SOURCE: Pollard, Arthur. “In Memoriam as a Personal Poem.” Tennyson Research Bulletin 3, no. 5 (November 1981): 175-84.

[In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture to the Tennyson Society in 1981, Pollard describes In Memoriam as a personal poem with universal application as the author relates his own experience of loss and bereavement.]

First of all, I should like to express my thanks and also my sense of humility at the honour you have conferred upon me in asking me to deliver the Tennyson lecture this year. The year just past saw great activity and success in securing the vast bulk of the Tennyson material and particularly the rightly-named Lincoln manuscript of In Memoriam for permanent deposit at the Research Centre (and I should like to pay my own personal tribute to all those, and not least the Lincolnshire County Council—most enlightened action for a local authority—who did so much and in the end succeeded so well). In the light of the events of 1980 it seemed to me appropriate, indeed almost obligatory, that your lecturer this year should devote his attention to In Memoriam.

I have, however, special reasons for my choice, and particularly for treating it in the way I propose. Some ten years ago I gave a talk about In Memoriam at Horncastle. Sir Charles Tennyson was in the audience. That was the first occasion on which I had met him, altogether too late in his life, alas, for me. In the discussion which followed he paid me the kind of gracious tribute which was so in keeping with his own character and generosity, whilst at the same time he picked up for comment several points with that incisiveness that we all knew so well. In the course of his complimentary remarks he was kind enough to say that he felt that I had appreciated the poem with such tenderness because I must be a poet myself. In that he was wrong; but if he was right to detect tenderness in my understanding of the poem, I think it may have derived from the private circumstances in which I composed my lecture.

Like Hallam, my own wife had died only a few months before; like him, suddenly struck down and by the same cause, cerebral haemorrhage. What therefore Sir Charles attributed to the poet in me came, if it came at all, more likely from my own bereft condition and the extent to which In Memoriam therefore spoke with especial directness and peculiar poignancy to me at that time.

It was my recollection of this event together specifically with some remarks by P. F. Baum in his Tennyson Sixty Years After that led me to the choice of my subject for this paper. Lest, however, any of you may fear that I shall embarrass you by too blatantly baring my soul or my emotions, let me hasten to add that I am aware of this danger and that after-events have done much to place my personal bereavement in perspective, an experience again that finds parallel and enlightenment by comparison with Tennyson's own.

There will nonetheless be an element of subjectivity in what I have to say. That may be no bad thing, for surely one element in our own century's failure properly to appreciate certain nineteenth-century poems and poets has been our fear of expressing our feelings. Professor Philip Collins in his fine paper on The Victorians and Tears has shown that, excessive as some of their displays of pathos may appear to us, there was in them a directness in the display of emotion that it is not altogether to our credit that we seem so embarrassed to regard. This restraint, to put it no worse, once made us suspicious, and even slighting, of Dickens, and it still confines our response to death. I think it was Geoffrey Gorer who said that we in our day are as reticent and even ashamed about death as the Victorians were about sex.

I have indicated what directed me to my topic, but equally I might have been guided to it by some words of Tennyson himself, a sentence which out of context seems paradoxical, if not contradictory: “It is a very impersonal poem as well as personal.” That is part of what Knowles reported the poet as saying in the passage that contains the more famous, but for our purposes only equally relevant, comment that In Memoriam “is rather the cry of the whole human race than mine. In the poem altogether private grief swells out into thought of, and hope for, the whole world. It begins with a funeral and ends with a marriage—begins with death and ends with promise of a new life—a sort of Divine Comedy, cheerful at the close” (Nineteenth Century, XXXIII, 1893, p. 182).

Later in that same remark Tennyson added: “It's too hopeful, this poem, more than I am myself.” From that T. S. Eliot may have derived a clue for his judgement that the doubt is more convincing than the faith. Eliot's sentence, however, seems to me to be more concerned with the way in which Tennyson was affected by and reacted to some public issues of his day, particularly the assault on traditional religious belief by new scientific theories. Eliot however may be the child of his and our time. Evolutionary optimism, like other aspects of Victorian doctrines of progress, seems hard to accept in our disillusioned century. That matter is a public issue and will not concern me. I want to concentrate on Tennyson's reaction to his private grief and the way in which we may read In Memoriam as a personal poem.

