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Tithonus
POEM TEXT 40 Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise,
41 And shake the darkness from their loosen'd manes,
1 The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, 42 And beat the twilight into flakes of fire.
2 The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
43 Lo! ever thus thou growest beautiful
3 Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
44 In silence, then before thine answer given
4 And after many a summer dies the swan.
45 Departest, and thy tears are on my cheek.
5 Me only cruel immortality
6 Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
46 Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears,
7 Here at the quiet limit of the world,
47 And make me tremble lest a saying learnt,
8 A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream
48 In days far-off, on that dark earth, be true?
9 The ever-silent spaces of the East,
49 'The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.'
10 Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.
50 Ay me! ay me! with what another heart
11 Alas! for this gray shadow, once a man—
51 In days far-off, and with what other eyes
12 So glorious in his beauty and thy choice,
52 I used to watch—if I be he that watch'd—
13 Who madest him thy chosen, that he seem'd
53 The lucid outline forming round thee; saw
14 To his great heart none other than a God!
54 The dim curls kindle into sunny rings;
15 I ask'd thee, 'Give me immortality.'
55 Changed with thy mystic change, and felt my blood
16 Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile,
56 Glow with the glow that slowly crimson'd all
17 Like wealthy men, who care not how they give.
57 Thy presence and thy portals, while I lay,
18 But thy strong Hours indignant work'd their wills,
58 Mouth, forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm
19 And beat me down and marr'd and wasted me,
59 With kisses balmier than half-opening buds
20 And tho' they could not end me, left me maim'd
60 Of April, and could hear the lips that kiss'd
21 To dwell in presence of immortal youth,
61 Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet,
22 Immortal age beside immortal youth,
62 Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing,
23 And all I was, in ashes. Can thy love,
63 While Ilion like a mist rose into towers.
24 Thy beauty, make amends, tho' even now,
25 Close over us, the silver star, thy guide, 64 Yet hold me not for ever in thine East:
26 Shines in those tremulous eyes that fill with tears 65 How can my nature longer mix with thine?
27 To hear me? Let me go: take back thy gift: 66 Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold
28 Why should a man desire in any way 67 Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet
29 To vary from the kindly race of men 68 Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam
30 Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance 69 Floats up from those dim fields about the homes
31 Where all should pause, as is most meet for all? 70 Of happy men that have the power to die,
71 And grassy barrows of the happier dead.
32 A soft air fans the cloud apart; there comes
72 Release me, and restore me to the ground;
33 A glimpse of that dark world where I was born.
73 Thou seëst all things, thou wilt see my grave:
34 Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals
74 Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;
35 From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure,
75 I earth in earth forget these empty courts,
36 And bosom beating with a heart renew'd.
76 And thee returning on thy silver wheels.
37 Thy cheek begins to redden thro' the gloom,
38 Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine,
39 Ere yet they blind the stars, and the wild team

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felt my blood glow with the same sunrise warmth that slowly
SUMMARY flushed your body and your palace, while I lay there with my
mouth, my forehead, my eyelids all warm and dampened with
The woods rot away; the woods rot away and fall. The mists
your kisses, sweeter than newly opened spring flowers. I could
drizzle their burden of water on the ground. Human beings are
hear the very lips that kissed me whispering mysterious, wild,
born and farm the fields and are buried beneath them; after
sweet words—like the song I once heard Apollo singing above
long lives, swans die. But I am endlessly devoured by
Troy, whose towers rose up as pale and ethereal as mists.
immortality: I lie in your arms, Eos, and wither away. Here in the
silence of the world's farthest limits, I resemble a white-haired Please don't keep me here forever in your eastern domain. How
shadow; like a dream, I wander the silent palaces of the East, can my deathless age carry on next to your immortal youth?
their mists upon mists, the shining halls of the morning. Your warm, glowing shadows feel cold to me, your rosy light
feels cold to me, and my withered feet feel cold as I pass
Pity me, a shadowy figure who was once a man—a man so
through the shimmering doorways of your palace, while (far
gloriously beautiful and so gloriously lucky to be chosen by you
below) the morning mists rise from the fields and homes of the
that he felt, in his puffed-up heart, that he must be a god
lucky people who are able to die, and from the grassy tombs of
himself. I asked you, Eos, to make me immortal. Smiling, you
the even luckier people who are already dead. Let me go; give
granted my wish, as casually as a wealthy man hands out
me back to the earth. You can see everything: you'll see my
money. But your servants the Hours, offended, worked away on
grave, too. Your beauty will arise afresh over and over, morning
me: they battered me and spoiled me and withered me. Though
by morning. And I, nothing more than dirt in dirt, will forget this
they couldn't kill me, they left me disfigured and aged, forced to
hollow palace, and forget the sight of you returning home in
live alongside you and your immortal youth—age that can't die
your silver-wheeled chariot.
next to youth that will never grow old. And everything that I
once was lay destroyed. Can your love for me, your beauty,
make up for this suffering?—even now, as the silver star that
guides you hangs right over our heads and reflects in your eyes,
THEMES
which tremble with tears at my words? Please let me die. Take
back the gift of immortality. Why should any man want to be set OLD AGE AND DEATH
apart from the rest of the gentle human race, or trespass In “Tithonus,” Tennyson examines the legendary
beyond the reasonable limits of human life—the boundary figure of that same name: a prince of Troy who
where everyone should stop, as is right and fitting? became the lover of the dawn goddess Eos (a.k.a. Aurora). Eos
A gentle breeze parts the clouds, and I see below me a glimpse made Tithonus immortal so that the two could be together
of the dark world I came from. Once again I see that old forever; sadly, she forgot to specify that he should be
mysterious shimmer on your lovely forehead and on your lovely immortally young. Tithonus thus became impossibly ancient.
shoulders, and feel your heart beating with fresh strength. Your The miserable Tithonus is this poem’s speaker, and his
cheek starts to blush through the darkness; your beautiful eyes, reflections capture the dreadful pain of old age—and the mercy
looking into mine, slowly brighten—though they have not yet of death. Death, in this poem, is kindly: humanity simply wasn’t
grown so bright as they will be when they put out the light of meant to live forever, and to one day become “earth in earth” is
the stars, when the wild band of horses who love you will rise no terrible doom, but a natural relief.
up, eager for you to hitch them to your chariot—when they will The aged Tithonus feels horribly out of place in the “gleaming
shake off the dark of night from their manes and charge halls of morn”—the celestial palaces he shares with his lover
through the twilight, fanning its faded coals into the fresh Eos. “Marr’d” (or disfigured) and “wasted” (or shrivelled) by the
flames of sunrise. long, merciless passage of time, he’s a “shadow” of his youthful
Oh! You always begin shining this way, without speaking, and self. He can no longer enjoy the pleasures of love in his broken
before you give me any answer, you leave me, your tears still old body. Where once he used to share in Eos’s mysterious
wet on my face. “change” as she glowed and renewed every morning (like the
Why must you always frighten me with your crying? You make dawn of which she is the goddess), now he feels alienated from
me shake, fearing that a saying I heard long ago on earth is true: that gorgeous eternal youth; the only embrace he shares with
"Even the gods can't take back their gifts." his one-time lover these days is one that leaves his face wet
with Eos’s guilty tears. His impossible, endless old age, in other
Alas, alas: how differently I felt, long ago, and how differently I words, has robbed him of all life’s pleasures, leaving him
saw—if that long-lost self was even the same person as me—the marooned in a world that can no longer make him happy.
shimmering light beginning to gather around you, and your
dark hair beginning to catch fire and glow with sunlight. As I Most mortals escape the pains of their later years the old-
watched you make this magical transformation, I changed, too: I fashioned way: by dying. For the immortal Tithonus, however,

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that simply isn’t an option. Though he begs Eos to “take back is “meet for all” (that is, fitting for everyone) to die one day. Any
[her] gift” and let him die, she doesn’t seem able to do so. attempt to go past the place where “all should pause,” the poem
Tithonus is thus robbed of his only possible release. His longing suggests, invites bitterly ironic doom.
for death and envy of “those happy men that have the power to
die” reminds readers that death, so often imagined as a terror Where this theme appears in the poem:
to be fled, is in fact a necessary, natural, even merciful part of
human life. Old age, with its frailty and loss, is far more unkind. • Lines 11-31

