Introduction

Alfred Lord Tennyson Is the most prominent of the Victorian poets. He had a very long literary career. The Spain of his career was pretty long. Alfred Tennyson lived up to 82 years and he started writing when he was very little. By the time when he was 12, he wrote an epic poem which was almost 6000 lines. And then he never stops writing.

Alfred Tennyson continued to write. And then He emerged as the most eminent poem of the Victorian era. Also considered the national poet. He is a man who lived through the entire Victorian period. All the changes in the Victorian era can be seen in his poem.

Lotos Eaters

Now talking about the poem The Lotos Eaters it was published in 1832. Once Alfred Tennyson visited Spain with his friend Henry Hallam where they visited the Pyrenees Mountains. It is that henry Hallam who died very young few years later.

Alfred Tennyson wrote the poem in memoriam. When he visited Spain he was all struck by the beauty of the land. And that is believed to be one inspiration for this poem to others. Also, another source of inspiration for this poem was Greek mythology and the story of Ulysses or Odysseus.

This poem Lotos Eaters is based on the story of Odysseus’s mariners described and scroll 9 of Homer’s Odyssey.

Homer writes about a storm that blows the great Heroes mariners off course as they attempt to journey back from Troy to their homes in Ithaca.

They came to an island where people do nothing but eat Lotos, a flower so delicious that some of his men, upon testing it, lose all desire to return to Ithaca and long only to remain in the land of the lotus.

Odysseus must drag his men away so that they can resume their journey home. in this poem, Tennyson powerfully evokes the mariners yearning to settle into a life of peaceful rest even death.

Alfred Tennyson provides an attempting and seductive vision of a life free from toil Nearly every stanza of the Choric song presents a different argument to justify the mariner’s resolution to remain in the lotos land.

For example in the second stanza of the song the mariner Express the irony of the fact that man who is the pinnacle and apex of the creation is the only creature made to toil and Labor all days of his life. Although the taste of the Lotos and the vision of life it offers is seductive. The poem suggests that the mariners may be deceiving themselves by succumbing to the hypnotic power of the flower.

Partaking of the lotos involves abandoning external reality and living instead in a world of appearance where everything “seems” to be but nothing actually is:

 The Lotos land emerges as a land where all things always seemed the same, indeed the word seems to recur throughout the poem and can be found In all but, one of the opening 5 stanzas, suggesting that the Lotos land is not so much a “land of a stream” as a “land of seems”.  in addition, in the final stanza of the chronic song, the poem describes the Lotos land as a “hollow” land with “hollow” caves, indicating that the vision of the sailors is somehow empty and insubstantial.

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