How, if it is in his own words, “rather the cry of the whole human race than mine,” is it possible for that to be done? I should like to suggest that the private grief does swell out, but not just into thought of, and hope for, the whole human race in terms of doctrinal and intellectual acceptance and modification of theories which puzzled and afflicted the public of his time. If it is true in Dryden's words that the poet ideally should possess a more comprehensive soul or in Keats' that a poem should be a wording of the reader's own highest thoughts, then In Memoriam should embody and express an experience into which Tennyson can lead us and to which those who have found themselves in a comparable situation may respond with particular recognition.

In Memoriam is the cry of the whole human race because it confronts us with the universal phenomenon of and response to bereavement. What gives it its power and importance is that it is the report of a poet, of one more acutely endowed to respond than the rest of us ordinary men. It is time therefore to make some distinctions. The character I am just now attributing to the poem is its universality. At the other extreme is its privateness, the way in which what happened to Tennyson when Hallam died happened to him alone. I want to differentiate the private and the personal. In so far as the poem records the private only (if it ever does that only), we intrude and may well feel embarrassed. In so far as it records the private as a recognisable relationship and which thus takes on something of the universal experience of mankind, it is describing what I prefer to define as personal. After all, what happens to us all and all the time is what in the sociologists' horrible jargon is called interpersonal relationships. It is with that kind of experience, with which in however pallid a fashion we may be able to compare our own, that I am principally concerned in examining In Memoriam as a personal poem.

It is at this point that I must return to Baum if only to show how my differences with him helped to set off and to crystallise my own thoughts about the personal character of the poem. He states, rightly in my view, that “the subject of In Memoriam is twofold,” namely, Tennyson's grief and his doubt and adds: “In Memoriam is therefore both an elegy and a philosophical poem; and each aspect, sorrow and consolation, has a double meaning, the personal and the impersonal” (Tennyson Sixty Years After, 1948, p. 119). Baum goes on to claim that the form of the verse may suit elegy but not a philosophic poem and that the autobiographic and the speculative sit ill side by side. I have already said that I am deliberately eschewing any consideration of In Memoriam as a public or philosophical poem, but you may well be wondering why I did not choose Baum's word for my title and set out to consider the poem as elegy. Here too I was deliberate in my choice, for though elegy ranges wide, it often, indeed usually, has within it a degree of the formal and sometimes indeed a lack of the personal that made me feel it not quite the appropriate description of the way in which I look at In Memoriam. Nor was ‘lament’ sufficient, for that too is limiting, even though it emphasises the personal response: it connotes too exclusively the emotional and the depressive reaction.

It might seem from what I have already said of Baum that his main quarrel is with In Memoriam in its philosophical and speculative character, but though this, I think, would be true, he is not uncritical of its personal emphases. He can and does recognise the power of Tennyson's experience, but it is always with qualified comment (and I italicise the reservations):

We … witness his sufferings in many intimate details; he confides to us the shadows and gleams of light as they came to him, the moments which to him seemed important then though to us they may appear inconsequent because they are not ours and because he has not fused them into a true whole. We are thus permitted to observe Tennyson's mind through many of the stages of his experience, even when his thoughts are unworthy and the tone confessional … we are permitted to see him now yearning for comfort, now distracted by trivial incidents, now seeking ecstatic communion with the dead, now agreeably at home with the living.

(p.127)

The comment concludes somewhat condescendingly: “Read in this sense In Memoriam is a remarkably frank and disarming revelation.” Christopher Ricks showed better grasp and greater economy when he said that it was at once “anonymous but confessional, private but naked” (Tennyson, 1978, p. 221).

I believe that Baum is very characteristic of a certain type of twentieth-century reader. He shows it in the way in which he distances himself from Tennyson. Thus: “Although there is never any doubt, biographically, of Tennyson's sincerity, there is a question whether he has made his personal suffering interesting, sufficiently real to the reader and therefore worthy of such protracted mourning. It is a question if parts of the poem are not too personal and intimate” (p. 120). Indeed, it seems to me that he confesses his own disqualification when he writes:

If … our minds are not naturally sympathetic to a story of this sort, if we do not readily share the kind of personal suffering which was Tennyson's, if the kind of religious doubt which he felt is foreign to us, if our hearts do not passionately yearn for direct communion with those who are separated from us by death, and if our minds can be satisfied without a belief in the everlasting survival of the individual self, then, in spite of the biographic interest in In Memoriam the poem will not awaken a quick response in us … and we will look for that literary art, that dramatic power by which all great poetry enlists our affections and stirs our emotions and creates a sense of common human experience even when the immediate grounds for it are not always there. … And this quality we shall not always find, for In Memoriam as a whole does not possess it.

