{"id":11259,"date":"2026-03-11T11:55:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-11T18:55:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/shakespeare\/?page_id=11259"},"modified":"2026-03-12T18:55:50","modified_gmt":"2026-03-13T01:55:50","slug":"olli-tennyson-notes","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/shakespeare\/olli-tennyson-notes\/","title":{"rendered":"OLLI – Tennyson Notes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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COMMENTARIES<\/div><\/a><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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\"Course<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Return to Victorian Literature & Culture Syllabus\/Home Page<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Commentaries: <\/strong>Introduction<\/a> | Carlyle<\/a> | Mill<\/a> | E. B. Browning<\/a> | Bront\u00eb<\/a> | Tennyson<\/a> | Mayhew<\/a> | Ruskin<\/a> | R. Browning<\/a> | Arnold<\/a> | Stevenson<\/a> | Pre-Raphaelites Intro<\/a> | D. G. Rossetti<\/a> | C. Rossetti<\/a> | Hopkins<\/a> | Pater<\/a> | Wilde<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMariana\u201d (1830)<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019ve read or seen Measure for Measure, <\/em>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, \u201cWhy?\u201d and the play doesn\u2019t endow Mariana with a deep motive for her continuing affection. In Jane Austen\u2019s novel Persuasion, <\/em>Anne Elliott debates Captain Harville regarding the ways men and women love each other. She finishes with the declaration, \u201cAll 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But in Tennyson\u2019s poem, the emphasis is on the pure sensuality of Mariana, who longs for her decamped suitor and gives us the refrain, \u201cI am aweary, aweary, \/ I would that I were dead\u201d (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\u2019s sensual longing in his 1851 painting, \u201cMariana.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Lady of Shalott\u201d (1831-32, 1832\/42)<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

This poem shows Tennyson to be self-consciously late-Romantic. The first several stanzas play with references to time and space, but it\u2019s clear that \u201cdown\u201d 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\u2019s life is her death once she tries to make the passage from the island to the mainland. The poem raises the question of art\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Parts 1-2.<\/strong> Poetic devices involve us in the aesthetic way of perceiving. Early on, the plot is enveloped by form; we are entranced by the Lady\u2019s image-weaving, even though we \u201csee\u201d her images spun. The Lady weaves a magic web\u2014is 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\u2019s parable of the cave when he writes \u201cShadows of the world appear.\u201d The Lady does not see the world outside directly\u2014she sees shadows, just like Plato\u2019s cave-dwellers. She lives, we might say, in art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The final stanza of Part 2 says the Lady \u201cstill delights \/ To weave the mirror\u2019s magic sights\u2026.\u201d Refer to Freud\u2019s essay \u201cCreative Writers and Daydreaming,\u201d 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 \u201cshadows\u201d of which she is \u201chalf-sick\u201d? Well, she is tired of seeing things at one remove, and wants direct access to life, to real experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part 3.<\/strong> 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\u2019s phrase \u201ctirra lirra\u201d has as one prominent possible source a song of Autolycus the springtime grifter in Shakespeare\u2019s The Winter\u2019s Tale <\/em>4.3:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When daffodils begin to peer,
With heigh! the doxy over the dale,
Why, then comes in the sweet o\u2019 the year;
For the red blood reigns in the winter\u2019s pale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Public domain text)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part 4.<\/strong> Is that \u201cpublish or perish,\u201d or \u201cpublish and<\/em> perish\u201d?  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 \u201cin her song.\u201d This means that within the context of the poem, she really<\/em> dies, but the phrasing is slippery\u2014what does it mean to \u201cdie in your song\u201d? Doesn\u2019t that mean you never existed outside of it since you lived in it too?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This construction leads to another reading of the poem as being about the wall between consciousness and the outside world\u2014a more directly philosophical interpretation that might be taken as going against Romantic self-expression. Is it that self-expression can\u2019t succeed because the self doesn\u2019t extend beyond the act of speaking, singing, writing? That isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The townspeople try to interpret the poem, but they feel only dread. That\u2019s one possible response to art. The other is Sir Lancelot\u2019s\u2014he blesses her beauty and asks God to lend her grace for that beauty\u2019s sake. He does not, like the villagers, try to ward off the Lady\u2019s effect on him as if she were a vampire\u2014he welcomes her power even if he doesn\u2019t fully understand where it comes from and doesn\u2019t know the story behind the pretty but dead face.