Life & Wisdom Quote by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Tennyson gives “darkness” hands, then lets those hands do what Victorian Britain most feared and most fetishized: touch the human. The line is a miniature manifesto of his age’s anxious optimism, where geology and evolutionary speculation were loosening the old, well-lit story of creation. “Out of darkness” doesn’t just mean ignorance or evil; it’s the prehistory that science was starting to sketch - deep time, blind process, the abyss before meaning. By animating it with “hands,” Tennyson smuggles purpose back into a world that might otherwise look mechanical.

The verb choices are doing the heavy lifting. “Reach thro’ nature” suggests an invisible force working inside the material world, not above it. That preposition matters: it’s immanent, intimate, almost invasive. Then “moulding men” lands with the thud of the factory floor. This is creation as manufacture, humans as soft matter pressed into shape - a metaphor that echoes industrial modernity as much as divine craftsmanship. It flatters us (we are made) and unsettles us (we are made).

The subtext is Tennyson’s signature balancing act: he wants the grandeur of a providential universe without pretending the new darkness isn’t there. The line’s music - the long reach of “reach thro’ nature,” the blunt monosyllables of “moulding men” - stages that tension in sound. Beauty becomes the vehicle for doubt, and doubt becomes the pressure that gives the beauty its bite.