Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam

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 Reading Guides to Long Poems
Published:
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Noam Reisner
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Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene: A Reading Guide

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Homer’s Odyssey: A Reading Guide

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Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

Anna Barton
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh: A Reading Guide

Michele Martinez
Hbk: 978 0 7486 3971 7
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 Alfred Lord Tennyson’s
In Memoriam
A Reading Guide

Anna Barton

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 For Dad, who read to me.

© Anna Barton, 2012

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

22 George Square, Edinburgh

www.euppublishing.com

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by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
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ISBN 978 0 7486 4135 2 (hardback)

ISBN 978 0 7486 4134 5 (paperback)
ISBN 978 0 7486 4912 9 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 0 7486 4914 3 (epub)
ISBN 978 0 7486 4913 6 (Amazon)

The right of Anna Barton

to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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 Contents

Acknowledgements vi
Editions vii
Abbreviations viii
Series Editors’ Preface ix

Introduction 1
1. Mapping and Making 5
2. The Poem 27
3. The Guide 120
4. Contexts and Reception 169
5. Teaching the Text 186

Annotated Bibliography 196

Works Cited 199
Index 203

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 Acknowledgements

First thanks go to David Amigoni, who suggested I write this book, to Jackie
Jones for her help towards its publication and to Sally Bushell for her patient
and encouraging editorial work. I am grateful for the keen eyes and thought-
ful suggestions of Iain Kee Vaughan and of my father, who both read drafts
of the manuscript. I acknowledge Faber and Faber for granting permission
for the inclusion of extracts from ‘In Memoriam’ by T.S. Eliot and Berlin
Associates for granting permission to reproduce Max Beerbohm’s cartoon,
‘Mr Tennyson, reading “In Memoriam” to his Sovereign.’ I would also like
to acknowledge the support of my colleagues at the Universities of Keele and
Sheffield, whose research and teaching have provided and continue to provide
stimulation and inspiration for my own work. Finally, I would like to thank
my students, whose ideas about and responses to In Memoriam inform this
book throughout.

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 Editions

The text of In Memoriam included in this Guide is based on the nine-volume

Eversley Tennyson, ed. Hallam Lord Tennyson, London: Macmillan, 1907–8.
This edition has been cross-referenced with Christopher Ricks, ed. (1987),
The Poems of Tennyson in Three Volumes, Harlow: Longman, and Susan
Shatto and Marion Shaw, eds (1982), In Memoriam, Oxford: Clarendon. All
other quotations from Tennyson are taken from the Ricks edition.

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 Abbreviations

Two sources quoted a number of times throughout the Guide are abbreviated
as follows:

EN Tennyson’s notes to the Eversley edition of In Memoriam.

Memoir Hallam Lord Tennyson (1897), Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir
By His Son, 2 vols, London: Macmillan.

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 Series Editors’ Preface

The form of the long poem has been of fundamental importance to Literary
Studies from the time of Homer onwards. The Reading Guides to Long
Poems Series seek to celebrate and explore this form in all its diversity across
a range of authors and periods. Major poetic works – The Odyssey, The
Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost, The Prelude, In Memoriam, The Waste Land
– emerge as defining expressions of the culture which produced them. One
of the main aims of the series is to make contemporary readers aware of the
importance of the long poem for our literary and national heritage.
How ‘long’ is a long poem? In ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ Edgar
Allan Poe asserted that there is ‘a distinct limit, as regards length, to all works
of literary art – the limit of a single sitting’. Defined against this, a long poem
must be one which exceeds the limit of a single sitting, requiring sustained
attention over a considerable period of time for its full appreciation. However,
the concept of poetic length is not simply concerned with the number of lines
in a poem, or the time it takes to read it. In ‘From Poe to Valéry’ T. S. Eliot
defends poetic length on the grounds that ‘it is only in a poem of some length
that a variety of moods can be expressed . . . These parts can form a whole
more than the sum of the parts; a whole such that the pleasure we derive
from the reading of any part is enhanced by our grasp of the whole.’ Along
with Eliot, the Series Editors believe that poetic length creates a unique space
for a varied play of meaning and tone, action and reflection, that results in
particular kinds of reading and interpretation not possible for shorter works.
The Reading Guides are therefore concerned with communicating the pleas-
ure and enjoyment of engaging with the form in a range of ways – focusing
on particular episodes, tracing out patterns of poetic imagery, exploring form,
reading and rereading the text – in order to allow the reader to experience
the multiple interpretative layers that the long poem holds within it. We also
believe that a self-awareness about how we read the long poem may help to
provide the modern reader with a necessary fresh perspective upon the genre.

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 x In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

The Reading Guides to Long Poems Series will engage with major works in
new and innovative ways in order to revitalise the form of the long poem for a
new generation. The series will present shorter ‘long poems’ in their entirety,
while the longest are represented by a careful selection of essential parts. Long
poems have often been read aloud, imitated or even translated in excerpts,
so there is good precedent for appreciating them through selective reading.
Nevertheless, it is to be hoped that readers will use the Guides alongside an
appreciation of the work in its entirety or, if they have not previously done so,
go on to read the whole poem.
Ultimately, the Edinburgh Reading Guides to Long Poems Series seeks to
be of lasting value to the discipline of Literary Studies by revitalising a form
which is in danger of being marginalised by the current curriculum but is
central to our understanding of our own literature, history and culture.

Sally Bushell with Isobel Armstrong and Colin Burrow

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BARTON 9780748641352 PRINT.indd xi
Max Beerbohm, ‘Mr Tennyson, reading “In Memoriam” to his Sovereign’, The Poets’ Corner (1904)

27/01/2012 14:58
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 Introduction

In 1904, caricaturist Max Beerbohm produced a cartoon entitled ‘Mr

Tennyson, reading “In Memoriam” to his Sovereign’. The cartoon pictures
a large, almost empty room decorated with heavy curtains, four small chairs
and a fireplace with an empty grate, above which sits an ornamental clock.
The walls are decorated with floral wallpaper and hung with a single por-
trait of Prince Albert. In the room sit Alfred Tennyson and Queen Victoria.
Tennyson, hair and beard flapping, arms gesturing widely and legs lifted
straight out in front of him, reads from sheets of paper that he holds in his
hand. Victoria, dressed in black, seated with her hands demurely in her lap
and her feet resting on a foot stool, looks straight ahead, past Tennyson,
towards the door.
Tennyson, who became Poet Laureate (the poet of the nation, an honour
bestowed by the monarch) in 1850, met Queen Victoria on a number of
occasions. He also enjoyed reading his poetry aloud. However, Tennyson
never read In Memoriam to Queen Victoria. By imagining this encounter,
Beerbohm, who was famous for satirising the culture and celebrities of his
day, pokes fun at poet, queen and poem. He also tells us something about
the cultural identity of In Memoriam at the end of the nineteenth century.
Beerbohm identifies In Memoriam with the Victorian establishment and with
the Victorian culture of mourning that found its best example in Victoria’s
own extended period of mourning for Prince Albert, who died in 1862. His
cartoon is probably based on reports that In Memoriam and the Bible were
the two texts in which the Queen found comfort after her husband’s death,
a widely reported fact which bestows the poem with a near-religious author-
ity.1 Beerbohm recognises that authority, but he also calls it into question by
inviting us to laugh at it.
The reason the cartoon is funny has to do with its scale. The room is far too
big for the two figures that sit in it. Victoria’s body more or less fits in a single
square of the carpet’s enormous pattern and her head is the size of one of the

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 2 In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

wallpaper flowers. She and Tennyson, almost swallowed up by the room, are
also sitting a long way apart. In this way, Beerbohm effectively communi-
cates the awkwardness of this encounter to the viewer, who can imagine the
strained atmosphere as Tennyson recites his poem enthusiastically, while his
sovereign sits, motionless. A reading of In Memoriam’s more than 20,000
words is itself an event made absurd by its scale, so that we might begin to
feel sorry for Queen Victoria and to wonder whether she is tempted to tug at
one of the bell-pulls that are positioned on either side of the fireplace so that
someone will come and take the poet and his long poem away.
In an earlier version of the cartoon, the flowers that pattern the wallpaper
are replaced by a skull and crossbones motif, a repetitive pattern on the theme
of mortality much like the pattern of stanzas that form In Memoriam (Bevis
2003: 432). The over-large room, an uncomfortable mixture of room of state
and private, domestic interior, might therefore suggest that the poem itself is
likewise a grossly exaggerated space: an intimate expression of grief, trans-
formed into an empty, monumental public performance that alienates readers
rather than touching them.
For readers encountering In Memoriam for the first time, this satirical
representation of Tennyson’s long elegy might ring true. In Memoriam is
excessive, repetitive, monumental, and decked out with the furnishings of
Victorian domestic sentiment. As its opening words, in which the speaker
addresses himself to the ‘Strong Son of God’, make clear, it is both a prayer
and a public / published declaration of Christian faith. However, Tennyson’s
long elegy is made up of lyric fragments that are often doubtful, questioning,
private and subversive. It is a poem published by a middle-aged man, engaged
to be married and well on his way to being recognised as one of the greatest
poets of the century; but it is also a collection of brief sketches of mourning,
some of which were written by a young man of twenty-four, struggling to
come to terms with the death of a close friend whom he describes, in one of
the first cantos he composed, as ‘the brother of my love’ (IX, 16): a bereave-
ment that left the poet, as he writes in the same canto, ‘widowed’ (IX, 18).2
In its published form, In Memoriam is a long poem that charts the three
years of the mourner’s life following his bereavement. However, during its
composition there is evidence that Tennyson thought of the poem, not as a
single text, but as a number of separate poems, written on loosely the same
theme. In his letters and in the letters and diaries of friends who read early
drafts of In Memoriam, it is referred to as ‘some beautiful Elegies’, ‘the memo-
rial poems’, ‘a volume of poems’ and simply ‘those poems’.3 None of these
descriptions suggests that the elegiac stanzas written by Tennyson constitute
one complete piece of work. The title of the published text, In Memoriam,
was not decided until just before its publication. As Christopher Ricks points

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 Introduction 3

out, Tennyson also considered The Way of the Soul, a title that would have
more clearly identified the poem as a narrative of spiritual progress, and
Fragments of an Elegy, which, by contrast, allows the text to be permeable,
broken and unfinished (Ricks 1989: 202).
The answer to the question, ‘what kind of poem is In Memoriam?’, is
therefore not straightforward, but by beginning to negotiate these questions
of fragmentation and wholeness, lyricism and length, it becomes possible for
us to find ways to engage with In Memoriam as readers. A poem’s form or
forms constitute(s) the terms of our engagement with it. The shape of a text
on the page invites us to inhabit a particular kind of space: public or private,
open or enclosed, comfortable or uncomfortable, familiar or strange. By
reading In Memoriam we enter two kinds of space at once and so, to under-
stand it, we are required to employ a kind of double vision. In her influential
study of Victorian Poetry, Isobel Armstrong coins the term ‘double poem’
to describe the distinctive qualities of poetry written after 1830 (Armstrong
1993: 13). This term is helpful when thinking about the best way to approach
In Memoriam. Armstrong argues that a double poem is both a representation
of the culture in which it is composed and published, and also a way in which
that same culture can be brought into question, challenged and even trans-
formed. By suggesting that Victorian poetry at once constructs and decon-
structs its own historical moment, Armstrong finds a new role for the reader,
whom she describes as ‘active’: ‘The active reader is compelled to be internal
to the poem’s contradictions and recomposes the poem’s processes in the act
of comprehending them as ideological struggle’ (Armstrong 1993: 17). Part of
what Armstrong means by this is that reading is an act of composition: that
as readers we should not just enter a poem and sit demurely with our hands
in our laps, but that we should rearrange the furniture, or even pull down the
walls and rebuild them.
This Guide explores the way in which In Memoriam invites this kind of
reading. It provides information about In Memoriam, its composition and
its context, but it also suggests strategies for reading the poem that enable
the reader to engage actively with its multiple, monumental form. Like other
Guides in this series, it acknowledges the fact that the long poem is an unfa-
miliar and potentially daunting form for a modern readership. As readers,
we are happy to immerse ourselves in a long novel. Habituated to the devices
of narrative, plot and character, we are experts at navigating the forms that
structure our novel-reading experience. The novel is a descendent of epic
poetry (Marxist critic Georg Lukács famously defined the novel as ‘the epic
of a world that has been abandoned by God’ (Lukács [1916] 1971: 88)), but,
in learning to read the novel, we have forgotten how to read the long poem;
its forms have become alien and so they prohibit, rather than enable our

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 4 In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

understanding. In Memoriam, one of the youngest poems to be covered by

this series, was published in the Age of the Novel, of the Brontës, Dickens and
Eliot, and in one sense the anxiety that it expresses when it asks ‘What hope
is there for modern rhyme [. . .] ?’ (LXXVII, 1) is justified. It is a poem that is
all too aware of its own belatedness, of the way the cultural tide was turning.
As readers, we are inheritors of that Victorian turn to the novel and it is for
that reason that the literary world of Jane Eyre, Middlemarch or Bleak House
feels much more familiar than that of In Memoriam.
This Guide, along with others in this series, aims to reacquaint readers
with the long poem by addressing the challenges that it poses, by introduc-
ing some of the formal practices that it employs and by exploring some of
the literary traditions with which it engages. It is by no means the last word
on In Memoriam, but a series of starting points, from which readers might
feel encouraged to find their own ways through the poem. The opening
chapter offers information about the poem’s biographical and literary
genesis. Addressing In Memoriam as a whole, it introduces some of its key
formal elements and considers its relationship with the elegiac tradition. The
main body of the Guide, which includes the full text of In Memoriam, reads
Tennyson’s elegy from four different perspectives, each of which traces a par-
ticular thematic motif through the poem. Following on from this, I provide
a selection of primary material that documents some significant elements of
In Memoriam’s contexts and reception. The Guide concludes with a chapter
that addresses the challenges and opportunities of teaching the poem, which
is accompanied by an annotated bibliography.

Notes
1. For a detailed discussion of Queen Victoria as a reader of In Memoriam, see Kirstie
Blair (2001), ‘Touching Hearts: Queen Victoria and the Curative Properties of In
Memoriam’, Tennyson Research Bulletin 5, pp. 246–54.
2. Many critics have commented on this double identity. To take just two, J. H. Buckley
writes that the poem ‘was to serve the whole generation as a sort of Victorian Essay on
Man’, but also comments on the poem’s ‘virtually formless structure’ and ‘large, loose
argument’ (Buckley 1960: 108 and 112); and Alan Sinfield identifies the poem as con-
taining the opposing aesthetics of the Romantics and the neo-Classicists (Sinfield 1971:
16–40).
3. These descriptions are included in Christopher Ricks’s account of the poem’s composi-
tion and publication, in The Poems of Tennyson in Three Volumes, pp. 345–7.

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 Chapter 1
Mapping and Making

This first chapter provides an overview of In Memoriam’s subject matter,

summarises relevant biographical information about Tennyson and ‘A. H.
H.’, and introduces some of the key questions and contexts that inform
the way Tennyson’s poem is read: Who is the speaker? Who is he speaking
to / about? Where does the poem begin? What is the relationship between its
different sections? What is the relationship between its content and its form?
Beginning with a consideration of the different ways that In Memoriam can
be defined and described – from fragmentary lyric to long poem, from elegy to
epic, moving on to talk about the composition of the poem and the develop-
ment of the In Memoriam stanza form, and ending by positioning the poem
within the elegiac tradition, the chapter aims to encourage readers to think,
when they read In Memoriam, not just about what they read, but also about
how they read and how In Memoriam forms the reader in relation to its own
complex and multiple forms.

Monuments and Fragments

A. H. H.
In Memoriam was published anonymously.1 The identity of its author was
no great secret; many people knew that Tennyson had been working on a
long elegiac composition for a number of years and Tennyson’s name was
accidentally printed in some of the advertisements for the work. However,
according to Tennyson’s demand, the first and all subsequent editions of the
poem were printed with a title page that read simply: In Memoriam A. H. H.
The open secret of In Memoriam’s authorship is an interesting place to start
when thinking about the poem in relation to its biographical context. It gives
the poem an identity that is both private and universal. The author keeps
himself and his grief out of the public eye; but he also gives his grief over to

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 6 In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

the public. The speaker of the poem could be anybody and so the speaker
becomes, potentially, everybody.
Tennyson addresses this question in some remarks on the poem that are
published in his biography: ‘[In Memoriam] is a poem, not an actual biogra-
phy [. . .] “I” is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the
human race speaking thro’ him’ (Memoir I, 305). What Tennyson describes
here is typical of the function of the ‘lyric I’, or the first-person speaker of lyric
poetry. Lyric (‘song-like’) poetry, as opposed to narrative or dramatic poetry,
is poetry that voices the thoughts and feelings of a single speaker. It is often
associated with the sincere expression of extreme or intense emotion, usually
love (as in a sonnet) or grief (as in an elegy). As Tennyson’s comment suggests,
the ‘I’ who speaks a lyric poem is never straightforwardly the poet. Even if the
poem is inspired by the poet’s own experiences and feelings, the act of formu-
lating those feelings into words on a page initiates a disconnect between poet
and text, poet and ‘I’. By using a shared or common language, a poet allows
the feelings the words describe to be recognised as common and so enables the
reader to become the speaker, ‘speaking through’ the poet. Therefore reading a
lyric poem, we feel both that we are listening in on a private confession of love
or grief and also that we inhabit that love or grief ourselves.
The title of In Memoriam also expresses this kind of lyric tension. The reader
is not told the identity of A. H. H., so reading the poem becomes rather like
coming across a private document, meant only for the eyes of those for whom
the initials have meaning. At the same time, ‘In Memoriam’, Latin for ‘to the
memory of’, adopts the formal language of public memorials and so confers
that same kind of public identity on the poem. The publicly private nature of
In Memoriam suggests that the relationship between the anonymous poet and
A. H. H. is at once central and peripheral to the concerns of the reader.
The initials A. H. H., which appear on the title page of In Memoriam,
stand for Arthur Henry Hallam, who was the eldest son of a wealthy and
influential political historian, Henry Hallam. Hallam met Alfred Tennyson,
the third son of a Lincolnshire clergyman, at Trinity College, Cambridge,
in 1829. Tennyson, who was a year older than Hallam, had been a student
at Cambridge since 1827; Hallam had enrolled in 1828. Hallam had been
a pupil at Eton, along with those who were to become important figures in
nineteenth-century political and cultural life; his closest school-friend was
William Ewart Gladstone, who later became Prime Minister. Tennyson’s
older brother Frederick had also been to Eton, but Tennyson’s father was not
wealthy enough to give all his sons such an expensive education and so Alfred
had been educated at a local day school and then by his father at home. Both
Tennyson and Hallam were considered to be young men of great promise,
but neither had any substantial achievements to their name. Hallam’s death,

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 Mapping and Making 7

four years later, which prevented him from living up to the expectations of
his youth, was also the event that led Tennyson to compose those poems that
were the making of his career.
Tennyson’s friendship with Hallam was a product of the intense, clois-
tered, masculine environment of early nineteenth-century Cambridge. They
first became friends when both men submitted a poem to a university
competition (Tennyson’s poem won). Both men were also members of the
Apostles, or the Society, an exclusive club that met in the private rooms
of its members to discuss political, philosophical and literary questions. In
1830, Hallam found Tennyson a publisher for his first signed volume of
poems (and, it is likely, provided financial backing for the project), Poems,
Chiefly Lyrical, and wrote an essay that compared Tennyson with Keats
and Shelley, two of the most popular poets of the day. In the same year,
Hallam became engaged to Tennyson’s sister Emily, an event that promised
the brotherhood that Tennyson talks about in section IX of In Memoriam.
Between 1829 and 1833 the two young men also travelled together, making
an ill-advised trip to Spain in 1830 in an attempt to support a short-lived
revolution against the Spanish monarchy, and visiting the Rhine country
in 1832. At the end of 1832, Tennyson, who had by now left Cambridge
following the death of his father in 1831, published his second signed
volume, Poems, to mixed reviews. In August 1833 Hallam set off on a
tour of Europe with his father. He died suddenly in Venice, of a brain
haemorrhage, a month later. After the autopsy, his body was brought back
to England by boat and he was buried in Clevedon, Somerset, in January,
1834.

Mapping Grief
Tennyson learned of Hallam’s death through a letter, sent by Henry Hallam,
which reached Tennyson in early October. It is at this point, one could argue,
that we meet our mourner. The first canto of the poem voices the overwhelm-
ing grief of a man who cannot conceive of anything that will make up for the
loss that he has suffered: ‘But who shall so forecast the years / And find in loss
a gain to match?’ (I, 5) and declares his resolve to revel in his grief in order to
keep alive his love for his lost friend:

Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drowned,

Let darkness keep her raven gloss:
Ah sweeter to be drunk with loss,
To dance with death, to beat the ground,
(I, 9–12)

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 8 In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

This description of the initial throes of grief is also a statement of purpose

for the poem that is to follow. The speaker suggests that the best way to
express his grief is through a Bacchanalian frenzy of wild dancing. He resolves
to overindulge in his grief, as one might overindulge in alcohol, so that he
is taken beyond the bounds of reason or social propriety. In Memoriam
becomes part of this excess: a spontaneous, heartfelt cry. However, a dance,
even a Bacchanalian ‘dance with death’, involves form, or some sort of
public ritual. These opening lines therefore also suggest an element of per-
formance, an ‘acting out’ of grief that immediately complicates any reading
of the poem’s spontaneity. By resolving to become ‘drunk with loss’, the
mourner reveals, not that he is drunk with loss, but that he considers this to
be the best response to his situation. This is the first of many examples of In
Memoriam’s meta-poetic or meta-elegiac identity. It is a poem about grief,
but it is also a poem that repeatedly asks how best to write about grief in
poetry.
This meta-poetic discourse is present from the outset of the section, which
begins, ‘I held it truth, with him who sings / To one clear harp in diverse
tones’ (I, 1–2). This reference to another singer and another song (which I
return to a number of times in this Guide) suggests that, by writing his poem,
the mourner engages in a literary dialogue with other writers. According to
Tennyson, the singer he refers to here is Goethe (1749–1832), an early nine-
teenth-century German author, one of the most influential and controversial
of his day.2 By making an oblique reference to Goethe, Tennyson indicates
something of his literary identity and professional ambition.
There is also something else going on here. By opening his poem with a
singer and a harp, Tennyson suggests that his poem is not an elegy, or not just
an elegy, but an epic.3 Epics, long narrative poems that tell the story of the
birth of a culture or a nation, form a tradition that originates with Homer’s
Iliad, a long poem that narrates the fall of Troy, and Homer’s Odyssey, which
follows a hero in the Greek army, Odysseus, as he makes his eventful journey
home from Troy to Ithaca. Traditionally, therefore, epics are stories of war,
adventure, heroic action and physical struggle. They are rooted in an oral
tradition whereby a culture gained a sense of communal identity by passing
their mythologised histories from one generation to the next. Different from
the private song of lyric, epic is public and communal. The opening lines of
The Iliad call out: ‘Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus’ (Homer
1987: 3). Likewise, The Odyssey begins by commanding the Muse to ‘Sing to
me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns / driven time and again off
course, once he had plundered / the hallowed heights of Troy’ (Homer 2006:
77). Paradise Lost, John Milton’s fifteenth-century English epic, conforms
to this convention as well: ‘Of Man’s First disobedience, and the Fruit / Of

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 Mapping and Making 9

that Forbidden Tree [. . .] Sing Heav’nly Muse’ (Milton 1968: 5). Tennyson’s
opening reference to a singer and a harp (although he is not the singer, nor
is his the harp) might be read as an epic allusion. Again, this complicates the
lyric identity of Tennyson’s text. In Memoriam is an elegy, and therefore a
lyric, but it also suggests itself as epic, not simply by its size, but also through
its self-conscious construction as a poem that will, in some way, tell the story
of nineteenth-century Britain. As lyric epic (a contradiction in terms) it turns
its gaze inward, lending the scope and scale of heroic battles between men and
nations to the emotional, psychological and spiritual experience of a recently
bereaved young man.

Setting Out
But what sort of journey is this? And does it really begin here? The answer to
the second of these questions – both yes and no – points us back towards In
Memoriam’s multiple structures and forms in a way that begins to equip us
as active readers of the text. As we have seen, section I is, in many significant,
not to say obvious, ways, the opening of In Memoriam; it echoes the opening
lines of classical epics and it describes the initial, overwhelming shock of
personal loss, from which a reader might expect a journey of recovery to
begin. It also comes at the start of the poem. However, there are two other
sections that might also be identified as the beginning of In Memoriam. The
first is the Prologue. The second is section IX, the first section that Tennyson
composed.
The Prologue consists of a declaration of faith that acts as both an apology
and a disclaimer for what follows:
Forgive my grief for one removed,
Thy creature, whom I found so fair.
I trust he lives, in thee, and there
I find him worthier to be loved
Forgive these wild and wandering cries,
Confusions of a wasted youth;
Forgive them when they fail in truth,
And in thy wisdom make me wise.
(Prologue, 37–44)

In published versions of the poem, these lines are dated 1849, the year before
the poem was published. One of the last sections composed by Tennyson and
a section that apologises for the ‘wild and wandering cries’ of a youth from
which the speaker has moved on, the Prologue is surely as much an end as
it is a beginning. Its position nevertheless demands that it be read first. By

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 10 In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

beginning at the end in this way, Tennyson offers some sense of the nature
of the journey on which his mourner embarks; it is a journey from despair to
hope, from doubt to faith. But he also implies that the journey is somehow
circular: that it begins and ends in the same place. The reader is given con-
fidence in the mourner’s progress, but this confidence is tempered by an
understanding that the progress the mourner makes is not linear but cyclical,
repeatedly returning on itself.
The other claim that the Prologue makes is that this cyclical journey is not
finished. The mourner’s prayer describes his faith as faith in an event that
has not happened yet. He writes, ‘Thou wilt not leave us in the dust’ (9), a
statement that admits that he, along with the rest of humankind, is still in the
dust at the time of writing. He describes God-given knowledge as ‘a beam in
darkness’ which must ‘grow’, continuing:

Let knowledge grow from more to more,

But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before’
(Prologue, 25–8)

The end that the Prologue looks towards is the end of the world, when
humanity will be reunited with God. In this context everything, including the
poem that we are about to read, is unfinished, or ‘broken’ (19).
This ultimate end is also described in terms of music and song. The
mourner imagines the mind and soul in harmony with one another and with
God, making ‘one music’. In this way, he invites a direct comparison with
his poem. He suggests that In Memoriam does not achieve the perfect music
that it strives towards and that it therefore remains in some way unfinished.
However, even the ultimate end alluded to in the Prologue is a return to the
beginning. The ‘as before’ that concludes the phrase describes a progress back
as well as forward. Tennyson’s notes to the poem say that ‘as before’ refers to
‘the ages of faith’, which is conveniently vague, but ‘before’ might also be read
as a reference to a pre-lapsarian world – a world before the Fall of humanity
as described in Genesis (I return to this reading in the ‘Lost for Words’ section
of the Reading Guide).
Although the manuscript evidence for the precise order in which Tennyson
composed the various cantos of In Memoriam is inconclusive, it is likely that
section IX was among the first that Tennyson wrote. It is contained in a note-
book that also includes sections XVII and XVIII. In the notebook, Tennyson
labels XVII and XVIII, ‘II’ and ‘III’. Along with section IX, these two sections
form a series of reflections on the return of Hallam’s body by boat to England.
The mourner prays for the ship to be brought safely and quickly home, and

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 Mapping and Making 11

gains small comfort from the thought of Hallam’s burial in familiar earth.
Again, this little sequence makes sense as a beginning. Nowhere in the poem
are we told about the death of Hallam, or the moment when Tennyson hears
of his friend’s death, and so the ‘fair ship’ lyrics begin the narrative of the
events of the mourner’s grief.
However, the beginning described in these sections is very different from
both the Prologue and section I. Although these two sections might ini-
tially be read as opposites – an expression of sincere faith followed by an
expression of sincere doubt, they both employ a similar epic register. The
mourner – and it is much more clearly ‘the mourner’ here – speaks in uni-
versal terms, adopting a collective voice that refers to ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘our’,
inviting the reader to acknowledge a shared experience. By contrast, sections
IX, XVII and XVIII maintain a much narrower focus. Like the Prologue,
section IX is a prayer of sorts, but it is also one of the few sections to refer
to Arthur by name and so, rather than being interpellated (‘hailed’ or recog-
nised and included) as mourners within a shared experience of mourning,
the reader is positioned outside, looking in on a private moment of grief,
felt by one individual for another. Another journey within In Memoriam,
then, is Tennyson’s transformation from young anonymous poet into the
bard of an age and a nation. This journey is neither cyclical nor linear. It is
broken up and absorbed into the poem’s final published form, so that the
personal and the public rub alongside one another, creating varying degrees
of tension.
Looking at the order in which the sections of In Memoriam were composed
is one way of mapping the poem. By considering the difference between
the poem’s published form and the fragments of manuscript that Tennyson
amassed over the seventeen years of the poem’s composition, it is possible to
appreciate In Memoriam, not as a ‘wild and wandering cry’, but as a carefully
constructed, formed and performed literary work.4 And yet Tennyson’s elegy
continues to draw attention to the fragmentary nature of its progress, leaving
traces of other routes to be mapped by the reader. For example, section XVII
concludes, ‘The dust of him I shall not see / ’Till all my widowed race be run,’
lines that are an imperfect repetition of section IX: ‘My Arthur, whom I shall
not see / ’Till all my widowed race be run,’ so that the poem appears at this
point to collapse back on itself, its progress stalled. At the same time, the line
works as a moment of self-citation and the phrase ‘’Till all my widowed race
be run’ is transformed from spontaneous lyric expression to elegiac conven-
tion, marking a step away from the immediacy of grief (it is interesting that, on
the second occasion this line is used, ‘my Arthur’ has become an anonymous
‘him’). It is this kind of mapping of In Memoriam’s patterns of images and
themes that I employ as a method for reading the poem in the Reading Guide

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 12 In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

section of this book. Before I come to that, the final two parts of this introduc-
tory chapter will consider ways to approach the stanza form of the poem and
discuss some of the works that make up In Memoriam’s literary context.

The In Memoriam Stanza

Mapping Time
So far, I have discussed the way In Memoriam charts the progress of the
speaker’s grief, considering the form of the poem as an – albeit fragmented
– whole: its multiple beginnings, its open endings, its cycles and repetitions.
It is equally important to think about the formal elements that make up this
whole: its stanza form, metre and rhyme scheme. In his introduction to poetic
rhythm, Derek Attridge writes about the relationship between rhythm and
movement:
although strictly speaking the idea of movement implies travel through space,
rhythm is what makes a physical medium (the body, the sound of speech or
music) seem to move with deliberatedness through time, recalling what has hap-
pened (by repetition) and projecting into the future (by setting up expectations),
rather than just letting time pass by. (Attridge 1995: 4)
What Attridge suggests here is that rhythm maps time. It transforms time
from something that is shapeless and difficult to grasp (time can seem to drag,
fly past or stop) into something that can be seen, heard and, as we shall see in
a moment, felt. This kind of mapping can be understood as the central work
of In Memoriam, which is concerned both with remembrance (‘recalling what
has happened’) and with recovery (‘projecting into the future’). The regular
metre and verse form of the poem constantly recalls itself, while at the same
time creating a pattern that compels onward movement.
This pattern or map of grief is visual; the passing of time is represented by
the shape of the stanzas on the page, which draw the eye from left to right,
top to bottom. It is also physical. Attridge again: ‘rhythm is felt as much as it
is heard or seen [. . .] it enables muscular movements to happen with a certain
evenness and predictability’ (Attridge 1995: 4). Attridge is keen to emphasise
the way that poetic rhythm is experienced by the body of the reader. The
passage of time is marked by a regular pulse that is created by the muscles of
the body when a poem is read aloud. In Memoriam reflects on these kinds of
bodily rhythms on a couple of occasions:

in the dusk of thee, the clock

Beats out the little lives of men.
(II, 7–8)

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 Mapping and Making 13

But, for the unquiet heart and brain,

A use in measured language lies;
The sad, mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.
(V, 5–8)

In the first of these, Tennyson describes a ticking clock that lends rhythm
to the passing time. Its beats are mirrored by the iambic beat of the line and
so the reader is invited to think about the poem as a kind of clock, a way
for the poet to measure out his hours, or to pass time, now that his friend is
dead. The other thing that ‘beats out the little lives of men’ is the heart: so we
might also understand the beat of the poem as a kind of pulse, bound up in
the workings of our living, breathing bodies. Seamus Perry points out that ‘to
beat out’ also means ‘to put an end to’, ‘like beating out a fire’ (Perry 2004:
130), so these lines not only describe the way the poem marks time, but also
the way it works steadily towards its own end, which, in this stanza, is associ-
ated with the end of life.
In the second example the mourner talks more directly about poetic rhythm,
but the connection with the rhythm of the living body remains strong. Here,
the mourner, who holds little hope that his words will adequately express his
grief (for more on this see the ‘Lost for Words’ section of the Reading Guide),
nevertheless declares that ‘measured’ (metrical) language is useful because its
regular, mechanic motion is soothing. The measure of language is set against
‘the unquiet heart and brain’ and so poetic rhythm is again understood as
something that acts on or through the body, regulating heartbeat. Yet, here
again, the poem seems barely to suppress a desire to beat itself out. An unquiet
heart is a troubled heart, but its opposite – a quiet heart – sounds more like
one that has stopped beating altogether. The desire to quiet an unquiet heart
might be interpreted as a suicidal impulse. Therefore the regular rhythm of
In Memoriam is both the thing that connects past and future by balancing
memory with anticipation, and also a bodily pulse that marks the difference
or distance of the speaker from the friend he mourns; a distance that the poem
repeatedly attempts and fails to bridge.

Ballad Metre
Tennyson’s description of metre as something that controls or dulls distressed
emotion echoes an essay by William Wordsworth, major Romantic poet and
Tennyson’s predecessor as Poet Laureate. Wordsworth writes:

The end of poetry is to produce excitement in co-existence with an over-balance

of pleasure [. . .] But, if the words by which this excitement is produced are

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in themselves powerful, or the images and feelings have an undue proportion

of pain connected with them, there is some danger that the excitement may
be carried beyond its proper bounds. Now the presence of something regular,
something to which the mind has been accustomed in various moods and in a
less excited state, cannot but have great efficacy in tempering and restraining the
passion by an intertexture of ordinary feeling. (Wordsworth [1800] 1991: 264)

Wordsworth’s remarks offer a different perspective on the ‘use’ of ‘meas-

ured language’. Rather than ‘dulling’ or ‘numbing’, Wordsworth talks about
rhythm in terms of regulating, tempering and restraining. This sense of the
regularity of metre might lead us to think about metre and regulation, or
metre and rules or laws. One of the functions of law is to organise individuals
into functioning social units. The regulation of metre might be understood
to serve a similar purpose, regulating private, individual emotions to public,
social rhythms. Perhaps what Wordsworth means, then, when he talks about
the way metre tempers and restrains emotion is that it transforms something
personal and inward into something communal and public, which is part of
a recognised, sanctioned, cultural discourse. The example that Wordsworth
offers to illustrate his point is ‘the metre of the old Ballads’. Ballads are English
folk songs that originated as part of an oral tradition of poetry, whereby
poems would be spoken aloud or sung, passed down and preserved through
community memory, rather than being written down, printed or published.
Wordsworth has his own reasons for naming ballads in particular. His essay
was published as the preface to Lyrical Ballads, an experimental volume of
poetry, which aimed at a recovery and adaptation of the ballad tradition.
However, his choice of example is also helpful for thinking about the metre
and stanza form of In Memoriam. The ballad metre to which Wordsworth
refers consists of four-line stanzas of alternating iambic tetrameter (four units
of rhythm, each consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syl-
lable) and iambic trimeter, following an ABAB rhyme scheme. Wordsworth
employed this form in a number of poems published in lyrical ballads. A good
example of this is a poem called simply ‘Song’ (another word for ballad):
She dwelt among th’untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove
A maid whom there was none to praise
And very few to love.
(Wordsworth [1800] 1991: 153)

When he uses this form, Wordsworth consciously references a literary tra-

dition from a time much earlier than his own, identifying his work with a
particular idea of national identity and history.5 The rhythm and rhyme
scheme lend themselves to being memorised; the end words of lines 1 and

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 Mapping and Making 15

2 set up cues for the end words of lines 3 and 4, and the iambic metre sets
up a momentum that carries each line through to its conclusion. If we think
back to what Attridge says about rhythm being experienced by the body,
then a rhythm like this that feels familiar or natural causes the reader, singer
or listener to recognise that their body has something in common with the
bodies of the people who composed and sang ballads in the past, creating
a sense of community across time and bearing witness to a shared cultural
identity.
The oral, communal, narrative poetry of the ballad is therefore very
different from the individual, emotional poetry we are likely to associate
with In Memoriam. However, the In Memoriam stanza, like the stanza of
Wordsworth’s ‘Song’ and the ballads that it imitates, is made up of four lines
of iambic tetrameter. By choosing this verse form, Tennyson references, or
places his poem in relation to, the ballad tradition. Like the epic, the ballad
connotes a desire to speak on behalf of a community and to use poetry to
establish and sustain a shared identity. In this case, because ballad metre is a
British form, Tennyson characterises that shared identity in national terms,
speaking with the cultural voice of the British people. Remember also that
In Memoriam was published anonymously. Although this decision to keep
authorial identity hidden could be interpreted as part of the poem’s aesthetic
of privacy, it might also be compared with the ballad, which has no single
author because it belongs to no single voice.
In section VI, the mourner addresses this theme of universal mourning,
describing the ‘commonplaces’ that are offered as inadequate comfort to his
grief:
One writes that ‘Other friends remain’,
That ‘Loss is common to the race’ –
And common is the commonplace
And vacant chaff well meant for grain.
That loss is common would not make
My own less bitter, rather more:
Too common! Never morning wore
To evening but some heart did break.
(VI, 1–8)

Taking up the word ‘common’ that is used in the letter from his well-wisher,
he broods upon it, considering the fact that the loss he feels is experienced
by countless people every day. He concludes that this common experience
is no comfort because bereavement is experienced as isolated instances of
heartbreak, so that the tragedy of grief is that it is common but can never
be shared. Ballad metre is sometimes referred to as ‘common metre’ and

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 16 In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

so this tension that Tennyson identifies between the commonplace and the
particular, the individual and the race, is one way to think about the In
Memoriam stanza, which both alludes to and separates itself from the com-
munal poetry of the ballad.
The two main differences between the ballad stanza and the In Memoriam
stanza can be seen clearly if we compare the stanzas we have just been looking
at with the opening stanzas of ‘Sir Patrick Spens’, a ballad that was published
in an influential anthology of traditional ballads that would have been famil-
iar to both Wordsworth and Tennyson:

The king sits in Dumferling toune,

Drinking the blude-reid wine:
O whar will I get a guid sailor
To sail this ship of mine?
(Percy 1765: 72–4)

The stanzas of ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ are divided clearly into two linked pairs of
lines. The end of the first two lines is marked by a silent beat, where the reader
is forced to pause; and, as we have seen, the first pair create, or anticipate, the
second pair by setting up an end rhyme that lines three and four complete.
In In Memoriam these divisions are not so pronounced, nor are the linked
continuations so clear.6 All four lines of each stanza make full use of their
tetrameter (four-beat) length so that the movement from line to line is con-
tinuous; and the rhyme scheme creates two pairs of lines that do not so much
follow one another as mirror one another, so that AB is reflected back as BA.
Ballad metre lends itself to the work of narrative, whereby one event leads to
another. The king sits and then he speaks, asking a question, which ensures
the presence of another character, who offers an answer, naming a third
character, whom the King summons, and so the story unfolds. The rhythm
and rhyme scheme of In Memoriam obstructs narrative. There are no pauses
to mark the end of one event and the beginning of another, so that time,
although measured, is featureless, like a flat plane of land; and each stanza
begins back where it started so that if the poem moves forward at all, it does
so always looking back over one shoulder. This sets up something more like
inertia than momentum, a reluctant progress that, in this particular example,
is at one with the mourner’s response to his letter of condolence. The mourner
is not moved by the letter (to reply, to act, even to view his situation differ-
ently); instead he dwells upon it, going over and over the same ground, deep-
ening his friend’s shallow commonplace, but not really getting anywhere. His
lack of progress is emphasised by the description of the progress of the day,
from morning to evening. Time passes but each day is the same, because each
day brings death and grief. The effect of time passing in this passage is the

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 Mapping and Making 17

cumulative effect of repetition (more ‘bitter’ for being ‘common’), rather than
the onward march of progress.
I began this section by suggesting that metre was a way of measuring
out, or giving form to, the time of grief. However, the In Memoriam stanza
provides a form that constantly threatens to disintegrate or unravel itself.
Again, the poem holds itself in tension: between fragmentation and whole-
ness, between the universal and the individual, between progress and stasis,
between structure and chaos.

Remembering the Elegy

So far, thinking about the various ways that In Memoriam is pieced together,
I have talked about the allusions that it makes to epic, ballad and lyric; but,
as we saw in the letters written by Tennyson and his friends, In Memoriam
is most often identified as an elegy. I have already discussed how the pro-
posed title, ‘Fragments of an Elegy’, draws attention to the poem’s fragility
and incompleteness, but it is important also to consider what it is that In
Memoriam fragments and / or collects back together. ‘Fragments of an Elegy’
implies that the elegy itself is broken in a way that must bear some relation
to the broken body of Arthur Hallam. We are led to think about the elegy as
a kind of poetry that is likewise lost and that is likewise mourned, or imper-
fectly remembered, by In Memoriam.
Elegy, loosely defined, is any kind of writing about any kind of loss. The
word elegy comes from the Greek word elegos, which means ‘mournful song’
and originally referred to the form and performance of a poem rather than
its content. Elegies were poems written in elegiac couplets that were often
performed to the accompaniment of a particular kind of flute. The elongated
length of the poetic lines and the melancholy tone of the flute meant that
elegy came to be associated with reflective or solemn themes. Eventually,
these themes – in other words, the content rather than the form of the elegy
– became its defining feature. Developing out of this tradition, and influ-
enced by the work of particular Ancient Greek writers (Theocritus, Bion and
Moschus), the English Elegiac tradition more firmly established elegy as the
poetry of grief, mourning and remembrance. Jahan Ramazani argues that In
Memoriam represents a turning point for elegy, a break with or breakdown
of the conventions of what he refers to as ‘classical elegy’ and the creation of
‘modern elegy’ (Ramazani 1994; 4). This is helpful when thinking about In
Memoriam as fragments of an elegy. The elegy that In Memoriam fragments,
in a way that allows it to be made new by modern authors, is the classical
funeral elegy.
If the sonnet is a form of lyrical poetry in which a man expresses desire

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 18 In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

for a woman who is out of reach, then the classical elegy is a type of lyrical
poetry in which a man expresses his grief for another man who is out of reach
through death (of course, elegies, like sonnets, have been written by women,
but this kind of elegy, like the sonnet, nevertheless remains a masculine tradi-
tion). This kind of elegy originates in the sixteenth century with ‘Astrophel’,
Edmund Spenser’s elegy for Sir Philip Sidney, a fellow poet who died in battle,
aged thirty-two. Two other important elegies written within this tradition
are Lycidas (1637/45), Milton’s elegy for his classmate, Edward King, who
drowned at the age of twenty-six, and Adonais (1821), Shelley’s elegy for
John Keats, who died in Rome of tuberculosis, aged twenty-five.7 Each of
these elegies, like In Memoriam, mourns the early death of a contemporary
who, although not in every case a close friend, was of great significance to
the author. Because of this shared circumstance, each elegist makes reference
to, and employs the conventions of, earlier elegies in order both to elevate
their subject and to elevate themselves: ‘the elegist borrows [the] uniform
of his predecessors to convince us of his seriousness and depth of feeling, so
that elegy, more than any other genre of poetry, is a poem made out of other
poems’ (Kennedy 2007: 5). In other words, all elegies remember the elegies
that have gone before them and so, even in its breaking down and piecing
back together of elegiac tradition, In Memoriam takes part in the traditions of
elegy. As Seamus Perry writes, Tennyson’s poem ‘elude[s] the expectation of
classical elegy, while constantly evoking their possibility’ (Perry 2004: 129).
To get a clearer sense of exactly how In Memoriam conforms to and
subverts the patterns established by earlier elegies, it is helpful to compare
Tennyson’s poem directly with that group of elegies that make up its gene-
alogy. In his important history of the elegy, Peter Sacks identifies a set of
conventions that characterise the classical funeral elegy. For the purposes
of this study, I have chosen to focus on just three: contest and inheritance,
performance and the pastoral, and the movement from despair to consolation
and resurrection.