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Lotos-Eaters\u201d (1833\/42)<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In Memoriam<\/em> Lyric 5 says that \u201cA use in measured language lies \/ \u2026 Like dull narcotics, numbing pain,\u201d a thought that seems apt for the present poem. In Homer\u2019s Odyssey, <\/em>it\u2019s 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 <\/em>them to reboard their ships and sail away. In Tennyson\u2019s poem, however, things are not so clear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the poem\u2019s beginning, Odysseus, the \u201che\u201d 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\u2019s voice drops out of the poem so that he has insufficient control over his men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tennyson\u2019s borrowings from John Keats\u2019s sensualism lend the poem its languidness: \u201cA land where all things always seemed the same\u201d (3-4). In Keats, we find autumn stillness, but here that stillness becomes a trance-inducing stasis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In any event, Tennyson\u2019s lotos-eaters don\u2019t need a group of mariners to locate them\u2014they come right down to the ships and offer Odysseus\u2019s men the fruit of the lotos plant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So far as we can tell, the captain isn\u2019t among those who eat of the lotos, but the speaker doesn\u2019t say that he does not <\/em>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 \u201cgave \/ To each\u201d (29-30). Presumably, that means everybody, though at the same time he implies that not everyone actually tasted <\/em>the narcotic substance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, the effect of the drug is profound. Anyone who eats the plant\u2019s fruit essentially adopts 1960s LSD guru Dr. Timothy Leary\u2019s mantra \u201cturn on, tune in, and drop out.\u201d The men decide that making it home to the \u201cFatherland\u201d is a sweet dream, but the struggle to return home is so weary, weary, weary <\/em>that one man blurts out, \u201cWe will return no more,\u201d and then they begin to sing. This is where the \u201cChoric Song\u201d usurps the speaker\u2019s voice and surfaces the consciousness of the men as a whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the source passage that the Norton editor mentions, Spenser\u2019s Faerie Queene<\/em> 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\u2019 situation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is resentment underlying the mariners\u2019 observations\u2014why is it, they want to know, that only they, <\/em>supposedly the \u201croof and crown of things,\u201d always end up laboring hardest? Isn\u2019t humankind superior to all the beasts? Protagoras would one day say that \u201cMan is the measure of all things.\u201d Choric stanza 4 is remarkably expressive of this resentful, self-pitying attitude.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the final, differently unfolding verse stanza\u2014one almost wants to call it a \u201cbundle\u201d\u2014the lotus flower has reached its full effect. The mariners are high, and they\u2019ve 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, \u201cDon\u2019t ask \u2018why,\u2019 ask \u2018why not?\u2019\u201d Why not<\/em> succumb to pleasure island, and forget about home? The gods are no help\u2014many are the anxious legends humans have spun about them.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The gods, it\u2019s 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\u2019s poem De Rerum Natura <\/em>labors so elegantly to put out of the minds of his anxious readers. But more on that below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the final section, character isn\u2019t 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\u2014only 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The stoned peroration or final part of the mariners\u2019 rhetorical set-piece, \u201cO, rest ye, brother mariners, \/ we will not wander more,\u201d is not, as it would be if Homer\u2019s 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\u2019s men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What if, in other words, the captain himself had not\u2014<\/em>ashe does in the Homeric source text\u2014shown up and set a course rejoining the heroic struggle to get home to Ithaca?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s dactylic hexameter. Homer kept Odysseus from spending much time on the lotos-eaters episode\u2014he surely wanted to emphasize the danger that Odysseus might have given in, and makes the king conscious of that\u2014he\u2019s retelling the story as an action long past to his Phaeacian host Alcinous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the Mariners refer to the \u201cGods together, careless of mankind (155), the line reflects Tennyson\u2019s interest in the Epicurean notion of the gods set forth by Lucretius\u2014they are said to be distant, not particularly active (they didn\u2019t even create the Cosmos\u2014random movement of the atoms did), and unconcerned with human affairs. The eighth stanza draws out into song the dangerous spiritual error that Tennyson\u2019s dilatory poem has been exploring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lucretian materialism is meant to bring comfort to humanity, taking away their fear of death and the gods. But Tennyson (who admired Lucretius\u2019s De Rerum Natura<\/em>) finds this un-Greek or unheroic. Perhaps the entire poem is psychological realism on Tennyson\u2019s part\u2014an 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cUlysses\u201d (1833\/42)<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In Homer\u2019s Odyssey, <\/em>Tiresias had told Odysseus that he must leave Ithaca one last time to propitiate the gods, so Tennyson\u2019s idea comes from Homer. Here in Tennyson\u2019s 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 \u201cbecome a name\u201d; his words are no longer oriented towards action. What he says about experience is almost Paterian\u2014Ulysses, too, wants \u201cto burn with that hard, gem-like flame,\u201d to expand life into a continual moment of great intensity, blotting out the ordinary things and events in life or transforming them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second, more