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“Mariana” (1830)
If you’ve read or seen Measure for Measure, you may remember that Mariana is the woman whom the hypocrite deputy-ruler Angelo has jilted over dowry money, but who (almost inexplicably) still loves him. Most of us ask, “Why?” and the play doesn’t endow Mariana with a deep motive for her continuing affection. In Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion, Anne Elliott debates Captain Harville regarding the ways men and women love each other. She finishes with the declaration, “All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one; you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.”
But in Tennyson’s poem, the emphasis is on the pure sensuality of Mariana, who longs for her decamped suitor and gives us the refrain, “I am aweary, aweary, / I would that I were dead” (11-12). This remains constant until she reaches the conclusion that her lost love will never return to her. John Everett Millais captures the lady’s sensual longing in his 1851 painting, “Mariana.”
“The Lady of Shalott” (1831-32, 1832/42)
This poem shows Tennyson to be self-consciously late-Romantic. The first several stanzas play with references to time and space, but it’s clear that “down” is the way to Camelot, the world of medieval romance and violence, of immersion in time as symbolized by the flowing river. The Lady will experience this immersion or contact as a rupture. Everyone else’s life is her death once she tries to make the passage from the island to the mainland. The poem raises the question of art’s relation to material life, an issue of concern to Tennyson himself. If poetry is a vocation, to what social end does one honorably pursue it?
Parts 1-2. Poetic devices involve us in the aesthetic way of perceiving. Early on, the plot is enveloped by form; we are entranced by the Lady’s image-weaving, even though we “see” her images spun. The Lady weaves a magic web—is the text another such web? In the fifth stanza of Part 2, she shows little regard for anything but her weaving, and is probably not yet troubled by desire. The metaphors of mirror and loom may refer first to the barrier between life and art, and second to the imaginative process. What is woven may represent the real world, but it remains distinct from that world. Still, Tennyson seems to be referring also to Plato’s parable of the cave when he writes “Shadows of the world appear.” The Lady does not see the world outside directly—she sees shadows, just like Plato’s cave-dwellers. She lives, we might say, in art.
The final stanza of Part 2 says the Lady “still delights / To weave the mirror’s magic sights….” Refer to Freud’s essay “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” where he argues that art is mainly wish-fulfillment. Here the Lady weaves what appears in the mirror, so her web represents representations. What exactly are the “shadows” of which she is “half-sick”? Well, she is tired of seeing things at one remove, and wants direct access to life, to real experience.
Part 3. Here the Lady gets her wish when Lancelot punctures the barrier, breaks the magic spell, with a riot of color and sound. The two young lovers in particular (of the final stanza in Part 2) have readied her for this intrusion. Towards the end of the third part, the magic stops, representation ends, and experience begins. Lancelot’s phrase “tirra lirra” has as one prominent possible source a song of Autolycus the springtime grifter in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale 4.3:
When daffodils begin to peer,
With heigh! the doxy over the dale,
Why, then comes in the sweet o’ the year;
For the red blood reigns in the winter’s pale.
The white sheet bleaching on the hedge,
With heigh! the sweet birds, O, how they sing!
Doth set my pugging tooth on edge;
For a quart of ale is a dish for a king.
The lark, that tirra-lirra chants,
With, heigh! with, heigh! the thrush and the jay,
Are summer songs for me and my aunts,
While we lie tumbling in the hay.
(Public domain text)
Part 4. Is that “publish or perish,” or “publish and perish”? The Lady writes her poem on the prow of the boat that will carry her to her death. The poem is simply her name. The villagers hear her singing, and she dies “in her song.” This means that within the context of the poem, she really dies, but the phrasing is slippery—what does it mean to “die in your song”? Doesn’t that mean you never existed outside of it since you lived in it too?
This construction leads to another reading of the poem as being about the wall between consciousness and the outside world—a more directly philosophical interpretation that might be taken as going against Romantic self-expression. Is it that self-expression can’t succeed because the self doesn’t extend beyond the act of speaking, singing, writing? That isn’t a new idea, but the third part sets it forth strongly. The Lady dwells in her own interiority and can neither remain satisfied with spinning her own world nor enter the world of time and experience.
