Lord Tennyson’s speaker makes a quiet, almost dignified peace with most of what death does. He does not resent the physical changes that come to a body—the “shatter’d stalks” or “ruin’d chrysalis” left behind. That kind of decay does not shake his faith, because he imagines a spirit moving on through an “Eternal process,” and virtue itself transplanted somewhere else where it will bloom again. For three stanzas the mood is gentle, reasonable, and consoling; you feel him trying to rise above raw grief with a long, trusting view of existence.
But the final stanza drops that reassuring calm. There is exactly one thing for which he does blame Death, and the anger he has been storing up finally breaks through: death has separated his life from his friend’s so completely that they cannot hear each other speak. All that philosophy cannot touch the loneliness of that silence. The poem’s power lies in that sudden shift—from spiritual patience to a deeply personal, aching wrath.