The Speaker

For the first five stanzas of “The Lotos-Eaters” a third-person, singular speaker determines the narrative progression of Tennyson’s poem. In many ways, Tennyson models this initial speaker after the traditional storytellers of epic poetry, such as Homer. Like these traditional storytellers, Tennyson’s speaker maintains a degree of distance between himself and the events of their story, detailing the events and action with remove and objectivity. For example, Tennyson’s speaker uses dialogue to quote the words of the other characters in the poem and maintains a steady narrative progression through telling about how “round about the keel with faces pale, / Dark faces pale against the rosy flame, / The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came” (25-27).

However, Tennyson also uses his speaker to depict the powerful draw of the lotos-eaters, the natural imagery of their island, and the oblivion that they represent. While the storytellers and narrators of...