Perhaps the poem even suggests that this embrace of death is a

kind of wisdom that only comes with age. The arrogant young GRIEF AND MEMORY
Tithonus could never have imagined wanting his glorious life to The story of “Tithonus” can be read, not just as a
be over. The elderly Tithonus wants nothing more than to be haunting tale of a wish gone bad, but as an extended
among the “happier dead.” metaphor for the experience of grief. The juxtaposition of the
eternally aging Tithonus with the eternally youthful Eos
Where this theme appears in the poem: mirrors the experience of a person mourning a loved one who
• Lines 1-76 died too young. The survivor keeps getting older, but the lost
one seems trapped in amber, never aging. (This was an
experience all too familiar to Tennyson: he drafted this poem
HUBRIS AND TRANSGRESSION shortly after his beloved friend Arthur Henry Hallam died at
Like the tragic Greek figure that he is, this poem’s the age of only 22.) Part of the pain of grief, the poem suggests,
Tithonus (the immortal, impossibly ancient lover of is the sense that a happier, more beautiful time remains frozen
the dawn goddess Eos) has a fatal flaw: pride. Smug about being in one’s memory: always present, but just out of reach. Perhaps
chosen as a goddess's lover, he asks her to make him immortal, such memories, no matter how lovely, can even start to feel like
and in so doing transgresses a grave boundary, the law that a prison.
says all mortals must one day die. Now, he suffers the Every day, the withered Tithonus is confronted with the sight
consequences. “Immortal age beside immortal youth,” he of his beloved Eos lighting up with the sunrise. Like the dawn of
discovers, is no fun at all. His hubris (or fatal arrogance) which she is the goddess, she shines brighter as night turns into
destroys him. Enticing as it might seem to go beyond the “goal morning: her eyes “brighten,” her cheek “redden[s],” and her
of ordinance” (that is, the natural limits of human life), this poem “bosom beat[s] with a heart renew’d.” In other words, she’s the
suggests that the wise mortal accepts their nature rather than very picture of fresh and glowing youth, always as beautiful as
trying to escape it. she was when Tithonus first loved her. Her “renew[al]” only
In the happier days when Tithonus asked Eos to “’give [him] keeps her the same: she’s an eternal vision of “immortal youth.”
immortality,’” he remembers, he felt like he was a special Tithonus, meanwhile, gets older and older, sadder and sadder,
person, singled out for greatness. Inflated with the pleasure of wasting away into a tragic “shadow” of his former self.
being “chosen” by a gorgeous goddess, Tithonus saw himself as Eos’s youth and beauty thus become an inescapable torment to
better and different than other people—in fact, as “none other Tithonus—just as the unchanging memory of dead loved ones
than a God!” might torment those who survive them. Trapped in Eos’s
But Grecian grandiosity, famously
famously, never leads to good things. "gleaming halls of morn," unable even to escape his suffering
Eos responds to Tithonus’s hubris with her own careless through his own death, Tithonus can be read as an image of a
exercise of power: she grants his wish for immortality as mourner paralyzed by changeless images of the person they’ve
casually as “wealthy men, who care not what they give.” But she lost. Perhaps only the mourner's own death can free them from
seems to have forgotten Tithonus's mortal nature as much as the prison of memory.
he has. It’s a real god-mistake to forget to make one’s lover
immortally young, not just immortal; Eos's omission is a Where this theme appears in the poem:
reminder that gods, unlike mortals, never need to worry about • Lines 1-76
aging! In short, both Eos and Tithonus ignore what Tithonus
really is: an ordinary mortal man, no matter how handsome he
is, no matter whom he’s dating.
LINE-BY
LINE-BY-LINE
-LINE ANAL
ANALYSIS
YSIS
Tithonus’s hubristic belief that he should live forever
transgresses the bounds not just of his own nature, but of LINES 1-6
human nature. As the sadder, wiser, older Tithonus laments, it’s
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
only a fool who wishes to “vary from the kindly race of men”: it
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,

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Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, unrhymed iambic pentameter. That means that each of the
And after many a summer dies the swan. poem’s lines uses five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM
DUM
Me only cruel immortality rhythm (with occasional variations for flavor). Here’s how that
Consumes: sounds in line 1:
“Tithonus” begins with a bird’s-eye view of a withering world.
The poem’s speaker looks out from a great height over vast The woods | deca
cayy, | the woods | deca
cayy | and fall
fall,
stretches of space and time. As he watches, “the woods decay
and fall”; clouds gather and rain descends; generations of This is the grand rhythm of Shakespearean tragedy and
people are born, farm the land, and die; and the long-lived Miltonic epic, and it lends Tithonus’s story a sorrowful weight.
“swan” at last dies, too.
LINES 6-10
These melancholy visions are seen through the eyes of
I wither slowly in thine arms,
Tithonus, the legendary figure after whom the poem is titled. In
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
Greek mythology, Tithonus was a Trojan prince who fell in love
A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream
with Eos, the goddess of the dawn. Wanting to prolong their joy
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
infinitely, Tithonus begged his divine lover to immortalize him.
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.
She did so—but forgot to specify that he should be immortally
young. Tithonus thus became unimaginably old: eternally The poem’s first lines feel like a lament directed at no one in
wasting away, unable to die. particular. In line 6, though, Tithonus reveals that he’s speaking
to someone: Eos herself. “I wither slowly in thine arms,” he tells
Tithonus’s first words suggest that he’s already deep into his
her. The image might put readers in mind of a sickbed where a
terrible, endless old age. The weary epizeuxis of “the
the woods
sad visitor embraces a dying loved one. Here, though, that
deca
decayy, the woods deca
decayy and fall” suggests that he’s seen forest
loved one will never and can never die; there’s immortal grief
after forest rise and rot away, frail as flowers, while epochs
and immortal suffering in Tithonus’s slow and endless
pass. And the polysyndeton of "man comes and tills the fields
withering.
and lies beneath" captures the one-thing-after-another circle of
life ticking ceaselessly away beneath Tithonus’s gaze. Readers might wonder what Eos makes of Tithonus’s words
here. Her only possible answer to the information “I wither
His other images suggest that his broad, immortal view of the
slowly in thine arms” would be, “I know.” Perhaps there’s
world has only saddened him. Looking on the heavy “vapours”
something the tiniest bit accusatory in Tithonus’s tone: he
that gather before rainfall, he personifies them, imagining that
spells out the terrible facts for which Eos is (partly) responsible,
when the rain comes, they mournfully “weep.” And his allusion
and of which Eos is already miserably aware.
to the swan, which lives “many a summer” before it dies, raises
echoes of a poignant old legend: swans were said to be Tithonus and Eos rest at the “quiet limit of the world,” a place
astonishingly long-lived, and to be silent until the moment of right on the boundary between the mortal and the divine
their deaths, when they sang lolovvely
ely,, unearthly songs
songs. realms. These are the “ever-silent spaces of the East,” the
“gleaming halls of morn”—the palaces of the morning, where the
These are visions of release as much as sorrow and death. The
goddess of the dawn resides, naturally. From these “gleaming
“vapours weep their burthen to the ground”; in other words, as
halls,” Tithonus and Eos look out over an endless stretch of “far-
they cry, a burden falls from them, and they’re freed. Readers
folded mists,” one layered on the other like silks. This palace
might imagine those soft clouds melting away not long after
seems to be somewhere high in the sky. All the imagery around
their tearful showers. And the swan’s death hints at a climactic,
this enchanted place conjures up a soft and shining grandeur:
transcendent beauty, a moment of glory that comes just before
the pale, silent brightness of the earliest morning reigns
it's all over—and because it’s all over.
eternally here.
Such releases are not for the immortal Tithonus. In this In this ethereal landscape, Tithonus feels himself to be nothing
dramatic monologue (a poem spoken in the voice of a particular more than a “white-haired shadow roaming like a dream.” That
character), Tithonus will lament that, while he knows the circle double-barreled moment of figurfigurativ
ativee language
language—the metaphor
of life and death more intimately than any other human being of the shadow meeting the simile of the dream—suggests just
ever could, he can’t participate in it himself. As he puts it, “Me how fragile and immaterial Tithonus feels, and how out of tune
only cruel immortality / Consumes.” Death devours everyone he is with his gorgeous home. As a “shadow,” he’s frail and
else; for him, it’s eternal life that, like Prometheus’s vulture
vulture, insubstantial, only an outline of what he once was—and he
gnaws away at him endlessly without ever releasing him into stands in sad, dark contrast with his sunny beloved. As a
oblivion. The divine gift of immortality has become, for “dream,” he has no solid reality, here or anywhere. He doesn’t fit
Tithonus, an ironic and nightmarish curse. in with his surroundings; he’s clearly not a god. But he wouldn’t
Tennyson tells this haunting tale in blank vverse
erse—that is, fit in with the mortal world, either. The “quiet limit of the world”

