Can someone give me the explanation of the lines for the poem called "Tithonus" by Lord Alfred Tennyson?

Answer 1

I will give a basic expalanation and you can work out the details by considering the poem closley. Aurora, the Goddess of Dawn, whom Homer had described as "rosy fingered", fell in love with a series of mortals, one of whom was Tithonus, a handsome Trojan prince. She requested for him the gift of immortality fron the gods or from Zeus but forgot to ask that he be eternally youthful. After some years of rapturous love , such as a hitherto mortal man may be said to enjoy with an immortal (one Greek word for god means deathless) Tithonus aged and grew old, when Aurora left him alone, giving him the run of her divine palace. The poem is the lament of Tithonus. He would rather die like other men than live in this gorgeous isolation, forsaken by the goddess. Other more general themes: the meeting of gods and mortals can lead to tragedy; the gifts of the gods are ambiguous; even the gods make mistakes, since Aurora forgot to ask for eternal youth for her beloved prince; lovely poetic evocation of the dawn and of the cycle of birth and death.