In Memoriam

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1850

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context

In Memoriam is a revolutionary repurposing of the elegy, a genre of poetry that dates to Antiquity. Before Tennyson’s take on the genre, elegies were designed to provide a poet the opportunity to expound on death as an abstract, a concept, the poet offering wisdom, strategies that would, in turn, help readers by inspiring them to view death, such a private and painful experience, within a wider context; that is, to give loss a context. The poet approached death impersonally—in John Milton’s Lycidas (1638), before Tennyson’s take considered among the defining elegies in British literature, Milton takes the occasion of the death of a young poet in a tragic shipwreck to fashion an elaborate pastoral centered on a character, a young, dreamy, and doomed shepherd named Lycidas. Elegies seldom spoke of a death too personal—often, as is the case in Walt Whitman’s several elegies after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, elegies addressed the loss of some titanic public figure, a head of state, a general, a poet. The tone of such elegies was heightened and ornate, the rhetoric dressed for public recitation, the poet a helpful conduit of such sorrow.

Tennyson repurposed the elegy. For him, death was strikingly, deeply personal. The poem is no roman a clef—the characters are real, historic, and even named. Thus, the elegy becomes less a public poem and more private, more painful, less like attending a memorial service and more like paging through Tennyson’s journal, the perspectives he offers—the struggles with loss, his doubts over the reality of God, his anger toward nature that seems so oblivious to humanity’s awareness of death—reflect what is vitally Tennyson. Elegies after Tennyson, most notably those fashioned by the Confessional poets more than a century later, reflect Tennyson’s belief in the power, dignity, and integrity of the poet as a feeling, aware, and suffering person.

Historic Context

The historic context of In Memoriam is defined entirely by Tennyson’s life itself, most notably for several reasons: the deeply personal nature of the loss explored in In Memoriam, Tennyson’s radical re-conception of the elegy as a private expression of private agonies, and the poem itself represents more than 15 years of Tennyson’s struggles with the implications of death in an era that seemed determined to render God irrelevant. The historic context thus reflects two critical realities: the four-year friendship Tennyson shared with Hallam and the rise of science.

Long after Tennyson’s death, various speculations, combined with biographical research into the archives of Tennyson’s private life in the advent of the emergence of queer theory in the 1980s have suggested that, at the core of Tennyson’s deep grief, is his own struggle to understand the implications of a complex sexual orientation. Were Hallam and Tennyson lovers? They met within the liberal context of college and spent four years traveling together in Europe before Hallam’s death. Did the Victorian perception of such relationships as both heinous sins and punishable crimes interdict that expression? Or was their intense friendship some sort of sublimated expression of a love, non-sexual but nevertheless passionate, that dared not name itself, as the Victorians were given to describe gay love. After all, the poem’s lyrical confessions of the haunting love the poet feels for his dead friend often edge toward the rhetoric of a devastated lover. In Memoriam is one poem, one that addresses the lamentations of a close friend certain that this sort of friendship will never happen again, but it is quite another poem if it is a lamentation of a lover who understands now that an entire element of his identity is to be quashed.

More than the influence of Hallam, perhaps, is Tennyson’s challenge to faith, a challenge represented by the rise in the hard sciences. The great middle cantos of the poem, Cantos 45-67, center on Tennyson’s clear appropriation of the imagery of the new sciences, particularly geology and biology (specifically evolution), to try to square the traditional Christian faith in a Creator God who, in turn, renders all moments, really all beings, with purpose and meaning against the emerging evidence of the time that the earth was not so much created in six days as evolved across eons, denying humanity its prominence and a Creationist view of God his purpose. Tennyson opens up his grief and his sense of loss to the reality of geological time, the expanse of which cannot comfort him but rather underscores how vast nature is and how puny humanity is. That he admits the sciences into an otherwise metaphysical conversation about the function of the soul and the purpose of God reflects Tennyson’s awareness of the problematic implications of geologists dating rocks in the millions of years and Darwin revealing evidence of humanity’s tediously slow movement into intellect and only eventually into perception. In the end, Tennyson affirms God’s position and the power of faith but only after testing it, really for the first time in the literature of the elegy, against science itself.