Sunset and evening star

Sunset and evening star. Alfred Tennyson* (1809-1892). Written in October 1889, and entitled ‘Crossing the Bar’. Tennyson had been seriously ill earlier in the year, and his nurse had suggested that he should write a hymn on his recovery. This poem ‘came in a moment’ several months later, as he was crossing the Solent. His son Hallam told his father that it was ‘the crown of your life’s work’, and Tennyson himself asked that it should be placed at the end of every edition of his poems (C.B. Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson, 1969, p. 1458). This hauntingly beautiful poem uses the image of putting out to sea at sunset as an emblem of setting out for death: Sunset and evening star,    And one...