(pp. 128-9)

I think that what I. A. Richards might have called doctrinal irrelevances got in the way for Baum. There is certainly no trace of any willing suspension of disbelief being exercised in Tennyson's favour here.

That obstinate refusal of imaginative empathy meets its countervailing reply in the perhaps over-lyrical, over-rhetorical but certainly more sympathetic sentences of A. C. Benson, writing with the poet's own century still in sight:

Tennyson's In Memoriam is probably the noblest monument ever raised by the human spirit to the memory of a lost and unforgotten friend. … It is the story of an overwhelming loss, when a soul is confronted by the fact that a kindred spirit, to whose touch all the chords of the survivor's being had vibrated, is suddenly swept, without a shadow of warning, a hint of doom, into the unseen; and the bereaved stretches feeble hands into the darkness, and finds no answer there; such a loss freezes the heart at its very source; very gradually the cloud lifts; the healing influence of time asserts itself; and the grieving spirit rises out of the shadow into a firm belief in immortality and into an absolute trust in the great purpose of God.

(Tennyson, 1904; 1912 reprint, p. 169)

Even parts of that comment, however, emphasise rather what In Memoriam has to say about Hallam and about the poet's faith rather than his grief. Tennyson himself said: “Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown'd,” and yet he knew that sense of self-betrayal which expressing grief conveyed. It was too sacred a thing and therefore

I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel.

(5. 1-2)

J. B. Steane appropriately recalls Rickie's remarks to Agnes about her fiancé's death in Forster's The Longest Journey:

It's the worst thing that can ever happen to you in all your life and you've got to mind it—you've got to mind it. They'll come saying, ‘Bear up—trust to time’—No, no; they're wrong. Mind it.

(q. Tennyson, 1966, p. 77)

In Memoriam is about just that, about giving full and honest recognition to grief, about minding it.

How then did Tennyson mind it? For the most part, by what Baum describes as “frank and disarming revelation.” Tennyson begins with exactly the situation that Rickie said Agnes would find herself in, coping with and having to reject all those well-meaning but quite ineffectual comforters:

One writes, that ‘Other friends remain,’
          That ‘Loss is common to the race’—
          And common is the commonplace,
And vacant chaff well meant for grain.

(6. 1-4)

The opening sections of the poem are dominated by the old yew (2) and the dark house (7), the one the unageing, unfeeling, detached symbolic guardian of the churchyard, the other the once inviting but now cheerless and unopening entrance to the Hallam home. Tennyson contemplates the severe finality of “A hand that can be clasp'd no more” (and they recall, of course, those other plangent lines:

O for the touch of a vanish'd hand
And the sound of a voice that is still).

The sentence “He is not here” has mocking overtones in the context of its earlier usage in the accounts of our Lord's Resurrection. Sections 11-15 chart the fluctuations between “calm despair and wild unrest” (16), states of feeling that are reflected in the moods of nature which are described, but again with ironic parallels as between the “calm and deep peace on this high wold” and “in my heart, if calm at all, / If any calm, a calm despair” (ll. 5, 14-15). It would be tedious, and it is unnecessary, to attempt to trace in detail the progress of Tennyson's emotions. Numbed grief, ineffectual fury against death, resignation to everlasting farewell, these are but some of the moods before the poem begins to move out of mourning and into something more like confidence and faith.

I am interested not so much in generalised transient states of feeling but rather in more exact and specific representations of the experience of bereavement. These are all of them facets of time—past, present and future; actual, possible and merely fanciful.