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suits him in one way only: like that “limit,” he’s betwixt and LINES 18-23
between, liminal, not one thing or another. But thy strong Hours indignant work'd their wills,
In his sufferings, perhaps he’s less like a dream, more like a And beat me down and marr'd and wasted me,
nightmare. And tho' they could not end me, left me maim'd
To dwell in presence of immortal youth,
LINES 11-17 Immortal age beside immortal youth,
Alas! for this gray shadow, once a man— And all I was, in ashes.
So glorious in his beauty and thy choice,
When Eos granted his wish for immortality, Tithonus
Who madest him thy chosen, that he seem'd
remembers, he didn’t have long to relish his triumph. Eos’s
To his great heart none other than a God!
servants—the personified “Hours”—took grave offense at this
I ask'd thee, 'Give me immortality.'
subversion of the natural order. And, because Eos forgot to give
Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile,
Tithonus immortal youth, those Hours could have their way
Like wealthy men, who care not how they give.
with him. They behaved like hired goons, roughing Tithonus up:
Here, a new stanza begins with an old idea: Tithonus reiterates
that he’s a shadow now, a “gray shadow” of the man he once But thy strong Hours indignant work'd their wills,
was. That long-lost man, he remembers, was really something. And beat me down and marr'd and wasted me,
In his youth, he says, he was “glorious in his beauty,” truly hot And tho' they could not end me, left me maim'd
stuff—but he felt all the more glorious for being Eos’s “choice.”
To be picked out as a goddess’s lover, to be her “chosen” one, is These violent lines get at the special iron
ironyy of Tithonus’s story.
enough to swell any handsome young person’s head. Tithonus’s As the goddess of the dawn, Eos is closely related to time: the
insistent polyptoton on "choice” and “chosen” here reflects just rising sun, her collaborator, measures out the hours and the
how much it mattered to him to be the one Eos wanted. days. The hours are hers here, “th
thyy strong Hours”; her own
These lines unearth the seeds of Tithonus’s destruction. Like a servants are her lover’s undoing.
true classical hero, he has a tragic flaw: hubris, or fatal “Maim’d,” “marr’d,” and “wasted,” Tithonus became a wracked
arrogance. When Eos chose him to be her lover, he remembers, and ugly husk of the beautiful young man he once was. He was
he felt as if he were “none other than a God!” With a “great left:
heart” puffed up beyond measure, swollen with both love and
egotism, the young Tithonus came to believe he was something To dwell in presence of immortal youth,
he was not. And in trying to match his circumstances to his Immortal age beside immortal youth,
inflated self-image, he brought a curse down upon himself:
His repetitions in these lines painfully juxtapose “immortal
immortal age”
I ask'd thee, 'Give me immortality.' with “immortal
immortal youth,” reminding readers of a further irony.
Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile, Eos’s “immortal youth” reflects the par
parado
adoxx of sunrise:
Like wealthy men, who care not how they give.
• The dawn is unspeakably ancient; it’s older even
These lines, with their simple but startling simile
simile, reveal both than the idea of time.
Tithonus’s and Eos’s folly. Tithonus’s mistake is to imagine • But every sunrise is also totally new: it begins a
himself as a god, and to demand the rights and privileges of fresh day, and symbolically
symbolically, it’s the “youth” of that
godhood. Eos’s mistake, likewise, is to forget her lover’s nature, day, the very spirit of newness.
so different from her own. She grants him immortality as
carelessly as “wealthy men” might drop a fifty-dollar tip. But in Eos’s “immortal youth,” then, is perhaps the most painful thing
so doing, she seems to forget that humans age! In her own the withered Tithonus could have to live alongside.
divinity (and as addled with love and lust as Tithonus is), she’s These lines also gesture to the sad story behind this poem:
out of touch with the realities of mortal life; perhaps she sees
her lover as a god, too. Tithonus asks for “immortality,” and • Tennyson first drafted “Tithonus” not long after his
that’s exactly what she gives him—not immortal youth, but dear friend Arthur Henry Hallam died at age 22. He
immortality. would grieve Hallam for the rest of his life, and
This heady mythological dilemma also captures a humbler would revisit and revise this heartbroken poem as a
human truth. Tithonus and Eos aren’t the first lovers to feel as if considerably older man.
their love makes them divine, or to wish their happiness • The image of “immortal age beside immortal youth”
together would never end. might thus get at one of the strange pains of grief:
the dead person remains frozen in amber, forever

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the same age, while the mourner gets older and transgress the “goal of ordinance”—the natural limit of human
older. Metaphorically
Metaphorically, one might read Tithonus as a life—as simply not “meet,” not suitable for him or for any human
man imprisoned in his grief, trapped in a memory as being. Immortality just isn’t meant for mortals, and he knows
painful as it is beautiful, feeling himself withering that now, more acutely than anyone in the world.
away within it.
Step outside the poem’s frame for a moment, and these lines
strike an unusual note. There’s plenty of verse out there in
Tithonus, indeed, feels that “all [he] was”—all his youthful
which a poet takes a shot at immortality—whether by making
beauty and joy and arrogance—now lies “in ashes.” That old
an immortal literary name for themselves or by immortalizing a
metaphor gains fresh meaning here. In a sense, Tithonus has
beloved in verse (or, more usually
usually, both
both). By contrast,
truly been burnt up by the merciless course of the sun.
Tithonus’s desperate wish that he’d stayed within the “goal of
LINES 23-31 ordinance,” rather than trying to stand out from the “kindly race
of men,” makes an urgent claim for the value of an ordinary life
Can thy love,
above a glorious immortal one.
Thy beauty, make amends, tho' even now,
Close over us, the silver star, thy guide, Even the pleasures of proximity to immortality and divinity
Shines in those tremulous eyes that fill with tears aren’t enough to redeem Tithonus’s eternal old age. “Can thy
To hear me? Let me go: take back thy gift: love, / Thy beauty, make amends […]?” he asks Eos: in other
Why should a man desire in any way words, “Can your beauty and your love for me make up for my
To vary from the kindly race of men suffering?” The implication is that these joys, acute though they
Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance are, can't "make amends," not altogether. In fact, Eos’s love and
Where all should pause, as is most meet for all? beauty might only compound Tithonus’s pain, leaving him to
writhe o ovver passed jo
joys
ys.
Tithonus’s memories of his downfall clearly affect the listening
Eos. As Tithonus speaks, he sees her “tremulous eyes […] fill LINES 32-36
with tears” at his sad remembrances. But even this moment of
A soft air fans the cloud apart; there comes
tender pity is limited by cruel time. “Close over us,” Tithonus
A glimpse of that dark world where I was born.
observes, the “silver star” that is Eos’s “guide” is rising; in other
Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals
words, the morning star is coming up, signaling the moment
From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure,
when Eos will have to leave to bring in the dawn.
And bosom beating with a heart renew'd.
In these last moments, while she’s still here and holding him,
As Tithonus lies in Eos’s arms with the morning star rising
Tithonus begs her for a mercy he’s clearly asked for many, many
inexorably above them, a change comes: a breeze “fans the
times before: “Let me go: take back thy gift.” But apart from her
cloud apart,” and Tithonus catches “a glimpse of that dark world
tears, Eos makes no reply.
where I was born,” looking down on the earth far below the
This passage suggests that this scene is a familiar one: the “gleaming halls of morn.” At the same moment, Eos begins,
couple must have had this conversation every morning for mysteriously, to glow.
centuries. Tithonus knows exactly what the “morning star”
Her glow is no mystery to Tithonus, of course: it’s something
reflecting in Eos’s tearful eyes means. And Eos’s helpless
he’s seeing “once more,” and it’s an “old
old mysterious glimmer,” an
silence feels both tragic and ominous. There’s nothing she can
altogether familiar sight. To the reader, though, this passage
say to her lover at this point; she must have said it all before.
gleams with strange, startling beauty. Take a moment to relish
For some reason, it seems to be outside her power to “take
the imagery and the music of these lines:
back [her] gift” and let him die. All she can do is hold him and
weep.
Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals
Tithonus doesn’t really seem to expect an answer, either. From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure,
Rather than waiting for her to speak, he turns away into his And bosom beating with a heart renew'd.
own self-accusing thoughts, hopelessly asking why he ever
wanted to “vary from the kindly race of men,” to be something The coming of the “mysterious glimmer,” readers soon realize, is
more than other humans. Even more significantly, he asks the first hint of sunrise. Eos, the dawn’s goddess, is starting to
himself why he once was so keen to: embody the dawn, glowing with that strange almost-light that
“steals” silently across the horizon a while before the sun
[…] pass beyond the goal of ordinance appears.
Where all should pause, as is most meet for all […]
That glimmer emerges from “thy pure brows, and from thy
shoulders pure
pure”—a melodious moment of anadiplosis that
In other words, looking back, he can only see his desire to