Contest and Inheritance

In the masculine elegiac tradition, where a young male poet writes about the
death of another young male poet, elegy’s compensatory relationship with
the loss that it mourns is intensified. The elegist voices his awareness that by
writing a poem for a poet who can no longer write, he is walking in the shoes
of a dead man. Therefore, comparison becomes one of the central conven-
tions of elegy. These comparisons consistently favour the mourned object
over the mourner, elevating his status by insisting that he is without equal
and therefore cannot be replaced. Milton writes, ‘For Lycidas is dead, dead

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 Mapping and Making 19

ere his prime, / Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer’ (8–9),8 and Shelley
describes Keats as poetry’s ‘extreme hope, the loveliest and the last’ (51).9
‘Last’ could simply mean most recent, but the reader is invited to understand
that Keats’s death represents for Shelley the untimely death of poetry itself.
Having insisted on the peerlessness of his subject, the elegist then reflects
modestly on the inadequacy of his own skill, drawing himself into unfavour-
able comparisons with the great talent that has been lost. It is worth noting
that, even by the seventeenth century, this is recognised as part of the conven-
tional performance of elegy. Milton calls on the ‘gentle Muse’ of tragedy, who
will begin the poem ‘with denial vain and coy excuse’ (18). It is a convention
to which Milton nevertheless conforms, figuring himself as an ‘uncouth swain’
(186) and implying that his song is likewise crude and basic. However, these
gestures of modesty in fact draw attention to, rather than masking, the sophis-
tication of Milton’s work, which manipulates elegiac conventions in order to
construct a complex, extended political metaphor. Milton therefore employs
his performance of grief at the death of a promising young poet to stage his
own arrival on the literary and political scene. Likewise, Shelley stages his
entrance on to the scene of mourning: ‘one frail Form / A phantom among
men; companionless’ (271–2), describing himself as Keats’s natural successor,
and concluding his elegy with an image of himself sailing in a boat towards
‘the inmost veil of Heaven’ where ‘the soul of Adonais, like a star, / Beacons
from the abode where the Eternal are’ (493–5). The ‘Eternal’ are those poets
who have gained immortality through fame, and it is no accident that two of
those poets that Shelley refers to directly in the poem are Milton and Sidney,
the author and subject of two canonical elegies. In so doing, he offers a clear
indication of his intentions for his elegy and identifies himself as the heir of
Keats and of Spenser and Milton. In this respect, an elegy is as much a monu-
ment to the living promise of the elegist as it is a monument to the lost promise
of the person mourned. An elegy is, paradoxically, a coming-of-age poem.
This is equally true of In Memoriam, which alludes to other poets and other
elegies in order to indicate the high rank of both the poet’s grief and his poetic
skill. Section LXIX, for example, describes a dream in which the mourner
imagines making and wearing a crown of thorns:

I wandered from the noisy town,

I found a wood with thorny boughs:
I took the thorn to bind my brows,
I wore it like a civic crown.
(LXIX, 5–8)

The mourner’s dream alludes to Shelley’s description of himself in Adonais:

‘He answered no, but with a sudden hand / Made bare his branded and

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 20 In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

ensaguined brow, / Which was like Cain’s or Christ’s’ (304–6). By employ-

ing this image of poet as Christ-figure, Tennyson also draws a comparison
between himself and Shelley (Adonais was a poem that held particular sig-
nificance for Tennyson because its publication, which occurred after Shelley
himself had died, was organised by the Apostles, the university society to
which Tennyson and Hallam had both belonged). However, the dream frame-
work that Tennyson places around this self-image perhaps implies a certain
scepticism of the Shelleyan Poet-Christ, a suspicion that the religious power of
poetry that Shelley describes is an illusion. Both the fact of Tennyson’s poetic
inheritance and its value are described as fantasy. Tennyson commented on
these lines: ‘I tried to make my grief into a crown of these poems – but it is
not to be taken too closely – To write verses about grief and death is to wear
a crown of thorns which ought to be put by, as people say’ (EN). A crown
of thorns also suggests a laurel wreath – a classical symbol of public honour
(root of the term ‘Poet Laureate’) and so this section also self-consciously
betrays the ambition invested in this kind of intertextual allusion.
In Memoriam’s main contest, however, is with Hallam. The identity of the
mourner and mourned object are constituted via comparisons, the one with
the other:

I vex my heart with fancies dim

He still outstript me in the race;
It was but unity of place
That made me dream I ranked with him.
(XLII, 1–4)

In this case the mourner describes his friend’s death as the experience of
being woken from a dream in which the two of them were equal. Here, and
throughout, In Memoriam conforms to the elegiac convention that insists on
the superiority of the mourned object. However, whereas in other elegies the
mourner implicitly gains the advantage in what David Kennedy describes as
the elegy’s ‘heroic performance of survival’ (Kennedy 2007: 29), Tennyson
complicates the outcome of this elegiac contest through repeated references to
his friend’s onward journey in death. In Lycidas, straightforward replacement
of dead voice by living voice takes place. The mourner, having established
that ‘Lycidas’ was a poet who ‘knew / Himself to sing, and build the lofty
rhyme’ (10–11), immediately refers to his own song: ‘He must not float upon
the watery bier / Unwept, and welter to the paraching wind, / Without the
need of some melodious tear’ (12–14). Milton’s confidence that he can supply
a song that will both pay tribute to and sing in place of ‘Lycidas’ (King) is
complicated by Shelley, who insists that Adonais (Keats) has ‘awakened from
the dream of life’ (344) and that the living ‘decay / Like corpses in a charnel’

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 Mapping and Making 21

(348–9) . He is nevertheless able to make this charnel into a lush poetic space
where he can display his talents at length. Adonais has travelled ahead of the
mourner, but at the end of the poem we see the mourner confidently follow-
ing him.
As I will discuss in the ‘Lost for Words’ section of the Reading Guide,
Tennyson’s elegy, although much longer than either Milton’s or Shelley’s,
constantly doubts its own adequacy to voice the absence of the poet’s friend,
stating: ‘I leave thy praises unexpressed’ and ‘So here shall silence guard thy
fame’ (LXXV, 1 and 16). The speaker also dwells on the difference or distance
between himself and his friend, which he often views as an insurmountable
problem. Hallam is not imagined as a beacon that will guide Tennyson to an
eventual reunion; instead Tennyson imagines how he must look to his friend
as he gazes down on him: ‘How dimly charactered and slight, / How dwarfed
a growth of cold and night, / How blanched with darkness must I grow’ (LXI,
6–8), so that the poet’s inferiority is reasserted from this heavenly perspec-
tive. Survival is never heroic in In Memoriam: the poem stages a contest that
Tennyson has always already lost.

Pastoral
Section XXXVII of In Memoriam abruptly introduces a set of classical ref-
erences that seem to belong to another poem. The mourner is addressed by
Urania and Melpemone, two Ancient Greek Muses (female personifications
of different kinds of inspiration) associated with elegy. Here Tennyson ges-
tures back through the English Elegiac tradition to its classical ancestry: the
pastoral elegies of Theocritus, in which a shepherd calls on the Muses to help
him express his grief at the death of a fellow shepherd. Pastoral literature is
literature that figures the countryside as a location of leisure, retreat, simplic-
ity and renewal. Within the pastoral elegy, the mourner-poet finds the time
and space to mourn and the opportunity to re-establish the natural order that
has been upset by the untimely death they mourn. As David Kennedy puts it,
pastoral elegy ‘examines change and loss against continuity’ (Kennedy 2007:
17).
English elegies establish themselves within the privileged natural environ-
ment of the pastoral by gesturing towards the figures and tropes that populate
classical pastoral elegies. The retreat of the English elegist to simple, natural
surroundings can therefore also be understood as a retreat from the present
into the past. Lycidas and Adonais achieve a more wholesale engagement
with the pastoral mode. In Lycidas, Milton represents himself and King as
fellow shepherds, tending their flocks and playing rustic music together in a
fantastic rural idyll: ‘Meanwhile the rural ditties were not mute / Tempered

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 22 In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

to the oaten flute, / Rough satyrs danced, and fawns with cloven heel / From
the glad sound would not be absent long’ (32–5). Shelley also retreats to the
landscape of classical pastoral to mourn Keats, whom he transforms into
Adonais, a derivation of a character from Greek myth. Both Milton and
Shelley are self-consciously artful in their employment of the pastoral mode,
constructing complex extended metaphors from the pastoral’s props and fur-
nishings. In Lycidas, the sheep and shepherds become a metaphor for failings
in the English church, and in Adonais, Keats’s poems are figured as his ‘flocks,
whom near the living streams / Of his young spirit he fed’ (75–6). Both also
test and play with the conventions of pastoral, challenging the natural order
that pastoral asserts. Nevertheless, in both poems the performance of pastoral
is sustained throughout.
In Memoriam is scarcely a pastoral elegy at all.10 The poem’s setting is as
often urban as it is rural. It might be possible to draw a comparison between
the dramatised voice of Tennyson’s mourner and the masks adopted by
authors of other pastoral elegies, but the mask of the mourner is closely
modelled on the features of its wearer rather than borrowed from the classics.
Any references to the classical tradition of pastoral elegy are made piecemeal,
appearing as single, detached fragments that refuse to be integrated into any
kind of complete reading. In section C the mourner looks out from the top of
a hill and finds ‘no place that does not breathe / Some gracious memory of my
friend’. The scene stretched out before him is pastoral:

Nor rivulet tinkling from the rock,

Nor pastoral rivulet that swerves
To left and right through meadow curves,
That feed the mothers of the flock.
(C, 13–16)
But this pastoral moment extends only brief comfort:
But each has pleased a kindred eye,
And each reflects a kindlier day;
And leaving these, to pass away
I think once more he seems to die
(C, 17–20)

Whereas, for earlier elegists, the pastoral represents a place of imagina-

tive return to the past, Tennyson’s mourner can only observe it from a
distance, regarding it as something irretrievably lost, from which he must
‘pass away’. In these moments, where the pastoral comes briefly into view,
In Memoriam performs the rejection of the pastoral mode and its failure to
provide relief. This rejection might be understood as an assertion of moder-
nity, which can be read in the context of In Memoriam’s engagement with

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 Mapping and Making 23

Victorian science and the profound challenges that it presented to the con-
solations of the natural world (a theme I return to in more detail later in the
Guide).

Consolation and Resurrection

The consolation offered by nature and religion form a third important conven-
tion of traditional masculine elegy, which moves towards a restoration of the
natural order and the promise of resurrection. In Lycidas these two related ends
are enabled by the pastoral framework of the poem. The poem, which begins
by demanding that melodious tears be shed, concludes with an injunction to
‘Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more, / For Lycidas your sorrow
is not dead’ (165–6). It compares Lycidas to the sun which sets at night only to
rise again in the morning: ‘So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high, / Through
the dear might of him that walked the waves’ (172–3). God in Christ works
in harmony with the cycle of nature to confirm Lycidas’s immortality. Death
ends with rebirth, and the shepherd is able to move on to the ‘fresh woods and
pastures new’ (193) because he has been restored by the work of elegy. In the
same way, Shelley, who begins, ‘I weep for Adonais – he is dead!’, concludes,
‘Peace, peace! he is not dead, he does not sleep, / He hath awakened from the
dream of life’ (343–4). For Shelley, natural consolation and religious resurrec-
tion are one and the same. His elegy ascribes to a neo-Platonic belief system
that recognises the creative and immortal power of nature, to which Keats
has returned, and through which he now lives. Shelley is also more concerned
with the power of his own poetry to immortalise (both himself and Keats), so
that the final image of Shelley travelling towards Keats’s star in a boat mingles
nature, life and poetry as a single ‘breath’ that carries the poet onward.
The breakdown of pastoral in In Memoriam means that it can neither
perform, nor confidently look forward to, the resurrection of Hallam.
Throughout, the elegy returns to images of natural consolation and Christian
resurrection, but rather than finding comfort in them, it interrogates them,
subjecting them to the mourner’s sceptical gaze. Section XXXI consid-
ers the gospel story of the resurrection of Lazarus, and focuses on Mary’s
question to her brother: ‘Where were’t thou brother, those four days?’ The
mourner is troubled by the fact that, in the gospel account, Mary receives no
answer:
Behold a man raised up by Christ!
The rest remaineth unrevealed;
He told it not; or something sealed
The lips of the Evangelist.
(XXXI, 13–16)

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 24 In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

Like Mary, the mourner wants to know the answer to that child-like question,
‘where do we go when we die?’ His suspicion is that the answer is unspeak-
able, and his fear is that the place or the experience of death is something so
foreign that his friend (referred to later as ‘strange friend’) will be transformed
beyond recognition, so that resurrection is not, in fact, the same as day return-
ing after night, but is a more radical and disruptive change that should be
feared as much as looked forward to.
Other sections of In Memoriam are happier to accept the consolation
offered by the elegiac conventions of natural renewal and Christian resurrec-
tion. Section XLIII considers death and resurrection in terms of night and day,
sleep and waking, arguing that, ‘If Sleep and Death be truly one’ then ‘love will
last as pure and whole / As when he loved me here in Time, / And at the spir-
itual prime / Rewaken with the dawning soul’ (XLIII, 1 and 13–16). But unlike
Shelley’s or Milton’s confident formulations of these elegiac tropes, Tennyson’s
description of death as a peaceful and changeless sleep is conditional. By saying
‘If Sleep and Death be truly one’, the speaker opens up the possibility of an ‘If
not’ that exists as an unwritten contradiction to faith and hope. The section
that follows reopens the question, immediately disrupting the fragile optimism
of the previous lines, ‘How fares it with the happy dead?’ (XLIV, 1), and the
mourner again expresses doubt that his friend will ever know him again. Any
consolation that In Memoriam achieves is temporary and doubtful. In fact, the
only thing that In Memoriam is ever confident about is its doubt: ‘There lives
more faith in honest doubt. / Believe me, than in half the creeds’ (XCI, 11–12).
In Memoriam’s paradoxical declaration of doubtful faith or faithful doubt
suggests that faith is not proved by the repetition of creeds (which are formal
confessions of faith, often said as part of a religious service), but by testing
and questioning the conventions of those creeds, conventions that inform the
conventions of elegy. I return to these questions in more detail in the ‘Cycle
and Ritual’ section of this Guide, but it is important to recognise poetry and
religion as mutually informing traditions, so that form falters with faith.
As In Memoriam draws to a close, it returns to those elegiac conventions
that it has thrown into doubt. Tennyson’s mourner comes round to the idea
that his friend survives in God, in nature and in himself:

Known and unknown; human, divine;

Sweet human hand and lips and eye;
Dear heavenly friend that canst not die,
Mine, mine forever, ever mine;
(CXXIX, 5–8)

On first reading this section, we might argue that elegy achieves its moment
of resurrection at the moment when it takes possession of its subject: ‘Mine,

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 Mapping and Making 25

mine forever, ever mine’ (8). However, on a second reading, this triumphant
cry begins to sound strained or desperate (in Maud, a poem published five
years after the publication of In Memoriam, Tennyson puts similar words
into the mouth of a mad man, who deludes himself into thinking that the
women he loves belongs to him: ‘Mine, mine by a right, from birth till death.
/ Mine, mine – our fathers have sworn’ (725–6)). Whereas we believe Shelley,
when he expresses his faith that ‘He lives, he wakes – ’tis Death is dead, not
he’ (361), there is something about this moment of reconciliation that does
not ring true. Although Milton and Shelley profess different religious faiths,
both their elegies express complete faith in the power of poetry to resurrect
and immortalise. Tennyson’s belief in the ability of elegy to defy death is
never so secure. In this section, the mourner’s hold on his friend is called into
question by the paradoxes that he uses, which describe the conclusions that
his elegy has reached. Hallam is a ‘strange friend’, ‘known and unknown’, ‘so
far, so near’, ‘past, present and to be’. Christopher Ricks makes sense of some
of these paradoxes for us:
The suggestion of paradox in ‘Strange friend’ (the dead friend cannot but be
almost a stranger) is [. . .] taken up in ‘Loved deeplier, darklier understood’ –
when you love someone deeply you do indeed understand them more and yet the
understanding is not simply illumination – love makes you more aware of the
mysteriousness of another, makes you understand ‘darklier’ the person that you
understandingly love. (Ricks 1989: 223)
Ricks is right, but it is worth noting that In Memoriam leaves the sense of
these lines unmade, holding these opposites in tension and allowing the reader
to appreciate their difference from one another. These paradoxes are a much
more accurate representation of the kind of double-edged consolation that In
Memoriam finds in itself. Unlike Adonais and Lycidas, it does not achieve an
untroubled harmony or wholeness at its conclusion; instead it finds a way to
accommodate, without solving, the questions, doubts and deep loss caused
by death.

Notes
1. For the best, recent biographical account of Tennyson and Hallam’s friendship and
In Memoriam’s publication, see Robert Martin’s biography of Tennyson (1980).
For more detailed biographical information about Arthur Hallam, see A Life Lived
Quickly by Martin Blocksidge (2010).
2. Shatto and Shaw quote Tennyson, ‘I alluded to Goethe’s creed. Among his last words
were [. . .] “from changes to higher changes”.’ They also note that there is no record
of these words belonging to Goethe (Shatto and Shaw 1982: 162).
3. For readings of other nineteenth-century epics, see Herbert Tucker (2008), Epic:
Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910.
4. For more detailed and extensive analysis of the In Memoriam manuscripts, see

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 26 In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

Christopher Ricks’s annotated edition of the poem (1987) and Susan Shatto and
Marion Shaw’s excellent single-volume edition (1982).
5. Anne Janowitz explores the changing political significance of the ballad form at the
turn of the nineteenth century in Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (1998).
6. A. C. Bradley’s early and influential commentary on In Memoriam (1901) offers a
helpful discussion of Tennyson’s development of the In Memoriam stanza. See also
Perry 2004: 135–6.
7. A. C. Bradley also carries out a comparison between Lycidas, Adonais and In
Memoriam (Bradley 1901: 23).
8. All quotations from Lycidas are taken from John Milton (1971), The Complete
Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, London: Longman, pp. 232–54.
9. All quotations from Adonais are taken from P. B. Shelley (1970), Complete Poems,
ed. Thomas Hutchinson, 2nd edn, London: Oxford University Press, pp. 430–44.
10. Other critics argue that In Memoriam identifies itself more closely with the pastoral
mode. See, for example, Buckley (1960), pp. 115–17; Sinfield (1971), pp. 64–5.

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 Chapter 2
The Poem

The Reading Guide aims to lead the reader through In Memoriam and should
be read alongside the text of the poem, which is printed, in full, below.
Initially, it is important to read In Memoriam from beginning to end in order
to gain an appreciation of the poem’s shape and the narrative that it outlines.
To help with this, I provide a summary of the poem and a brief accompanying
glossary indicating sections addressed in the commentary. However, because
In Memoriam is a poem of fragments that both construct and threaten to
disassemble the whole, the Guide, which follows the full text of the poem,
does not perform a straightforwardly chronological reading of the poem.
Instead, it selects four different pathways through the text, each focusing on a
particular theme: language, touch, economies of loss, and cycles and rituals.1
Taking the poem apart and piecing it back together in different ways will give
a sense of the wide variety of images, metaphors, ideas and arguments that
In Memoriam strains to hold together within its length and of the different
ways that they work with and against one another. The themes I have chosen
provide just a sample of the different ways through In Memoriam, and in
the ‘Teaching the Text’ section that concludes this book I suggest others that
readers might want to trace for themselves. At the beginning of each reading,
I list those sections of the poem on which the reading focuses and it is a good
idea to reread those sections before coming to the commentary text. In each
case, the commentary will explain some of the key ideas that underpin the
reading and then explore how these ideas find expression in In Memoriam,
and how they inform and structure the elegy.

Outline
As we have seen, In Memoriam does not describe a sequence of events that
can be neatly summarised. However, in an article by Tennyson’s friend, James
Knowles, published in 1893, in which Knowles records Tennyson’s own

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 28 In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

comments about his elegy, Tennyson argues that the poem can be divided up
into a number of groups (Knowles 1893: 182). I use these groups as the basis
for a ‘map’ of In Memoriam, offering brief summaries of the content of each
group.
Prologue (not mentioned in Knowles’s article): A prayer in which the mourner
expresses faith in God and asks forgiveness for moments of doubt caused
by grief.
Sections I to VIII: The mourner describes the initial shock and despair of loss.
Sections IX to XXI: The ‘fair ship’ lyrics, which focus on the return of
Hallam’s body from Austria to England.
Sections XXII to XXVII: The mourner reflects on his friendship with A. H. H.
and considers the end of their shared life.
Sections XXVIII to XLIX: The first of three Christmases. The speaker and
his family celebrate and mourn together. In the sections that follow, the
mourner’s grief is tempered by a tentative renewal of faith.
Sections L to LVIII: These sections consider different kinds of progress: the
progress of A. H. H. as he moves on ahead of the mourner in death, and
the progress of the species, which is called into question by the proofs of
evolutionary science.
Sections LIX to LXXI: Returning again to think about the change that his
friend has undergone in death, the mourner wonders whether the distance
that separates them from one another will ever be bridged. He describes
the temporary, illusory reunion offered by sleep and dreams and expresses
a desire to be haunted.
Sections LXXII to XCVIII: This group, which begins on the anniversary of
Hallam’s death and which includes the elegy’s second Christmas, begins
to trace a more certain recovery, a return to the concerns of everyday life
and a resignation or reconciliation to the death of A. H. H.
Sections XCIX to CIII: This small group begins on the same day one year later
and refers to the move from the family home at Somersby to a new home
at Dalby, made by the Tennyson family in 1837.
Sections CIV to CXXXI: The last group begins with the third Christmas,
spent in an unfamiliar location that offers the possibility of a new begin-
ning. As the poem draws to a close, winter moves into spring and the
mourner begins to look towards the future with renewed faith, both in
God and in his own work.
Epilogue (not mentioned in Knowles’s article): Describes the marriage of
Tennyson’s sister, Cecilia, and his friend, Edmund Lushington.

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 The Poem 29

The Poem
The text of In Memoriam is taken from the Eversley Edition (1907–8), edited
by Tennyson’s son, Hallam Tennyson. The only editorial change to the
text is the removal of apostrophised abbreviations (so that ‘thro’’ becomes
‘through’, ‘possess’d’ becomes ‘possessed’, and so on). Explanatory notes that
were provided by Tennyson and included in an appendix to the Eversley are
also given as footnotes. Notes in languages other than English are given in
translation.

IN MEMORIAM A. H. H. The Prologue is an affirmation of

OBIT MDCCCXXXIII Christian faith that praises God as the
author of creation, expresses belief in a
divine wisdom that exceeds human
1 Strong Son of God, immortal Love,* knowledge and hope that humanity
2 Whom we, that have not seen thy face, will eventually return to perfect
knowledge of and union with God.
3 By faith, and faith alone, embrace, See: ‘Lost for Words’.
4 Believing where we cannot prove;

5 Thine are these orbs of light and shade;*

6 Thou madest Life in man and brute;
7 Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot
8 Is on the skull which thou hast made.

9 Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:

10 Thou madest man, he knows not why,
11 He thinks he was not made to die;
12 And thou hast made him: thou art just.

13 Thou seemest human and divine,

14 The highest, holiest manhood, thou:
15 Our wills are ours, we know not how;
16 Our wills are ours, to make them thine.

17 Our little systems have their day;

18 They have their day and cease to be:
19 They are but broken lights of thee,
20 And thou, O Lord, art more than they.

21 We have but faith: we cannot know;

22 For knowledge is of things we see;

1 The footnotes that follow reproduce Tennyson’s notes to the poem. This might be taken in a St John
sense.
5 Sun and Moon.

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 30 In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

23 And yet we trust it comes from thee,

24 A beam in darkness: let it grow.

25 Let knowledge grow from more to more,

26 But more of reverence in us dwell;
27 That mind and soul, according well,
28 May make one music as before,*

29 But vaster. We are fools and slight;

30 We mock thee when we do not fear:
31 But help thy foolish ones to bear;
32 Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light.

33 Forgive what seemed my sin in me;

34 What seemed my worth since I began;
35 For merit lives from man to man,
36 And not from man, O Lord, to thee.

37 Forgive my grief for one removed,

38 Thy creature, whom I found so fair.
39 I trust he lives in thee, and there
40 I find him worthier to be loved.

41 Forgive these wild and wandering cries,

42 Confusions of a wasted youth;
43 Forgive them where they fail in truth,
44 And in thy wisdom make me wise.

1849
I. The mourner begins in a state of
1 I held it truth, with him who sings intense doubt, unable to escape the
immediate circumstances of his grief.
2 To one clear harp in divers tones, See: ‘Losing Touch’ and ‘Profit and
3 That men may rise on stepping-stones Loss’.
4 Of their dead selves to higher things.*

5 But who shall so forecast the years

6 And find in loss a gain to match?
7 Or reach a hand through time to catch
8 The far-off interest of tears?*

28 As in the ages of faith.

4 I alluded to Goethe’s creed. Among his last words were these [. . .] ‘from changes to higher changes’.
8 The good that grows for us out of grief.

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 The Poem 31

9 Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drowned,

10 Let darkness keep her raven gloss:
11 Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss,
12 To dance with death, to beat the ground,

13 Than that the victor Hours should scorn

14 The long result of love, and boast,
15 ‘Behold the man that loved and lost,
16 But all he was is overworn.’*

II. The mourner compares himself with a

1 Old Yew, which graspest at the stones tree that stands in a graveyard.
See: ‘Lost for Words’ and ‘Losing
2 That name the under-lying dead, Touch’.
3 Thy fibres net the dreamless head,*
4 Thy roots are wrapt about the bones.

5 The seasons bring the flower again,

6 And bring the firstling to the flock;
7 And in the dusk of thee, the clock
8 Beats out the little lives of men.

9 O not for thee the glow, the bloom,

10 Who changest not in any gale,
11 Nor branding summer suns avail
12 To touch thy thousand years of gloom:

13 And gazing on thee, sullen tree,

14 Sick for thy stubborn hardihood,
15 I seem to fail from out my blood
16 And grow incorporate into thee.

III.* The mourner listens to the voice of

1 O Sorrow , cruel fellowship, Sorrow, who insinuates doubts about
the meaning and purpose of life and
2 O Priestess in the vaults of Death, death.
3 O sweet and bitter in a breath, See: ‘Losing Touch’.
4 What whispers from thy lying lip?

5 ‘The stars,’ she whispers, ‘blindly run;

6 A web is woven across the sky;

16 Yet it is better to bear the wild misery of extreme grief than that Time should obliterate the sense
of loss and deaden the power of love.
3 ‘The powerless heads of the dead’ (Odyssey X, 521 etc.).
III First realization of blind sorrow.

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 32 In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

7 From out waste places comes a cry,

8 And murmurs from the dying sun:*

9 ‘And all the phantom, Nature, stands –

10 With all the music in her tone,
11 A hollow echo of my own, –
12 A hollow form with empty hands.’

13 And shall I take a thing so blind,

14 Embrace her as my natural good;
15 Or crush her, like a vice of blood,
16 Upon the threshold of the mind?

IV. The mourner surrenders himself to

1 To Sleep I give my powers away; sleep and to unconscious thought.
See: ‘Profit and Loss’.
2 My will is bondsman to the dark;
3 I sit within a helmless bark,
4 And with my heart I muse and say:

5 O heart, how fares it with thee now,

6 That thou should’st fail from thy desire,
7 Who scarcely darest to inquire,
8 ‘What is it makes me beat so low?’

9 Something it is which thou hast lost,

10 Some pleasure from thine early years.
11 Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears,
12 That grief hath shaken into frost!*

13 Such clouds of nameless trouble cross

14 All night below the darkened eyes;
15 With morning wakes the will, and cries,
16 ‘Thou shalt not be the fool of loss.’

V. This section expresses the mourner’s

1 I sometimes hold it half a sin doubts about his own ability to express
his grief accurately in poetry.
2 To put in words the grief I feel; See: ‘Lost for Words’ and ‘Losing
3 For words, like Nature, half reveal Touch’.
4 And half conceal the Soul within.

8 Expresses the feeling that sad things in nature affect him who mourns.
12 Water can be brought below freezing point and not turn into ice – if it be kept still; but if it be
moved, suddenly it turns into ice and may break the vase.

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 The Poem 33

5 But, for the unquiet heart and brain,

6 A use in measured language lies;
7 The sad mechanic exercise,
8 Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

9 In words, like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er,

10 Like coarsest clothes against the cold:
11 But that large grief which these enfold
12 Is given in outline and no more.

VI. The mourner describes the inadequate

1 One writes, that ‘Other friends remain,’ consolation offered by letters of
condolence.
2 That ‘Loss is common to the race’– See: ‘Lost for Words’.
3 And common is the commonplace,
4 And vacant chaff well meant for grain.

5 That loss is common would not make

6 My own less bitter, rather more:
7 Too common! Never morning wore
8 To evening, but some heart did break.

9 O father, wheresoe’er thou be,

10 Who pledgest now thy gallant son;
11 A shot, ere half thy draught be done,
12 Hath stilled the life that beat from thee.

13 O mother, praying God will save

14 Thy sailor, – while thy head is bowed,
15 His heavy-shotted hammock-shroud
16 Drops in his vast and wandering grave.

17 Ye know no more than I who wrought

18 At that last hour to please him well;
19 Who mused on all I had to tell,
20 And something written, something thought;

21 Expecting still his advent home;

22 And ever met him on his way
23 With wishes, thinking, ‘here to-day,’
24 Or ‘here to-morrow will he come.’

25 O somewhere, meek, unconscious dove,

26 That sittest ranging golden hair;

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 34 In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

27 And glad to find thyself so fair,

28 Poor child, that waitest for thy love!

29 For now her father’s chimney glows

30 In expectation of a guest;
31 And thinking ‘this will please him best,’
32 She takes a riband or a rose;

33 For he will see them on to-night;

34 And with the thought her colour burns;
35 And, having left the glass, she turns
36 Once more to set a ringlet right;

37 And, even when she turned, the curse

38 Had fallen, and her future Lord
39 Was drowned in passing through the ford,
40 Or killed in falling from his horse.

41 O what to her shall be the end?

42 And what to me remains of good?
43 To her, perpetual maidenhood,
44 And unto me no second friend.

VII. The mourner visits his friend’s home

1 Dark house, by which once more I stand and stands at the door.
See: ‘Losing Touch’.
2 Here in the long unlovely street,
3 Doors, where my heart was used to beat
4 So quickly, waiting for a hand,

5 A hand that can be clasped no more –

6 Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
7 And like a guilty thing I creep
8 At earliest morning to the door.

9 He is not here; but far away

10 The noise of life begins again,
11 And ghastly through the drizzling rain
12 On the bald street breaks the blank day.

VIII. The mourner compares himself to a

lover who visits the house of his
1 A happy lover who has come beloved, only to find that she has gone
2 To look on her that loves him well, away. He compares his poem to a
3 Who ’lights and rings the gateway bell, flower that he plants on the tomb of
his friend.
4 And learns her gone and far from home; See: ‘Lost for Words’.

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5 He saddens, all the magic light

6 Dies off at once from bower and hall,
7 And all the place is dark, and all
8 The chambers emptied of delight:

9 So find I every pleasant spot

10 In which we two were wont to meet,
11 The field, the chamber and the street,
12 For all is dark where thou art not.

13 Yet as that other, wandering there

14 In those deserted walks, may find
15 A flower beat with rain and wind,
16 Which once she fostered up with care;

17 So seems it in my deep regret,

18 O my forsaken heart, with thee
19 And this poor flower of poesy
20 Which little cared for fades not yet.

21 But since it pleased a vanished eye,

22 I go to plant it on his tomb,
23 That if it can it there may bloom,
24 Or dying, there at least may die.

IX. The mourner addresses the ship that

1 Fair ship, that from the Italian shore brings Arthur’s body back from
Austria for burial in England.
2 Sailest the placid ocean-plains See: ‘Cycle and Ritual’.
3 With my lost Arthur’s loved remains,
4 Spread thy full wings, and waft him o’er.

5 So draw him home to those that mourn

6 In vain; a favourable speed
7 Ruffle thy mirrored mast, and lead
8 Through prosperous floods his holy urn.

9 All night no ruder air perplex

10 Thy sliding keel, till Phosphor,* bright
11 As our pure love, through early light
12 Shall glimmer on the dewy decks.

10 Star of dawn.

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13 Sphere all your lights around, above;

14 Sleep, gentle heavens, before the prow;
15 Sleep, gentle winds, as he sleeps now,
16 My friend, the brother of my love;

17 My Arthur, whom I shall not see

18 Till all my widowed race be run;
19 Dear as the mother to the son,
20 More than my brothers are to me.

X. The mourner continues his address,

1 I hear the noise about thy keel; imagining all the things that a ship
might bring and reflecting on the
2 I hear the bell struck in the night: importance of the ritual of burial.
3 I see the cabin-window bright; See: ‘Losing Touch’ and ‘Cycle and
4 I see the sailor at the wheel. Ritual’.

5 Thou bringest the sailor to his wife,

6 And travelled men from foreign lands;
7 And letters unto trembling hands;
8 And, thy dark freight, a vanished life.

9 So bring him: we have idle dreams:

10 This look of quiet flatters thus
11 Our home-bred fancies: O to us,
12 The fools of habit, sweeter seems

13 To rest beneath the clover sod,

14 That takes the sunshine and the rains,
15 Or where the kneeling hamlet drains
16 The chalice of the grapes of God;

17 Than if with thee the roaring wells

18 Should gulf him fathom-deep in brine;
19 And hands so often clasped in mine,
20 Should toss with tangle* and with shells.

XI.
1 Calm is the morn without a sound,
2 Calm as to suit a calmer grief,
3 And only through the faded leaf
4 The chestnut pattering to the ground:

20 Tangle, or ‘oar-weed’.

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5 Calm and deep peace on this high wold,*

6 And on these dews that drench the furze,
7 And all the silvery gossamers
8 That twinkle into green and gold:

9 Calm and still light on yon great plain

10 That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,
11 And crowded farms and lessening towers,
12 To mingle with the bounding main:

13 Calm and deep peace in this wide air,

14 These leaves that redden to the fall;
15 And in my heart, if calm at all,
16 If any calm, a calm despair:

17 Calm on the seas, and silver sleep,

18 And waves that sway themselves in rest,
19 And dead calm in that noble breast
20 Which heaves but with the heaving deep.

XII.
1 Lo, as a dove when up she springs
2 To bear through Heaven a tale of woe,
3 Some dolorous message knit below
4 The wild pulsation of her wings;

5 Like her I go; I cannot stay;

6 I leave this mortal ark behind,*
7 A weight of nerves without a mind,
8 And leave the cliffs, and haste away

9 O’er ocean-mirrors rounded large,

10 And reach the glow of southern skies,
11 And see the sails at distance rise,
12 And linger weeping on the marge,

13 And saying; ‘Comes he thus, my friend?

14 Is this the end of all my care?’
15 And circle moaning in the air:
16 ‘Is this the end? Is this the end?’

5 A Lincolnshire wold or upland from which the whole range of marsh to the sea is visible.
6 My spirit flies from out my material self.

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17 And forward dart again, and play

18 About the prow, and back return
19 To where the body sits, and learn
20 That I have been an hour away.

XIII. The mourner compares his tears to the

1 Tears of the widower, when he sees tears of a widower.
See: ‘Lost for Words’.
2 A late-lost form that sleep reveals,
3 And moves his doubtful arms, and feels
4 Her place is empty, fall like these;

5 Which weep a loss for ever new,

6 A void where heart on heart reposed;
7 And, where warm hands have prest and closed,
8 Silence, till I be silent too.

9 Which weep the comrade of my choice,

10 An awful thought, a life removed,
11 The human-hearted man I loved,
12 A Spirit, not a breathing voice.

13 Come Time, and teach me, many years,

14 I do not suffer in a dream;
15 For now so strange do these things seem,
16 Mine eyes have leisure for their tears;

17 My fancies time to rise on wing,

18 And glance about the approaching sails,
19 As though they brought but merchants’ bales,
20 And not the burthen that they bring.

XIV. The mourner imagines what might

1 If one should bring me this report, happen if Arthur were to return, alive.
See: ‘Losing Touch’.
2 That thou hadst touched the land to-day,
3 And I went down unto the quay,
4 And found thee lying in the port;

5 And standing, muffled round with woe,

6 Should see thy passengers in rank
7 Come stepping lightly down the plank,
8 And beckoning unto those they know;

9 And if along with these should come

10 The man I held as half-divine;

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11 Should strike a sudden hand in mine,

12 And ask a thousand things of home;

13 And I should tell him all my pain,

14 And how my life had drooped of late,
15 And he should sorrow o’er my state
16 And marvel what possessed my brain;

17 And I perceived no touch of change,

18 No hint of death in all his frame,
19 But found him all in all the same,
20 I should not feel it to be strange.

XV.
1 To-night the winds begin to rise
2 And roar from yonder dropping day:
3 The last red leaf is whirled away,
4 The rooks are blown about the skies;

5 The forest cracked, the waters curled,

6 The cattle huddled on the lea;
7 And wildly dashed on tower and tree
8 The sunbeam strikes along the world:

9 And but for fancies, which aver

10 That all thy motions gently pass
11 Athwart a plane of molten glass,*
12 I scarce could brook the strain and stir

13 That makes the barren branches loud;

14 And but for fear it is not so,
15 The wild unrest that lives in woe
16 Would dote and pore on yonder cloud

17 That rises upward always higher,

18 And onward drags a labouring breast,
19 And topples round the dreary west,
20 A looming bastion fringed with fire.

XVI. The mourner turns once more to the

1 What words are these have fallen from me? subject of his own writing.
See: ‘Lost for Words’.
2 Can calm despair and wild unrest

11 A calm sea.

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3 Be tenants of a single breast,

4 Or sorrow such a changeling be?

5 Or doth she only seem to take

6 The touch of change in calm or storm;
7 But knows no more of transient form
8 In her deep self, than some dead lake

9 That holds the shadow of a lark

10 Hung in the shadow of a heaven?
11 Or has the shock, so harshly given,
12 Confused me like the unhappy bark

13 That strikes by night a craggy shelf,

14 And staggers blindly ere she sink?
15 And stunned me from my power to think
16 And all my knowledge of myself;

17 And made me that delirious man

18 Whose fancy fuses old and new,
19 And flashes into false and true,
20 And mingles all without a plan?

XVII. The mourner blesses the ship as he

1 Thou comest, much wept for: such a breeze imagines its approach.
See: ‘Cycles and Rituals’.
2 Compelled thy canvas, and my prayer
3 Was as the whisper of an air
4 To breathe thee over lonely seas.

5 For I in spirit saw thee move

6 Through circles of the bounding sky,
7 Week after week: the days go by:
8 Come quick, thou bringest all I love.

9 Henceforth, wherever thou may’st roam,

10 My blessing, like a line of light,
11 Is on the waters day and night,
12 And like a beacon guards thee home.

13 So may whatever tempest mars

14 Mid-ocean, spare thee, sacred bark;
15 And balmy drops in summer dark
16 Slide from the bosom of the stars.

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17 So kind an office hath been done,

18 Such precious relics brought by thee;
19 The dust of him I shall not see
20 Till all my widowed race be run.

XVIII. Returns to the theme of the burial.

1 ’Tis well; ’tis something; we may stand See: ‘Cycle and Ritual’.
2 Where he in English earth is laid,
3 And from his ashes may be made
4 The violet of his native land.*

5 ’Tis little; but it looks in truth

6 As if the quiet bones were blest
7 Among familiar names to rest
8 And in the places of his youth.

9 Come then, pure hands, and bear the head

10 That sleeps or wears the mask of sleep,
11 And come, whatever loves to weep,
12 And hear the ritual of the dead.

13 Ah yet, even yet, if this might be,

14 I, falling on his faithful heart,
15 Would breathing through his lips impart
16 The life that almost dies in me;

17 That dies not, but endures with pain,

18 And slowly forms the firmer mind,
19 Treasuring the look it cannot find,
20 The words that are not heard again.

XIX.
1 The Danube to the Severn gave*
2 The darkened heart that beat no more;
3 They laid him by the pleasant shore,
4 And in the hearing of the wave.

5 There twice a day the Severn fills;

6 The salt sea-water passes by,

4 Cf. ‘Lay her in the earth, / And from her fair and unpolluted flesh / May violets spring’ (Hamlet, V,
i, 232–4).
1 He died at Vienna and was brought to Clevedon to be buried.

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7 And hushes half the babbling Wye,

8 And makes a silence in the hills.*

9 The Wye is hushed nor moved along,

10 And hushed my deepest grief of all,
11 When filled with tears that cannot fall,
12 I brim with sorrow drowning song.

13 The tide flows down, the wave again

14 Is vocal in its wooded walls;
15 My deeper anguish also falls,
16 And I can speak a little then.

XX. Draws a comparison between ‘lesser

1 The lesser griefs that may be said, griefs’, which can be expressed, and
‘other griefs’ that cannot.
2 That breathe a thousand tender vows, See: ‘Lost for Words’ and ‘Profit and
3 Are but as servants in a house Loss’.
4 Where lies the master newly dead;

5 Who speak their feeling as it is,

6 And weep the fulness from the mind:
7 ‘It will be hard,’ they say, ‘to find
8 Another service such as this.’

9 My lighter moods are like to these,

10 That out of words a comfort win;
11 But there are other griefs within,
12 And tears that at their fountain freeze;

13 For by the hearth the children sit

14 Cold in that atmosphere of Death,
15 And scarce endure to draw the breath,
16 Or like to noiseless phantoms flit:

17 But open converse is there none,

18 So much the vital spirits sink
19 To see the vacant chair, and think,
20 ‘How good! how kind! and he is gone.’

XXI. Written in the pastoral mode, this

1 I sing to him that rests below, section addresses questions about the
place of elegiac, lyric verse in the
2 And, since the grasses round me wave, modern world.
See: ‘Lost for Words’.

8 Taken from my own observation – the rapids of the Wye are stilled by the incoming sea.

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3 I take the grasses of the grave,

4 And make them pipes whereon to blow.

5 The traveller hears me now and then,

6 And sometimes harshly will he speak:
7 ‘This fellow would make weakness weak,
8 And melt the waxen hearts of men.’

9 Another answers, ‘Let him be,

10 He loves to make parade of pain
11 That with his piping he may gain
12 The praise that comes to constancy.’

13 A third is wroth: ‘Is this an hour

14 For private sorrow’s barren song,
15 When more and more the people throng
16 The chairs and thrones of civil power?

17 ‘A time to sicken and to swoon,

18 When Science reaches forth her arms
19 To feel from world to world, and charms
20 Her secret from the latest moon?’

21 Behold, ye speak an idle thing:

22 Ye never knew the sacred dust:
23 I do but sing because I must,
24 And pipe but as the linnets sing:

25 And one is glad; her note is gay,

26 For now her little ones have ranged;
27 And one is sad; her note is changed,
28 Because her brood is stolen away.

XXII.
1 The path by which we twain did go,
2 Which led by tracts that pleased us well,
3 Through four sweet years arose and fell,
4 From flower to flower, from snow to snow:

5 And we with singing cheered the way,

6 And, crowned with all the season lent,
7 From April on to April went,
8 And glad at heart from May to May:

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9 But where the path we walked began

10 To slant the fifth autumnal slope,
11 As we descended following Hope,
12 There sat the Shadow feared of man;

13 Who broke our fair companionship,

14 And spread his mantle dark and cold,
15 And wrapt thee formless in the fold,
16 And dulled the murmur on thy lip,

17 And bore thee where I could not see

18 Nor follow, though I walk in haste,
19 And think, that somewhere in the waste
20 The Shadow sits and waits for me.

XXIII.
1 Now , sometimes in my sorrow shut,
2 Or breaking into song by fits,
3 Alone, alone, to where he sits,
4 The Shadow cloaked from head to foot,

5 Who keeps the keys of all the creeds,*

6 I wander, often falling lame,
7 And looking back to whence I came,
8 Or on to where the pathway leads;

9 And crying, How changed from where it ran

10 Through lands where not a leaf was dumb;
11 But all the lavish hills would hum
12 The murmur of a happy Pan:

13 When each by turns was guide to each,

14 And Fancy light from Fancy caught,
15 And Thought leapt out to wed with Thought
16 Ere Thought could wed itself with Speech;

17 And all we met was fair and good,

18 And all was good that Time could bring,
19 And all the secret of the Spring*
20 Moved in the chambers of the blood;

5 After death we shall learn the truth of all beliefs.

19 Reawakening of life.

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21 And many an old philosophy

22 On Argive heights divinely sang,
23 And round us all the thicket rang
24 To many a flute of Arcady.

XXIV.
1 And was the day of my delight
2 As pure and perfect as I say?
3 The very source and fount of Day
4 Is dashed with wandering isles of night.*

5 If all was good and fair we met,

6 This earth had been the Paradise
7 It never looked to human eyes
8 Since our first Sun arose and set.

9 And is it that the haze of grief

10 Makes former gladness loom so great?
11 The lowness of the present state,
12 That sets the past in this relief?

13 Or that the past will always win

14 A glory from its being far;
15 And orb into the perfect star
16 We saw not, when we moved therein?

XXV
1 I know that this was Life,* – the track
2 Whereon with equal feet we fared;
3 And then, as now, the day prepared
4 The daily burden for the back.

5 But this it was that made me move

6 As light as carrier-birds in air;
7 I loved the weight I had to bear,
8 Because it needed help of Love:

9 Nor could I weary, heart or limb,

10 When mighty Love would cleave in twain
11 The lading of a single pain,
12 And part it, giving half to him.

4 Sun-spots.
1 Chequered, but the burden was shared.

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XXVI.
1 Still onward winds the dreary way;
2 I with it; for I long to prove
3 No lapse of moons can canker Love,
4 Whatever fickle tongues may say.

5 And if that eye which watches guilt*

6 And goodness, and hath power to see
7 Within the green the mouldered tree,
8 And towers fallen as soon as built –

9 Oh, if indeed that eye foresee

10 Or see (in Him is no before)
11 In more of life true life no more
12 And Love the indifference to be,

13 Then might I find, ere yet the morn

14 Breaks hither over Indian seas,
15 That Shadow waiting with the keys,
16 To shroud me from my proper scorn.*

XXVII.
1 I envy not in any moods
2 The captive void of noble rage,
3 The linnet born within the cage,
4 That never knew the summer woods:

5 I envy not the beast that takes

6 His license in the field of time,
7 Unfettered by the sense of crime,
8 To whom a conscience never wakes;

9 Nor, what may count itself as blest,

10 The heart that never plighted troth
11 But stagnates in the weeds of sloth;
12 Nor any want-begotten rest.

13 I hold it true, whate’er befall;

14 I feel it, when I sorrow most;
15 ’Tis better to have loved and lost
16 Than never to have loved at all.

5 The Eternal Now. I AM.

16 Scorn of myself.

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XXVIII. The following three sections describe

1 The time draws near the birth of Christ: the first Christmas.
See: ‘Cycle and Ritual’.
2 The moon is hid; the night is still;
3 The Christmas bells from hill to hill
4 Answer each other in the mist.

5 Four voices of four hamlets round,

6 From far and near, on mead and moor,
7 Swell out and fail, as if a door
8 Were shut between me and the sound:

9 Each voice four changes on the wind,

10 That now dilate, and now decrease,
11 Peace and goodwill, goodwill and peace,
12 Peace and goodwill, to all mankind.

13 This year I slept and woke with pain,

14 I almost wished no more to wake,
15 And that my hold on life would break
16 Before I heard those bells again:

17 But they my troubled spirit rule,

18 For they controlled me when a boy;
19 They bring me sorrow touched with joy,
20 The merry merry bells of Yule.

XXIX.
1 With such compelling cause to grieve
2 As daily vexes household peace,
3 And chains regret to his decease,
4 How dare we keep our Christmas-eve;

5 Which brings no more a welcome guest

6 To enrich the threshold of the night
7 With showered largess of delight
8 In dance and song and game and jest?

9 Yet go, and while the holly boughs

10 Entwine the cold baptismal font,
11 Make one wreath more for Use and Wont,
12 That guard the portals of the house;

13 Old sisters of a day gone by,

14 Gray nurses, loving nothing new;

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15 Why should they miss their yearly due

16 Before their time? They too will die.

XXX.
1 With trembling fingers did we weave
2 The holly round the Christmas hearth;
3 A rainy cloud possessed the earth,
4 And sadly fell our Christmas-eve.

