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’Tis Better to Have Loved and Lost?

Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850) is a poem about love and death, the two things which change all things – which is a powerful reason for reading what happens to be a powerful piece of writing, one of the key works of the nineteenth century, and one which has been described antithetically as the epitome of Victorian scepticism and of Christian faith. And there you have it: a great work of art precisely because it contains no single clear moral, despite its many pronouncements, but teaches us instead that life is a complex business which can’t be diluted to the simplicity of a didactic dictum.

The poem partakes rather of that suspension of decision which is the exact opposite of what we expect and get from propaganda, an art form best left to the politicians. Great writers never attempt to reduce human existence to a formula; there are no rights and wrongs, no clear-cut messages in any work of art, and that is why In Memoriam is an artistic triumph.

Another reason for reading the poem is that it isn’t actually a poem, it’s 132 poems, composed over seventeen years, which the author eventually arranged into an invented chronological order, with Christmases and anniversaries and flashbacks, before presenting it for publication as a single composition which it both is and isn’t. So there are two ways to read it: either as it is presented, with its progress from grief and despair to recovery and hope of new life; or recognizing that this was a superficial pattern imposed by the poet on poems that had been composed over a long period according to the mood of the moment, often expressing violent conflicts and clashes of ideas and emotions, and that had then been reshuffled to form a more coherent entity.

What is In Memoriam specifically about? It was begun in 1833 when Arthur Henry Hallam, Tennyson’s close fri

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Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850) is a poem about love and death, the two things which change all things – which is a powerful reason for reading what happens to be a powerful piece of writing, one of the key works of the nineteenth century, and one which has been described antithetically as the epitome of Victorian scepticism and of Christian faith. And there you have it: a great work of art precisely because it contains no single clear moral, despite its many pronouncements, but teaches us instead that life is a complex business which can’t be diluted to the simplicity of a didactic dictum.

The poem partakes rather of that suspension of decision which is the exact opposite of what we expect and get from propaganda, an art form best left to the politicians. Great writers never attempt to reduce human existence to a formula; there are no rights and wrongs, no clear-cut messages in any work of art, and that is why In Memoriam is an artistic triumph. Another reason for reading the poem is that it isn’t actually a poem, it’s 132 poems, composed over seventeen years, which the author eventually arranged into an invented chronological order, with Christmases and anniversaries and flashbacks, before presenting it for publication as a single composition which it both is and isn’t. So there are two ways to read it: either as it is presented, with its progress from grief and despair to recovery and hope of new life; or recognizing that this was a superficial pattern imposed by the poet on poems that had been composed over a long period according to the mood of the moment, often expressing violent conflicts and clashes of ideas and emotions, and that had then been reshuffled to form a more coherent entity. What is In Memoriam specifically about? It was begun in 1833 when Arthur Henry Hallam, Tennyson’s close friend and fellow student at Trinity College, Cambridge, died suddenly while in Vienna of a cerebral haemorrhage. He was 22 and engaged to Tennyson’s sister, Emily. Tennyson was grief-stricken and began to question the conventional Christian beliefs which were already under attack from other quarters. So the poem is essentially an elegy: it opens a gate we all go through. We love, we fall in love, we lose our loved ones. Few of us would wish to die and be forgotten; fewer still would wish to forget those lost loved ones. The funeral service acts as a twoway outlet for this huge human emotion, followed in most cases either by a headstone or a scattering of ashes. After which comes, if we are lucky, the penned elegy, which can be as much about the bereaved as the departed, or even more so. In Tennyson’s case AHH was both a bosom companion and engaged to Emily, so his death was not only a personal tragedy but also a family one: the circumstances were ripe for a potentially profound and historic piece of writing, always assuming Tennyson could hold it together and balance his intellect and his emotions. He rose to the challenge.

Old Yew, which graspest at the stones, That name the under-lying dead, Thy fibres net the dreamless head, Thy roots are wrapt about the bones.