The townspeople try to interpret the poem, but they feel only dread. That’s one possible response to art. The other is Sir Lancelot’s—he blesses her beauty and asks God to lend her grace for that beauty’s sake. He does not, like the villagers, try to ward off the Lady’s effect on him as if she were a vampire—he welcomes her power even if he doesn’t fully understand where it comes from and doesn’t know the story behind the pretty but dead face.
“The Lotos-Eaters” (1833/42)
In Memoriam Lyric 5 says that “A use in measured language lies / … Like dull narcotics, numbing pain,” a thought that seems apt for the present poem. In Homer’s Odyssey, it’s reasonably clear that Odysseus does not himself taste of the lotus; instead, he sends a group of his men inland, where they meet and mingle with the lotos-eaters. When Odysseus sees the mellow, passive effect that the lotos plant has on his men, he forces them to reboard their ships and sail away. In Tennyson’s poem, however, things are not so clear.
At the poem’s beginning, Odysseus, the “he” who shouts encouragement to his men, sounds like his heroic self. But the island itself exercises an almost narcotic effect on the mariners, and it makes sense to suppose that this effect is visited on the captain himself as well as on the mariners. Or at least that Odysseus’s voice drops out of the poem so that he has insufficient control over his men.
Tennyson’s borrowings from John Keats’s sensualism lend the poem its languidness: “A land where all things always seemed the same” (3-4). In Keats, we find autumn stillness, but here that stillness becomes a trance-inducing stasis.
In any event, Tennyson’s lotos-eaters don’t need a group of mariners to locate them—they come right down to the ships and offer Odysseus’s men the fruit of the lotos plant.
So far as we can tell, the captain isn’t among those who eat of the lotos, but the speaker doesn’t say that he does not do so, either. The speaker is not,as in Homer, Odysseus himself, but is obviously one of the crew members. It is this crewman who says that the lotos-eaters “gave / To each” (29-30). Presumably, that means everybody, though at the same time he implies that not everyone actually tasted the narcotic substance.
Well, the effect of the drug is profound. Anyone who eats the plant’s fruit essentially adopts 1960s LSD guru Dr. Timothy Leary’s mantra “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” The men decide that making it home to the “Fatherland” is a sweet dream, but the struggle to return home is so weary, weary, weary that one man blurts out, “We will return no more,” and then they begin to sing. This is where the “Choric Song” usurps the speaker’s voice and surfaces the consciousness of the men as a whole.
In the source passage that the Norton editor mentions, Spenser’s Faerie Queene Book II, Canto VI, the loose lady Phaedria is trying to lull him into getting lost in a land of idle pleasures, so it makes sense that Tennyson would use this frame for the mariners’ situation.
There is resentment underlying the mariners’ observations—why is it, they want to know, that only they, supposedly the “roof and crown of things,” always end up laboring hardest? Isn’t humankind superior to all the beasts? Protagoras would one day say that “Man is the measure of all things.” Choric stanza 4 is remarkably expressive of this resentful, self-pitying attitude.
By the final, differently unfolding verse stanza—one almost wants to call it a “bundle”—the lotus flower has reached its full effect. The mariners are high, and they’ve decided to live like gods, as they say, lying around in beds of asphodel like the blessed in Elysium, the Greek heaven. As Martin Mull would say, “Don’t ask ‘why,’ ask ‘why not?’” Why not succumb to pleasure island, and forget about home? The gods are no help—many are the anxious legends humans have spun about them.
The gods, it’s thought, are fundamentally unfair and partial, concerned more than anything else with their own pleasures and prerogatives. These gods are just the sort that the Roman poet Lucretius’s poem De Rerum Natura labors so elegantly to put out of the minds of his anxious readers. But more on that below.
