Can somebody please give me the tone/style of the poem “Tithonus” by Lord Alfred Tennyson?
mrs-campbell Teacher High School – 11th Grade eNotes Editor It is a beautifully written poem filled with a tone of longing and pleading, enhancing the sad and lonely plight of Tithonus, whose message is that immortality is not a blessing, but a curse, and one should think twice before desiring it. In the poem Tennyson is writing from the point of view of Tithonus, the former lover of the goddess of the dawn, Aurora. Aurora has granted him the gift of eternal life, but not the gift of eternal youth, so Tithonus grows older and older, without the ability to die. Tennyson, in the poem, speaks as Tithonus might have, mourning over how lonely he feels, how he doesn’t feel a part of the human community anymore (“Why should a man desire in any way/To vary from the kindly race of men”), how he misses his youth and beauty, and how immortality isn’t all it’s cracked up to be (“Of happy men have the power to die”). He begs the beautiful Aurora to “Let me go: take back thy gift” and allow him to b
