Aging & Wisdom Quote by Alfred Lord Tennyson

A Victorian poet flirting with gender heresy is always more interesting than the marble-bust version of him. Tennyson’s line imagines time as a slow chemical reaction: in “the long years,” partners don’t just settle into roles, they exchange traits. “The man be more of woman, she of man” isn’t a slogan about equality; it’s a wager that intimacy and endurance can dissolve the hard borders that society insists are natural.

The phrasing is telling. “Must grow” carries both inevitability and prescription, like a gardener who also happens to be a moralist. Tennyson isn’t merely describing what love does; he’s quietly instructing it: a successful union matures into mutuality, where each learns the other’s emotional language, strengths, and vulnerabilities. The subtext is almost radical for his era: masculinity and femininity aren’t fixed essences but capacities that can be learned, shared, performed.

Context matters: Tennyson wrote in a culture built on separate spheres, with “manly” public power and “womanly” private feeling treated as destiny. His move is to smuggle a more fluid anthropology into a formally elevated register, making it sound like wisdom rather than rebellion. That’s why it works. He uses the authority of poetic inevitability to normalize what his society would label unnatural: a marriage (or companionship) that is less a hierarchy than a slow, reciprocal remix.