public, part of the poem, beginning, \u201cThis is my son, mine own Telemachus\u2026,\u201d implies a rejection of the task Homer set for his hero. Tennyson isn\u2019t much interested in the historical element of Odyssean lore\u2014the \u201ctask\u201d of the Odyssey was to revitalize a more domesticated land with its former heroic values. But in Tennyson\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ulysses\u2019 construction of his homecoming as a peril to his heroic soul may remind us of the quick retreat that Homer\u2019s Odysseus makes when he and his mariners land on the island of the lotos-eaters in The Odyssey, <\/em>Book 9. The captain recognizes the threat to his home-going mission posed by the laid-back lotos-eaters. Here in Tennyson\u2019s 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 \u201cjust giving in,\u201d lies beneath the manifest content, so to speak, of Tennyson\u2019s poem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Ulysses addresses his old comrades, he sounds like Satan in Paradise Lost<\/em>\u2014his will is \u201cTo strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.\u201d 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\u2019s main enterprises, and one might say something similar about Robert Browning and certain other Victorian poets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Isobel Armstrong\u2019s 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\u2019t trying to follow fiction\u2019s realism-imperative; it doesn\u2019t really need to tell stories, much less ones that seem almost \u201cripped from the headlines.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTithonus\u201d (1833\/59)<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Tithonus asked for and received the gift of immortality from Dawn (Eos), but she forgot to request also eternal youth <\/em>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 \u201cHours\u201d or seasons will keep taking from him everything material that he had thought would last forever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tennyson\u2019s poem \u201cTithonus,\u201d 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,<\/em> and the brotoi, <\/em>mortal human beings. Each realm in the Greek cosmos\u2014the Underworld or Hades, the Earth, and Mount Olympus or the heavens\u2014interacts with the others, but each has distinct prerogatives that it guards jealously. It\u2019s dangerous for humans in their earthly realm to intrude on the prerogatives of the Olympians or the ruler of Hades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Memoriam A.H.H. <\/em><\/strong>(1833-1849)<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Structure<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I. Drawing upon Tennyson\u2019s remark that he had organized the poem by means of the three celebrations of Christmas it records, A. C. Bradley (\u201cThe Structure of In Memoriam,<\/em>\u201d in Robert Ross, ed., In Memoriam,<\/em> New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1973) and E. D. H. Johnson (\u201cIn Memoriam:<\/em> The Way of the Poet,\u201d in Robert Ross, ed., In Memoriam,<\/em> New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1973) suggests the following structure:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. (1-27) Despair: ungoverned sense (subjective)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. (28-77) Doubt: mind governing sense, i.e., despair (objective)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. (78-102) Hope: spirit governing mind, i.e. doubt (subjective)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. (103-31) Faith: spirit harmonizing with sense (objective)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The four-part division in relation to Tennyson\u2019s theory of poetry would be<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Poetry as release from emotion<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Poetry as release from thought<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Poetry as self-realization<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. Poetry as mission (or prophecy)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

IV. Patterns of conversion, turning points, and climaxes: 95, one of the longer sections of IM,<\/em> 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\u2019s sister, and the conflict of science and religion all have their contributory climactic structures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014a reassurance that time, evolution, and human life have meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Poet\u2019s Three Main Areas of Concern<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. The need to find an appropriate way to express sorrow and hope\u2014a way that will not trap the speaker in those states, but that will not deny their necessity, either. In Memoriam<\/em> deals with Romantic themes\u2014grief, isolation, the poet\u2019s anxiety over the expressive capacity of language. But Tennyson\u2019s elegiac poem is highly structured and formal, too\u2014a 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014he says we can contemplate things with pleasure in art that would cause us unbearable grief or horror if they really happened.) In Tennyson\u2019s 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\u2019s phrase \u201cthe work of mourning.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cthe dreadful clink of the hammer\u201d in one\u2019s brain\u2014i.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\u2019s theory of natural selection and evolution intensified Victorian religious doubt. Some Victorian intellectuals also disfavored the more severe formulations of Christian theology\u2014Calvinist pre-election, and so forth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. The need to reconsider the Romantic regard for nature\u2019s value as a source of moral intelligibility and comfort. But the concept of nature is itself undergoing change\u2014even Lyell\u2019s uniformitarianism (the forces that shape the earth today have been shaping it the same way for millions of years) leads to a sense of \u201cdeep time\u201d or \u201cgeological time.