5 At our old pastimes in the hall

6 We gambolled, making vain pretence
7 Of gladness, with an awful sense
8 Of one mute Shadow watching all.

9 We paused: the winds were in the beech:

10 We heard them sweep the winter land;
11 And in a circle hand-in-hand
12 Sat silent, looking each at each.

13 Then echo-like our voices rang;

14 We sung, though every eye was dim,
15 A merry song we sang with him
16 Last year: impetuously we sang:

17 We ceased: a gentler feeling crept

18 Upon us: surely rest is meet:
19 ‘They rest,’ we said, ‘their sleep is sweet,’
20 And silence followed, and we wept.

21 Our voices took a higher range;

22 Once more we sang: ‘They do not die
23 Nor lose their mortal sympathy,
24 Nor change to us, although they change;

25 ’Rapt from the fickle and the frail

26 With gathered power, yet the same,
27 Pierces the keen seraphic flame
28 From orb to orb, from veil to veil.’

29 Rise, happy morn, rise, holy morn,

30 Draw forth the cheerful day from night:
31 O Father, touch the east, and light
32 The light that shone when Hope was born.

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XXXI.* The mourner imagines the reaction of

1 When Lazarus left his charnel-cave, Lazarus’s sister, after her brother has
been raised from the dead.
2 And home to Mary’s house returned, See: ‘Lost for Words’.
3 Was this demanded—if he yearned
4 To hear her weeping by his grave?

5 ‘Where wert thou, brother, those four days?’

6 There lives no record of reply,
7 Which telling what it is to die
8 Had surely added praise to praise.

9 From every house the neighbours met,

10 The streets were filled with joyful sound,
11 A solemn gladness even crowned
12 The purple brows of Olivet.

13 Behold a man raised up by Christ!

14 The rest remaineth unrevealed;
15 He told it not; or something sealed
16 The lips of that Evangelist.

XXXII.
1 Her eyes are homes of silent prayer,
2 Nor other thought her mind admits
3 But, he was dead, and there he sits,
4 And he that brought him back is there.

5 Then one deep love doth supersede

6 All other, when her ardent gaze
7 Roves from the living brother’s face,
8 And rests upon the Life indeed.

9 All subtle thought, all curious fears,

10 Borne down by gladness so complete,
11 She bows, she bathes the Saviour’s feet
12 With costly spikenard and with tears.

13 Thrice blest whose lives are faithful prayers,

14 Whose loves in higher love endure;
15 What souls possess themselves so pure,
16 Or is there blessedness like theirs?

XXXI ‘She goeth unto the grave to weep there’ (St John XI: 31).

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XXXIII.
1 O thou that after toil and storm
2 Mayst seem to have reached a purer air,
3 Whose faith has centre everywhere,
4 Nor cares to fix itself to form,

5 Leave thou thy sister when she prays,

6 Her early Heaven, her happy views;
7 Nor thou with shadowed hint confuse
8 A life that leads melodious days*

9 Her faith through form is pure as thine,

10 Her hands are quicker unto good:
11 Oh, sacred be the flesh and blood
12 To which she links a truth divine!

13 See thou, that countest reason ripe

14 In holding by the law within,
15 Thou fail not in a world of sin,
16 And even for want of such a type.

XXXIV.
1 My own dim life should teach me this,
2 That life shall live for evermore,
3 Else earth is darkness at the core,
4 And dust and ashes all that is;

5 This round of green, this orb of flame,

6 Fantastic beauty; such as lurks
7 In some wild Poet, when he works
8 Without a conscience or an aim.

9 What then were God to such as I?

10 ’Twere hardly worth my while to choose
11 Of things all mortal, or to use
12 A little patience ere I die;

13 ’Twere best at once to sink to peace,

14 Like birds the charming serpent draws,
15 To drop head-foremost in the jaws
16 Of vacant darkness and to cease.

8 ‘As if afraid to disturb the Pierian days and music-haunted slumbers of tranquil Vopiscus’ (Statius,
Silvae I, iii, 22–3).

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XXXV. Considers the permanence of the

1 Yet if some voice that man could trust mourner’s love in the face of mortality
and temporal change.
2 Should murmur from the narrow house, See: ‘Profit and Loss’.
3 ‘The cheeks drop in; the body bows;
4 Man dies: nor is there hope in dust:’

5 Might I not say? ‘Yet even here,

6 But for one hour, O Love, I strive
7 To keep so sweet a thing alive:’
8 But I should turn mine ears and hear

9 The moanings of the homeless sea,

10 The sound of streams that swift or slow
11 Draw down Æonian hills, and sow
12 The dust of continents to be;

13 And Love would answer with a sigh,

14 ‘The sound of that forgetful shore*
15 Will change my sweetness more and more,
16 Half-dead to know that I shall die.’

17 O me, what profits it to put

18 An idle case? If Death were seen
19 At first as Death, Love had not been,
20 Or been in narrowest working shut,

21 Mere fellowship of sluggish moods,

22 Or in his coarsest Satyr-shape
23 Had bruised the herb and crushed the grape,
24 And basked and battened in the woods.

XXXVI. Describes the transmission of divine

1 Though truths in manhood darkly join, truth via the gospel narrative.
See: ‘Losing Touch’.
2 Deep-seated in our mystic frame,
3 We yield all blessing to the name
4 Of Him that made them current coin;

5 For Wisdom dealt with mortal powers,

6 Where truth in closest words shall fail,
7 When truth embodied in a tale
8 Shall enter in at lowly doors.*

14 The land where all things are forgotten.

8 For divine Wisdom had to deal with the limited powers of humanity, to which truth logically argued
out would be ineffectual, whereas truth coming in the story of the gospel can influence the poorest.

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9 And so the Word had breath, and wrought

10 With human hands the creed of creeds
11 In loveliness of perfect deeds,
12 More strong than all poetic thought;

13 Which he may read that binds the sheaf,

14 Or builds the house, or digs the grave,
15 And those wild eyes* that watch the wave
16 In roarings round the coral reef.

XXXVII.
1 Urania speaks with darkened brow:
2 ‘Thou pratest here where thou art least;
3 This faith has many a purer priest,
4 And many an abler voice than thou.

5 ‘Go down beside thy native rill,

6 On thy Parnassus set thy feet,
7 And hear thy laurel whisper sweet
8 About the ledges of the hill.’

9 And my Melpomene replies,

10 A touch of shame upon her cheek:
11 ‘I am not worthy even to speak
12 Of thy prevailing mysteries;

13 ‘For I am but an earthly Muse,

14 And owning but a little art
15 To lull with song an aching heart,
16 And render human love his dues;

17 ‘But brooding on the dear one dead,

18 And all he said of things divine,
19 (And dear to me as sacred wine
20 To dying lips is all he said),

21 ‘I murmured, as I came along,

22 Of comfort clasped in truth revealed;
23 And loitered in the master’s field,*
24 And darkened sanctities with song.’

15 By this is intended the Pacific Islanders, ‘wild’ having a sense of the ‘barbarian’ in it.
23 The province of Christianity.

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XXXVIII.
1 With weary steps I loiter on,
2 Though always under altered skies
3 The purple from the distance dies,
4 My prospect and horizon gone.

5 No joy the blowing season* gives,

6 The herald melodies of spring,
7 But in the songs I love to sing
8 A doubtful gleam of solace lives.

9 If any care for what is here

10 Survive in spirits rendered free,
11 Then are these songs I sing of thee
12 Not all ungrateful to thine ear.

XXXIX.
1 Old warder of these buried bones,
2 And answering now my random stroke
3 With fruitful cloud and living smoke,*
4 Dark yew, that graspest at the stones

5 And dippest toward the dreamless head,

6 To thee too comes the golden hour
7 When flower is feeling after flower;
8 But Sorrow – fixt upon the dead,

9 And darkening the dark graves of men, –

10 What whispered from her lying lips?
11 Thy gloom is kindled at the tips,
12 And passes into gloom again.*

XL. Compares the parting of death with

1 Could we forget the widowed hour the parting of a woman from her
family on her wedding day.
2 And look on Spirits breathed away, See: ‘Lost for Words’.
3 As on a maiden in the day
4 When first she wears her orange-flower!

5 When crowned with blessing she doth rise

6 To take her latest leave of home,

5 The blossoming season.

3 The yew, when flowering, in a wind or if struck sends up its pollen like smoke.
13 In section II, as in the last two lines of this section, Sorrow saw only the winter gloom of the foliage.

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7 And hopes and light regrets that come

8 Make April of her tender eyes;

9 And doubtful joys the father move,

10 And tears are on the mother’s face,
11 As parting with a long embrace
12 She enters other realms of love;

13 Her office there to rear, to teach,

14 Becoming as is meet and fit
15 A link among the days, to knit
16 The generations each with each;

17 And, doubtless, unto thee is given

18 A life that bears immortal fruit
19 In those great offices that suit
20 The full-grown energies of heaven.

21 Ay me, the difference I discern!

22 How often shall her old fireside
23 Be cheered with tidings of the bride,
24 How often she herself return,

25 And tell them all they would have told,

26 And bring her babe, and make her boast,
27 Till even those that missed her most
28 Shall count new things as dear as old:

29 But thou and I have shaken hands,

30 Till growing winters lay me low;
31 My paths are in the fields I know,
32 And thine in undiscovered lands.

XLI.
1 Thy spirit ere our fatal loss
2 Did ever rise from high to higher;
3 As mounts the heavenward altar-fire,
4 As flies the lighter through the gross.

5 But thou art turned to something strange,

6 And I have lost the links that bound
7 Thy changes; here upon the ground,
8 No more partaker of thy change.

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9 Deep folly! yet that this could be –

10 That I could wing my will with might
11 To leap the grades of life and light,
12 And flash at once, my friend, to thee.

13 For though my nature rarely yields

14 To that vague fear implied in death;
15 Nor shudders at the gulfs beneath,
16 The howlings from forgotten fields;

17 Yet oft when sundown skirts the moor

18 An inner trouble I behold,
19 A spectral doubt which makes me cold,
20 That I shall be thy mate no more,

21 Though following with an upward mind

22 The wonders that have come to thee,
23 Through all the secular to-be,
24 But evermore a life behind.

XLII. Considers the distance that separated

1 I vex my heart with fancies dim: the mourner and his friend in life and
continues to separate them in death.
2 He still outstript me in the race; See: ‘Profit and Loss’.
3 It was but unity of place
4 That made me dream I ranked with him.

5 And so may Place retain us still,

6 And he the much-beloved again,
7 A lord of large experience, train
8 To riper growth the mind and will:

9 And what delights can equal those

10 That stir the spirit’s inner deeps,
11 When one that loves but knows not, reaps
12 A truth from one that loves and knows?

XLIII.* The mourner wonders whether the

1 If Sleep and Death be truly one, dead remember their past lives.
See: ‘Losing Touch’ and ‘Cycle and
2 And every spirit’s folded bloom Ritual’.

XLIII If the immediate life after death be only sleep, and the spirit between this life and the next should
be folded like a flower in a night slumber, then the remembrance of the past might remain, as the smell
and colour do in the sleeping flower; and in that case the memory of our love would last as true, and
would live pure and whole within the spirit of my friend until it was unfolded at the breaking of morn,
when the sleep was over.

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3 Through all its intervital gloom*

4 In some long trance should slumber on;

5 Unconscious of the sliding hour,

6 Bare of the body, might it last,
7 And silent traces of the past
8 Be all the colour of the flower:

9 So then were nothing lost to man;

10 So that still garden of the souls
11 In many a figured leaf enrolls
12 The total world since life began;

13 And love will last as pure and whole

14 As when he loved me here in Time,
15 And at the spiritual prime*
16 Rewaken with the dawning soul.

XLIV.
1 How fares it with the happy dead?
2 For here the man is more and more;
3 But he forgets the days before
4 God shut the doorways of his head.*

5 The days have vanished, tone and tint,

6 And yet perhaps the hoarding sense
7 Gives out at times (he knows not whence)
8 A little flash, a mystic hint;

9 And in the long harmonious years

10 (If Death so taste Lethean springs),
11 May some dim touch of earthly things
12 Surprise thee ranging with thy peers.

13 If such a dreamy touch should fall,

14 O turn thee round, resolve the doubt;
15 My guardian angel will speak out
16 In that high place, and tell thee all.

3 In the passage between this life and the next.

15 Dawn of the spiritual life hereafter.
4 Closing of the skull after babyhood.

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XLV. Describes the development of

1 The baby new to earth and sky, individual consciousness.
See: ‘Losing Touch’ and ‘Cycle and
2 What time his tender palm is prest Ritual’.
3 Against the circle of the breast,
4 Has never thought that ‘this is I:’

5 But as he grows he gathers much,

6 And learns the use of ‘I’, and ‘me,’
7 And finds ‘I am not what I see,
8 And other than the things I touch.’

9 So rounds he to a separate mind

10 From whence clear memory may begin,
11 As through the frame that binds him in
12 His isolation grows defined.

13 This use may lie in blood and breath,

14 Which else were fruitless of their due,
15 Had man to learn himself anew
16 Beyond the second birth of Death.

XLVI. Describes life as a landscape, surveyed

1 We ranging down this lower track, retrospectively, from a distance.
See: ‘Profit and Loss’.
2 The path we came by, thorn and flower,
3 Is shadowed by the growing hour,
4 Lest life should fail in looking back.

5 So be it: there no shade can last

6 In that deep dawn behind the tomb,
7 But clear from marge to marge shall bloom
8 The eternal landscape of the past;

9 A lifelong tract of time revealed;

10 The fruitful hours of still increase;
11 Days ordered in a wealthy peace,
12 And those five years its richest field.

13 O Love, thy province were not large,

14 A bounded field, nor stretching far;
15 Look also, Love, a brooding star,
16 A rosy warmth from marge to marge.

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XLVII.* Considers death as the surrender of

1 That each, who seems a separate whole, individual identity.
See: ‘Cycle and Ritual’.
2 Should move his rounds, and fusing all
3 The skirts of self again, should fall
4 Remerging in the general Soul,

5 Is faith as vague as all unsweet:

6 Eternal form shall still divide
7 The eternal soul from all beside;
8 And I shall know him when we meet:

9 And we shall sit at endless feast,

10 Enjoying each the other’s good:
11 What vaster dream can hit the mood
12 Of Love on earth? He seeks at least

13 Upon the last and sharpest height,

14 Before the spirits fade away,
15 Some landing-place, to clasp and say,
16 ‘Farewell! We lose ourselves in light.’

XLVIII.
1 If these brief lays, of Sorrow born,
2 Were taken to be such as closed
3 Grave doubts and answers here proposed,
4 Then these were such as men might scorn:

5 Her care is not to part and prove;

6 She takes, when harsher moods remit,
7 What slender shade of doubt may flit,
8 And makes it vassal unto love:

9 And hence, indeed, she sports with words,

10 But better serves a wholesome law,
11 And holds it sin and shame to draw
12 The deepest measure from the chords:

13 Nor dare she trust a larger lay,

14 But rather loosens from the lip
15 Short swallow-flights of song, that dip
16 Their wings in tears, and skim away.

XLVII The individuality lasts after death and we are not utterly absorbed into the Godhead. If we are
to be finally merged in the Universal Soul, Love asks to have at least one more parting before we lose
ourselves.

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XLIX.
1 From art, from nature, from the schools,
2 Let random influences glance,
3 Like light in many a shivered lance
4 That breaks about the dappled pools:

5 The lightest wave of thought shall lisp,

6 The fancy’s tenderest eddy wreathe,
7 The slightest air of song shall breathe
8 To make the sullen surface crisp.

9 And look thy look, and go thy way,

10 But blame not thou the winds that make
11 The seeming-wanton ripple break,
12 The tender-pencilled shadow play.

13 Beneath all fancied hopes and fears

14 Ay me, the sorrow deepens down,
15 Whose muffled motions blindly drown
16 The bases of my life in tears.

L.
1 Be near me when my light is low,
2 When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
3 And tingle; and the heart is sick,
4 And all the wheels of Being slow.

5 Be near me when the sensuous frame

6 Is racked with pangs that conquer trust;
7 And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
8 And Life, a Fury slinging flame.

9 Be near me when my faith is dry,

10 And men the flies of latter spring,
11 That lay their eggs, and sting and sing
12 And weave their petty cells and die.

13 Be near me when I fade away,

14 To point the term of human strife,
15 And on the low dark verge of life
16 The twilight of eternal day.

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LI. Considers the implications of the

1 Do we indeed desire the dead presence of the dead among the living.
See: ‘Cycle and Ritual’.
2 Should still be near us at our side?
3 Is there no baseness we would hide?
4 No inner vileness that we dread?

5 Shall he for whose applause I strove,

6 I had such reverence for his blame,
7 See with clear eye some hidden shame
8 And I be lessened in his love?

9 I wrong the grave with fears untrue:

10 Shall love be blamed for want of faith?
11 There must be wisdom with great Death:
12 The dead shall look me through and through.

13 Be near us when we climb or fall:

14 Ye watch, like God, the rolling hours
15 With larger other eyes than ours,
16 To make allowance for us all.

LII. The ‘Spirit of true love’ responds to the

1 I cannot love thee as I ought, mourner’s frustration concerning the
limitations of his poetry.
2 For love reflects the thing beloved; See: ‘Lost for Words’ and ‘Profit and
3 My words are only words, and moved Loss’.
4 Upon the topmost froth of thought.

5 ‘Yet blame not thou thy plaintive song,’

6 The Spirit of true love replied;
7 ‘Thou canst not move me from thy side,
8 Nor human frailty do me wrong.

9 ‘What keeps a spirit wholly true

10 To that ideal which he bears?
11 What record? not the sinless years
12 That breathed beneath the Syrian blue:

13 ‘So fret not, like an idle girl,

14 That life is dashed with flecks of sin.
15 Abide:* thy wealth is gathered in,
16 When Time hath sundered shell from pearl.’

15 Wait without wearying.

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LIII.*
1 How many a father have I seen,
2 A sober man, among his boys,
3 Whose youth was full of foolish noise,
4 Who wears his manhood hale and green:

5 And dare we to this fancy give,

6 That had the wild oat not been sown,
7 The soil, left barren, scarce had grown
8 The grain by which a man may live?

9 Or, if we held the doctrine sound

10 For life outliving heats of youth,
11 Yet who would preach it as a truth
12 To those that eddy round and round?

13 Hold thou the good: define it well:

14 For fear divine Philosophy
15 Should push beyond her mark, and be
16 Procuress to the Lords of Hell.

LIV. The mourner describes his faith in a

1 Oh yet we trust that somehow good divine plan for creation, but then
dismisses that faith as ‘a dream’.
2 Will be the final goal of ill, See: ‘Lost for Words’ and ‘Profit and
3 To pangs of nature, sins of will, Loss’.
4 Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

5 That nothing walks with aimless feet;

6 That not one life shall be destroyed,
7 Or cast as rubbish to the void,
8 When God hath made the pile complete;

9 That not a worm is cloven in vain;

10 That not a moth with vain desire
11 Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire,
12 Or but subserves another’s gain.

13 Behold, we know not anything;

14 I can but trust that good shall fall
15 At last – far off – at last, to all,
16 And every winter change to spring.

LIII There is a passionate heat of nature in a rake sometimes. The nature that yields emotionally may
turn out straighter than a prig’s. Yet we must not be making excuses, but we must set before ourselves a
rule of good for young and old.

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17 So runs my dream: but what am I?

18 An infant crying in the night:
19 An infant crying for the light:
20 And with no language but a cry.

LV. Encounters a crisis of faith, faced with

1 The wish, that of the living whole evidence of the vulnerability of
individual life.
2 No life may fail beyond the grave, See: ‘Profit and Loss’.
3 Derives it not from what we have
4 The likest God within the soul?*

5 Are God and Nature then at strife,

6 That Nature lends such evil dreams?
7 So careful of the type she seems,
8 So careless of the single life;

9 That I, considering everywhere

10 Her secret meaning in her deeds,
11 And finding that of fifty seeds
12 She often brings but one to bear,

13 I falter where I firmly trod,

14 And falling with my weight of cares
15 Upon the great world’s altar-stairs
16 That slope through darkness up to God,

17 I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,

18 And gather dust and chaff, and call
19 To what I feel is Lord of all,
20 And faintly trust the larger hope.

LVI. The crisis deepens as the mourner

1 ‘So careful of the type?’ but no. considers the evidence of evolution.
See: ‘Profit and Loss’.
2 From scarpèd cliff and quarried stone
3 She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone:
4 I care for nothing, all shall go.

5 ‘Thou makest thine appeal to me:

6 I bring to life, I bring to death:
7 The spirit does but mean the breath:
8 I know no more.’ And he, shall he,

4 The inner consciousness – the divine in man.

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9 Man, her last work, who seemed so fair,

10 Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
11 Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies,
12 Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

13 Who trusted God was love indeed

14 And love Creation’s final law –
15 Though Nature, red in tooth and claw
16 With ravine, shrieked against his creed –

17 Who loved, who suffered countless ills,

18 Who battled for the True, the Just,
19 Be blown about the desert dust,
20 Or sealed within the iron hills?

21 No more? A monster then, a dream,

22 A discord. Dragons of the prime,*
23 That tare each other in their slime,
24 Were mellow music matched with him.

25 O life as futile, then, as frail!

26 O for thy voice to soothe and bless!
27 What hope of answer, or redress?
28 Behind the veil, behind the veil.

LVII.
1 Peace; come away: the song of woe
2 Is after all an earthly song:
3 Peace; come away: we do him wrong
4 To sing so wildly: let us go.

5 Come; let us go: your cheeks are pale;

6 But half my life I leave behind:
7 Methinks my friend is richly shrined;
8 But I shall pass; my work will fail.*

9 Yet in these ears, till hearing dies,

10 One set slow bell will seem to toll
11 The passing of the sweetest soul
12 That ever looked with human eyes.

22 The geological monsters of the early ages.

8 The poet speaks of these poems. Methinks I have built a rich shrine to my friend, but it will not last.

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13 I hear it now, and o’er and o’er

14 Eternal greetings to the dead;
15 And ‘Ave, Ave, Ave,’ said,
16 ‘Adieu, adieu’ for evermore.

LVIII.* The mourner is advised to endure his

1 In those sad words I took farewell: life with patience.
See: ‘Profit and Loss’.
2 Like echoes in sepulchral halls,
3 As drop by drop the water falls
4 In vaults and catacombs, they fell;

5 And, falling, idly broke the peace

6 Of hearts that beat from day to day,
7 Half-conscious of their dying clay,
8 And those cold crypts where they shall cease.

9 The high Muse answered: ‘Wherefore grieve

10 Thy brethren with a fruitless tear?
11 Abide a little longer here,
12 And thou shalt take a nobler leave.’

LIX.
1 O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me
2 No casual mistress, but a wife,
3 My bosom-friend and half of life;
4 As I confess it needs must be;

5 O Sorrow, wilt thou rule my blood,

6 Be sometimes lovely like a bride,
7 And put thy harsher moods aside,
8 If thou wilt have me wise and good.

9 My centred passion cannot move,

10 Nor will it lessen from to-day;
11 But I’ll have leave at times to play
12 As with the creature of my love;

13 And set thee forth, for thou art mine,

14 With so much hope for years to come,
15 That, howsoe’er I know thee, some
16 Could hardly tell what name were thine.

LVIII ‘Ulysses’ was written soon after Hallam’s death, and gave my feelings about the need of going
forward and braving the struggle of life perhaps more simply than anything in In Memoriam.

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LX. The mourner compares his love for his

1 He past; a soul of nobler tone: friend and the distance that separates
them with the love of a woman for a
2 My spirit loved and loves him yet, man from a higher social class.
3 Like some poor girl whose heart is set See: ‘Lost for Words’.
4 On one whose rank exceeds her own.

5 He mixing with his proper sphere,

6 She finds the baseness of her lot,
7 Half jealous of she knows not what,
8 And envying all that meet him there.

9 The little village looks forlorn;

10 She sighs amid her narrow days,
11 Moving about the household ways,
12 In that dark house where she was born.

13 The foolish neighbours come and go,

14 And tease her till the day draws by:
15 At night she weeps, ‘How vain am I!
16 How should he love a thing so low?’

LXI. The mourner imagines how he must

1 If , in thy second state sublime, appear to his friend, who looks back at
him from beyond the grave.
2 Thy ransomed reason change replies See: ‘Profit and Loss’ and Cycle and
3 With all the circle of the wise, Ritual’.
4 The perfect flower of human time;

5 And if thou cast thine eyes below,

6 How dimly charactered and slight,
7 How dwarfed a growth of cold and night,
8 How blanched with darkness must I grow!

9 Yet turn thee to the doubtful shore,

10 Where thy first form was made a man;
11 I loved thee, Spirit, and love, nor can
12 The soul of Shakespeare love thee more.

LXII. The mourner requests that his friend

1 Though if an eye that’s downward cast not trouble himself with memories of
the past.
2 Could make thee somewhat blench or fail, See: ‘Profit and Loss’.
3 Then be my love an idle tale,
4 And fading legend of the past;

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5 And thou, as one that once declined,

6 When he was little more than boy,
7 On some unworthy heart with joy,
8 But lives to wed an equal mind;

9 And breathes a novel world, the while

10 His other passion wholly dies,
11 Or in the light of deeper eyes
12 Is matter for a flying smile.

LXIII.
1 Yet pity for a horse o’er-driven,
2 And love in which my hound has part,
3 Can hang no weight upon my heart
4 In its assumptions up to heaven;

5 And I am so much more than these,

6 As thou, perchance, art more than I,
7 And yet I spare them sympathy,
8 And I would set their pains at ease.

9 So mayst thou watch me where I weep,

10 As, unto vaster motions bound,
11 The circuits of thine orbit round
12 A higher height, a deeper deep.

LXIV. The mourner speculates that his friend

1 Dost thou look back on what hath been, remembers his past life in the same
way that a successful man remembers
2 As some divinely gifted man, his humble origins.
3 Whose life in low estate began See: ‘Losing Touch’.
4 And on a simple village green;

5 Who breaks his birth’s invidious bar,

6 And grasps the skirts of happy chance,
7 And breasts the blows of circumstance,
8 And grapples with his evil star;

9 Who makes by force his merit known

10 And lives to clutch the golden keys,
11 To mould a mighty state’s decrees,
12 And shape the whisper of the throne;

13 And moving up from high to higher,

14 Becomes on Fortune’s crowning slope

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15 The pillar of a people’s hope,

16 The centre of a world’s desire;

17 Yet feels, as in a pensive dream,

18 When all his active powers are still,
19 A distant dearness in the hill,
20 A secret sweetness in the stream,

21 The limit of his narrower fate,

22 While yet beside its vocal springs
23 He played at counsellors and kings.
24 With one that was his earliest mate;

25 Who ploughs with pain his native lea

26 And reaps the labour of his hands,
27 Or in the furrow musing stands;
28 ‘Does my old friend remember me?’

LXV.
1 Sweet soul, do with me as thou wilt;
2 I lull a fancy trouble-tost
3 With ‘Love’s too precious to be lost,
4 A little grain shall not be spilt.’

5 And in that solace can I sing,

6 Till out of painful phases wrought
7 There flutters up a happy thought,
8 Self-balanced on a lightsome wing:

9 Since we deserved the name of friends,

10 And thine effect so lives in me,
11 A part of mine may live in thee
12 And move thee on to noble ends.

LXVI.
1 You thought my heart too far diseased;
2 You wonder when my fancies play
3 To find me gay among the gay,
4 Like one with any trifle pleased.

5 The shade by which my life was crost,

6 Which makes a desert in the mind,
7 Has made me kindly with my kind,
8 And like to him whose sight is lost;

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9 Whose feet are guided through the land,

10 Whose jest among his friends is free,
11 Who takes the children on his knee,
12 And winds their curls about his hand:

13 He plays with threads, he beats his chair

14 For pastime, dreaming of the sky;
15 His inner day can never die,
16 His night of loss is always there.

LXVII.
1 When on my bed the moonlight falls,
2 I know that in thy place of rest
3 By that broad water of the west,*
4 There comes a glory on the walls;

5 Thy marble bright in dark appears,

6 As slowly steals a silver flame
7 Along the letters of thy name,
8 And o’er the number of thy years.

9 The mystic glory swims away;

10 From off my bed the moonlight dies;
11 And closing eaves of wearied eyes
12 I sleep till dusk is dipt in gray:

13 And then I know the mist is drawn

14 A lucid veil from coast to coast,
15 And in the dark church like a ghost
16 Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn.*

LXVIII.
1 When in the down I sink my head,
2 Sleep, Death’s twin-brother, times my breath;
3 Sleep, Death’s twin-brother, knows not Death,
4 Nor can I dream of thee as dead:

5 I walk as ere I walked forlorn,

6 When all our path was fresh with dew,

3 The Severn.
16 I myself did not see Clevedon till years after the burial of A. H. H. (Jan 3, 1834), and then in later
editions of In Memoriam I altered the word ‘chancel’ (which was the word used by Mr Hallam in his
Memoir) to ‘dark church’.

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7 And all the bugle breezes blew

8 Reveillée to the breaking morn.

9 But what is this? I turn about,

10 I find a trouble in thine eye,
11 Which makes me sad I know not why,
12 Nor can my dream resolve the doubt:

13 But ere the lark hath left the lea

14 I wake, and I discern the truth;
15 It is the trouble of my youth
16 That foolish sleep transfers to thee.

LXIX.* Describes a dream in which the

1 I dreamed there would be Spring no more, mourner imagines that he is cast out
from society.
2 That Nature’s ancient power was lost: See: ‘Losing Touch’.
3 The streets were black with smoke and frost,
4 They chattered trifles at the door:

5 I wandered from the noisy town,

6 I found a wood with thorny boughs:
7 I took the thorns to bind my brows,
8 I wore them like a civic crown:

9 I met with scoffs, I met with scorns

10 From youth and babe and hoary hairs:
11 They called me in the public squares
12 The fool that wears a crown of thorns:

13 They called me fool, they called me child:

14 I found an angel of the night;*
15 The voice was low, the look was bright;
16 He looked upon my crown and smiled:

17 He reached the glory of a hand,

18 That seemed to touch it into leaf:
19 The voice was not the voice of grief,
20 The words were hard to understand.

LXIX To write poems about death and grief is ‘to wear a crown of thorns’, which the people say ought
to be laid aside.
14 But the Divine Thing in the gloom brought comfort.

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LXX.
1 I cannot see the features right,
2 When on the gloom I strive to paint
3 The face I know; the hues are faint
4 And mix with hollow masks of night;

5 Cloud-towers by ghostly masons wrought,

6 A gulf that ever shuts and gapes,
7 A hand that points, and pallèd shapes
8 In shadowy thoroughfares of thought;

9 And crowds that stream from yawning doors,

10 And shoals of puckered faces drive;
11 Dark bulks that tumble half alive,
12 And lazy lengths on boundless shores;

13 Till all at once beyond the will

14 I hear a wizard music roll,
15 And through a lattice on the soul
16 Looks thy fair face and makes it still.

LXXI.
1 Sleep , kinsman thou to death and trance
2 And madness, thou hast forged at last
3 A night-long Present of the Past
4 In which we went through summer France.

5 Hadst thou such credit with the soul?

6 Then bring an opiate trebly strong,
7 Drug down the blindfold sense of wrong
8 That so my pleasure may be whole;

9 While now we talk as once we talked

10 Of men and minds, the dust of change,
11 The days that grow to something strange,
12 In walking as of old we walked

13 Beside the river’s wooded reach,

14 The fortress, and the mountain ridge,
15 The cataract flashing from the bridge,
16 The breaker breaking on the beach.

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LXXII.
1 Risest thou thus, dim dawn, again,
2 And howlest, issuing out of night,
3 With blasts that blow the poplar white,
4 And lash with storm the streaming pane?

5 Day, when my crowned estate begun

6 To pine in that reverse of doom,
7 Which sickened every living bloom,
8 And blurred the splendour of the sun;

9 Who usherest in the dolorous hour

10 With thy quick tears that make the rose
11 Pull sideways, and the daisy close
12 Her crimson fringes to the shower;

13 Who might’st have heaved a windless flame

14 Up the deep East, or, whispering, played
15 A chequer-work of beam and shade
16 Along the hills, yet looked the same,

17 As wan, as chill, as wild as now;

18 Day, marked as with some hideous crime,
19 When the dark hand struck down through time,
20 And cancelled nature’s best: but thou,

21 Lift as thou mayst thy burthened brows

22 Through clouds that drench the morning star,
23 And whirl the ungarnered sheaf afar,
24 And sow the sky with flying boughs,

25 And up thy vault with roaring sound

26 Climb thy thick noon, disastrous day;
27 Touch thy dull goal of joyless gray,
28 And hide thy shame beneath the ground.

LXXIII.
1 So many worlds, so much to do,
2 So little done, such things to be,
3 How know I what had need of thee,
4 For thou wert strong as thou wert true?

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5 The fame is quenched that I foresaw,

6 The head hath missed an earthly wreath:
7 I curse not nature, no, nor death;
8 For nothing is that errs from law.*

9 We pass; the path that each man trod

10 Is dim, or will be dim, with weeds:
11 What fame is left for human deeds
12 In endless age? It rests with God.

13 O hollow wraith of dying fame,

14 Fade wholly, while the soul exults,
15 And self-infolds the large results
16 Of force that would have forged a name.

LXXIV.
1 As sometimes in a dead man’s face,
2 To those that watch it more and more,
3 A likeness, hardly seen before,
4 Comes out – to some one of his race:

5 So, dearest, now thy brows are cold,

6 I see thee what thou art, and know
7 Thy likeness to the wise below,
8 Thy kindred with the great of old.

9 But there is more than I can see,

10 And what I see I leave unsaid,
11 Nor speak it, knowing Death has made
12 His darkness beautiful with thee.

LXXV.
1 I leave thy praises unexpressed
2 In verse that brings myself relief,
3 And by the measure of my grief
4 I leave thy greatness to be guessed;

5 What practice howsoe’er expert

6 In fitting aptest words to things,
7 Or voice the richest-toned that sings,
8 Hath power to give thee as thou wert?

8 Cf. Zoroaster’s saying, ‘Nought errs from law.’

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9 I care not in these fading days

10 To raise a cry that lasts not long,
11 And round thee with the breeze of song
12 To stir a little dust of praise.

13 Thy leaf has perished in the green*

14 And, while we breathe beneath the sun,
15 The world which credits what is done
16 Is cold to all that might have been.

17 So here shall silence guard thy fame;

18 But somewhere, out of human view,
19 Whate’er thy hands are set to do
20 Is wrought with tumult of acclaim.

LXXVI.
1 Take wings of fancy, and ascend,
2 And in a moment set thy face
3 Where all the starry heavens of space
4 Are sharpened to a needle’s end;*

5 Take wings of foresight; lighten through

6 The secular abyss* to come,
7 And lo, thy deepest lays are dumb
8 Before the mouldering of a yew;

9 And if the matin songs,* that woke

10 The darkness of our planet, last,
11 Thine own shall wither in the vast,
12 Ere half the lifetime of an oak.

13 Ere these have clothed their branchy bowers

14 With fifty Mays, thy songs are vain;
15 And what are they when these remain
16 The ruined shells of hollow towers?

LXXVII.
1 What hope is here for modern rhyme
2 To him, who turns a musing eye
3 On songs, and deeds, and lives, that lie

13 At twenty-three.
4 So distant in void space that all our firmament would appear to be a needlepoint thence.
6 The ages upon ages to be.
9 The great early poets.

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4 Foreshortened in the tract of time?

5 These mortal lullabies of pain

6 May bind a book, may line a box,
7 May serve to curl a maiden’s locks;
8 Or when a thousand moons shall wane

9 A man upon a stall may find,

10 And, passing, turn the page that tells
11 A grief, then changed to something else.
12 Sung by a long-forgotten mind.

13 But what of that? My darkened ways

14 Shall ring with music all the same;
15 To breathe my loss is more than fame,
16 To utter love more sweet than praise.

LXXVIII. The second Christmas.

1 Again at Christmas did we weave See: ‘Cycle and Ritual’.
2 The holly round the Christmas hearth;
3 The silent snow possessed the earth,
4 And calmly fell our Christmas-eve:

5 The yule-clog sparkled keen with frost,

6 No wing of wind the region swept,
7 But over all things brooding slept
8 The quiet sense of something lost.

9 As in the winters left behind,

10 Again our ancient games had place,
11 The mimic picture’s breathing grace,*
12 And dance and song and hoodman-blind.

13 Who showed a token of distress?

14 No single tear, no mark of pain:
15 O sorrow, then can sorrow wane?
16 O grief, can grief be changed to less?

17 O last regret, regret can die!

18 No – mixt with all this mystic frame.
19 Her deep relations are the same,
20 But with long use her tears are dry.

11 Tableaux vivants.

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LXXIX*
1 ‘ More than my brothers are to me,’ –
2 Let this not vex thee, noble heart!
3 I know thee of what force thou art
4 To hold the costliest love in fee.

5 But thou and I are one in kind,

6 As moulded like in Nature’s mint;
7 And hill and wood and field did print
8 The same sweet forms in either mind.

9 For us the same cold streamlet curled

10 Through all his eddying coves; the same
11 All winds that roam the twilight came
12 In whispers of the beauteous world.

13 At one dear knee we proffered vows,

14 One lesson from one book we learned,
15 Ere childhood’s flaxen ringlet turned
16 To black and brown on kindred brows.

17 And so my wealth resembles thine,

18 But he was rich where I was poor,
19 And he supplied my want the more
20 As his unlikeness fitted mine.

LXXX. Imagines the situation reversed, so that

1 If any vague desire should rise, the mourner had died in Arthur’s
place.
2 That holy Death ere Arthur died See: ‘Profit and Loss’.
3 Had moved me kindly from his side,
4 And dropt the dust on tearless eyes;

5 Then fancy shapes, as fancy can,

6 The grief my loss in him had wrought,
7 A grief as deep as life or thought,
8 But stayed in peace with God and man.

9 I make a picture in the brain;

10 I hear the sentence that he speaks;
11 He bears the burthen of the weeks
12 But turns his burthen into gain.

LXXIX This section is addressed to my brother Charles (Tennyson Turner).

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13 His credit thus shall set me free;

14 And, influence-rich to soothe and save,
15 Unused example from the grave
16 Reach out dead hands to comfort me.

LXXXI. Argues that the growth of his love for

1 Could I have said while he was here, his friend was cut short by his untimely
death.
2 ‘My love shall now no further range; See: ‘Profit and Loss’.
3 There cannot come a mellower change,
4 For now is love mature in ear.’

5 Love, then, had hope of richer store:

6 What end is here to my complaint?
7 This haunting whisper makes me faint,
8 ‘More years had made me love thee more.’

9 But Death returns an answer sweet:

10 ‘My sudden frost was sudden gain,
11 And gave all ripeness to the grain,
12 It might have drawn from after-heat.’

LXXXII. Argues that the only thing he cannot

1 I wage not any feud with Death come to terms with is the fact that he
and his friend can no longer hear one
2 For changes wrought on form and face; another.
3 No lower life that earth’s embrace See: ‘Profit and Loss’.
4 May breed with him, can fright my faith.

5 Eternal process moving on,

6 From state to state the spirit walks;
7 And these are but the shattered stalks,
8 Or ruined chrysalis of one.

9 Nor blame I Death, because he bare

10 The use of virtue out of earth:
11 I know transplanted human worth
12 Will bloom to profit, otherwhere.

13 For this alone on Death I wreak

14 The wrath that garners in my heart;
15 He put our lives so far apart
16 We cannot hear each other speak.

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LXXXIII.
1 Dip down upon the northern shore,
2 O sweet new-year delaying long;
3 Thou doest expectant nature wrong;
4 Delaying long, delay no more.

5 What stays thee from the clouded noons,

6 Thy sweetness from its proper place?
7 Can trouble live with April days,
8 Or sadness in the summer moons?

9 Bring orchis, bring the foxglove spire,

10 The little speedwell’s darling blue,
11 Deep tulips dashed with fiery dew,
12 Laburnums, dropping-wells of fire.

13 O thou, new-year, delaying long,

14 Delayest the sorrow in my blood,
15 That longs to burst a frozen bud
16 And flood a fresher throat with song.

LXXXIV. Considers the engagement between

1 When I contemplate all alone Arthur and Tennyson’s sister, Emily.
See: ‘Losing Touch’.
2 The life that had been thine below,
3 And fix my thoughts on all the glow
4 To which thy crescent would have grown;

5 I see thee sitting crowned with good,

6 A central warmth diffusing bliss
7 In glance and smile, and clasp and kiss,
8 On all the branches of thy blood;

9 Thy blood, my friend, and partly mine;

10 For now the day was drawing on,
11 When thou should’st link thy life with one
12 Of mine own house,* and boys of thine

13 Had babbled ‘Uncle’ on my knee;

14 But that remorseless iron hour
15 Made cypress of her orange flower,
16 Despair of Hope, and earth of thee.

12 The projected marriage of A. H. H. with Emily Tennyson.

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17 I seem to meet their least desire,

18 To clap their cheeks, to call them mine.
19 I see their unborn faces shine
20 Beside the never-lighted fire.

21 I see myself an honoured guest,

22 Thy partner in the flowery walk
23 Of letters, genial table-talk,
24 Or deep dispute, and graceful jest;

25 While now thy prosperous labour fills

26 The lips of men with honest praise,
27 And sun by sun the happy days
28 Descend below the golden hills

29 With promise of a morn as fair;

30 And all the train of bounteous hours
31 Conduct by paths of growing powers,
32 To reverence and the silver hair;

33 Till slowly worn her earthly robe,

34 Her lavish mission richly wrought,
35 Leaving great legacies of thought,
36 Thy spirit should fail from off the globe;

37 What time mine own might also flee,

38 As linked with thine in love and fate,
39 And, hovering o’er the dolorous strait
40 To the other shore, involved in thee,

41 Arrive at last the blessèd goal,*

42 And He that died in Holy Land
43 Would reach us out the shining hand,
44 And take us as a single soul.

45 What reed was that on which I leant?

46 Ah, backward fancy, wherefore wake
47 The old bitterness again, and break
48 The low beginnings of content.

41 Cf. Paradise Lost, II: ‘’ere he arrive / The happy isle’.

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LXXXV. A reflective passage that looks back

1 This truth came borne with bier and pall, over the first years of grief.
See: ‘Cycle and Ritual’.
2 I felt it, when I sorrow’d most,
3 ’Tis better to have loved and lost,
4 Than never to have loved at all –

5 O true in word, and tried in deed,

6 Demanding, so to bring relief
7 To this which is our common grief,
8 What kind of life is that I lead;

9 And whether trust in things above

10 Be dimmed of sorrow, or sustained;
11 And whether love for him have drained
12 My capabilities of love;

13 Your words have virtue such as draws

14 A faithful answer from the breast,
15 Through light reproaches, half exprest,
16 And loyal unto kindly laws.

17 My blood an even tenor kept,

18 Till on mine ear this message falls,
19 That in Vienna’s fatal wall
20 God’s finger touched him, and he slept.

21 The great Intelligences fair

22 That range above our mortal state,
23 In circle round the blessèd gate,
24 Received and gave him welcome there;

25 And led him through the blissful climes,

26 And showed him in the fountain fresh
27 All knowledge that the sons of flesh
28 Shall gather in the cycled times.

29 But I remained, whose hopes were dim,

30 Whose life, whose thoughts were little worth,
31 To wander on a darkened earth,
32 Where all things round me breathed of him.

33 O friendship, equal-poised control,

34 O heart, with kindliest motion warm,

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35 O sacred essence, other form,

36 O solemn ghost, O crownèd soul!

37 Yet none could better know than I,

38 How much of act at human hands
39 The sense of human will demands
40 By which we dare to live or die.*

41 Whatever way my days decline,

42 I felt and feel, though left alone,
43 His being working in mine own,
44 The footsteps of his life in mine;

45 A life that all the Muses decked

46 With gifts of grace, that might express
47 All-comprehensive tenderness,
48 All-subtilising intellect:

49 And so my passion hath not swerved

50 To works of weakness, but I find
51 An image comforting the mind,
52 And in my grief a strength reserved.

53 Likewise the imaginative woe,

54 That loved to handle spiritual strife,
55 Diffused the shock through all my life,
56 But in the present broke the blow.

57 My pulses therefore beat again

58 For other friends that once I met;
59 Nor can it suit me to forget
60 The mighty hopes that make us men.

61 I woo your love: I count it crime

62 To mourn for any overmuch;
63 I, the divided half of such
64 A friendship as had mastered Time;

65 Which masters Time indeed, and is

66 Eternal, separate from fears:
67 The all-assuming months and years
68 Can take no part away from this:

40 Yet I know that the knowledge that we have free will demands from us action.

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69 But Summer on the steaming floods,

70 And Spring that swells the narrow brooks,
71 And Autumn, with a noise of rooks,
72 That gather in the waning woods,

73 And every pulse of wind and wave

74 Recalls, in change of light or gloom,
75 My old affection of the tomb,
76 And my prime passion in the grave:

77 My old affection of the tomb,

78 A part of stillness, yearns to speak:
79 ‘Arise, and get thee forth and seek
80 A friendship for the years to come.

81 ‘I watch thee from the quiet shore;

82 Thy spirit up to mine can reach;
83 But in dear words of human speech
84 We two communicate no more.’

85 And I, ‘Can clouds of nature stain

86 The starry clearness of the free?
87 How is it? Canst thou feel for me
88 Some painless sympathy with pain?’

89 And lightly does the whisper fall;

90 ‘’Tis hard for thee to fathom this;
91 I triumph in conclusive bliss,
92 And that serene result of all.’

93 So hold I commerce with the dead;

94 Or so methinks the dead would say;
95 Or so shall grief with symbols play
96 And pining life be fancy-fed.

97 Now looking to some settled end,

98 That these things pass, and I shall prove
99 A meeting somewhere, love with love,
100 I crave your pardon, O my friend;

101 If not so fresh, with love as true,

102 I, clasping brother-hands, aver
103 I could not, if I would, transfer
104 The whole I felt for him to you.

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105 For which be they that hold apart

106 The promise of the golden hours?
107 First love, first friendship, equal powers,
108 That marry with the virgin heart.

109 Still mine, that cannot but deplore,

110 That beats within a lonely place,
111 That yet remembers his embrace,
112 But at his footstep leaps no more,

113 My heart, though widowed, may not rest

114 Quite in the love of what is gone,
115 But seeks to beat in time with one
116 That warms another living breast.

117 Ah, take the imperfect gift I bring,

118 Knowing the primrose yet is dear,
119 The primrose of the later year,
120 As not unlike to that of Spring.

LXXXVI.* The mourner experiences relief in

1 Sweet after showers, ambrosial air,* nature.
See: ‘Cycle and Ritual’.
2 That rollest from the gorgeous gloom
3 Of evening over brake and bloom
4 And meadow, slowly breathing bare

5 The round of space, and rapt below

6 Through all the dewy-tasselled wood,
7 And shadowing down the hornèd flood
8 In ripples, fan my brows and blow

9 The fever from my cheek, and sigh

10 The full new life that feeds thy breath
11 Throughout my frame, till Doubt and Death,
12 Ill brethren, let the fancy fly

13 From belt to belt of crimson seas

14 On leagues of odour streaming far,
15 To where in yonder orient star*
16 A hundred spirits whisper ‘Peace.’

LXXXVI Written at Barmouth.