In the final section, character isn’t set off from or challenged by nature, as it should be in the heroic context. Words lose their proper orientation towards action, and the Mariners surrender to mellow nature. We find no striving, no wandering, no strength—only rhetoric that justifies inaction. The mariners have become irresponsible poets, and Odysseus is either absent or (much less likely) is one of them. Wandering has lost its purposive edge, and expression, at least for the present time, has become divorced from action.
The stoned peroration or final part of the mariners’ rhetorical set-piece, “O, rest ye, brother mariners, / we will not wander more,” is not, as it would be if Homer’s Odysseus were in charge, met with ruthless herding back up into the ships, but rather with silence, with the absence of any opposition at all. Where is Odysseus? Tennyson probably wrote the poem this way to emphasize the deep danger of the apathy that has beset Odysseus’s men.
What if, in other words, the captain himself had not—ashe does in the Homeric source text—shown up and set a course rejoining the heroic struggle to get home to Ithaca?
The eighth stanza of the Choric Song shows a change in form. It is deceptively translation-like since the lines are long enough to look like Homer’s dactylic hexameter. Homer kept Odysseus from spending much time on the lotos-eaters episode—he surely wanted to emphasize the danger that Odysseus might have given in, and makes the king conscious of that—he’s retelling the story as an action long past to his Phaeacian host Alcinous.
When the Mariners refer to the “Gods together, careless of mankind (155), the line reflects Tennyson’s interest in the Epicurean notion of the gods set forth by Lucretius—they are said to be distant, not particularly active (they didn’t even create the Cosmos—random movement of the atoms did), and unconcerned with human affairs. The eighth stanza draws out into song the dangerous spiritual error that Tennyson’s dilatory poem has been exploring.
Lucretian materialism is meant to bring comfort to humanity, taking away their fear of death and the gods. But Tennyson (who admired Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura) finds this un-Greek or unheroic. Perhaps the entire poem is psychological realism on Tennyson’s part—an admission that strong desires beget or are linked to strong counter-desires: authentic heroism is twinned with strong nihilism and the desire to forget, to accept sweet oblivion.
“Ulysses” (1833/42)
In Homer’s Odyssey, Tiresias had told Odysseus that he must leave Ithaca one last time to propitiate the gods, so Tennyson’s idea comes from Homer. Here in Tennyson’s 1832 poem, we find a modern mind confronting Greek striving. In Homer, all the wandering was for the sake of getting home and re-establishing order on Ithaca. But here the point seems to be that adventurism is its own purpose. Ulysses laments that he has “become a name”; his words are no longer oriented towards action. What he says about experience is almost Paterian—Ulysses, too, wants “to burn with that hard, gem-like flame,” to expand life into a continual moment of great intensity, blotting out the ordinary things and events in life or transforming them.
The second, more public, part of the poem, beginning, “This is my son, mine own Telemachus…,” implies a rejection of the task Homer set for his hero. Tennyson isn’t much interested in the historical element of Odyssean lore—the “task” of the Odyssey was to revitalize a more domesticated land with its former heroic values. But in Tennyson’s recasting, revitalization means rejecting the domestic life, associating it with unheroic plodding or even lassitude, and setting out again as a wanderer towards death. Ulysses stands apart from his son, to whom he would gladly cede the task of ruling over the human herd in Ithaca.
Ulysses’ construction of his homecoming as a peril to his heroic soul may remind us of the quick retreat that Homer’s Odysseus makes when he and his mariners land on the island of the lotos-eaters in The Odyssey, Book 9. The captain recognizes the threat to his home-going mission posed by the laid-back lotos-eaters. Here in Tennyson’s poem, Ulysses feels much the same way about his home, now that he has arrived there. Heroic ideals are posited against a strong counter-current: here, a sentiment of lassitude, of “just giving in,” lies beneath the manifest content, so to speak, of Tennyson’s poem.
When Ulysses addresses his old comrades, he sounds like Satan in Paradise Lost—his will is “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” This is a very general directive, not a call to strive towards some specific goal. Exploring psychological states, and connecting them with landscapes, as our Norton editor would add, is one of Tennyson’s main enterprises, and one might say something similar about Robert Browning and certain other Victorian poets.
