Paper no. 04
Literature
of Victorian Age
Smt.S.B.Gardi
Department of English, MKBU
Vachchhalata Joshi
Roll no.21
Vachchhalatajoshi.14@gmail.com
Topic: Alfred Tennyson
Critical Analysis of In Memoriam
In Memoriam Genre and Style
Life of Tennyson
Born on August 6, 1809, in Somersby, Lincolnshire, England,
Alfred Lord Tennyson is one of the most well-loved Victorian poets. Tennyson,
the fourth of twelve children, showed an early talent for writing. At the age
of twelve he wrote a 6,000-line epic poem. His father, the Reverend George
Tennyson, tutored his sons in classical and modern languages. In the 1820s,
however, Tennyson's father began to suffer frequent mental breakdowns that were
exacerbated by alcoholism. One of Tennyson's brothers had violent quarrels with
his father, a second was later confined to an insane asylum, and another became
an opium addict.
Tennyson
escaped home in 1827 to attend Trinity College, Cambridge. In that same year,
he and his brother Charles published Poems by Two Brothers. Although the poems
in the book were mostly juvenilia, they attracted the attention of the
"Apostles," an undergraduate literary club led by Arthur Hallam. The
"Apostles" provided Tennyson, who was tremendously shy, with much needed
friendship and confidence as a poet. Hallam and Tennyson became the best of
friends; they toured Europe together in 1830 and again in 1832. Hallam's sudden
death in 1833 greatly affected the young poet. The long elegy In Memoriam and
many of Tennyson's other poems are tributes to Hallam.
In
1830, Tennyson published Poems, Chiefly Lyrical and in 1832 he published a
second volume entitled simply Poems. Some reviewers condemned these books as
"affected" and "obscure." Tennyson, stung by the reviews,
would not publish another book for nine years. In 1836, he became engaged to
Emily Sellwood. When he lost his inheritance on a bad investment in 1840,
Sellwood's family called off the engagement. In 1842, however, Tennyson's Poems
in two volumes was a tremendous critical and popular success. In 1850, with the
publication of In Memoriam, Tennyson became one of Britain's most popular
poets. He was selected Poet Laureate in succession to Wordsworth. In that same
year, he married Emily Sellwood. They had two sons, Hallam and Lionel.
At
the age of 41, Tennyson had established himself as the most popular poet of the
Victorian era. The money from his poetry (at times exceeding 10,000 pounds per
year) allowed him to purchase a house in the country and to write in relative
seclusion. His appearance—a large and bearded man, he regularly wore a cloak
and a broad brimmed hat—enhanced his notoriety. He read his poetry with a
booming voice, often compared to that of Dylan Thomas. In 1859, Tennyson
published the first poems of Idylls of the Kings, which sold more than 10,000
copies in one month. In 1884, he accepted a peerage, becoming Alfred Lord
Tennyson. Tennyson died on October 6, 1892, and was buried in Westminster
Abbey.
Genre
and style of In memoriam
uestions
of genre matter about In Memoriam because we tend to read according to certain
definite genre rules, taking, for instance, something we recognize as satire
very differently from something we categorize as a love poem, a tragedy, or an
epic. Tennyson's great experimental poem reconceives the traditional elegy,
which it blends with other genres, including ordinary lyric, epic, dream
vision, landscape meditations, dramatic monologues, and so on. The Princeton
Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics defines elegy, which comes from the Greek
elegeia, "lament," as a "lyric, usually formal in tone and
diction, suggested either by the death of an actual person or by the poet's
contemplation of the tragic aspects of life. In either case, the emotion,
originally expressed as a lament, finds consolation in the contemplation of
some permanent principle."
Many
of the most famous elegies in English, including Milton's "Lycidas"
(1637), Shelley's "Adonais" (1821), and Arnold's "Thyrsis"
(1867) participate in the tradition of the pastoral idyll or ecologue, which
dates back to Greek Moschus's "Lament for Bion" and the first idyll
of Theocritus by way of Vergil's enormously influential Ecologues. This genre,
whose action unfolds in an idealized country setting populated by shepherds and
shepherdesses, employs particularly elevated formal diction and follows a
ritualized progression. Pastoral elegy contains, for example, an announcement
of a death, a mourning procession by denizens of the woodland, who may include
shepherdesses and nymphs, a complaint to nature, until a final ritualistic
resolution occurs. By alluding to pastoral elegies, In Memoriam in some sense
aligns itself with this genre at the same time that its very different form and
method challenges it.
One
sign of Tennyson's combination of radically untraditional and traditional
appears in the style — or rather styles — of In Memoriam, for unlike its
predecessors, this poem varies from section to section as it embodies or
alludes to a range of genres. Consequently, some of the sections employ plain style
with simple, everyday diction, whereas others, which draw upon Spenser and
Keats, emphasize lush, sensuous language. Similarly, the poem also manipulates
its simple stanzaic form (abba) with astonishing virtuosity, sections sometimes
consisting of only one or two long sentences whereas other sections use very
short sentences. Some sections adapt the style and diction of sonnets, others
resemble pastorals, yet others take the form of dialogues, and so on.
