in each stanza and the way in which the objects of perception become increasingly closer to their subjects. Sight is dominant in the second stanza, and the objects of visual perception are at a distance. As the Victorian critic R. H. Hutton explained: the mingled freshness and sadness in contemplating the days that are no more are likened to "a mixture of the feelings with which we see the light upon an approaching sail that brings us friends from the other hemisphere, and the light upon a retreating sail which takes them away thither; for does not the memory of those days both bring and take away? does it not restore us the vivid joy of the past only to make us feel that it is vanished?"(41)

The third stanza, in which both sight and sound figure, presents a partially analogous situation. The contrast between dawning sun and closing eyes is similar to the dawning/waning contrast of the previous stanza; but we are now indoors, in a confined space. And the waning is that of dying eyes in which the objects of visual perception blur into "a glimmering square" (as if tears have gathered in them). The glimmer recalls the glitter of the previous stanza; but while the latter is hard and constant, the former suggests a simultaneous brightening and fading. There is thus no need for a contrasting image, as reddening was needed to complement glittering.

The final stanza is the culmination of both the oscillating and the centripetal movement. The dominant sense is touch, in which (in contrast to sight and sound) there is an interaction between perceiver and perceived. And when memories of real kisses and of feigned kisses become equally affecting, the distinction between objective and subjective, palpable and impalpable, has disappeared. The adjectives "deep" and "wild" refer as much to the consciousness of the speaker as to the memories; the stanza's penultimate line is the only line in the poem that "ends with a sharp closed syllable--regret--a poetic stop to this hitherto fluent emotion";(42) and there is a further note of finality in "Death in Life," which picks up from the second stanza the subterranean suggestiveness of "underworld."