Isobel Armstrong’s thesis about Victorian poetry is partly that poetry constituted an alternative realm where great nuance could be developed regarding issues that prose authors were also writing about. That kind of reading implies that poetry isn’t trying to follow fiction’s realism-imperative; it doesn’t really need to tell stories, much less ones that seem almost “ripped from the headlines.”
“Tithonus” (1833/59)
Tithonus asked for and received the gift of immortality from Dawn (Eos), but she forgot to request also eternal youth for her lover. Tithonus cannot, therefore, enjoy his immortality the way a true god could. Dawn will eventually turn him into a chattering cicada, but for now the “Hours” or seasons will keep taking from him everything material that he had thought would last forever.
Tennyson’s poem “Tithonus,” then, reinforces the unbridgeable gap between the human and the divine, even for a culture, the Greeks, that traded quite a lot in the interaction between the immortals, athanatoi, and the brotoi, mortal human beings. Each realm in the Greek cosmos—the Underworld or Hades, the Earth, and Mount Olympus or the heavens—interacts with the others, but each has distinct prerogatives that it guards jealously. It’s dangerous for humans in their earthly realm to intrude on the prerogatives of the Olympians or the ruler of Hades.
In Memoriam A.H.H. (1833-1849)
Structure
I. Drawing upon Tennyson’s remark that he had organized the poem by means of the three celebrations of Christmas it records, A. C. Bradley (“The Structure of In Memoriam,” in Robert Ross, ed., In Memoriam, New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1973) and E. D. H. Johnson (“In Memoriam: The Way of the Poet,” in Robert Ross, ed., In Memoriam, New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1973) suggests the following structure:
1. (1-27) Despair: ungoverned sense (subjective)
2. (28-77) Doubt: mind governing sense, i.e., despair (objective)
3. (78-102) Hope: spirit governing mind, i.e. doubt (subjective)
4. (103-31) Faith: spirit harmonizing with sense (objective)
The four-part division in relation to Tennyson’s theory of poetry would be
1. Poetry as release from emotion
2. Poetry as release from thought
3. Poetry as self-realization
4. Poetry as mission (or prophecy)
II. The poet also explained to a friend (Knowles) that the poem had nine natural groups of sections: 1-8, 9-20, 21-27, 28-44, 45-58, 59-71, 72-93, 94-103, 104-131. It would be a good idea to characterize the organizing principle of each group.
III. Structure of motifs created by paired sections, such as 2 and 39, 7 and 119, and so on, and by repetition of images, metaphors, and paradigms, including hand, door, ship, time, and dream.
IV. Patterns of conversion, turning points, and climaxes: 95, one of the longer sections of IM, contains its most famous climax and moment of conversion, but it is only one of several, for those sections concerning poetry and the role of poetry, the fate of Tennyson’s sister, and the conflict of science and religion all have their contributory climactic structures.
V. Patterns provided by types, biblical and biological (see sections 1, 12, 33, 53-56, 82, 85, 103, 118, 123, 131). Playing upon two competing meanings of the term type, Tennyson parallels and contrasts the biological and the religious. Although he admits that man as a type (species) may well disappear like the dinosaurs and become a fossil in the iron hills, he finds in Arthur Henry Hallam a type (prefiguration) of both the reappearance of Christ and of the higher form (species, type) of humanity—a reassurance that time, evolution, and human life have meaning.
The Poet’s Three Main Areas of Concern
1. The need to find an appropriate way to express sorrow and hope—a way that will not trap the speaker in those states, but that will not deny their necessity, either. In Memoriam deals with Romantic themes—grief, isolation, the poet’s anxiety over the expressive capacity of language. But Tennyson’s elegiac poem is highly structured and formal, too—a working-out of his emotions. Formal elegy (poetic ritual) helps him establish distance from the recurrent rawness of his grief and affords him an opportunity to express and explore painful interior states.
