Talk:The Deserted House

File:W.E.F. Britten - The Early Poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson - The Deserted House.jpg

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Picture of the day

"The Deserted House" is a five-stanza poem written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in 1830, and included in his collection Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. The poem is characterised by its reliance on short lines which alternate in rhyme and meter to prevent a felicitous feel, a technique which has drawn much positive critical commentary. In the poem, Tennyson uses the image of a dark house as a metaphor for a dead body, underlining it with the closing stanza:

Come away: for Life and Thought
Here no longer dwell;
But in a city glorious—
A great and distant city—have bought
A mansion incorruptible.
Would they could have stayed with us!

This illustration by W. E. F. Britten, showing the eponymous house, accompanied the poem in a 1901 reprint.Illustration: W. E. F. Britten; restoration: Adam Cuerden

silliness in description of poem

I don't know who Joseph is, or what is on page 99 of him, but this description "The first four stanzas of the poem describe the emptiness of a house, while the fifth, final stanza reveals that the empty house is a metaphor for a dead body after the soul has left" is silly and inaccurate.

The clue that this is a body, not a house, is in the first stanza. Nothing in the last stanza gives away the fact that it is a body any more than any other paragraph. However, "Life and Thought have gone away" is a pretty big clue that it's about someone dead. I don't see how anyone could find the last stanza to be some big eye-opening reveal that -- GASP! -- it's about a body! If you didn't figure it out by then, you probably didn't get it in the last stanza either. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.49.196.193 (talk) 20:03, 28 May 2014 (UTC)