Crossing the Bar

Crossing the Bar, written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, relates the notion of death back to a bay harbor that has a sandbar. The author develops these two scenarios that are supposed to represent death. The first was the idea of the ship being forced to turn back homeward after the journey out to the depths of the sea. This seemed to present death as the final return after a long journey that was a little bit off course and not coming back because of the lack of visible signs provided by the sandbar such as the sounds and the foam created by the waves crashing against and over it. This helped set up the divide that the sandbar creates from the safety of the harbor in comparison to the sea for the second set that the author provided. The second set was the idea that once the author crosses the sandbar he will reach a different place. It seemed that the second place had a "Pilot,"(13) that represented God. Maybe once the sandbar has been crossed and the new place has been reached, a metaphorical ship will sweep up to take the person that has passed on to a new place. Some interesting and a little bit confusing parts of the poem where in spots with odd capitalization such as, "Bourne of Time and Place,"(13) that lead to believe he must be thinking of the material world that actually contains a hourly clock and locations, but it leaves room for the vice versa to be contemplated as the Heavenly realm and where we are really coming from. The poem could us some clarification in certain areas, but the death theme was definitely represented through the intertwined scenarios.