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‘Victorian elegy wears both a public and a private face, the one
expressive of the loss of a sustaining culture, the other of personal
loss' (JOHN ROSENBERG). Consider this comment, illustrating
your answer with detailed reference to Tennyson's In Memoriam.
Essay 1: Draft.
Student: Maria Gamez Roldan.
EN51011B.
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. But the poet not only wrote about this, but also about private feelings like the grief that accompanies a loss or the personal doubts that an individual could have about faith. An accurate 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 the work made by Tennyson by relating it to a statement made by John Rosenberg: ‘ Victorian elegy wears both a public and a private face, the one expressive of the loss of a sustaining culture, the other of personal loss ’^1. This quote 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 ’ 2. The period in which Tennyson lived was full of new scientific and technological advances. As he was aware of this, he used his poetry to discuss the existing relationship between these new discoveries and what religion supposed. In canto XXI, the poet uses a specific scientific language to show some voices that he is imagining, voices who argued between them. One of them is saying that the poet should keep crying the death of the man he (^1) John Rosenberg, Elegy For An Age: The Presence Of The Past In Victorian Literature (London: Anthem Press, 2005). p. 9. (^2) John Rosenberg, p. 9.
loved but the other one blames the poet for writing about grief and pain when he had more important problems to be aware of, 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, When more and more the people throng The chairs and thrones of civil power? ’ 3. Hence, this canto shows the confusion that Tennyson is suffering: he knows about the significance of the changing society but he cannot forget the loss of his beloved friend. Moreover, in this section science is represented as a personification of a woman in order to explain how is “she” making the world easier to understand thanks to the secrets that she is letting people know: ‘ When Science reaches forth her arms To feel from world to world, and charms Her secret from the latest moon? ’ 4. In canto LV, Tennyson discusses whether God and Science (mentioned as ‘Nature’) are one against each other. In the poem, it is read ‘ So careful of the type she seems ’ 5 , meaning ‘type’ species for the Victorian scientists and showing again here the engagement of the poet with the scientific language of the period and his knowledge of the theory of natural selection, which would became famous later thanks to Darwin and On the Origin of the Species (1859). This line suggests that Nature cares about species but it is careless about individuals. On the contrary, God cares about species but he does about individuals, too. In this section the poet is realising how cruel nature could be, so his 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. (^3) Alfred Tennyson Tennyson and Christopher Ricks, Tennyson (London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis, 2014), p. 366. (^4) Alfred Tennyson Tennyson and Christopher Ricks, p. 366. (^5) Margaret W Ferguson, Tim Kendall and Mary Jo Salter, The Norton Anthology Of Poetry , 6th edn (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018), p. 1049. (^6) Margaret W Ferguson, Tim Kendall and Mary Jo Salter, p. 1050.
name ’ 11 , and he is right. 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 exist since the beginning of the times, but during the Victorian Period the citizens used to ignore the fact of men having intimate relationships with other males. All things considered, it is really difficult to know if the relationship between the two men was strictly a friendship or whether romantic love was involved. In canto I, the feelings of the poet are out of control. He is fighting a sort of existential crisis as he believed that the deaths would find something better after their lives, but now he does not know what to believe because his pain does not let him think properly. Again, he is using personifications of love and grief in order to intensify these: ‘ Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown’d ’ 12. Moreover, Tennyson alludes to an old saying in the two last lines of this section: ‘ "Behold the man that loved and lost, / But all he was is overworn” '^13 , what emphasises that sense of hope that the poet might had. Something similar happens in canto II, where the poet loses the sense of himself as he is discovering that not only god is making things difficult for humans, but also nature. Due to that, he turns into a tree: ‘ And gazing on thee, sullen tree, Sick for thy stubborn hardihood, I seem to fail from out my blood And grow incorporate into thee. ’ 14. Moreover, this section is also a good example of the pathetic fallacy characteristic of the elegy, where he is releasing his private or inner thoughts by relating them to the external world. As it can be seen, In Memoriam is a work in which themes as suffering, religion and the natural world meet. By writing it, Tennyson depicts the reactions, uncertainties and perhaps fears that the Victorian society may have experienced when seeing all 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 (^11) Jeff Nunokawa, "In Memoriam And The Extinction Of The Homosexual", ELH , 58.2 (1991), 427, . (^12) Margaret W Ferguson, Tim Kendall and Mary Jo Salter, p.1046. (^13) Margaret W Ferguson, Tim Kendall and Mary Jo Salter, p. 1046. (^14) Margaret W Ferguson, Tim Kendall and Mary Jo Salter, p. 1047.
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. In conclusion, it could be said that this poem respects the traditional purpose of the elegy which is to cry a loss; 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. Bibliography: Cole, Sarah Rose, "The Recovery Of Friendship: Male Love And Developmental Narrative In Tennyson’s In Memoriam", Victorian Poetry, 50 (2012), 43-66 . 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. Nunokawa, Jeff, "In Memoriam And The Extinction Of The Homosexual", ELH, 58 (1991), 427- . 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). (^15) John D Rosenberg, p. 51.