1 It was a west wind.
15 Any rising star is here intended.

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LXXXVII.*
1 I past beside the reverend walls
2 In which of old I wore the gown;
3 I roved at random through the town,
4 And saw the tumult of the halls;

5 And heard once more in college fanes

6 The storm their high-built organs make,
7 And thunder-music, rolling, shake
8 The prophet blazoned on the panes;

9 And caught once more the distant shout,

10 The measured pulse of racing oars
11 Among the willows; paced the shores
12 And many a bridge, and all about

13 The same gray flats again, and felt

14 The same, but not the same; and last
15 Up that long walk of limes I past
16 To see the rooms in which he dwelt.

17 Another name was on the door;

18 I lingered; all within was noise
19 Of songs, and clapping hands, and boys
20 That crashed the glass and beat the floor;

21 Where once we held debate, a band

22 Of youthful friends, on mind and art,
23 And labour, and the changing mart,
24 And all the framework of the land;

25 When one would aim an arrow fair,

26 But send it slackly from the string;
27 And one would pierce an outer ring,
28 And one an inner, here and there;

29 And last the master-bowman, he,

30 Would cleave the mark. A willing ear
31 We lent him. Who, but hung to hear
32 The rapt oration flowing free

LXXXVII Trinity College, Cambridge.

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33 From point to point, with power and grace

34 And music in the bounds of law,
35 To those conclusions when we saw
36 The God within him light his face,

37 And seem to lift the form, and glow

38 In azure orbits heavenly-wise;
39 And over those ethereal eyes
40 The bar of Michael Angelo.*

LXXXVIII.*
1 Wild bird, whose warble, liquid sweet,
2 Rings Eden through the budded quicks,
3 O tell me where the senses mix,
4 O tell me where the passions meet,

5 Whence radiate: fierce extremes employ

6 Thy spirits in the darkening leaf,
7 And in the midmost heart of grief
8 Thy passion clasps a secret joy:

9 And I – my harp would prelude woe –

10 I cannot all command the strings;
11 The glory of the sum of things
12 Will flash along the chords and go.

LXXXIX. The mourner remembers time spent at

1 Witch-elms that counterchange the floor his family home with his friend.
See: ‘Cycle and Ritual’.
2 Of this flat lawn with dusk and bright;
3 And thou, with all thy breadth and height
4 Of foliage, towering sycamore;

5 How often, hither wandering down,

6 My Arthur found your shadows fair,
7 And shook to all the liberal air
8 The dust and din and steam of town:

9 He brought an eye for all he saw;

10 He mixt in all our simple sports;
11 They pleased him, fresh from brawling courts
12 And dusty purlieus of the law.

40 The broad bar of frontal bone over the eyes of Michael Angelo.
LXXXVIII To the Nightingale.

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13 O joy to him in this retreat,

14 Immantled in ambrosial dark,
15 To drink the cooler air, and mark
16 The landscape winking through the heat:

17 O sound to rout the brood of cares,

18 The sweep of scythe in morning dew,
19 The gust that round the garden flew,
20 And tumbled half the mellowing pears!

21 O bliss, when all in circle drawn

22 About him, heart and ear were fed
23 To hear him, as he lay and read
24 The Tuscan poets on the lawn:

25 Or in the all-golden afternoon

26 A guest, or happy sister, sung,
27 Or here she brought the harp and flung
28 A ballad to the brightening moon:

29 Nor less it pleased in livelier moods,

30 Beyond the bounding hill to stray,
31 And break the livelong summer day
32 With banquet in the distant woods;

33 Whereat we glanced from theme to theme,

34 Discussed the books to love or hate,
35 Or touched the changes of the state,
36 Or threaded some Socratic dream;

37 But if I praised the busy town,

38 He loved to rail against it still,
39 For ‘ground in yonder social mill
40 We rub each other’s angles down,

41 ‘And merge’ he said ‘in form and gloss

42 The picturesque of man and man.’
43 We talked: the stream beneath us ran,
44 The wine-flask lying couched in moss,

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45 Or cooled within the glooming wave;

46 And last, returning from afar,
47 Before the crimson-circled star
48 Had fallen into her father’s grave,*

49 And brushing ankle-deep in flowers,

50 We heard behind the woodbine veil
51 The milk that bubbled in the pail,
52 And buzzings of the honied hours.

XC.
1 He tasted love with half his mind,
2 Nor ever drank the inviolate spring
3 Where nighest heaven, who first could fling
4 This bitter seed among mankind;

5 That could the dead, whose dying eyes

6 Were closed with wail, resume their life,
7 They would but find in child and wife
8 An iron welcome when they rise:

9 ’Twas well, indeed, when warm with wine,

10 To pledge them with a kindly tear,
11 To talk them o’er, to wish them here,
12 To count their memories half divine;

13 But if they came who past away,

14 Behold their brides in other hands;
15 The hard heir strides about their lands,
16 And will not yield them for a day.

17 Yea, though their sons were none of these,

18 Not less the yet-loved sire would make
19 Confusion worse than death, and shake
20 The pillars of domestic peace.

21 Ah dear, but come thou back to me:

22 Whatever change the years have wrought,
23 I find not yet one lonely thought
24 That cries against my wish for thee.

48 Before Venus, the evening star, had dipt into the sunset. The planets, according to Laplace, were
evolved from the sun.

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XCI. The mourner prays to feel his dead

1 When rosy plumelets tuft the larch, friend’s presence.
See: ‘Losing Touch’.
2 And rarely pipes the mounted thrush;
3 Or underneath the barren bush
4 Flits by the sea-blue bird of March;

5 Come, wear the form by which I know

6 Thy spirit in time among thy peers;
7 The hope of unaccomplished years
8 Be large and lucid round thy brow.

9 When summer’s hourly-mellowing change

10 May breathe, with many roses sweet,
11 Upon the thousand waves of wheat,
12 That ripple round the lonely grange;

13 Come: not in watches of the night,

14 But where the sunbeam broodeth warm,
15 Come, beauteous in thine after form,
16 And like a finer light in light.

XCII.
1 If any vision should reveal
2 Thy likeness, I might count it vain
3 As but the canker of the brain;
4 Yea, though it spake and made appeal

5 To chances where our lots were cast

6 Together in the days behind,
7 I might but say, I hear a wind
8 Of memory murmuring the past.

9 Yea, though it spake and bared to view

10 A fact within the coming year;
11 And though the months, revolving near,
12 Should prove the phantom-warning true,

13 They might not seem thy prophecies,

14 But spiritual presentiments,
15 And such refraction of events
16 As often rises ere they rise.

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XCIII.
1 I shall not see thee. Dare I say
2 No spirit ever brake the band
3 That stays him from the native land
4 Where first he walked when claspt in clay?

5 No visual shade of some one lost,

6 But he, the Spirit himself, may come
7 Where all the nerve of sense is numb;
8 Spirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost.

9 O, therefore from thy sightless range

10 With gods in unconjectured bliss,
11 O, from the distance of the abyss
12 Of tenfold-complicated change,

13 Descend, and touch, and enter; hear

14 The wish too strong for words to name;
15 That in this blindness of the frame
16 My Ghost may feel that thine is near.

XCIV.
1 How pure at heart and sound in head,
2 With what divine affections bold
3 Should be the man whose thought would hold
4 An hour’s communion with the dead.

5 In vain shalt thou, or any, call

6 The spirits from their golden day,
7 Except, like them, thou too canst say,
8 My spirit is at peace with all.

9 They haunt the silence of the breast,*

10 Imaginations calm and fair,
11 The memory like a cloudless air,
12 The conscience as a sea at rest:

13 But when the heart is full of din,

14 And doubt beside the portal waits,
15 They can but listen at the gates,
16 And hear the household jar within.

9 This was what I felt.

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XCV. The mourner reads letters, written by

1 By night we lingered on the lawn, his dead friend.
See: ‘Lost for Words’ and ‘Losing
2 For underfoot the herb was dry; Touch’.
3 And genial warmth; and o’er the sky
4 The silvery haze of summer drawn;

5 And calm that let the tapers burn

6 Unwavering: not a cricket chirred:
7 The brook alone far-off was heard,*
8 And on the board the fluttering urn:

9 And bats went round in fragrant skies,

10 And wheeled or lit the filmy shapes
11 That haunt the dusk, with ermine capes
12 And woolly breasts and beaded eyes*

13 While now we sang old songs that pealed

14 From knoll to knoll, where, couched at ease,
15 The white kine glimmered, and the trees
16 Laid their dark arms about the field.

17 But when those others, one by one,

18 Withdrew themselves from me and night,
19 And in the house light after light
20 Went out, and I was all alone,

21 A hunger seized my heart; I read

22 Of that glad year which once had been,
23 In those fallen leaves which kept their green,
24 The noble letters of the dead:

25 And strangely on the silence broke

26 The silent-speaking words, and strange
27 Was love’s dumb cry defying change
28 To test his worth; and strangely spoke

29 The faith, the vigour, bold to dwell

30 On doubts that drive the coward back,
31 And keen through wordy snares to track
32 Suggestion to her inmost cell.

7 It was a marvellously still night and I asked my brother Charles to listen to the brook, which we had
never heard so far off before.
12 The ermine or perhaps the puss-moth.

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33 So word by word, and line by line,

34 The dead man touched me from the past,
35 And all at once it seemed at last
36 The living soul was flashed on mine,

37 And mine in this was wound, and whirled

38 About empyreal heights of thought,
39 And came on that which is, and caught
40 The deep pulsations of the world,

41 Æonian music measuring out

42 The steps of Time – the shocks of Chance –
43 The blows of Death. At length my trance*
44 Was cancelled, stricken through with doubt.

45 Vague words! but ah, how hard to frame

46 In matter-moulded forms of speech,
47 Or even for intellect to reach
48 Through memory that which I became:

49 Till now the doubtful dusk revealed

50 The knolls once more where, couched at ease,
51 The white kine glimmered, and the trees
52 Laid their dark arms about the field:

53 And sucked from out the distant gloom

54 A breeze began to tremble o’er
55 The large leaves of the sycamore,
56 And fluctuate all the still perfume,

57 And gathering freshlier overhead,

58 Rocked the full-foliaged elms, and swung
59 The heavy-folded rose, and flung
60 The lilies to and fro, and said

61 ‘The dawn, the dawn,’ and died away;

62 And East and West, without a breath,
63 Mixt their dim lights, like life and death,
64 To broaden into boundless day.

43 The trance came to an end in a moment of critical doubt, but the doubt was dispelled by the glory
of the ‘boundless day’.

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XCVI.
1 You say, but with no touch of scorn,
2 Sweet-hearted, you, whose light-blue eyes
3 Are tender over drowning flies,
4 You tell me, doubt is Devil-born.

5 I know not: one indeed I knew

6 In many a subtle question versed,
7 Who touched a jarring lyre at first,
8 But ever strove to make it true:

9 Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,

10 At last he beat his music out.
11 There lives more faith in honest doubt,
12 Believe me, than in half the creeds.

13 He fought his doubts and gathered strength,

14 He would not make his judgment blind,
15 He faced the spectres of the mind
16 And laid them: thus he came at length

17 To find a stronger faith his own;

18 And Power was with him in the night,
19 Which makes the darkness and the light,
20 And dwells not in the light alone,

21 But in the darkness and the cloud,

22 As over Sinaï’s peaks of old,
23 While Israel made their gods of gold,
24 Although the trumpet blew so loud.

XCVII. Considering the gulf that separates him

1 My love has talked with rocks and trees; from his friend, the mourner compares
himself with the wife of a great
2 He finds on misty mountain-ground scientist.
3 His own vast shadow glory-crowned;* See: ‘Lost for Words’.
4 He sees himself in all he sees.

5 Two partners of a married life –

6 I looked on these and thought of thee
7 In vastness and in mystery,
8 And of my spirit as of a wife.

3 Like the spectre of the Brocken.

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9 These two-they dwelt with eye on eye,

10 Their hearts of old have beat in tune,
11 Their meetings made December June
12 Their every parting was to die.

13 Their love has never past away;

14 The days she never can forget
15 Are earnest that he loves her yet,
16 Whate’er the faithless people say.

17 Her life is lone, he sits apart,

18 He loves her yet, she will not weep,
19 Though rapt in matters dark and deep
20 He seems to slight her simple heart.

21 He thrids the labyrinth of the mind,

22 He reads the secret of the star,
23 He seems so near and yet so far,
24 He looks so cold: she thinks him kind.

25 She keeps the gift of years before,

26 A withered violet is her bliss:
27 She knows not what his greatness is,
28 For that, for all, she loves him more.

29 For him she plays, to him she sings

30 Of early faith and plighted vows;
31 She knows but matters of the house,
32 And he, he knows a thousand things.

33 Her faith is fixt and cannot move,

34 She darkly feels him great and wise,
35 She dwells on him with faithful eyes,
36 ‘I cannot understand: I love.’

XCVIII.
1 You leave us:* you will see the Rhine,
2 And those fair hills I sailed below,
3 When I was there with him; and go
4 By summer belts of wheat and vine

1 ‘You’ is imaginary.

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5 To where he breathed his latest breath,

6 That City. All her splendour seems
7 No livelier than the wisp that gleams
8 On Lethe in the eyes of Death.

9 Let her great Danube rolling fair

10 Enwind her isles, unmarked of me:
11 I have not seen, I will not see
12 Vienna; rather dream that there,

13 A treble darkness, Evil haunts

14 The birth, the bridal; friend from friend
15 Is oftener parted, fathers bend
16 Above more graves, a thousand wants

17 Gnarr* at the heels of men, and prey

18 By each cold hearth, and sadness flings
19 Her shadow on the blaze of kings:
20 And yet myself have heard him say,

21 That not in any mother town

22 With statelier progress to and fro
23 The double tides of chariots flow
24 By park and suburb under brown

25 Of lustier leaves; nor more content,

26 He told me, lives in any crowd,
27 When all is gay with lamps, and loud
28 With sport and song, in booth and tent,

29 Imperial halls, or open plain;

30 And wheels the circled dance, and breaks
31 The rocket molten into flakes
32 Of crimson or in emerald rain.

XCIX.
1 Risest thou thus, dim dawn, again,
2 So loud with voices of the birds,
3 So thick with lowings of the herds,
4 Day, when I lost the flower of men;

17 Snarl.

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5 Who tremblest through thy darkling red

6 On yon swollen brook that bubbles fast
7 By meadows breathing of the past,
8 And woodlands holy to the dead;

9 Who murmurest in the foliaged eaves

10 A song that slights the coming care,
11 And Autumn laying here and there
12 A fiery finger on the leaves;

13 Who wakenest with thy balmy breath

14 To myriads on the genial earth,
15 Memories of bridal, or of birth,
16 And unto myriads more, of death.

17 O wheresoever those may be,

18 Betwixt the slumber of the poles,*
19 To-day they count as kindred souls;
20 They know me not, but mourn with me.

C.
1 I climb the hill:* from end to end
2 Of all the landscape underneath,
3 I find no place that does not breathe
4 Some gracious memory of my friend;

5 No gray old grange, or lonely fold,

6 Or low morass and whispering reed,
7 Or simple stile from mead to mead,
8 Or sheepwalk up the windy wold;

9 Nor hoary knoll of ash and haw

10 That hears the latest linnet trill,
11 Nor quarry trenched along the hill
12 And haunted by the wrangling daw;

13 Nor runlet tinkling from the rock;*

14 Nor pastoral rivulet that swerves
15 To left and right through meadowy curves,
16 That feed the mothers of the flock;

18 The ends of the axis of the earth, which move so slowly that they seem not to move, but slumber.
1 Hill above Somersby.
13 The rock is Holywell, which is a wooded ravine, commonly called there ‘the Glen’.

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17 But each has pleased a kindred eye,

18 And each reflects a kindlier day;
19 And, leaving these, to pass away
20 I think once more he seems to die.

CI.
1 Unwatched , the garden bough shall sway,
2 The tender blossom flutter down,
3 Unloved, that beech will gather brown,
4 This maple burn itself away;

5 Unloved, the sun-flower, shining fair,

6 Ray round with flames her disk of seed,
7 And many a rose-carnation feed
8 With summer spice the humming air;

9 Unloved, by many a sandy bar,

10 The brook shall babble down the plain,
11 At noon or when the lesser wain
12 Is twisting round the polar star;

13 Uncared for, gird the windy grove,

14 And flood the haunts of hern and crake;
15 Or into silver arrows break
16 The sailing moon in creek and cove;

17 Till from the garden and the wild

18 A fresh association blow,
19 And year by year the landscape grow
20 Familiar to the stranger’s child;

21 As year by year the labourer tills

22 His wonted glebe, or lops the glades;
23 And year by year our memory fades
24 From all the circle of the hills.

CII.
1 We leave the well-belovèd place
2 Where first we gazed upon the sky;
3 The roofs, that heard our earliest cry,
4 Will shelter one of stranger race.

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5 We go, but ere we go from home,

6 As down the garden-walks I move,
7 Two spirits of a diverse love*
8 Contend for loving masterdom.

9 One whispers, ‘Here thy boyhood sung

10 Long since its matin song, and heard
11 The low love-language of the bird
12 In native hazels tassel-hung.’

13 The other answers, ‘Yea, but here

14 Thy feet have strayed in after hours
15 With thy lost friend among the bowers,
16 And this hath made them trebly dear.’

17 These two have striven half the day,

18 And each prefers his separate claim,
19 Poor rivals in a losing game,
20 That will not yield each other way.

21 I turn to go: my feet are set

22 To leave the pleasant fields and farms;
23 They mix in one another’s arms
24 To one pure image of regret.

CIII.
1 On that last night before we went
2 From out the doors where I was bred,
3 I dreamed a vision of the dead,
4 Which left my after-morn content.

5 Methought I dwelt within a hall,

6 And maidens with me:* distant hills
7 From hidden summits fed with rills
8 A river* sliding by the wall.

9 The hall with harp and carol rang.

10 They sang of what is wise and good
11 And graceful. In the centre stood
12 A statue veiled, to which they sang;

7 First, the love of the native place; second, this enhanced by the memory of A. H. H.
6 They are the muses, poetry, arts – all that made life beautiful here, which we hope will pass with us
beyond the grave.
8 Life.

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13 And which, though veiled, was known to me,

14 The shape of him I loved, and love
15 For ever: then flew in a dove
16 And brought a summons from the sea:*

17 And when they learnt that I must go

18 They wept and wailed, but led the way
19 To where a little shallop lay
20 At anchor in the flood below;

21 And on by many a level mead,

22 And shadowing bluff that made the banks,
23 We glided winding under ranks
24 Of iris, and the golden reed;

25 And still as vaster grew the shore

26 And rolled the floods in grander space,
27 The maidens gathered strength and grace
28 And presence, lordlier than before;

29 And I myself, who sat apart

30 And watched them, waxed in every limb;
31 I felt the thews of Anakim,
32 The pulses of a Titan’s heart;

33 As one would sing the death of war,

34 And one would chant the history
35 Of that great race, which is to be,
36 And one the shaping of a star;

37 Until the forward-creeping tides

38 Began to foam, and we to draw
39 From deep to deep, to where we saw
40 A great ship lift her shining sides.

41 The man we loved was there on deck,

42 But thrice as large as man he bent
43 To greet us. Up the side I went,
44 And fell in silence on his neck:

45 Whereat those maidens with one mind

46 Bewailed their lot; I did them wrong:

16 Eternity.

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47 ‘We served thee here,’ they said, ‘so long,

48 And wilt thou leave us now behind?’

49 So rapt I was, they could not win

50 An answer from my lips, but he
51 Replying, ‘Enter likewise ye
52 And go with us:’ they entered in.

53 And while the wind began to sweep

54 A music out of sheet and shroud,
55 We steered her toward a crimson cloud
56 That landlike slept along the deep.

CIV. The following three sections describe

1 The time draws near the birth of Christ; the third Christmas.
See: ‘Cycle and Ritual’.
2 The moon is hid, the night is still;
3 A single church below the hill*
4 Is pealing, folded in the mist.

5 A single peal of bells below,

6 That wakens at this hour of rest
7 A single murmur in the breast,
8 That these are not the bells I know.

9 Like strangers’ voices here they sound,

10 In lands where not a memory strays,
11 Nor landmark breathes of other days,
12 But all is new unhallowed ground.

CV.
1 To-night ungathered let us leave
2 This laurel, let this holly stand:
3 We live within the stranger’s land,
4 And strangely falls our Christmas-eve.

5 Our father’s dust is left alone

6 And silent under other snows:
7 There in due time the woodbine blows,
8 The violet comes, but we are gone.

9 No more shall wayward grief abuse

10 The genial hour with mask and mime;

3 Waltham Abbey church.

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11 For change of place, like growth of time,

12 Has broke the bond of dying use.

13 Let cares that petty shadows cast,

14 By which our lives are chiefly proved,
15 A little spare the night I loved,
16 And hold it solemn to the past.

17 But let no footstep beat the floor,

18 Nor bowl of wassail mantle warm;
19 For who would keep an ancient form
20 Through which the spirit breathes no more?

21 Be neither song, nor game, nor feast;

22 Nor harp be touched, nor flute be blown;
23 No dance, no motion, save alone
24 What lightens in the lucid east

25 Of rising worlds by yonder wood.*

26 Long sleeps the summer in the seed;
27 Run out your measured arcs, and lead
28 The closing cycle rich in good.

CVI.
1 Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
2 The flying cloud, the frosty light:
3 The year is dying in the night;
4 Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

5 Ring out the old, ring in the new,

6 Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
7 The year is going, let him go;
8 Ring out the false, ring in the true.

9 Ring out the grief that saps the mind,

10 For those that here we see no more;
11 Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
12 Ring in redress to all mankind.

13 Ring out a slowly dying cause,

14 And ancient forms of party strife;

25 The scintillating motion of the stars that rise.

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15 Ring in the nobler modes of life,

16 With sweeter manners, purer laws.

17 Ring out the want, the care, the sin,

18 The faithless coldness of the times;
19 Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
20 But ring the fuller minstrel in.

21 Ring out false pride in place and blood,

22 The civic slander and the spite;
23 Ring in the love of truth and right,
24 Ring in the common love of good.

25 Ring out old shapes of foul disease;

26 Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
27 Ring out the thousand wars of old,
28 Ring in the thousand years of peace.

29 Ring in the valiant man and free,

30 The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
31 Ring out the darkness of the land,
32 Ring in the Christ that is to be.

CVII. Marks Arthur’s birthday.

1 It is the day when he was born,* See: ‘Cycle and Ritual’.
2 A bitter day that early sank
3 Behind a purple-frosty bank
4 Of vapour, leaving night forlorn.

5 The time admits not flowers or leaves

6 To deck the banquet. Fiercely flies
7 The blast of North and East, and ice
8 Makes daggers at the sharpened eaves,

9 And bristles all the brakes and thorns

10 To yon hard crescent, as she hangs
11 Above the wood which grides* and clangs
12 Its leafless ribs and iron horns

13 Together, in the drifts that pass

14 To darken on the rolling brine

1 February 1, 1811, in Bedford Place, London.

11 Grates.

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15 That breaks the coast. But fetch the wine,

16 Arrange the board and brim the glass;

17 Bring in great logs and let them lie,

18 To make a solid core of heat;
19 Be cheerful-minded, talk and treat
20 Of all things even as he were by;

21 We keep the day. With festal cheer,

22 With books and music, surely we
23 Will drink to him, whate’er he be,
24 And sing the songs he loved to hear.

CVIII.
1 I will not shut me from my kind,*
2 And, lest I stiffen into stone,
3 I will not eat my heart alone,
4 Nor feed with sighs a passing wind:

5 What profit lies in barren faith,

6 And vacant yearning, though with might
7 To scale the heaven’s highest height,
8 Or dive below the wells of Death?

9 What find I in the highest place,

10 But mine own phantom chanting hymns?
11 And on the depths of death there swims
12 The reflex of a human face.

13 I’ll rather take what fruit may be

14 Of sorrow under human skies:
15 ’Tis held that sorrow makes us wise,
16 Whatever wisdom sleep with thee.

CIX.
1 Heart-affluence in discursive talk
2 From household fountains never dry;
3 The critic clearness of an eye,
4 That saw through all the Muses’ walk;

1 Grief shall not make me a hermit, and I will not indulge in vacant yearnings and barren aspirations;
it is useless trying to find him in the other worlds – I find nothing but the reflections of myself: I had better
learn the lesson sorrow teaches.

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5 Seraphic intellect and force

6 To seize and throw the doubts of man;
7 Impassioned logic, which outran
8 The hearer in its fiery course;

9 High nature amorous of the good,

10 But touched with no ascetic gloom;
11 And passion pure in snowy bloom
12 Through all the years of April blood;

13 A love of freedom rarely felt,

14 Of freedom in her regal seat
15 Of England; not the schoolboy heat,
16 The blind hysterics of the Celt;

17 And manhood fused with female grace

18 In such a sort, the child would twine
19 A trustful hand, unasked, in thine,
20 And find his comfort in thy face;

21 All these have been, and thee mine eyes

22 Have looked on: if they looked in vain,
23 My shame is greater who remain,
24 Nor let thy wisdom make me wise.*

CX.
1 Thy converse drew us with delight,
2 The men of rathe and riper years:
3 The feeble soul, a haunt of fears,
4 Forgot his weakness in thy sight.

5 On thee the loyal-hearted hung,

6 The proud was half disarmed of pride,
7 Nor cared the serpent at thy side
8 To flicker with his double tongue.

9 The stern were mild when thou wert by,

10 The flippant put himself to school
11 And heard thee, and the brazen fool
12 Was softened, and he knew not why;

24 If I do not let . . .

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13 While I, thy nearest, sat apart,

14 And felt thy triumph was as mine;
15 And loved them more, that they were thine,
16 The graceful tact, the Christian art;

17 Nor mine the sweetness or the skill,

18 But mine the love that will not tire,
19 And, born of love, the vague desire
20 That spurs an imitative will.

CXI.
1 The churl in spirit, up or down
2 Along the scale of ranks, through all,
3 To him who grasps a golden ball,
4 By blood a king, at heart a clown;

5 The churl in spirit, howe’er he veil

6 His want in forms for fashion’s sake,
7 Will let his coltish nature break
8 At seasons through the gilded pale:

9 For who can always act? but he,

10 To whom a thousand memories call,
11 Not being less but more than all
12 The gentleness he seemed to be,

13 Best seemed the thing he was, and joined

14 Each office of the social hour
15 To noble manners, as the flower
16 And native growth of noble mind;

17 Nor ever narrowness or spite,

18 Or villain fancy fleeting by,
19 Drew in the expression of an eye,
20 Where God and Nature met in light;

21 And thus he bore without abuse

22 The grand old name of gentleman,*
23 Defamed by every charlatan,
24 And soiled with all ignoble use.

22 From Italian ciarlatano, a mountebank; hence the accent on the last syllable.

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CXII.
1 High wisdom holds my wisdom less,
2 That I, who gaze with temperate eyes
3 On glorious insufficiencies,*
4 Set light by narrower perfectness.

5 But thou, that fillest all the room

6 Of all my love, art reason why
7 I seem to cast a careless eye
8 On souls, the lesser lords of doom.*

9 For what wert thou? some novel power

10 Sprang up for ever at a touch,
11 And hope could never hope too much,
12 In watching thee from hour to hour,

13 Large elements in order brought,

14 And tracts of calm from tempest made,
15 And world-wide fluctuation swayed
16 In vassal tides that followed thought.

CXIII.
1 ’Tis held that sorrow makes us wise;
2 Yet how much wisdom sleeps with thee
3 Which not alone had guided me,
4 But served the seasons that may rise;

5 For can I doubt, who knew thee keen

6 In intellect, with force and skill
7 To strive, to fashion, to fulfil –
8 I doubt not what thou wouldst have been:

9 A life in civic action warm,

10 A soul on highest mission sent,
11 A potent voice of Parliament,
12 A pillar steadfast in the storm,

13 Should licensed boldness gather force,

14 Becoming, when the time has birth,
15 A lever to uplift the earth
16 And roll it in another course,

3 Unaccomplished greatness such as Arthur Hallam’s.

8 Those that have free-will, but less intellect.

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17 With thousand shocks that come and go,

18 With agonies, with energies,
19 With overthrowings, and with cries.
20 And undulations to and fro.

CXIV.
1 Who loves not Knowledge? Who shall rail
2 Against her beauty? May she mix
3 With men and prosper! Who shall fix
4 Her pillars?* Let her work prevail.

5 But on her forehead sits a fire:

6 She sets her forward countenance
7 And leaps into the future chance,
8 Submitting all things to desire.

9 Half-grown as yet, a child, and vain –

10 She cannot fight the fear of death.
11 What is she, cut from love and faith,
12 But some wild Pallas from the brain

13 Of Demons? fiery-hot to burst

14 All barriers in her onward race
15 For power. Let her know her place;
16 She is the second, not the first.

17 A higher hand must make her mild,

18 If all be not in vain; and guide
19 Her footsteps, moving side by side
20 With wisdom, like the younger child:

21 For she is earthly of the mind,

22 But Wisdom heavenly of the soul.
23 O, friend, who camest to thy goal
24 So early, leaving me behind,

25 I would the great world grew like thee,

26 Who grewest not alone in power
27 And knowledge, but by year and hour
28 In reverence and in charity.

4 ‘Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars’ (Proverbs, 9: 1).

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CXV.
1 Now fades the last long streak of snow,
2 Now burgeons every maze of quick
3 About the flowering squares, and thick
4 By ashen roots the violets blow.

5 Now rings the woodland loud and long,

6 The distance takes a lovelier hue,
7 And drowned in yonder living blue
8 The lark becomes a sightless song.

9 Now dance the lights on lawn and lea,

10 The flocks are whiter down the vale,
11 And milkier every milky sail
12 On winding stream or distant sea;

13 Where now the seamew pipes, or dives

14 In yonder greening gleam, and fly
15 The happy birds, that change their sky
16 To build and brood; that live their lives

17 From land to land; and in my breast

18 Spring wakens too; and my regret
19 Becomes an April violet,
20 And buds and blossoms like the rest.

CXVI.
1 Is it, then, regret for buried time
2 That keenlier in sweet April wakes,
3 And meets the year, and gives and takes
4 The colours of the crescent prime?*

5 Not all: the songs, the stirring air,

6 The life re-orient out of dust,
7 Cry through the sense to hearten trust
8 In that which made the world so fair.

9 Not all regret: the face will shine

10 Upon me, while I muse alone;
11 And that dear voice, I once have known,
12 Still speak to me of me and mine:

4 Growing spring.

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13 Yet less of sorrow lives in me

14 For days of happy commune dead;
15 Less yearning for the friendship fled,
16 Than some strong bond which is to be.

CXVII.
1 O days and hours, your work is this
2 To hold me from my proper place,
3 A little while from his embrace,
4 For fuller gain of after bliss:

5 That out of distance might ensue

6 Desire of nearness doubly sweet;
7 And unto meeting when we meet,
8 Delight a hundredfold accrue,

9 For every grain of sand that runs,

10 And every span of shade that steals,*
11 And every kiss of toothéd wheels,*
12 And all the courses of the suns.

CXVIII.
1 Contemplate all this work of Time,
2 The giant labouring in his youth;
3 Nor dream of human love and truth,
4 As dying Nature’s earth and lime;

5 But trust that those we call the dead

6 Are breathers of an ampler day
7 For ever nobler ends. They say,
8 The solid earth whereon we tread

9 In tracts of fluent heat began,

10 And grew to seeming-random forms,
11 The seeming prey of cyclic storms,
12 Till at the last arose the man;

13 Who throve and branched from clime to clime,

14 The herald of a higher race,
15 And of himself in higher place,
16 If so he type this work of time

10 The sun-dial.
12 The clock.

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17 Within himself, from more to more;

18 Or, crowned with attributes of woe
19 Like glories, move his course, and show
20 That life is not as idle ore,

21 But iron dug from central gloom,

22 And heated hot with burning fears,
23 And dipt in baths of hissing tears,
24 And battered with the shocks of doom

25 To shape and use. Arise and fly

26 The reeling Faun, the sensual feast;
27 Move upward, working out the beast,
28 And let the ape and tiger die.

CXIX.
1 Doors , where my heart was used to beat
2 So quickly, not as one that weeps
3 I come once more; the city sleeps;
4 I smell the meadow in the street;

5 I hear a chirp of birds; I see

6 Betwixt the black fronts long-withdrawn
7 A light-blue lane of early dawn,
8 And think of early days and thee,

9 And bless thee, for thy lips are bland,

10 And bright the friendship of thine eye;
11 And in my thoughts with scarce a sigh
12 I take the pressure of thine hand.

CXX.
1 I trust I have not wasted breath:
2 I think we are not wholly brain,
3 Magnetic mockeries; not in vain,
4 Like Paul with beasts,* I fought with Death;

5 Not only cunning casts in clay:

6 Let Science prove we are, and then
7 What matters Science unto men,
8 At least to me? I would not stay.

4 ‘If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth me, if the dead
rise not? Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die’ (1 Corinthians 15: 32).

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9 Let him, the wiser man who springs

10 Hereafter, up from childhood shape
11 His action like the greater ape,
12 But I was born to other things.

CXXI.
1 Sad Hesper o’er the buried sun
2 And ready, thou, to die with him,
3 Thou watchest all things ever dim
4 And dimmer, and a glory done:

5 The team is loosened from the wain,

6 The boat is drawn upon the shore;
7 Thou listenest to the closing door,
8 And life is darkened in the brain.

9 Bright Phosphor, fresher for the night,

10 By thee the world’s great work is heard
11 Beginning, and the wakeful bird;
12 Behind thee comes the greater light:

13 The market boat is on the stream,

14 And voices hail it from the brink;
15 Thou hear’st the village hammer clink,
16 And see’st the moving of the team.

17 Sweet Hesper-Phosphor, double name*

18 For what is one, the first, the last,
19 Thou, like my present and my past,
20 Thy place is changed; thou art the same.

CXXII. The mourner wonders whether his

1 Oh, wast thou with me, dearest, then, friend has been with him as he has
begun to recover from his grief.
2 While I rose up against my doom, See: ‘Cycle and Ritual’.
3 And yearned to burst the folded gloom,
4 To bare the eternal Heavens again,

5 To feel once more, in placid awe,

6 The strong imagination roll
7 A sphere of stars about my soul,
8 In all her motion one with law;

17 Death and sorrow brighten into death and hope.

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9 If thou wert with me, and the grave

10 Divide us not, be with me now,
11 And enter in at breast and brow,
12 Till all my blood, a fuller wave,

13 Be quickened with a livelier breath,

14 And like an inconsiderate boy,
15 As in the former flash of joy,
16 I slip the thoughts of life and death;

17 And all the breeze of Fancy blows,

18 And every dew-drop paints a bow,*
19 The wizard lightnings deeply glow,
20 And every thought breaks out a rose.

CXXIII. Considers the changes wrought on the

1 There rolls the deep where grew the tree. earth’s surface by evolution.
See: ‘Profit and Loss’.
2 O earth, what changes hast thou seen!
3 There where the long street roars, hath been
4 The stillness of the central sea.*

5 The hills are shadows, and they flow

6 From form to form, and nothing stands;
7 They melt like mist, the solid lands,
8 Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

9 But in my spirit will I dwell,

10 And dream my dream, and hold it true;
11 For though my lips may breathe adieu,
12 I cannot think the thing farewell.

CXXIV. Describes a renewal of faith.

1 That which we dare invoke to bless; See: ‘Lost for Words’.
2 Our dearest faith; our ghastliest doubt;
3 He, They, One, All; within, without;
4 The Power in darkness whom we guess;

5 I found Him not in world or sun,

6 Or eagle’s wing, or insect’s eye;
7 Nor through the questions men may try,
8 The petty cobwebs we have spun:

18 Every dew-drop turns into a miniature rainbow.

4 Balloonists say that even in a storm the middle of the sea is noiseless.

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9 If e’er when faith had fallen asleep,

10 I heard a voice ‘believe no more’
11 And heard an ever-breaking shore
12 That tumbled in the Godless deep;

13 A warmth within the breast would melt

14 The freezing reason’s colder part,
15 And like a man in wrath the heart
16 Stood up and answered ‘I have felt.’

17 No, like a child in doubt and fear:

18 But that blind clamour made me wise;
19 Then was I as a child that cries,
20 But, crying, knows his father near;

21 And what I am beheld again

22 What is, and no man understands;
23 And out of darkness came the hands
24 That reach through nature, moulding men.

CXXV.
1 Whatever I have said or sung,
2 Some bitter notes my harp would give,
3 Yea, though there often seemed to live
4 A contradiction on the tongue,

5 Yet Hope had never lost her youth;

6 She did but look through dimmer eyes;
7 Or Love but played with gracious lies,
8 Because he felt so fixed in truth:

9 And if the song were full of care,

10 He breathed the spirit of the song;
11 And if the words were sweet and strong
12 He set his royal signet there;

13 Abiding with me till I sail

14 To seek thee on the mystic deeps,
15 And this electric force, that keeps
16 A thousand pulses dancing, fail.

CXXVI.
1 Love is and was my Lord and King,
2 And in his presence I attend

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3 To hear the tidings of my friend,

4 Which every hour his couriers bring.

5 Love is and was my King and Lord,

6 And will be, though as yet I keep
7 Within his court on earth, and sleep
8 Encompassed by his faithful guard,

9 And hear at times a sentinel

10 Who moves about from place to place,
11 And whispers to the worlds of space,
12 In the deep night, that all is well.

CXXVII. These two sections express the faith

1 And all is well, though faith and form that, in spite of the violent changes
that pattern human experience, history
2 Be sundered in the night of fear; works towards an end that is ordained
3 Well roars the storm to those that hear by God.
4 A deeper voice across the storm, See: ‘Profit and Loss’.

5 Proclaiming social truth shall spread,

6 And justice, ev’n though thrice again
7 The red fool-fury of the Seine
8 Should pile her barricades with dead.

9 But ill for him that wears a crown,

10 And him, the lazar, in his rags:
11 They tremble, the sustaining crags;
12 The spires of ice are toppled down,

13 And molten up, and roar in flood;

14 The fortress crashes from on high,
15 The brute earth lightens to the sky,
16 And the great Æon sinks in blood,

17 And compassed by the fires of Hell;

18 While thou, dear spirit, happy star,
19 O’erlook’st the tumult from afar,
20 And smilest, knowing all is well.

CXXVIII.
1 The love that rose on stronger wings,
2 Unpalsied when he met with Death,
3 Is comrade of the lesser faith
4 That sees the course of human things.

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5 No doubt vast eddies in the flood

6 Of onward time shall yet be made,
7 And thronèd races may degrade;
8 Yet O ye mysteries of good,

9 Wild Hours that fly with Hope and Fear,

10 If all your office had to do
11 With old results that look like new;
12 If this were all your mission here,

13 To draw, to sheathe a useless sword,

14 To fool the crowd with glorious lies,
15 To cleave a creed in sects and cries,
16 To change the bearing of a word,

17 To shift an arbitrary power,

18 To cramp the student at his desk,
19 To make old bareness picturesque
20 And tuft with grass a feudal tower;

21 Why then my scorn might well descend

22 On you and yours. I see in part
23 That all, as in some piece of art,
24 Is toil cöoperant to an end.

CXXIX.
1 Dear friend, far off, my lost desire,
2 So far, so near in woe and weal;
3 O loved the most, when most I feel
4 There is a lower and a higher;

5 Known and unknown; human, divine;

6 Sweet human hand and lips and eye;
7 Dear heavenly friend that canst not die,
8 Mine, mine, for ever, ever mine;

9 Strange friend, past, present, and to be;

10 Loved deeplier, darklier understood;
11 Behold, I dream a dream of good,
12 And mingle all the world with thee.

CXXX.
1 Thy voice is on the rolling air;
2 I hear thee where the waters run;

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3 Thou standest in the rising sun,

4 And in the setting thou art fair.

5 What art thou then? I cannot guess;

6 But though I seem in star and flower
7 To feel thee some diffusive power,
8 I do not therefore love thee less:

9 My love involves the love before;

10 My love is vaster passion now;
11 Though mixed with God and Nature thou,
12 I seem to love thee more and more.

13 Far off thou art, but ever nigh;

14 I have thee still, and I rejoice;
15 I prosper, circled with thy voice;
16 I shall not lose thee though I die.

CXXXI. Addresses the will of God and looks

1 O living will that shalt endure with faith towards the future.
See: ‘Lost for Words’.
2 When all that seems shall suffer shock,
3 Rise in the spiritual rock,
4 Flow through our deeds and make them pure,

5 That we may lift from out of dust

6 A voice as unto him that hears,
7 A cry above the conquered years
8 To one that with us works, and trust,

9 With faith that comes of self-control,

10 The truths that never can be proved
11 Until we close with all we loved,
12 And all we flow from, soul in soul.

Epilogue* Describes the marriage of Tennyson’s

1 O true and tried, so well and long, sister, Cecilia, to his friend, Edmund
Lushington.
2 Demand not thou a marriage lay; See: ‘Lost for Words’ and ‘Profit and
3 In that it is thy marriage day Loss’.
4 Is music more than any song.

Epilogue The marriage of Edmund Lushington and Cecilia Tennyson, October 10, 1842.

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5 Nor have I felt so much of bliss

6 Since first he told me that he loved
7 A daughter of our house; nor proved
8 Since that dark day a day like this;

9 Though I since then have numbered o’er

10 Some thrice three years: they went and came,
11 Remade the blood and changed the frame,
12 And yet is love not less, but more;

13 No longer caring to embalm

14 In dying songs a dead regret,
15 But like a statue solid-set,
16 And moulded in colossal calm.

17 Regret is dead, but love is more

18 Than in the summers that are flown,
19 For I myself with these have grown
20 To something greater than before;

21 Which makes appear the songs I made

22 As echoes out of weaker times,
23 As half but idle brawling rhymes,
24 The sport of random sun and shade.

25 But where is she, the bridal flower,

26 That must be made a wife ere noon?
27 She enters, glowing like the moon
28 Of Eden on its bridal bower:

29 On me she bends her blissful eyes

30 And then on thee; they meet thy look
31 And brighten like the star that shook
32 Betwixt the palms of paradise.

33 O when her life was yet in bud,

34 He too foretold the perfect rose.
35 For thee she grew, for thee she grows
36 For ever, and as fair as good.

37 And thou art worthy; full of power;

38 As gentle; liberal-minded, great,
39 Consistent; wearing all that weight
40 Of learning lightly like a flower.

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41 But now set out: the noon is near,

42 And I must give away the bride;
43 She fears not, or with thee beside
44 And me behind her, will not fear.

45 For I that danced her on my knee,

46 That watched her on her nurse’s arm,
47 That shielded all her life from harm
48 At last must part with her to thee;

49 Now waiting to be made a wife,

50 Her feet, my darling, on the dead
51 Their pensive tablets round her head,
52 And the most living words of life

53 Breathed in her ear. The ring is on,

54 The ‘wilt thou’ answered, and again
55 The ‘wilt thou’ asked, till out of twain
56 Her sweet ‘I will’ has made you one.

57 Now sign your names, which shall be read,

58 Mute symbols of a joyful morn,
59 By village eyes as yet unborn;
60 The names are signed, and overhead

61 Begins the clash and clang that tells

62 The joy to every wandering breeze;
63 The blind wall rocks, and on the trees
64 The dead leaf trembles to the bells.

65 O happy hour, and happier hours

66 Await them. Many a merry face
67 Salutes them – maidens of the place,
68 That pelt us in the porch with flowers.

69 O happy hour, behold the bride

70 With him to whom her hand I gave.
71 They leave the porch, they pass the grave
72 That has to-day its sunny side.

73 To-day the grave is bright for me,

74 For them the light of life increased,
75 Who stay to share the morning feast,
76 Who rest tonight beside the sea.

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77 Let all my genial spirits advance

78 To meet and greet a whiter sun;
79 My drooping memory will not shun
80 The foaming grape of eastern France.

81 It circles round, and fancy plays,

82 And hearts are warmed and faces bloom,
83 As drinking health to bride and groom
84 We wish them store of happy days.

85 Nor count me all to blame if I

86 Conjecture of a stiller guest,
87 Perchance, perchance, among the rest,
88 And, though in silence, wishing joy.

89 But they must go, the time draws on,

90 And those white-favoured horses wait;
91 They rise, but linger; it is late;
92 Farewell, we kiss, and they are gone.

93 A shade falls on us like the dark

94 From little cloudlets on the grass,
95 But sweeps away as out we pass
96 To range the woods, to roam the park,

97 Discussing how their courtship grew,

98 And talk of others that are wed,
99 And how she looked, and what he said,
100 And back we come at fall of dew.

101 Again the feast, the speech, the glee,

102 The shade of passing thought, the wealth
103 Of words and wit, the double health,
104 The crowning cup, the three-times-three,

105 And last the dance; – till I retire:

106 Dumb is that tower which spake so loud,
107 And high in heaven the streaming cloud,
108 And on the downs a rising fire:

109 And rise, O moon, from yonder down,

110 Till over down and over dale
111 All night the shining vapour sail
112 And pass the silent-lighted town,

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113 The white-faced halls, the glancing rills,

114 And catch at every mountain head,
115 And o’er the friths that branch and spread
116 Their sleeping silver thro’ the hills;

117 And touch with shade the bridal doors,

118 With tender gloom the roof, the wall;
119 And breaking let the splendour fall
120 To spangle all the happy shores

121 By which they rest, and ocean sounds,

122 And, star and system rolling past,
123 A soul shall draw from out the vast
124 And strike his being into bounds,

125 And, moved thro’ life of lower phase,

126 Result in man, be born and think,
127 And act and love, a closer link
128 Betwixt us and the crowning race

129 Of those that, eye to eye, shall look

130 On knowledge; under whose command
131 Is Earth and Earth’s, and in their hand
132 Is Nature like an open book;

133 No longer half-akin to brute,

134 For all we thought and loved and did,
135 And hoped, and suffered, is but seed
136 Of what in them is flower and fruit;

137 Whereof the man, that with me trod

138 This planet, was a noble type
139 Appearing ere the times were ripe,
140 That friend of mine who lives in God,

141 That God, which ever lives and loves,

142 One God, one law, one element,
143 And one far-off divine event,
144 To which the whole creation moves.

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Note
1. This approach is, in part, suggested by J. H. Buckley’s reading of In Memoriam in
which he identifies dark, light, water and the hand as four key images on which the
structure of In Memoriam depends (Buckley 1960: 112).

