SOURCE: Markley, A. A. “The Foot Upon the Skull: In Memoriam and the Tradition of Roman Love Elegy.” Tennyson Research Bulletin 6, no. 2 (November 1993): 112-21.

[In the following essay, Markley asserts that Tennyson's allusions to Roman love elegy are an attempt to heighten the expression of experience and emotion throughout In Memoriam.]

Tennyson opens his prologue to In Memoriam with an invocation to the ‘Strong Son of God, immortal Love’. The Victorian reader would immediately recognize the identification of Christ here; moreover there is an echo of George Herbert's ‘Love’, which begins with the invocation ‘Immortal Love’ (Hill 1971, 119). Nevertheless, this address to a deified ‘Love’ sets up an immediate association with the genre of Latin love elegy popular in the late Roman Republic and the early Roman Empire. Tennyson's first line echoes not only Herbert, but also Propertius I.1, in which the narrator speaks of his first encounter with oppressive ‘Amor’ upon meeting his lover Cynthia:

Cynthia prima suis miserum me cepit ocellis,
          contactum nullis ante cupidinibus.
tum mihi constantis deiecit lumina fastus
          et caput impositis pressit Amor pedibus

(I.1.1-4)

It was Cynthia who first captured miserable me
with her eyes,
Me, never before touched by desire.
Then Love forced me to cast down my eyes
of steady haughtiness,
and stepped on my head with his foot.

Tennyson's second stanza cements the association with Propertius:

Thine are these orbs of light and shade;
          Thou madest Life in man and brute;
          Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made.

While Tennyson's stanza obviously refers to the victory of Christ over Death, and even brings to mind references to Christ's heel bruising the head of Satan in Genesis and in Milton (Paradise Lost X.181, XII.430), it is likewise important to note that the poet has very skillfully infused Christian and Classical elements here in the image of the foot upon the skull. It is also significant that Tennyson's narrator introduces his grief in this poem and explains it as having been caused by a ‘fair creature’. In doing so he grounds his poem from the very beginning within the Roman elegiac tradition.

The study of classical literature was one of Tennyson's lifelong pursuits, and the influence of classical verse on the technical aspects of his poetry has long been acknowledged. George Clayton Tennyson taught Greek and Latin to his children, and made them memorize long passages of Latin, including the odes of Horace. Tennyson's library contained numerous volumes of Latin poetry, including several editions of the complete works of Horace and Ovid, and several collections of the works of Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius. Indeed, the poet asked that a volume of Horace's Opera and one containing collected works of Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius be brought to him just days before he died (Campbell 1971, 39, 59).

In In Memoriam Tennyson employs a wide range of traditional situations which the Roman elegists used repeatedly to invoke complex relationships and intense emotional states. His chief reason for doing so is certainly that the posture of the tormented lover and the depth of passion and longing that Propertius and the other elegists achieved in the persona of that lover provided a rich starting point for Tennyson in his attempt to express the profound loss that he experienced upon his friend's death. By alluding to Roman elegy throughout In Memoriam, the poet invites the reader into that context and within it experiments with ways to express his own emotional state and his psychological progression through grief.

As he does with his opening invocation in the Prologue, the narrator of In Memoriam frequently refers to and addresses a personified Love. While referring to Christ on one level, these addresses also continue to remind the reader of the frequent addresses to ‘Love’ in Roman elegy. In section 35, for example, Tennyson sets up a dialogue with the persona of Love concerning the erosions of time. Section 126 proclaims Love as ‘my lord and king’, placing him in a position of command—a treatment of Love very much in the elegiac tradition, in which Love is often addressed as a military commander. Here the narrator speaks of himself as in attendance at the court of Love, waiting to hear the news that couriers bring, and sleeping at court ‘Encompassed by his faithful guard’ (126.8) conscious upon hearing the pacing sentinel that all is well in the ‘deep night’. A passage in Ovid's Amores also describes Amor as a military figure:

Militat omnis amans, et habet sua castra Cupido;
          Attice, crede mihi, militat omnis amans.

