by
Poet's Day

Two Lives Bound Fast in One

Two Lives Bound Fast in One
by
Poet's Day

This week’s poem “Circumstance” is by Alfred, Lord Tennyson and I have chosen it from a book of his collected works I bought from That Little Bookshop.

Two lovers whispering by an orchard wall:
Two lives bound fast in one with golden ease;

Poem 405. Circumstance

Two children in two neighbour villages
Playing mad pranks along the heathy leas;
Two strangers meeting at a festival;
Two lovers whispering by an orchard wall:
Two lives bound fast in one with golden ease;
Two graves grass-green beside a grey church-tower,
Wash’d with still rains and daisy-blossomed;
Two children in one hamlet born and bred:
So runs the round of life from hour to hour.

This poem by Tennyson is short but tells the history of a generation of people in nine lines.

We begin with children playing with each other in the fields between their villages. They meet again after a gap of years at a fete or celebration of some kind—it could be a music festival or any other gathering of like-minded individuals–but there’s a connection between the two of them, so much so that they begin meeting by the old orchard and eventually marry. The last scene shows us their graves side by side in the churchyard, marked with mossy headstones and bestrewn with daisies and then we see their children “in one hamlet born and bred” beginning the cycle anew and Tennyson muses that life is much like a round song, with new cycles rising from the old. The title of the poem with also suggests a cyclical connection, circumstance being derived from a Latin word meaning “encircle”.

I like this poem because it suggests so much by saying so little. Each line paints a picture that we largely construct ourselves—we can all imagine a couple whispering secretively to each other, but your couple will look very different to mine. Even the solemn picture of the graves, though it says more than the other images, conjures up a picture that will be different for you than it is for me.

There are a few performances on YouTube but unfortunately none of them are all that great.