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 Chapter 3
The Guide

Lost for Words: Prologue, II, V, VI, VIII, XIII, XVI, XX, XXI,
XXXII, XL, LII, LIV, LVI, LX, XCV, XCVII, CXXIV, CXXXI,
Epilogue
In Memoriam is centrally concerned with the limits of linguistic expression.
As we have seen, in section V, Tennyson’s mourner bleakly reflects that poetic
composition is useful because the rhythm that it generates numbs his grief.
The implication of this line is clear: measured language is good for little else;
it is no use as an accurate or adequate description of the mourner’s own feel-
ings, or of the friend that he has lost. This failure of language in the face of
grief is a familiar convention of mourning. Faced with the grief of a bereaved
friend, we might well resort to phrases such as ‘I am more sorry than I can
say’ or ‘I know there is nothing I can say’ or ‘nothing I can say will bring
them back.’ These kinds of non-utterance both fulfil the social need for speech
and also acknowledge that death is an event that defeats speech. Of course,
to say that one is lost for words is a way of indicating the extremity of one’s
response to almost any situation. I might be rendered speechless with rage, or
love someone more than words can say. Again, these expressions are linguis-
tic conventions. They are ways of saying ‘I am very angry’ or ‘I love you very
much.’ They are therefore less interesting for the quality of emotion that they
(fail to) express than for what they, like Tennyson’s stanza about measured
language, say about words. These phrases, embedded in our social discourse,
define the limits of language and accept that words are an imperfect way of
communicating. This fact is unlikely to be a cause for concern on a daily basis
(in fact, it relieves us of the responsibility of saying exactly what we mean),
but a poem is more likely to be aware of and frustrated by the inadequacy of
words because they are the medium or material it uses to create art. If poetry
is, as Coleridge’s definition has it, ‘the best words in the best order’ (Coleridge
[1835] 1990, XIV, I, 90), then what happens when there is no right word, but

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only words that are wrong or half-right? In Memoriam is filled with articulate
distress about its own inarticulacy. The defining paradox of In Memoriam is
that it writes at length about the impossibility of writing. This first section of
the Reading Guide will focus on some of the sections in which the mourner
voices his doubts about language, trace the movement of the poem towards a
renewed faith in words and introduce some of the religious and philosophical
ideas that inform Tennyson’s linguistic anxiety.

‘What words are these have fallen from me?’

The first stanza of section V sums up the elegist’s ambivalence about his work:

I sometimes hold it half a sin

To put in words the grief I feel
For words, like nature, half reveal
And half conceal the soul within.
(V, 1–4)

The sense of this stanza is fairly straightforward: the mourner feels that writing
about his grief is almost sinful because words disguise or mask reality as much
as they communicate it (this lack of faith in language is reflected in the repeated
use of ‘half’, which suggests that the mourner is so uncertain of language that
he is unable to commit himself to any definite statement). But as well as com-
municating and performing ambivalence, these four lines also allude to two
philosophical traditions concerning the origin and work of language. The first
of these has to do with language and the ‘sin’ that the mourner refers to in line
1; the second is concerned with the relationship between language, nature and
the soul, which Tennyson sketches in lines 3 and 4.
It may not be immediately apparent why the mourner associates failed lan-
guage with sin. Perhaps he feels that the injustice his poem does to his friend’s
memory amounts to a sort of crime (what Proust describes in Remembrance
of Things Past as ‘posthumous infidelity’ (Proust 1981 III: 940)). However,
Tennyson’s use of the word ‘sin’ suggests that the crime he half-commits
is against God rather than Hallam. The association of language and sin is
not made by Tennyson alone. It has a long tradition in Christian religious
philosophy and has to do with a post-lapsarian understanding of the world.
Post-lapsarian means ‘after the fall’ and it is a term that refers to humankind’s
fall from grace, which is described in the Old Testament book of Genesis. One
of the things that is understood to characterise the fallen-ness of humanity is
language. As humanity becomes separated from God, words are cut adrift
from the things that they name. Genesis describes pre-lapsarian language as
one in which words are perfectly fitted to the things they name: ‘And out of

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the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the
air, and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them; and what-
soever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof’ (Genesis
2: 19). As Stanley Fish puts it,
Adam’s knowledge is infused into him by God and the names he imposes are
accurate, intensively and extensively [. . .] The loss of perfect language is, more
than anything else, the sign of the Fall since, in Eden, speech is an outward mani-
festation of the inner paradise. (Fish 1998: 114)

Contemporary literary theory also recognises a separation between words

and their meanings, which they frame in secular terms, identifying a troubling
disconnect between the ‘signifier’ (the word) and the ‘signified’ (the thing it
describes). This means that language is never absolute or universal, but is
always subjective and shifting, affected by the social, historical and cultural
context in which it is used. We cannot look to language for complete truth
or knowledge. Without these burdens of responsibility, some theorists argue,
language gains its freedom. The ambiguity of language is the source of its
creative potential and opens words up to interpretation. However, unable to
rely on our ability to know the world through language, our grip on a shared
reality is loosened. This is the give-and-take of deconstructionist theory,
which is discussed in complex detail in the work of critics such as Roland
Barthes and Jacques Derrida. Derrida has written about how death opens
up the unbridgeable gap between the name (signifier) and the dead object
(the signified) in a way that might be helpful when considering Tennyson’s
self-consciously post-lapsarian elegy. Derrida argues that, when a person
dies, all that survives is their name and that this survival is the ultimate proof
of the ‘alienability’ of language: its separateness from the things or people it
describes. When we call a person or a thing by its name we pre-empt, antici-
pate or rehearse their death: ‘in calling or naming someone while he is alive,
we know that his name can survive him and already survives him [. . .] the
name begins during his life to get along without him speaking and bearing
his death each time it is pronounced’ (Derrida 2001: 49). This means that a
name (or word), always inadequate, in the event of death becomes both more
inadequate and more important, because the person to whom it belonged is
no longer around to speak for themselves. Therefore, in mourning, language
becomes more crucial and more elusive. As Derrida puts it, mourning has ‘to
fail, to fail well’ (144).
A good, or thorough, failure is an apt description of In Memoriam and
Derrida’s work on mourning shares some of Tennyson’s concerns. In the first
lines of section 2, for example, the elegist considers ‘the stones / That name
the underlying dead’, figuring the gap between name and person as one of

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physical depth. However, although mourning presents Derrida and Tennyson

with a common linguistic problem, the implications of that problem remain
very different. For Derrida, writing as an atheist Jew in post-war Europe,
language has, to use his famous phrase, ‘always already’ failed. It is a closed
system that can never get beyond itself. Names have never been ‘internally
and exclusively accurate’ and there is no possibility of a world in which lan-
guage works better. For Tennyson, the chasm that exists between word and
world symbolises the chasm that exists between God and sinful humanity.
The Christian tradition insists that humankind was not created in this state of
alienation and professes faith in a time when ‘the Word was with God and the
Word was God’ (John 1: 1) and hope for a time when word and world will
be reunited. When Derrida names things and people, he rehearses their death;
when Adam names the animals in Eden, he performs an act of creation. In
In Memoriam, the broken relationship with God, symbolised by Tennyson’s
broken or sinful language, is experienced afresh by the loss of Hallam. As
Sinfield has it, ‘the life together of Hallam and the poet had all the beauty,
freshness and innocence of the garden of Eden – and as with Eden [. . .] it was
the entry of death into the poet’s pre-lapsarian world which marked its end’
(Sinfield 1971: 65). It is from this second Fall – experienced as a loss of poetic
and religious faith – that the elegist struggles to recover over the course of the
poem.
The great epic of the Fall is Milton’s Paradise Lost, which retells the story
of Genesis over twelve books. Milton’s version focuses in detail on the char-
acter of Satan, himself a fallen (or rebel) angel, who tempts Eve to sin. An epic
must have a hero, and readers of Paradise Lost frequently assign that role to
Satan, who seems to embody a heroic individualism that might be compared
with Ulysses or Achilles. A reading of this kind recasts the Fall in a positive
light, seeing what Milton describes in the poem’s opening lines as ‘man’s first
disobedience’ as a revolutionary act against the despotic authority of God.
According to this reading, sin becomes a word to describe an act that tests the
limits imposed on humanity, challenges received wisdom and asserts that no
knowledge (not even the knowledge of good and evil) is out of bounds. Sin
is scientific investigation, geographical exploration, artistic creativity. This
reading held great appeal for Romantic writers who lived through a time of
revolution in Europe and political unrest in Britain. Their works express their
support of radical political change and their fascination with the possibilities
and changes of human invention (or imagination), the hero as over-reacher.
In his Preface to Prometheus Unbound, for example, Shelley writes that Satan
has ‘courage, and majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent
force’ (Shelley 1970: 205).1 Tennyson was born just a few decades after these
poets, as the memory of revolution was beginning to recede. As a young

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poet, Tennyson was greatly influenced by the Romantics and so, although
the fallen-ness equates to Tennyson’s experience of grief and his relation-
ship to the language of elegy, there is, at the same time, a sense in which In
Memoriam clings jealously to the half-sin that it commits, drawing out the
period of mourning across the poem’s length, exploring its transgressive, crea-
tive possibilities.

Behind the Veil

The second two lines of section V point towards a second philosophical
framework that Tennyson employs in In Memoriam’s struggle for language.
By comparing words to the natural world that conceals as much as it reveals
of its inner soul, Tennyson adopts a Platonic world view. Plato was an
Ancient Greek philosopher, the pupil of Socrates, who argued that reality
was made up of essential forms which were beyond the everyday experience
and comprehension of humankind. Plato’s famous illustration of this philoso-
phy, included in his work, The Republic (380 bc), compares human beings
to prisoners, chained to one another in a cave, looking at shadows cast by
an artificial light, which show the outlines of objects being moved around by
unseen beings outside the cave.2 The shadows both conceal and reveal this
reality. Like human experience of the world, the shadows bear some rela-
tionship to the objects that cast them, but the effect they give is both partial
and misleading. Tennyson’s stanza suggests that words behave like Platonic
shadows, secondary representations or echoes of truth, that mediate it into
the sensible or literate world, but incur a crucial loss in the act of translation.
This idea returns a few lines later when the mourner resolves to wrap himself
in words, which he says will behave like ‘weeds’ (mourning dress) or ‘coarsest
clothes against the cold’. Like Plato’s shadows, clothes both conceal the body
of the wearer and reveal the shape or ‘outline’ of the body they conceal. The
mourner implies that the words of his elegy are coarse, so that the outline of
grief that they offer is likely to be bulky, ill-fitting and crude.
Tennyson writes that the thing that words both conceal and reveal is the
soul. This refers to another, related aspect of Platonic philosophy, which
explores the relationship between the soul and the body. Platonic philosophy
argues that the soul and not the body is the location of a person’s true self, or
identity. Rather like the shadows on the cave wall, or the clothing of words
worn by Tennyson’s mourner, the body is merely the outward manifestation
of the inner reality of any individual. Plato illustrates this idea when he tells
the story of Socrates’ death, recording a conversation between Socrates and
one of his followers:

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‘How shall we bury you?’ asked Crito. ‘However you like,’ Socrates said [. . .]
‘When I drink the poison I shall no longer remain here with you, but will go away
to some kind of happiness of the blessed. You must cheer up and say you are
burying my body.’ (Plato 1993: 182)

This anecdote identifies death as the moment when soul and body are
revealed to be separate; the corpse, the soul’s outer casing, becomes an object
of small concern that can be disposed of without too much fuss. This has par-
ticular relevance for In Memoriam, which, as we will see in the next chapter,
bemoans and worries about the loss of Hallam’s body. In section V, Tennyson
forges a connection between bodies and words, writing that words conceal
and reveal the soul in the same way that, according to Platonic philosophy,
the body reveals and conceals the soul. By stressing the corporeality or mate-
riality of poetic language, Tennyson again emphasises that he is ill equipped
to deal with the mourned object, who is, by definition, no longer of the body.
This Platonic understanding of poetic language also comes to Tennyson via
Romanticism. Shelley, the Romantic poet most associated with Platonism,
employs the image of the cave in an allegorical image of poetic creativity,
describing the cave as ‘the still cave of the witch Poesy’, in which the mind
seeks ‘in the shadows that pass by / Ghosts of all things that are’ (‘Mont Blanc’,
43–5). As we saw in Adonais, Shelley employs a second Platonic image – the
veil – to achieve consolation at the conclusion of his elegy. A veil is another
thing that both reveals and conceals, and, as in Adonais, Shelley’s poetry often
talks about lifting or going beyond the veil in order to express his desire to
get to the truth of things. Whereas, for Tennyson, this veil is composed of
language, for Shelley at the end of Adonais poetic language is employed to
penetrate the veil. In other poems Shelley tests his poetic faith even further.
Whereas in Adonais Shelley declares that Keats’s soul will penetrate the inner-
most veil of heaven, in ‘Mont Blanc’, looking on the sublime Alpine landscape,
he wonders if the veil has been lifted before the eye of his imagination: ‘Has
some unknown omnipotence unfurled / The veil of life and death?’ (‘Mont
Blanc’, 52–3). These kinds of Romantic possibilities seem to be shut down by
Tennyson’s mourner when his question, ‘what hope of answer or redress?’,
receives what sounds like the fading echo of a reply: ‘Behind the veil, behind
the veil’ (LVI, 27–8). The speaker of In Memoriam, cut off from God and scep-
tical of any natural order or law, understands language to be part of a world in
which he can perceive scant evidence of connection to a wider truth.
In the Prologue to In Memoriam, which, as we have seen, draws the poem
into a circle, revealing the redemptive consolatory path that the elegy halt-
ingly follows, Tennyson employs a kind of Platonic Christianity, writing
about the ‘little systems’ (of knowledge or, perhaps, of language) that are

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‘but broken lights’ of God (Prologue, 17–19). The following stanzas go on to

talk about the impossibility of knowledge through sight, ‘for knowledge is of
what we see’ (22), and to profess faith in a connection between the limited
knowledge of body and mind and God’s truth, which is again figured as illu-
mination: ‘a beam in darkness’. The mourner calls for the beam of human
knowledge to grow, asserting confidence in the possibility of human progress,
and looks forward to the point when ‘mind and soul, according well / May
make one music as before’. Here again we see Tennyson’s Christian Platonism
at work. ‘Mind and soul’ alludes to the Platonic idea of mind / body dualism,
while the idea that mind and soul might eventually return to a state of original
harmony locates the poem firmly within the Christian framework of Fall and
Redemption. Reunited, mind and soul are imagined making ‘one music’, a
meta-poetic reference that figures the redemption of humankind as a harmo-
nious composition, or perfect poem.
In the following stanzas the mourner asks God to forgive ‘what seemed my
sin in me’ (33). This line pre-empts the reference to the elegy’s ‘half sin’, iden-
tifying sin, grief and poetry closely with one another. Something that ‘seemed’
a sin is, by implication, something that has been revealed not to be a sin and
so, even when asking for forgiveness, the speaker suggests that forgiveness is
unnecessary or that it has somehow already occurred through the redemptive
work of the poem. In Memoriam is very interested in how things ‘seem’. If
something only seems to be the case, there is every chance that it is not as it
seems. When, for example, in section II, the mourner writes that, as he gazes
on the yew tree whose roots make contact with the buried bodies of the
dead, ‘I seem to fail from out my blood / And grow incorporate into thee’ (II,
15–16), the word ‘seem’ indicates to the reader that the mourner is deluded
or is indulging in a bleak fantasy.
In section VIII, the same note of doubt is introduced when the mourner
again tries to justify his failed attempts to write. He employs an extended
simile that compares his grief to the grief of a ‘happy lover’ who goes to visit
his beloved and finds out that she has gone away. He imagines the lover wan-
dering along paths down which he used to walk with his love and finding a
flower ‘beat with rain and wind / Which once she fostered up with care’ (VIII,
15–16). He compares this flower to his poem – ‘this poor flower of poesy’ (a
piece of wordplay that turns Tennyson’s collection of lyrics into a posy of
flowers) – suggesting that in Hallam’s absence, his words begin to fail, but
still survive. Or at least, ‘so seems it in my deep regret’ (17, my emphasis).
‘Seems’ connects the simile with the thing it illustrates, making the simile
appear untrustworthy. His poem seems like a flower, but is it? Perhaps it is a
flower that has already died. By introducing a sense of doubt about his simile,
Tennyson acts out the doubtful or fading poetry that he describes.

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Tears of a widower
If In Memoriam is (or seems) like a flower, then the mourner is like a lover.
This comparison between the mourner’s friendship with his ‘lost Arthur’ and
the heterosexual relationship between a man and a woman points to a second
aspect of In Memoriam’s struggle for language. Critics differ widely in the
way they define the sexuality of Tennyson’s and Hallam’s relationship.3 To
describe it as a close friendship hardly does justice to the passionate desire
expressed throughout In Memoriam. However, to apply the label ‘homo-
sexual’ to the relationship implies a physical sexuality of which there is no evi-
dence. Part of the problem is one of language. As Alan Sinfield has discussed
in his studies of representations of sexuality in the nineteenth century, the
words that we now use to describe sexuality do not simply provide labels for
a set of pre-existing, fixed sexual identities (Sinfield 1994: 11). Words such as
‘heterosexual’, ‘homosexual’, ‘bisexual’, ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ also construct or
contribute to a modern understanding of sexual identity, making sex central
to the way the modern self is defined. Sinfield argues that, in the nineteenth
century, sex did not enter into questions of identity in the same way.
This difference between Victorian and modern articulations of sexual iden-
tity means that it is difficult to gain an accurate understanding of Tennyson’s
relationship with Hallam and cautions against an autobiographical reading
of In Memoriam that seeks out a suppressed homosexuality that we – with
our modern, post-Freudian understanding of sexuality – feel must lurk behind
it. By placing the language of homosexuality in its historical context, Sinfield
suggests that In Memoriam, by failing to define its sexuality (refusing to
speak its name), makes room for multiplicity and ambiguity, and escapes
the controlling power of public discourse. This ambiguity is achieved by the
similes in sections VI, VIII, XIII, XXXII, XL, LX and XCVII that compare
the mourner’s grief to the grief of a widow or widower, or compare the
separation between the mourner and his dead friend as the separation of
an uneven love match, in which the woman cannot match the man’s social
status or intelligence. In each case, the ‘as’, ‘like’ or ‘seems’ that signposts the
simile creates a connection and a distance between its two halves, implying
both sameness and difference. When the mourner writes that his grief seems
like the grief of a man for a woman who has gone away on a long journey,
the word ‘seems’ makes clear that this image of heterosexual love does not
quite capture the nature of the relationship between mourner and friend. In
section XIII, the mourner confidently describes his tears, which fall ‘like’ the
tears of a ‘widower’ (XIII, 1). The mourner’s tears are ‘like’, but not the same
as, the tears of a bereaved husband. A ‘widower’ is a word borrowed from
a heterosexual discourse that names those relationships and identities that it

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recognises as legitimate. By using the name ‘widower’ as an inadequate stand-

in for his own identity, the mourner points out that there is no such name for
what he is. His relationship with his friend, both in life and in death, evades
the grasp of language.
Feminist criticism has coined the term ‘homosocial’ to get beyond the
question of sexuality, arguing that same-sex relationships are most fruitfully
understood in socio-political terms and demonstrating how the close bonds
that men form with other men are a means of maintaining patriarchal power,
a means by which, as Eve Sedgwick puts it, ‘“men promot[e] the interests of
men”’ (Sedgwick 1985: 4). Reading In Memoriam from this perspective, it
becomes interesting to think about how women – particularly Tennyson’s
sister Emily, who was engaged to Hallam when he died – are represented
within the poem. If heterosexual relationships are employed by Tennyson as
a way of both describing and not describing his relationship with Hallam,
then Emily’s place within the poem becomes problematic. Similes such as the
one in section VIII lead the reader to think of Tennyson’s bereaved sister,
but the simile seems to elbow her out of the way so that it is Tennyson and
not Emily that is ‘widowed’. Tennyson’s sister is curiously absent from In
Memoriam. Some similes appear to be written with Emily in mind. Section
LX, for example, compares the mourner’s love to the love ‘of some poor girl
whose heart is set / On one whose rank exceeds her own’ (LX, 3–4), an accu-
rate description of the barriers that prevented Emily and Hallam’s engage-
ment. But even in this case, the image is merely the means of illustrating the
relationship between mourner and friend, which remains the poem’s exclusive
focus. By repeatedly figuring himself as a woman, Tennyson effectively denies
the possibility of feminine agency within the poem. The images of femininity
that Tennyson employs are passive, silent and intellectually weak. In section
VI, the girl waiting for her love to return from the sea is a ‘meek, unconscious
dove’; the eyes of Lazarus’s sister are ‘homes of silent prayer’ (XXXII, 1); and
in section XCVII, Tennyson compares himself, separated from Hallam, who
has gone on ahead of him in death, to the wife of a great scientist: ‘She knows
but matters of the house, / And he, he knows a thousand things’ (XCVII,
30–1). Although, in each case, the mourner identifies himself with these
women, his similes rely for their meaning on a patriarchal power structure
that silences and subjugates women. Whereas In Memoriam maintains a fruit-
fully ambiguous sexual identity, it reinforces categories of gender, defining
itself throughout as a masculine elegy.4

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Living words of life

As the Prologue promises, In Memoriam’s sinful language works towards its
own redemption. As the mourner gradually moves out of his state of grief
towards a tentative recovery, his language becomes less fraught with doubt
and questions posed in earlier sections are resolved. Section XVI asks, ‘what
words are these have fall’n from me?’ (XVI, 1), a question which suggests
that the mourner exerts no conscious control over his elegy. He does not
speak the words; they fall from his mouth or his pen, unwilled. He barely
recognises the poem as his own and refuses responsibility for what he has
written. Questioning the changeful nature of his sorrow, which he sometimes
experiences as ‘calm despair’, sometimes as ‘wild unrest’, he again offers a
special metaphor to suggest the separation between his written expressions of
grief and that grief’s reality: ‘doth she only seem to take / The touch of change
in calm or storm / But knows no more of transient form / In her deep self,
than some dead lake’ (XVI, 5–8). Like the stones in section II, that ‘name the
underlying dead’, the surface of the lake reveals nothing of its depths. Each of
these similes locates language on the surface, marking or masking a deeper,
unreadable truth. This motif returns again in section XX, when the mourner
compares his ‘lighter moods’, which gain comfort from his words, with
‘other griefs within’ (11) that find no outward or surface expression. Whereas
shallow feeling is easily articulated, deep grief is best expressed by an absence
of language, in silence.5
In the following sections these doubts about the value and responsibility
of the elegy return, but here they are put into the mouths of other speakers
so that the elegist is forced to defend his work. These stanzas represent a
brief return to the pastoral mode and therefore allude to those earlier works
that have greater faith in the consolations of poetry and nature. Again, the
distance that separates the dead body from the living is emphasised: ‘I sing to
him that rests below’ (XXI, 1); but, whereas in section II the speaker ‘gazes’
at the tree that grows beside the gravestones, on this occasion he takes ‘the
grasses of the grave / And makes them pipes whereon to blow’ (XXI, 3–4), so
that the music or song of his poetry achieves a physical, natural connection
with the resting place of the friend he mourns. The voices that critique this
pastoral scene sound strikingly modern. They accuse him of ‘weakness’ (8),
of courting public approval and of wasting his poetry on private grief, when
it should be used to address a national cause. Wearing the mask of the pasto-
ral elegist, the mourner is able to voice a defence of his poem: ‘I do but sing
because I must / And pipe but as the linnets sing’ (XXI, 23–4). He continues
to insist that he is not responsible for his poetry, but rather than expressing
dismay at words that have ‘fallen’ from his pen unbidden, here he implies that

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poetry comes naturally to him and that his grief is part of the natural cycle of
life and death.
Section LII again interrogates the relationship between depth and surface,
language and meaning. Here again, the lyric constitutes a dialogue between
two voices, but it is the mourner who has relapsed into expressions of self-
doubt: ‘My words are only words, and moved / Upon the topmost froth of
thought’ (LII, 3–4). As the poet’s doubts return, so do those images associated
with doubt in earlier sections. ‘Topmost froth’ suggests the white foam that
appears on the crest of a wave and so recalls the lake in section XVI that com-
municates nothing of its depths. In this section, words are imperfect acts of
love rather than grief, and the mourner is answered by the Spirit of true love
who instructs him, ‘“blame not thou thy plaintive song”’ (LII, 5). In each of
these self-reflexive dialogues the last word is given to the voice that speaks in
defence of the elegy, so that each marks a temporary moment of renewed faith
in the illusory and fragile surfaces of language.
Although the mourner resolves to sing rather than to keep silent, he contin-
ues to insist on his lack of control over his broken language. One of the poem’s
most famous stanzas offers a powerful image of poetry as spontaneous, sense-
less noise: ‘So runs my dream: but what am I? / An infant crying in the night /
An infant crying for the light: / And with no language but a cry’ (LIV, 17–20).
‘Infant’ derives from the Latin ‘infans’, which means ‘unable to speak’, so it is
a word that defines childishness in part by a lack of language. In these terms,
the poet is indeed an infant: he is unable to speak his grief. Like the ‘wild and
wandering cry’ described in the Prologue, the cry of the child is the non- /
pre-linguistic sound of basic human (or even animal) need, distress or desire.
This bleak metaphor describes a moment of intense self-doubt in which the
mourner appears to stumble backwards, undoing the progress he has made.
However, it also allows for the possibility that progress will begin again. The
stanza recalls Paul’s letter to the Corinthians: ‘When I was a child, I spake
as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became
a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly:
but then face to face’ (1 Corinthians 13: 11–12). Writing in the confidence
of his faith, Paul’s letter employs childhood as a metaphor for development.
Likewise, Tennyson’s image contains the same, albeit unspoken, promise of
articulate adulthood. The image of the crying child returns towards the end
of the elegy, a repetition that enables the reader to register that development:
‘Then was I as a child that cries, / But crying knows its father near’ (CXXIV,
17–20). This time, the metaphor is employed in the past tense, implying that
the speaker has moved beyond his infantile state and is able to reflect back on
it using poetic language. At this point of mature reflection the speaker is able
to conclude that even his most senseless cries formed part of his progress. The

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metaphor is rewritten, demonstrating the elegy’s changing relationship with

its own language.
The final section of In Memoriam looks forward to a time ‘when all that
seems shall suffer shock’ (CXXXI, 2), describing death, or the end of the
world, as a moment of visual revelation, when the illusions created by the
way the world ‘seems’ through the eyes of fallen humanity is destroyed. The
final use of the word ‘seems’ deliberately recalls the way things so often ‘seem’
to the mourner over the course of his poem so that redemption is described
as the achievement of perfect poetic vision and language. The mourner also
offers a last cry: ‘That we may lift from out of dust / A voice as unto him
that hears, / A cry above the conquered years / To one that with us works’
(CXXXI, 5–8). As the mourner draws his elegy to a close, his cry is no longer
the wild inarticulate cry of a child; it is transformed into the cry of a com-
munal voice that speaks to God, confident in the faith that it will be heard.
In the Epilogue, the private, fallen language of grief gives way to the public,
social language of a wedding ceremony. The Epilogue describes the marriage
of Tennyson’s sister Cecilia to his friend, Edmund Lushington. It follows the
redemptive pattern of pastoral elegy, ending with the promise of new life by
imagining the child that will result from the marriage. By concluding his poem
with a wedding rather than, for example, the coming of spring or the break of
day after night, In Memoriam frames the cycle of death and new life in social
rather than in natural terms, so that social laws and customs are lent a kind
of natural force.
The Epilogue is long and the wedding is recounted in some detail, but the
mourner begins this section by writing that he will not write: ‘Demand thou
not a marriage lay; / In that it is thy marriage day / Is music more than any
song’ (Epilogue, 2–4). If what follows is not a marriage song, then what is
it? With what kind of language does In Memoriam conclude? In Memoriam
uses the Epilogue to look for an answer to this question and to experiment
with the possibilities of post-elegiac language. The speaker rejects the poetry
of mourning, ‘No longer caring to embalm / In dying songs a dead regret’
(Epilogue, 13) and describing ‘the songs I made’ as ‘echoes out of weaker
times’ (Epilogue, 22). Heard as ‘dying songs’ and as ‘echoes’, the elegy is
experienced as if at a distance, so that the speaker suggests that he has trav-
elled far beyond his grieving self.
He continues in this gently dismissive mood: ‘As half but idle brawling
rhymes / The sport of random sun and shade’ (Epilogue, 23–4) – descriptions
that are themselves faint echoes of the ‘half a sin’ and ‘touch of change in calm
and storm’ described in the poem’s opening sections. The speaker still enter-
tains the same doubts about the value of his words, but although these doubts
remain, there is now less at stake and he breaks off, almost mid-thought,

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to ask, ‘But where is she, the bridal flower [. . .]?’ (Epilogue, 25). The elegy
is snapped shut and the speaker is brought back to the present just as his
sister enters the room, ‘glowing like the moon / Of Eden on its bridal bower’
(Epilogue, 28–9). Describing the new beginning of marriage in pre-lapsarian
terms, the speaker suggests that his sister’s wedding is redemptive. It rescues
poet and poem from their fallen state and allows for the possibility of a
renewed faith in God and in language.
This faith is reinforced by the marriage ceremony, which is described as an
exchange of words that have the power to bind two people together: ‘And
the most living words of life / Breathed in her ear. The ring is on, / The “Wilt
thou” answered, and again / The “wilt thou” asked, till out of twain / Her
sweet “I Will” has made you one’ (Epilogue, 54–6).This exchange is what J.
L. Austin, in his series of published lectures, How To Do Things With Words,
describes as ‘performative’ (Austin 1976). Performative language is language
that does what it says so that speech constitutes action. A promise is performa-
tive because to say ‘I promise’ is the same as the act of promising. Likewise,
spoken in a marriage ceremony, ‘I will’ is performative because the marriage
is achieved through that utterance (‘Her sweet “I will” has made you one’).
Performative language, therefore, is language at its most powerful and direct.
It acts, rather than describing action, removing the gap that separates word
and meaning. To recognise the performative is to acknowledge that words are
not ‘only words’, as Tennyson’s mourner so often insists, but that they carry
authority. Austin emphasises that performative language only works within a
framework of established social conventions, offering the wedding ceremony
as an example: ‘For (Christian) marrying, it is essential that I should not be
already married with a wife living, sane and undivorced [Austin was writing at
a time when the laws governing marriage and divorce were much stricter than
they are today] and so on. Without this framework, performative language is
a mockery: like marriage to a monkey’ (Austin 1976: 8–9). To employ per-
formative language is therefore to acknowledge and participate in society. By
recording the marriage vows, the Epilogue achieves a transition from the alien-
ated language of grief, to the language of religious and social contract.
In Memoriam concludes with resurrection, at the expense of, as well as
by means of, the poetic language of elegy. Whereas Adonais and Lycidas are
both brought back to life by the poems that mourn their deaths, the Epilogue
to In Memoriam silences its own song in order to make way for a new kind of
language, the ‘living words of life’ that marry his sister to his friend. ‘Living
words of life’ is itself a strikingly unpoetic phrase, a tautology that implies
that the descriptive language of poetry has exhausted itself. The description
of the wedding celebration continues to emphasise the close relationship
between language and social custom. The mourner lists ‘the feast, the speech,

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the glee’ and describes ‘the wealth of words and wit’ before he departs alone
into a landscape that is characterised by silence; the bell-tower is ‘dumb’ and
the town is ‘silent-lighted’ (Epilogue, 101–12). In this final, wordless setting,
the moon rises, recalling the ‘moon of Eden’ described a few lines earlier,
while the mourner imagines the birth of his as-yet unconceived nephew or
niece who will be a ‘closer link / Betwixt us and the crowning race’ (Epilogue,
127–8). The mourner expresses his faith in the progress of humanity towards
God with an image of pre-lapsarian literacy: ‘Of those that, eye to eye, shall
look / On knowledge; under whose command is Nature like an open book’
(Epilogue, 129–32). Whereas in section V, words, ‘like nature’, concealed as
much as they revealed, here the simile shifts so that nature is compared to the
written word, which can be read and perfectly understood. The union of man,
God, language and nature that the Epilogue promises, is a return to the Eden
described in Genesis where the gap between name and thing, perception and
truth, man and God is closed.

Losing Touch: I, II, III, VII, X, XIV, XVIII, XXX, XXXVI, XLIV,
XLV, LXIV, LXIX, LXXX, LXXXIV, LXXXV, XCIII, XCV

‘These touching lines’

A second core motif which this Guide seeks to draw to the reader’s atten-
tion is that of touch. Many of the early reviews of In Memoriam remark on
the poem’s capacity to touch its readership. The reviewer for The Examiner
writes that the poem is ‘as beautiful as touching’ and that, when reading
In Memoriam, ‘every chord of the human heart is touched in turn’ (Forster
1850: 357). The Athenaeum describes the ‘touching and graceful modesty’
with which ‘the heart’s experience is so touchingly chronicled’ (Marston
1850: 629). In Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, Franklin Lushington enthusiasti-
cally asserts that In Memoriam is ‘one of the most touching and exquisite
monuments ever raised to a departed friend’ (Lushington 1850: 499), and
the Memoir records the misguided conviction of an anonymous reviewer
that ‘these touching lines evidently come from the full heart of the widow
of a military man’ (Memoir I: 298). These references to the touching quality
of In Memoriam, which are offered as tokens of praise, indicate the review-
ers’ shared participation in a particular aesthetic discourse whereby a piece
of literature is judged on its ability to elicit an emotional response from its
readership. This understanding of how literature works, or what literature
(and other forms of artistic production) ought to do, is familiar and still has
currency today. As readers, gallery and cinema-goers, or music lovers, we are
still likely to express our appreciation of a particular poem, painting, film or

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song in terms of the way it works on our feelings. We might describe it as

‘affecting’ or ‘moving’ (an adjective which suggests itself as a more emphatic
version of ‘touching’; to be moved is to be touched with some force), or claim
particular attachment to works that we feel we ‘relate to’ or ‘sympathise
with’, or that strike an emotional chord with us. The roots of these kinds of
value judgements can be traced back to the cultural and philosophical tradi-
tions of sentiment and sensibility that developed alongside the Empiricist
philosophy of Hume and Locke in the eighteenth century, and this section of
the Reading Guide aims to explore In Memoriam’s engagement with these
traditions and the discourses that they generated. The reviewers’ repeated
use of the language of touch also echoes In Memoriam’s own tactile vocabu-
lary. In Memoriam is a touching poem that is obsessed with touch, haunted
by Arthur Hallam’s absent, disembodied or remembered hands. Focusing
on those moments in the poem when hands ‘reach’, ‘clasp’, ‘grasp’, ‘catch’,
‘tremble’, ‘weave’, ‘stretch’, ‘break’, ‘grasp’, ‘grapple’, ‘clap’, ‘strike’, ‘hold’
and – again and again – ‘touch’, it is possible to appreciate how the feeling
body that Tennyson’s elegy mourns is central to an understanding of what it
means to be touched by In Memoriam.
‘Touch’ is a word that belongs in the realm of the physical and the mate-
rial. As a noun it denotes one of the five physical senses; as a verb it describes
the act of one physical / material body coming into contact with another.
Therefore, if we use the word ‘touch’ to describe the way something has
affected us emotionally, we are likely to understand ourselves to be speaking
figuratively. If I describe an actor’s performance as ‘touching’, I am unlikely
to be talking about his physical manhandling of members of the cast or audi-
ence. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) records examples of ‘touch’
being used to describe emotional affect that date back almost as far as the
earliest recorded use of ‘touch’ in the English language. This suggests that the
difference between physical touch and emotional touch is not as great – or as
straightforward – as it seems, and that to express the communication of the
emotions in terms of touch is to acknowledge emotional experience as some-
thing material, to locate it within the feeling body.
One way to think about the materiality of emotional experience is to think
about the way the body registers emotion through a quickened heart beat,
through tears or through a blush. These bodily manifestations of feeling are
sometimes referred to as affective responses, or the language of affect. Modern
psychological theory still argues about whether the body’s affective response to
an encounter or event occurs before or as the result of mental processes so that
emotion ‘happens’ in the mind and is then communicated to the body.6 In the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the experience of bodily affect was under-
stood as evidence of the body’s ability to respond directly to the world around

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it. This way of knowing and interacting with the world through the body was
one of the founding ideas of the discourses of sentiment and sensibility, which
revolutionised the way literature was written and understood in Britain and
throughout Europe in the mid to late eighteenth century.
This new focus on sentiment and sensibility was influenced by the work
of philosophy, which developed new ideas about human nature and the way
humans relate to one another and to the world around them. John Locke’s
Empiricist treatise, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690),
argues that the self is a product of the world it encounters, that the mind begins
as a blank slate (tabula rasa) and that its ideas and understanding are formed
as the result of sense impressions of its environment. Taught by the senses, the
mind is subordinate to them, so that knowledge – of the self as well as of the
world – is entirely material.7 Worried by the implications of Locke’s material-
ism, which called into question an understanding of the human self as innately
moral, philosophers such as Hume and Shaftsbury suggested that, rather than
being entirely blank, the human mind was created with an ability to distin-
guish good from evil. However, this model retains an emphasis on bodily expe-
rience because it claims that moral judgement is felt before it is understood. If
anything, these modifications of Locke’s theory therefore extend the power of
the feeling body, giving it the capacity to judge as well as to know.
Sentiment and sensibility are terms that describe this capacity. The culture,
or ‘cult’, of sensibility placed great value on human feeling so that acute
emotional receptiveness, manifested through the weeping, sighing, swooning,
blushing body, was understood as the mark of refined, moral and intelligent
character. Literature contributed to this cult in a number of ways. The sen-
timental novel told the stories of men and women of feeling who embodied
the sentimental ideal, providing examples for its readership to follow and
inviting the reader to experience and exhibit emotional / bodily responses in
sympathy with the novel’s fictional characters. Likewise, readers of poetry
now looked for evidence of the fine sensibility of the poet in his or her verses
and expected to be moved by what they read. The Romantic formulation of
poetry as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling recollected in tran-
quillity’ (Wordsworth [1800] 1991) developed out of the sentimental tradi-
tion, and early Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge engage
directly with the Empiricist philosophy and sentimental discourse. In one
short lyric Wordsworth writes, ‘My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow
in the sky’ (Wordsworth [1807] 1982), recording the joy he experiences in
nature in terms of an immediate bodily response. As well as describing this
sentimental response, poetry now sought to elicit a like response in its reader-
ship, asserting a new confidence in its own importance for the development of
human subjectivity, understanding and knowledge.

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As Jerome McGann demonstrates in his detailed exploration of the poetics

of sensibility, the elegiac tradition also took a sentimental turn during this
period (McGann 1996: 29). Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard (1751) reflects on the sentimental reaction effected by the inscrip-
tions carved on a collection of gravestones:
Yet ev’n these bones from insult to protect
Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhimes and shapeless sculpture deck’d,
Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.
(Gray 1969: 77–80)
Here poetry stands in for the body of the deceased and of other mourners,
causing a sympathetic response on their behalf. The simple words of the
epitaph work on the sensible body of the poet, which replies with a release of
breath, a sentimental response that precedes language. It is interesting that the
‘rhimes’ that Gray reads on the gravestones and the sculptures that he sees are
‘uncouth’ and ‘shapeless’. By drawing attention to their lack of artistic accom-
plishment, Gray suggests that poetry should not be valued for its skill, but for
the quality of the sentiment that produced it. Gray’s elegy forms an important
part of In Memoriam’s sentimental inheritance. When the first reviews of In
Memoriam say that it is a ‘touching poem’, they respond to the elegy on its
own terms, indicating their knowledge and sympathetic understanding of the
cultural discourse that the elegy invokes.

‘Empty hands’
However, throughout In Memoriam, Tennyson’s mourner repeatedly expe-
riences what Angela Leighton describes as the ‘trouble of touch’ (Leighton
2007: 70), describing an inability to touch and be touched that indicates a
sensibility imprisoned by its own materiality. A similar crisis is more briefly
evoked in ‘Break, Break, Break’, a short lyric by Tennyson, written around
the time of Hallam’s death and published in 1842:
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
(1–4)
‘Break, break, break’ is a poem that describes the failure of sympathy. Out of
touch with the vanished hand of a loved one, the speaker is unable to establish
any meaningful connection with anything else. The simile that the lyric fails
to draw is that the speaker is like the cold grey stones against which the sea

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beats. The repeated, rhythmic invocation to the sea to ‘break’ might be read
as the expression of the speaker’s own desire to be broken down, or violently
moved by the experience of loss. Instead, the speaker remains untouched by
the natural scene he describes (his heart is not broken, nor does it leap up
like Wordsworth’s), or by the affective rhythms of his own lyric, which are
experienced as hollow, meaningless and without compensation. The same,
of course, cannot be said for the reader, who is moved, or touched, by the
speaker’s affective crisis.
The tactile images and figures of speech that pervade In Memoriam from
the outset suggest a materialist world view plunged into a crisis by the physi-
cal absence of the dead man’s body. As Buckley puts it, ‘the hand comes to
represent the material body that defines and isolates the individual and pulses
with the only sort of life he can immediately understand’ (Buckley 1960:
114). The first section begins with just such a figure of speech: ‘I held it truth
with him who sings’ (I, 1, my italics), a common turn of phrase that never-
theless suggests the physical apprehension of truth or knowledge. Tennyson
encourages this literal reading by developing the conceit in the following
stanzas:
But who shall so forecast the years
And find in loss a gain to match?
Or reach a hand through time to catch
The far-off interest of tears?
(I, 5–8)
Truths that can be held are physical, immediate and earthbound and so the
promise of future comfort is impossible to grasp. Limited within present
sensation the mourner can only resolve to ‘let love clasp grief’ (I, 9), to cling
bodily to the only impression he has left of the friend he has lost. Rather than
reaching through time, his hands can only ‘beat the ground’ (I, 12), an image
of poetic composition that identifies it as a crudely physical act.
From this materialist perspective, the ‘Old Yew’ that grows by the grave-
side in section II is an ideal mourner. It ‘graspest at the stones / That name the
underlying dead’ (II, 1–2), a model of enduring grief, ‘untouched’ (12) by the
changing seasons. The speaker dwells on the yew:
And gazing on thee, sullen tree,
Sick for thy stubborn hardihood,
I seem to fail from out my blood
And grow incorporate into thee.
(II, 13–16)
These lines recall (or perhaps parody) Romantic descriptions of the sensible
self’s sympathetic union with the natural world (‘My heart leaps up when I

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behold a rainbow in the sky’). The mourner’s apprehension of the tree via the
physical gaze leads to an experience of corporeal union that is a surrogate for
reunion with his friend. This return to the empirical certainties of the natural
world is also the theme of section III. The sorrow to which the mourner clings
speaks to him, offering a bleak image of a purely material universe in which
nature is represented as a ‘phantom’, ‘A hollow form with empty hands’ (III,
12). Listening to the ‘sweet and bitter’ voice of Sorrow, the mourner asks
whether he should accept or reject the vision of nature that she describes:
‘Embrace her as my natural good; / Or crush her, like a vice of blood, /
Upon the threshold of the mind’ (III, 14–16). Again this mental struggle is
represented in manual terms. The mourner may either ‘embrace’ or ‘crush’
Sorrow’s philosophy; thought is still located within the body.
Throughout the first half of In Memoriam the mourner continues to expe-
rience his loss in physical terms: ‘the attempt to recover the body of Hallam
[. . .] involves him in a long, tormented drama of touch’ (Leighton 2007: 69).
The part of Hallam’s body that is most often remembered and regretted is his
hand, which both represents and creates the bond of friendship. The hand
also writes and so Tennyson’s focus on Hallam’s hands also invites the reader
to think about the way that writing, or poetry, might relate to, or stand in for
the body. A short poem by John Keats, composed around 1819 and published
in 1892, in which the poet reflects on the relationship between hand and text,
provides a helpful way into Tennyson’s tactile poetics:
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d – see here it is
I hold it towards you.
(Keats [1819] 1972: 700)
In this unsettling lyric fragment the text attempts literally to touch the reader.
The hand that writes the poem preserves itself in the act of composition so
that, regardless of the fact that by the time the poem was published, Keats had
been dead for nearly seventy years, when the poem is read, the hand lives. It
performs the haunting that it promises, insisting both on the intimate con-
nection between written word and writing body, and on the ability of words
to act like, or in place of, bodies. The speaker of In Memoriam desires to be
haunted rather than to haunt. By continually dwelling on the dead and absent
hands of his friend, he invites comparison with the living hand that holds the
pen.

