‘Crossing the Bar’ by Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

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.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.

Considering the Poem

The underlying, single metaphor here is familiar: a comparison between the spiritual processes of dying and a voyage from the river of life, across the dangerous sandbar at the river’s mouth and out into the timeless, placeless (13) sea of eternity. The familiarity, perhaps, eases the reader but, while this ease contributes to the poem’s sustained mood of still quiet and clarity, it doesn’t explain it completely.

So, what else contributes to that mood? For one thing, little happens in the poem. The time changes hardly a jot from ‘sunset’ (1) to ‘Twilight’ (9) but even that action takes place only in the silence of the poet’s thinking. The plain vocabulary creates a sense of simple clarity and the repeated ‘When’ clauses (4, 7, 12, 16) make us feel that nothing described is doubtful, so that even the hopes in the poem (3-4, 11-12, 15-16) seem almost certainties. The rhyme scheme is regular and the rhythmic pulse in pairs of lines (four stresses then three in the following line) has an easing, quietening effect.

The meticulous organisation of the verse, especially the many parallels of structure between one part of the poem and another, are also a deep source of the quiet mood. To get a feel for the degree of detailed planning, compare the first with the third verse, and the second with the fourth, line by line. The pairs of verses map on to each other in the tiniest detail. This parallelism has a lot to do with the poem’s meditative stillness, and the poet’s deep confidence in God’s guardianship.

The pilot, of course, accompanies the ship’s captain through a difficult, critical stage of a journey. Here, the poet lives through the leaving of his human home in time and space. At the bar’s crossing in the final verse, he tells us that he’ll no longer perceive God only through a glass darkly, but directly. He also tells us that the ‘Pilot’ has been present throughout the dangerous journey, his presence heard at first only in a distant ‘call’ (2) but known silently, confidently, and finally, as Paul says in the first letter to the Corinthians (13:12), ‘face to face’ (15).