Tiresias, the Blind Seer of Thebes

Lord Tennyson · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 6 pages

Six pages carrying Tennyson's Tiresias complete, spoken throughout in the voice of the blind seer and addressed to a young man, with the epigraph from the poem's own coda — the tolling of his funeral bell broke on my Pagan Paradise.

The poem opens on what was lost. Tiresias wishes he were as in the years of old, while the blessed daylight still made itself ruddy through both the roofs of sight and woke eyes now dull but then keen to seek the meanings ambushed under all they saw — the flight of birds, the flame of sacrifice, what omens foreshadow fate, and the secret of the gods. He turns to his listener with the warning that the gods, despite human prayer, are slower to forgive than human kings, and that Arēs still burns in anger against the guiltless heirs of Cadmus, who killed the dragon by the springs of Dircē. The middle of the poem is the account of how he was blinded, and it is told as a young man's ambition: he walked all the lands beneath the Heliconian ridge, but his habit was to climb the highest heights in some strange hope of seeing the nearer God. On one naked peak, on a day when the winds were dead for heat and the noonday crag burned the hand, he followed a torrent down to a secret olive-glade and there saw Pallas Athene climbing from the bath — for which the sight of the world was taken from him, and the sight of what is to come given in its place. What follows is a prophecy his listener will not act on unless he chooses to, and the poem is built on the peculiar helplessness of a seer whom nobody believes.

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