Crossing the Bar

What is it like to die? Tennyson is not celebrating death. Nor is he encouraging others to do so. Death is mysterious, and humanity is cursed/blessed with the awareness of its reality. But because we have no first-hand accounts of what death is, we have to approach it through metaphor. What might death be like?

But Tennyson converts death, the noun, into dying, a verb. Christians do not want to die any more than anyone else. It is not that the speaker in Tennyson’s poem looks forward to death or rushes to embrace it. Because of the nature of the experience of death, no one has ever returned from it, survived it, and provided any idea of what exactly it means to transition from “is” to “was”. Literature is far more comfortable with the before and after of death than that actual moment. The poem then anatomizes what that transition might feel like for a Christian who is not so much at the end of anything but rather at the beginning of something transcendent.

Literature since Antiquity has conjured, often with elaborate, imaginative detailing, the afterlife as a real place with dimension and textures, peopled by an assortment of fetching fantasy figures, star-dusted angels and radiant gods. And literature has long been fascinated with recounting the actual experience of death, whether from sickness or war, peaceful or violent, sudden or drawn-out. Writers have chronicled the growing sense of panic and helplessness as characters move toward the moment of their demise. But that actual moment of translation, that slender and passing moment when death is experienced, that moment escapes retelling. Unlike the lead-up to it or the mythical realm that comes after it, that moment is terrifying, suggesting that everything to that moment is now gone. It is a moment of supreme alienation—die surrounded by loving family and friends and still you die alone.

Tennyson refuses to allow that moment such terrors. Yes, it is a moment that marks a move that cannot be recalled, and, yes, the passage to death marks a moment of vulnerability and aloneness. No one else is on his boat, save the Pilot. But Tennyson offers perspective. Rather than making death the end-all, the terror that closes life, Tennyson reconfigures it using his deeply-held Christian faith. He diminishes its dimensions. Drawing on his love of the sea, Tennyson suggests death itself is a transitory sandbar, tricky perhaps if you sail unaware of it. But knowing its whereabouts and understanding exactly what such a ridge of sand means, a person can head out to the open ocean with confidence and anticipation.

The analysis of Tennyson’s poem involves unpacking his elaborate metaphor. The inner harbor where the ship loads is the furious busy-ness of a person’s life. The comings and goings along the harbor suggest the day-to-day routine of every person’s life.  The harbor, then, is in the grandest and widest metaphor in the poem: nothing less than Earth itself. The “one clear call” (Line 2) to departure, the “evening bell” (Line 9), is a summons that it is time to die. Tennyson, himself just weeks from a near-brush with death, suggests that in each of us is a moment when we realize death is now. But death here is not something frightening but rather a calling to head out to sea. Within the context of Tennyson’s harbor metaphor, that voyage is perfectly natural, inevitable, and even routine. A harbor makes no sense unless ships depart from it.

All the speaker hopes for is a smooth passage over the sandbar that he knows edges the harbor. It can be treacherous only if a person is not aware or denies its reality. The speaker hopes the departure is at full tide so that the actual crossing over will not have the churning noise and confusions of passing over the sandbar at low tide. At high tide, the sand bar will be far underwater, at a depth that makes for quick and easy crossing. He hopes only for a quiet passage. The passage, that is the movement into death, is not avoidable, but the speaker hopes it will be a calm transition.

The moment he embarks—the moment of his dying—he pleads that no one mourn him. Yes, he departs the world of “Time and Place” (Line 13), but he is heading into a greater space, a greater time—nothing less than eternity. Using the tantalizingly close majesty of the open ocean just beyond the sandbar, Tennyson creates a narrative of dying that looks not backward—that is the dead-end logic of misty regrets and lacerating self-recriminations—but rather forward. He closes the poem not giving a lingering and longing look back at the harbor but rather his eyes facing ahead, anticipating meeting the “Pilot” face to face at last (Line 15). That meeting, however, which is the signal joy of Christians, is attainable only through the passage through death, only by crossing the bar.