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emphasizes how perfect the eternally youthful goddess is. when those horses’ hooves “beat the twilight into flakes of fire,”
Unmarred and unwasted, she’s Tithonus’s opposite. as if they were running across a bed of dormant coals, stirring
The pulsing /b/ alliter
alliteration
ation in “b
bosom beating with a heart them back to life. But it’s also a sight that Tithonus can’t share
renew’d,” meanwhile, captures the throb of that refreshed in. He’s not part of this daily renewal, with its animal energy and
heart in sound. It also draws attention to the idea that Eos is its fiery splendor. He can only watch it from afar—and wither,
not just changeless, but reborn. Just like the dawn of which she and wither.
is the patroness, she’s in some sense "renew'd" every morning, LINES 43-49
even as she’s always just the same.
Lo! ever thus thou growest beautiful
Eos’s transformation, then, is the image of “immortal youth” in In silence, then before thine answer given
contrast with Tithonus’s “immortal age.” Par
arado
adoxically
xically, the Departest, and thy tears are on my cheek.
dawn is at once eternal and eternally new. With an "old Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears,
mysterious glimmer" more ancient than the very concept of And make me tremble lest a saying learnt,
time, Eos is also reborn, young and “pure,” every single morning. In days far-off, on that dark earth, be true?
LINES 37-42 'The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.'
Thy cheek begins to redden thro' the gloom, Tithonus has just finished evoking a scene of mysterious and
Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine, awe-inspiring beauty: Eos’s daily embodiment of dawn, the
Ere yet they blind the stars, and the wild team glow that comes over her as she prepares to usher the sunrise
Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise, in. But it’s a sight he’s seen a million times, and it's “ever thus,”
And shake the darkness from their loosen'd manes, always just this way: Eos glows, renews—then leaves “in
And beat the twilight into flakes of fire. silence,” without giving any “answer” to Tithonus’s pleas for
death. All she leaves behind her, he says, are “tears […] on my
As the sad Tithonus looks on, Eos’s dawn transformation
cheek.” Their embrace (partly a sad echo of long-ago love, partly
continues. It began with just a “mysterious glimmer,” like the
the tenderness of the sickbed) never leads anywhere.
first hint of pale light on the horizon. Now, her glow gathers
warmth and strength: Here, Tithonus starts to sound almost peevish about this
morning ritual. “Why,” he asks Eos, “wilt thou ever scare me
Thy cheek begins to redden thro' the gloom, with thy tears […]?” Her silent weeping frightens him,
Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine, understandably. If she has no answer to his begging, he has
Ere yet they blind the stars, […] reason to “tremble” over a “saying” he remembers hearing long,
long ago, back in his life on earth: “’The Gods themselves
Readers can perceive the swell of sunrise in the imagery here. cannot recall their gifts.’”
Eos’s reddening cheek evokes blushing clouds; her slowly If this is so, Eos is helpless. Her terrible gift of immortality,
brightening eyes haven’t yet “blind[ed] the stars,” just as the granted as casually as if she were flipping Tithonus a quarter,
earliest light of dawn doesn’t yet blot the brightest stars out. turns out to be irredeemable.
(Notice, too, how the anaphor
anaphoraa on “th
thyy cheek” and “th
thyy sweet Tithonus’s vagueness about when and how he heard that grim
eyes” marks Eos’s transformation moment by moment; it’s as if saying suggests just how much ground he’s lost. He knows he’s
Tithonus’s eyes are fixed on her changing face.) heard someone say this—sometime—somewhere—in his life
Brilliantly, these images of dawn personified also capture the back on the “dark earth,” a life so distant it might as well been
bright-eyed flush of youthful love. Seeing Eos’s blush and her someone else’s. His vagueness opens up the possibility that Eos
eyes brightening near his, Tithonus also sees what he must herself told him this, perhaps back when they were first getting
have seen when the couple were young together. The image of to know each other, when neither of them knew how terrible a
her eyes “close to [his],” in particular, suggests that Eos’s dawn divine gift would become.
glow echoes the romantic and sexual love they shared when Tennyson frames this dramatic moment in two short stanzas
stanzas,
they were both young and beautiful. She relives that excitement the briefest in the poem—one three lines long and one four.
and pleasure every morning; he can only watch. Appearing at the end of these short, striking stanzas, the fateful
Soon, too, she’ll leave him. Even now, he observes, Eos’s “wild words "'The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts'" stand
team,” the celestial horses who draw her chariot across the sky, out, bold and terrible.
are pawing the ground, eager for their mistress to come and As the critic Christopher Ricks points out, those words might
harness them. also subtly allude to a passage from John Milton’s Pararadise
adise Lost
Lost.
These horses “love thee,” Tithonus tells Eos, perhaps with a hint In that great epic poem, which retells the biblical story of the
of wistfulness—or even envy. It’s a glorious sight, no doubt, Garden of Eden and the fall of humanity, Milton’s narrator has

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something similar to say when Eve eats the forbidden fruit Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing,
from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (which the While Ilion like a mist rose into towers.
deceitful serpent has told her will make her like God). Wishing Tithonus’s reminiscences of happy youth now grow even more
her transgression undone, that poem's narrator says: “But past luxurious. Back in the day, he remembers, Eos didn’t weep over
who can recall, or done undo? / Not God Omnipotent, nor Fate.” his shriveled body in the mornings. Instead, as she embraced
This quiet thematic echo suggests that Tithonus’s irreversible him, he felt his:
curse has something of the Fall in it. Like Eve, Tithonus wished
to be something more than he was, to escape his mortal nature; Mouth, forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm
this kind of pride might be the fundamental human failing. With kisses balmier than half-opening buds
Of April, […]
LINES 50-57
Ay me! ay me! with what another heart That simile suggests that the young couple’s kisses felt as
In days far-off, and with what other eyes delicious as the earliest days of spring. The flowers Tithonus
I used to watch—if I be he that watch'd— imagines here are still only “half-opening”; they have their
The lucid outline forming round thee; saw whole blossoming lives ahead of them.
The dim curls kindle into sunny rings; And the image of kisses “balmier” even than those buds calls up
Changed with thy mystic change, and felt my blood sensuous bliss. The word “balmy” can suggest warmth (as in
Glow with the glow that slowly crimson'd all “balmy weather”), sweet smells (as in a “balm,” a scented oil or
Thy presence and thy portals, incense—see Keats’s “embalmed
embalmed darkness
darkness,” full of flowers), and
Flinching from the awful thought that Eos can do nothing to delicate moisture (as in the “fast balm” of amorous sweat that
help him, Tithonus turns back to the happy times that got the “cement[s]” the lovers’ hands in John Donne’s “TheThe Ecstasy
Ecstasy”).
two of them into this predicament. The “days far-off” of the Think of the damp, tender, scented petals of a sun-warmed
couple’s joyful young love now seem to him so distant that they crocus, Tithonus suggests—then imagine something like that,
might as well have happened to a different person. In the but even lovelier—and then you’ll be close to how delicious those
mornings, as the “lucid outline” (or clear, glowing halo of light) kisses felt.
used to form around Eos’s body, “I used to watch—if I be he that The young couple’s embraces satisfied not just Tithonus’s
watch’d,” he says. senses of sight and touch and taste and smell, but hearing, too.
And he didn’t just watch. As Eos's "dim curls kindle[d] into While Eos kissed him, he remembers, she would whisper to
sunny rings"—that is, as her hair began to shine with sunlight, as him—words “wild and sweet,” spoken in some divine language
if "kindl[ing]" into flame—he shared in her transformation, or he couldn’t understand. But her voice reminded him, he says,
felt as if he did. His mirroring diacope here captures his sense of:
that he was caught up in the swell of dawn:
[…] that strange song I heard Apollo sing,
Changed with thy mystic change
change, and felt my blood While Ilion like a mist rose into towers.
Glow with the glow that slowly crimson'd all
Thy presence and thy portals, […] These lines allude to the legend that the god Apollo (patron of
music and the sun, among other things) used an enchanted
He basked, in other words, in Eos’s reflected glory—and felt as song to raise the walls of Ilion (a.k.a. Troy—the great city of
if he were part of it. (The internal rh
rhyme
yme between “glow
glow” and which Tithonus was a prince). Tithonus’s vision of Ilion’s topless
“slow
slowly” helps to evoke that sense of Eos’s light pervading and towers rising “like a mist” suggests deep awe: it’s like something
“crimson[ing]” all it touched, too.) out of a fairy tale, a city soaring up into the air as silent and
Here, Tithonus remembers a common illusion of youth and of weightless as fog while a god sings. (The /s/ and /z/ sibilance in
youthful love: the sense that it will go on forever. When he was these lines—“sstrange song,” “ssing,” “misst,” “rosse,”
young, these images suggest, he felt as if he, like Eos, was “towerss”—evokes an awestruck quiet.)
reborn to new delight every morning, and always would be. Eos’s voice seems to have worked on Tithonus as the sight of
Ilion’s birth did; it’s an experience of unearthly beauty he can
LINES 57-63 never forget. (Perhaps in more ways than one: readers wouldn’t
while I lay, be wrong to hear some sexual subtext in this vision of a god’s
Mouth, forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm voice raising towers, especially alongside all those balmy
With kisses balmier than half-opening buds kisses.)
Of April, and could hear the lips that kiss'd
Taken together, this stanza works like a mini-aubade, a love
Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet,

