Subtitled �The Way of a Soul.�
Known to AT during composition as �the elegies.� Dantesque, sections or cantos?
Epic? Elegy?
Epithalamion? Progress?
Divine comedy? Liturgical.
Three Christmases (28, 78, 104-05).
Consider analogy to Shakespeare�s sonnets?
To Milton�s �Lycidas.� To
Wordsworth�s Prelude.
To John Keble�s The Christian Year
(1827). What claim has the
soul to immortality? Emily
Tennyson, bereaved fianc�e, finally marries in 1842.
�Break, Break, Break� (1834).
AHH d. 15 Sept. 1833 in Vienna.
News reached AT around 1 Oct.
Severe depression (50-56).
Poetry of ideas, shared intersubjectivity.
Grief as universal. Poem�s
closure is achieved internally, not imposed mythically from above.
Concern over poet�s measure of control.
Internal symmetries in ABBA
tetrameter quatrain. Enclosed,
rocking, not progressive. T. S.
Eliot: �The reading of long poems is not nowadays much practised...But
Tennyson�s long poems are not long poems in quite the same sense as those of his
contemporaries....Maud and
In Memoriam are each a series of
poems, given form by the greatest lyrical resourcefulness that a poet has ever
shown� [!]. Catullus, �Atque in
perpetuum frater ave atque vale.�
Sections
1-20:
Motifs: hands, the yew-tree, helmless bark, doors, the dark house, sleep,
poetry, loss of self in loss of other, passivity, poet as dove, storms,
delirium. The ship bearing the body
home. Death and resurrection hope.
Self as chrysalis. Fate of
individual and fate of species.
Changing of tides.
Sections
21-49:
Motifs: pastoral elegy, defense of poetry (�I do but sing because I must�),
memories of AHH and sense of canceled potential for further shared experience.
Hope of personal reunion.
Doubts. Journey down the path or
track of life. Anatomy of death?
The shadow. Unclear way
without fellow traveler. Refusal to
be resigned. Rejects stoicism.
Time and eternity. Bleak
landscapes. Christmas diminished,
deferred. Paradigms of
resurrection. Mary�s faith.
Lazarus. The wager.
Love combats death, and love knows no dimension in nature.
Poetry vs. faith? Reproach
and defense on grounds that Hallam believed. The eternal now.
Apology. Contingency of life
on memory. Speculation on
postmortal existence (cp. Newman�s Dream
of Gerontius).
Sections
50-58:
Invocation of friend. Or
not? Impersonal themes.
Anatomy of doubt. Doubt as
spirit of the age. How to counter
with affirmation. Theodicy?
Wish fulfillment? General
despair (the type) vs. special despair (the individual).
How to measure change?
Radical isolation. Evolution as a
comfortless system. Domestication of science.
Behind the veil.
Valediction. Ave, atque vale.
Mors omnia vincit.
Sections
59-71:
Letting go. Releases clasp or
grasp. Drifts egoless in dream of
reunion. Analogies of love.
Sleep and dreams. Dimming &
brightening of memory. Concrete
sensation.
Sections
72-98:
Poetry of sensation. Sensation
returns with passion. Floral
catalogue (85). Reinvocation.
Wish for sense beyond sense.
Mystic reunion (95). Apotheosis of
AHH. Vienna unvisited.
Sections
99-131:
Anniversary of death. Moving from family
home. Loss of hallowed ground.
Reunion with muses. Strange
new bells. Graves of Hallam and
father. Celebration of hope.
Ceremonies of commemoration.
Commitment to society. Inventory of
Hallam�s character. Why must the
good die young? Melting of snow (115).
Paradox of spring. Man,
science, and progress. Reason vs.
Faith. Hope and Love.
Benediction.
Epilogue:
An elegy becomes an epithalamion.
T. S.
Eliot: Tennyson �had the finest ear
of any English poet since Milton [combined with] the greatest lyrical
resourcefulness that a poet has ever shown. . . .Tennyson is the great master of
metric as well as of melancholia; I do not think any poet in English has ever
had a finer ear for vowel sound, as well as a subtler feeling for some moods of
anguish. Tennyson is the saddest of all English poets� (Eliot, �In Memoriam�
[1936]).