Wit & Attitude Quote by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Tennyson writes like a man who’s watched reputations rise and rot on the strength of a sentence. “Guard your roving thoughts with a jealous care” isn’t prudishness; it’s a Victorian survival tactic. In a culture where social standing was a kind of currency, the mind is framed as a private estate that needs fencing. “Jealous” is doing heavy lifting here: not mild caution, but possessive vigilance, the sense that your interior life can be stolen, misread, or used against you.

The metaphor that makes the warning snap is the clockwork. Speech becomes “the dialer of thoughts,” not the engine, not the intricate gears, just the face. You can’t see the machinery, only the hour it reports. That’s Tennyson’s subtextual jab at the period’s faith in polished talk and public moral posture: people don’t judge your complexity, they judge your timestamp. You might contain contradictions, doubts, or unprocessed grief, but once it’s spoken it’s flattened into a readable display.

“Every fool can plainly read in your words what is the hour of your thoughts” carries a cool insult and a democratic threat. It’s not that only the clever decode you; even the fool gets a vote once you’ve given them language to hold. The line anticipates modern anxieties about being “quoted” rather than understood. Say the wrong thing at the wrong moment and you’ve announced your inner weather to an audience that can’t tell the difference between a passing cloud and the climate.