We return on Thursday to our dear friend Tennyson, and also to his dear friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. Hallam is familiar to us as the reviewer who acknowledged Tennyson's innovation of the dramatic monologue ("a graft of the lyric onto the dramatic,"from "On some of the characteristics of modern poetry," in the last section of your text book). As well as a promising literary critic, Hallam was also Tennyson's dear friend, was beloved of Tennyson's family, and engaged to Tennyson's sister. While traveling abroad in 1833, at the age of 22, Hallam died suddenly, leaving Tennyson bereft.
Written in snatches over more than 16 years, In Memoriam is both a deeply personal tribute to a lost love, and an exploration of human grief and mourning that spoke to an entire culture's anxieties about faith, loss, and humanity's place in a universe that seemed increasingly foreign and hostile.
As you read, you may want to look for moments that speak to these larger cultural concerns, for example the discussion of faith and theories of evolution in stanzas 54-56. Equally, you may want to read with an eye toward the ways that Tennyson seeks for ways to articulate his relationship with his lost friend (stanza 40, for example).
Happy reading,
Prof. M.
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| Tennyson and his son, Hallam. |
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| Portrait of Victoria in mourning (Bertha Muller, National Portrait Gallery) |
When starting “In Memorium,” I wondered why Tennyson chose such a boring structure for his poem. Each stanza is the same, with four feet - iambic tetrameter – rhyming ABBA. As a result, the actual sound of the poems are really boring, like a steady marching beat – da dum, da dum, da dum, da dum, over and over again. It took effort to see the beauty of the language hiding in the mundane structure. But in strophe V, Tennyson seems to elucidate his choice of structure. Tennyson claims that to put his grief in words is “half a sin,” in some way, because it “half reveals” his soul. It’s unclear which part is the so called “sin” – the revelation of one’s soul or the concealment of it? Or is it that words can never truly express what he’s feeling, in which case this sad half-baked attempt is sacrilege? Either way, he decides that the writing is worth the effort, since it gives him some measure of comfort by dulling the pain: “The sad mechanic exercise, / Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.” Essentially, he’s explaining that this highly mechanical structure in fact helps, not hinders, his self-expression. It’s also interesting that each paragraph of the poem “half reveals and half conceals” in its own way – it opens with a line, produces a couplet, and then neatly closes again with the ABBA structure. Like “coarsest clothes,” the structure is meant to only express so much and no more, simultaneously open and closed away, just like the poet’s emotions which can only be half revealed.
ReplyDeleteIn reply to the prompt about the different ways Tennyson tries to describe his relationship with his lost friend, I found a line that I feel, when explored deeper can help shed light on the relationship. In XIII, Tennyson describes how his mourning is like the tears of a widower after he feels that the place next to him in bed is empty. The comparison of Tennyson's love for his friend to that of a woman, reminded me of another famous love connection that was compared in the same way. This is the love of King David and Jonathan, Saul's son. In the biblical writings, as David mourns Jonathan he says that his love for Jonathan was more wonderful to him than the love of a woman. Their relationship was a deep friendship; both were willing to die for the other. David was also Jonathan's brother in law, so not only did they have a friend relationship, but they were brothers, and lovers (in a non-romantic way). As Tennyson struggles to find words to describe his pain, perhaps he tapped into the lamentations of David to express his pain. Much like is done in many religions, sometimes our own words cannot express our pain, so we turn to words that have been spoken for generations by fellow mourners to express what we are not sure we can express on our own.
ReplyDeleteThe poem (elegy?) itself is very structured, which is nice in some ways, but it gets annoying after a while; still, it’s not heroic couplets, rather an ABBA rhyme, so at least there is an interest in that you have a sound at the end of each verse that is not-quite-familiar in terms of end-sound
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Out of curiosity, I looked further into the circumstances of Hallam’s death-- he died of a stroke, which was blamed on “lack of blood in the brain” (so an ischemic stroke?). Whatever the exact medical causes, the “lack of blood,” seems to fit the poem-- it is not very lively, but slow and stagnant in its plodding… and it plods on for so long. Yet the iambic tetrametre fits the blood-themes as well; the unstressed/stressed pattern fits that of the heartbeat, and the even number of repeats stresses the regularity of that beat.