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Without the physical contact of hand in hand, the mourner’s isolation in

grief is absolute. In section VII, the mourner returns to the ‘dark house’ where
his friend used to live, stands at the door, but turns away without going in:
Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand.
A hand that can be clasped no more –
(VII, 1–5)
The description mingles hand and heart. Standing at the doors of the house,
he remembers, not his hand beating the door, but his heart beating in antici-
pation of the friendly handshake he would receive when the door was opened.
By slipping from heart to hand in this way, Tennyson again invokes a sen-
timental, materialist discourse, suggesting an intimate connection between
physical sense and emotional sensibility so that the heart is almost trans-
formed into a hand that beats and is touched. But at the word ‘hand’ the spell
of memory is broken and the mourner is forced to recognise himself as an iso-
lated figure within a bleak cityscape, where ‘ghastly through the drizzling rain
/ On the bald streets breaks the blank day’ (VII, 9–12). The hard alliteration
of ‘bald’, ‘break’ and ‘blank’ emphasises the materiality of poetic language as
it beats within the body of the reader.
In the ‘fair ship’ lyrics, some of the earliest composed by Tennyson, the
mourner’s anticipation of the ship carrying ‘my lost Arthur’s loved remains’
(again note that it is the remains, i.e. the body, that is described as an object
of love here) is experienced through the senses:
I hear the noise about thy keel;
I hear the bell struck in the night:
I see the cabin-window bright;
I see the sailor at the wheel.
(X, 1–4)
The repetition of ‘I hear’, ‘I hear’, ‘I see’, ‘I see’ creates a list of sense impres-
sions felt in the mourner’s imagination that express his desire for the safe
return of Hallam’s body. Its return is prefaced by a series of reunions between
other bodies. The ship brings ‘the sailor to his wife’, ‘travelled men from
vanished lands’ and ‘letters unto trembling hands’ (X, 5–7). This last image
again encourages a reading of word as body. The trembling hand, an image
familiar to readers of the sentimental body, responds to the touch of the letter
as if it were the living body that it both represents and guarantees. In contrast,
Hallam’s body is figured as a physical absence, obscure and invisible: ‘thy
dark freight, a vanished life’ (X, 8). The mourner reflects that his hankering

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after the remains of his friend is therefore an ‘idle dream’, but it maintains its
hold over him and the section concludes with the haunting image of a body
lost at sea: ‘hands so often clasped in mine, / Should toss and tangle with
the shells’ (X, 19–20). Isolated from its human context, the familiar hand is
made strange, transformed into a specimen of marine biology, a ghoulish sea
anemone or a piece of flotsam.
Canto XIV is the stuff of more sustained fantasy. Continuing to address
himself to the ship that bears Arthur’s body, the mourner imagines hearing
the news that it has ‘touched the land’ (XIV, 2), a touch which prefaces the
arrival, not of dead, but of living hands, ‘beckoning unto those they know’
(XIV, 8) and the return of his friend. He considers how he would respond if
‘The man I held as half-divine; / Should strike a sudden hand in mine’ (XIV,
10–11) and concludes, ‘I should not feel it to be strange’ (XIV, 20). Because
grief has been experienced thus far as a physical absence or loss, the mourner
is easily able to imagine reunion. Arthur’s death is conflated with his journey
overseas and so his return seems entirely plausible. However, this happy scene
rests on a flimsy construction of ‘if’s, ‘should’s and ‘and’s. It is a hasty list
of possibilities, driven by the speaker’s desire, but undermined by the condi-
tional mood, which betrays the immateriality of the imagined scene. When
the ship does finally arrive, in canto XVIII, vital hand does not clasp vital
hand; instead, Arthur’s head is borne by the ‘pure hands’ of those that make
up the funeral procession, an image that emphasises the passive vulnerability
of the corpse and its new relationship with the living.

‘Lame hands of faith’

The materialism that dominates In Memoriam’s understanding and articula-
tion of bereavement in its early sections, making the mourner’s separation
from his lost friend so absolute, begins to lose its hold as time passes, allow-
ing for the possibility of a kind of touch that might extend beyond the grave.
A. C. Bradley writes that ‘the process of change [in In Memoriam] consists
largely in the conquest of the soul over its bondage to sense’ (Bradley 1901:
42). This change begins during the first of three Christmases that chart the
poem’s cyclical progress, as the mourner’s sensible hands join those of his
family in a solemn performance of the customary festivities: ‘With trembling
fingers did we weave / The holly round the Christmas hearth’ (XXX, 1–2).
‘Hand-in-hand’ (XXX, 11), the group sit in silence and then sing ‘A merry
song we sang with him / Last year’ (XXX, 15–16), so that community, or fel-
low-feeling, is established through the joining of hands and voices, a tentative
suggestion of the touching properties of poetry. Far from the work of the poet
alone, however, this awakening of sentiment is established as the work of

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Christian faith within a domestic, familial setting that ends with a prayer for
the intervention of God’s touch in the approaching dawn: ‘O Father, touch
the east, and light / The light that shone when Hope was born’ (XXX, 31–2).
Christian discourse offers the mourner a way of conceiving and articulating
touch that is both physical and metaphysical. Section XXXVI talks about the
story of the Gospel, ‘truth embodied in a tale’ (7), so that the truth of God,
which is beyond language, is bodied forth both in New Testament narrative
and in the living body of Christ. Words stand for and act like the bodies they
describe, sharing the divine agency of the incarnation: ‘And so the Word
had breath, and wrought / With human hands the creed of creeds’ (XXXVI,
9–10). Here Tennyson adapts the words of John 1: 14: ‘And the word became
flesh and dwelt among us.’ The change from ‘flesh to breath’ demands the
reader’s attention. ‘Breath’, which implies speech as well as life, is, perhaps,
a more literal rendering of the incarnated word and so Tennyson’s rephras-
ing of the famous words from John’s Gospel makes an emphatic connection
between human body, divine power and language. The works of God, word
and body are so closely related in these lines that the ‘human hands’ that
wrought the ‘creed of creeds’ are almost, but not quite, the human hands that
wrote the creed of creeds. This reading is encouraged by the following stanza,
which describes the power of the embodied word to reach men from all walks
of life: ‘Which he may read that binds the sheaf, / Or builds the house, or
digs the grave’ (XXXVI, 13–14). These three manual labourers will read and
understand the Gospel because, the stanza implies, it is also a piece of manual
work, wrought / written by human hands like theirs.
As In Memoriam works towards its faltering recovery of faith (‘I stretch
lame hands of faith’ (LV, 17)), it expresses hope that the touch of friendship
will be renewed beyond the grave. Section XL concludes, ‘But thou and I
have shaken hands / Till growing winters lay me low’ (XL, 29–30), lines that
echo section VII: ‘A hand that can be clasped no more’; however, rather than
breaking off to consider the isolated figure of the mourner guiltily creeping
to the house where he knows he will not find his friend, these lines run on
into the possibility of another meeting. The mourner also allows himself to
hope that the memory of touch that haunts him might likewise haunt his
friend. He wonders if some remnant of his dead friend’s sensing self remains
intact, receptive to the memory of a touch that is both ‘dim’ and ‘dreamy’ but
that the mourner prays will yield a response. Like the imagined reunion of
mourner and friend in section XIV, these lines are written in the conditional
mood, but whereas the first reunion is described using the future unreal condi-
tional (‘if . . . should’), which emphasises the impossibility of Arthur’s return,
the second is described using the future real conditional (‘if . . . then’), which
contains the hope of renewed connection.

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The mourner attempts to reason out this hope in the following section,
using the image of a child who gains self-consciousness, or a sense of identity
via a touch that, like so many of the instances of touch in In Memoriam,
prefaces separation (Ricks’s notes to the poem inform us that this image was
borrowed from an essay by Hallam, entitled ‘On Sympathy’, which Hallam
presented at a meeting of the Apostles and which was subsequently published
in the Remains). Touch, again associated with speech, the means by which
the child establishes his identity in relation to the world around him, is a
strangely isolating act, understood as a meeting of physical boundaries that
confirms difference or otherness rather than achieving connection. The body
is a ‘frame’ that ‘binds’ the individual within himself until ‘the second birth of
death’ (XLV, 11 and 16). The tentative hope that the mourner may be remem-
bered and recognised by his dead friend, which is offered by the analogy of
birth and death, gives way to the image of the isolated living body in which
the speaker remains trapped.
The question of posthumous reunion returns in section LXIV, via an
extended metaphor that again describes life in terms of a sequence of manual
tasks and experiences. The mourner’s separation from his friend is compared
with the separation of childhood companions in adulthood, as one pursues
a successful political career, leaving the other to live out a rural existence in
the place of their birth. The mourner imagines that, in spite of their separate
lives, each retains a memory of their earlier life together. This metaphor is a
more straightforward expression of the hope and anxiety surrounding the
permanence of the mourner’s separation from his friend described in XL and
XLI, a concern that presses on the poem throughout. Like the ‘baby new to
earth and sky’, the two friends establish their identity through different kinds
of touch. One ‘grasps’, ‘grapples’, ‘clutches’ and ‘moulds’ (LXIV, 5–10); the
other ‘reaps the labour of his hands’ (LXIV, 26). Although the work the two
men do and the status they achieve is markedly different, the way their work
is described emphasises their shared, bodily humanity, inferring connection
even as it talks about separation and establishing grounds for a continued and
significant bond between them. The metaphor also works to make the separa-
tion of the living from the dead more surmountable, reducing it to a matter of
physical distance that might easily be bridged.
Just as body and embodied language extend their reach beyond the iso-
lating limits that separate life and death in In Memoriam, so the mourner
begins to imagine a reciprocal touch, reaching back towards him. Section
LXIX describes a dream in which the poet / mourner sees himself as a Christ
figure. The elegy itself is reimagined as a crown of thorns, which the mourner
binds around his own head, an act of self-martyrdom that invites scorn from
a public who, like the detractors in section XXI, voice the poet’s own doubts

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about the value and purpose of his elegy. However, in his dream, the poet
finds ‘an angel of the night’ who ‘reached the glory of a hand, / That seemed
to touch it into leaf’ (LXIX, 17–18). The transformative touch of the angel
who might be Hallam, an agent of God, or both, enlivens crown of thorns or
verses, so that they are transformed into a symbol of the new birth of spring.
This dream of recovery, which alludes to the resurrection of pastoral elegy
(a resurrection achieved here through the direct intervention of touch rather
than via the natural cycle of the seasons), is invoked repeatedly throughout
the second half of the poem. Section LXXX concludes with a desire that
Hallam might ‘Reach out dead hands and comfort me’ (LXXX, 16), and
section LXXXIV looks forward to the time when God will ‘reach us out the
shining hand, / And take us as a single soul’ (LXXXIV, 43–4). The power
of this touch is not always benevolent. The poet describes an anniversary of
his friend’s death as a ‘Day, marked as with some hideous crime, / When the
dark hand struck down through time, / And cancelled nature’s best’ (LXXII,
18–19), and in section LXXXV Hallam’s death is described in more gently
euphemistic terms: ‘God’s finger touched him, and he slept’ (LXXXV, 20).
However, even these descriptions of Hallam’s death, which imagine God’s
will as embodied act, comprehending spiritual belief in physical terms, break
down the barriers that determine the poet’s isolation from his friend in the
earlier sections of the poem.
The mourner’s desire for a reciprocal touch achieves its fullest and most
confident expression in sections XCIII and XCV. The touch that the mourner
despairs of, alludes to and dreams about throughout In Memoriam is com-
manded and then received. In XCIII the poet asks the spirit of his friend to
visit him while he sleeps, describing slumber as the temporary death of the
sensing body, ‘where all the nerve of sense is numb’. The mourner accepts,
‘I shall not see thee,’ that he will not encounter a ‘visual shade of someone
lost’, and describes the place where his friend’s spirit now lives as ‘thy sight-
less range’. He does not desire to see his friend, but to be touched by him,
requesting that he

Descend, and touch, and enter; hear

The wish too strong for words to name;
That in the blindness of the frame
My ghost may feel that thine is near.
(XCIII, 13–16)

Here again, sight, or blindness, represents the limitation of physical senses,

whereas touch is imagined exceeding or penetrating the frame of the body,
sensed by the spirit / ghost of the mourner. The recognition of one spirit
by another, one ghost by another, returns the elegy to the conventions of

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sentiment, describing a fellow-feeling that transcends death. The other sense

that is invoked is hearing, which responds to wishes rather than words. In the
same way that touch extends beyond the material contact of one body with
another, hearing is described as receptive to something beyond language. The
lines establish a connection between the limits of the body and the limits of
language, and present a powerful challenge to both. At the same time the
words of the poem draw attention to themselves as things that are both seen
and heard. ‘Hear’ might be heard as ‘here’ (‘Descend, and touch, and enter
here’), even as it is seen or read as ‘hear’. Hearing and the immediate presence
implied by ‘here’ are thereby mapped on to one another, suggesting some-
thing of the touching properties of poetry and so promising the sympathetic
connection for which the mourner longs.
This promise is fulfilled in the next section but one, when ‘word by word,
and line by line, / The dead man touched me from the past’ (XCV, 33–4), a
reunion of souls that is achieved through the reading of letters. Again this
occurs as night, when the mourner is alone and the world is dark, but it is
encircled by a richly sensed experience of the natural world around him.
No longer cut off from the natural world, the mourner is gathered into its
‘dark arms’, in a relationship of renewed sympathy with nature that perhaps
enables him to feel the touch of his friend.

Profit and Loss: IV, X, XIII, XX, XXXV, XLII, XLVI, LII, LIV,
LV, LVI, LVIII, LXI, LXII, LXXX, LXXXI, LXXXII, CVII, CVIII,
CXXIII, CXXVII, CXXVIII, Epilogue

An Idle King
In 1833 Tennyson composed a series of poems that dramatised the voices of
four characters from classical mythology and religious history: ‘Tithonus’, a
man who wished for immortality but failed to ask for eternal youth and so
was doomed to live out an eternal life of increasing decrepitude; ‘Tiresias’,
the blind prophet; ‘St Simeon Stylites’, who achieved sainthood by living
out his old age on the top of a high column; and ‘Ulysses’, the warrior hero
of Homer’s Odyssey, who is imagined after his return home from his epic
voyage, a bored and ageing ruler. These poems yield interesting readings in the
context of Hallam’s death. Through the mouths of these old men, Tennyson,
aged only twenty-four, communicates his grief in terms of an intense world-
weariness and a sense of having been left behind. As Tennyson himself put it,
in a conversation with his friend James Knowles: ‘There is more about myself
in “Ulysses”, which was written under the sense of loss and that all had gone
by, but that still life must be fought out to the end. It was more written with

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the feeling of his loss upon me than many poems in In Memoriam’ (in Ricks
1989: 113). With these remarks in mind, it is worth noting that the opening
lines of ‘Ulysses’ are concerned, not with loss, but with profit (or lack of it):
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
(‘Ulysses’, 1–5)
Ulysses reflects on how best to spend his declining years and concludes that
his current occupation is likely to yield ‘little profit’. He describes his life as an
economic transaction, whereby the spending or investing of himself ought to
yield payment.8 However, as Herbert Tucker puts it, ‘the outstanding feature
of Ulysses’ tally sheet is that the quantities fail to tally. The books are out of
balance’ (Tucker 1988: 213). The ageing king understands his domestic reign
over Ithaca as an unwilling involvement in an unfamiliar and unsatisfac-
tory economic system. Describing himself as idle within a barren landscape,
he suggests that a natural economy in which labour yields harvest has been
replaced by a less reciprocal economic exchange in which he spends himself
in the work of legislation and his race give him nothing in return. Instead,
they ‘hoard’ – an unprofitable economic activity that is related to the idle
consumption of eating and sleeping.
The image of a hoarded life returns a few lines later:
Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From the eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself
(24–9)
Ulysses’ decision to set off on one final voyage is again described as the
choice of one economy over another. A model of stagnant accumulation
(‘life piled on life’) is rejected in favour of a model of transaction where
the ‘little’ that remains promises more. As many critics of the poem have
pointed out, Ulysses never makes this final transaction. The poem ends with
an expression of resolve ‘to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield’, but with
no definite action. We are therefore led to question whether Ulysses’ speech
is no more than idle rhetoric and whether Tennyson’s acknowledgement that
‘life must be fought out to the end’ is, in fact, overwhelmed by his sense of
loss. This section of the Reading Guide aims to consider those moments in In

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Memoriam when the speaker, like Ulysses, has to choose between hoarding
and spending. It will discuss the relationship between mourning and econom-
ics by looking at Freudian theories of mourning and it will think about the
way the poem engages with the different models of change and exchange that
were introduced by the discoveries of Victorian natural science.

The Work of Mourning

The economic vocabulary employed by Ulysses returns in In Memoriam
in two sections that express doubt in the work / worth of elegy. In section
XXXV, the speaker holds an imaginary conversation with Love and asks
whether it is worth trying to keep his love for his friend alive in the knowledge
that, in the end, everything will be forgotten. The conversation ends with a
feeling of resignation – ‘O me, what profits it to put / An idle case?’ (XXXV,
17–18) – and the speaker reflects that it is impossible to love fully with death
always in mind. In section CVIII, the same words are used in an expression
of more sustained resolve. Echoing Ulysses’ vocabulary, the mourner adopts
a similar economic position. He rejects an isolated and introspective state,
which he describes in terms of eating, feeding and harvesting, invoking the
economy of agriculture and describing a series of fruitless or uncertain invest-
ments that he decides to exchange for the ‘fruit [. . .] of sorrow under human
skies’ (CVIII, 14). The choice he makes here is not between mourning and not
mourning but between two different kinds of mourning: one more economi-
cally sound (fruitful or profitable) than the other. However, as with so many
of the moments of resolve and revelation that punctuate In Memoriam, and
like the unfulfilled resolve of Ulysses at the end of his monologue, the invest-
ment that Tennyson’s speaker appears determined to make in this section is
repeatedly held back. We cannot trust the strength of mind that seems to be
communicated in the repeated ‘will’ at the beginning of this section and might
begin to suspect that the speaker is trying to convince himself, as well as us,
of his purpose.
The economic choice that is presented to Ulysses and to Tennyson’s
mourner enables us to relate Tennyson’s experience and expression of grief to
an essay by Freud, the founder of psychoanalytic theory, called ‘On Mourning
and Melancholia’ (1917). In his essay, Freud compares two different but con-
nected psychological states: mourning, which he describes as ‘normal [. . .],
commonly the reaction to the loss of a beloved person’, and melancholia,
which he describes as a ‘narcissistic mental disorder’ that ‘appears in the
place of mourning’ (Freud 2005: 203). One of the ways that Freud describes
the difference between these two states is through the language of econom-
ics. He talks about mourning as a kind of psychological ‘work’. The person

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who has experienced a bereavement or loss must work to acknowledge that

the lost person or object no longer exists, cut her connection to that person
or object, and turn back to or reconnect with reality. Freud writes that even
the ‘normal’ process or work of mourning ‘is carried out piecemeal at great
expenditure of time and investment of energy’ (205). He uses the language of
expense and investment to explain mourning as the means by which a loss
might be regained.
In the case of melancholia, mourning does not ‘work’; or, to be more
precise, work is carried out, but it is the wrong work and so no profit is
achieved. Freud argues that the reason for this is that the loss that has caused
this psychological reaction is unknown or somehow less certain. Freud
writes that this might happen if someone has not died, but has been lost to
the mourner in another way, ‘as, for example, in the case of an abandoned
bride’ (205) (an example that might make us think again about the pairs of
separated lovers that Tennyson’s mourner compares himself to throughout In
Memoriam). Because the mourner is unable to identify his loss as a distinct
object or solid fact, he cannot achieve separation from it and so the work of
mourning turns inward, becoming a kind of loss of self and, in Freud’s words,
‘drawing investment energies to itself from all sides’ (212). In his essay, Freud
mentions Hamlet, a literary figure who provides a good example of a melan-
cholic subject. Hamlet’s father is dead, but because of the circumstances of his
death, Hamlet is unable to mourn successfully and he is trapped in a torpor
of indecision and inaction. One of Hamlet’s best-known soliloquies begins by
suggesting economic failure: ‘How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable / Seem
to me all the uses of this world’ (I, ii, 133–4, emphasis mine). Hamlet’s psy-
chological state isolates him from the day-to-day world. He hoards himself
away from it, shuts himself from his subjects, spending emotional energy but
profiting nothing. To return to ‘Ulysses’ and In Memoriam, the unprofitable
idleness and hoarding described by Ulysses, or the elegist’s solitary eating of
his own heart and ‘vacant yearning’ can also be understood as descriptions
of a melancholic state. Both speakers are caught up in an economy of melan-
choly, where the exchange of death for life cannot be transacted.
In the case of ‘Ulysses’, the currency that Ulysses must hoard or invest is
his own life. His speech makes a persuasive argument about how he should
spend his declining years. Similarly, in In Memoriam the speaker repeatedly
tries and fails to invest in the routines and rituals of the world around him (for
more on these rituals see the following section, ‘Cycle and Ritual’). However,
in both poems the speakers also comment on the economic work of their own
words. The self-absorbed voice of the poetic subject can be regarded as a mel-
ancholic investment (hoarding or eating one’s own heart) that prevents profit-
able transaction. According to this reading, which chimes with W. H. Auden’s

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famous comment that ‘there was little about melancholia that [Tennyson]
didn’t know; and little else that he did’ (Auden 1973: 222), a working, fruitful
economy only begins at the point when the poem ends. On the other hand, we
might think about each poem as a text that carries out the work of mourning,
gradually reaping the ‘fruit [. . .] of sorrow’.

Idle Tears
Tennyson dwells on the meaning of tears in a short lyric, which was published
as part of his long narrative poem, The Princess (1847):

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

Tears from the depths of some divine despair
Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
(‘Tears, Idle Tears’, 1–5)

Idle tears, like Ulysses the idle king, might be identified as figures of mel-
ancholy.9 Their meaning is unknown and they serve no known purpose,
constituting emotional investment without profit. They are not caused by a
specific loss or bereavement, but by thinking about the past while experienc-
ing the beauty of the present. The lyric employs images of dawn and dusk, in
which night and day, death and life, past and present occupy the same space.
However, whereas Ulysses is unhappy in the idle half-life of Ithaca and strives
to move onwards, the speaker of ‘Tears, Idle Tears’ seems to enjoy the melan-
choly experience he describes. If Ulysses seeks to escape from his melancho-
lia, then the voice of this later lyric indulges in it, creating something that is
both ‘sad’ and ‘sweet’ and which the reader is invited to enjoy. The perverse
enjoyment of idleness explored in ‘Tears, Idle Tears’ is helpful to bear in
mind when thinking about work and idleness, profit and loss, mourning and
melancholia in In Memoriam. The elegist attempts to carry out the work of
mourning, but he is also attracted to melancholia’s idle tears.
Peter Sacks argues that In Memoriam is balanced between these two
impulses, reflecting ‘an attitude that we recognise as melancholia’ while at
the same time representing ‘a successful work of mourning’ (Sacks 1985:
169). He encourages us to think about the form of the poem in terms of an
economy of melancholy, arguing that the length of the poem, its ‘fragmentary
hoarding of self-encircling but incomplete eddies or wreaths of song’ (183),
represents the way the mourner ‘accumulates rather than lets go’ (168). From
this perspective the mourner becomes a kind of miser, and the elegy might
be compared to a growing pile of gold hidden under the mattress. However,

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Herbert Tucker suggests that it would be more accurate to think of the accu-
mulative form of In Memoriam in capitalist terms, so that the poem is more
like money placed in a bank, which accrues interest by carrying out work of
its own over the passing of time. Tucker writes: ‘the therapeutic magic of In
Memoriam – which in the broadest terms converts the debt burden of “loss”
into “gain” – [is] a miracle of emotional capitalism’ (Tucker 1988: 392). He
quotes from section I of the poem, which adds the vocabulary of finance to
that of song and touch. The mourner asks, ‘But who shall so forecast the years
/ And find in loss a gain to match?’, expressing his scepticism that the loss of
Hallam might be recouped in the distant future. The hands that the mourner
attempts to imagine reaching through time attempt to catch ‘the far-off inter-
est of tears’ (I, 8, emphasis mine). The mourner, like Ulysses, thinks that his
books are out of balance. He sees no prospect of compensation for the loss of
Hallam and, at the opening of the poem, expresses doubt in a capitalist model
of investment where interest is paid ‘for the forbearance of debt’ (OED).
Seeing no prospect of profit from his tears, the mourner considers them to be
a poor investment and turns away from the natural or conventional expres-
sions of grief (what Freud might describe as the ‘normal affect of mourning’
(203)).
However, tears and weeping are referred to repeatedly throughout In
Memoriam. Often the shedding of tears is associated with poetic composition;
both are outward signs of an inner grief. For the elegist, both tears and words
represent a currency of uncertain value. In section XX, the mourner describes
two different kinds of grief:

My lighter moods are like to these

That out of words a comfort win;
But there are other griefs within,
And tears that at their fountain freeze;
(XX, 9–12)

He suggests that his less intense periods of mourning do serve an economic

function – words win, or earn comfort – but that the grief that is felt most
deeply does not. Unable to express itself using tears or words, this grief
remains unspent (we might describe his tears, anachronistically, as frozen
assets) and so the capitalist marketplace of mourning cannot work. In section
IV, he desires that these frozen tears should be allowed to flow: ‘Break, thou
deep vase of chilling tears, / That grief has shaken into frost!’ (IV, 11–12);
but in section LVIII, the mourner’s muse asks ‘Wherefore grieve / Thy breth-
ren with a fruitless tear?’ (LVIII, 9–10), suggesting that tears are a wasteful
or meaningless expense. The fluctuating value placed on tears and the other
expressions of grief that are associated with them – namely, poetry – points

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towards the mourner’s own uncertainty about the kind of mourning-work he

carries out.
Idleness is also an idea that tempts and troubles the mourner, who often
accuses himself of idle action. In section X, idleness is again associated with
the conventions of mourning. The speaker confesses his belief that it is
better for Hallam’s body to be buried in native soil than to perish at sea. He
describes this belief as an ‘idle dream’ caused by ‘habit’ (X, 9), but neverthe-
less desires Hallam’s body to be returned safely to England. He is accused of
fretting ‘“like an idle girl”’ (LII, 13); describes his love as ‘an idle tale’ (LXII,
3) and, in the Epilogue, writes that, looking back, his elegiac lyrics appear ‘As
echoes out of weaker times, / As half but idle brawling rhymes, / The sport
of random sun and shade’ (Epilogue, 22–4). In order to bring the poem to an
end, the mourner discredits the work carried out over the course of its 131
lyric sections. His ability finally to put an end to the idleness that he accuses
himself of throughout the elegy demonstrates change or recovery and there-
fore suggests that his words and tears were not so idle after all. As Peter Sacks
suggests, the difference between mourning and melancholia, hoarding and
spending in In Memoriam is not straightforward and the poem represents a
paradoxical economy in which idleness performs a kind of work.

What hope of answer or redress?

In Memoriam not only employs economic language to describe the individual
psychology of mourning. It also talks about the mourned object as a loss
that must be repaid. At different points in the poem Hallam is compared to
money or economic produce. The mourner watches the approaching sails of
the ship that carries Arthur’s body ‘as though they brought but merchants’
bales’ (XIII, 19), allowing the reader to think about Hallam as an object of
economic exchange. He describes aspects of Hallam’s character in financial
terms, making references to Hallam’s ‘ransomed reason’ (LXI, 2) and his
‘heart-affluence’ (the riches of his heart) (CIX, 1); and in a section addressed
to Charles Tennyson, he compares his relationship with his brother to his
relationship with Hallam by talking about himself and Hallam as different
kinds of currency. In each of these examples, Hallam’s death becomes a meas-
urable, material payment made to nature and to God, and so the mourner
looks to both religion and natural science to find compensation.
As we saw earlier in this Reading Guide, when the mourner cries out ‘What
hope of answer, or redress?’, the reply comes, ‘Behind the veil, behind the
veil’ (LVI, 27–8). The mourner wants an answer, an explanation for Hallam’s
death, but he also wants redress, or compensation. The suggestion made here
is that repayment will be made in the afterlife, so that, in crude terms, loss

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on earth is exchanged for heavenly gain. In Memoriam struggles towards this

hope. In section XLII, the speaker finds comfort in the thought that he may
later reap the reward of his loss by feeding on the fruits of Hallam’s greater
experience. Hallam, by now a ‘lord of large experience’ will ‘train / To riper
growth’ the ‘mind and will’ (XLII, 7–8) of his less experienced friend. He
imagines the joy he will find in ‘reaping’ the truths that Hallam has learned.
This is one of many occasions when Tennyson employs the vocabulary of
agricultural economy to talk about religious faith. A few sections later, it
is not Hallam’s lost future, but Hallam and Tennyson’s shared past that is
imagined ripening to fruition in ‘that deep dawn behind the tomb’ (XLVI,
6). There, the past ‘bloom[s]’ into an eternal landscape. By talking about the
relationship between past and future in these terms, the mourner begins to
transform his loss into something natural, so that Hallam’s sudden death,
which is initially recognised as an untimely and unnatural rupture, becomes
part of the economic cycles of sowing and harvesting.
Sections LXXX to LXXXII return to these meditations on loss and gain,
this time combining images of agricultural economy with a vocabulary that
is more directly financial. In section LXXX the mourner describes a ‘vague
desire’ that the situation be reversed and that he had died first, instead of
Hallam. Hallam, whom the speaker considers to be superior to him in every
other way, is now also described as the ideal mourner, providing an example
for the speaker to follow:

I make a picture in the brain;

I hear the sentence that he speaks;
He bears the burthen of the weeks
But turns his burthen into gain.
His credit thus shall set me free;
And, influence-rich to soothe and save,
Unused example from the grave
Reach out dead hands to comfort me.
(LXXX, 15–16)
The economic work going on in these stanzas is twofold. Firstly, Hallam
is imagined turning the burden of his grief into gain. He does this through
speech and therefore provides a model not only for an effective economic
system of mourning but also for the role of words – and, by extension, poetry
– in that system. Hallam is described as both the mourner and the poet that
Tennyson is trying to be. Secondly, the example of Hallam is itself shown to
have economic value. The speaker refers to Hallam’s ‘credit’, a word that
means both ‘good name, reputation, honour’ (OED) and that which ‘enables
a person or body of persons to be trusted with goods or money in expectation

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of future payment’ (OED). This double meaning allows us to read Hallam’s

death in capitalist terms. Because Hallam died early, the example of his life
is ‘unused’ and therefore exists as credit. The speaker hopes that the unused
riches of Hallam’s influence might now be cashed in.
Section LXXXI pursues a different line of thought, complaining that, by
taking Arthur early, Death has prevented the mourner’s love for his friend
from fulfilling its potential. In this instance Hallam’s sudden death seems at
first to disrupt rather than to participate in the natural economy of agricul-
ture. Love is compared to a plant or crop, harvested before it was ‘mature in
ear’ (LXXXI, 4), when it still had ‘hope of richer store’ (5). However, Death,
who is given the last word, demonstrates a better knowledge of agriculture
and explains, ‘“My sudden frost was sudden gain, / And gave all ripeness
to the grain, / It might have drawn from after-heat”’ (LXXXI, 10–12).
Again, the circumstances of Hallam’s death find a parallel in nature that
rebalances the books of loss and gain so that, in section LXXXII, the speaker
is content that ‘transplanted human worth / Will bloom to profit otherwhere’
(LXXXII, 11–12).
Tennyson places particular emphasis on the periods of inactivity that
punctuate the agricultural year. Harvest is the result of ‘fruitful hours of still
increase’, a ‘wealthy peace’ (XLVI, 10 and 11), and the mourner is advised
to ‘Abide: thy wealth is gathered in, / When Time hath sundered shell from
pearl’ (LII, 15–16). According to this economic model, waiting is a sort of
work. The remaining years of Tennyson’s life, and particularly the three years
of grief that In Memoriam charts, accrue value that will be reaped or gath-
ered in the future. This is the theme of sections CXVII and CXVIII, which
consider the ‘work of Time’ (CXVIII, 1). The ‘days and hours’ that separate
the mourner from his friend work to achieve ‘fuller gain of after bliss’ (CXVII,
4). ‘Distance’ creates ‘desire of nearness doubly sweet’, (CXVII, 6) so that the
delight that they will experience when they meet again will ‘a hundredfold
accrue’ (CXVII, 8).
Tennyson’s use of numerical calculations in these stanzas – ‘doubly’, ‘a
hundredfold’ – demonstrates how time is measured and evaluated like a kind
of commodity or currency with which the mourner stakes his claim on the
future. With this in mind, the description of ‘measured language’ in section V
gains new significance. The measures of the elegy’s metrical patterns do not
just mark time; they also keep count. Each stanza gives a material weight to
the time of loss, so that the mourner can demonstrate just how much he is
owed. In the Epilogue, time is enumerated again:

Though I since then have numbered o’er

Some thrice three years: they went and came,

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Remade the blood and changed the frame,

And yet is love not less, but more
(Epilogue, 9–12)

Between the end of the final section and the beginning of the Epilogue, three
years have become nine and the work carried out during the time that the
preceding stanzas record has trebled. At the wedding of his sister the mourner
begins to experience the fruits of his labour. There is a sense of repayment
here – of gain made for loss suffered – but there is also a sense of gain beyond
calculation. The mourner’s precise ‘thrice three’ receives ‘more’, a quantity
that is not and cannot be measured. The Epilogue is full of the language of
increase: ‘regret is dead, but love is more’ (Epilogue, 17); the mourner has
‘grown’ to ‘something greater’ (Epilogue, 20); his sister is a rose that ‘grew’
and ‘grows’ for her husband (Epilogue, 35–6); and the wedding celebration
is a ‘wealth / Of words and wit’. These wealthy words suggest, finally, the
possibility of a new kind of economy, one that is invoked again in the Preface
when the speaker declares, ‘Let knowledge grow from more to more, / But
more of reverence in us dwell’ (Prologue, 25–6). ‘More’ leads to ‘more’ and
yet ‘more’, an incalculable profit that comes from God.

Idle Ore
Christopher Ricks’s notes to the poem draw attention to the similarity
between the Prologue’s expectation that more knowledge will lead to more
reverence and the following sentence from Vestiges of the Natural History
of Creation by Robert Chambers: ‘The acquisition of this knowledge is con-
sequently an available means of our growing in a genuine reverence for him
[God]’ (233). Chambers’s Vestiges (1844) was one of two influential forerun-
ners to On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (1859). The other was
The Principles of Geology by Charles Lyell, published in 1833–4. The theo-
ries set out in these publications differ significantly, both from one another
and from Darwin’s theory of evolution, but both presented a huge challenge
to a Judeo-Christian understanding of a God-created universe. Lyell used
evidence of rock formations and fossils to demonstrate the massive geological
changes that had shaped the earth and its species over time. Chambers set out
a theory of transmutation, arguing that all living species (including humans)
developed from earlier, less sophisticated forms. Tennyson read both Lyell
and Chambers in the years between Hallam’s death and the publication of In
Memoriam, but he was unwilling to admit that his poem was directly influ-
enced by these controversial theories, claiming that the sections that deal with
evolutionary theory were composed before the publication of Chambers’s

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Vestiges. However, the poem’s ‘honest doubt’ is often caused by observations

of the natural world which call the certain returns of faith into question.
As we have seen, Christian faith provides a benevolent image of a natural
world, where ‘not a worm is cloven in vain’ (LIV, 9); but in sections LV
and LVI, this economy is called into question when Nature is shown to be a
careless and haphazard book-keeper. The mourner complains that, although
Nature seems to ensure the survival of whole species, ‘she’ is ‘careless of the
single life’ (LV, 11). This failure to account for individuals is also recognised
in Chambers, who suggests that nature operates through an economy of
chance, which disrupts a balanced give-and-take that makes sacrifice mean-
ingful. In the broader scheme of things, the individual is not counted and
therefore does not count / matter.
The mourner’s doubts become more insistent in the following section, as
the extent of Nature’s carelessness increases. Drawing on Lyell’s contention
that ‘species cannot be immortal, but must perish, one after the other, like
the individuals which compose them’ (1835: iii, 155), Tennyson imagines an
abrupt interruption from Nature herself, who declares the full measure of
her indifference, crying, ‘“A thousand types are gone: / I care for nothing, all
shall go”’ (LVI, 3–4). ‘A thousand’, ‘nothing’ and ‘all’ are quantities that lend
uncompromising extremes of scale to the ravages of evolution, making the
mourner’s single loss appear absolutely insignificant. With the stakes raised in
this way, Hallam becomes a metonym (a part that represents a greater whole)
for the human race – ‘Man, her last work, who seemed so fair’ (LVI, 9) – and
his death prefigures human extinction. Hallam’s significance is not increased
by this comparison; instead, the destruction of the race seems to matter as
much or as little as the end of a single life. ‘Blown about the desert dust / Or
sealed within the iron hills’ (19–20), humanity appears flimsy and insubstan-
tial compared to the weight and force of the natural world.
However, Lyell’s geological theory does not entirely support this nihilis-
tic interpretation of nature. Principles argues that geological change works
towards an eventual good; that ‘the general tendency of subterranean move-
ments, when their effects are considered for a sufficient lapse of ages, is emi-
nently beneficial’ (ii, 290). From this perspective, nature is not ‘red in tooth
and claw’, an agent of uncalculating destruction; she is a careful investor,
working towards long-term stability and profit. In fact, as Isobel Armstrong
points out, Lyell talks about the systems that govern geological change as
an ‘economy’, whereby damage always leads to repair (Armstrong 1993:
254).
It is this perspective that the mourner adopts in the closing sections of In
Memoriam. In section CXVIII, he compares Hallam’s death with the creation
of the human race rather than its extinction. The second stanza trusts that

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‘those we call the dead / Are breathers of an ampler day’ (CXVIII, 5–6) and
connects this belief to a description of earth’s origins in which man rises out
of ‘seeming-random forms’ and ‘cyclic storms’. This development is again
described using the vocabulary of incalculable increase as man grows ‘from
more to more’ (CXVIII, 17). Humanity is ‘not idle ore’, but iron that has been
mined and manufactured into something useful. Tennyson combines images
of evolutionary change with images of human industry so that the creation of
the world is compared to the work of miner and blacksmith and its violence
is reinterpreted as the productive violence of industrial labour. In these terms,
Hallam’s death becomes, paradoxically, a work of creation: a profitable
rupture that works towards the greater good.
In sections CXXIII and CXXVII to CXXVIII, the connection between
rupture and creation is developed in ways that encourage the reader to con-
sider the work of the poet himself. The mourner looks out on a landscape
and sees its apparently solid forms as a series of ongoing fluctuations. Trees
have been exchanged for seas and seas for streets; hills ‘flow / From form to
form’ and ‘melt like mist’; and the ‘solid lands’ are ‘like clouds’ (CXXII, 5–8).
The mourner still cannot bring himself to let his friend become part of this
change, but he no longer regards it with the terror that dominates his earlier
contemplation of nature. He accepts that ‘all is well, though faith and form /
Be sundered in the night of fear’ (CXXVII, 1–2), implying that even Hallam’s
death is part of that ‘all’. Tennyson’s repeated reference to ‘form’ implies a
connection between geology and poetry. In the first section of this Guide, I
described In Memoriam as a series of fragments that make up a complete
whole. In the context of the natural economies with which the poem engages,
this formal tension between fragmentation and wholeness might be read
as an echo or performance of the violent economy of evolutionary science.
According to this reading, the breaks and shifts that constitute the poem’s
uncertain movement are part of its wider work and contribute, in Lyell’s
words, to a ‘stable system’. Tennyson concludes section CXVIII with a self-
reflexive simile that endorses this reading. The mourner reflects that ‘all, as in
some piece of art, / Is toil cöoperant to an end’ (CXVIII, 23–4). Nature and
art (or poetry) carry out similar work: each toils bit by bit towards promised
completion.

Cycle and Ritual: IX, XVII, XVIII, XXVIII, XXX, XLIII, XLV,
XLVII, LI, LXI, LXXVII, LXXVIII, LXXXV, LXXXVI, LXXXIX,
CIV, CV, CVI, CVII, CXXII
By the end of In Memoriam, the speaker has come to terms with the economic
give-and-take of evolutionary progress. Nevertheless, In Memoriam itself

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does not so much evolve as revolve. It rolls towards its conclusion, turning
forward, round and back in a series of cycles that carry mourner and reader
onwards through time and also turn and return to the scenes of the past.
Reading the poem, our attention is constantly drawn to the fact that time is
passing, but the passage of time is often marked by moments of repetition that
draw us back to where we started. The three years of mourning that the poem
charts could be represented as a straight line – year one, year two, year three;
but they could equally be drawn as a circle that is traced three times, like the
hands moving round a clock face – a year, another year, another year. This
paradoxical tension between repetition and change, circle and line, means
that the poem is able to incorporate the past into the present and the future,
ensuring the preservation of Hallam’s memory. The backwards and onwards
movement of time is naturalised, ritualised and formalised by the elegy, ena-
bling the mourner to be reincorporated into the everyday world from which
his grief has separated him.

Three Examples: From Lucy to Prufrock

Before considering the images and forms of cycle and ritual in In Memoriam,
it is worth looking at the way three other poems address this temporal
paradox. The first is a poem by William Wordsworth:

A slumber did my spirit seal

I had no human fears
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years
No movement has she now, no force
She neither hears nor sees
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course
With rocks and stones and trees.
(Wordsworth [1800] 1991: 154)
This short lyric is one of a series known as the ‘Lucy Poems’, written by
Wordsworth about the death of a young woman. The first stanza, written
in the past tense, describes the speaker’s love for Lucy as a kind of sleep
that lulls him into the belief that the woman is immune to the passing of
time. The second stanza, written in the present tense, informs the reader
that Lucy is now dead and describes her insensible body lying in the ground.
In one sense, therefore, the change that occurs between stanzas one and
two is sudden and shocking. The poem describes a movement from life to
death, immortality to mortality, sleep to wakefulness. However, the tone,
language and form of the poem strangely fail to register that shock. The

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death itself is not described; occurring in the space between the two stanzas,
it is passed over or enveloped by the poem as the lines of iambic tetram-
eter and trimeter move seamlessly from the first to the second stanza. The
rhythm drives time forward, but because the metrical pattern of the two
stanzas is identical, time is also represented as repetition and return. The
difference between ‘now’ and ‘then’ is both described and refused. This
formal work echoes the images employed by the lyric voice, which imagines
the dead woman incorporated into the natural revolutions of the earth so
that life and death, like day and night, become part of the same repetitive
process.
Two poems by the modernist poet T. S. Eliot regard cycle and ritual dif-
ferently. The Waste Land, Eliot’s best-known work, begins at the return of
spring:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
(Eliot 2004: 61)
These lines are just a small part of a much longer poem, but it is possible to
think about this opening sentence in isolation. Whereas, in Wordsworth’s
lyric, poetic form is presented as natural or organic – it rolls with and like
the rolling course of day into night – Eliot’s poem is presented as an artificial
construct, under attack from the forces of nature. In Wordsworth’s lyric, the
diurnal (daily) cycle works with the form of the poem in its incorporation of
the dead woman. Here, the cycle of months, seasons and years causes ‘cruel’
disturbance. The kind of work performed by the passing of time is similar
in both poems. April ‘breeds’, ‘mixes’ and ‘stirs’, in much the same way that
Wordsworth’s diurnal course ‘rolls’; each verb describes an act of combina-
tion, suggesting the blurring of distinct boundaries. But this blurring works
against the form of Eliot’s poem. ‘Breeding’, ‘mixing’ and ‘stirring’ all disrupt
the separation of one poetic line from another so that each unit of sense runs
over two lines, causing an overlapping effect that appears to dissolve the
formal limits of the text. It is as if the poet and his poem have become a victim
of the rolling seasons. The return of April makes it impossible to separate line
from line and impossible to separate past from present and future or death
from life.
In one final example – again from Eliot – the cycles of passing time appear
less unsettling and more mundane:
For I have known them all already, known them all –
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

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I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall
(Eliot 2004: 16)

These lines are taken from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, a dra-
matic monologue in which the speaker repeatedly fails to declare his love
or even to identify a love-object. In this case, time’s repetitions are not the
repetitions of nature, but the repetitions of domestic ritual. The ‘evenings’,
‘mornings’ and ‘afternoons’ are not earth’s diurnal course, but a sequence of
hot drinks, taken at the same time each day. The form of the poem remains
undisturbed. The beat of the lines maintains a regular rhythm and each line
contains a unit of sense. However, there is no organic or formal harmony.
Instead, ritualised or formalised time appears stale and empty, and the
speaker’s experience of time becomes a symptom of his malaise. These three
examples, which illustrate the powerful unity of poetic, natural and temporal
cycles in the face of death, experience natural time as a painful and intrusive
force over which it fails to exert formal control, or experience time through
the superficial forms of everyday life, provide some insight into the different
ways that In Memoriam shapes and is shaped by time.

