Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, These three alone lead life to sovereign power.”
- Source
- Oenone
- Date
- 1832
- Local voice
- Poetic speaker · Pallas
Meaning of “Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, These three alone lead life…”
Tennyson joins respect for oneself with knowledge and restraint: durable personal power is presented as the result of living by an inward law rather than seeking power merely for its own sake.
Where does it come from?
Oenone, in The Early Poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Project Gutenberg #8601. Pallas speaks the lines while arguing that self-reverence, self-knowledge and self-control lead to a life governed by right rather than by reward; this is poetic character speech, not a prose maxim detached from the poem.
Why the local voice matters
Pallas speaks these lines inside Tennyson’s poem Oenone while arguing that true power follows self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control and living by right rather than by reward.