It is with an aspect of this last, the fanciful, that I want to begin. I refer to Tennyson's awareness of the place that dreams usurp in the type of situation that he is exploring. It may be the dream of deception like that of

                    the widower, when he sees
          A late-lost form that sleep reveals
          And moves his doubtful arms, and feels
Her place is empty

(13. 1-4)

or perhaps it is the nightmare terror in which

          I find a trouble in thine eye,
          Which makes me sad I know not why,
Nor can my dream resolve the doubt;
But ere the lark hath left the lea
          I wake, and I discern the truth;
          It is the trouble of my youth
That foolish sleep transfers to thee

(68. 10-16)

or, more happily, in the later calmer phase it can be the vision which represents Hallam much in the terms of “The Passing of Arthur” (103).

If such are some manifestations of the unconscious response, the conscious is, as one might expect, associated particularly with the memory of places and occasions. There is the passing reference to the London house already mentioned; there is the visit to Cambridge with its “reverend walls … high-built organs … the measured pulse of racing oars … long walk of limes” and then “the rooms in which he dwelt. / Another name was on the door.” (87); there is even the irrational but quite understandable hatred of the place where Hallam died:

          I have not seen, I will not see
Vienna; rather dream that there,
A treble darkness, Evil haunts.

(98.11-13)

It is, however, the place with which the most tender of Hallam's associations with the Tennyson family were linked that evokes the poet's most tender reminiscences, not least because Tennyson's own connections with it had come to a sorrowful end. I refer, of course, to Somersby, where

Witch-elms that counterchange the floor
          Of this flat lawn with dusk and bright;
          And thou, with all thy breadth and height
Of foliage, towering sycamore;
How often, hither wandering down,
          My Arthur found your shadows fair.

(89. 1-6)

It is such details of remembered comradeship that remain in the memory and give added poignancy to recollection of the places with which they are associated, a poignancy itself reinforcing the sadness of removal from familiar places:

No gray old grange, or lonely fold,
          Or low morass and whispering reed,
          Or simple stile from mead to mead,
Or sheepwalk up the windy wold …
But each has pleased a kindred eye,
          And each reflects a kindlier day;
          And, leaving these, to pass away,
I think once more he seems to die.

(100.5-8, 17-20)

That first Christmas after Hallam's death Tennyson “slept and woke with pain, [and] almost wish'd no more to wake,” but at least he was able to hear those familiar “four voices of four hamlets round” (28), and together then the family wove “the holly round the Christmas hearth” (30). After the departure from Somersby there was only “A single peal of bells below, / [and] these are not the bells I know” (104); and “To-night ungather'd let us leave / This laurel, let this holly stand” (105).

The first group of Christmas poems was, we know, amongst the earliest written after the death of Hallam. They remind us how powerfully and how vividly his presence impressed itself upon the Tennysons from the time of his first visit to Somersby at Christmas 1829. How marvellous it must have been to have had Hallam there and, sad though it is to have to say it, to have him there and the father, Dr Tennyson, gloomy, alcoholic and half-mad, away! Hallam's capacity to give to experience a heightened significance is reflected in the passage I quoted above from section 100. There in Tennyson's detailed and precise catalogue of the several features of the landscape is all the familiarity and love of the place he knew. To it he adds, after Hallam's death, a new emotion by which, though the happiness of the past is not obliterated, it is now suffused by a pervasive and ineluctable sadness from those very associations which gave birth to the original happiness—“each reflects a kindlier day [by which] once more he seems to die.”

Alongside the past beyond recall except in plangent memory Tennyson is also left to envisage an unrealised future, the might-have-been had Hallam still been there. This is delineated in several perspectives of time, each determined by the distance from the date of Hallam's death. There is, for instance, section 14 in which Tennyson portrays that experience of early bereavement in which somehow, neither quite deliberately nor quite spontaneously, the relict is at times quite unable to believe in the reality of the loved one's death:

If one should bring me this report,
          That thou hadst touched the land to-day
          And I went down unto the quay
And found thee lying in the port …
And I perceived no touch of change,
          No hint of death in all his frame,
          But found him all in all the same
I should not feel it to be strange.

(ll. 1-4, 17-20)

Tennyson accurately sets that experience in the context of the desire not just for continued company but also within the bereaved's need for the consolation and support in his loss that he knew the loved one had possessed the strength to provide:

And I should tell him all my pain,
          And how my life had drooped of late,
          And he should sorrow o'er my state
And marvel what possessed my brain.

