Crossing the Bar

What the poem says

Tennyson pictures death as a ship leaving harbor at evening. The bar is the sandbank at the mouth of a harbor, where waves break at low tide. He asks for a tide so full that the boat slips out without a sound. The second half repeats the picture: twilight, a bell, then dark. He asks that nobody mourns his going, because he hopes to see his Pilot face to face once he has crossed. Four short stanzas, a minute to read.

When it fits

Choose it for someone who met death calmly and held a Christian faith, often an older person after a long life. The sea images suit a sailor, a fisherman or anyone who loved the water. If the family wants a poem that speaks to those left behind rather than for the one who died, Remember by Christina Rossetti does that. Death Is Nothing at All stays closer to everyday speech.

Reading it aloud

A child or grandchild reads it in a funeral service or celebration of life, often near the end, before the committal or the closing hymn. Read slowly and let each stanza settle. One tip: say "crost" as "crossed", the old spelling is Tennyson's and needs no comment. Put the poem in the funeral program so guests can read along.

About the poet and the text

Alfred Tennyson was Poet Laureate of Britain for more than forty years. He wrote these lines in 1889, at eighty, after a crossing to the Isle of Wight, and asked that they close every collection of his poems. We copied the text from Demeter and Other Poems, published by Macmillan in London in 1889, through the Wikisource transcription.