Alfred Tennyson

As thro' the Land

As through the land at eve we went,

Biblical harvest scene

Plucking grain while walking echoes the Disciples in Matthew 12:1. Tennyson sets a marital argument against this sacred backdrop.

And plucked the ripened ears,
We fell out, my wife and I,
O we fell out I know not why,

Trivial cause

The vagueness is the point—couples fight over nothing. The "I know not why" makes the reconciliation more universal.

And kissed again with tears.
And blessings on the falling out
That all the more endears,
When we fall out with those we love
And kiss again with tears!

Shift to elegy

Line 10 pivots the entire poem. What seemed like a simple reconciliation poem becomes about grief and a dead child.

For when we came where lies the child
We lost in other years,
There above the little grave,
O there above the little grave,

Repetition as ritual

The repeated "O there above the little grave" mimics prayer or keening. The stutter captures the difficulty of speaking about loss.

We kissed again with tears.
This work was published before January 1, 1931, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.
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Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Hidden Grave

This poem performs a bait-and-switch. The first nine lines read like a cheerful lyric about marital reconciliation—a couple argues over nothing, makes up, and the speaker philosophizes that "falling out" makes love stronger. Then line 10 drops: "For when we came where lies the child / We lost in other years." Suddenly we're reading an elegy.

The structure is deliberate misdirection. Tennyson buries the real subject (dead child, ongoing grief) under the surface subject (trivial argument). This mirrors how the couple has buried their child, how grief gets buried under daily life, how married people carry loss together without speaking it. The "falling out" wasn't random—it happened because they were walking to their child's grave, a journey that would strain any marriage.

Notice "We lost in other years"—not "we lost years ago" but "in other years," as if the past is a different country. The phrase creates distance while acknowledging the loss never fully recedes. The poem's present tense ("we went," "we fell out") collapses past grief into present experience. This isn't about one visit to a grave; it's about all visits, about marriage as the ongoing navigation of shared loss.

Kissing with Tears

The phrase "kissed again with tears" appears three times, creating a refrain that shifts meaning each time. First iteration: tears of reconciliation after a petty fight. Second iteration (in the philosophical middle section): tears as general symbol of love's intensity. Third iteration: tears of grief at their child's grave. Same phrase, three different weights.

This is Tennyson working in his ballad mode—simple language, repetition, a story that builds through refrains. The form echoes folk songs about loss, but the psychology is sophisticated. The couple's argument isn't explained because it doesn't need to be. Grief makes people irritable. Walking to your dead child's grave with your spouse surfaces every unspoken tension in a marriage.

The final image is devastating precisely because it's so physical: two people kissing above a small grave. "Little grave" emphasizes the child's size, making the loss concrete. The poem doesn't explain how the child died or when. Those details would distract from the central truth: this couple's intimacy is permanently shaped by shared grief. They kiss "again"—as they did after arguing, as they presumably did before the child died, as they will continue to do. The repetition suggests both ritual and survival.