James Dickey’s “On the Hill Below the Lighthouse” best reminds me of the Lord Upon first reading Dickey’s poem, a deep yearning and sentimentalemotion is achieved. There is a great sense of not regret but of something that thenarrator longs for. This can be seen in the last stanza of the poem.“Now that I can be sure of my sleep;The moon is held strongly within it.A woman comes true when I think her.Shade swings, and she lies against me.Let us lie in the returning light;Let us lie where your angel is walking,Coming back, coming back, going over.”It is not until this last stanza that I completely feel the concept of nostalgia. Here it canbe seen that there was once a woman that the narrator had deep feelings for and he recallshow she used to lie next to him in the light of the lighthouse’s beam. The last line,“coming back, coming back, going over” is almost like a unifying device for the wholepoem. It almost seems that the narrator is recalling the woman that was from his past andreplaying the whole scene of when they were together in his head all over again.And it is also this quality of recollection that has reminded so much of Tennyson. In Tennyson’s “Tears, Idle Tears,” a strong sense of nostalgia is perceived. In the lastline of every stanza there are the words, “...the days that are no more.” This appears to bethe unifying device that connects this poem together. However, in this poem, there seemsto be a sense of regret. Unlike Dickey’s poem, this poem is much more sad and moredepressing. It appears that this poem was the reaction of the death of a loved one. Tennyson explains in his first stanza that as he looks into the autumn fields, he recalls ofhappy days with a loved one that will no longer happen anymore. “Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,Tears from the depth of some divine despairRise in the heart, an...
