However, the rhythmical undulations, image reverberations, meticulously crafted metrical variations, and the carefully chosen diction result in a powerfully complex and dynamic poem. “Crossing the Bar” appears deceptively simple: sixteen lines, divided into four four-line stanzas, the poem is in form a traditional ballad. The quarter and eighth notes must have chased the slower half notes like waves chasing one another to shore, with the cacophony of voices sounding much like the moaning of the sandbar to which Tennyson alludes in the poem.Īn analysis of the musical settings requires first an understanding of the various interpretations of the poem itself. One can only imagine how the anthem, composed not only for the occasion, but with the acoustics of the Abbey in mind, must have sounded, with a few well-placed rests and lingering dotted half notes to allow the words to resound among the rafters of the Abbey like ghosts. Sir John Frederick Bridge, organist and musical director at Westminster Abbey, had composed a musical setting for Tennyson’s poem on the occasion of his funeral in 1892, just three years after Tennyson had composed the sixteen line lyric. A great multitude filled the Abbey, and the rendering, in Sir Frederick Bridge’s setting, of ‘Crossing the Bar’ by the Abbey Choir sent the ‘wild echoes’ of the dead man’s verse flying up and on through the great arches overhead with a dramatic effect not to be forgotten” (234). Gladstone was more stately this of Tennyson, as befitted a poet, had a more intimate beauty. Humphry Ward writes, “I saw the Tennyson funeral in the Abbey, and remember it vividly. In the Epilogue to her 1918 memoir A Writer’s Recollection s, Mrs.
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