\u201d The death of Hallam shocks Tennyson, but the long sense of time threatens to overwhelm any sense of human significance\u2014see the fine set of lyrics 54-56 on this issue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Prologue<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014is it a genuine calling, or self-indulgence? Refer to 1<\/em> John<\/em> 4:21: \u201cAnd this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also.\u201d The remark implies that if poetry is to be an authentic use of one\u2019s time, it should perform some social function\u2014not just amount to private expression, venting, or some other selfish thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Herbert also wrestled with movements of spirit that may be less than accepting of God\u2019s will. This is not a matter of doubt, however, as it is with Tennyson. With Herbert, the issue has to do with the mind\u2019s 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\u2019s better self and unruly thoughts and desires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stanza 1. The first stanza introduces a big issue\u2014what is the relationship between faith and knowledge? Another eminent Victorian, John Henry Newman, captured this issue well when he wrote that there is \u201ccertitude,\u201d and there is logical proof. In matters of faith, he suggests, the idea isn\u2019t to look for scientific or logical proof\u2014the right attitude has more to do with a deep feeling of certainty in the truth of Christian doctrine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stanzas 2-4. The speaker asserts that Providence (God\u2019s plan) encompasses everyone and everything. He says that man \u201cthinks he was not made to die,\u201d and claims that he draws certitude from that. If we have such a strong feeling that something of us survives, well then, something must\u2014why 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\u2014a state that In Memoriam<\/em> explores\u2014must be cast away along with sorrow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stanza 5. The speaker says, Carlyle-like, that \u201cOur little systems have their day.\u201d They are only \u201cbroken lights\u201d of God\u2019s divine and radiant Truth, so human knowledge will never replace God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stanza 6. The poem will make a search for the true ground of being and faith. The \u201cbeam\u201d of light in the darkness could refer to any number of biblical passages, but Christ\u2019s \u201cI am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life\u201d would be a good candidate. (John <\/em>8:12)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stanzas 7-8. Knowledge will grow until mind and soul, knowledge and faith, unite again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/em> He accuses himself of an excessive grief that might imply lack of trust in God\u2019s plan. As Queen Gertrude says to Hamlet concerning his father\u2019s death, \u201cwhy stands it so particular with thee?\u201d The speaker\u2019s \u201cwild and wandering cries\u201d are, however, rhetorical and dramatic utterances. They explore, vent, contain and direct \u201cpowerful feelings.\u201d Tennyson\u2019s craft as a poet helps him arrange his emotions and gain perspective on them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lyric 1 <\/strong>(Stage 1 = 1-27, Near-Despair, ungoverned sense, subjective)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Loss should lead to growth, but perspective is an acquisition of time\u2014a slow, sorrowful process. The speaker begins his exploration of sorrow\u2019s psychology\u2014grief is necessary and human. He rejects stoic indifference to grief because he is not yet ready for \u201ccalm of mind, all passion spent\u201d (a line from Milton\u2019s Samson Agonistes<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lyric 2<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over time, the tree obliterates the names of the dead, effacing our attempt to memorialize them. Nature envelops the person\u2019s dust, and shadow envelops our entire lives. The speaker betrays a strong desire to put an end to answer-seeking and self-consciousness. Carlyle\u2019s 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\u2019s mysterious presence. We might also say that the tree is one of Wordsworth\u2019s \u201cbeautiful and permanent forms of nature.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lyric 3<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014towards what path of thought will Sorrow lead the speaker?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the second stanza, Sorrow says that we inhabit a blind universe\u2014Carlyle\u2019s steam-engine universe\u2014and that there is, therefore, no divine providence and no purpose to life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the fourth stanza, the speaker raises the possibility of rejecting the Wordsworthian religion of nature, but does not do so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lyric 4<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This poem shows that the speaker suffers from a divided consciousness, as in Lyric 2.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lyric 5<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s rhythmic language helps to still the speaker\u2019s pain. It distances him from his own emotions. But is a narcotic effect the same as perspective or therapeutic value?