Sweet and Low

Alfred Tennyson wrote "Sweet and Low" in 1849 and put it into print the following year, as one of a set of songs he inserted between the cantos of his long poem The Princess. The speaker is a mother at a cradle, asking the sea wind to bring the baby's father home. Nothing in the two verses says who he is or where he has gone, only that he is somewhere west of her and expected.

It reached nurseries by way of music. Joseph Barnby set the words as a part-song in 1863, and that tune is the one nearly everybody sings.

Origins

The Princess was published in 1847. The songs that most readers now know from it, including this one, were not in that first edition. Tennyson added six lyric interludes for the third edition of 1850, placing them between the numbered cantos, and "Sweet and Low" falls between the second and third. "The splendour falls on castle walls" came in with the same batch.

In November 1849 Tennyson sent two versions of the lullaby to Emily Sellwood, whom he married the following June, and asked her to pick the one he should use. When the revised book appeared, Charles Kingsley thought so highly of the poem that he quoted it complete in his review in Fraser's Magazine in September 1850.

The laureateship came after, not before. Tennyson was appointed Poet Laureate on 19 November 1850, some months after William Wordsworth's death that April, and he held the post until he died in 1892. So the cradle song was written by a poet who was not yet Laureate, though it spent the next forty years circulating under his laureate name.

Joseph Barnby published his setting in 1863 with Novello and Company. Barnby spent his career on church music and hymn tunes, and "Sweet and Low" is one of the few secular part-songs he wrote; it is also the piece he is remembered for. It moved quickly from choral societies into drawing rooms and school songbooks, which is how a Victorian narrative poem ended up being sung over actual cradles.

Meaning & Interpretation

The two verses do two different jobs. The first talks to the wind and never explains itself: "blow him again to me" arrives before the reader knows who "him" is. The second verse turns down to the child and answers the question, twice, in the plainest words available: "Father will come to thee soon."

The sea imagery points one way. "Silver sails all out of the west" is a ship coming in, and the west wind she is coaxing is the wind that would carry it. Tennyson never states that the father is a sailor, and he never says whether the ship arrives. Read as interpretation rather than fact, a good many readers hear worry underneath the hush, a woman steadying herself while she settles the baby, since a mother certain of a homecoming would not need to bargain with the weather.

The "dying moon" is the setting moon, which places the scene late, close to morning. Most of the lullaby effect comes from sound rather than sense: repeated openings, long vowels, and the two closing lines that stretch out past the metre of everything above them.

Who wrote Sweet and Low?

Alfred Tennyson wrote the words in 1849, and they were first printed in 1850 in the third edition of his poem The Princess. He was appointed Poet Laureate later that same year, in November 1850. The familiar melody is not his; it was composed by Joseph Barnby and published in 1863.

What does "wind of the western sea" mean?

It is the wind blowing in off the ocean to the west, the wind that would push a homebound ship toward shore. The mother is addressing it directly and asking it to blow steadily and quietly, both to bring the father back and to keep from waking the baby.

Who is the "him" in the first verse?

The baby's father. The first verse never names him, and the line "blow him again to me" only makes sense once the second verse says "Father will come to thee soon" and describes sails coming in from the west.

Is Sweet and Low a poem or a lullaby?

Both, in that order. Tennyson wrote it as a song inside a long narrative poem, meant to be read on the page rather than sung to a real infant. Barnby's 1863 music is what turned it into a working lullaby, and by the late Victorian period it was printed in children's songbooks alongside traditional nursery rhymes that were centuries older.