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poem set at dawn (and often tenderly lamenting the end of a inescapable fate. Tithonus sees it as an ability, and a blessing.
couple’s night together). Tithonus’s and Eos’s mistake, this Preferable even to the lives of those mortal “happy men” are
poignant passage implies, was to believe that an aubade might the fates of the “happier dead” beneath their “grassy barrows,”
be made to last forever. or grave mounds. Tithonus’s attention to the grass growing
LINES 64-71 over those graves quietly links his longing for death to a wish
for a more human relationship with eternity. The bodies
Yet hold me not for ever in thine East: beneath those barrows are becoming grass, being absorbed
How can my nature longer mix with thine? back into the world, living not forever but again and differently.
Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet Tithonus wants, in other words, to be part of things again.
Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam Readers here might look back to the poem’s first lines, where
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes Tithonus watched as “man comes and tills the fields and lies
Of happy men that have the power to die, beneath.” His great desire now is to be taken back into the
And grassy barrows of the happier dead. steady cycle in which he should by rights participate, alongside
the whole “kindly race of men.”
Tithonus’s bittersweet memories of his and Eos’s young love
now seem to grow too painful to bear. Tithonus turns away LINES 72-76
from them and returns to his old plea: that Eos might find some Release me, and restore me to the ground;
way to let him go, to release him from “[her] East,” her immortal Thou seëst all things, thou wilt see my grave:
world of dawn, into an ordinary human death. “How can my Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;
nature longer mix with thine?” he asks her plaintively: he can’t I earth in earth forget these empty courts,
bear to be what he is, a creature neither mortal nor immortal, And thee returning on thy silver wheels.
alongside Eos’s true divinity.
For the last time in the poem—though, readers can imagine, not
While for a moment Tithonus seemed to have escaped into his the last time in Tithonus’s endless life—Tithonus begs Eos
memories, reality returns now, and it feels all the crueler for again: “Release me, and restore me to the ground.”
the brief respite. The relentless diacope in these lines captures
the chill of Tithonus's despair: These words might take readers back to the beginning of the
poem, with its visions of weeping clouds and dying swans. Here
Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold as there, the “release” of death also means relief, the lifting of a
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet burden.
Upon thy glimmering thresholds, […] Tithonus’s wish to be “restore[d …] to the ground” likewise
suggests healing as much as return. On the most
This is another of those moments that might reflect the poem’s straightforward level, these words mean that he wants to go
origins in Tennyson’s grief for Hallam. Stranded in the back to the dirt from which he came, like the happy dead
“gleaming halls of morn,” watching his lover go through her beneath their “grassy barrows.” But the word “restore” also
“mystic change” every day, Tithonus is in some sense trapped in implies that Tithonus might be renewed in death, restored by
his memories. This is the self-same “rosy” place where he and the ground. He wants nothing more than to become “earth in
Eos once felt they were living out an eternal spring morning. earth,” to let the grass grow from his body, to become part of
But while the surroundings are the same, the joy is gone for the circle of life again—and thus to be reborn in his own way,
good. Like a mourner, then, Tithonus is trapped in memories transformed.
that he can neither escape nor truly relive. The palace is “cold”; Here, for the first time, Tithonus seems to imagine what it
the good times are over, as unforgettable as they are might be like to be Eos, rather than bemoaning what it’s like to
unreachable. be him. “Thou seest all things,” he consoles her; she’ll thus “see
In this dire predicament, the “dark world” Tithonus came from [his] grave,” too. Tithonus might worry, then, that Eos won’t let
looks like a merciful, restful place. Tithonus seems to glance him die because she doesn’t want to lose him, even in his
down at it here, seeing an ordinary day coming in; he watches wretched state. The idea of her watching over his grave seems
with longing as the morning “steam / floats up” from the fields, a intended to console them both. But readers know that Eos is
sight that recasts the grand ethereal beauty of “Ilion” rising “like truly powerless to help here, not just holding back for fear of
a mist” into something familiar, homey, rural, and wistful. The grief. The line “the Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts” is
“happy men” who live in those ordinary fields, Tithonus says, too ominously potent, the pressure of the original myth (in
have the “power to die”—a way of perceiving death that perhaps which the best Eos can do is to transform Tithonus into a
only an unhappy immortal could reach. Ordinary mortals tend cricket) too strong.
to see death as something that has power over them, an But still, Tithonus begs. His closing words, readers might

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imagine, are ones he’s been saying every morning for centuries, the gods) granted.
and will go on saying for centuries more. Once again, his • Alas, Zeus didn't think to make Tithonus immortally
musical repetitions juxtapose two kinds of eternity: young. Tithonus thus aged and withered—and
withered, and withered, and withered.
Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn b byy morn
morn; • At last, the grieving Eos transformed him into a
I earth in earth forget these empty courts, grasshopper or a cicada, turning his senile raving
And thee returning on thy silver wheels. into a sad, constant chirp.

Tithonus dreams of falling back into the circle of life, becoming The Tithonus of this poem has a subtly different story. Here,
“earth in earth”; Eos, he imagines, will go on conducting that Zeus doesn't enter into it. Rather, it's Eos herself who
cycle from above, “morn by morn.” Those par parallel
allel phrasings immortalizes her lover, then realizes her mistake—and is
again summon up the big par parado
adoxx of time, its simultaneous apparently powerless to do anything about it. As Tithonus
eternity and newness. Eos, immortally new, measures and remembers once hearing someone say: "'The Gods themselves
marshals time from the outside. Tithonus wants nothing more cannot recall their gifts.'"
than to be back on the inside of time, merging with the rocks By reshaping the myth along these lines, Tennyson heightens
and stones and trees as they roll on below, rising and falling. the drama. Eos has reason to feel even more guilty that she's
The words “earth in earth,” as Tennyson himself noted in an consigned her lover to this awful fate; every morning, Tithonus
annotation to the poem, also allude to a moment in Dante’s says, she leaves her "tears [...] on [his] cheek," perhaps in
Divine Comedy, the great epic chronicling Dante’s journey remorse as much as grief. And Tithonus has cause for
through Hell and Purgatory to Paradise: anger—though he doesn't express much. This poem's Tithonus
mostly seems torn between a longing for his lost youth and a
• In Par
aradiso
adiso (the final book of the three-volume longing for sweet death.
poem), Dante encounters the soul of St. John the The poem also alludes to some of Tennyson's deepest poetic
Evangelist in Heaven. St. John takes this influences:
opportunity to correct a misapprehension a lot of
people hold about his afterlife. Contrary to folk • Eos’s “tremulous eyes” in line 26 echo a line from
belief, he explains, he didn’t ascend to Heaven in his John K Keats
eats’s early poem “II stood tip-toe upon a little
body. Rather, his flesh is “in terra terra”—“in earth, hill
hill"—a line that also describes a moment of
earth.” tenderness between a god and a human (the love-
• Even one of the greatest of the Apostles, then, died god Cupid and his mortal beloved Psyche).
and rotted like any other human being. Human • Tithonus’s recollection that “the Gods themselves
greatness, the allusion suggests, emerges from cannot recall their gifts” echoes a similar sentiment
humble mortal bodies, not from hubristic grabs at in Milton’s Par aradise
adise Lost
Lost, in which the narrator
divinity. laments Eve’s choice to eat the forbidden fruit. “But
past who can recall, or done undo? / Not God
But in these closing lines, Tithonus doesn’t just want to escape Omnipotent, nor Fate,” Milton’s speaker says in
the "empty courts" of the heavens, humbly die, and fade into Book 9. This subtle allusion underscores Tithonus’s
the earth. He also wants to "forget" even the gorgeous sight of fateful pride and hubris. Like Eve, he transgresses,
Eos “returning on [her] silver wheels," coming home to him. The crossing a limit. And like Eve’s, his mistake is
final and perhaps the cruelest blow of immortality is that irreversible.
memory—one of the consolations of old age—becomes, to • Finally, Tithonus’s longing to become “earth in earth”
Tithonus, only a torment. alludes to a moment in Dante’s Par aradiso
adiso, where the
soul of St. John the Evangelist declares that his body
is in fact “in terra terra”—"in earth, earth." He thus
POETIC DEVICES contradicts the folk belief that he ascended to
heaven with his body intact. (In an annotation to the
ALLUSION poem, Tennyson observed that he was thinking of
this line when he wrote "Tithonus.") Even St. John
"Tithonus" alludes to an episode from classical mythology:
himself, then, was fleshly, earthly, mortal. A person
of greatness, this allusion suggests, accepts
• Tithonus was a legendary prince of Troy who fell in mortality as part of their lot; Tithonus's folly looks
love with Eos (a.k.a. Aurora), goddess of the dawn. especially misguided in light of St. John's wisdom.
• Wishing to be with her forever, he begged her to
make him immortal—a favor that Zeus (the king of

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[...] I lay,
Where Allusion appears in the poem:
Mouth, forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm
• Lines 11-23: “ Alas! for this gray shadow, once a With kisses balmier than half-opening buds
man— / So glorious in his beauty and thy choice, / Who Of April, [...]
madest him thy chosen, that he seem'd / To his great
heart none other than a God! / I ask'd thee, 'Give me Here, the goddess's caresses feel warm and "dewy" as a
immortality.' / Then didst thou grant mine asking with a morning in early spring, when the flowers are still only "half-
smile, / Like wealthy men, who care not how they give. / opening," their whole blossoming lives ahead of them: another
But thy strong Hours indignant work'd their wills, / And image of eternal renewal that also suggests sheer physical
beat me down and marr'd and wasted me, / And tho' they delight.
could not end me, left me maim'd / To dwell in presence
of immortal youth, / Immortal age beside immortal youth, These pleasures are nothing but a memory now. If the lovers
/ And all I was, in ashes.” embrace these days, it's only for Eos to drop a guilty tear on
• Line 26: “those tremulous eyes” Tithonus's cheek. That bitter reality transforms Tithonus's
• Line 49: “'The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.'” experience of the "gleaming halls of morn":
• Line 75: “I earth in earth forget these empty courts,”
Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet
IMAGERY
Upon thy glimmering thresholds,
The poem's imagery captures Tithonus's poignant predicament.
Surrounded by unearthly, immortal, sensuous beauty, he can The light and warmth of the lovely dawn can no longer reach
only long for oblivion. Tithonus. Forced to live amongst the "ashes" of his joyful youth,
Tithonus lives at the "quiet limit of the world," a place on the unable to enjoy what once was his deepest delight, Tithonus
outer edges of the reality that mortals know. Here lie the can only feel this rosy world as "cold." The tactile imagery there
"gleaming halls of morn," the palaces ruled by Tithonus's suggests just how isolated he feels: he's the only chilly thing in a
beloved Eos, goddess of the dawn. The imagery around these world of eternal blossoming warmth, beyond the reach of
halls is all rosy light and softness: these "ever-silent spaces of everything he once loved.
the East" are shining and quiet as dawn itself.
The aged Tithonus, among these beauties, feels himself to be Where Imagery appears in the poem:
nothing more than a "gray shadow," a "white-hair'd" figure • Lines 7-10: “Here at the quiet limit of the world, / A
tiptoeing through a magical realm, out of place. His beloved, by white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream / The ever-
contrast, is eternally young and eternally renewed. Every silent spaces of the East, / Far-folded mists, and gleaming
morning, he watches as a "lucid outline," a clear nimbus of light, halls of morn.”
gathers around Eos, and her "dim curls kindle into sunny rings." • Line 11: “ Alas! for this gray shadow, once a man—”
This goddess, in other words, slowly lights up just as the dawn • Lines 25-27: “the silver star, thy guide, / Shines in those
does, shining with a fresh glow that "redden[s]" and tremulous eyes that fill with tears / To hear me?”
"brighten[s]" as the morning comes. • Lines 32-39: “A soft air fans the cloud apart; there comes
Besides sensuously capturing the beauty of a slow-gathering / A glimpse of that dark world where I was born. / Once
dawn, these images of Eos's "mystic change" conjure up a more the old mysterious glimmer steals / From thy pure
par
parado
adoxx: dawn is both eternal and perpetually new. The vision brows, and from thy shoulders pure, / And bosom
of the goddess transforming in exactly the same way every beating with a heart renew'd. / Thy cheek begins to
morning gets at the desperate sadness of Tithonus's own redden thro' the gloom, / Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly
shadowy predicament. He's immortal, too—but endlessly close to mine, / Ere yet they blind the stars,”
withering, rather than endlessly renewing. His images of • Lines 40-42: “arise, / And shake the darkness from their
loosen'd manes, / And beat the twilight into flakes of fire.”
himself as "gray" and "white," pallid and faded, contrast
• Lines 53-63: “The lucid outline forming round thee; saw
painfully with Eos's brightness.
/ The dim curls kindle into sunny rings; / Changed with
More painful still, the daily vision of Eos's transformation only thy mystic change, and felt my blood / Glow with the
reminds Tithonus of what he's lost. When he was young and in glow that slowly crimson'd all / Thy presence and thy
love, he recalls, he felt that he, too, "glow[ed] with the glow" portals, while I lay, / Mouth, forehead, eyelids, growing
that illuminated Eos every morning. Like a lot of young people, dewy-warm / With kisses balmier than half-opening buds
in other words, he felt as if he would be young and in love / Of April, and could hear the lips that kiss'd / Whispering
forever. He remembers, too, the love he and Eos shared: I knew not what of wild and sweet, / Like that strange