The seasons bring the flower again And bring the firstling to the flock; And in the dusk of thee the clock Beats out the little lives of men.

O not for thee the glow, the bloom, Who changest not in any gale, Nor branding summer suns avail To touch thy thousand years of gloom:

And gazing on thee, sullen tree, Sick for thy stubborn hardihood, I seem to fail from out my blood And grow incorporate into thee.

 

In Memoriam, No. 2

The evergreen yew is traditionally planted in graveyards as a symbol of eternal life, and as such is a familiar image in elegies. For Tennyson the yew represents the freedom he longs for: an escape and release from the seemingly endless and pointless cycle of birth and death, the change and decay of which there will be a lot more to follow in the sequence. Here the chosen images and epithets – dusk, gloom, sullen, stubborn – are hardly joyful ones but at least they offer an unchanging certainty, preferable to the fugitive hands of the clock that beats out our little lives. Better the tree’s thousand years of gloom than the flashy futile kaleidoscope of human life. So, there is envy as well as identification. Like many poets before and after him, like Keats envying the urn or nightingale, he yearns to be one with the world of the yew tree. And there is another important aspect of his envious longing. The tree enjoys a close contact with the lost loved one, a closeness which the bereaved poet has lost. It clutches at the headstone, head and bones; the actions of the roots and fibres suggest a human desire, the poet’s desire to grasp his dead friend. Essentially the tree experiences an embrace which he longs to share, to be wrapped around Hallam’s body. And one more thing: as he stares at the envied yew, his yearning to embrace the dead appears to be fulfilled as he leaves his body and grows ‘incorporate into thee’. There is a pun here on ‘corpse’, and also a double meaning in ‘thee’. He has incorporated himself not only into the tree but by implication and extension into the body of his friend; he has entered him, in spirit at least. This is as close to necrophilia as a Victorian poet can come. After that moment of grasped calm, Tennyson’s emotions start to unravel. Sorrow becomes a cruel friend and a bitter priestess, offer-ing false, mocking oracles which he struggles to reject. ‘The stars’, she whispers, ‘blindly run.’ When asleep he is at sea without a rudder, under a cloud of vague objectless anxieties, all somehow much better in the morning, as we all know: what seems insurmountable at 3 a.m. is not so bad at 8 a.m. But what happens when you can’t sleep and get up to wander the streets? It is in this black mood that he approaches his dead friend’s old home in poem No. 7:

Dark house, by which once more I stand Here in the long unlovely street, Doors where my heart was used to beat So quickly, waiting for a hand,

A hand that can be clasp’d no more ‒ Behold me, for I cannot sleep, And like a guilty thing I creep At earliest morning to the door.

He is not here; but far away The noise of life begins again, And ghastly through the drizzling rain On the bald street breaks the blank day.

