Get out the microscope, because we’re going through this poem line-by-line.
Lines 937-952
If these brief lays, of Sorrow born,
Were taken to be such as closed
Grave doubts and answers here proposed,
Then these were such as men might scorn:
Her care is not to part and prove;
She takes, when harsher moods remit,
What slender shade of doubt may flit,
And makes it vassal unto love:
And hence, indeed, she sports with words,
But better serves a wholesome law,
And holds it sin and shame to draw
The deepest measure from the chords:
Nor dare she trust a larger lay,
But rather loosens from the lip
Short swallow-flights of song, that dip
Their wings in tears, and skim away.
- Tennyson now talks about how his sorrowful "lays" (which is an old-timey word for "songs") are not meant as solutions to these great cosmic questions. If so, then men might rightfully laugh at them.
- Instead, she (that's the personified Sorrow) takes the speaker's doubts and make them a servant to his love for Arthur.
- "Vassal" means "servant," and is used a lot in medieval courtly love poetry. Again, he's describing his powerful feelings for Arthur in terms of a relationship between two lovers.
- Sorrow is guiding him to write this poem, but she only allows him to write in short spurts.
- The words that she inspires are imagined by Tennyson as birds that briefly dip their wings in tears and then fly away—so sad.