Crossing the Bar

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"Crossing the Bar" is an 1889 poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, that traditionally finishes out Tennyson anthologies. It is thought that Tennyson wrote the poem as his own elegy, as the poem has a tone of finality about it. The narrator uses an extended metaphor to compare death to crossing the "sandbar" between the harbor of life and the ocean of death.

The poem contains four simple stanzas, usually alternating between long and short lines. Tennyson employs a traditional ABAB rhyme scheme.

Example:

"But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep,

Turns again home."

Scholars have noted that the form of the poem follows the content. That is to say that the long-short lines hold a wavelike quality that parallels the narrative thread of the poem.

The poem was set to music by Hubert Parry in 1903.