A week or so ago, I quoted Lady Anne Gregory’s Cold, Sharp Lamentation and remarked that it seemed rather Tennysonian to me. So, to demonstrate that, is one of the earliest poems I ever learned by heart, with a similar emotional charge and very similar physical milieu. Tennyson is incomparably the better poet, of course, but this is an early work and the gap in thought and feeling, and the Romantic passion, is less than one might expect. This is Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Break, Break, Break:
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
O, well for the fisherman's boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!
Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.
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