In the opening line of Alfred Tennyson's "The Lotus Eaters", Odysseus raises the battle cry of "Courage!" to his men as they advance on their trajectory towards a strange and nameless "land". For these weary wanderers, this place is clearly another inevitable detour and not their final destination; even so, its exact nature and meaning remain ambiguous in the first three stanzas. Using various poetic techniques, Tennyson skillfully describes the land as one that not only presents the viewer with images of otherworldly beauty, but also holds inherent danger for the prying visitor. Through the use of creative diction and variations in rhyme scheme and prosody, Tennyson's scenic descriptions work in two ways: he reveals the true identity of the land by paralleling and imitating its interesting effects and qualities in the poetic language itself. Ultimately, it is the poet and not the hero who first unravels the mystery of the land of the lotus eaters, revealing it not as the sublimely serene sanctuary it might initially seem, but as a diversionary trap that threatens to strand Odysseus. and his crew forever in the amnesia and melancholy of still time. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The country's opening descriptor immediately draws attention to its strangeness and sense of detachment from reality: "In the afternoon they came to a land/ Where it always seemed afternoon. This interlocking line reinforces the same quality of constancy and anniversary of which the earth gives, since each of the two lines begins with the same word “In” and reiterates the same key word “afternoon”. With this repetitive diction, there is a shift in the poem from the powerful thrust and direct linearity of the two initial lines, "towards" and "towards the shore", at a certain defined point (emphasized by the anapestic foot in the first line, the last of which the stressed syllable reveals a forward thrust); of cyclic loop. It is at this moment in the first stanza that the movement of the lines becomes slower and less teleological, a change reflected by the replacement of action words such as "mount" and "pointed" with those of inaction and sleep. Fittingly, this is where Tennyson moves on to describe natural rather than human activity; the landscape is personified in such a way that it, rather than humans, becomes the main actor in the first three stanzas of the poem. Throughout the first and second stanzas, words such as "languid," "fainting," "breathing," "full-faced," and "moon," as well as phrases such as "tired dream" and "sleeping sheets," convey effectively the sleepy, lazy atmosphere of the eternal afternoon. Even images that normally convey frenetic, energetic movement are imbued with a peculiar stillness and lethargy: "And like a smoke downward, the thin stream / Along the cliff seemed to fall. , stop and fall". Defying the normal flow of water, the waterfalls of this mysterious land appear to meander and float in space and time. This is also reflected in the strangely inverted and interlocking construction of the line itself (which breaks with the conventions of English grammar) and in the phrase “fall and pause and fall,” both interesting choices that reinforce temporal nonlinearity in the land of the Lotus Eaters. Tennyson adopts the Spenserian rhyme scheme for “The Lotus Eaters,” which allows for three several rhymes appear alternately within the nine long lines of a single stanza. There is a regularity and consistency to this particular choice that parallels the aura!”)..