In Memoriam

In Memoriam is at its complex, emotional core a simple elegy. The poem comes to terms with the implications of the death of someone special, someone who seemed by dint of their youth, their resilience, their capacity for life impervious to even the threat of mortality. What is singular about Tennyson’s epic—apart from its sheer scale—is the deeply personal nature of the elegy. Within more conventional elegies, the focus rests on death and the poem itself stays safely, coolly abstract as the poet grapples with the concept of death and the reality of its inevitability. Elegies have long been deemed public poetry; that is, the poet, perhaps deeply troubled, puts on the persona of a public figure and hands out (down?) hard-earned wisdom to help guide the Reader (always a capital R) when inevitably it comes time for the Reader to confront death. The poet traditionally works to come across as thoughtful, philosophical, even objective. In those works, and perhaps no better comparison can be drawn than to Percy Shelley’s towering Adonais (1821), a philosophical inquiry into death at a young age using the death of John Keats, a fellow poet Shelley had only briefly met. In that case, death, not Shelley’s emotional profile, is the subject.

In this work, Tennyson is the very much the subject. Tennyson’s elegy is intensely, even immodestly personal, for he reveals disturbing uncertainties over the very existence and purpose of Christians (scandalous at the time) and hints subtly that the relationship with the dead poet might have been more than an intense friendship (Tennyson repeatedly refers to himself as Hallam’s “widow”), another topic decidedly taboo in Victorian England. There is no doubt Tennyson is the speaker; no doubt Arthur Hallam is the deceased, the shrouded body being shipped from Italy and buried in the nearby churchyard; no doubt the woman whose joyous wedding cracks the despair of the poet and finally lets in the redeeming light of hope is Tennyson’s own sister. Although exploring the poet’s own emotional devastation is something of a given for contemporary readers familiar with the 20th-century school of Confessionalist “introspective” poets, for a poet to lay so bare his own heart, his own fears, his own anxieties, and ultimately his own resolution marks In Memoriam as a harbinger of poetry that would emerge more than a century later.

The second challenge to the poem is its scale. Not just the 2000+ lines but the fact that Tennyson gathered his songs, or cantos, across more than 15 years. This is not an elegy anchored to the pivotal moment of adjustment when the poet struggles in a raw and unguarded moment to come to terms with death. In such elegies, tone is consistent—mournful, melancholy, the depth of the sadness and the sorrow unmitigated because the emotional wounding is so raw. Because Tennyson arranged the cantos sometimes years after they were composed, the overall effect is less of sorrow as it is an evolution away from sorrow. There is significant emotional change across the 133 cantos, a working through the experience of loss and moving toward a strategy not of contentment (the poet points out repeatedly that the spirit of Hallam will never entirely remove itself) but rather of optimistic adjustment. In the end, sorrow itself, so intimidating and so absolute in the opening sections, is dismissed as a crutch, a deceit, a sham whose presence, if unchallenged, undermines the very foundation of Christianity by suggesting that life must be meaningless because death is inevitable. The poet has no truck with sorrow by the closing canto: a loving God has got the whole world in his hands.

Tennyson was born into Christianity; his father was a practicing cleric, albeit a deeply flawed man. Tennyson studied the wisdom literature of Judeo-Christianity and writes here not as some angry flame-throwing atheist but rather like a student whose diligent studying is about to be tested. He opens the poem with a series of stinging yet honest questions addressed not to a cosmic, clockmaker-type God who cares nothing for His creation but rather to Jesus Christ, who within Christianity represents the most immediate evidence of God’s redemptive, personal love: the death of Christ makes meaningful the death of everyone who believes. Forgive these questions, the poet asks in the Prologue, but why deprive me of the one whose love made your own creation worthier of admiration? In these opening cantos, Jesus Christ is suspended uneasily between hero and villain through the poet’s deft use of rhetorical questions. The more he asserts that he fears the directions his questions are leading, the more the poem advocates exactly what the poet fears. Christ, if he is there at all, is at best hapless, at worst ironic.

In the opening cantos, the poet dwells on the actual physical body of his dead friend. He pictures the boat carting the body across stormy seas from Italy; he imagines the corpse wrapped in its shroud; he imagines the body in its simple wooden casket buried in the nearby churchyard now helpless as tree roots thrust themselves through and around his rotting bones. The figure that dominates the early cantos is the New Testament figure of Lazarus, Jesus’s close friend whom Jesus commanded to come back from the dead. The poet struggles to find the solace the story is intended to offer in Canto 32, a story that “sinks ‘neath the weight of dark” (Line 7). Again and again, his faith frustrates his hunger for solace. He is left struggling to find solace first in sleep, which does not work because it is temporary and can be haunted by nightmares; then in time and the conventional wisdom that time will lessen the grief; then in considering the far deeper grief of others, most notably Hallam’s parents and his fiancée, Tennyson’s own sister; then in nature, but its sheer impersonality denies him comfort. Nothing works. Ultimately the only thing that comforts him is his poetry, an effort that is isolating and, in the end, leaves him cold, apart, and emotionally dead.

