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It was Tennyson himself who said, “Poetry is like shot-silk with many glancing colours. Every reader must find his own interpretation according to his own ability and according to his sympathy with the poet.” These words may be in some measure justification for finding in The Lotos-Eaters the description of a psychoanalytic process which could be possible only in relation to our most modern mental clinics and which is without question an anachronism as attributed to literature first published in 1833. But “Poetry is truer than fact” and The Lotos-Eaters, to those who read it so, is the true presentation of the conflict of a dissociated personality. In the accustomed symbols of psychiatry the poem presents the emotional experience of the neurotic carrying you with him from trough to crest of the “mounting wave” and back again. It is the story of a failure.
Preliminary to analysis, the conflict of dissociation is confined to the subconscious, and it becomes articulate only in the Choric Song. The sea has done its worst and the sight of land calls for courage, courage versus despair, the despair of the patient unintelligently aware of his plight. Even as he sights land, he sinks moonstruck, down into the trough of dissociation, the sensuous indulgence of memory,
Breathing like one that hath a weary dream.
Meanwhile
the slender stream
Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem.
Life is made up of streams, of wavering lights and shadows, a gleaming river, an eternity of sunset on the unrelenting silent snow, and overtopping the valley as the dominant note, stands the shadowy pine, sinister and ominous.