Tennyson’s Timeless Truths: Poetry That Still Comforts and Inspires

Alfred Lord Tennyson, born this week – August 6, 1809 – wrote some of the simplest, most insightful, and most quoted poetry in the Western world. He also offered truth in quiet ways.

To him belong famous lines, within famous poems, and yet there are other poems no one recites, if not forgotten, barely remembered. Yet they resonate.

Many will recall Tennyson’s famous lines, which are so well known that people forget where they came from, a matter remedied without much work on his birthday.

He wrote, for example, these four in different poems, each arresting: “'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,”  “Ours is not to wonder why; ours is just to do or die,” “We are all a part of every person we have ever met,” “My strength is as the strength of ten, Because my heart is pure", and “What the sunshine is to the flower, the Lord Jesus Christ is to my soul.”

He was a man who attended to others, including his widowed mother for years, and was admired by Queen Victoria, yet could write so simply, with such comfort that his poems were destined to become enduring sources of strength and consolation for more than centuries.

Among the many seldom celebrated is this one, entitled just “The Owl.”

When cats run home and light is come,
And dew is cold upon the ground,
And the far-off stream is dumb,
And the whirring sail goes round,
And the whirring sail goes round;
Alone and warming his five wits,
The white owl in the belfry sits.

When merry milkmaids click the latch,
And rarely smells the new-mown hay,
And the cock hath sung beneath the thatch
Twice or thrice his roundelay,
Twice or thrice his roundelay;
Alone and warming his five wits,
The white owl in the belfry sits.

Many read the poem as a simple description of the busy village routines, and the contrast of the white owl, simple and observant in the belfry, the top of a church. Others attribute to the owl qualities tied to his presence in the church.

To me, the point is simpler, that we have all the activity of life, the many views on truth; then we have the belfry, itself unmoving, unchanging, and truth itself, beacon, wisdom, purity, white and still in a busy world.

Whatever you think, on his birthday, it is nice to consider the truths poetically offered, even two centuries later, most in quiet ways.