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impenetrable numbness. He's among those "rosy shadows," but
song I heard Apollo sing, / While Ilion like a mist rose into they can't touch him and they can't warm him. All he wants now
towers.” is to be "earth
earth in earth
earth"—a phrase whose diacope stresses the
• Lines 66-71: “Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold / unity and finality that come with death. Tithonus looks wistfully
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet / Upon thy down to the mortal world, where human beings return to the
glimmering thresholds, when the steam / Floats up from dirt from which they came.
those dim fields about the homes / Of happy men that
have the power to die, / And grassy barrows of the
Where Repetition appears in the poem:
happier dead.”
• Line 1: “The woods decay, the woods decay”
REPETITION • Line 3: “and,” “and”
• Line 12: “thy choice”
Repetitions intensify Tithonus's speech, capturing his despair
• Line 13: “thy chosen”
and mirroring the painful, endless march of time.
• Line 19: “and,” “and”
His first words offer a perfect example: • Lines 21-22: “immortal youth, / Immortal age beside
immortal youth,”
The woods deca
decayy, the woods deca
decayy and fall, • Lines 23-24: “thy love, / Thy beauty”
• Line 31: “all,” “all”
This moment of epizeuxis compresses centuries into a few • Line 35: “From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders
words. The woods, from Tithonus's eternal point of view, are pure,”
endlessly decaying and endlessly falling; he's been watching the • Lines 37-38: “Thy cheek begins to redden thro' the
world for so long that he's seen great forests rise and vanish gloom, / Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine,”
over and over again. His repetition here feels both weary and • Line 41: “And”
poignant. There's nothing he'd like to do so much as "fall" like • Line 42: “And”
those woods, but he can only "decay," watching generations of • Line 45: “thy tears”
luckier mortal creatures going to their deaths. As he puts it a • Line 46: “thy tears”
couple of lines later, "Man comes and tills the fields and lies • Line 50: “Ay me! ay me!,” “with what another heart”
beneath"—a moment of polysyndeton that suggests an endless • Line 51: “with what other eyes”
cycle. Every time another "and" hits, another stage in the circle • Line 55: “Changed with thy mystic change”
of life comes along—for everyone but Tithonus himself. • Line 56: “Glow with the glow”
• Line 57: “Thy presence and thy portals”
Once upon a time, he recalls, he felt that he was sharing in a • Line 66: “Coldly,” “cold”
happier kind of immortality. When he was young and in love, he • Line 67: “cold”
used to watch his beloved Eos starting to glow as dawn came • Line 73: “thou wilt”
on, and felt himself: • Line 74: “Thou wilt”
• Line 75: “earth in earth”
Changed with th
thyy m
mystic
ystic change
change, and felt my blood
Glow with the glow that slowly crimson'd all
JUXTAPOSITION
These lines are full of echoes and mirrorings. "Changed with Tithonus laments that his existence is one of "immortal age
thy [...] change" and "glow with the glow" reflect each other beside immortal youth." He gets endlessly older; Eos remains
through parparallelism
allelism even as the young Tithonus reflects Eos's endlessly young. This terrible juxtaposition is also an image of
"change" and "glow" through internal diacope
diacope. Repetitions what it feels like to age in general. Eos, remember, is the
capture, here, a sense of young love as a blissful attunement: goddess of the dawn, a figure representing nature's eternal
Tithonus and Eos are matched in their beauty, youth, and joy. renewal. In a way, then, Tithonus's predicament resembles the
predicament of every living human being: the sun keeps coming
All that is long over now, of course. As an impossibly ancient up fresh every day, as if reborn, but everyone who lives beneath
man, Tithonus feels the gorgeous "halls of morn" as little more it keeps getting older. Tithonus's real curse is that he can't end
than a joyless icebox: this slow, sad process by dying, the way ordinary mortals do.

Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold The juxtaposition between Tithonus and Eos also evokes the
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet relationship between the living and the dead. Tennyson wrote
Upon thy glimmering thresholds, "Tithonus" not long after his beloved friend Arthur Hallam
unexpectedly died at the age of just 22. The poem's image of
Here, polyptoton on "coldly" and "cold" insists on Tithonus's one lover growing older and older while the other stays the

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same age captures how it feels to mourn. Like Eos, Hallam fully of the divine nor the mortal realm, he can't help feeling like
remains (for the grieving poet) frozen in time: die young, and a dream. Or maybe like a nightmare.
you never get old. Tennyson and Tithonus, meanwhile, are left When Eos granted Tithonus's wish for immortality, he
to look mournfully back on happier days with their changeless remembers, she did so:
beloveds.
[...] with a smile,
Where Juxtaposition appears in the poem: Lik
Likee wealth
wealthyy men
men, who care not how they give.
• Lines 1-6: “The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, /
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, / Man In other words, Eos offers Tithonus immortality as casually as a
comes and tills the field and lies beneath, / And after rich person might hand you twenty bucks. She has divine gifts
many a summer dies the swan. / Me only cruel to spare; it costs her nothing to grant Tithonus's huge wish. But
immortality / Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,” that's a problem. This image of divine generosity is also an
• Lines 11-17: “ Alas! for this gray shadow, once a image of divine carelessness, of a goddess simply not thinking
man— / So glorious in his beauty and thy choice, / Who hard enough about what it's like to be a mortal. If Eos had
madest him thy chosen, that he seem'd / To his great treated this weighty gift more thoughtfully, she might have
heart none other than a God! / I ask'd thee, 'Give me spared her lover a life of endless decay.
immortality.' / Then didst thou grant mine asking with a Now, Tithonus is left to wither and remember better times.
smile, / Like wealthy men, who care not how they give.” Looking back, he recalls how Eos used to shower him with:
• Line 22: “Immortal age beside immortal youth,”
• Lines 50-63: “Ay me! ay me! with what another heart / In
[...] kisses balmier than half-opening buds
days far-off, and with what other eyes / I used to
Of April [...]
watch—if I be he that watch'd— / The lucid outline
forming round thee; saw / The dim curls kindle into
sunny rings; / Changed with thy mystic change, and felt Eos's kisses, in other words, were as soft and dewy as the
my blood / Glow with the glow that slowly crimson'd all / budding flowers of early spring. This simile, besides conjuring
Thy presence and thy portals, while I lay, / Mouth, up deep sensuous pleasure, reminds readers that Eos and
forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm / With kisses Tithonus were both in the spring of their lives, back then—as
balmier than half-opening buds / Of April, and could hear fresh as just-barely-peeping April flowers. Eos, of course,
the lips that kiss'd / Whispering I knew not what of wild renews her youth eternally; Tithonus is now lodged in an
and sweet, / Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing, / eternal and ever-deepening winter.
While Ilion like a mist rose into towers.” The poem's final simile is a haunting, atmospheric one. Tithonus
• Lines 64-68: “ Yet hold me not for ever in thine East: remembers how once, long ago, he:
/ How can my nature longer mix with thine? / Coldly thy
rosy shadows bathe me, cold / Are all thy lights, and cold [...] heard Apollo sing,
my wrinkled feet / Upon thy glimmering thresholds,” While Ilion lik
likee a mist rose into towers.
• Lines 74-75: “Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;
/ I earth in earth forget these empty courts,”
This passage alludes to the myth (told by Ovid
Ovid, among others)
that the god Apollo built Ilion—another name for Troy—with his
SIMILE enchanted music. Here, Ilion is at once as grand and as
The poem's similes convey Tithonus's predicament through insubstantial as a rising fog. Readers might think of a time
vivid images. they've seen fog from a distance: mists can indeed look like the
The first arrives early in the poem, in the passage where turrets of a distant city. Besides painting an eerie, vivid picture,
Tithonus explains his terrible situation. Eternally aging, he sees this simile reminds readers of what Tithonus has been
himself now as nothing more than: lamenting all along. Everything on earth—even great Troy,
which famously fell to Greek forces—reveals itself to be as
A white-hair'd shadow roaming lik
likee a dream transient and insubstantial as a mist, if you watch it for long
The ever-silent spaces of the East, enough. Everything, that is, except for the unhappy Tithonus
himself.
If Tithonus is like a dream, he's insubstantial, unreal, elusive; the
simile suggests that he has no place in Eos's world. He's not a Where Simile appears in the poem:
young and exuberant god, an immortal lover relishing more • Line 8: “A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream”
happ
happyy, happ
happyy lo
lovve with his immortal beloved. Nor is he a mortal • Lines 16-17: “Then didst thou grant mine asking with a
man who can end his painful old age in merciful death. Neither