(I.9.1-2)

All lovers are soldiers, and Cupid has his own camp;
Atticus, believe me, all lovers are soldiers.

Tennyson draws a portrait of Love that is different from that of the elegiac poets, yet he does so in the context of similar metaphors and situations.

As in his repeated addresses to Love, Tennyson also evokes the conventions of Roman elegy in his invocations to ‘Sorrow’, whom the speaker addresses much as the Roman elegist did his mistress. In section 3 the narrator first mentions Sorrow, characterizing her as a sibyl-like priestess in the ‘vaults of Death’. In section 16 he speaks of the varying emotions which reveal themselves through his poems and he attributes the cause of his mutable emotional state to Sorrow. This characterization of Sorrow and the narrator's subjugation to her resembles the Roman elegist's descriptions of his subjugation to his mistress. The degree of passion and emotion that the narrator feels is provided by the elegiac conventions, although the replacement of the mistress with Sorrow locates the reader in the specific context of In Memoriam.

Sorrow's role as the addressed ‘lover’ is taken furthest in 59, in which the speaker proposes marriage to her. Like the anguished elegiac lover, he invites Sorrow to ‘rule my blood’, and to ‘put thy harsher moods aside’—a reference that particularly recalls the personality of the typical domina in elegiac poetry. Although marriage proposals are not usual in the repartee between the classical elegist and his mistress—indeed often the lady is already married to someone else—the proposal here demonstrates the degree of the speaker's devotion and dedication to the object of his love, a stance common in the tradition of love elegy.

Tennyson again evokes the conventions of Roman love elegy in his consideration of the eternal nature of the love that exists between the speaker and his friend. Sections 129 and 130 are a pair of addresses to the friend, before the poet closes In Memoriam with the prayer to the ‘living will’ of section 131. Section 129 contains the speaker's testament of his all-encompassing love for his friend, and 130 a valediction expressing his assurance that his friend has become a part of the living world around him, ‘mix'd with God and Nature’ (130.11). Here the speaker also expresses his faith that he will never lose his friend through death. This certainty on the part of the narrator recalls the Roman lover's assurances of the infinite limits of his love for his mistress. Propertius, in poem I.19, speaks of his eternal love for Cynthia in the context of his own death:

illic quidquid ero, semper tua dicar imago:
                                                                      traicit et fati litora magnus amor.

(I.19.11-12)

There, whatever I may be, may I always be called your
shade: Great Love penetrates the shores of fate.

In In Memoriam an earlier expression of the narrator's eternal love for his friend occurs in the first stanza of 26, in the poet's statement that ‘No lapse of time can canker Love, / Whatever fickle tongues may say’, (26.3-4), a passage which echoes Catullus's similar sentiment concerning disapproving onlookers in poems 5 and 7. In poem 5 Catullus writes that he will exchange so many kisses with Lesbia that the numbers will be thrown all into confusion, so that no malcontent will be able to cast an ‘evil eye’ on the lovers when he sees their kisses to be so many. Similarly, in poem 7, Catullus writes of innumerable kisses that ‘an evil tongue’ will not be able to curse.

Yet another characteristic of Roman elegy which Tennyson builds upon is the hyperbolic listing of the mistress's idealized virtues. Propertius lists Cynthia's beauty, her gait, and her graceful mannerisms in II.1; in II.2 he compares her physical virtues to those of the goddesses. In II.3 Propertius denies that he loves Cynthia for her physical features, and glorifies her accomplishments as a dancer and as a composer and singer of lyric poems.

Ovid likewise sings the virtues of Corinna in Amores I.5, in which he catalogues the specific charms of his lover's body in a description of a sexual encounter with her. In II.15 he again speaks of her ideal physical features in an expression of envy for a ring that will be touched and worn by her.

Tennyson produces an encomium in section 109, in which his narrator catalogues his friend's virtues, albeit virtues that are less superficial and not associated with the physical qualities usually enumerated by the Roman elegists. The narrator lists such features as his friend's ‘critic clearness’, ‘seraphic intellect’, pure passion and love of freedom; he characterizes his friend as an ideal human being, embodying a manhood ‘fused with female grace’, and possessed of extraordinary wisdom. In the epilogue to In Memoriam this characterization culminates in the suggestion that Hallam manifested on earth a nobler type of human being that is to come, the ‘crowning race’ of the future, ‘Appearing ere the times were ripe’ (139).

