Stanza 3 Summary

Get out the microscope, because we’re going through this poem line-by-line.

The charmed sunset linger'd low adown
In the red West: thro' mountain clefts the dale

In this new stanza, we get a little more detail about that setting sun. It's sinking down—sort of like most suns do in the evening.
Except here, it's a little difference. It seems to "linger" a little, as if it was enchanted ("charmed"). This new land is beautiful, but also a little spooky.
In the second half of line 20, Tennyson leaves the sun behind, and starts off on a new description. He mentions a valley ("dale") that we can see though breaks ("clefts") in the mountains. Then the description breaks off at the end of the line. That technique, where a sentence carries across multiple lines, is called enjambment. Keep an eye out for it, because Tennyson uses it a bunch in this poem. You could even say it's his enjambment. Get it? His jam? Anyone?

Was seen far inland, and the yellow down
Border'd with palm, and many a winding vale
And meadow, set with slender galingale;

In these lines we get a few more images of the landscape in this beautiful new place. The guys can see yellow fields ("down" is another term for a field) with palm trees around them. They also see lots of winding valleys and meadows, with ginger ("galingale") plants around them.
The whole look of this place reminds us of a tropical paradise. We're seeing something like Kauai. Exotic plants, the waterfalls, the palm trees—we're not in Kansas anymore, gang.

A land where all things always seem'd the same!

This is a key line, which really helps to establish the mood of this beautiful landscape. It describes it as a place where nothing seems to change. That's an echo of line 4, where this spot was described as a land of endless afternoons.
Again, this seems both tempting and a little spooky to us—a beautiful land outside of time.

And round about the keel with faces pale,
Dark faces pale against that rosy flame,

Now, all of a sudden, some new folks show up. At first we just see them as faces, gathering around the "keel" (that's the bottom part of the boat our friends the sailors arrived in).
The image of these new faces is mysterious. At first they are described as "pale" then as "Dark." Put together, these "Dark faces pale" seem like a kind of contradiction in terms—an oxymoron. Then we learn that it's the sunset, the "rosy flame" that is making them seem pale.
Whatever the explanation, this is turning out to be a place where nothing is clear and simple, and things may not be quite as they seem. (Cue spooky music.)

The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came.

Who are these new arrivals, with their pale-dark faces? Well, it turns out they are the famous "Lotos-eaters" of the title of this poem. They seem calm and friendly ("mild-eyed"), but also bummed-out ("melancholy").
So, who are these guys? Well, they're the folks who live in this enchanted land Tennyson pulled this story out of ancient legends of an island where the inhabitants ate a plant called the Lotos. That plant made them sleepy, lazy, and unable to leave the island.
The most famous version of this story, and the most important source for Tennyson, was Book 9 of Homer's Odyssey, where Odysseus visits the island of the Lotos-eaters and nearly loses his crew to them (see our "Allusions" section for the full scoop on that).