In memmoriam
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n Memoriam (1850)
Inspiration:
In Memoriam was inspired by the death of Tennyson’s dear friend Arthur Hallam. Composed
between Hallam’s death in 1833 and its publication in 1850, it is a personally cathartic poem
which traces the ‘dark night of the soul’ which Tennyson went through as well as his recovery
from psychological grief and metaphysical despair and his recuperation of some semblance of
faith in the purposiveness of the universe. (Compare In Memoriam with Kamau Brathwaite’s
Zea’s Mexican Diaries.)
Tennyson’s Metaphysical Despair (Science versus Belief):
Hallam’s death had the effect of bringing to the foreground for Tennyson metaphysical
questions that were increasingly being posed in Victorian England in the wake of Darwinism:
is there a God? Is there a spiritual plane beyond the physical universe? Do humans have a
soul? Is there life after death? What is the nature of human identity? Is there a purpose to
life? Is life the product of chance? Is the theory of evolution (the ‘survival of the fittest’) the
key to explaining the history of human civilisation (as opposed to conceptions such as Hegel’s
of human history as the progressive self-realisation of God/Spirit in matter)? (Note, in this
regard, the central importance in this regard of three poems directly concerned with Darwinism
[‘nature red in tooth and claw’] at the centre of the poem: poems 54, 55, 56.) In posing such
questions, Tennyson would seem to be ‘writing back’ in particular to the optimistic pantheism
of Wordsworth as expressed in The Prelude. (Compare Mathew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” to In
Memoriam.)
The Unity of the Poem:
An important point to note is the process of composition: this elegiac poem was written in bits
and pieces over 17-odd years. Tennyson did not realise until very late that he had composed
a unified collection which he published as such. Is it merely a collection of discrete poems or
is it one unified poem consisting of several sub-poems? What factors, if any, unify the poem?
The poem may be unified by the presence of certain recurrent motifs and strains of imagery:
one important strain, perhaps not unrelated to the fact that the poem is tantamount to a ‘dark
night of the soul’ followed by the morning of recovery, is that to do with darkness and
light/night and morning--the early poems are filled with images of gloom but there is a
Richard L. W. Clarke LITS2002 Notes 11A 3
progressively discernible movement towards light (glimpsed in the later poems); important in
this regard are the motifs of dawn and dusk--the blazing light of day is never broached in the
poems which are, rather, most often permeated by or depict twilight (see, e.g., poem 121).
Poem 95 may represent Tennyson’s epiphany--he undergoes a progressive change of heart,
the optimism of which is progressively manifested in the poems that follow.
The Anxiety of Influence:
How does In Memoriam (as its very title indicates, a basically retrospective poem) compare to
The Prelude in any/all the foregoing respects? Notwithstanding its overt purpose (it is an elegy
for and, ostensibly, about a friend), is it largely an autobiographical poem? Does it reveal more
about Tennyson and his outlook, his doubts, his anxieties, than anything else? It is something
of a bildungsroman which traces Tennyson’s spiritual growth? Is Tennyson creatively
‘misreading,’ as Bloom might put it, the Romantics in general? Note, in this regard, poem 88.
Here, Tennyson may be commenting on the optimistic point of view expressed by Romantic
poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge Shelley, and Keats. Tennyson makes obvious allusions
to the skylark and the nightingale (and the questions which they arouse in the perceiver) as
well as to such Romantic symbols of the divine presence which manifests itself through such
mundane objects (the harp).
To put all this another way, it is important to realise that there is a dialectic of tradition
and innovation in Tennyson’s work (this may be true of all poetry). That is, there are both
important continuities linking Tennyson’s work to that of precursors like Wordsworth and
profound discontinuities.
وهذا المواقع فيه ما يفيد ان شاء الله
http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/ten...section8.rhtml
http://www.archive.org/stream/poetry...guoft_djvu.txt
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