page_title: Tithonus (poem)
section_title: Synopsis and structure
hierarchical_section_title: Tithonus (poem) / Synopsis and structure
context_page_description: "Tithonus" is a poem by the Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, originally written in 1833 as "Tithon" and completed in 1859. It first appeared in the February edition of the Cornhill Magazine in 1860. Faced with old age, Tithonus, weary of his immortality, yearns for death. The poem is a dramatic monologue with Tithonus addressing his consort Eos, the goddess of the dawn.
context_section_description: The poem begins with Tithonus speaking to Eos "at the quiet limit of the world" (line 7) where he lives with her. Confronted with old age and its attendant pains, he meditates upon death and mortality, and mourns the fact that death cannot release him from his misery. He recounts how Eos, choosing him to be her lover, had filled him with so much pride that he had seemed "To his great heart none other than a God!" (14). Though she carelessly granted him immortality at his asking, he could not escape the ravages of time. The Hours aged him and his youth and beauty faded away−-"But thy strong Hours indignant work'd their wills / And beat me down and marr'd and wasted me" (18–19). He asks Eos to set him free−-"Let me go; take back thy gift" (27)−-and questions why anyone should desire that which is unattainable.
  Eos departs at dawn without replying to his wish that she take back the boon of immortality. As she leaves, her tears fall on his cheek. This fills him with the foreboding that the saying he had learnt on earth, that even "The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts"(49), might be true. He remembers his youth when he would feel his whole body come alive at dawn as Eos kissed him and whispered to him words "wild and sweet" (61), which seemed like the song Apollo sang as Ilion (Troy) was being built. In the final section, weary of life and immortality, he yearns for death to take him. He feels that "men that have the power to die" (70) are happy and fortunate. Since his "immortal age" (22) can no longer be reconciled with Eos' "immortal youth" (22), he once more begs her:
  Release me, and restore me to the ground;
  
  Thou seest all things, thou wilt see my grave:
  
  Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;
  
  I earth in earth forget these empty courts,
  
  And thee returning on thy silver wheels. (72–76)
caption: Dawn (1881) by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Eos was the Greek goddess of the dawn.
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