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ground"—that is, while clouds release their load of rain. These
smile, / Like wealthy men, who care not how they give.” weeping clouds mirror Tithonus's own helpless grief. But their
• Lines 59-60: “kisses balmier than half-opening buds / Of tears are also part of the natural cycle Tithonus has been exiled
April” from. "Decay[ing] and fall[ing]" like everything else on earth,
• Line 63: “While Ilion like a mist rose into towers.” these clouds get to evaporate after they've wept.
Tithonus, meanwhile, lives a strange half-life. Twice, he calls
METAPHOR himself a "shadow": a "white-hair'd shadow," a "gray shadow."
The poem's metaphors
metaphors, like its similes
similes, make abstract pains and This metaphor casts him as immaterial and frail—and
beauties tangible. underscores his strange relationship with the sunny, fiery
One of the most persistent metaphors here is a recurring goddess of the dawn. As a shadow, he's just the vague outline of
image of flame. When Eos's body begins to light up around the young man Eos loved, a half-creature created by her eternal
dawn, her "dim curls kindle into sunn
sunnyy rings
rings," their renewed light.
gold shining as brightly as if her hair had caught fire. The horses
who pull her chariot paw the ground, eager to "beat beat the twilight Where Metaphor appears in the poem:
into flak
flakes
es of fire
fire"—in other words, to light up the dim sky with • Line 2: “The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,”
the sunrise, as if they were stirring last night's coals into fresh • Lines 5-6: “Me only cruel immortality / Consumes:”
flames. These images make a certain kind of sense: as the dawn • Line 8: “A white-hair'd shadow”
goddess, Eos collaborates with the fires of the sun, reigniting • Line 11: “ Alas! for this gray shadow, once a man—”
the day. • Lines 18-21: “But thy strong Hours indignant work'd
But those same fires—which, after all, mark the passing of time, their wills, / And beat me down and marr'd and wasted
the arrival of another day—have the power not only to warm me, / And tho' they could not end me, left me maim'd / To
and beautify but to burn things up. Eos lights up afresh every dwell in presence of immortal youth,”
morning; meanwhile, the ancient Tithonus finds "all [he] was" • Line 23: “And all I was, in ashes.”
lies "in
in ashes
ashes." Fiery time is Eos's element and Tithonus's • Line 42: “beat the twilight into flakes of fire.”
destruction. • Lines 53-54: “saw / The dim curls kindle into sunny
rings”
Tithonus also captures the agony of his eternal old age through
personification
personification. After he became immortal, he remembers, the
passing hours came and beat him up, one by one:
VOCABULARY
But th
thyy strong Hours indignant work'
work'dd their wills
wills,
Vapours (Line 2) - Mists, thin clouds.
And beat me down and marr'd and wasted me,
And tho' they could not end me, left me maim'd Burthen (Line 2) - Burden.
To dwell in presence of immortal youth, Tills (Line 3) - Cultivates, farms.
Wither (Line 6) - Shrivel, decay.
Presenting the passing hours as Eos's hired goons, Tithonus
gets at the violence of aging: the sense that time mercilessly Thee, Thou, Thy, Thine (Line 6, Line 12, Line 13, Line 15, Line
batters everyone who lives to old age. That these personified 16, Line 18, Line 23, Line 24, Line 25, Line 27, Line 35, Line 37,
hours are "indignant" at Tithonus's immortality suggests that Line 38, Line 40, Line 43, Line 44, Line 45, Line 46, Line 53, Line
they take their work seriously, too. There's no dodging them: 55, Line 57, Line 64, Line 65, Line 66, Line 67, Line 68, Line 73,
they have a job to do, and even Eos isn't going to stop them Line 74, Line 76) - Old-fashioned ways of saying "you" or
doing it. "your":
Similarly, a personified "cruel immortality" doesn't just wither • "Thee" is the object form of you, as in "I love you
ou."
Tithonus, it "consumes" him, gnawing away at him endlessly. • "Thou" is the subject form of you, as in "YYou can do it."
Particularly hideous in this image is the suggestion that • "Thy" and "thine" both mean "your"; "thine" gets used before
words that start with a vowel, "thy" before words that start
immortality devours Tithonus without doing away with him.
with a consonant.
Like Prometheus (the mythological figure whose ever-
regenerating liver was daily devoured by a vulture), he suffers Morn (Line 10, Line 74) - Morning.
the impossibly horrible fate of being consumed forever. Marr'd (Line 19) - A contraction of "marred," meaning "spoiled,"
Another moment of personification feels more poignant. "damaged," or "defaced."
Looking down on the "dark world" where once he lived, Wasted (Line 19) - Shriveled, shrunk, atrophied.
Tithonus watches while "the vapours weep their burden to the
Maim'd (Line 20) - A contraction of "maimed"—that is,

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disfigured and incapacitated. Tithonus tells his haunting story over the course of 76 lines of
Tremulous (Line 26) - Trembling. (Here, the word suggests that blank vverse
erse (that is, unrhymed iambic pentameter—more on
Eos's eyes brim with quivering tears, or that her eyelashes that in the Meter section of this guide). Those lines are divided
flutter as she tries to blink those tears back.) into seven irregular stanzas, the breaks between them marking
shifts in Tithonus's mood or thought.
The goal of ordinance (Line 30) - The given limits of mortal life.
This is a form inspired by Milton's Par
aradise
adise Lost and
Meet (Line 31) - Fitting, just, appropriate. Shak
Shakespearean
espearean trtragedy
agedy. In choosing blank verse, Tennyson
Bosom (Line 36) - Breast, chest. gives Tithonus's speech (and the questions it raises about aging
Thro' (Line 37) - A contraction of "through." and mortality) a melancholy grandeur.
Ere (Line 39) - Before. METER
The wild team (Line 39) - That is, the horses who pull Eos's "Tithonus" is written in blank vverse
erse—that is, unrhymed lines of
chariot. iambic pentameter. Each line is built from five iambs, metrical
Yearning for thy yoke (Line 40) - That is, "longing for you to feet with a da-DUM
DUM rhythm, like this:
harness them."
The woods | deca
cayy, | the woods | deca
cayy | and fall
fall,
Beat the twilight into flakes of fire (Line 42) - That is, fan the
metaphorical coals of twilight into the fresh flames of the rising
This is the grand rhythm of high tragedy, the same meter in
sun.
which Satan spurs on rebel angels and Hamlet contemplates
Lo! (Line 43) - An exclamation meaning something along the death
death.
lines of "Look! Behold!"
Most long works written in iambic pentameter introduce
Lest (Line 47) - In case, in the event that. Tithonus is metrical variations for the sake of emphasis and naturalism.
"trembl[ing] lest" the "saying" he once learned "be true"—in "Tithonus" is no exception. Listen, for instance, to lines 55-56,
other words, at the thought that the expression he once heard in which Tithonus recounts a half-agonized, half-awestruck
might turn out to be accurate. memory of how he used to feel as he watched his beloved Eos
Ay me! (Line 50) - A cry of sorrow, rather like "Alas!" or "Oh glowing brighter and brighter at dawn:
woe!"
Lucid (Line 53) - Clear, luminous. Changed with | thy myst
yst- | ic change
change, | and felt | my
blood
The dim curls kindle into sunny rings (Line 54) - That is, "The Glow with | the glow | that slow
slow- | ly crim
crim- | son'd all
dark curls of your hair seeming to catch fire as they took on the
color of sunlight." Tithonus is describing Aurora lighting up and
Both of these lines start with a trochee (the opposite foot to an
glowing as the time for sunrise nears.
iamb, with a DUM
DUM-da rhythm). By moving a strong stress to the
Ilion (Line 63) - Another name for Troy, the legendary city of front of the line, Tennyson makes Tithonus sound urgent and
which Tithonus was a prince. emotional; as the old, old man remembers those long-lost days
Happy (Line 70, Line 71) - "Happy," in these lines, doesn't so of shared youth and beauty, his voice gains a new pained
much mean "cheerful" as "lucky." energy.
Barrows (Line 71) - Funeral mounds—that is, graves with RHYME SCHEME
heaped, rounded piles of earth on top of them.
Written in blank vverse
erse, "Tithonus" doesn't use a rh
rhyme
yme scheme
scheme.
Instead, the poem makes music in other, subtler ways—for
instance, through internal rhrhyme
yme, as in line 56's "glow
glow with the
FORM, METER, & RHYME glow that slow
slowly crimson'd all," or through other echoing
FORM sounds, as in in lines 8-10:

"Tithonus" is a dramatic monologue: a poem spoken in the voice A white-hair'd sh

shadow roaming like a dream
of a particular character, like a speech in a play. The speaker The ever-ssilent spaccess of the Easst,
here is Tithonus himself, a Trojan prince from Greek mythology Far-folded misstss, and gleaming hallss of morn.
who fell in love with Eos (a.k.a. Aurora), the goddess of the
dawn. Tithonus asks his beloved to make him immortal so he The soft /sh/, /s/, and /z/ sibilance here captures the hush of
can be with her forever. She grants his wish—but fails to specify dawn's "ever-silent" palace and the scuff of Tithonus's limping
that Tithonus should also remain eternally young. Tithonus thus footsteps, evoking a scene at once peaceful and hauntingly
lives forever, but gets older and older, more and more withered.

