Tennyson never tells us why the speaker will not walk beside this stream again. The poem gives no reason, no name and no scene of leaving, only a person speaking to a bit of running water as if it could hear. That silence is part of its power. Whatever lies behind the goodbye, the poem suggests it is final, and it makes the loss feel enormous by setting one small human absence against the vast, patient life of the landscape.
The construction is very simple, and the simplicity does a lot of the work. There are four quatrains, and every one ends with the same line: "For ever and for ever." The rhymes barely change either. Lines one and three always rhyme on that open "ee" sound (*sea*, *be*, *lea*, *tree*, *bee*, *thee*), while lines two and four rhyme on "-iver" or "-ever" (*deliver*, *river*, *shiver*, *quiver*, *ever*). The poem keeps returning to the same sounds, like water running over the same stones. The shorter second and fourth lines give each stanza a lilting, rocking rhythm that suits a stream. The refrain, with its repeated "for ever," sounds almost like a chant, and it closes each stanza like a door.
Yet the refrain is not quite the same each time, because what comes before it keeps shifting. In the first stanza the speaker says "No more by thee my steps shall be," which sounds like a habit coming to an end. In the second it hardens into "Nowhere by thee my steps shall be," and the loss now covers all places. The stream itself is also being sent away. "Thy tribute wave deliver" makes the rivulet a kind of servant paying tribute to the sea. By the second stanza the speaker's tone has softened to "softly flow," and he wishes it growth, "a rivulet then a river." There is tenderness here, even generosity: he blesses the thing he is leaving. But the opening word "cold" hints at how hard this parting may be to bear.
The third stanza turns on the word "But." Where the first two stanzas follow the water downstream, away from the speaker, this one stays put: "here will sigh thine alder tree / And here thine aspen shiver." The trees seem to feel what the speaker feels, since they "sigh" and "shiver" like mourners, and the bee that will "hum" nearby suggests a world carrying on with its ordinary business. The refrain now means something different. "For ever and for ever" no longer describes only his absence. It also describes the place going on without him, perhaps without even noticing. The word "thine," repeated for the trees, shows how fully he has made the stream and its banks a companion, something belonging to *you* rather than to *it*.
The last stanza widens the view to its limit: "A thousand suns will stream on thee, / A thousand moons will quiver." Day and night pass in huge numbers, and the verbs are gentle and beautiful, with sunlight streaming and moonlight trembling on the surface. The beauty is what hurts. Then comes a second "But," and the speaker returns to himself: "But not by thee my steps shall be." The poem ends not on the grand cycle of time but on the small human fact it cannot get around.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. Tennyson, one of the best-known Victorian poets, could write long and elaborate verse, but here he uses almost nothing: two rhyme sounds, one refrain, a handful of plain nouns such as tree, bee and moon. There is no outburst of grief and no explanation, so readers have room to fill the gap with their own partings, whether from a place, a person or a time of life. The poem works like the stream it addresses, quiet on the surface, with a strong current beneath.