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EN51011B
Student number: 33574899
Public and Private Faces in
In Memoriam
Word Count: 2013 words
Although he began writing in the purest Romanticism, the British poet Lord Alfred Tennyson soon became interested in common problems of the Victorian Period such as the changing society, the conflict between religion and science and the issues related to political power. The consequences of this changing society affected people as individuals, what concluded in a whole affected society. However, the poet not only wrote about this public face of the world, but also about private feelings like the grief that accompanies a loss, or the personal doubts that an individual could have about faith. An example of this mixture between the public and the private can be found in his work In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), well- known as In Memoriam. This extensive elegiac poem was written in order to pay tribute to his closest friend from Cambridge and fiancé of his sister Arthur Hallam, who suddenly died in 1833 at the age of twenty-two. This essay attempts to comment on the work made by Tennyson by exploring some sections of the poem and by relating it to the statement made by John Rosenberg. It can be found in his book Elegy for an Age: The Presence of the Past in Victorian Literature, where he also sustains that the poet is magnificent when relating both
private and public faces of the elegy due to ‘his performances as a public bard were at least as popular as his more personal lyrics.’^1 The representatives of science started to question the legitimacy of any religious influence in scientific publications, instruction, and institutions; but this conflict was not between religious and non-religious scientists, it was a conflict that affected both fields: religion and science. 2 Tennyson, as he was aware of what was happening during his era, used his poetry to discuss the existing relationship between these discoveries and what religion meant. In Canto XXI, the poet uses a specific scientific language to show some voices that he imagines, voices which argue between them. The language that he used differs as each voice expresses different feelings: One of them is blaming the poet for spreading his sadness to others, so the language used is direct and strong. The second one admires his ‘parade of pain’; because of the fact of starting words with the same sound, this alliteration gives a sense of unity in diversity to the section and aims to fluency. The third voice blames the poet again. Now, for writing about grief and pain when he had more pressing problems to focus on, such as the political and scientific changes of the Victorian Era: ‘ A third is wroth: "Is this an hour For private sorrow's barren song, (^1) John Rosenberg, Elegy For An Age: The Presence Of The Past In Victorian Literature (London: Anthem Press, 2005). p. 9. (^2) Eszter Pál, "Science And Society. Scientific Societies In Victorian England", Review Of Sociology , 24.4, 85-111.
rejection against it and his doubts about faith are getting worse. Surprisingly, at the end of this poem Tennyson seems to become more secure about his faith: ‘ I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, And gather dust and chaff, and call To what I feel is Lord of all, And faintly trust the larger hope. ’^6 This part of his work is related to the canto that follows: Canto LVI. The doubts and the struggle of the poet intensify here. In the previous canto, Tennyson thought that Nature cared about the species, but now his mind has changed, as it is suggested in the first line of this section: ‘ “So careful of the type?" but no. ’^7 Now, the author is referring again to the theory of natural selection, and he affirms that Nature does not take care of anything, a fact that emphasises the idea of science being against God and religion, something that Tennyson repeats multiple times in his elegiac poem. In the final stanza, the author is so desperate, represented that by the use of exclamations and interrogations and the repetition of phrases, that the only thing that would make him feel better is the spirit of his friend Hallam: ‘ O life as futile, then, as frail! O for thy voice to soothe and bless! What hope of answer, or redress? Behind the veil, behind the veil. ’^8 Despite the voices that told him that he should not write about his most private feelings in Canto XXI, Tennyson uses In Memoriam to alleviate most of the pain that (^6) Margaret W Ferguson, Tim Kendall and Mary Jo Salter, p. 1050. (^7) Margaret W Ferguson, Tim Kendall and Mary Jo Salter, p. 1050. (^8) Margaret W Ferguson, Tim Kendall and Mary Jo Salter, p. 1050.
