Tears, Idle Tears

"[1] William Wordsworth also wrote a poem inspired by this location in 1798, "Tintern Abbey", which develops a similar theme.

While Tintern Abbey may have prompted the poem, it seems unlikely that its powerful emotion derives only from a generalised feeling for the past.

[5] The ambiguity occurs in the contrasting descriptions of the tears: they are "idle", yet come from deep within the narrator; the "happy autumn-fields" inspire sadness.

Literary critic Cleanth Brooks writes, "When the poet is able, as in 'Tears, Idle Tears', to analyze his experience, and in the full light of the disparity and even apparent contradiction of the various elements, bring them into a new unity, he secures not only richness and depth but dramatic power as well.

"[6] Critic Graham Hough in a 1953 essay asks why the poem is unrhymed, and suggests that something must be "very skillfully put in [rhyme's] place" if many readers do not notice its absence.

[2] Readers tend not to notice the lack of rhyme because of the richness and variety of the vowel sounds Tennyson employs into the poem.