In Memoriam A. H. H.

Context A collection of separate lyrics originally entitled Fragments of an Elegy written intermittently over the seventeen years following Hallams death, and with no thought of publication. First published anonymously in 1850, two weeks before Tennysons marriage. The poem sold out three editions before the end of the year and seemed to answer a public craving for reassurance in a period of rapid change and scientific development. Summary The poems 131 separate lyrics, plus Epilogue, group together, according to Tennysons own structure, as follows: 18 The poet is grief-stricken at the loss of his friend 9 20 The ship carries Hallams body back 21 27 Recollections of walks and talks with Hallam 28 49 The first Christmas 50 58 Doubt and uncertainty in the face of new evolutionary doctrines 59 71 The spirit of Hallam 72 98 First anniversary of death and the second Christmas 99 103 Departure from Somersby and the third Christmas 104 131 Spring and hope culminate in the marriage of Edmund (Lushington) and Cecilia (Tennysons sister) 6 The speaker recalls the words of comfort others have written to him: that he has other friends, and that death happens all the time. He bitterly dismisses these words, saying that such commonplace sentiments are all too frequent, and calling them vacant chaff without a grain of comfort for him inside. For knowing that death happens all the time makes it worse if every day someones heart is broken by their loss. The speaker now imagines some of these people. First, he imagines a father drinking the health of his soldier-son, unaware that, at that very moment, a bullet has killed him, in the process killing something of the fathers life too. Next he imagines a mother praying for the safe passage of her sailor-son, likewise unaware that, at that very moment, his dead body, wrapped in a shroud made of a hammock, and weighted down with lead shot, is being consigned to a watery grave. These people he sees as similar to him for he was, at the very time of Hallams death, trying to please him (presumably through his poetry). Hallam

used to think about everything the speaker had to say some of which he had written down, some of which he was merely thinking. He was expecting his arrival any day, and constantly imagined him on his journey home, believing he would be back that very day or the day after. The speakers thoughts now return to others in the same situation. First, he imagines a blameless young girl, sitting doing up her blonde hair as she waits for her lover, and pleased at how beautiful she looks. The fire is lit in the hearth, in anticipation of his arrival, and she selects a ribbon or a flower whichever he will like the most for the finishing touch for her hair. As she realises that he will actually see it in her hair that night, she blushes, and comes away from the mirror, turning back again just to arrange a curl. And at that very moment that she turns back, the curse falls, and her husband-to-be is killed whether as he tries to ford a river or in a fall from his horse. The speaker wonders what will happen to her, and whether he himself has anything to look forward to. The girl, he imagines, will be doomed never to marry; the speaker has lost his closest friend. 21 The speaker writes his poetry for Hallam, who now lies underground. He imagines himself as a shepherd (a traditional figure for a poet, ultimately derived from Virgils Eclogues) who simply takes the reeds around him to fashion the pipes on which he plays; in the same way, the speaker simply chooses the subject-matter closest to him for his poem. He imagines the criticism of his poetry by those who merely pass by. One voice says that he is taking his sadness to extremes. Another voice says that he should be ignored he is putting his grief on public display in order to earn praise for his faithfulness to his dead friend. A third voice angrily accuses him of self-indulgently choosing pointless private grief at a time when public revolt is in the air. Is this, the voice asks, a time to be weak and feeble when Science is ambitiously pushing forward the limit of human endeavour? All three are wrong, the speaker says. They never knew Hallam, whom he now calls sacred dust, as if he is a precious thing. He writes poetry to express his feelings because he has no alternative, just as songbirds cannot help but sing. One songbird is happy, because her chicks have left the nest, and her song is a happy one; another is sad, because her chicks have been stolen from her, and so her song has a different, sadder note. It is just the same for him. 55