‘Wheels of Being’
To take the Wordsworthian example first, one of the images that In
Memoriam keeps returning to is that of the circle.10 Like Wordsworth’s
lyric, in which day rolls round into night, In Memoriam employs circles and
circular movement to represent the natural rhythm of creation. Tennyson is
decidedly concerned with ‘creation’ rather than Wordsworth’s more straight-
forward ‘earth’. Harmonious nature is always closely related to Christian
faith. In the Prologue, the speaker reaffirms his faith in God the creator,
declaring,
Thine are these orbs of light and shade
Thou madest Life in man and brute;
Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made.
(Prologue, 5–8)
As images of creation, the sun and moon combine circular shape with cyclical
movement and these circles and cycles provide a model for understanding the
relationship between life and death in lines 6 and 7, so that death is to life
what night is to day. Having established that this kind of circular space and
time symbolises the created universe, Tennyson repeatedly describes different
kinds of movement as cyclical, each time giving tacit emphasis to his Christian

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belief. From the description of the baby who presses his palm ‘Against the
circle of the breast’ (XLV, 3, emphasis mine) and, as he matures, ‘rounds he
to a separate mind’ (XLV, 9) to the description of the ‘rolling hours’ (LI, 14)
and the ‘wheels of Being’ (L, 4), circles imply form and movement ordained
by God.
In sections IX to XVII cyclical motion is again invoked in prayer as the
mourner looks for the return of the ‘fair ship’ that carries Arthur’s ‘loved
remains’. The mourner addresses the heavens, asking them to ‘sphere all your
lights around, above’ (IX, 13) and imagines the boat moving ‘through circles
of the bounding sky’ (XVII, 5–6). Here, too, thoughts of the cycle of death
and life are not far from the mourner’s mind and the sleep of the heavens
and the winds provides a simile for Arthur’s own sleep: three sleeps that will
each end with waking. These implications are made explicit in section XLIII,
which considers that ‘If Sleep and Death be truly one’ (XLIII, I), then ‘that
still garden of the souls / In many a figured leaf enrolls / The total world since
life began’ (XLIII, 10–12). Heaven, described as a garden in which souls grow
like plants, is both divine and natural. The metaphor of the ‘figured leaf’
which ‘enrolls’ the world, in the same way that Wordsworth’s Lucy is ‘rolled
round’ with the rest of the earth, suggests a close relationship between natural
and supernatural forms, so that it might be possible to see the pattern of the
next world in this one.
As the poem progresses, the life beyond the grave is frequently imagined
in terms of rounds and cycles. Section XLVII, one of a number of lyrics that
struggle with the possibility that the mourner and his friend will not recognise
one another when they meet in heaven, employs an image that again echoes
Wordsworth’s Lucy poem. Two sections earlier, as we have seen, Tennyson
describes growing up as a process through which an individual ‘rounds’ to ‘a
separate mind’. Considering the next phase of development, from life on earth
to life in death, Tennyson reverses this image:

That each, who seems a separate whole,

Should move his rounds, and fusing all
The skirts of self again, should fall
Remerging in the general Soul
(XLVII, 1–4)

In the same way that Lucy’s self is given over to the earth, the separate self-
hood of adult identity is surrendered in death and the individual ‘fuses’ the
skirts (or edges) of himself with a greater whole. Whereas Wordsworth’s
speaker appears to accept this incorporation, Tennyson’s mourner expresses
a tentative faith that ‘Eternal form shall still divide / The eternal soul from all
beside’ (6–7), so that he and his Arthur will still be able to make one another

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out after death. However, there is a strange tension here between the idea of
a ‘general Soul’ and an ‘eternal soul’. Hallam’s soul is both eternally separate
from and part of a general whole. The difficulty involved in comprehending
this idea is reflected in the fact that the mourner is forced to use the word
‘soul’ twice, so that it becomes a word or thing that has to accommodate two
opposite concepts (this relation between separateness and wholeness might
bring us back to the separation and wholeness of In Memoriam itself. I will
return to the relationship between cycle and poetic form at the end of this
section).
Returning to the same concerns in section LXI and LXII, the speaker
jealously imagines his friend making conversation with ‘the circle of the
wise’ (LXI, 3) and travelling ‘unto vaster motions’ than himself, describing
‘The circuits of thine orbit round / A higher height, a deeper deep’ (LXIII,
10–12). Again, the speaker is very aware of his exclusion from these cycles
and tries to remember himself to his friend. The same image is repeated once
more in section LXXXV, the longest section in the poem, which signals a
measure of recovery by describing the experience of new friendship (the ‘you’
addressed by the speaker may be either Edmund Lushington, whose marriage
to Tennyson’s sister Cecilia is described in the Epilogue, or Emily Sellwood,
whom Tennyson himself married in 1850). This section reflects back on the
earlier periods of grief, evaluating thoughts expressed in the elegy’s previous
stanzas. It describes

The great Intelligences fair

That range above our mortal state,
In circle round the blessed gate
Received and gave him welcome there
And led him through the blissful climes,
And showed him in the fountain fresh
All knowledge that the sons of flesh
Shall gather in the cycled times.
(LXXXV, 21–8)

The shift into the simple past tense – quite rare in In Memoriam – that char-
acterises this section; and the use of the simple future in the last line quoted
above (‘Shall gather’) means that the poem performs, or works in harmony
with ‘the cycled times’ it describes, rolling from past to future and thereby
drawing mourner and Arthur together.
The following stanza, which begins, ‘But I remained, whose hopes were
dim’ (LXXXV, 29), sums up the sense of desertion expressed in so much of
the first half of the elegy, but even this description of deep despair hints at the
divine cycle that moves the mourner closer to his lost love. The next stanza,

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which is made up of a series of exclamations, each describing Arthur in more

and more rhapsodic terms, provides a visual pun or clue that hints towards
the shape of things to come:

O friendship, equal-poised control,

O heart, with kindliest motion warm,
O sacred essence, other form,
O solemn ghost, O crownèd soul!
(LXXXV, 33–6)

Each description of Arthur’s memory begins with an ‘O’, a wordless sound

that communicates both desire and regret. On the printed page, these sounds
appear as a series of circles that might represent the natural and heavenly
cycles that form a significant part of the reflections and imaginings of this
section. Looking and listening to the stanza again, we begin to notice that the
stanza is made up of a pattern of o’s; ‘poised control’, ‘motion’, ‘other form’,
‘solemn ghost’ and ‘crownéd soul’ are all words with circles at their centres
and these circles might symbolise a connection between written language,
created nature and the deeper movement of life beyond the grave. Although
Hallam is described as an ‘other form’, a phrase that suggests that he has
become different from or alien to the speaker, the shapes that form themselves
on the page imply the possibility of a link between the forms of this world
and the next.
From this point, the poem repeatedly invokes this natural / supernatu-
ral motion in order to comfort and reassure. In the following section, the
‘ambrosial air’ that follows rainfall ‘rollest’ from the ‘gloom’ of evening, over
‘brake and bloom’ (note, again, all those o’s), down through ‘the round of
space’ and towards the speaker, fanning his brows, blowing the fever from
his cheek, and filling his body in a way that makes him part of its natural
rolling movement (LXXXVI, 1–10). A couple of sections later, the word
‘ambrosial’ is used again, this time to describe the darkness that ‘immantled’
(clothed or enveloped) Arthur, as he read poetry on the lawn at Tennyson’s
family home in Somersby. The idyllic scene described in this section also con-
tains a sequence of exclamatory O’s, but the tone has shifted slightly, from
desire and regret to happy recollection. Arthur is described coming from ‘the
dust and din and steam of town’ to a pastoral retreat, which brings him ‘joy’
and those he meets there (Tennyson and his siblings), ‘bliss’ (LXXXIX, 13
and 21). Here, the O’s are more directly echoed in the sounds that encircle
family and friends as they sit together in the natural environment. The family
group is drawn into a circle with Arthur at its centre (21) and they listen to
the ‘sweep of scythe’ (a long arced blade that is wielded with a circular sweep
of the arm) and a gust of wind that flies ‘round’ the garden. This memory

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leads on to a second, in which the two friends walk and converse together,
returning ‘Before the crimson-circled star / Had fallen into her father’s grave’
(LXXXIX, 47–8). Human and heavenly activity mirror one another in their
harmonious geometry.
In section CXXII, as In Memoriam draws to a close, the earthly and heav-
enly circles that have shaped the elegy’s faith, both in God and in the pos-
sibility of reunion between living and dead, are internalised by the speaker
so that they become directly involved in the poetic process. Perhaps recalling
the touch of the ‘dead man’ that he experienced in section XCV, the speaker
remembers a desire, felt in the presence of his friend’s ghost,

To feel once more, in placid awe,

The strong imagination roll
A sphere of stars about my soul,
In all her motion one with law;
(CXXII, 5–8)

Here, the imagination ‘rolls’, adopting the kind of movement that the poem
has described throughout as both divine and natural. In this way it can be
understood as ‘one with law’. In other words, the imagination works with,
rather than against, the created order of the universe. The speaker refers to
‘The strong imagination’ (rather than ‘my strong imagination’), which works
in or on the soul of the speaker, while the speaker himself remains ‘placid’.
The imagination described here is therefore not (or not just) the imagina-
tion of the speaker, but the divine imagination working within him. At this
moment God becomes a poet and the circles and cycles that have rolled forth
from God’s imagination become a poem.
The description of creator-poet employed in section CXXII invites the
reader to think about the place of In Memoriam itself within the divine order
that links heaven to earth and promises an ongoing connection between the
mourner and his dead friend. At the beginning of this section I said that In
Memoriam might be understood as a circle traced three times. This reading is
suggested by the way time is measured in the poem, through a return to sig-
nificant festivals and anniversaries (more on this below), but it is also implied
in the In Memoriam stanza, which moves forward by circling round and back
on itself. To take that same stanza from section CXXII as an example, it is
possible to see the ‘roll’ of the imagination and the ‘sphere’ of stars reflected
in the rhyme scheme of the lines that describe them. The ABBA lines, which
refuse or halt the onward momentum of rhyming couplets (ABAB), are often
read as a pattern that expresses the mourner’s unwillingness or inability to
progress: a rhyme scheme that represents stasis (see Chapter 1). However,
if we interpret this doubling back as a circle, the stanza becomes an organic

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form that rolls and rounds in imitation of the motion of the created universe.
The poem’s separate fragments are brought together to form a general whole
because of the pattern of movement that they share, a pattern that finds its
origins in created nature.
In the Epilogue the speaker imagines the conception of a new niece or
nephew, son or daughter of his newly married sister and her husband. The
moment of conception occurs when, ‘star and system rolling past, / A soul
shall draw from out the vast / And strike its being into bounds’ (Epilogue,
122–4). The beginning of the life-cycle is therefore understood in much the
same terms as the end of the life-cycle. The ‘separate whole’ that was imag-
ined ‘remerging with the general Soul’ in section XLVII, is here seen at its
initial point of separation. It is not so much a compensation for death – a
new life given in return for the life that has been lost – as a reinterpretation of
death as just one point in a perpetual cycle.

The Ritual of the Dead

However, as with so many sets of images in In Memoriam, this interpretation
of the poem as an organic cycle that incorporates both speaker and mourner
is not the whole story. The natural circles that the poem draws are marked
by a repetitive sequence of human rituals that mediate between the individual
and the social, the human, divine and natural. At times, these rituals are valu-
able and meaningful; at others they are hollow and comfortless, resembling
the empty domestic rituals that have measured out the life of Eliot’s Prufrock.
Catherine Bell, in her important study of the theory of ritual, provides some
definitions that work as a useful starting point for a reading of In Memoriam’s
repetitive performances. One of the first things she establishes about ritual is
that it is action; it will ‘act out, express or perform’ ideas or concepts (Bell
1993: 19). Furthermore, Bell observes that it is often understood as ‘particu-
larly thoughtless action – routinized, habitual, obsessive or mimetic – and
therefore the purely formal, secondary and mere physical expression of logi-
cally prior ideas’ (19). In other words, by taking an idea and turning it into an
action and then by repeating that action so that it becomes a habit or routine,
ritual becomes separate from the ideas that they are supposed to express.
Bell also writes that ‘ritual is the means by which individual perception
and behaviour are socially appropriated or conditioned’ (20). Ritual is not
a natural or spontaneous action (crying or laughing, for example); it is the
kind of action that we learn and that identifies us as part of a particular social
group. To return to the example of Prufrock’s coffee spoons, drinking coffee
is not necessarily a ritual. I might drink coffee at any time of day if I were
tired or cold. But it becomes a ritual when it is repeated at the same time each

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day and performed not as an individual response to thirst or fatigue, but out
of habit and as part of a social custom. As a ritual, drinking coffee, particu-
larly using a specific kind of cutlery to do so, becomes a way of identifying an
individual as part of a particular social class (Prufrock’s coffee spoons identify
him as a member of the bourgeois gentility that Eliot’s poem aims to poke fun
at). Finally, Bell talks about the relationship between ritual and time, arguing
that ritual challenges a linear understanding of time through its series of iden-
tical, repetitive performances that collapse different points in time together.
Rituals – repetitive, formal performances that emphasise action more than
thought and the social more than the individual and that understand time
as static rather than progressive – are referred to throughout In Memoriam.
Also, in an important sense, In Memoriam is itself a kind of ritual; but I
turn first to the rituals it describes. The first is the ritual of burial, described
in section XVIII. Reading this section, it is important to remember that
Tennyson did not attend Hallam’s burial; nor did he visit Hallam’s grave until
after the publication of In Memoriam. These facts do not call into question
the sincerity of Tennyson’s grief or the authenticity of these stanzas, but they
do suggest that when Tennyson imagines a burial, he is speaking with a voice
that is not straightforwardly personal. It is perhaps easier to see what I mean
by this if we look at the first stanza of the section:
’Tis well; ’tis something; we may stand
Where he in English earth is laid,
And from his ashes may be made
The violet of his native land.
(XVIII, 1–4)
Here, like in Wordsworth’s ‘Song’, a dead body is incorporated into the earth.
However, the emphasis this time is not on nature, but on nation; the mourner
draws consolation from the fact that his friend will be posthumously repatri-
ated. By emphasising their shared Englishness, the speaker draws on a sense
of identity that is social rather than personal. The use of the plural first-person
pronoun (‘we’) also suggests a shift away from the individual intimacy of
the lyric ‘I’, towards a more communal, public voice. Writing about social,
religious ritual, the mourner speaks with the voice of the nation. He repeats
an invocation to his fellow-mourners, using the poem as a force for social
cohesion and collective experience by calling them to ‘come [. . .] and hear the
ritual of the dead’ (XVIII, 12).
However, in the next two stanzas the communal voice breaks down into an
expression of grief that is deeply personal:
Ah yet, even yet, if this might be,
I, falling on his faithful heart,

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Would breathing through his lips impart

The life that almost dies in me;
(XVIII, 13–16)

The spontaneous, exclamatory ‘Ah’ interrupts the measured solemnity of the

previous stanza, suggesting that the speaker cannot sustain the public voice of
ritual. The speaker’s desire to breathe life into his friend’s corpse is a macabre
assault on the restraint of the funeral rites and has no place in the social forms
of ritual action. By placing the social, public voice of ritual alongside the
private voice of grief in this way, this section communicates In Memoriam’s
ambivalence about ritualised action and speech.
The next occasion for ritual action in the poem is the first of three
Christmases. The speaker’s relationship with this ritual celebration is
expressed through his ambivalent response to the communal voice of
Christian worship. As Christmas draws near, the mourner listens as the
‘Christmas bells from hill to hill / Answer each other in the mist’ (XXVIII,
3–4). The ringing of church bells – a Christian ritual – is understood to be
a cohesive force, drawing separate villages together into a single community
that speak the same language. The mourner hears these ‘four voices’, which
exert a strange power over him, overcoming his suicidal despair by speaking
to his memory: ‘But they my troubled spirit rule, / For they controlled me
when a boy’ (XXVIII, 17–18). In the same way that ritual sound unites dif-
ferent geographical places, it unites different temporal moments, bringing the
past into the present so that the changes and losses that have occurred with
the passing of time momentarily lose their force. It is possible to detect a note
of resentment in the speaker’s voice as he gives himself over to ritual and
memory. The verbs ‘controlled’ and ‘rule’ imply that the speaker is unable
to resist the strength of ritualised memory that is exerted against his will.
Christian ritual elicits a conditioned response that is at odds with individual
experience. The last line describes the ‘merry merry bells of Yule’, employing
repetition in such a way that makes the Yuletide merriment sound troublingly
insistent.
At first, the rituals of Christmas are at odds with the sombre mood of the
family, but as they join hands in a circle and sing together the mood shifts.
The ‘merry song’ they sing, like the ‘merry bells’, does not express how they
are feeling, but the ritualised act of singing effects a change:

Then echo-like our voices rang;

We sung, though every eye was dim,
A merry song we sang with him
Last year: impetuously we sang
(XXX, 13–16)

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This stanza reflects and performs the work of ritual. The family sing the
song they ‘sang with him’ (Arthur) the previous Christmas, and although the
repeated song draws attention to the painful difference between present and
past, the echo-rhymes collapse the two moments into one. The first two lines
of the stanza describe the Christmas just past; the second two describe the
previous year. The difference between the two is indicated by a shift in the
verb, from ‘sung’ to ‘sang’. However, rhymes and half-rhymes bind the two
pairs of lines together, from ‘rang’ to ‘sung’ to ‘song’ to ‘sang’ to ‘sang’, and
the line between immediate past and more distant past blurs.
When they sing a second time, the words of their song are reported in the
poem so that poem and song become one. In this way the poem itself becomes
a ritual performance and the isolated, sceptical voice of elegy is drawn into
the communal expressions of religious faith. The speech marks that indicate
the beginning and end of reported speech still maintain some separation
between elegy and hymn, but because the hymn is transposed into the In
Memoriam stanza, this difference appears negligible. The song ends in the
penultimate stanza of section XXX, but its theme and tone persist in the final
stanza so that the elegy appears to identify with and continue the ritual work
of Christian song.
In Memoriam continues to perform the repetitions of ritual in its descrip-
tion of the second Christmas. Section LXXVIII begins with a stanza almost
identical to the opening stanza of section XXX:
With trembling fingers did we weave
The holly round the Christmas hearth;
A rainy cloud possessed the earth,
And sadly fell our Christmas-eve. (XXX, 1–4)
Again at Christmas did we weave,
The holly round the Christmas hearth
The silent snow possessed the earth,
And calmly fell our Christmas-eve. (LXXVIII, 1–4)

Apart from the first line, which acknowledges repetition, only the weather
and the mood have undergone slight alterations, shifting from rain to ‘silent
snow’ and from sadness to calm. This repetition of language, syntax and
end-rhyme means that we experience the stanza as routine or habit: the ritu-
alised description of ritual. Whereas in section XXX, the games and songs of
Christmas celebration neither express nor conceal the grief of the Tennyson
family, this second Christmas passes without ‘token of distress’ (XXX, 13).
Both Christmases mark and mourn loss, but the first Christmas mourns a lost
friendship and the second Christmas marks a lost grief, asking ‘O sorrow,
then can sorrow wane? / O grief, can grief be changed to less?’ (XXX, 15–16).

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The paradox of this double loss is expressed in the next line: ‘O last regret,
regret can die!’(XXX, 17). The end of sorrow is not a cause for celebration,
but the occasion for new sorrow and a second bereavement. In this sense,
the unchanging rituals of Christmas serve to highlight unwelcome change.
However, in another sense, they represent a deeper continuity that overwrites
change. Responding to his own regretful exclamation, the mourner concludes
his second Christmas with an image of natural and spiritual continuity: ‘No –
mixt with all this mystic frame, / Her deep relations are the same, / But with
long use her tears are dry’ (XXX, 18–20).
The final Christmas occurs in a new location, a change that disrupts habit-
ual custom and causes the mourner to reassess the form and function of ritual
practice once again. The call and response of the bells described in section
XXVIII are replaced by ‘a single peal’ that sounds ‘like strangers’ voices’
(CIV, 9) in the unfamiliar landscape; the holly is left ‘ungathered’ (CV, 1) and
Christmas games are not played. The poem holds echoes of its ritualised form.
The final line of the first stanza repeats the refrain of the previous two: ‘And
strangely fell our Christmas-eve’; but ‘eve’ rhymes with ‘leave’ rather than
‘weave’ so that the action of making the wreath is replaced by an injunction
not to act. Like the tears that are described as having dried ‘through long use’
in section LXXVII, the ‘dying use’ of family ritual comes to an end: ‘For who
would keep the ancient form / Through which the spirit breathes no more?’
(CV, 19–20). This question has implications for more than just the ancient
forms of the Christian festival. It can also be asked of the elegy itself, the form
of which, though not ancient, has certainly been well used by this, its 105th
section. Therefore, when the speaker asked that there be ‘neither song, nor
game, nor feast; / Nor harp be touched, nor flute be blown’ (CV, 21–2), we
sense that the poem might likewise soon fall silent.
In the following section the speaker listens again to the unfamiliar bells that
he describes in CIV and finds new meaning there. They peal through section
CVI, renouncing the ‘old forms’, ‘mournful rhymes’ and ‘old shapes’ of elegy,
and announcing a new poetry, ‘the fuller minstrel’, which forms part of an
optimistic vision of the future. But this optimism is short-lived. In one of
the poem’s most striking juxtapositions, the following section leaps forward
two months to ‘the day when he was born’ (CVII, 1); this time, ‘he’ is not
Christ, but Arthur. This anniversary is represented as a fractured echo of the
preceding Christmases. The pattern of the stanza that begins sections XXX,
LXXVIII and CVI returns as a trace in lines 5 to 8, which rhymes ‘leaves’
with ‘eaves’ rather than ‘leave’ and ‘eve’, creating different meanings out of
the same sounds. Whereas the third Christmas is observed in silence, song
is still used to mark Arthur’s birthday. The speaker expresses a determined
resolve to ‘keep the day’: ‘surely we / Will drink to him’ (22–3). This is not a

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question, but it looks like one and perhaps indicates the speaker’s embarrass-
ment at falling back on the habits of ritual so soon after the bold declarations
of the previous section. It communicates a self-conscious awareness that poet
and poem are unable to practise what they preach. The tension that exists
between sections CVI and CVII, between the renunciation and the preserva-
tion of ritual, therefore dramatises the struggle that takes place throughout In
Memoriam between different forms of faith and different kinds of poetry, a
struggle that, despite the poem’s best intentions, is never quite resolved.

Notes
1. For a comprehensive exploration of the reception of Paradise Lost in the early nine-
teenth century, see Lucy Newlyn (2001), Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader.
2. For a lucid discussion of the fable of the cave and its place in Platonic philosophy, see
David Ross (1953), pp. 69–77.
3. A good summary of the arguments on both sides of the question is provided by Ricks
(1989: 205–12) and Sinfield (1986: 128–9). See also Jeff Nunokawa’s essay, ‘In
Memoriam and the Extinction of the Homosexual’, reproduced in Stott (1996).
4. The best feminist reading of In Memoriam is Alfred Lord Tennyson by Marion Shaw
(1988), which explores representations of love and marriage in Tennyson’s poetry.
5. T. S. Eliot, in the essay which is included in part in the ‘Contexts and Reception’
section of the Guide, provides a different perspective on this set of images, writing
that the ‘surface’ of Tennyson’s poetry is ‘intimate with its depths’ (Eliot [1936] 1999:
338).
6. See, for example, R. S. Lazarus (1982), ‘Thoughts on the Relations between Emotions
and Cognition’, American Physiologist, 37 (10), pp. 1019–24.
7. Donald S. Hair’s reading of In Memoriam provides a detailed discussion of the rela-
tionship between Locke’s philosophy and In Memoriam’s faith (Hair 1991: 102–16).
Another relevant and illuminating perspective is provided by Isobel Armstrong’s
chapter, ‘The Collapse of Object and Subject in In Memoriam’ (Armstrong 1982:
172–206), which looks at Tennyson’s poem in the context of Idealist philosophy.
8. The discussion of Tennyson’s use of economic images in this section is heavily
indebted to Iain Kee Vaughan, whose doctoral thesis, Wordsworth’s Economic Spirit
(2009), explores the relationship between early nineteenth-century theories of eco-
nomics and the poetry of William Wordsworth.
9. One of the best readings of the melancholia of ‘Tears, Idle Tears’ and In Memoriam
is provided by Gerhard Joseph in the first chapter of Tennyson and the Text (Joseph
1992: 9–24).
10. In Memoriam’s circle imagery is also addressed by Sinfield as part of his discussion of
the way language works in In Memoriam (Sinfield 1971: 146–56).

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 Chapter 4
Contexts and Reception

This section brings together extracts from a range of primary material that
offers a sense of the literary, philosophical and print-cultural context of In
Memoriam’s composition, publication and afterlife. In each case, an extract
from an essay, article or review is accompanied by an introduction that links
it to Tennyson’s poem. The section begins with a review of Tennyson’s first
volume of poetry written by Hallam himself, originally published in the
Englishman’s Magazine and later included in the Remains in Verse and Prose
of Arthur Henry Hallam, published by Arthur’s father, Henry, in 1834. This
is followed by part of Henry Hallam’s memoir of his son and an account of
the funeral. I also include an extract from Hallam Tennyson’s Memoir of his
father, which includes Tennyson’s own remarks about In Memoriam and a
draft section that was not included in the final published version of the poem.
Extracts from Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology and Robert Chambers’s
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation are included to provide a starting
point for explorations of the scientific context of In Memoriam’s composition
(see also the ‘Profit and Loss’ section of the Reading Guide). The second half
of the section focuses on material published in response to In Memoriam,
beginning with some contemporary reviews and ending with an essay by T. S.
Eliot, which demonstrates how In Memoriam’s identity and reputation were
shaped by its readership.

Compositional Contexts

Arthur Henry Hallam, Review of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical

Hallam’s review of Tennyson’s first volume of poetry, one of the most influ-
ential early essays on Tennyson, was published in the Englishman’s Magazine
in August 1831. The full title of the review, ‘On Some of the Characteristics
of Modern Poetry and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson’, indicates

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that Hallam’s review aimed to use Tennyson to define the role of poetry in the
early 1830s, a period that is now recognised as a time of transition between
the Romantic and Victorian eras. In the extract printed below, Hallam
talks about the relationship between poetry and national culture, arguing
that ‘modern poetry’, often characterised by a spirit of disillusionment and
melancholy, exists at the edge of British cultural life and is written in oppo-
sition to the national mood. He suggests that a mark of a poet’s quality is
his lack of mainstream cultural appeal and he paints a picture of the poet as
visionary outsider. This picture is heavily influenced by Hallam’s love of the
Romantics – particularly Shelley – but it also relates closely to the poetic iden-
tity Tennyson fashions for himself in his early work and that he continues to
develop in In Memoriam. Because Tennyson and Hallam were close friends
when Hallam wrote this review, it is fair to assume that his definition of the
modern poet is also, to some extent, Tennyson’s, and this essay can be related
to the anxious discussion of the purpose and efficacy of poetry that takes
place throughout In Memoriam.

But the age in which we live comes late in our national progress. That first raci-
ness and juvenile vigour of literature, when nature ‘wantoned as in her prime,
and played at her will her virgin fancies’ is gone never to return. Since that day
we have undergone a period of degradation. ‘Every handicraftsman has worn
the mask of poesy.’ It would be tedious to repeat the tale so often related of the
French contagion and the heresies of the Popian school. With the close of last
century came an era of reaction, an era of painful struggle to bring our over-
civilised condition of thought into union with the fresh productive spirit that
brightened the morning of our literature. But repentance is unlike innocence:
the laborious endeavour to restore has more complicated methods of action
than the freedom of untainted nature. Those different powers of poetic disposi-
tion, the energies of Sensitive, of Reflective, of Passionate Emotion, which in
former times were intermingled, and derived from mutual support an extensive
empire over the feelings of men, were now restrained within separate spheres
of agency. The whole system no longer worked harmoniously, and by intrinsic
harmony acquired external freedom; but there arose a violent and unusual action
in the several component functions, each for itself, all striving to reproduce the
regular power which the whole had once enjoyed. Hence the melancholy which
so evidently characterises the spirit of modern poetry; hence that return of the
mind upon itself and the habit of seeking relief in idiosyncrasies rather than
community of interest. In the old times the poetic impulse went along with the
general impulse of the nation; in these it is a reaction against it, a check acting for
conservation against a propulsion towards change. We have indeed seen it urged
in some of our fashionable publications, that the diffusion of poetry must be in
the direct ration of the diffusion of machinery, because a highly civilised people
must have new objects of interest. But this notable argument forgets that against

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this objective amelioration may be set the decrease of subjective power, arising
from a prevalence of social activity, and a continual absorption of higher feel-
ings into the palpable interests of ordinary life. The French Revolution may be a
finer theme than the war of Troy, but it does not so evidently follow that Homer
is to find his superior. Our inference, therefore, from this change in the rela-
tive position of the artist to the rest of the community is, that modern poetry in
proportion to its depth and truth is likely to have little immediate authority over
public opinion. Admirers it will have; sects consequently it will form; and these
strong undercurrents will in time sensibly affect the principle stream. Art herself,
less manifestly glorious than in her periods of undisputed supremacy, retains her
essential prerogatives, and forgets not to raise up chosen spirits who may minister
to her state and vindicate her title. (Hallam 1831: 619–20)

Henry Hallam’s Memoir

Remains in Verse and Prose by Arthur Henry Hallam is an important con-
textual document, not only because it provides evidence of Hallam’s early
promise, but also because it offers a range of other accounts of Hallam
and responses to his death. It includes a letter from his close friend at Eton,
William Ewart Gladstone, and others written by members of the Cambridge
Apostles who went on to lead influential lives in Victorian religious, social and
political life. The extract reprinted below is taken from the editor’s preface
and offers an account of Hallam’s funeral by his father. Tennyson did not
attend Hallam’s funeral, nor did he visit his grave until after In Memoriam
was published, so this account provided a source for the imagined gravestones
that appear throughout the poem. However, it is perhaps more interesting in
its description of Hallam himself, which sets up a set of conventions to which
In Memoriam later conforms. Hallam is described as ‘almost faultless’ and
the author comes to terms with his son’s untimely death by suggesting that he
was a young man too good for this world who has progressed into a better
one. This idea is taken up by Tennyson, who considers the implications of
this progress in detail, worrying that he will never ‘catch up’ with his friend,
who was so far in advance of him in all things, including death. Henry Hallam
also expresses difficulty in providing an adequate account of his son and of his
own grief, another convention employed by In Memoriam.
The remains of Arthur were brought to England and interred on the 3rd of
January 1834, in the Chancel of Clevedon Church, in Somersetshire, belonging
to his maternal grandfather, sire Abraham Elton; a place selected by the Editor,
not only from the connexion of kindred, but on account of its still and seques-
tered situation, on a lone hill that overhangs the Bristol Channel.
More ought, perhaps, to be said; but it is very difficult to proceed. From the
earliest years of this extraordinary young man, his premature abilities were not

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more conspicuous than an almost faultless disposition, sustained by a more calm

self-command than has often been witnessed in that season of life. The sweet-
ness of temper that distinguished his childhood, became, with the advance of
manhood, an habitual benevolence, and ultimately ripened into that exalted
principle of love towards God and man, which animated and almost absorbed his
soul during the latter period of his life, and to which most of the following com-
positions bear such emphatic testimony. He seemed to tread the earth as a spirit
from some better world; and in bowing to the mysterious will which has in mercy
removed him, perfected by so short a trial, and passing over the bridge which
separates the seen from the unseen life in a moment, and, as we believe, without
a moment’s pang, we must feel not only the bereavement of those to whom he
was dear, but the loss which mankind have sustained by the withdrawing of such
a light. (Hallam 1834: 35–6)

Hallam Tennyson’s Memoir

Hallam’s memoir of his father, published five years after Tennyson’s death,
is the first authoritative biography of the poet. Much of it is a collaborative
work, put together by Hallam in close consultation with his father.1 It con-
tains an account of In Memoriam’s composition, Tennyson’s notes on the
poem and a number of draft sections that were not included in the final poem.
Like the reviews of the poem (see below), the Memoir constructs and frames
In Memoriam in a way that has been influential for the poem’s critical after-
life. Tennyson stresses the ‘dramatic’ nature of the poem’s speaker, describing
the voice as one that is both individual and universal. He also insists on the
spontaneity of the composition process. By claiming that he never intended
the poems to be made into a whole and also that he never intended them for
publication, he emphasises In Memoriam’s lyric identity; but he also identifies
it with Dante’s Divine Comedy, a comparison that hints at his epic ambition
for the poem.
The Memoir offers one account of those sections of In Memoriam that
were written first: sections IX, XXX, XXXI, LXXXV and a version of section
XXVII. It also points to a number of possible intertexts, mentioning poems
that were composed in the same book of manuscript paper as these opening
sections. ‘Morte d’Arthur’, a retelling of the death of King Arthur, which
was eventually worked into Tennyson’s Arthurian epic, Idylls of the King, is
drawn into a close relationship with these early elegiac fragments, suggesting
that in the early months of composition, Tennyson was testing out different
forms of poetic response to his friend’s death.
The other manuscript fragments included in the extracts reprinted below
offer a sense of the development of the In Memoriam stanza and the inception
of some of the poem’s central images and themes. In the ‘germ’ Tennyson is

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already interested in images of hands; he desires the press of his dead friend’s
hand and imagines he sees Hallam’s ghost, standing with his hands clasped.
The lines are written in iambic tetrameter stanzas of four and then five lines,
with an ABAB rhyme scheme. It closely resembles the In Memoriam stanza,
only omitting its innovative rhyme scheme. More like English ballad metre,
it provides a bridge between the two forms, demonstrating how Tennyson
developed the one from the other. The more complete section, ‘The Grave’
(the first of a number reprinted in the Memoir), also contains traces of other
sections. Its opening lines recall the beginning of section CVIII, in which the
speaker resolves, ‘I will not shut me from my kind’ (CVIII, 1), and the voices
from the crowd are very similar to the voices of the three travellers that
criticise the mourner’s solitary mourning in XXI. The Memoir notes that this
section was originally included as section LVII, which places it between those
sections that most directly address the spiritual crisis caused by the science of
evolution and the section that begins ‘Peace; come away: the song of woe /
Is after all an earthly song’ (LVII, 1–2). The inclusion of this deleted section
therefore has a significant effect on the meaning of this call for ‘peace’ (or
silence). Whereas, in the published version, the mourner breaks off from a
series of despairing exclamations about nature’s indifference to life and death,
in the earlier draft, the mourner is instead called to ‘come away’ from the side
of his friend’s grave. This is just one example of the close relationship between
structure and meaning in In Memoriam, demonstrating the poem’s openness
to composition, decomposition and recomposition.

Extract 1
On the evening of one of these sad winter days my father had already noted
down in his scrap-book some fragmentary lines, which proved to be the germ of
‘In Memoriam’:
Where is the voice I loved? ah where
Is that dear hand that I would press?
Lo! the broad heavens cold and bare,
The stars that know not my distress!
* * * * *
The vapour labours up the sky,
Uncertain forms are darkly moved!
Larger than human passes by
The shadow of the man I loved,
And clasps his hands, as one that prays!
[. . .]
‘The Two Voices’ or ‘Thoughts of Suicide’ was begun under the cloud of this
overwhelming sorrow, which, as my father told me, for a while blotted out all

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joy from his life, and made him long for death, in spite of his feeling that he was
in some measure a help and comfort to his sister. But such a first friendship and
such a loss helped to reveal himself to himself, while he enshrined his sorrow in
his song. Tennant writes: ‘Alfred although much broken in spirits is yet able to
divert his thoughts from gloomy brooding, and keep his mind in activity.’
In the earliest manuscript of ‘The Two Voices’ a fine verse is found which was
omitted in the published edition as too dismal (after ‘under earth’).
From when his baby pulses beat
To when his hands in their last heat
Pick at the death-mote in the sheet.
Then in the same manuscript-book come the first written sections of ‘In
Memoriam’, in the following order:
Fair ship that from the Italian shore.
(written on a stray sheet)
With trembling fingers did we weave.
When Lazarus left his charnel-cave.
This truth came borne with bier and pall.
It draweth near the birth of Christ.
And between ‘With trembling fingers’ and ‘When Lazarus left his charnel-cave’
he has written the first draft of his ‘Morte d’Arthur’. (Memoir I, 107–9)

Extract 2
‘It must be remembered,’ writes my father, ‘that this is a poem, not an actual
biography. It is founded on our friendship, on the engagement of Arthur Hallam
to my sister, on his sudden death at Vienna, just before the time fixed for their
marriage, and on his burial at Clevedon church. The poem concludes with the
marriage of my youngest sister Cecilia. It was meant to be a kind of Divina
Commedia, ending with happiness. The sections were written at many different
places, and as the phases of our intercourse came to my memory and suggested
them. I did not write them with any view of weaving them into a whole, or for
publication, until I found that I had written so many. The different moods of
sorrow as in a drama are dramatically given, and my conviction that fear, doubts,
and suffering will find answer and relief only through faith in a God of Love. ‘I’
is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race
speaking thro’ him. After the Death of A.H.H., the divisions of the poem are
made by First Xmas Eve (Section XXVIII), Second Xmas (LXXVIII), Third Xmas
Eve (CVI. and CV. Etc.). I myself did not see Clevedon till years after the burial
of A.H.H. Jan. 3rd 1834, and then in later editions of ‘In Memoriam’ I altered the
word ‘chancel’, which was the word used by Mr Hallam in his Memoir, to ‘dark
church.’ As to the localities in which the poems were written, some were written
in Lincolnshire, some in London, Essex, Gloucestershire, Wales, anywhere where
I happened to be’
‘And as for the metre of ‘In Memoriam’ I had no notion till 1880 that Lord
Herbert of Cherbury had written his occasional verse in the same metre. I

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believed myself the originator of the metre, until after ‘In Memoriam’ came out,
when some one told me that Ben Jonson and Sir Philip Sidney had used it. The
following poems were omitted from ‘In Memoriam’ when I published, because I
thought them redundant.’
The Grave (originally No. LVII). (Unpublished.)
I keep no more a lone distress,
The crowd have come to see thy grave,
Small thanks or credit shall I have,
But these shall see it none the less.
The happy maiden’s tears are free
And she shall weep and give them way;
Yet one unschool’d in want will say
‘The dead are dead and let them be.’
Another whispers sick with loss:
‘O let the simple slab remain!
The “Mercy Jesu” in the rain!
The “Miserere” in the moss!’
‘I love the daisy weeping dew,
I hate the trim-set plots of art!’
My friend, thou speakest from the heart,
But look, for these are nature too.
(Memoir I, 304–7)

Scientific Contexts
One of the most significant contexts for the crisis of faith occasioned by
Hallam’s death and described in In Memoriam is that of pre-Darwinian
evolutionary science. There are two publications that appear to have had
a direct influence on the elegy’s language and thought. The first is Charles
Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–3) and the second is Robert Chambers’s
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). Although the publica-
tion of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) has eclipsed both of these
earlier texts, they had a huge impact on the Victorian consciousness and
were extensively discussed, reviewed and parodied in contemporary newspa-
pers and periodicals. Although both publications try to accommodate their
scientific theories within a framework of Christian belief, each presented
profound challenges to Judeo-Christian accounts of a divinely authored
universe. Principles of Geology, which bases its theory about the gradual
formation of the earth’s surface on evidence gathered from the observa-
tion of rocks and fossils, suggested that the earth’s creation was a long and
gradual process, rather than a single, divinely authored act. Vestiges of the

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Natural History of Creation is principally concerned with the development of

particular species; its most controversial claim being that the human species
originated with lower forms of life. Tennyson owned copies of both Lyell and
Chambers, but would not admit the influence of Chambers on In Memoriam,
stating that those sections of the elegy that address theories of evolution were
written ‘some years before the publication of Vestiges of Creation in 1844’
(Memoir, I, 223). Nevertheless, there are some striking similarities between
the language and ideas of both Lyell and Chambers and In Memoriam, and
the extracts provided below again suggest In Memoriam as a kind of textual
collage that takes fragments of contemporary cultural material and forms
them into poetry so that the poem speaks both with its own voice and with
the voice of its age.

Principles of Geology
The vocabulary that Lyell uses to set out his ideas about the changing forma-
tion of the earth’s surface can be traced throughout In Memoriam. Principles
begins with an examination of earlier geological theories, which Lyell calls
‘systems’. Likewise, Tennyson begins his poem by talking about our ‘little
systems’ that ‘have their day and cease to be’ (Prologue, 17–18); Lyell talks
about nature as something that can be read, a figure of speech that is repeated
in the Epilogue, which describes nature as ‘an open book’; and Lyell employs
the metaphorical language of illumination to describe his attempt to discover
and reveal scientific knowledge, talking about a partial illumination that
might be compared to the ‘broken lights’ of Tennyson’s Prologue. The first of
the two short extracts printed below provides context for sections LV to LVII,
in which the mourner contemplates the mortality of species. The second,
taken from the conclusion of volume I, demonstrates how Lyell struggles to
come to terms with the apparent indifference of the geological system he has
described.
The reader has only to reflect on what we have said of the habitations and the
stations of organic beings in general, and to consider them in relations to those
effects which we have contemplated in our first volume as resulting from the
igneous and aqueous causes now in action, and he will immediately perceive that,
amidst the vicissitudes of the earth’s surface, species cannot be immortal, but
must perish one after the other, like the individuals which compose them. There
is no possibility of escaping from this conclusion [. . .]. (Lyell 1835: III, 135)
I shall endeavour to point out in the sequel, that the general tendency of subterra-
nean movements, when their effects are considered for a sufficient lapse of ages, is
eminently beneficial, and that they constitute an essential part of that mechanism
by which the integrity of the habitable surface is preserved, and the very existence

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and perpetuation of dry land secured. Why the working of this same machinery
should attend with so much evil, is a mystery far beyond the reach of our phi-
losophy, and probably must remain so until we are permitted to investigate, not
our planet alone and its inhabitants, but other parts of the moral and material
universe with which they may be connected. Could our survey embrace other
worlds, and the events, not of a few centuries only, but of periods as indefinite
as those with which geology renders us familiar, some apparent contradictions
might be reconciled, and some difficulties would doubtless be cleared up. But
even then, as our capacities are finite, while the scheme of the universe may be
infinite, both in time and space, it is presumptuous to suppose that all sources
of doubt and complexity would ever be removed. On the contrary, they might,
perhaps, go on augmenting in number, although our confidence in the wisdom
of the plan of Nature should increase at the same time; for it has been justly said,
that the greater the circle of light, the greater the boundary of darkness by which
it is surrounded. (Lyell 1835: II, 291)

Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation2

At the heart of Chambers’s thesis is his theory of ‘Progressive Development’.
This model of evolution involves a gradual progress from simple to more
complex forms of life that is closely related to the development of the embryo
in the womb. Chambers argues that the most compelling evidence for species
evolution is the way that an embryo takes on various forms during the course
of its development, before assuming a recognisably human shape. These
forms, Chambers argues, are the traces of its species heritage. The first of the
three extracts printed below outlines this theory, which provides an interesting
context for the various infants, metaphorical and real, born and unborn that
populate In Memoriam, so that, when Tennyson’s speaker describes himself
as ‘an infant crying in the night’, his infantilisation might be read in terms of
evolutionary progress. The second extract is frequently suggested as a source
for section LV, in which the mourner complains that nature seems ‘so careful
of the type’ and yet ‘so careless of the single life’ (LV, 7–8). Finally, the third
extract, in which Chambers emphasises the compatibility of his theory with
belief in God bears close resemblance to Tennyson’s own reassertion of faith in
the Prologue and Epilogue of his poem. Like Lyell, Chambers refers to imper-
fect ‘systems’ and expresses faith in humankind’s further perfectibility, looking
forward to a ‘redress’ of present suffering that is understood in economic
terms.
We have yet to advert to the most interesting class of facts connected with the
laws of organic development. It is only in recent times that physiologists have
observed that each animal passes, in the course of its germinal history, through
a series of changes resembling the permanent forms of the various orders of

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animals inferior to it in the scale. Thus, for instance, an insect, standing at the
head of the articulated animals, is, in the lava state, a true annelid, or worm,
the annelid being the lowest in the same class. The embryo of a crab resembles
the perfect animal of the inferior order myriapoda, and passes through all the
forms of transition which characterise the intermediate tribes of crustacean. The
frog, for some time after its birth, is a fish with external gills, and other organs
fitting it for an aquatic life, all of which are changed as it advances to maturity,
and becomes a land animal. The mammifer only passes through still more stages,
according to its higher place on the scale. Nor is man himself exempt from this
law. His first form is that which is permanent in the animalcule. His organisa-
tion gradually passes through conditions generally resembling a fish, a reptile,
a bird, and the lower mammalia, before it attains its specific maturity. At one
of the last stages of his foetal career, he exhibits an intermaxillary bone, which
is characteristic of the perfect ape; this is suppressed, and he may then be said
to take leave of the simial type, and become a true human creature. (Chambers
[1844] 1994: 194)
It is clear, moreover, from the whole scope of the natural laws, that the indi-
vidual, as far as the present sphere of being is concerned, is to the Author of
Nature a consideration of inferior moment. Everywhere we see the arrangements
for the species perfect; the individual is left, as it were, to take his chance amidst
the mêlée of the various laws affecting him. If he be found inferiorly endowed,
or ill befalls him, there was at least no partiality against him. The system has the
fairness of a lottery, in which every one has the like chance of drawing a prize.
(Chambers [1844] 1994: 377)
To reconcile this to the recognised character of the Deity, it is necessary to
suppose that the present system is but a part of a whole, a stage in a Great
Progress, and that the Redress is in the reserve. Another argument here occurs –
the economy of nature, beautifully arranged and vast in its extent as it is, does
not satisfy even man’s idea of what might be; he feels that, if this multiplicity of
theatres for the exemplification of such phenomena as we see on earth were to go
on forever unchanged, it would not be worthy of the Being capable of creating
it. An endless monotony of human generations, with their humble thinkings and
doings, seems an object beneath that august Being. But the mundane economy
might be very well as a portion of some great phenomenon, the rest of which
was yet to be evolved. It therefore appears that our system, though it may at first
appear at issue with other doctrines in esteem amongst mankind, tends to come
into harmony with them, and even to give them support. I would say, in conclu-
sion, that, even where the two above arguments may fail of effect, there may yet
be a faith derived from this view of nature sufficient to sustain under all senses
of the imperfect happiness, the calamities, the woes, and pains of this sphere of
being. (Chambers [1844] 1994: 385–6)

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Reviews and Anthologies

On publication, In Memoriam received a good deal of attention from contem-
porary newspapers and journals.3 Because the poem’s anonymity did little to
prevent the identity of its author from becoming known, the poem’s celebrity
had much to do with the reputation that Tennyson had already established
for himself and reviews frequently identified In Memoriam as the high point
of Tennyson’s career to date. Reviews therefore provide illuminating context
for studies of Tennyson’s biography, offering contemporary accounts of his
career and growing celebrity. They also help to construct a sense of how the
poem was read by Tennyson’s contemporaries. As well as offering opinions
about a published work, reviews also have the power to mediate between
the work and the reading public, defining its identity and significance for its
audience. In the Victorian period, it was common for reviews to reproduce
large sections of a work, so that a reviewer was able to identify what he
thought were its most important sections, providing an edited version that
supported their reading. Similar work was carried out by poetry anthologies.
Macmillan’s Golden Treasury (1885), edited by F. T. Palgrave, includes a
selection of forty-two sections from In Memoriam, published in a different
order from the one decided on by Tennyson for the 1850 text. This decision
effectively rewrote In Memoriam for a significant readership who may only
have come to the poem via the anthology.4 In the selected extracts repro-
duced below, reviewers describe what sort of poem they think In Memoriam
is and identify the terms by which it should be read and appreciated. Even
in the year of its publication, In Memoriam’s formal identity was a matter of
debate. Reviews tend to talk about In Memoriam as a collection of poems
rather than as a single text, but also describe it as a diary, a monument, a
series of meditations and a soliloquy. There is greater agreement when it
comes to the content of the poem. Reviewers repeatedly emphasise the poem’s
depth, sincerity, earnestness and truth, describing it as different from, and
better than, other, more artful or intellectual kinds of poetry. However, they
are also keen to recognise In Memoriam’s manliness and Englishness. They
strike a fine balance between identification of the individuality and privacy
of the poem’s voice and of its universal application, so that the singular-
ity voiced by the poem becomes one that is ‘common to the race’ and the
author of In Memoriam begins to be transformed into the nation’s poet.
It was partly as the result of this reception that Tennyson was made Poet
Laureate a few months after In Memoriam’s publication. The first poem that
he wrote as laureate, Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, an elegy
for Arthur Wellesley, military hero and former prime minister, received very
mixed reviews. Having crowned their national poet, the Victorian public

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 180 In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

were dissatisfied with the national, public poetry that he subsequently pro-
duced.5

J. Westland Marston, The Athenaeum

This volume of verse, though published anonymously, bears such intrinsic proof
of Mr Tennyson’s authorship that we hazard nothing in at once assuming the
fact. Nor probably has the writer any motive to conceal it except the delicate
bias which, in raising so solemn and tender a memorial, would not obtrude on
the tablet even the name of its founder. The book is a detailed record of that
mental experience in a degree familiar to all who have cherished and lost some
eminent type of human worth. The tendency of all feeling minds, and of imagina-
tive minds in particular, to incarnate their idea of excellence – so to identify the
noblest properties of spiritual life with that special form that displays them as to
crowd all the light of existence into one focus of personality – and thence to feel
total eclipse when Death’s shadow veils that single orb – these are the ‘painful
passages’ of inner life vividly disclosed in the book before us [. . .] The various
poems which are included under the general title of ‘In Memoriam’ are formally
distinguished from each other only by being divided into sections, and are all
written in the same stanza. Taking the bereavement recorded at the commence-
ment for their key-note, they embody all the phases of feeling and speculation,
which such a loss induces. So elemental are most of these outpourings, that the
mere intellect scarcely furnishes any clue to their beauty and their reality. We
recognise their power less by any mental estimate than by their vibration on the
deepest and most mysterious chords of the heart, – and their effect is analogous
to that produced by the unexpected sound of some long absent voice reviving
in the breast of manhood the dormant and forgotten sensibilities of childhood.
They come on us with all the truthfulness of a diary: – but it is the diary of a
love so profound, that though using the largest symbols of the imagination, they
appear to us as direct and true as the homeliest language. The beauty and melody
of illustration are so absorbed in the pervading feeling, that we become fully
conscious of the former attributes only by a recurrence of the poems. (Marston
1850: 629–30)

Anonymous, The Leader

Sacred to the memory of one long loved and early died, this tablet bears neither
the name of the deceased nor of the affectionate hand that raised it. Our readers
have already been informed that it is erected by our greatest living poet – Alfred
Tennyson – to the memory of Arthur Hallam. On first announcing the volume we
stated our belief that it was unique in the annals of literature. The only poems that
occurred to us as resembling it were the Lament of Bion, by Moschus; Lycidas,
by Milton; and Adonais, by Shelley; but these are all distinguished from it both
by structural peculiarities, and by the spirit which animates them. They may fitly
be compared with each other, because they are all rather the products of sorrow-

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 Contexts and Reception 181

ing fancy than of genuine sorrow. Herein note a fundamental difference from In
Memoriam, which is the iterated chant of a bereaved soul always uttering one
plaint, through all the varying moods of sorrow. There is iteration in Moschus,
and it is effective; but this ever-recurring burden [. . .] is not the ‘trick of grief’
but the trick of art. The unity and recurrence in Tennyson lie deeper – they are
internal, not external. Tennyson does not, like Moschus, Milton and Shelley, call
upon the woods and streams, the nymphs and men, to weep for his lost Arthur;
he weeps himself. He does not call on his fancy for images of woe; he lets his own
desolate heart break forth in sobs of music. The three great poets are superior to
him in what the world vulgarly calls poetry, in the graceful arabesque of fancy,
when the mind at ease plays with a grief that is just strong enough to stimulate it,
not strong enough to sombre it; but they are all three immeasurably below him in
strength, depth, and passion, consequently in the effect produced upon the minds
of others. To read Moschus is a critical delight; beautiful conceits are so beauti-
fully expressed that our admiration at the poet’s skill is intense; but who believes
the poet’s grief? Who is saddened by his mournfulness, or solaced by his hope?
[. . .] The comparison is not here of genius, but of feeling. Tennyson sings a deeper
sorrow, utters a more truthful passion, and singing truly, gains the predominance
of passion over mere sentiment. (Anonymous, The Leader 1850: 303–4)

Anonymous, Fraser’s Magazine

We now come to the first of the volumes whose names stand at the head of our
article – In Memoriam; a collection of poems on a vast variety of subjects, but
all united, as their name implies, to the memory of a departed friend. We know
not whether to envy more – the poet the object of his admiration, or that object
the monument of which has been consecrated to his nobleness. For this latest and
highest volume, written at various intervals during a long series of years, all the
poet’s peculiar excellencies, with all that has been acquired from others, seem to
have been fused down into a perfect unity, and brought to bear on his subject
with that care and finish which only a labour of love can inspire [. . .] In every
place where in old days they had met and conversed; in every dark wrestling of
the spirit with the doubts and fears of manhood, throughout the whole outward
universe of nature, and the whole inward universe of spirit, the soul of his dear
friend broods – at first a memory shrouded in blank despair, then a living pres-
ence, a ministering spirit, answering doubts, calming fears, stirring up noble
aspirations, utter humility, leading the poet upward step by step to faith, and
peace, and hope. Not that there runs throughout the book a conscious or organic
method. The poems seem often merely to be united by the identity of their metre,
so exquisitely chosen, that while the major rhyme in the second and third lines of
each stanza gives the solidity and self-restraint required by such deep themes, the
mournful minor rhyme of each first and fourth line leads the ear to expect some-
thing beyond, and enables the poet’s thoughts to wander sadly on, from stanza
to stanza and poem to poem, in an endless chain of

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 182 In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

Linked sweetness long drawn out.

