<P> Critic Graham Hough in a 1951 essay asks why the poem is unrhymed, and suggests that something must be "very skillfully put in (rhyme's) place" if many readers do not notice its absence . He concludes that "Tears, Idle Tears" does not rhyme "(b) ecause it is not about a specific situation, or an emotion with clear boundaries; it is about the great reservoir of undifferentiated regret and sorrow, which you can brush away...but which nevertheless continues to exist". Readers tend not to notice the lack of rhyme because of the richness and variety of the vowel sounds Tennyson employs . (T.S. Eliot considered Tennyson an unequaled master in handling vowel sounds; see, for example, Tennyson's "Ulysses".) Each line's end - sound--except for the second - last line's "regret"--is an open vowel or a consonant or consonant group that can be drawn out in reading . Each line "trails away, suggesting a passage into some infinite beyond: just as each image is clear and precise, yet is only any instance" of something more universal . </P> <P> The poem, one of the "songs" of The Princess, has been set to music a number of times . Edward Lear put the lyric to music in the 19th century, and Ralph Vaughan Williams' pianistic setting of 1903 was described by The Times as "one of the most beautiful settings in existence of Tennyson's splendid lyric". </P>

What does the poem tears idle tears mean