Wordsworth, too, saw meter and poetic devices as ways of establishing meditative distance, ways of blanketing otherwise too-intense events and feelings with a layer of unreality. (This insight is as old as Aristotle—he says we can contemplate things with pleasure in art that would cause us unbearable grief or horror if they really happened.) In Tennyson’s cycle, Sorrow will be personified, negotiated with, listened to, and overcome. But grief is not an easy thing to leave behind; its persistence is signaled in Freud’s phrase “the work of mourning.”
2. The need to wrestle with religious doubt, whether this doubt comes from the pain occasioned by the loss of a dear friend, or from what John Ruskin would later call “the dreadful clink of the hammer” in one’s brain—i.e. the chipping away of faith caused by the advancing sciences of geology (Lyell), biology, chemistry, etc. These sciences were at work even before Darwin’s theory of natural selection and evolution intensified Victorian religious doubt. Some Victorian intellectuals also disfavored the more severe formulations of Christian theology—Calvinist pre-election, and so forth.
3. The need to reconsider the Romantic regard for nature’s value as a source of moral intelligibility and comfort. But the concept of nature is itself undergoing change—even Lyell’s uniformitarianism (the forces that shape the earth today have been shaping it the same way for millions of years) leads to a sense of “deep time” or “geological time.” The death of Hallam shocks Tennyson, but the long sense of time threatens to overwhelm any sense of human significance—see the fine set of lyrics 54-56 on this issue.
The Prologue
The poetry of George Herbert (1593-1633) is an influence on Tennyson. Herbert, like Milton and others, felt the need to justify his habit of writing poetry—is it a genuine calling, or self-indulgence? Refer to 1 John 4:21: “And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also.” The remark implies that if poetry is to be an authentic use of one’s time, it should perform some social function—not just amount to private expression, venting, or some other selfish thing.
Herbert also wrestled with movements of spirit that may be less than accepting of God’s will. This is not a matter of doubt, however, as it is with Tennyson. With Herbert, the issue has to do with the mind’s attempt to order contrary passions and align the fallen, flawed human self and will with the perfect will of God. In this sense, poetic language might serve to mediate between one’s better self and unruly thoughts and desires.
Stanza 1. The first stanza introduces a big issue—what is the relationship between faith and knowledge? Another eminent Victorian, John Henry Newman, captured this issue well when he wrote that there is “certitude,” and there is logical proof. In matters of faith, he suggests, the idea isn’t to look for scientific or logical proof—the right attitude has more to do with a deep feeling of certainty in the truth of Christian doctrine.
Stanzas 2-4. The speaker asserts that Providence (God’s plan) encompasses everyone and everything. He says that man “thinks he was not made to die,” and claims that he draws certitude from that. If we have such a strong feeling that something of us survives, well then, something must—why else would we have such a feeling? God made us, and must have given us the capacity for that feeling, so he will have the thing so. The third and fourth stanzas insist that despair—a state that In Memoriam explores—must be cast away along with sorrow.
Stanza 5. The speaker says, Carlyle-like, that “Our little systems have their day.” They are only “broken lights” of God’s divine and radiant Truth, so human knowledge will never replace God.
Stanza 6. The poem will make a search for the true ground of being and faith. The “beam” of light in the darkness could refer to any number of biblical passages, but Christ’s “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” would be a good candidate. (John 8:12)
Stanzas 7-8. Knowledge will grow until mind and soul, knowledge and faith, unite again.
Stanzas 9-11. The speaker apologizes for the tortuous Romantic path of self-exploration and doubt that makes up the lyric progression of In Memoriam. He accuses himself of an excessive grief that might imply lack of trust in God’s plan. As Queen Gertrude says to Hamlet concerning his father’s death, “why stands it so particular with thee?” The speaker’s “wild and wandering cries” are, however, rhetorical and dramatic utterances. They explore, vent, contain and direct “powerful feelings.” Tennyson’s craft as a poet helps him arrange his emotions and gain perspective on them.