Throughout,
Tennyson weaves his extremely varied styles and allusions to various genres
together with chains of images and motifs, which in Tennysonian manner combine
the simple and the complex: in isolation, most images, like most of the
sections in which they appear, seem fairly simple and straightforward, but
their participation in a network of repeated and often contrasted images makes
almost every one of them resonate with additional meaning and complexity.
Critical
Analysis of In Memoriam
‘In Memoriam’ is often
considered Tennyson’s greatest poetic achievement. It is a stunning and
profoundly moving long poem consisting of a prologue, 131 cantos/stanzas, and
an epilogue. It was published in 1850, but Tennyson began writing the
individual poems in 1833 after learning that his closest friend, the young
Cambridge poet Arthur Henry Hallam, had suddenly died at age 22 of a cerebral
hemorrhage. Over the course of seventeen years Tennyson worked on and revised
the poems, but he did not initially intend to publish them as one long work.
When he prepared “In Memoriam” (initially planning on calling it “The
Way of the Soul”) for publication, Tennyson placed the poems in an order to
suit the major thematic progressions of the work; thus, the poems as published
are not in the order in which they were written. Even with the reordering of
the poems, there is no single unified theme. Grief, loss and renewal of faith,
survival, and other themes compete with one another.
The poem partly belongs to the genre of elegy, which is a poem
occasioned by the death of a person. The standard elegy includes ceremonial
mourning for the deceased, extolling his virtues, and seeking consolation for
his death. Other famous elegies, to which In
Memoriam is often compared, include John Milton’s Lycidas, Shelley’s Adonais,
and Wordsworth’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” The epilogue is
also an epithalamion, or a classical wedding celebration poem. The stanzas of
the poems have uneven lengths but have a very regular poetic meter. The style,
which Tennyson used to such great effect that it is now called the “In Memoriam stanza,” consists of
tetrameter quatrains rhymed abba. The
lines are short, and the rhythm is strict, which imparts a sense of stasis as
well as labor to move from one line to the next.
In terms of structure, Tennyson once remarked that the poem was
organized around the three celebrations of Christmas that occur. Other scholars
point to different forms of structure. According to scholars A.C. Bradley and
E.D.H. Johnson, cantos 1-27 are poems of despair/ungoverned sense/subjective;
cantos 28- 77 are poems of mind governing sense/despair/objective; cantos
78-102 are poems of spirit governing mind/doubt/subjective; and cantos 103-31
are spirit harmonizing sense and spirit/objective. In terms of the structure of
Tennyson’s thoughts on the meaning of poetry, the scholars find a four-part
division: poetry as release from emotion, poetry as release from thought,
poetry as self-realization, and poetry as mission/prophecy. Canto 95 is seen,
from this view, as the climax of the poem.
The most conspicuous theme in the poem is, of course, grief. The poet’s
emotional progression from utter despair to hopefulness fits into the structure
observed by the scholars. The early poems are incredibly personal and bleak.
Tennyson feels abandoned and lost. He cannot sleep and personifies the cruelty
of Sorrow, “Priestess in the vaults of Death.” He wonders if poetry is capable
of expressing his loss. He wanders by his friend’s old house, sick with
sadness. Memory is oppressive. Nature herself seems hostile, chaotic. His grief
has a concomitant in a lack of religious faith.
However, as the poems proceed, the poet begins to grapple with his grief
and find ways to move beyond it. He learns, as scholar Joseph Becker writes, to
“experience deeper layers of grief so that he may transcend the limitations of
time and space that Hallam’s death represents.” He has learned to love better
and embrace his sorrow, which he now personifies as a wife, not a mistress. He
learns that Hallam, while once his flesh-and-blood friend whom he misses
dearly, is now a transcendent spiritual being, something the human race can
aspire to become. Although Tennyson will never fully recover from the loss of
Hallam, he can move forward; the wedding of his other sister establishes this
result for him.
One of the reasons why the poem is so lauded by critics is its
engagement with some contemporary Victorian religious and scientific debates
and discourses. Tennyson is dealing not only with his sorrow over Hallam’s
death, but also with the lack of religious faith that came with it. He wonders
what the point of life is if man’s individual soul is not immortal after death.
His emotions vacillate between doubt and faith. He eventually comes to terms
with the fact that Hallam may be gone in bodily form, but that he is a perfect
spiritual being whose consciousness endures past his death. Becker writes that
Tennyson experiences “renewed faith … that both individual and human survival
are predicated on spiritual rather than physical terms.”
Also, significantly, he ruminates over the new scientific findings of
the age, which are forerunners of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. In
particular, Charles Lyell’s Principles of
Geology (1830) undermined the biblical story of creation. Several of
the cantos deal with the ideas of the randomness and brutality of Nature
towards man. Canto LVI has the poet anguishing, “So careful of the type? But
no. / From scarped cliff and quarried stone / She cries, ‘A thousand types are
gone: / I care for nothing, all shall go.’” One of the most famous lines in the
English language, “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” is also in this canto.
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