he feels in his deepest self. So much is that that this elegy became one of the most personal works ever written by the Victorian poet. Sarah Rose Cole claims in her journal that ‘ Tennyson symbolically links the political power of male friendship to the intimate affections of the Victorian home, ’^9 addressing the duality that the poem has. It is known that Hallam and Tennyson were very close friends, something that lead scholars of all around the world to think about the nature of this relationship. On the final stanza of Canto XCIII, the poet wrote the following: ‘ Descend, and touch, and enter; hear The wish too strong for words to name; That in this blindness of the frame My Ghost may feel that thine is near. ’ 10. By looking at the language used, and more specifically to the enumeration made in the first line of this stanza, it is seen the desperation and grieving of the poet as he is begging for his friend to come to him. Jeff Nunokawa analysis these final lines of the section affirming that ‘it is difficult for a contemporary audience to read these lines, in which Tennyson prays for Hallam’s embrace, without thinking that the wish was too strong for words to name is the love that dare not speak its name. ’^11 It is easy for a contemporary reader to think that these are not lines that they would dedicate to someone who is only a friend, but a lover. It is necessary to think about this when it was written; homosexuality has existed since the beginning of the times, but during the Victorian Period the citizens used to ignore the fact of men (^9) Sarah Rose Cole, "The Recovery Of Friendship: Male Love And Developmental Narrative In Tennyson’s In Memoriam", Victorian Poetry, 50.1 (2012), https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2012.0005 (^10) Alfred Tennyson Tennyson and Christopher Ricks, p. 436. (^11) Jeff Nunokawa, "In Memoriam And The Extinction Of The Homosexual", ELH , 58.2 (1991), 427, https://doi.org/10.2307/2873375.
those new discoveries that were being made during the era. All of this plus the power of the language that the poet used in this elegy made it a piece greatly enjoyed by the Victorians. Even Queen Victoria claimed that ‘ next to the Bible In Memoriam is my comfort, ’^15 as she found some relief to her suffering by reading it after the death of Prince Albert; what means that this is also a private work, full of personal references. This poem respects the traditional purpose of the elegy: the society's desire for its own continuance depends on the return of its dead ones. 16 Hence, the purpose of the elegy is to keep these dead ones alive by writing the painful feelings down; but here, Tennyson explores not only the grief that accompanies the death of a beloved one, but also that feeling of loss of the values and moral standards that categorised the Victorian Period. In conclusion, what Tennyson did in In Memoriam was to establish a cry for two different but related deaths: one private and real death that affected the individual self, as it is the death of Arthur Hallam, and other public and symbolic one that was related to the society as a whole, as it is the death of tradition during this part of the Victorian Era. Both of them meet in In Memoriam , becoming this work in an incredibly popular book, as people worried about different this recurred to the poem in order to find relief and comfort by reading it. (^15) John D Rosenberg, p. 51. (^16) David Kennedy, "‘Representable Justice’: Returning The Dead And Policing The City In Some Victorian And Contemporary Elegies", Mortality , 14.1 (2009), 19-33 <https://doi.org/ 10.1080/13576270802591285> p. 20.
Bibliography
Cole, Sarah Rose, "The Recovery Of Friendship: Male Love And Developmental Narrative In Tennyson’s In Memoriam", Victorian Poetry, 50 (2012), 43-66 <https:// doi.org/10.1353/vp.2012.0005>. Ferguson, Margaret W, Tim Kendall, and Mary Jo Salter, The Norton Anthology Of Poetry , 6th edn. (New York: W. W Norton & Company, 2018), pp. 1046-1053. Kennedy, David, "‘Representable Justice’: Returning The Dead And Policing The City In Some Victorian And Contemporary Elegies", Mortality , 14 (2009), 19- https://doi.org/10.1080/13576270802591285. Nunokawa, Jeff, "In Memoriam And The Extinction Of The Homosexual", ELH, 58 (1991), 427-438 https://doi.org/10.2307/2873375. Pál, Eszter, "Science And Society. Scientific Societies In Victorian England", Review Of Sociology , 24, 85-111. Rosenberg, John, Elegy For An Age: The Presence Of The Past In Victorian Literature (London: Anthem Press, 2005). Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, and Christopher Ricks, Tennyson (London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis, 2014).