Tennyson also draws on the emotional content and situation of Roman elegy in his exploration of his narrator's grief at being separated from his beloved friend. The Roman elegist was very often preoccupied by his despair at being separated from his mistress by such physical barriers as the night and the barred doors of his lover's home, or by the greater barriers of geographical distance occasioned by travel. This is the ‘paraclausithyron’ theme and Propertius I.16 provides a perfect example of this sub-genre of Roman elegy. Here the door itself repeats the typical speech of the excluded lover, a long, doleful address to the door which he calls ‘more inwardly unfeeling’ than his mistress herself (‘Ianua vel domina penitus crudelior ipsa’ I.16.17). The lover asks of the door:

cur numquam reserata meos admittis amores,
          nescia furtivas reddere mota preces?

(I.16.19-20)

Why do you never, unbolted, admit my desires,
knowing nothing of emotions, nor how to answer my
secret requests?

Similarly, in Tibullus I.1, the narrator describes himself as sitting as a ‘janitor’, or door-keeper, before his mistress's ‘harsh doors’. In I.2, Tibullus's speaker wishes the bolted door of his mistress would suffer the harshness of rain and lightning bolts, and begs it to yield to him and open quietly to allow him to slip inside, remembering the many times when the poet serenaded the door and bedecked its posts with garlands (I.2.7-14).

Ovid's speaker in Amores I.6 comparably addresses the porter of Corinna's home and begs him to open the door. In poem II.1 the lover trusts that his songs will eventually succeed in making Corinna's doors give way, and in III.11 he speaks of his weariness in putting up with Corinna's rejection and refers to his long hours of lying in vigil before her locked-up house, watching in anguish as other men slip out from meetings with her at night.

In their edition of In Memoriam, Susan Shatto and Marion Shaw have identified Tennyson's use of the paraclausithyron tradition in sections 7 and 119 of the poem (Shatto and Shaw, 1982, 26); in both sections the speaker addresses the doors of his friend's former home with the lines:

Doors where my heart was used to beat
          So quickly …

(7.3-4 and 119.1-2)

In both sections the narrator has come to the house while the rest of the world sleeps, and in both he reflects on times spent with his friend. A definite progression in his psychological state can be perceived as having taken place between the composition of 7 and 119. In section 7 he stands in the ‘unlovely’ street, waiting for his friend's hand; then, realizing that he can no longer clasp that hand, he creeps away as the ‘blank day’ breaks. In 119, however, though standing in the street he smells the meadow and hears birds singing, he sees the glimmer of a more promising dawn, and in a vivid memory he takes his friend's hand. The doors remain closed, but, unlike the elegiac lovers who experience ultimate rejection, Tennyson's speaker has at last found a means to get beyond the doors.

Tennyson again writes of the situation of the excluded lover in section 94, when he speaks of the purity of heart necessary for a communion with the dead:

But when the heart is full of din,
          And doubt beside the portal waits,
          They can but listen at the gates,
And hear the household jar within.

(94.13-16)

Here again the poet has appropriated Roman elegiac tradition in order to convey the emotional pain of exclusion and separation.

In addition to experimenting with the convention of the paraclausithyron, Tennyson also evokes the despair of separation from the beloved in ways that reflect other aspects of this theme in Roman poetry, particularly the common situation of the elegist's laments at being separated from his lover by geographical distance. In Propertius's ode I.8 the speaker expresses his horror at Cynthia's decision to travel to Illyria:

Tune igitur demens, nec te mea cura moratur?

(I.8.1)

I say, are you out of your mind? Does your love for
me not detain you?

In II.16 Ovid finds himself in Sulmo, far away from his lover, and he curses those who first made roads upon the earth. He continues his lamentation:

Ulmus amat vitem, vitis non deserit ulmum;
          separor a domina cur ego saepe mea?
at mihi te comitem iuraras usque futuram—
          per me perque oculos, sidera nostra, tuos!

