When Alfred, Lord Tennyson came to write In Memoriam, one of the most experimental and yet most influential poems of the century, he already had refined his characteristic basic poetic structure and needed a theme that would permit him to apply his gifts to a major form. Arthur Henry Hallam's death in 1833 provided Tennyson with one by forcing him to question his faith in nature, God, and poetry.
In Memoriam reveals that Tennyson, who found that brief lyrics best embodied the transitory emotions that buffeted him after his loss, rejected conventional elegy and narrative because both falsify the experience of grief and recovery by mechanically driving the reader through too unified — and hence too simplified — a version of these experiences. Creating a poetry of fragments, Tennyson leads the reader of In Memoriam from grief and despair through doubt to hope and faith, but at each step stubborn, contrary emotions intrude, and one encounters doubt in the midst of faith, pain in the midst of resolution. Instead of the elegaic plot of Lycidas, Adonais, and Thyrsis, In Memoriam offers 133 fragments interlaced by dozens of images and motifs and informed by an equal number of minor and major resolutions, the most famous of which is section 95's representation of Tennyson's climactic, if wonderfully ambiguous, mystical experience of contact with Hallam's spirit. In addition, individual sections, like 7 and 119 or 28, 78, and 104 variously resonate with one another.
Tennyson, the real, once-existing man with his actual beliefs and fears, cannot be extrapolated from within the poem's individual sections, for each presents Tennyson only at a particular moment. In Memoriam thus fulfills Paul Valéry's definition of poetry as a machine that reproduces an emotion. Tennyson makes us re-experience an idealized version of his own separate experiences — and thereby become ready to accept the entirely subjective truths of religious belief.
An earlier entry of what is probably the most famous quotation from In Memoriam was posted here. This is another familiar excerpt from section 54:
In Memoriam:54
So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.
...
O life as futile, then, as frail!
O for thy voice to soothe and bless!
What hope of answer, or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil.
In Memoriam reveals that Tennyson, who found that brief lyrics best embodied the transitory emotions that buffeted him after his loss, rejected conventional elegy and narrative because both falsify the experience of grief and recovery by mechanically driving the reader through too unified — and hence too simplified — a version of these experiences. Creating a poetry of fragments, Tennyson leads the reader of In Memoriam from grief and despair through doubt to hope and faith, but at each step stubborn, contrary emotions intrude, and one encounters doubt in the midst of faith, pain in the midst of resolution. Instead of the elegaic plot of Lycidas, Adonais, and Thyrsis, In Memoriam offers 133 fragments interlaced by dozens of images and motifs and informed by an equal number of minor and major resolutions, the most famous of which is section 95's representation of Tennyson's climactic, if wonderfully ambiguous, mystical experience of contact with Hallam's spirit. In addition, individual sections, like 7 and 119 or 28, 78, and 104 variously resonate with one another.
Tennyson, the real, once-existing man with his actual beliefs and fears, cannot be extrapolated from within the poem's individual sections, for each presents Tennyson only at a particular moment. In Memoriam thus fulfills Paul Valéry's definition of poetry as a machine that reproduces an emotion. Tennyson makes us re-experience an idealized version of his own separate experiences — and thereby become ready to accept the entirely subjective truths of religious belief.
An earlier entry of what is probably the most famous quotation from In Memoriam was posted here. This is another familiar excerpt from section 54:
In Memoriam:54
So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.
...
O life as futile, then, as frail!
O for thy voice to soothe and bless!
What hope of answer, or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil.
... Alfred, Lord Tennyson
No comments:
Post a Comment