Break, Break, Break
poem by Lord Tennyson
"Break, Break, Break" is a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson written during early 1835 and published in 1842. The poem is an elegy that describes Tennyson's feelings of loss after Arthur Henry Hallam died and his feelings of isolation while at Mablethorpe, Lincolnshire.
Themes
The poem describes feelings of loss, spoken by a man standing on the rocky sea shore. It has a strong biographical connection, containing Tennyson's feelings of melancholy and nostalgia. Tennyson captures his strong emotions in other poems, including Morte D' Arthur, "Tithonus", and "Ulysses". The suffering felt within the poem is connected to the suffering described in Tennyson's In Memoriam, in that they both describe longing for Tennyson's deceased friend Hallam. This longing is voiced in the third stanza of "Break, Break, Break".
"Break, Break, Break" can be classified as an elegy on the subject of Tennyson's feelings about Hallam. Like "On a Mourner," written a year before, both poems use a very simple style and describe a scene in minimalistic terms. This technique is later used in later elegies written by Tennyson, including "Crossing the Bar", "In the Garden at Swainston", and "To the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava".
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 29, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q4959227. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1835 and 1842.
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This entry incorporates text from “Break, Break, Break” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.