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lonely. place where Eos's servants, the "strong Hours," hold sway.
Looking down on the world of ordinary people who "have the
power to die," sadly watching as his lover glows with fresh dawn
SPEAKER light day after day after day, Tithonus is stuck in the middle,
The poem's speaker is the titular Tithonus himself: an able neither to die nor to relish his immortality. He's out of tune
impossibly old immortal begging his lover (the dawn goddess both with the immortally beautiful "halls of morn" and the "dim
Eos) for death. In becoming immortal, Tithonus feels he's fields" of mortal life.
committed a terrible, transgressive act of hubris, attempting to
reach beyond the "goal of ordinance" (that is, the appropriate
boundaries of human life). Now, he's suffering the
CONTEXT
consequences.
LITERARY CONTEXT
Readers can understand, though, why he might have found
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) was one of the most
himself in this predicament. Tithonus's lyrical reminiscences of
influential and beloved poets of the Victorian era. Poet
the days when he and his beloved Eos were young and happy
Laureate to Queen Victoria herself, he became the famous
together paint a picture of the kind of overflowing bliss one
public face of mid-19th-century English poetry.
would naturally long to enjoy forever. But where Tithonus once
shared his beloved's "mystic change" as she took on her Tennyson began his poetic career as a student at Cambridge.
morning "glow," rejoicing in her eternally renewed beauty, now There he met Arthur Henry Hallam, a friend who would
he can only watch from a sad distance, knowing that his become one of his greatest influences—but not, alas, because
unimaginable age has carried him far, far away from that sweet of a long and happy life together. Hallam tragically died just
freshness. before he was to marry Tennyson's sister. Tennyson's
overwhelming grief would go on to inspire much of his most
In his lamentations over his own hubris, Tithonus is a mirror
powerful verse, "Tithonus" included. He first drafted the poem
image of another Tennyson hero: Ulysses
Ulysses, who's just raring to
(under the title "Tithon") in 1833, the year Hallam died. The
surpass human limitations. (Tennyson's "Ulysses" was in turn
grandest poetic result of Hallam's death, however, was
inspired by Dante
Dante, whose Ulysses is condemned to Hell for his
certainly Tennyson's In Memoriam
Memoriam, a wildly popular book-length
hubristic ambition: though his words are stirring, his goals are
elegy that would fuel a Victorian obsession with grief and
as prideful and fatally flawed as the young Tithonus's.) Critics
mourning.
often treat Tennyson's "Tithonus" and "Ulysses" as a matched
pair; both poems reflect on transgressions beyond the "goal of Like his friends Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett
ordinance," the natural limits of human life. Browning
Browning, Tennyson was influenced by the Romantic poets,
from whom he inherited a taste for mythology, magic, and
Tithonus might also be read as a voice for Tennyson himself.
melancholy. The death of the dashing Lord Byron came as a
Tennyson first drafted both "Ulysses" and "Tithonus" while
meaningful shock to him as a young boy (though he admired
grieving his young friend Arthur Henry Hallam. Tithonus's
Byron less as he got older), and echoes of John K Keats
eats and Percy
sense of himself as a helplessly aging man still in love with an
Bysshe Shelle
Shelleyy run all through his work. But Tennyson also
eternally youthful goddess mirrors Tennyson's struggle.
considered himself part of a longer English poetic lineage that
Hallam, here, is the beautiful beloved who will never get any
reached back to Milton and ShakShakespeare
espeare. One can also see a
older, frozen in amber as a poignantly young man. Tennyson is
broader European influence in Tennyson's famous "Ulysses
Ulysses,"
the aging lover, looking back on a sweet and vanished time.
which retells an episode from Dante's Inferno (and which is
often read as a pendant to this poem).
SETTING While Tennyson fell out of style among the early-20th-century
modernists (who dismissed his work as too quaint, too pretty,
"Tithonus" is set in the mysterious "gleaming halls of and too conservative), recent scholars have given him more
morn"—the celestial palaces where Eos, goddess of the dawn, credit, praising his deep sense of mystery and wonder. There's
holds court. High above the earth (which Tithonus can glimpse no question that he's an important and influential writer: to this
sometimes when "a soft air fans the cloud apart"), this is a place day, poems like "The
The Lady of Shalott
Shalott" are among the best-
of "far-folded mists" and subtle, shimmering colors. known and best-loved in the world.
It's also a par
parado
adoxical
xical place. Outside of time, as immortal as the
sunrise, the palaces of the sunrise are also deeply involved in
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
time—for what marks passing time so clearly as the movement Tennyson wasn't just a popular poet during his time, but a major
of the sun? While Eos's palace itself never changes, it's a place public figure. As Poet Laureate to Queen Victoria, Tennyson
where the helplessly aging Tithonus can't escape change: a wrote for the British Empire at its peak.

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During Victoria's reign, proverbially, the "sun never set on the to find a wealth of Tennyson resources.
British Empire": Britain had colonial holdings across the world, (https:/
([Link]
[Link]/authors/tenn
[Link]/authors/tennyson/inde
yson/[Link])
[Link])
and saw itself as the rightful, "civilized" ruler of all the lands it
• Portr
ortraits
aits of T
Tenn
ennyson
yson — See some images of Tennyson via
had conquered. Some of Tennyson's own work reflects the
London's National Portrait Gallery.
intense British patriotism of the time. His "Charge
Charge of the Light (https:/
([Link]
/[Link]/collections/search/person/
.[Link]/collections/search/person/
Brigade
Brigade," for instance, is a bombastic celebration of military mp04454/alfred-tenn
mp04454/alfred-tennyson-1st-baron-tenn
yson-1st-baron-tennyson)
yson)
self-sacrifice. But it's also a tragedy, and reflects another major
Victorian preoccupation: mourning. • Tithonus in Art — Learn more about the Tithonus myth
and see another artwork inspired by it—this one a painting
Queen Victoria's beloved husband Prince Albert died when
by Francesco Solimena. (https:/
([Link]
/[Link]
.[Link]/art/
.edu/art/
Tennyson was about a decade into his tenure as Poet Laureate.
collection/object/103R
collection/object/103RG1)
G1)
Victoria went into deep mourning for the rest of her life—and
sparked a craze for flamboyant public grief. Victorian mourners LITCHARTS ON OTHER ALFRED LORD TENNYSON
would wear black for years, make elaborate wreaths and POEMS
jewelry out of the hair of the dead, and pose corpses for post-
• Break, Break, Break
mortem portraits. Tennyson fanned the flames of this
• Crossing the Bar
obsession with his great elegy "In
In Memoriam
Memoriam," a long poetic
• Tears, Idle T
Tears
ears
commemoration of a beloved friend, dead too young. • The Brook
Perhaps the Victorian obsession with death and mourning also • The Charge of the Light Brigade
speaks to the melancholy of a changing 19th-century world. • The Eagle
The burgeoning Industrial Revolution ushered in an era of • The Kr
Krakaken
en
rapid, dirty, and dangerous change. Britain embraced its new • The Lady of Shalott
economic might—but also mourned disappearing ways of life • Ulysses
and a blighted countryside.

HOW T
TO
O CITE
MORE RESOUR
RESOURCES
CES
MLA
EXTERNAL RESOURCES
Nelson, Kristin. "Tithonus." LitCharts. LitCharts LLC, 25 Oct 2019.
• A Brief Biogr
Biograph
aphyy — Learn more about Tennyson's life and Web. 13 Oct 2023.
work via the British Library. (https:/
([Link]
/[Link]/people/
.[Link]/people/
alfred-lord-tenn
alfred-lord-tennyson)
yson) CHICAGO MANUAL
• The PPoem
oem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem. Nelson, Kristin. "Tithonus." LitCharts LLC, October 25, 2019.
(https:/
([Link]
[Link]/TUKGnq4vknA
Gnq4vknA?si=hLiX37Z
?si=hLiX37Z-_cb
-_cbVhK1K)
VhK1K) Retrieved October 13, 2023. [Link]
alfred-lord-tennyson/tithonus.
• Tenn
ennyson
yson at the Victorian W
Web
eb — Visit the Victorian Web

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