Lyric 1 (Stage 1 = 1-27, Near-Despair, ungoverned sense, subjective)
Loss should lead to growth, but perspective is an acquisition of time—a slow, sorrowful process. The speaker begins his exploration of sorrow’s psychology—grief is necessary and human. He rejects stoic indifference to grief because he is not yet ready for “calm of mind, all passion spent” (a line from Milton’s Samson Agonistes).
Lyric 2
Over time, the tree obliterates the names of the dead, effacing our attempt to memorialize them. Nature envelops the person’s dust, and shadow envelops our entire lives. The speaker betrays a strong desire to put an end to answer-seeking and self-consciousness. Carlyle’s sense of mystery hovers over this poem, but provides no comfort. The tree itself is rooted in eternity, ultimate perspective. In the final stanza, the speaker wants to lose consciousness and merge with the tree’s mysterious presence. We might also say that the tree is one of Wordsworth’s “beautiful and permanent forms of nature.”
Lyric 3
The poem objectifies sorrow to gain perspective on it, but this tactic does not always work. In the first sent stanza, the speaker tries to gain perspective on his grief—towards what path of thought will Sorrow lead the speaker?
In the second stanza, Sorrow says that we inhabit a blind universe—Carlyle’s steam-engine universe—and that there is, therefore, no divine providence and no purpose to life.
In the third stanza, she says that Nature is void of meaning or hope; there is no source or ground for being, no anchor for the expression of emotions.
In the fourth stanza, the speaker raises the possibility of rejecting the Wordsworthian religion of nature, but does not do so.
Lyric 4
This poem shows that the speaker suffers from a divided consciousness, as in Lyric 2.
Lyric 5
The speaker questions the expressive transparency of language, its ability to convey feeling. He questions Romantic optimism about the vital role of language as mediator from one soul to another. But the lyric’s rhythmic language helps to still the speaker’s pain. It distances him from his own emotions. But is a narcotic effect the same as perspective or therapeutic value?
Lyric 7
This poem explores the psychological state of disbelief, mourning.
Lyric 11
The speaker is out of joint with natural calm; his perspective does not match that of nature personified. Are we to understand calm here as the peace that passes understanding? The speaker also confronts in his imagination the still body of his friend. He is preparing to reckon with the body’s silence and its transformation into a thing of dead nature.
Lyric 14
In the final stanza, the speaker is again preparing himself to let go of Arthur Hallam’s life-image. Viewing the body is necessary if we are to accept death.
Lyric 15
In the third stanza, the speaker refers to the ship’s motion—the apparition is the ship bearing his friend’s body. See Job 37:18. For the final stanza, see Revelation 15:2. Will the speaker’s interior state lead him to ultimate vision, to the meaning of Arthur’s passing?
Lyric 28
This poem, written early, marks the beginning of the second stage that runs through to Lyric 77: doubt, mind governing sense, objective. The speaker is wrestling with doubt, that eminently Victorian problem. In the second stanza, he hears the bells, symbols of religious faith at its simplest and finest, implying harmony among mankind. In stanza five, the bells recall him to a former state of simple faith, a sense that the world is morally intelligible.
As in Wordsworth’s poetry, past feelings rekindle new emotions of a similar kind. But bells are not words. The last two lines reverse Shelley’s formula in “We are as Clouds”—the bells bring “sorrow touched with joy.”
Lyric 30
In stanza seven, the speaker says that there is a spirit moving through the universe. The imagery here is similar to Dante’s, or to Shelley’s in his elegy for Keats, “Adonais.” Is Arthur Hallam moved now by the divine or primal love, il primo amore? Lucretius’s references in De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of the Universe) to the soul wandering into infinity may also be relevant here.
Lyric 34
The speaker describes an alternate poetics—expression without the need for progress or arrangement of the passions to serve moral ends. But he does not embrace this alternate poetics, as we can tell from the conditional mood of the final two stanzas.
