In Memoriam

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1850

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Themes

The Redemptive Power of Grief

Grief serves a purpose. For Tennyson, grief is a verb, not a noun. Despite its considerable length, or perhaps because of it, there is a restlessness that drives Tennyson’s elegy. The poet, for all his heavy contemplations of the different aspects of loss and the psychology of mourning, brings to his grief a determination not to concede to the gravitational curve of sorrow. As the elegy, across its cantos (and across time, years in Tennyson’s own life), examines different questions about the dimension and depth of loss, whether nature or art or family or even God can provide solace, what drives the elegy is the poet’s obvious determination not to surrender to grief, to upcycle grief into consolation, into some workable strategy that can provide comfort, what he terms “mortal sympathy” (Line 23) in Canto 31. The grief does not dissipate—that is the “cheap” and “shoddy” wisdom of funeral home cliches.

But grief in its integrity, in its formidable reality, becomes the avenue toward redemption. More than a century before what is termed now “thanapsychology,” which explored particularly the dynamics of profound loss and the strategy (or stages) of adjustment, Tennyson charts how grief, without losing its dark integrity, drives itself to consolation. If nature shows a studied indifference, if art eventually wallows in its ornate argument, if others seem headed inevitably to the same sort of experience, if no one escapes the brutal hammer stroke of mortality, the poet turns at last to the comfort he so deeply needs, for him, the reassurance of a God, despite the architectures of science, still provides meaning and purpose. Emotional and psychological peace of mind comes only through grief. The soul, so defiant and so absolute, requires the body, so fragile and so vulnerable, which the poet affirms in Canto 57: “spirit does but mean the breath” (Line 7). Grief then becomes the means, not the end; hope becomes the inevitable outcome, not the superimposed goal; and peace earns redemption not clichéd panacea.

The Challenge of Science

In Tennyson’s life, time itself underwent a radical re-perception. Tennyson maintains a steady conversation with the new sciences and its impact in humanity’s apparently misperception of its own importance. Does the perception of the sheer length of time the Earth has been in place give ironic context to mourning the 22-year lifespan of a single individual? Surely, science mocks such grief as extravagant, melodramatic, even selfish. Given that the new popular fascination with the pioneering (and controversial) discoveries in the physical sciences, most notably the dimensions of the universe itself and the reach of time (millions of years) geological forces needed to shape the earth, Tennyson offers his spacious private grief over a friend whose entire life spanned barely 20 years. How can grief matter, the poet asks in Canto 88, when “science reaches forth her arms / To feel from world to world, and charms Her secrets from the latest moon” (Lines 66-67).

Tennyson ponders the implications of time and the notions of the size of the universe (in Cantos 37-39, he actually catalogues the newest planets discovered by astronomers) and decides that far from diminishing the place of humanity, science now places humanity (and God by extension) within a far vaster cosmic drama. Individuals perish, he argues, but the species endures, the planet remains, life itself still animates the universe. Individuals become then parts of that grand, free-wheeling cosmos. Hallam is both apart from that cosmos but gloriously, triumphantly a part of it. That energy, that very vastness, mocks the sting of death. Science itself gives Tennyson entrance to a radically new kind of optimism which, within a generation, would be abandoned for a grim and anxious existentialism. Science offers hope a far more expansive and far deeper dimension. Far from futility and desperate pessimism, science illuminates the cosmos and makes possible a community of elements in swirling, churning, fractal cooperation. Science tells the sorrowful poet that Hallam was always his and never his, and it does so through the lens of Tennyson’s Christianity.

The Triumph of God

Despite of its evident awareness of the implications of the new sciences and its acknowledgment of the cultural sea change away from the centuries-old reliance on an omnipotent deity who infuses the universe with a saving purpose, and despite all its direct challenges and angry questions addressed to nothing less than Jesus Christ himself, In Memoriam affirms the triumph of the Christian God.

In the earliest cantos, which represent the poet’s initial response to the grief of his loss, he cannot square a loving and compassionate God-Creator with the stark reality that that same loving God predestines these creatures He so loves to experience this heavy sorrow. How can a practicing and dutiful Christian square a loving God with the experience of mourning? Christians maintain faith that the cosmos is framed by a presence that understands what seems inscrutable to us: the logic of death itself. His Christian upbringing cautions him that his very grief is an expression of doubt, a kind of sin, for which he begs, only partially ironically, for forgiveness for these “wild and wandering cries” (Line 41) in the Prologue. The emergence of his reaffirmation of the triumph of God is keyed to his relationship with Sorrow, which he personifies and addresses throughout the elegy. Initially, Sorrow is his companion, his truest and most understanding friend, his only consolation to indulge its vast and antic grief. By the closing cantos, however, sorrow is unmasked as a vile and intrusive fiend, a lowercase cheat whose design is to forever block the poet from accessing genuine comfort. Sorrow is a shadow show, a distraction for the poet who, mesmerized by the gaudy and excessive show of his grief, cannot even glimpse the only resolution afforded him: “Love is and was my Lord and King” (Line 1), he affirms in Canto 127. With that reaffirmation, the poet understands in Canto 130 that the loss of his friend, “far off, my lost desire” (Line 1), still deep and still immediate, is now vaster because it admits the grandeur and mystery of a God whose omnipotence shames the poet’s arrogant hunger to understand what humanity cannot. God is repositioned at the center of the cosmos, His will “the truths that can never be proved” (Line 10). This realigning of God in Canto 132 positions God as the author and arbiter of even the mysteries unfolding within the hard sciences, thus underscoring God’s triumph over life, death, and all the rest.