In using Christmas as a kind of organizing trope for the elegy, Tennyson reveals how he is working his way through his grief, his flirtation with atheism, and his return to Christ Triumphant. In the first Christmas scenes (Cantos 21-26), the poem finds all the trappings of the holiday season—the family get togethers, the worship services, the assertions of community and fellowship—troublingly ironic. By what right, he asks, do people privilege happiness in a season devoted to worshipping the very agency who could bring us peace, bring us joy but who refuses, who allows everything to die.

By Canto 50, the poet begins to articulate a vision beyond his grief. He begins to cast about for a strategy able to engage and contain the magnitude of the experience of loss, after rejecting nature for its indifference to the rhythm of death and after rejecting the sweet parables and easy wisdom of Christian writing and after arguing himself out of waging some kind of bitter feud with death (death, he decides in Cantos 44-48 is no more responsible for his sorrow than the ocean is responsible for a grieving parent who has lost a child at sea). How then to handle what is his manifest sticking point: He cannot entirely remove Hallam from his emotional life. The solution that In Memoriam, in Canto 79, begins to explore before affirming can seem cliché, even hackneyed, the kind of empty devotional offered in countless funerals: Trust that God directs this world. The turn upward can seem sentimental except for the context, the 2000+ lines of thought that reflect how hard-earned that apparently simple answer is. The poet shares his sorrow, his anger, the ecstasy of his friendship, the irony of his loss of what he cannot let go, and that context gives the solution; the poet then begins to move toward its authenticity, its power, and its conviction.

In Canto 115, the poet asks, “[w]ho loves not knowledge?” (Line 1), bravely setting up the formidable task ahead. This task is to forsake the complications and sloppiness of his emotions and to pursue the question of handling mortality more logically, less intuitively, more intellectually, less like a poet, more than a lawyer. In Canto 114, he will pursue this task by being a “potent voice in Parliament” (Line 11). He challenges himself in Canto 119 to “contemplate all this work of Time” (Line 1), rejecting that God loves to watch his creation suffer—the idea violates common sense and would certainly void the logic of millennia of thought about the condition and reach of the Christian God. Without delving into the theology of a loving God, in Canto 126, the poet affirms what was in the Prologue (Canto 127) darkly ironic: “Love is and was my Lord and King” (Line 1). That affirmation is not the poem’s starting point but rather its endpoint: “And all is well,” he says in Canto 128, “tho faith and form / Be sundered in the night of fear” (Lines 1-2).

Within the context of the larger poem, here the poet asserts that the previous 127 cantos were the night. Now, deliberately and defiantly, the dawn begins to break. Yes, he concedes in Cantos 130 and 131, Hallam, his “lost desire,” will never be entirely gone because “[t]hy voice is on the rolling air” (Line 1). His passion, he assures the cosmos itself in Canto 131, is “vaster […] now” (Line 10). His love has found its way to a saving, redemptive context. I have you still, he says to Hallam, but I prosper now. As if addressing his own dark doubts from the Prologue, yes, he concedes now with happiness. He has no evidence of this omnipotent and generous God aside from his beliefs, he affirms in Canto 132—it is one of the “truths that never can be proved” (Line 10)—save his conviction that humanity is one, a single, grand, blessed organism that will not be defined by the death of any element. We flow, he affirms in Canto 132, “soul in soul” (Line 12).

In the Epilogue, the poet tests his new conviction through his experience of his sister’s joyous marriage (Tennyson, he shares, is to give his sister away). Mourning gives way to celebration, the ceremonies of death morph into the rituals of love. “Regret is dead, but love is more / Than the summers that are flown” (Lines 133-34). Indeed, in watching the wedding, with all its flowers and music, with all its positivity and happiness, Tennyson himself taps into the reality that certainly the God who sanctions death permits this stunning moment as well, soul to soul, heart to heart. Be content, God’s wisdom assures him, that Hallam was part of the narrative of your life. In having the wedding procession walk past the churchyard where Hallam is buried, the poem juxtaposes love and life with sadness and death. In the end, even as the Epilogue closes and the poet stands apart from the celebrations of the wedding party, the free-flowing drink and the dancing, the poet decides the value of his recovered faith actually comes from the agony of his doubts and the authenticity of his long struggle to find God in suffering. He is one with the God who is, in turn, one with Hallam. God, he affirms in Canto 133, is “one law, one element” (Line 142).