There are records of risings and fallings again, of alternate cloud and sunshine,
throughout the book; earnest and passionate, yet never bitter; humble, yet never
abject; with a depth and vehemence of affection ‘passing love of woman’ yet
without a taint of sentimentality; self-restrained and dignified, without ever nar-
rowing into artificial coldness; altogether rivalling the sonnets of Shakespeare.
– Why should we not say boldly surpassing – for the sake of the superior faith
into which it rises, for the sake of the proem at the opening of the volume – in
our eyes the noblest English Christian poem which several centuries have seen?
(Anonymous, Fraser’s Magazine 1850: 252)

Anonymous, Quarterly Review

It would be very difficult to convey a just idea of this volume either by narrative
or by quotation. In the series of monodies or meditations which compose it, and
which follow in long series without weariness or sameness, the poet never moves
away a step from the grave of his friend, but, while circling around it, has always
a new point of view. Strength of love, depth of grief, aching sense of loss, have
driven him forth as it were on a quest of consolation, and he asks it of nature,
thought, religion, in a hundred forms which a rich and varied imagination con-
tinually suggest, but all of them connected by one central point, the recollection
of the dead. This work he prosecutes, not in vain effeminate complaint, but in
manly recognition of the fruit and profit even of baffled love, in noble suggestions
of the future, in heart-soothing and heart-chastening thoughts of what the dead
was and what he is, and of what one who has been, and therefore still is, in near
contact with him is bound to be. The whole movement of the poem is between
the mourner and the mourned: it may be called one long soliloquy; but it has this
mark of greatness, that, though the singer is himself a large part of the subject,
it never degenerates into egotism – for he speaks typically on behalf of humanity
at large, and in his own name, like Dante on his mystic journey, teaches deep
lessons of life and conscience to us all [. . .] By the time ‘In Memoriam’ had sunk
into the public mind, Mr. Tennyson had taken the rank as our first then living
poet. (Anonymous, Quarterly Review 1859: 458–9)

Modernist Reactions
Having been formed into the image of national poet by the reviewers and
having conformed to that image by accepting the laureateship, Tennyson’s
identity was irrevocably bound up with Victorian Britain. As the nineteenth
century drew to a close and confidence in the Victorian ideals of earnest
endeavour and faithful progress began to wane, Tennyson became associated
with what came to be recognised as the bourgeois conservatism of Victorian
culture. Fin-de-siècle caricatures of the poet, like the one by Beerbohm that
begins this guide, paved the way for a modernist rejection of the poet and his

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 Contexts and Reception 183

work. Ezra Pound wrote parodies under the pen-name ‘Alf Venison’ and, in
his modernist epic, Ulysses, James Joyce renames him ‘Lawn Tennyson, gen-
tleman poet’. Virginia Woolf wrote a satirical play called Freshwater (1923),
which lampooned the poet’s family life at their home on the Isle of Wight,
and in her influential essay, ‘A Room of One’s Own’, she asks ‘Why has
Alfred ceased to sing She is coming, my dove, my dear? [. . .] Shall we lay the
blame on the war? [. . .] But why say “blame”? Why, if it was an illusion, not
praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth
in its place?’ (Woolf [1928] 1945: 16), describing Tennyson’s lyric voice (she
quotes from Maud, Tennyson’s poem about the Crimean War) as an illusion
that has been shattered or drowned out by the First World War. The war,
which Woolf identifies as the beginning of the modern era, caused the deaths
of so many young men that poetry was compelled to find new ways to grieve.
Through the lens of modernism, In Memoriam is often seen as the last tradi-
tional elegy, a work that modern writers wrote against or away from.
However, an essay by T. S. Eliot, three extracts from which are reprinted
below, attempts to rescue In Memoriam for an early twentieth-century reader-
ship. His sensitive, influential reading of the poem is set within the context of a
sharp critique of Victorian culture and even of Tennyson himself. He suggests
that Tennyson’s contemporaries misread the elegy and recasts the poem as an
expression of doubt rather than of faith, drawing attention to its fine surfaces
and arguing that it must be read as single encompassing whole. This reading
contrasts sharply and deliberately with early reviews of In Memoriam and draws
the poem into the twentieth century, tacitly inviting comparisons with Eliot’s
own work, The Waste Land (1922). Eliot’s modernist epic, like In Memoriam,
is a poem that captures the voice of its cultural moment. Like In Memoriam,
it is a poem about loss and the doubtful possibility of consolation and, like In
Memoriam, it treads a fine line between fragmentation and wholeness, lyricism
and length. In the concluding section of The Wasteland, the speaker refers to
‘these fragments I have shored against my ruin’ (V, 431), describing his own
poem in terms that could equally be applied to Tennyson’s ‘fragments of an
elegy’. The modernist In Memoriam described in Eliot’s essay is not necessarily
any more accurate than the Victorian In Memoriam described in the reviews;
but by remaking the poem in this way, Eliot suggests that In Memoriam is a
poem that can be formed and transformed with each new reading.
Apparently Tennyson’s contemporaries, once they had accepted In Memoriam,
regarded it as a message of hope and reassurance to their rather fading Christian
faith. It happens now and then that a poet by some strange accident expresses
the mood of his generation, at the same time that he is expressing a mood of his
own which is quite remote from that of his generation. This is not a question of
insincerity: there is an amalgam of yielding and opposition below the level of

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 184 In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

consciousness. Tennyson himself, on the conscious level of the man who talks
to reporters and poses for photographers, to judge from remarks made in con-
versation and recorded in his son’s Memoir, consistently asserted a convinced,
if somewhat sketchy, Christian belief. And he was a friend of Frederick Denison
Maurice – nothing seems odder about that age than the respect which its eminent
people felt for each other. Nevertheless, I get a very different impression from In
Memoriam from that which Tennyson’s contemporaries seem to have got. It is of
a much more interesting and tragic Tennyson. His biographers have not failed to
remark that he had a good deal of the temperament of the mystic – certainly not
at all the mind of the theologian. He was desperately anxious to hold the faith of
the believer, without being very clear about what he wanted to believe: he was
capable of illumination which he was incapable of understanding. The ‘Strong
Son of God, immortal Love’, with an invocation of whom the poem opens,
has only a hazy connexion with the Logos, or the Incarnate God. Tennyson is
distressed by the idea of a mechanical universe; he is naturally, in lamenting his
friend, teased by the hope of immortality and reunion beyond death. Yet the
renewal craved for seems at best but a continuance, or a substitute for the joys
of friendship upon Earth. His desire for immortality never is quite the desire for
Eternal Life; his concern is for the loss of man rather than for the gain of God.
[. . .]
Tennyson’s feelings, I have said, were honest; but they were usually a good
way below the surface. In Memoriam can, I think, justly be called a religious
poem, but for another reason than that which made it seem religious to his con-
temporaries. It is not religious because of the quality of its faith, but because of
the quality of its doubt. Its faith is a poor thing, but its doubt is a very intense
experience.
[. . .]
In ending we must go back to the beginning and remember that In Memoriam
would not be a great poem, or Tennyson a great poet, without the technical
accomplishment. Tennyson is the great master of the metric as well as of mel-
ancholia; I do not think any poet in English has ever had a finer ear for a vowel
sound, as well as a subtler feeling for some moods of anguish:

Dear as remember’d kisses after death,

And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign’d
On lips that are for others; deep as love
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret.
And this technical gift of Tennyson’s is no small thing. Tennyson lived in a
time which was already acutely time-conscious: a great many things seemed to
be happening, railways were being built, discoveries were being made, the face
of the world was changing. That was a time busy in keeping up to date. It had,
for the most part, no hold on permanent things, on permanent truths about man
and God and life and death. The surface of Tennyson stirred about with his time;
and he had nothing to which to hold fast except his unique and unerring feeling

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 Contexts and Reception 185

for the sounds of words. But in this he had something that no one else had.
Tennyson’s surface, his technical accomplishment, is intimate with his depths:
what we most quickly see about Tennyson is that which moves between the
surface and the depths, that which is of slight importance. By looking innocently
at the surface, we are most likely to come to the depths, to the abyss of sorrow.
Tennyson is not only a minor Virgil, he is also with Virgil as Dante saw him, a
Virgil among the Shades, the saddest of all English poets, among the Great in
Limbo, the most instinctive rebel against the society in which he was the most
perfect conformist. (Eliot [1936] 1999: 328–38)

Notes
1. For a full account of the collaborative authorship of the Memoir, see Philip K. Elliott
(1995), The Making of the Memoir, Lincoln: Tennyson Society.
2. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship
of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (2003), by James Secord, provides a full
and fascinating history of Vestiges.
3. A comprehensive survey of reviews received by In Memoriam is provided in Edgar F.
Shannon’s Tennyson and the Reviewers (1952).
4. Marion Shaw writes that Palgrave’s selection resulted in ‘a poem as uncomplicated,
beautiful, and homogeneous as a double string of pearls’ (Shaw 1980: 198), a far cry
from the complex, multiple character of the complete text.
5. This is an argument that I make more fully in Chapter 3 of Tennyson’s Name (2008).

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 Chapter 5
Teaching the Text

This section of the Reading Guide provides a selection of suggestions and

starting points for teaching In Memoriam. It includes strategies for reading
the poem, sample seminar and module outlines and ideas for assessment
activities that aim to enable students to engage with those formal elements
and thematic concerns addressed in earlier chapters.

Reading the Text

One of the most significant challenges of teaching In Memoriam is getting
students to read it. Its length and repetitiveness – two characteristics that are
key to understanding the poem – also pose problems for students, who will
often have one week to ‘get through it’ in preparation for class. A couple of
straightforward solutions to this initial problem are: to spend more than one
week teaching the poem (see the outline for an In Memoriam module, below)
or to ask students to read selected sections (you could take one of the chapters
of the reading guide as the basis for this kind of selective approach). However,
regardless of whether students are being asked to read the whole poem or
just parts of it, in one week or over several, it is important to get students to
think about the reading experience: to reflect on how they are reading as well
as what they are reading. Students might be provided with a list of questions
that encourage this kind of reflection, for example:

• What did you find most difficult about reading the poem?
• Do you think the poem traces a narrative?
• Would you describe the development of the poem as linear or cyclical, or
would you say that it failed to develop at all?
• Can you identify any important turning points in the poem?
• Do you think that the poem is best understood as a single long poem or a
connected series of short poems?

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 Teaching the Text 187

Questions of this kind encourage students to see the challenges involved in

reading In Memoriam as a key rather than a barrier to understanding the
text; and, because there is no right answer to any of them, they can be used
to introduce the formal and generic tensions on which In Memoriam is struc-
tured.

Initial Responses
Two common – and opposite – responses to In Memoriam are that it is
impenetrable, repetitive and dull, and that it is deeply moving (sometimes
because the reader can relate to the experience of grief that the poem
describes). Both of these responses are tricky to develop into a fruitful critical
discussion. The first closes down interpretive possibilities; the second leads to
responses that are overly evaluative or personal. However, these responses
can also be employed to explore In Memoriam’s paradoxical double identity,
the relationship between fragment and monument, private and public that is
discussed at the beginning of this book. In a class where both of these initial
responses to the poem are expressed, students can be asked to identify how
the poem elicited the response it did from them and then to consider how the
same poem can have resulted in such different readings. Emotionally sympa-
thetic responses to the poem can be challenged by drawing attention to the
poem’s composition and structure: why, if the poem is simply a sincere out-
pouring of grief, does Tennyson not publish the sections in the order that they
were written? Readers who focus on the poem’s scale and artificiality should
be asked to think about moments when the poem threatens to fracture or
break down (see, for example, section XVI). Another common response to In
Memoriam is that it is self-indulgent. It can be pointed out that this is some-
thing that In Memoriam thinks about itself (see, for example, section XXI),
so that, by levelling this kind of accusation at the poem, apparently resistant
readers in fact identify one of In Memoriam’s central questions: (how) should
we use poetry to respond to loss?

Teaching In Memoriam as a Victorian text

In Memoriam is often included as part of core undergraduate modules that
survey the literature of the Victorian period. Encouraging students to think
about In Memoriam’s self-consciously paradoxical textual identity and their
own role as readers of the poem introduces the theme of post-Romantic
literary doubt that identifies the poem with its historical moment. This can
be employed as a starting point for consideration of other ways that In
Memoriam defines and can be defined as a Victorian text. Again, the main

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 188 In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

barrier to this kind of discussion is the lyric, apparently personal nature of

In Memoriam and the fact that it is a poem about the ‘universal’ experience
of grief. For this reason it can be difficult to see how this poem is about,
or informed by, the cultural and philosophical concerns of the nineteenth
century. To encourage their awareness of the ways that the speaker’s grief is
informed by its historical and cultural context, students can be asked to pay
attention to the identity of the speaker and to the historically inflected themes
and motifs that the speaker employs to articulate his grief, so that they begin
to see the poem as a construct that assembles and forms (to a greater or lesser
extent) a range of cultural and textual materials.
Discussion about the identity of the speaker might begin with Tennyson’s
comment, recorded in Hallam’s memoir of his father, that ‘“I” is not always
the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking
thro’ him’ (see ‘Contexts and Reception’). What does Tennyson mean by
this? What do students make of the implication that the voice is not the same
throughout the poem (if ‘“I” is not always the author’, this suggests that ‘I’
is sometimes the author and sometimes something else)? Can students iden-
tify parts that they think are spoken by the author and parts spoken by, or
on behalf of, ‘the human race’? Is it possible to speak on behalf of humanity
or is the universal ‘I’ really a white, masculine, Western, educated, Victorian
‘I’? By drawing attention to the problems involved in claiming to speak for
everyone, it is possible to think about the relationship between universality
and historical specificity, so that by looking at those sections where Tennyson
seems to speak with the voice of the race, we can gain insight into the funda-
mental concerns of a particular nation, gender and class in the first half of the
nineteenth century.
Many of the central motifs of In Memoriam tread a similarly fine line
between the universal and the historical. In the Reading Guide section of this
book I trace four motifs through the poem, discussing how they explore and
describe Tennyson’s grief and also engage with Victorian science, religion, lit-
erature and philosophy. A learning activity based on this kind of reading can
help students to trace different routes through the poem and to gain a sense
of the different cultural materials that the poem weaves together. It will also
encourage students to think about the relationship between repetition and
progress that structures the poem.

Activity: Mapping the poem

The week before the tutorial, the tutor should assign a word, image or
motif to two or three students. Motifs might include: speech and language,
hands and touch, economics, circles and cycles, religious ritual, nature,

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 Teaching the Text 189

love, family, blood, the country and the city, houses and rooms, daybreak
and sunset, light, the sea. Students should be told to read the poem with
their motif in mind, marking points where it features and answering the
following questions in preparation for the tutorial:
• What is the significance of this motif?
• What does it represent for the speaker?
• How does the speaker represent the motif?
• What language does he use?
• Does the motif engage with ideas or themes that you have come across
in other Victorian texts you have read?
• If so, how?
• Do the answers to any of these questions change as the poem progresses?
• What changes occur and why?
In the tutorial, students reading for the same motif should pair up to
discuss their readings. They should then be asked to present their readings
to the rest of the group.

Thinking About Form

Although students often regard form as the most difficult aspect of reading
and writing about poetry, initial responses to In Memoriam are frequently
dominated by one of its most important formal aspects: length. Discussions
of the more detailed aspects of In Memoriam’s form can begin with this
observation. Students can be encouraged to think about length as a formal
feature that represents and performs the experience of three years of mourn-
ing, shaping the time of grief as well as describing the experience of grief.
Students can then be asked to consider what kind of shape Tennyson gives
to his grief in In Memoriam. Students might be asked to identify and evalu-
ate different ways in which the poem describes its own form. Is it a series of
‘wild and wandering cries’, as the speaker claims in the Prologue? Is it a ‘sad
mechanic exercise’, as described in section V; or a collection of ‘brief lays’,
as in XLVIII? Does it ‘mingle all without a plan’ (XVI, 20)? Or is it ‘toil cor-
porate to an end’ (CXXVIII)? Is Fragments of an Elegy a more apt title than
the more monumental In Memoriam; or would The Way of the Soul, with its
implications of progress and development be better still? By justifying why
they agree or disagree with these diverse descriptions, students will begin to
describe and analyse the different and contradictory aspects of the poem’s
form.
Bearing these large-scale formal definitions in mind, students might then be
encouraged to think about how the details of In Memoriam’s form contribute

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 190 In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

to their understanding of the poem. Below are two activities designed to help
students get to grips with the In Memoriam stanza.

Activity: Comparative forms

This activity aims to enable students to engage with the In Memoriam
stanza by comparing it with two poetic forms with which they may already
be familiar. The activity deals with short sections of In Memoriam and
so can be carried out in a seminar or workshop without any preparation.
Students can work on their comparative readings individually or in small
groups and then present their ideas to the larger group.

Comparison 1: Section LII and Sonnet 43 from Sonnets from the

Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints! – I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! – and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
(Barrett Browning [1850] 2010: II, 478)
This comparison takes as its starting point the frequent comparisons
drawn between In Memoriam and the sonnet sequence (I have suggested a
sonnet by another Victorian writer, but a Shakespearean sonnet would be
equally appropriate). Students should be asked to read both texts and to
think about the following points:
• Use the Browning sonnet (reproduced here) to remind yourself of the
sonnet form. Pay attention to the number of lines, rhyme scheme and
metre. Think about whether the form encourages you to pause at any
point, whether it draws attention to any shifts in the poem’s argument,
whether you would describe the form as closed or open, complete or
incomplete.

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 Teaching the Text 191

• Do the same with section LII of In Memoriam.

• Can you identify any significant similarities or differences? Do you
think section LII is a sort of sonnet, and why?

Comparison 2: Section XV and ‘The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens’, lines

1–20
The king sits in Dumferling toune,
Drinking the blude-reid wine:
‘O whar will I get guid sailor,
To sail this ship of mine?’
2
Up and spak an eldern knicht,
Sat at the kings richt kne:
‘Sir Patrick Spens is the best sailor
That sails upon the se.’
3
The king has written a braid letter,
And signd it wi his hand,
And sent it to Sir Patrick Spens,
Was walking on the sand.
4
The first line that Sir Patrick red,
A loud lauch lauched he;
The next line that Sir Patrick red,
The teir blinded his ee.
5
‘O wha is this has don this deid,
This ill deid don to me,
To send me out this time o’ the yeir,
To sail upon the se!
(Percy [1765] 1996: I, 72–3)
This comparison is based on the similarities between the In Memoriam
stanza and ballad metre, which are outlined in the ‘Mapping and Making’
section of this book. I suggest an extract of the ballad so that the activity
can be carried out within a single class, but students could also be asked to
read the whole ballad in preparation for the seminar. Again, the following
questions should be given to guide discussion:
• What are the key formal elements of this ballad? Pay attention to the
stanza form, metre and rhyme scheme.
• A ballad is a type of poem that tells a story. How does the form of this
ballad contribute to / affect the story that it tells?

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 192 In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

• How does the ballad form compare to the form of this section of
In Memoriam? What are the main similarities? What are the main
differences and how do they affect the way the poem sounds and / or
feels?

Activity: Decomposing and recomposing

This activity aims to encourage an understanding of form through practice.
Students can reflect on how the In Memoriam stanza works by playing
around with it, disassembling and reassembling it. Begin by showing
the students the ‘germ’ of In Memoriam (reproduced in the ‘Contexts
and Reception’ chapter, above) in order to introduce the idea that the
In Memoriam stanza was a form that Tennyson developed while he was
composing the poem. Having understood that form is the result of a set of
conscious decisions on the part of the poet, it is then possible to discuss
how those decisions affect the tone and meaning of the poem. One way
to do this is to consider how the poem would have looked if Tennyson
had made a different set of decisions. What if he had written the poem in
rhyming couplets? What if he had placed the line breaks in different places?
Choose a section of the poem and ask the students to rewrite it, changing
only the form and keeping the sense intact (depending on time and class
size, this activity could be carried out in small groups or done as a class).
For example, section XXII might be rewritten to look like this:
XXII.
The path by which we twain did go,
Which led by tracts that pleased us well,
From flower to flower, from snow to snow,
Through four sweet years arose and fell;
And we with singing cheered the way,
And, crowned with all the season lent,
And glad at heart from May to May,
From April on to April went:
But where the path we walked began
To slant the fifth autumnal slope,
There sat the Shadow feared of man,
As we descended following Hope;
Who broke our fair companionship,
And spread his mantle dark and cold,
And dulled the murmur on thy lip,
And wrapt thee formless in the fold,
And bore thee where I could not see
Nor follow, though I walk in haste.

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 Teaching the Text 193

I think that Shadow waits for me:

It sits somewhere within the waste.
Ask the students to discuss the new version they have produced. How
does the section look now? How does it sound? (How) has the relationship
between form and meaning changed? In the example given, students might
recognise an increase of pace and might be encouraged to think about how
the unbroken ABAB rhyme scheme achieves a different relationship with
the interrupted journey that the section describes, building up a momen-
tum that mirrors the mourner’s hasty footsteps and carrying the events
forward. Having discussed their new versions, students should then be
asked to look back at the section in its original form and think about how
it looks and sounds in comparison. What happens to its pace and momen-
tum? Is there a change in tone? What is the relationship between form
and meaning here? Discussing section XXII, students can again consider
the path, the journey and the passing of the seasons: does the form of the
section complicate, or create tension with, the events that are described?
For example, might the backwards-looking rhyme scheme lead us to ques-
tion the mourner’s sincerity when he says ‘I walk in haste,’ and draw our
attention to his desire to dwell in the past rather than look forward to the
future? This section also talks about Arthur being ‘wrapt . . . formless in
the fold’, a reference to form that might help to focus discussion on ques-
tions of form and formlessness and the relationship between Tennyson’s
formal composition and the decomposing body it remembers.

Module Outline: Grieving Forms: In Memoriam and the Poetry of

Loss
As I have tried to show throughout this Guide, In Memoriam is a hugely rich
text that yields to multiple readings and stands in vital relation to a great
number of other texts. These readings and relationships might form the basis
for a stand-alone module for either undergraduate or postgraduate students.
The outline below suggests texts, discussion topics and assessment ideas for
a ten-week module. It begins by establishing In Memoriam’s place within the
elegiac tradition and moves on to explore the questions of voice and perform-
ance, raised by Tennyson’s mourner, through other, more overtly dramatic
responses to the death of Hallam. Week five encourages students to think
about the poem’s faltering religious belief alongside other Victorian poetic
expressions of faith and doubt, and week six explores the poem’s engagement
with pre-Darwinian evolutionary science by reading Tennyson’s descriptions
of ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ alongside its scientific intertexts. In week

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 194 In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

seven discussion focuses on the ways poetry articulates sexuality, reading the
elegy as love lyric alongside the Sapphic poetry of Swinburne and the Michael
Field poets; and in week eight students are invited to think about the ways in
which this anonymous poem contributed to and also complicates the public
spectacle of Victorian grief. The module ends by moving into the twentieth
century, concluding with T. S. Eliot’s modernist, elegiac epic, The Waste
Land.

Outline
Selections from In Memoriam will be set each week alongside the following
texts:
Week 1: Mapping Grief: Fragments, Cycles and Wholes
Introductory Tutorial
Week 2: Remembering the Elegy 1
Spenser, Astrophel (1595)
Milton, ‘Lycidas’ (1637)
Week 3: Remembering the Elegy 2
Gray, ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1751)
Shelley, Adonais (1821)
Week 4: Performing Grief
Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’ (1842), ‘Tithon’ (1833)
Week 5: Loss of Faith
Christina Rossetti, ‘When I am dead my dearest’ (1862)
Emily Brontë, ‘No coward soul is mine’ (1850)
G. M. Hopkins, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ (1918)
Week 6: The Science of Mourning
Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (1830–3) (extracts)
Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844)
(extracts)
Week 7: The Grief that Dare not Speak its Name
A. C. Swinburne, ‘Ave Atque Vale: In Memory of Charles Baudelaire’
(1878)
‘Anactoria’ (1866)
Michael Field, ‘Sometimes I do despatch my heart’ (1893)
Week 8: Private Grief, Public Spectacle
Tennyson, Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington (1854)
Wordsworth, ‘Essays on Epitaphs’ (1810)
Robert Browning, ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church’
(1845)

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 Teaching the Text 195

Week 9: Afterlives 1
Matthew Arnold, ‘Thrysis’ (1866)
Thomas Hardy, ‘The Going’ (1912), ‘Your Last Drive’ (1912), ‘Rain on a
Grave’ (1913), ‘The Voice’ (1914)
Week 10: Afterlives 2
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

Assessment – Option 1: Edited Edition

This assessment activity is designed to offer students a hands-on engagement
with In Memoriam’s forms and meanings by asking them to construct their
own In Memoriam out of the poem’s elegiac fragments. Students are required
to edit and introduce a select edition of In Memoriam, choosing a collec-
tion of lyrics that relate to a particular theme, influence or context. Their
introductory essay to the edition will combine close readings of their chosen
sections with relevant critical, theoretical and historical material. One way to
introduce this assessment activity is to show students a range of select editions
(from Palgrave’s selection for the Macmillan Golden Treasury to the Norton
edition) and invite them to consider the editorial decisions that have been
made and the effect that they have on the poem’s textual identity. Certain
editions emphasise particular themes; others alter the order of the lyrics so
that the poem follows a different line of development. If students are made
aware of the creative potential of editorial work, they will be encouraged to
think carefully about the implications of their editorial decisions and produce
editions that communicate their own reading of the poem.

Assessment – Option 2: Essay

This assessment method is designed to lead on from the ‘Mapping the Poem’
activity, outlined above. Rather than responding to a set essay question,
students can be asked to perform a close-reading of the poem that traces the
development of a particular motif or idea. As above, students might choose
from a list of options, or might be invited to identify their own image / idea.
This assessment requires a combination of detailed close-reading and a sense
of the way the poem works as a whole.

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 Annotated Bibliography

The tradition of modern scholarly writing about In Memoriam is so rich and wide-
ranging that it is impossible to do justice to it in the space available. The briefly
annotated, highly select bibliography provided here lists some of the best introduc-
tions to Tennyson’s poetry, as well as a handful of the most influential work on In
Memoriam itself.

Editions
Gray, Erik, ed. (2004), In Memoriam: Norton Critical Edition, New York: W. W.
Norton.
An accessible edition that provides helpful explanations of many of In Memoriam’s
literary allusions and contexts. Also includes a selection of extracts from critical
essays that samples a range of approaches and perspectives.
Ricks, Christopher, ed. (1987), The Poems of Tennyson in Three Volumes, 2nd
edn, Harlow: Longman.
The definitive modern edition of Tennyson’s poetry. Generously annotated, pro-
viding information about the poem’s composition and revision, and suggesting
connections with other works by the poet. In Memoriam is also included, in full,
in Longman’s select edition of Tennyson (2006).
Shatto, Susan and Marion Shaw, eds (1982), In Memoriam, Oxford: Clarendon.
A single-volume scholarly edition, annotated in meticulous detail, with informa-
tion about composition and manuscript variation, as well as extensive commen-
tary.

Companions and Introductions

Culler, A. Dwight (1977), The Poetry of Tennyson, New Haven: Yale University
Press.
This sensitive study charts the development of Tennyson’s poetic identity in
relation to his work, focusing on literary rather than biographical contexts. It
includes chapters on many of his major works, including In Memoriam.

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 Annotated Bibliography 197

Perry, Seamus (2004), Tennyson, Tavistock: Northcote House.

A brilliant introduction to Tennyson’s style, including a series of deft close-
readings. Essential reading for anyone coming to Tennyson for the first time.
Ricks, Christopher (1989), Tennyson, 2nd edn, Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Another indispensable introduction that provides an illuminating account of
Tennyson’s life and work.
Shaw, Marion (1988), Alfred Lord Tennyson, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester
Wheatsheaf.
One of the best feminist accounts of Tennyson’s poetry. Engages with psychoana-
lytical theory, taking in a range of work, including In Memoriam.
Sinfield, Alan (1986), Alfred Tennyson, Oxford: Blackwell.
A concise introduction written from a Marxist, deconstructionist perspective that
reads the poems with an eye to their political context.

Biographies
Martin, Robert Bernard (1980), Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart, Oxford:
Clarendon.
The best recent biography. Offers a lively, detailed account of Tennyson’s life and
some interesting psychological insights.
Ormond, Leonee (1993), Alfred Tennyson: A Literary Life, Basingstoke:
Macmillan.
A useful critical biography that reads Tennyson’s work in its biographical and
literary contexts.
Tennyson, Hallam (1897), Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by his Son, 2 vols,
London: Macmillan.
Hallam Tennyson’s personal, partial memoir of his father remains an essen-
tial biographical resource. The narrative incorporates journal extracts, letters,
unpublished poems and the reminiscences of many of Tennyson’s friends.
Tennyson, Sir Charles (1949), Alfred Tennyson, London: Macmillan.
A biography by Tennyson’s grandson. The first to provide details of Tennyson’s
troubled family history.

Studies of In Memoriam
Armstrong, Isobel (1992), ‘Tennyson in the 1850s: From Geology to Pathology
– In Memoriam (1850) to Maud (1855)’, in Tennyson: Seven Essays, ed. Philip
Collins, New York: St Martin’s, pp. 102–40.
One of the best treatments of In Memoriam’s engagement with evolutionary
science.
Bradley, A. C. (1901), A Commentary on Tennyson’s In Memoriam, 3rd edn,
London: Macmillan.
An important early work of criticism and analysis that draws on biographical
detail and identifies significant themes.

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 198 In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

Peltason, Timothy (1986), Reading In Memoriam, Princeton: Princeton University

Press.
A lively account of the poem, influenced by deconstructionist criticism.
Sacks, Peter (1985), The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Sacks’s reading of the elegiac tradition in England is influenced by Freudian
theories of mourning and melancholia, and includes an excellent chapter on the
psychology of In Memoriam’s mourner.
Sinfield, Alan (1971), The Language of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Oxford:
Blackwell.
Very different from Sinfield’s later, post-Marxist account of Tennyson’s life and
work, this fine, nuanced reading focuses on the different traditions that inform In
Memoriam’s rich, allusive language.

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 Works Cited

Anonymous (1850), ‘In Memoriam’, Fraser’s Magazine, September, pp. 245–55.

Anonymous (1850), ‘In Memoriam’, The Leader, June, pp. 303–4.
Anonymous (1859), ‘Tennyson’s Poems’, Quarterly Review, October, pp. 454–85.
Armstrong, Isobel (1982), Language as Living Form in Nineteenth-Century Poetry,
Sussex: Harvester.
Armstrong, Isobel (1993), Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics, London:
Routledge.
Attridge, Derek (1995), Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Auden, W. H. (1973), Forwards and Afterwords, London: Faber & Faber.
Austin, J. L. [1955] (1976), How To Do Things With Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and
Marina Sbisà, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Barrett Browning, Elizabeth (2010), The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed.
Sandra Donaldson, 5 vols, London: Pickering & Chatto.
Barton, Anna (2008), Tennyson’s Name: Identity and Responsibility in the Poetry
of Alfred Lord Tennyson, Aldershot: Ashgate.
Beerbohm, Max (1904), The Poets’ Corner, London: W. Heinemann.
Bell, Catherine (1993), Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Bevis, Matthew (2003), Lives of Victorian Literary Figures, part 1, vol. 3, London:
Pickering & Chatto.
Blair, Kirstie (2001), ‘Touching Hearts: Queen Victoria and the Curative Properties
of In Memoriam’, Tennyson Research Bulletin 5, pp. 246–54.
Blocksidge, Martin (2010), A Life Lived Quickly: Tennyson’s Friend Arthur Henry
Hallam and His Legend, Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press.
Bradley, A. C. (1901), A Commentary on Tennyson’s In Memoriam, 3rd edn,
London: Macmillan.
Buckley, Jerome Hamilton (1960), Tennyson: The Growth of a Poet, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Chambers, Robert [1844] (1994), Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, ed.
James Secord, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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 200 In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1969–90), The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor

Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 16 vols, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Derrida, Jacques (2001), The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and
Michael Naas, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Eliot, T. S. [1936] (1999), ‘In Memoriam’, Selected Essays, 3rd edn, London: Faber
& Faber, pp. 286–95.
Eliot, T. S. (2004), The Complete Poems and Plays, London: Faber & Faber.
Elliott, Philip K. (1995), The Making of the Memoir, Lincoln: Tennyson Society
Monographs.
Fish, Stanley (1998), Surprised by Sin, 2nd edn, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Forster, John (1850), ‘In Memoriam’, The Examiner, June, pp. 356–7.
Freud, Sigmund [1917] (2005), ‘On Mourning and Melancholia’, trans. Shaun
Whiteside, On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, ed. Maud Ellman,
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Gray, Thomas, William Collins and Oliver Goldsmith (1969), Poems, ed. Roger
Lonsdale, London: Longman.
Hair, Donald S. (1991), Tennyson’s Language, Toronto: University of Toronto
Press.
Hallam, Arthur Henry (1831), ‘On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry
and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson’, Englishman’s Magazine, August,
pp. 616–28.
Hallam, Arthur Henry (1834), Remains in Verse and Prose, ed. Henry Hallam,
London.
Homer (1987), The Iliad, trans. Martin Hammond, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Homer (2006), The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Janowitz, Anne (1998), Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Joseph, Gerhard (1992), Tennyson and the Text, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Keats, John (1972), The Complete Poems, ed. Miriam Allott, Harlow: Longman.
Kennedy, David (2007), Elegy, Abingdon: Routledge.
Knowles, James (1893), ‘Aspects of Tennyson’, The Nineteenth Century, January,
pp. 164–88.
Leighton, Angela (2007), On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Legacy of a
Word, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lukács, Georg [1916] (1971), The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lushington, Franklin (1850), ‘In Memoriam’, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, August,
pp. 499–506.
Lyell, Charles (1835), Principles of Geology, 4th edn, London: John Murray.
Marston, J. Westland (1850), ‘In Memoriam’, The Athenaeum, June, pp.
629–30.
Martin, Robert Bernard (1983), Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart, Oxford: Clarendon.

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 Works Cited 201

McGann, Jerome (1996), The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style,

Oxford: Clarendon.
Milton, John [1667] (1968), Paradise Lost, ed. Christopher Ricks, Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Milton John (1971), The Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, London:
Longman.
Newlyn, Lucy (2001), Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Nunokowa, Jeff (1996), ‘In Memoriam and the Extinction of the Homosexual’, in
Tennyson, ed. Rebecca Stott, London: Longman, pp. 197–209.
Percy, Thomas [1765] (1996), Reliques of Ancient English and Poetry, 3 vols,
London: Routledge.
Perry, Seamus (2004), Alfred Tennyson, Tavistock: Northcote House.
Plato (1993), The Last Days of Socrates, trans. Hugh Tredennick and Harold
Tarrant, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Proust, Marcel [1913–1927] (1981), Remembrance of Things Past, 7 vols, trans.
C. K. Scott-Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, London: Chatto & Windus.
Ramazani, Jahan (1994), The Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy
to Heaney, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ricks, Christopher (1989), Tennyson, 2nd edn, Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Ross, David (1953), Plato’s Theory of Ideas, 2nd edn, Oxford: Clarendon.
Sacks, Peter (1985), The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Secord, James (2003) Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication,
Reception and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosovsky (1985), Between Men: English Literature and Male
Homosocial Desire, New York: Columbia University Press.
Shannon, Edgar Finley, Jr. (1952), Tennyson and the Reviewers: A Study of his
Literary Reputation and of the Influence of the Critics upon his Poetry 1827–
1851, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Shaw, Marion (1980), ‘Palgrave’s In Memoriam’, Victorian Poetry 18.2, Summer,
pp. 199–201.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1970), Complete Poems, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, 2nd edn,
London: Oxford University Press.
Sinfield, Alan (1971), The Language of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Oxford:
Blackwell.
Sinfield, Alan (1986), Alfred Tennyson, Oxford: Blackwell.
Sinfield, Alan (1994), The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer
Movement, New York: Cassell.
Tennyson, Alfred [1850] (1981), In Memoriam, ed. Susan Shatto and Marion
Shaw, Oxford: Clarendon.
Tennyson, Alfred (1987), The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, 3 vols,
2nd edn, Harlow: Longman.

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 202 In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

Tennyson, Hallam (1897), Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by his Son. 2 vols,
London: Macmillan.
Tucker, Herbert (1988), Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Tucker, Herbert (2008), Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Woolf, Virginia [1928] (1945), A Room of One’s Own, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Wordsworth, William (1982), The Poems, 2 vols, ed. John O. Hayden, London:
Yale University Press.
Wordsworth, William and S. T. Coleridge [1798–1800] (1991), Lyrical Ballads /
The Text of the 1798 Edition with the Additional 1800 Poems and the Prefaces,
ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones, 2nd edn, London: Methuen.

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 Index

Armstrong, Isobel, 3, 154, 168n Eliot, T. S., 157–8, 183–5, 194, 195
Arnold, Matthew, 195 Empiricism, 135
Athenaeum, The, 133, 180 Epic, 3, 5, 8–9, 11, 15, 25n, 123, 144, 172,
Attridge, Derek, 12, 15 183
Auden, W. H., 147–8 Evolution see Science
Austin, J. L., 132 Examiner, The, 133

Ballad, 13–17, 26n, 173, 191–2 Faith, 2, 9–10, 24–5, 123–6, 130–2, 140–4,
Barrett-Browning, Elizabeth, 190 151, 154–5, 158, 166, 168, 168n, 174,
Barthes, Roland, 122 175, 181–2, 183–4
Beerbohm, Max, 1–2, 182 Fall, The, 10, 121–4, 126, 131–2
Bell, Catherine, 163–4 Field, Michael, 194
Bible, The, 1, 10, 23, 121–3, 130, 141 Fish, Stanley, 122
Body, 12–15, 17, 124–6, 134–44, 193 Fraser’s Magazine, 181–2
Bradley, A. C., 26n, 140 Freud, Sigmund, 127, 146–9
Brontë, Emily, 194
Browning, Robert, 194 Genesis, 10, 121–2, 123
Buckley, J. H., 4n, 26n, 119n, 137 Goethe, Johann Wilhelm von, 8, 25n
Gray, Thomas, 136, 194
Cambridge, 6–7
Cambridge Apostles, 7, 20, 142, 171 Hallam, Arthur Henry, 6–7, 20–1, 25n,
Chambers, Robert, 153–4, 175, 177–8, 127–8, 142, 171–2
194 Review of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical,
Childhood, 130–1, 142, 180 169–71
Christ, 20, 23, 141, 142, 167 Hallam, Henry, 6, 7
Christmas, 28, 140, 165–8 Remains in Verse and Prose of Arthur
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 120, 135 Henry Hallam, 171–2
Hardy, Thomas, 195
Dante, 172, 182, 185 Homer, 171
Darwin, Charles, 153 The Iliad, 8
Derrida, Jacques, 122–3 The Odyssey, 8, 144
Doubt see Faith Homosexuality see Sexuality
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 194
Economics, 144–55 Hume, David, 134–5
Eden, 122–3, 132–3
Elegy, 2–3, 6, 8–9, 17–25, 128, 131, 132, Joyce, James, 183
136, 143, 183

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 204 In Memoriam: A Reading Guide

Keats, John, 7, 18–25 Sedgwick, Eve Kosovsky, 128

‘This living hand, now warm and capable’, Sellwood, Emily, 160
138 Senses, the see Touch
Kennedy, David, 18, 20, 21 Sentiment, 134–6, 139–40, 181, 182
Knowles, James, 27–8, 144 Sexuality, 127–8, 194
Shakespeare, 182, 190
Lazarus, 23, 128 Hamlet, 147
Leader, The, 180–1 Shatto, Susan, 25n, 26n
Leighton, Angela, 136, 138 Shaw, Marion, 25n, 16n, 168n, 185n
Locke, John, 134–5, 168n Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 7, 123, 125, 170, 181
Lukács, Georg, 3 Adonais, 18–25, 125, 180, 194
Lushington, Edmund, 28, 131, 160 Sidney, Sir Philip, 17–19, 175
Lyell, Charles, 153–5, 175–7, 194 Simile, 126–8, 136–7
Lyric, 2–3, 6, 8–9, 11, 17–18, 157, 164, 172, Sincerity, 6, 11, 164, 179, 183, 187, 193
188 Sinfield, Alan, 4n, 26n, 123, 127, 168n
‘Sir Patrick Spens’, 16, 191–2
Materialism, 135, 137, 139–40 Society, The see Cambridge Apostles
Melancholia, 146–8, 150, 168n, 184 Socrates, 124–5
Metre, 12–17, 137, 157–8, 173–5, 181, Soul, 3, 124–6, 140, 143, 159–63
190–1 Spenser, Edmund, 18–19, 194
Milton, John Swinburne, A. C., 194
Lycidas, 18–26, 180–1, 194
Paradise Lost, 8–9, 123 Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 133
Tennyson, Alfred
National Identity, 8–9, 11, 14–15, 129, 164, ‘Break, Break, Break’, 136–7
170, 179–80, 182 In Memoriam: Anonymity, 5–6, 11, 15,
Nature, 21–3, 121, 124–5, 129–31, 133, 179, 180; Composition, 2, 9 –12,
135, 137–8, 143–4, 145, 150–5, 157–9, 25–6n, 153, 172, 173–4; In Memoriam
161–3, 175–8, 193 stanza, 12–17; Poem outline, 27–8;
Reviews, 133–4, 136, 179–82, 183,
Oral tradition, 8, 14–15 185n
Maud, 183n
Palgrave, F. T., 179, 185n, 195 Ode on the Death of the Duke of
Pastoral, 21–3, 26n, 129, 131, 143, 161 Wellington, 179, 194
Perry, Seamus, 13, 18, 26 Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, 7, 169–70
Plato, 23, 123–6, 168n Princess, The, 148
Pound, Ezra, 183 ‘Tears, Idle Tears’, 148, 168n
Proust, Marcel, 121 ‘Ulysses’, 144–9
Tennyson, Cecilia, 28, 13, 160
Quarterly Review, The, 182 Tennyson, Emily, 7, 128
Tennyson, Hallam, 29
Ramazani, Jahan, 17 Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir By His
Religious belief see Faith Son, 6, 133, 172–5
Rhythm see Metre Touch, 132–4
Ricks, Christopher, 2–3, 4n, 25, 26n, 142, Tucker, Herbert, 25n, 145, 149
153, 168n
Ritual, 155–68 Victoria, 1–2
Romanticism, 4n, 13, 123–4, 125, 135, Victorian, 1, 182–3, 187–89
137–8, 170, 187
Rossetti, Christina, 194 Westland-Marston, J., 180–1
Woolf, Virginia, 183
Sacks, Peter, 18, 148, 150 Wordsworth, William, 13–16, 135, 137,
Science, 23–4, 28, 153–5, 173, 175–8 156–9, 164, 168n, 194

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