In Memoriam

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1850

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Christmas

The poem uses Christmas and the festive Christmas season to symbolize the poet’s struggle to tap into authentic Christian hope in the face of his deep loss. The flow of time, more than a decade, measured against the grieving of the poet is marked by three different celebrations of Christmas in Canto 28, Canto 78, and Canto 104. Initially Christmas, shortly after Hallam’s death, only reminds the poet how distant and apart he is from the traditional celebrations of the season, the church services (praising a God the poet now sees as either cruel or indifferent), the joyous songs (which ring hollow in the poet’s ear), and the festive gatherings around food and drink. The season seems ironic to the poet. He is grieving, and a joyous world seems distant and irrelevant, which he admits starkly in Canto 29: “I almost wish’d no more to wake” (Line 14).

The second Christmas season marks the poet’s emotional nadir. He is now too content with his despair, too set in his resignation to a God distant and unfeeling, a season that is an escape, a cruel dodge that must inevitability wane. The joyous carols in Canto 78 are little more than “mortal lullabies of pain” (Line 5). The poet himself has grown accustomed to his loss and lives only within the context of sorrow. He does not cry anymore because tears say nothing, mean nothing given his conditional alienation. “Can grief be changed to less?” (Line 16), he asks rhetorically in Canto 79 because he knows the answer.

It is in the closing Christmas season that the poet reveals just how much his heart now feels the energy of the season, the love and the comradeship, the hope and the compassion. In Canto 104, he sees now the symbolic power of such a holiday interred within the “crystal cold of December” (Line 5). Christmas now symbolizes hope in a brutal and cold winter-world, a saving energy that can, if embraced, compel the entire year. The poet is determined now to tap into that hope even though his sorrow is still as fresh as it was. His sorrow will not diminish Christmas, “neither song, nor game, nor feast / Nor harp be touch’d, nor flute be blown” (Lines 128-29), he says in Canto 128. In turn, the poet feels the rich and complex love of the season—the feasts, the hymns, the gatherings—as Christmas ultimately symbolizes not only Christ’s birth but the restoration of his faith in God and his trust in what he sees now is a most (im)perfect humanity.

The Grave

It is not surprising that a poem anatomizing the experience of loss and the feel of grief should use the grave as a symbol of mortality. Elegies, most notably Thomas Gray’s landmark “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” published nearly a century before Tennyson’s work and a model upon which he drew, uses an autumnal leaf-strewn churchyard as a backdrop for the poet’s ruminations, a sobering reminder of the reality of mortality and the inevitability of its intrusion. In the opening cantos, particularly Cantos 2-8, Tennyson reflects on the grave of his friend. Indeed, with a kind of grim Poe-esque Gothicism, he imagines the body, so youthful and so vibrant, wrapped in the traditional burial cloths before being boxed in a simple wooden casket for transport from Italy. In Canto 10, the poet imagines the crated body of his friend at sea, the cabin window “bright,” the sailor “at the wheel” (Lines 3, 4). The poet then considers the churchyard itself and the open grave into which his friend was lowered. In a cringe-worthy moment of honesty in Canto 2, the poet even imagines the gnarled roots of the cemetery’s ancient yew trees thrusting their roots through the skull of his friend, “thy roots wrapt about the bones” (Line 4).

What such apparently morbid fixation on the physical, literal grave symbolizes, however, is not some creepy delight in the macabre. Rather, Tennyson establishes what elegies before so elegantly dodged—he mourns a real person, a real body, whose presence he misses on levels so deep that he needs to understand the reality of that death first. The poet cannot afford for his friend to be some abstract symbol, some embodied virtue. Hallam, actually named in Canto 9, is no poetic convention. Although Hallam exists uneasily suspended in two tenses simultaneously, he nevertheless existed, and for proof the poet offers nothing less than Hallam’s grave. Death at a young age—Hallam was barely 23—is difficult to engage, youth itself seems impervious to death. It is only in Cantos 26-28 that the poet recognizes the importance of accepting the reality of his friend’s death, a real body in a real casket in a real grave, only because that gives fire and richness to the love he cannot at this point in the poem regard as anything but sorrow: “’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all” (Line 15-16), he admits in Canto 27. Without putting himself imaginatively over the grave, without feeling the desolate wind of the churchyard and seeing the yawning black of the open grave, the poet cannot begin his emotional recovery.

A Wedding

The wedding scene that closes the poem symbolizes the recovery of possibility and the reclamation of hope in the glories (and ironies) of life. In Memoriam, for all its sober and often dark reflection on the meaning of death, is as well a grand celebration of life and love. Tennyson is most often defined as a conservative, a poet whose perspectives and themes might have edged toward radical new insights into theology and science, politics and the military, but whose forms reflected his university education and his grounding in the traditional expressions of poetry. The Epilogue, the longest canto at more than 140 lines, is nothing less than a traditional epithalamium, a genre of poetry, dating back to Antiquity, which celebrates a wedding ceremony. With audacity, Tennyson violates the conventions of the elegy by soaring into this joyous account of his sister’s wedding. If weddings occur in a traditional elegy, they are deeply ironic, a sign of what has been lost, a bittersweet memory or a dashed hope. This genre-busting strategy, however, closes the poem with the poet, in the beginning mired in an emotional crisis measured as much by the sorrows lacerating his heart as by the doubts cutting into his faith, here confesses his happiness uncomplicated by irony: “Nor have I felt so much bliss / Since first [the groom] told me that he loved / A daughter of this house [Tennyson’s sister]” (Lines 6-7). Regret, he effuses, is “dead” because ultimately love is “more” (Line 17).

He details his sister’s ceremony with the loving generosity of a wedding videographer. He remembers his little sister delighting in play as a child, her curls dancing in the spring sun. He muses on the “happy hours” (Line 65) ahead of them, a far cry from his desperate sorrow and black visions earlier in the elegy. In a moment of striking fusion, the wedding party marches past the cemetery where Hallam lies buried. The poem closes with an account of the reception feasting and the wild dancing—the poet apart from the celebrations but aware in his heart of how a wedding affirms the continuation of life and the energy of love and that all of this—life, love, death—all is under the gentle control and reassuring direction of “One God, one law, one element” (Line 140). It would be too much, perhaps, for the poet himself to lay claim to a love of his own. The use of the poet as an observer of the wedding allows the wedding as symbol of a keener edge. The poet acknowledges the power of mortal love (which earlier he had despaired for its fragility) and concedes life to the control of a God he cannot begin to understand but cannot bring himself to hate. Perhaps, he muses, perhaps someday love might return to his life. That is the powerful lesson of the closing epithalamium.