Life and death are represented in Tennyson's In Memoriam as in constant tension.

Despite the death of Hallam and the enormous impact it has on Tennyson, there is an underlying hope in renewed life, as symbolized in the yew trees in section 39, those keepers of the dead that respond to the speaker "With fruitful cloud and living smoke."

The smoke evokes images of the endless cycle of life and death, of death and rebirth. The ashes are the ashes of the dead, but the smoke that rises from them is, as we've just seen, "living smoke" that points towards the life that must go on despite the tragic death of Tennyson's closest friend in the prime of life.

Continuing with the imagery of the yew trees, Tennyson further explores the paradoxical relation between life and death by presenting the yews as trees that seem to bow down to the dead but that also take part in the rituals of spring, a time of year normally associated with new life. Here we see nature, in all its richness and variety, portrayed as something epitomizing the ambiguity of the endless cycle of life and death to which all of us are subject.