The speaker says that each life is part of a larger whole, and that our wish that no life should be taken prematurely comes from Gods presence in each of us. He wonders then whether God and Nature are at war, if Nature creates such unpleasant scenarios. She seems so careful to preserve the species, but so uncaring for the individual life. Looking in every thing she does for a clue to her true intentions, and discovering that in her world only one seed in fifty ever comes to fruition, the speaker is seized with doubt where once he was confident. Burdened with care, he turns instead to his religious faith, which guides him through the darkness towards God. He gropes feebly for Him, but everything that he seems to grasp is dead and worthless. He calls on Him for help, and puts what weak belief he can muster into the larger hope that He offers. 56 After having asserted in Section 55 that Nature cares only for the survival of species (so careful of the type) and not for the survival of individual lives, the speaker now questions whether Nature even cares for the species. He quotes a personified, feminine Nature asserting that she does not attend to the survival of the species, but arbitrarily bestows life or death on all creatures. For Nature, the notion of the spirit does not refer to any divine, unearthly element, but rather to the simple act of breathing. The poet questions whether Man, who prays and trusts in God' love in spite s of the evidence of Nature' brutality (Nature, red in tooth and claw), will s eventually be reduced to dust or end up preserved like fossils in rock: And he, shall he, Man...Be blown about the desert dust, Or sealed within the iron hills? The thought of this evokes a notion of the human condition as monstrous, and more terrifying to contemplate than the fate of prehistoric dragons of the prime. The speaker declares that life is futile and longs for his departed friend' voice to soothe him and mitigate the effect of Nature' s s callousness. 64 The speaker wonders whether the dead Hallam remembers the past. He compares him to a man of extraordinary gifts, who begins life humbly in a village, and overcomes those humble beginnings, seizing on favourable opportunities as they arise, rising above misfortune and battling against what seems to be his destiny. This man forces his way to attention, and ends up with the keys to political office, able to shape the laws of a powerful country and secure the monarchs ear. Going from strength to strength, such a man becomes at the height of his fortune the figure of hope for a whole nation, the figure to whom the whole world looks. Yet, in a kind of daydream in his quieter moments, this man still feels affection for the distant hills of his boyhood, and something

sweet in the streams of his youth. These hills and streams were the original limits of his life, at a time when beside their babbling springs he was merely playing at politicians with his earliest childhood friend. And this childhood friend by whom Tennyson means himself is now painfully turning over this ground alone and reaping the fruits of this bitter labour, or standing in the furrow he has turned wonders whether his old friend Hallam himself still remembers the man he left behind in his native lea. 90 The speaker reflects in this section on the cold welcome the dead would get if they ever returned to life. Whoever was first responsible for this, he condemns as having only ever half loved another person, and as having never drunk from the purest source of love, which he sees as close to heaven itself. If the dead, who were loudly mourned as their eyes closed for the last time, could return to life, they would find a cold welcome from their wives and children. It was easy, when a drink or two had loosened them up, to toast their memory on a note of fond sadness to reminisce about them, wishing they were still alive, and to treasure their memory as something precious. But if the dead returned, they would see their wives married to other men, and their hard-hearted heirs walking around the land that was once theirs, unwilling to give it back even for a day. Even if their sons and heirs werent like this, the return of a master who was still loved and mourned would cause greater upset than his death ever did, and turn the calm of home upside down. In the final stanza, he now addresses Hallam. If he were just to come back, whatever changes the years had brought, there would be not the smallest part of him unwilling to see him return. 101 In this section the speaker imagines what will happen to Somersbys garden once he has left. He imagines the branches of the trees swaying in the wind, unwatched by any human eye, and the delicate blossoms fluttering to the ground. He imagines the leaves of one tree, a beech, turning brown in Autumn as it stands unloved, and another tree, a maple, turning to such a burning gold that it seems to be on fire. He imagines the sunflowers, similarly abandoned, flowering brightly and surrounding their seed heads with a calyx of fire, and the rose-carnations releasing their summer scent into the air. Moving beyond the garden itself, he imagines a stream, likewise unappreciated, nonetheless winding across the plain past sand and silt, day and night, imagining it as it flows past a windfilled copse and floods the nests of wading-birds, or as it breaks the moons reflection into beautiful silver shards. Finally, he imagines the garden and the landscape beyond it will fill with a new meaning for whoever will be living there instead of him, as year by year the countryside becomes part of their life. The speaker sees this as part of a

