Analysis- Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead

Essay by DigitalDragonJunior High, 9th gradeA-, August 2004

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HOME they brought her warrior dead:

She nor swooned, nor uttered cry:

All her maidens, watching, said,

'She must weep or she will die.'

Then they praised him, soft and low, 5

Called him worthy to be loved,

Truest friend and noblest foe;

Yet she neither spoke nor moved.

Stole a maiden from her place,

Lightly to the warrior stepped, 10

Took the face-cloth from the face;

Yet she neither moved nor wept.

Rose a nurse of ninety years,

Set his child upon her knee--

Like summer tempest came her tears-- 15

'Sweet my child, I live for thee.'

- Lord Alfred Tennyson

Home they brought her warrior dead is a poem all to do about the feelings that a widow is to undergo when her husband, she learns has been killed in battle. When they have brought the corpse home, her feelings was nothing too emotional and she never fainted out of sadness or never cried her heart out.

She stayed rather composed and quiet. Her maidens urged her to cry as they said that if she didn't't all the pent up emotions inside her that she was trying to struggle with would burst out of her thus resulting in her death. When an old nurse who was as old as 90 years rose to her feet and placed the warrior's baby on the wife's knees, her tears came quickly and only then did she start crying thus showing us that it was not the warrior's life that she was grieving for, but her baby who was now going to enter this world without a father. This poem glosses over emotions such as sadness and grief, expectation of what the widow should have to do and what the widow never did.

The poet is told from a third...