265. Sunset and evening star
Alfred Tennyson, 1809-92
A song of immortality, written in ten minutes in the author’s eighty-first year. It is always printed at the end of Tennyson’s poems. Tennyson once said: “I can hardly understand how any great, imaginative man, who has lived, suffered, thought and wrought, can doubt of the soul’s continuous progress in the after life.”
The poem was written on an October day in 1889, as the poet was crossing from Aldworth to Farringford. Tennyson’s son wrote in his Memoir of his father, concerning its origin:
Before he reached Farringford he had the moaning of the bar in his mind, and after dinner he showed me this poem written out. I said: “That is the crown of your life’s work.” He answered: “It came in a moment.” He explained the “Pilot” as “that Divine and Unseen who is always guiding us.” A few days before my father’s death, in 1892, he said to me: “Mind you put ‘Crossing the Bar,’ at the end of all editions of my poems.” My father considered Edmund Lushington’s translation into Greek of “Crossing the Bar” one of the finest translations he had ever read.
MUSIC. CROSSING THE BAR was composed for these words. The tune, in the nature of an unaccompanied quartet anthem, may be sung with freedom in regard to time and shading.
For comments on the composer, Joseph Barnby, see [Hymn 21].