natural cycle: just as year by year the farm-labourer turns the soil on his chosen meadow and pollards the trees in the forest clearing and just as, year by year, his own presence will gradually fade from the memory of the soil. 105 It is the eve of the third Christmas without Hallam. The speaker is in London and calls on his friends to leave the laurel-branches and holly unpicked. He feels that he is living in a foreign country now, and that Christmas Eve feels foreign to him. He imagines his father (who had died two years before Hallam) lying back in Somersby in the cold silence of death; but he knows that honeysuckle and violets flower even there, even though he is no longer around to see it. He resolves to let his misplaced grief no longer spoil the happiness of Christmas with its empty feelings. For the move to London, like the passing of time, has freed him from his past. He pleads on this Christmas Eve, a night he loves, to be spared from the solemn thoughts that cast a shadow across our lives, out of respect for the memory of past years. These shadows are ultimately insignificant (petty), he says, even though they seem the biggest test (chiefly proved) we face. But he also rejects the Christmas rituals of the past the dancing and the warming mulled wine. For they seem to be empty rituals which no longer have any meaning. He calls for there to be no songs or games or feasting, for no instruments to be played, for there to be no dancing no activity at all, in fact, beyond the sun rising in the east by the wood. The summer by which he means all that is good for a long time lies dormant in the seed. He calls on time to run its course and bring the present era, which is full of future promise (rich in good), to a close. 106 It is New Years Eve. The speaker hears the church bells ringing in the New Year, and calls on them to ring out the old year, and let it die. In the stanzas that follow, he lists all that is bad, that he looks to see die with the old year, and all that he hopes the new year will usher in. Out with lies; in with truth. Out with the grief for those we love that drains us; out with the struggle between societys haves and have-nots; in with justice for all mankind. Out with the old way of doing things and the old politics of party set against party; in with a higher way of living, in which manners are better and laws are fairer. Out with deprivation, unhappiness, sinfulness; out with the chilly atheism of today; out with the sad poetry Im forced to speak; in with a poetry that captures more of mens hearts than just the sadness.

Out with the misplaced pride we take in class and background; out with public slanging and spiteful whispers; in with a love of truth and right, a love of good that is shared by all. Out with the old diseases and afflictions; out with the obsessive love of money; out with the old love of war; in with a thousand years of peace. In with a man who is brave and free, whose heart is generous and whose heart is kind. Out with the darkness in which we have been living; in with the broader Christianity of the future (as Tennyson himself called it). Commentary In spite of the title, the poem is not really about Hallam, but about Tennyson and his reactions to Hallams death. In Memoriam can be seen as an attempt by Tennyson to make sense of loss, and not to see it as meaningless. T. S. Eliot called In Memoriam a poem composed by joining lyrics, which have only the unity and continuity of a diary, the concentrated diary of a man confessing himself. Tennyson on his poem: It must be remembered that this is a poem, not an actual biography. It is founded on our friendship, on the engagement of Arthur Hallam to my sister, on his sudden death at Vienna, just before the time fixed for their marriage, and on his burial at Clevedon Church. The poem concludes with the marriage of my youngest sister Cecilia. It was meant to be a kind of Divina Commedia, ending with happiness. The sections were written at many different places, and as the phases of our intercourse came to my memory and suggested them. I did not write them with any view of weaving them into a whole, or for publication, until I found that I had written so many. The different moods of sorrow as in a drama are dramatically given, and my conviction that fear, doubts, and suffering will find answer and relief only through Faith in a God of Love. I is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking through him. The abba rhyme scheme, which together with an iambic tetrameter rhythm gives a formal unity to the poem, can be seen as suggestive of differing emotional states co-existing, and an outward calm concealing a central passion.