This study will critique Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem "The Splendor Falls on Castle Walls," also known as "Bugle Song," focusing on the lyrics, music, and rhyme, and the ways these elements suggest and support the meaning of the poem. The argument of the study will be that Tennyson's use of these literary devices successfully conveys the conclusion that there is both a dying and an eternal life at work in both nature and in the life of human beings. Tennyson effectively creates a realm in which the poem unites with the speaker's emotions and thoughts and produces a consciousness of the transcendent qualities of humanity in time and nature.
The presence of the bugle, in fact, the central role of that instrument in the poem, suggests that, indeed, the poem is to be heard as a lyrical work, a song, without, of course, accompanying music in the literal sense. A "song," says J.A. Cuddon, is the designation used to denote such a poem and "distinguish it from narrative or dramatic verse of any kind" (Cuddon 372). In other words, Tennyson's poem can be called a song in that it does not tell a story or present dramatic events. Instead, it creates images and a mood which flows those images through the use of words, rhyme and music in the poetic sense. The poem merely presents a portrait of a natural setting which is punctuated by the sounds of a bugle (representing the presence of humanity, its longings and its losses) which are in turn reflected back from nature in echoes which reverberate through eternity from "soul to soul."
The poem qualifies as a lyric as well in its brevity and in the fact that it "expresses the feelings and thoughts of a single speaker . . . in a personal and subjective fashion" (Cuddon 372). The lyrics of this poem express feelings and thoughts having to do with the transitory nature of life and with the speaker's sense that despite this transitoriness there is something which remains, which is shared by human b...