Examples of imagery in the brook
Answers
In “The Brook,” by the English poet Alfred Tennyson (1812-1889), the Brook named in the title speaks for itself, describing its origins, its travels, and its ultimate union with a large, brimming river. The poem is typical of the interest many nineteenth-century English poets showed in writing poems about the attractive aspects of nature. In the 1800s, England was losing much of its natural beauty, thanks to the growth of huge cities and heavy industry during the so-called Industrial Revolution. It is not surprising, then, that many Romantic poets (such as William Wordsworth) and many Victorian authors (such as Tennyson) celebrated, somewhat nostalgically, the lovely landscapes that were so often threatened by the rise of the new mechanized, industrial culture.
“The Brook” is shaped like the very thing it describes. On the page, it looks long and narrow. Rather than using the common ten-syllable line that had become very conventional in much English poetry by this time, Tennyson instead chooses alternating lines of four syllables and three syllables. The poem thus has a shape that seems appropriate to the appearance and rhythms of a brook, now moving outward, then moving inward, and then back outward again, much as a brook’s waters might move. The poem’s effect would be different if every single line were exactly the same length. Instead, Tennyson makes the work move in a pattern that is at once irregular and predictable, much like the brook itself.
Tennyson’s decision to let the brook describe itself and its routes makes the stream seem almost alive. Rather than depicting the stream from a distanced, objective perspective, he gives the brook a kind of literal vitality by personifying it. Apparently, the brook begins in a kind of lake populated by water birds (“coot and hern” ), but no sooner does the poem allude to this place of origins than the text, like the brook itself, makes a “sudden sally” (2), a noun suggesting a quick movement or leap. The brook moves swiftly, and so does the poem: only eight lines into the work, the stream has already passed twenty villages (or “thorpes” ) and fifty “bridges” , presumably small rural bridges made of wood or stone rather than the kinds of massive, imposing steel bridges being erected elsewhere.