Lyric 39
This poem should be compared with Lyric 2. In the first stanza, the speaker sees the tree as truly animate: it is part of nature’s regenerative cycle. But then Sorrow takes away the speaker’s belief in the regenerative power of nature, implying that the comfort we take is imported, a function of anthropomorphism.
Lyric 54
In the final stanza, the carefully ordered rhetoric of faith is described as a dream, and the poet’s language as a cry. But a cry does not give us the moral understanding we crave; we want to assert that some purpose governs the universe.
Lyric 55
In the second stanza, the speaker asks if God and nature are at war with each other. He may be thinking of Sir Charles Lyell’s principle of uniformitarianism, which says that consistent forces operating over vast periods of time have shaped the earth. If the species or type is all that matters, what consolation is that fact for individuals? Can science offer us satisfying knowledge? Or even bearable knowledge?
In the final two stanzas, the speaker sounds like Shelley in “O World, O Life, O Time.” Life is cast as an arduous path, with the speaker groping for purpose and meaning. Science has been destructive of faith, disintegrating the individual psyche and the sense of community.
Lyric 56
In the first stanza, Nature says she cares not even for the type—geological strata convey in cold stone the passing not only of the individual but also of the species. Evidently, Nature (pace Wordsworth) can betray the heart that loves her.
In the fourth stanza, the speaker says we trusted that love was God’s primal impulse and ordering principle—Aristotle’s final cause (purpose) and first cause (God) conjoined.
In the sixth stanza, the speaker raises the problem of self-consciousness. We “look before and after and pine for what is not,” as Shelley says. We try to establish a hierarchy of beings, but geological time does not respond to our efforts in a comforting manner.
I recall Pascal’s remark that “the silence of these infinite spaces” terrifies him. Tennyson’s speaker says we cannot be satisfied with thinking of ourselves in purely material terms—it crushes our sense of worth and even humanity. The final stanza brings in a Carlylean sense of history again—put on the veil and stop asking questions.
Lyric 75
In this poem, we find the Shakespearean theme of immortality through verse. This conventional sentiment leads us to the fuller transition of Lyric 78. The third stage through Lyric 102 is marked by hope, with spirit governing intellect and doubt. It is a subjective stage, as was the darker stage one.
With Lyric 103, the fourth stage arrives—that of faith, with spirit harmonizing sense and intellect and feeling. The fourth stage is an objective part of the poem.
Lyric 108
The speaker will seek solace in social interaction—not in religious speculation. He has begun to pull back from his grief for Arthur Hallam, and there is a hint of a feeling of abandonment in the final stanza.
Lyric 118
In the second stanza, it’s been said that there is probably a reference to Jean LaPlace’s idea of the earth as a fiery discharge from the Sun. The rest of the lyric sets forth the idea of inner evolution: the animal in us is a chaos that must be overcome and left behind. Human nature is satyr-like, and requires acts of will, self-overcoming, to transcend itself.
Lyric 123
These are very rhetorical poems with conventional themes coming to the forefront, along with a reassertion of the Carlylean sense of mystery. The theme is something like “life is a dream,” but the ordering power of the language works against that notion. In the final stanza, the speaker implies that to affirm the inconstancy of all things human, the delusional state in which we dwell, does not satisfy or convince. It is only the initial move on the way towards faith. God lies at the end of the path of doubt and faith alike.
Lyric 124
The speaker, in stanza 2, says that he does not find God in arguments about “intelligent design.” This is the sort of thing that abstract reasoning cooks up. In the final stanza, a sense of mystery puts an end to the speaker’s searching—the light comes from darkness.
Lyric 126
This poem may be looking back to George Herbert, who sometimes portrays Christ as a great lord in a court. The “faithful guard” is the Church. The speaker begins to feel protected, encompassed by Anglican ceremony and faith.
Edition: Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 11th edition. Volume E, The Victorian Age. New York: 2024. ISBN-13: 978-0393543322.
Copyright © 2026 Alfred J. Drake
Document Timestamp: 3/12/2026