The reference to Hallam’s burial in XIX incorporates the now-nonfunctional heart of the deceased, which is what pumps the blood. The rivers upon which the body travelled and along which was buried are also stressed here; the rivers also have a repetitive, unstressed/stressed wave-motion. The Wye river, which is presumably connected to the Severn (?) is described to be stagnant-- just as Hallam’s bloodflow (and cause of death) stopped. And just as the life stops and the river stops, so do Tennyson’s tears and he feels as if he’s downing, a deadly sensation of too much fluid, which is equally capable of causing a stroke. Tennyson’s fluid stages of grief rise and fall in intensity; I don’t think that his sorrow was self-destructive, but simply waxed and waned in its intensity as he mourned the loss of his friend for sixteen years. The wane/wax is again an unstressed/stressed sort of repetition, and so despite its relative boringness after the first five stanzas or so, the metric scheme truly does fit the poem.
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ReplyDeleteI was taken aback by the length of this poem. It was as if Tennyson was attempting to make up for a life cut short by demonstrating how much worth it contained (almost quantitatively.) Like everyone else, I did feel like the overall structure of the poem was a little boring. However, as it went on there were moments of such beautiful poetry that Tennyson snapped me awake ("Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drowned.") The format seemed to be deliberate. It felt as if the grief was being reeled in as if Tennyson was impatient with over-exaggerated grief and instead wanted to contain himself and speak with clarity.
DeleteTennyson also has stanzas (such as stanzas 11 and 50) that employ repetition. To me, the repetition created an image of a heartbroken man rocking back and forth in an attempt to calm himself down and repeating to himself, "it's going to be okay" almost as if in a trance. Because the poem was written over the course of 17 years, it can function as a map to chart the stages of grief, or so one would think. Although the later stanzas do reflect a deeper contemplation on the reconciliation of mortality in the face of a larger plan, Tennyson still lapses into these repetitions as if reining himself in, proving that loss can’t be mapped. You can never know when it will strike.
(Rachel don't read this part because spoilers) In the poem Tennyson says, "That nothing walks with aimless feet," he is speaking to the human tendency to think that every action they do and their very existence somehow matters. This reminded me a lot of a part in The Handmaid's Tale. Janine has lost her baby because the baby was born with a mutation (shredder). Janine blames herself because she conceived the baby with her doctor and not with her commander/husband/master (side note: this book is amazing. Read it!) The narrator (Offred) says that this it is foolish to assume that we have such mastery over the things that happen to us. Tennyson is speaking about a similar idea (although the tone is completely different.) We like to believe that our lives matter, and more so that our actions impact our own lives, and can influence fate. To both Offred (Atwood) and Tennyson this is a coping mechanism.
"For now so strange do these things seem:" Throughout, Tennyson is constantly navigating being pushed up against the notion that death is the most common of commonplace things while being thrust against the intimate, face-slap, impossible-to-breath experience of losing his person. His biblical allusion in the prologue goes a ways to showing how this piece will go on (and on and on), with the recognition of the natural, unstoppable character of death, with the shock, sorrow, and anger with which man inherently reacts to this forceful power, the loss of life. For Tennyson, losing AHH is the loss of a mythical "Arthur," it requires - no, it deserves - the gods, Jesus, and everything beautiful, powerful, fantastical. He takes an everything but the kitchen sink approach to his depiction of a mourning so great, only the Muse of elegy herself is worthy or capable of handling the emotion Tennyson must express. Yet, at the very same time, or, more specifically, in the stanza immediately before, he discusses nothing more or less mundane, normal, and human than celebrating Christmas. Death is the purview of people, of sisters and brothers -- as seen in the use of Mary and Lazarus -- of mothers, and widowers, and waiting brides. For me, the scale of Arthur is awesome, and Tennyson makes a point with his use of such language, but the most achingly awful is the young woman who waits, endlessly and forever twirling her hair for a man who will never, can never come. Death is handled with recognition of the immediacy of its impact, and its down right unbelievable quality. How can life of someone so living have been stamped out? Tennyson asks and asks. He doesn't arrive at an answer, but his attempt is admirable. Even way at the end of the poem, he still says "My friend who cans't never die." Yes, because AHH lives on in Tennyson etc, but also, because death as a Thing remains impossible to grasp, understand. It cannot be held in ones palm and examined, it cannot be pinned down. Perhaps the wildly varying section lengths are indicative of "In Memoriam" being the process by which Tennyson is figuring this out. Sometimes there is a logical, thinking through something, sometimes a rush of emotion that appears to be impossible to quell, sometimes a sort of aside to melancholy or sweet effect. I don't pretend to understand most of what I read today, but it did make me feel.
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