Point of View

Early on in “The Lotos-eaters,” Tennyson establishes a third-person perspective. This use of a third person speaking voice combined with the clear allusion to classical texts suggests the distant, storytelling narrative voice typical to ancient epics. Indeed, Tennyson’s narrative speaker does spend large swaths of the first stanzas describing the Lotos-eaters’ island.

Yet, the authority of this account is quickly undermined by the interference of the "Choric Song." Rather than continuing to rely on a third-person point of view, the lotos eaters seize speakership for themselves. They become their own speakers and subjective rhetoricians as a they defend the malaise that has befallen them as a result of ingesting the lotos.

However, even before the intrusion of the "Choric Song," evidence of an unstable narrative voice appear even in the very first stanza of the poem. The third-person perspective is, like the lotos-eaters, a...