Crossing the Bar: A Poetic Heirloom in Our New Zealand Family

Kawhia Harbour Entrance - Photograph by Brian O'Connor

“Crossing the Bar”: A Poem That Carried Us Home

Sunset and evening star,

      And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

      When I put out to sea,

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Some poems don’t just mark a moment—they echo across lifetimes. When my brother died recently, Crossing the Bar by Alfred, Lord Tennyson was read at his funeral by my sister. It was the same poem read at our father’s funeral in 2002, and before that, at our grandmother’s 1963. I’ve been reflecting on what it means to return to the same words in times of loss—not out of habit, but because they still speak. For our family, “Crossing the Bar” has become more than a poem—it’s a poetic heirloom that carries memory, grief, and connection across generations.

1. The Poem’s Imagery and Family Resonance

Tennyson’s verses weave a maritime farewell: “the bar” is the sandbar between life and what lies beyond. That threshold, both gentle and inevitable, mirrors our own rite of passage in grief. Each time we gather, the lines  

 But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

      Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

      Turns again home.

comfort us with the promise of calm seas, even when our hearts feel storm-tossed.

In my grandmother’s era, the poem sounded like a lament to Victorian stoicism. At my father’s service, it felt more like a vow of reunion. Recently, at my brother’s farewell, it rang as a celebration of his return home. The imagery stays the same, but with each passing and each new reading gives us fresh meaning.

2. Generations of Farewell: A Timeline

In our family, Crossing the Bar isn’t tied to a specific era or reading style—it’s the shared breath we take as we say goodbye. The poem doesn’t change, but we do. Each time it’s read, the voice is different: sometimes steady, sometimes breaking, sometimes barely above a whisper. Yet the words are still intact, like a shoreline we return to.

My sister’s voice at my brother’s funeral was strong and resolute, as if she were guiding him home.

At my father’s service, the poem was read with reverence. It was a moment of stillness in a day of high emotion.

Years earlier, my father had spoken of hearing Crossing the Bar at his mother’s funeral. When he recalled the moment decades later, his voice faltered. The memory of those lines, spoken in grief, still had the power catch in his throat.

Sharing that moment with him stayed in my mind. It wasn’t just the poem, it was the way it lived inside him, quietly, until emotion cracked the surface. I began to understand that Crossing the Bar wasn’t just a ritual of farewell. It was a carrier of memory, a way grief travels through time without losing its shape.

There’s no timeline here, no neat progression. Just a constellation of voices, each illuminating the same text from a different angle. The poem becomes a kind of emotional echo chamber—what one person reads, another remembers. And in that remembering, grief becomes communal. Tracing the poem through three funerals reveals subtle shifts.

3. When Poem Meets Place: The Bar at Kawhia

Kawhia Harbour is a large inlet on the west coast of New Zealand, carved by rising seas into a labyrinth of tidal arms and shallow bays. A sandbar at its mouth has long obstructed large ships, making the crossing perilous for early settlers and Māori alike. Until roads reached Kawhia in the mid-20th century, every resident and visitor ventured only by boat, timing wave and tide to cross safely over the bar.

For our early family, “crossing the bar” was never just poetic imagery, it was their reality. The same channel that defined their comings and goings became a metaphor for life’s final journey. Tennyson’s words, when read on Kawhia’s shores, resonate doubly: a universal passage and a literal milestone navigated again and again.

4. Crossing the Bar: A Poetic Heirloom in Our New Zealand Family

   Twilight and evening bell,

      And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

      When I embark;

We didn’t preserve the poem with dates or margin notes. It wasn’t filed away with certificates or tucked into a family archive. But we remember it. Not just as words spoken at a farewell, but as something that settled into our collective rhythm—recalled in quiet moments, resurfacing when needed, passed on without ceremony.

It belongs to a category of inheritance that resists documentation. Emotional heirlooms. The things we carry without keeping.

These are the sayings we repeat without quite knowing why. The jokes that still land, even when the original teller is long gone. The stories our parents told—sometimes embellished, sometimes half-true—that shaped how we speak to our own children and grandchildren. Their voices echo in the way we describe a place, or cook a favourite meal, or hold a particular object with reverence simply because they once did.

We pass on the memory of a fishing spot they loved, a chair they always sat in, a phrase they used when they were frustrated or amused. We remember how they folded towels, how they stirred soup, how they paused before answering. These fragments don’t live in photo albums or official records. They live in us.

And like the poem, they surface when we need them most. Not because they were preserved, but because they were absorbed—into our habits, our language, our sense of what feels like home.

5. Tennyson’s Intent and Universal Yearning

Alfred, Lord Tennyson composed Crossing the Bar near the end of his life, requesting it be placed last in every edition of his works. His words reflect an awareness of mortality paired with faith in a guiding presence:

   For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place

      The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

      When I have crost the bar.

Tennyson’s balance of acceptance and anticipation resonates because every generation contends with the unknown at life’s edge. Our family’s repeated choice of this poem attests to its blend of solace and wonder—a spiritual anchor as much as a literary treasure. Crossing the Bar: A Poetic Heirloom in Our New Zealand Family

6. Invitation to Reflect

Do you have a poem that surfaces at pivotal moments in your family story? Perhaps it’s tucked in an old journal or whispered at a ceremony. Consider:

- Which lines feel like echoes of shared memory?  

- How does reading them today differ from earlier encounters?  

- Could those verses serve as a bridge between past and future farewells?

Invite your loved ones to revisit that text together. Share copies, annotate margins, or record readings for posterity. You might discover that the words you thought you knew still have new depths to reveal.

Grief shapes us, generation by generation. When Crossing the Bar drifts across voices and decades—and over the waters of Kawhia Harbour—it becomes more than a poem. It becomes a vessel of collective remembrance, bearing us gently from one shore to the next.  

References

1. KAWHIA HARBOUR | Te Ara Encyclopaedia of New Zealand

Kermode, Leslie Owen. “KAWHIA HARBOUR.” In An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, edited by A. H. McLintock. Wellington: Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 1966. https://teara.govt.nz/mi/1966/kawhia-harbour

2.Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. “Crossing the Bar.” In Demeter and Other Poems. London: Macmillan and Co., 1889.  

Crossing the Bar | Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45321/crossing-the-bar