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lyric 7<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This poem explores the psychological state of disbelief, mourning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lyric 11<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s silence and its transformation into a thing of dead nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lyric 14<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the final stanza, the speaker is again preparing himself to let go of Arthur Hallam\u2019s life-image. Viewing the body is necessary if we are to accept death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lyric 15<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the third stanza, the speaker refers to the ship\u2019s motion\u2014the apparition is the ship bearing his friend\u2019s body. See Job<\/em> 37:18. For the final stanza, see Revelation<\/em> 15:2. Will the speaker\u2019s interior state lead him to ultimate vision, to the meaning of Arthur\u2019s passing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lyric 28<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As in Wordsworth\u2019s poetry, past feelings rekindle new emotions of a similar kind. But bells are not words. The last two lines reverse Shelley\u2019s formula in \u201cWe are as Clouds\u201d\u2014the bells bring \u201csorrow touched with joy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lyric 30<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In stanza seven, the speaker says that there is a spirit moving through the universe. The imagery here is similar to Dante\u2019s, or to Shelley\u2019s in his elegy for Keats, \u201cAdonais.\u201d Is Arthur Hallam moved now by the divine or primal love, il primo amore? <\/em>Lucretius\u2019s references in De Rerum Natura <\/em>(On the Nature of the Universe<\/em>) to the soul wandering into infinity may also be relevant here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lyric 34<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The speaker describes an alternate poetics\u2014expression 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lyric 39<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s regenerative cycle. But then Sorrow takes away the speaker\u2019s belief in the regenerative power of nature, implying that the comfort we take is imported, a function of anthropomorphism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lyric 54<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the final stanza, the carefully ordered rhetoric of faith is described as a dream, and the poet\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lyric 55<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the final two stanzas, the speaker sounds like Shelley in \u201cO World, O Life, O Time.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lyric 56<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the first stanza, Nature says she cares not even for the type\u2014geological strata convey in cold stone the passing not only of the individual but also of the species. Evidently, Nature (pace<\/em> Wordsworth) can<\/em> betray the heart that loves her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the fourth stanza, the speaker says we trusted that love was God\u2019s primal impulse and ordering principle\u2014Aristotle\u2019s final cause (purpose) and first cause (God) conjoined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the sixth stanza, the speaker raises the problem of self-consciousness. We \u201clook before and after and pine for what is not,\u201d as Shelley says. We try to establish a hierarchy of beings, but geological time does not respond to our efforts in a comforting manner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I recall Pascal\u2019s remark that \u201cthe silence of these infinite spaces\u201d terrifies him. Tennyson\u2019s speaker says we cannot be satisfied with thinking of ourselves in purely material terms\u2014it crushes our sense of worth and even humanity. The final stanza brings in a Carlylean sense of history again\u2014put on the veil and stop asking questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lyric 75<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With Lyric 103, the fourth stage arrives\u2014that of faith, with spirit harmonizing sense and intellect and feeling. The fourth stage is an objective part of the poem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lyric 108<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The speaker will seek solace in social interaction\u2014not 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lyric 118<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the second stanza, it\u2019s been said that there is probably a reference to Jean LaPlace\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lyric 123<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201clife is a dream,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lyric 124<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The speaker, in stanza 2, says that he does not find God in arguments about \u201cintelligent design.\u201d 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\u2019s searching\u2014the light comes from darkness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lyric 126<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This poem may be looking back to George Herbert, who sometimes portrays Christ as a great lord in a court. The \u201cfaithful guard\u201d is the Church. The speaker begins to feel protected, encompassed by Anglican ceremony and faith.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Edition: <\/strong>Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature,<\/em> 11th<\/sup> edition. Volume E, The Victorian Age. New York: 2024. ISBN-13: 978-0393543322.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Copyright \u00a9 2026 Alfred J. Drake<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Document Timestamp: 3\/12\/2026<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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