In Memoriam

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1850

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form

In Memoriam is an elegy, albeit one on an ambitious scale to which elegies have seldom aspired. An elegy explores the impact of loss, the logic of grief, and the struggles, emotional as well as psychological, to the reality of death. Technically, In Memoriam itself is not a poem at all but a cycle of 133 loosely related cantos, each of a different length. What is absolute, what organizes the poem’s wide-ranging meditations is the form itself. It provides reassuring stability in a poem that is otherwise dangerously reckless in its emotions and its themes.

The form Tennyson uses is the quatrain, four-line stanzas, in tight iambic pentameter that, across the poem’s more than 2000 lines, creates a reassuring sort of stability and structure even when the poet himself veers dangerously closes to solipsistic emotions and careless, even reckless thoughts about life, love, and especially God. The tight form maintains the discipline of order, drawing on a poetic form that is itself grounded in centuries of British poetic tradition. Thus, despite the indulgence of hyper-emotionalism, despite raising radical and dangerous notions about the meaning and purpose of life in a bleak cosmos where nature is indifferent and God seems increasingly irrelevant, the form itself reassures that Tennyson may edge toward anarchic insights but will ultimately return to affirm the traditional response to a heart tossed so abruptly into the reality of loss. The form is a harbinger of the closing affirmation that God is in his heaven and thus, however it may appear to humanity’s limited perception, all is right. Anarchy and atheism after all are poor fits for tight quatrains of careful iambic pentameter.

Meter

Like the quatrain form, the poem abides by a tight metrical pattern both in its meter and its rhyme. Each quatrain begins with an assertion that the rest of the quatrain will explore, embellish, or develop. The stanza’s rhyming scheme—ABBA—gives each quatrain its own sense of beginning and ending, each quatrain resolves itself through the use of this meter. Iambic pentameter squares off each line in four packets of two stresses, the first uninflected, the second inflected.

Consider, for instance, the meter of, say, Lines 19 and 20 of Canto 114:

With overthrowings, and with cries

And undulations to and fro.

The same patterning, with some occasional subtle variations, defines the entire 133 cantos. The meter directs the elegy, drives its argument in a way that is both steadying and careful. The effect, in recitation, is calming, regular, not hypnotic but reassuringly stable—the rhythms and the rhymes giving the poem a steadying sense of pattern.

Pattern, after all, is what the poet seeks in his immediate experience so upended and dropped into chaos by the unexpected death of his friend. Reeling within a confusion of emotions, the poet (who admits in Cantos 5 and 6 the generous benediction of writing his grief out) structures through the architecture of sculpted lines of careful patterns what his life so unexpectedly has rendered ironic. Indeed, each quatrain with its ABBA rhyme scheme ends tidily and cleanly—no quatrain anticipates the next one nor leaves the thought incomplete. Tennyson the poet understands what Tennyson the person needs. What the meter provides is nothing less than what Tennyson the person so desperately seeks, the reassuring logic of closure. Despite the vastness of the poem’s scale, each individual quatrain abides by the sound logic of micro-architecture.

Voice

In Memoriam, the voice is uncomplicated by narrative distancing—the poet speaks directly to the audience from his own immediate experience. He is Tennyson; the beloved dead is Hallam; the bride in the Epilogue is his own sister, Emilia, married in 1842. There is no gimmicky persona trickery, no poetic ventriloquism as the poet attempts to step away from the intense emotional experience of the poem and masquerade behind some character. This is Tennyson, an accomplished poet, who speaks the sculpted lines, who voices the elevated diction, the allusions to Antiquity, the awareness of breakthrough revelations in the sciences. It is not like a traditional elegy, designed to be enunciated at great assemblies or cathedrals. This is more intimate, more familiar, more immediate.

Real life fuses with persona. Tennyson exposes himself and his flaws, his angry questioning, his moments of despair, his struggle to comprehend the predicament of a species at once cursed and blessed with the knowledge of mortality, and even in his more intemperate moments his daring questions directed at nothing less than Christ himself. The poet himself confesses his position as the voice of the elegy early on when he reveals in Canto 5 that his poetry, that actual process of writing through his grief, of putting his private grief to words, is his greatest comfort, greater than nature, greater than family, greater than memories, and greater, he pauses, than the traditional comforts of religion:

But, for the unquiet heart and brain

A use in measured language lies

The sad mechanic exercise

Like dull narcotics, numbing pain (Lines 5-8).

This poetry, what he ironically dismissed as this sad, mechanic exercise, is his deepest solace. He thus sees no reason to obfuscate, to lie, to temper his emotions. His pain is authentic, his doubts understandable, and his joy immediate. And because, unlike elegists Tennyson read who deliberately distanced themselves from the emotion of loss and mourning in an effort to play Public Poet, Tennyson dared to share his struggles through grief. He sounded a universal sincerity, the voice speaking for humanity itself.