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In Memoriam

In Memoriam is a great elegy written by Alfred Tennyson to mourn the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam in 1833. The poem explores the themes of death and doubt that were prevalent during the Victorian era. Tennyson questions his Christian faith in the face of Hallam's death and the emerging theories of evolution, but ultimately aims to convince his fiancée of his religious beliefs through the poem. While individual lyrics can stand alone, the poem is best appreciated as a unified work that traces Tennyson's grieving process over three years and gradually moves towards resolution.

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706 views

In Memoriam

In Memoriam is a great elegy written by Alfred Tennyson to mourn the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam in 1833. The poem explores the themes of death and doubt that were prevalent during the Victorian era. Tennyson questions his Christian faith in the face of Hallam's death and the emerging theories of evolution, but ultimately aims to convince his fiancée of his religious beliefs through the poem. While individual lyrics can stand alone, the poem is best appreciated as a unified work that traces Tennyson's grieving process over three years and gradually moves towards resolution.

Uploaded by

Raluca Pascu
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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In Memoriam - Alfred Tennyson

In Memoriam is great elegy for his friend and fellow – student Arthur Henry Hallam who died
in 1833. In the lyrics that make up In Memoriam he found his own poetic voice properly for
the first time, escaping from the influence of Keats.
Typically for the High Victorian era that was to follow it, the themes of the poem are
death and doubt. The first of these was always popular with the Victorians who invented a
complexity of mourning and a style of funerary art. That can seem exaggerated to a later
generation. The second theme, doubt, is profoundly connected in the poem to the new
evolutionary explanation of the universe that was emerging in the 1840’s and 1850’s.
Tennyson had a difficult engagement to his future wife, Emily Sellwood, during the years of
composition of the poem and it appears that it needed, finally, to convince her that his
Christian faith was sound before she would agree to marry him. With this in view he sent her
privately – printed version of In Memoriam, to which he had recently added the prologue,
some months before its official publication. Astonishingly, it convinced her that her fiancé
was indeed a Christian.
Perhaps the prologue goes some way towards explaining this. With its addition the
poem at least opens with a direct invocation of Christ: “Strong Son of God, Immortal Love”.
But a careful reading of the rest of the poem reveals more of doubt than of faith while much
of the prologue itself shows anxiety about religious faith. Having invoked Christ, it continues:
“Whom we, that have not seen thy face
By faith and faith alone embrace
Believing where we cannot prove.”
The emphasis is on the reasons to doubt, rather than on the reasons to believe, and this
tone remains dominant throughout the poem. “Thine are these orbs of light and shade
Thou madest Life is man and brute
Thou madest Death; and I, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made.

Thou wilt not live us in the dust:


Thou madest man, he knows not why;
He thinks he was not made to die;
And thou hast made him: thou art just.”
These words “trust” and “somehow” are repeated in the poem on several occasions
always stressing the uncertain nature of good. (“Oh yes we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill”,
“Yet if some voice that man could trust,
Should murmur from the narrow house “ and so on) along with words such as “yet” and
“but”, they offer a key to the poem.

The doubt comes from the fact of death. Tennyson said that he would despair if he
ever came truly to doubt God or Immortality, Yet Hallam’s death and the anguished questrim
as to where Hallam now was and whether they would meet again put an immense strain on
these beliefs. Death in In Memoriam “keeps the key to all the creeds” for only after death will
the truth be revealed though it may be the truth that all religion is untrue.
The poem’s lyrics are separate from one another and most of them can be read as units
more or less successfully; a lyric such as: “I envy not in any moods” (no 27) could be
anthologized separately without huge loss. But undoubtedly the poem works best as a whole.
It has a vague structure, passing through three years of mourning, showing us three
Christmases and moving towards some sort of very tentative resolution. Above all, its
emotional register pervades all its constituent parts, which would therefore lose something if
cut off from it. When evolution is the topic (in lyrics 54-56 for instance) we are still aware
that it is personal grief that has provoked these thoughts and that it is not only the answer to
life’s mysteries that is “Behind the veil, behind the veil”, but the whereabouts of Tennyson’s
friend, too. A good comparison in this respect would be Shakespeare’s sonnets which can be
read separately, but which are nonetheless a sequence.
Lyric 48, in which Tennyson describes his own method in the poem, asks us not to
take his “short shallow- flights of song” too seriously as intellectual arguments; the “slender
shade of doubt”, he protests, has become “vassal onto love”. But this is nonetheless the great
poem of Victorian doubt as the poet himself recognizes when he proclaims, in an astute move,
that “There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds”.
In Memoriam is a great elegy, a great poem of doubt, and an excellent picture of
Victorian frame of mind. Last but not least, it is also characterised by an extraordinary
euphony and a masterly use of the rhythms in English.

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