The Splendour Falls on Castle Walls Analysis

The Echo MeterWe'll start with by explaining the meter, since that's where many new Shmoopers often get confused when reading poetry. The "meter" of a poem just describes the pattern (if there is o...

The speaker of this poem is clearly a nature lover. There he is (and we're just assuming that he's a… he), up in the mountains somewhere all by himself, taking in the view of a valley at sunset....

"The Splendour Falls on Castle Walls" is a short, song-like poem that was inserted into a longer poem called The Princess as a kind of break in the action. The Princess is—you guessed it—about...

Tennyson is famous for making his poems sound like what they're meant to describe, and this poem is no exception. The speaker describes echoes in the mountains, and the poem itself is filled with "...

This poem usually gets referred to by its first line: "The Splendour Falls on Castle Walls," or just as "The Splendour Falls." The first line of the poem is kind of weird, though. As we point out i...

Like many of his fellow Victorian poets, Tennyson was interested in mythology, and in English and Norse mythology in particular. Everyone in the nineteenth century was interested in origins and his...

When you get past the difficult first line (see "What's Up with the Title"), there aren't that many tough words to trip up even a novice Shmooper. Most of the vocabulary here is relatively straight...

"Splendour Falls" is a short poem that was added to a longer poem called The Princess, which was later adapted into a comic operetta called Princess Ida by Gilbert and Sullivan in 1884. "Splendour...

Shmoopers, there's not a lot of sex happening here. The speaker is alone in the mountains, watching a sunset. (Yes, this would be a great spot to take a date, but he seems to be alone—apart from...

"Elfland": This is an English name for the Old Norse "Alfheimr," or "Elf Home," which was the home of the Light Elves according to Norse mythology. (10)