This is the bleakest of the lyrics in which Tennyson describes himself haunting Hallam’s house in the early hours ‘like a guilty thing’, which is an allusion to the opening scene of Hamlet, except that here, by a striking reversal, it is not the dead man but the mourner who appears as the guilty ghost and fulfils that role, a restless revenant, troubling the once happy home. Readers may regard the situation as fanciful and even contrived, but I confess to doing exactly the same thing after my first wife died young and I found myself out in the small hours saying her name to the stray dogs of dawn, haunting the street where we first set up house after we were married; and the ‘long unlovely street’ perfectly reflects the desolation I felt. Tennyson is open about his desire for tactile union; the image of the hand is used forty times in the sequence to express the loss of Hallam’s presence and the poet’s physical loneliness and longing for contact. All to no avail: ‘He is not here.’ It’s an even more striking allusion, the four flat stark monosyllables echoing the exact words of the angel to Mary Magdalene and the other Mary who came to the tomb of Jesus to anoint the body. They were weeping bitterly, and yet the four words which appear to offer no hope indicate in fact the wildest hope of all: the hope of resurrection. And suddenly Hallam is associated with the risen Christ and Tennyson becomes a weeping woman, a bride of Christ, the first of several instances in the sequence where the poet, in exploring his relationship with the dead Hallam, assumes the role of the female, as bride, widower and even mother. This has led some critics to suggest that his love for Hallam was the love that dare not speak its name – though I think it more likely that when a man loses a close friend and spends the next seventeen years of his life attempting to re-establish that contact with him, the friend is liable to assume the form of a lost love, which has more to do with the poetic process than with any sexual or romantic reality. The reality now is that the new day brings no hope, no joy, only more of the same: ‘The noise of life begins again’, not the ‘sound’ or ‘sounds’ of life, because life without Hallam is a cacophonous monotony, without meaning or music. Eliot called Tennyson the saddest of all the English poets, Auden called him the stupidest, adding that there was little about melancholia that he didn’t know, and there was little else that he did know; and Shaw chipped in with his picture of a morbid and unhappy mystic, afraid of death, sex and God, and with the brains of a third-rate policeman. These are gibes as stupid as they are unjust; he was a master craftsman and a marathon man, revising and polishing his work to an extent that even Browning considered insane. But he was a professional. Unfortunately, he suffered from a number of dis-advantages: he wasn’t born poor, didn’t die poor, was not misunder-stood like Keats or drowned like Shelley, didn’t suffer an early death, didn’t reject the poet laureateship, was an idol of Queen Victoria, whom he met twice, and who told him what a comfort In Memoriam had been to her after the death of Albert – and oh yes, he also wrote ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. An easy target then for critics. In Memoriam is actually Tennyson’s poetic journal, the private diary of a man confessing himself in public, and its compulsive hold on me has little to do with its strict chronological structure, rather its concentrated and sustained, yet loose, diurnal drive, the human moods swinging wildly, as they do, giving the poem its truthfulness and honesty. Eliot felt that its faith was a poor paltry thing: if I do not believe I shall despair, therefore I must believe – and that it was the doubt that made it so real and so convincing. Tennyson’s own view was that ‘it’s too hopeful, this poem, more than I am myself’, while others felt that his personal faith was stronger than it appears in the poem; and others again, notably Charles Kingsley, championed the work as ‘the noblest Christian poem which England has produced for two centuries’, placing Tennyson on a pedestal with Milton. Never trust the teller, trust the tale. And never trust the critic either, especially if he is one like the Reverend Kingsley, with an axe to grind. Tennyson had an axe to grind too. He had known Miss Emily Sellwood since childhood and had proposed to her (twice) unsuccessfully – she considered his religious beliefs did not conform sufficiently to her own. The first engagement was suspended and altogether it took him a decade and a half to get her to the altar. It’s no coincidence that the marriage eventually took place just a few weeks after the publication of In Memoriam. One critic called the poem his letter of seduction to her, a proof of his Christianity. A stupid poet? Tennyson knew what he was doing, and doubtless also knew the old saying that when Judas Iscariot goes out, he meets Judas Iscariot. Different readers found and still find in the poem precisely what they want to find, which was probably exactly as Tennyson intended. Ultimately what matters is not the poet or his critics but the poem itself. It is fiercely fearless and rich in the paradoxical possibilities that lie at the heart of the human situation, stating in this case that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, while other parts of it whisper to hurt hearts that perhaps it’s not, perhaps it’s better to have lived less and suffered less pain. I kept a copy of the poem in my pocket when I took a donkey across the Cévennes after the death of my first wife in 1993; and when later I decided to write a book charting my journey from grief to recovery, it was Tennyson who was my model, my Virgil and Dante, my guide through hell. His poem is a love letter not principally to Emily Sellwood but to Arthur Hallam, and I have never read a more sustained, searching, devastating and bitter-sweet letter to the dead. It is a masterpiece.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 63 © Christopher Rush 2019


About the contributor

Christopher Rush has been writing for thirty-five years. His books include the memoirs To Travel Hopefully and Hellfire and Herring, and Will, a novel about Shakespeare. His latest novel, Penelope’s Web, was published in 2015.

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