(II.16.41-44)

The elm loves the vine, the vine does not desert the elm;
Why then am I so often separated from my lady? But you
swore that you would accompany me—You swore by me
and by those eyes, my stars, of yours!

A section of In Memoriam which Tennyson developed out of this theme of despair at travel and separation is the cycle of sections that concerns the arrival of the ship bearing Hallam's body (poems 9-17). In these sections the poet's obsession with the loss of his friend causes him to fear for the safe passage of his friend's body. The theme of separation is also at work in In Memoriam in section 67, in which the narrator speculates on the distance between himself and his friend's sepulchre as he lies down to sleep in the moonlight, which shines on both places at once. The speaker also concentrates on the distance between him and his friend in section 117, an address to the ‘days and hours’ that separate him from his friend's embrace. While the elegist frequently prays for the quick passage of the time that he must endure before seeing his mistress again, Tennyson's narrator recognizes the function of this time to ‘hold me from my proper place … For fuller gain of after bliss’ (117.4).

In section 117, the speaker's expression of the delight that will accrue ‘a hundredfold’, especially following the reference to his friend's embrace, recalls Catullus's estimation of the hundreds and thousands of kisses that he desires from Lesbia in poem 5. Likewise, the image of innumerable grains of sand in line 9 of 117 and the reference to the ‘kiss’ of toothed wheels in line 12 recalls Catullus 7, which compares the speaker's numbering of desired kisses to the number of grains of sand on the beach of Cyrene. The ‘courses of the suns’, invoked here as a unit of measuring the time of one's life, is another poetic convention used by Catullus in poem 5, and may recall Andrew Marvell's ‘To His Coy Mistress’, which also owes a debt to Catullus: ‘Thus though we cannot make our Sun stand still / Yet we will make him run,’ (45-46).

In section 98 Tennyson's narrator expresses his hatred for Vienna, the city in which his friend died, another emotional situation that conventionally grows out of the elegist's obsession with his separation from his beloved. Here the speaker vows that he will never see Vienna, and with the hyperbolic tendency of the elegist, he characterizes it as a place haunted by evil in which friends are often parted, fathers bend ‘above more graves’, and sadness darkens the ‘blaze of kings’. The last three stanzas of the section detail the aspects of Vienna that the speaker's friend admired and enjoyed, and this attention to the attractive features that the city held for his friend compounds the reader's perception of the speaker's bitterness. The Roman elegist's bitterness toward the places that take his mistress away from him lie in the same vein; examples are Propertius's views of ‘frigid Illyria’ in I.8 and of ‘corrupt Baiae’ in I.11 as well as Tibullus's ‘harsh grain field’ in poem II.3.

Throughout In Memoriam Tennyson experiments with the weaving together of traditions—strands of Christian symbolism, and a wide range of traditional conventions common to the genre of Latin love elegy. In fusing these traditions, the poet evokes a sense of the intense emotional states of the characteristic elegiac lover and shapes this familiar stance in the development of a more modern, Christian narrative persona. The depth of passion and longing that Latin elegy lends to the Victorian Christian framework of the poem provides the reader with a very graphic and powerful expression of human experience and emotion.

Works Cited

Barber, E. A., 1987, Sexti Properti: Carmina. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Campbell, Nancie, 1971, Tennyson in Lincoln: A Catalogue of the Collections in the Research Centre, volume I. Lincoln: The Tennyson Society.

Fordyce, John, 1961, Catullus. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hill, Robert W., 1971, Tennyson's Poetry. New York: Norton.

Kenney, E. J., 1986, Ovid Nasonis: Amores, Medicamina Faciei Femineae, Ars Amatoria, Remedia Amoris. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Postgate, J. P., 1987, Tibulli: Aliorumque Carminum Libri Tres. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ricks, Christopher, 1987, The Poems of Tennyson. Essex: Longman.

Shatto and Shaw, 1982, Susan Shatto and Marion Shaw, Tennyson: In Memoriam. Oxford: Oxford University Press.