(ll. 13-16)

At greater distance from the event Tennyson seeks strength by comparing his own feelings at the loss of Hallam with what he thinks those of Hallam would have been, had the situation been reversed. This is obviously a more self-conscious version of the might-have-been, and Tennyson's language acknowledges it as such. With his sensitive, profound and comprehensive appreciation of Hallam's character (and I shall not have time to examine those sections, 109-114, which deal with this) he recognises that Hallam's would have been

          A grief as deep as life or thought,
But stayed in peace with God and man

(80. 7-8)

but he then deliberately considers his own position and posits the contrast with the way in which Hallam would have reacted:

I make a picture in the brain;
          I hear the sentence that he speaks;
          He bears the burthen of the weeks
But turns his burthen into gain …

(80. 9-12)

The final stage of the might-have-been is that vision, at once happy in what it imagines and sad that it will never be, of Hallam and Emily married and with children, and “boys of thine / Had babbled ‘Uncle’ on my knee” (84. 12-13), of whom he could passingly persuade himself:

I seem to meet their least desire
          To clap their cheeks, to call them mine.

(ll. 17-18)

That is the happiness, even though it is but seeming. The next two lines with their negatives constitute the sadness:

          I see their unborn faces shine
Beside the never-lighted fire.

(ll. 19-20)

But this is not to say that the association of Tennyson and Hallam must now be all fancy and unreality. The poet finds and enjoys a very real continuing “commerce with the dead” (85. 93), one, however, which requires preparation of heart and mind so that the “spirit is at peace with all” (94. 8). Then, with the world shut out, “The spirits from their golden day … [can] haunt the silence of the breast” (94. 6, 9). Earlier it had been merely the belief that “in the songs [he] love[d] to sing / A doubtful gleam of solace live[d]” (38. 7-8), by which

If any care for what is here
          Survive in spirits rendered free,
          Then are these songs I sing of thee
Not all ungrateful to thine ear.

(38. 9-12)

From this belief that what he sang might please Hallam, Tennyson moves through the thought of his possible unworthiness, of his shame if Hallam were to see—

Do we indeed desire the dead
          Should still be near us at our side?
          Is there no baseness we would hide?
No inner vileness that we dread?

(51. 1-4)

—by way of his faith in possible communion with Hallam that I have noted above through to the experience of actual communion described in the dialogue of section 85. Even that, however, is but prelude to the climax, the visionary communication, as

                    word by word, and line by line,
          The dead man touched me from the past,
          And all at once it seemed at last
The living soul was flash'd on mine.

(95. 33-6)

It happened, as all who have read about and appreciated the friendship of Hallam and Tennyson recognise, when and where it had to happen—

By night we linger'd on the lawn,
          For underfoot the herb was dry
          And genial warmth; and o'er the sky
The silvery haze of summer drawn

(95. 1-4)

—in a setting redolent of associations with Hallam, in a late evening of high midsummer—at Somersby.

Looking backward, say, to section 41 it is possible to see how far Tennyson had travelled in his experience and understanding of his separation from Hallam. There he had feared that it was permanent:

Yet oft when sundown skirts the moor
          An inner trouble I behold,
          A spectral doubt which makes me cold
That I shall be thy mate no more.

(41. 17-20)

Now he knows the reality of present communion and it enables him to look forward with renewed

                    trust that those we call the dead
          Are breathers of an ampler day
For ever nobler ends.

(118. 5-7)

Ironically, it is this ampler vision that is less convincing, because, as I believe, it goes beyond Tennyson's relations with Hallam himself which are the originating and consistently sustaining source of the poem's inspiration.

Tennyson's argument is never as convincing as his experience. Even in his deepest uncomprehending sorrow his subjective personal certainty is never wholly extinguished. Love, he never doubts, cannot die—“If Death were seen / At first as Death, Love had not been” (35. 18-19). But that is an unfulfilled and unfulfillable condition; death is never total because it cannot destroy love. That being so, there is nothing either illogical or stridently superficial in his claim:

If e'er when faith had fallen asleep,
          I heard a voice, ‘believe no more’ …
A warmth within my breast would melt
          The freezing reason's colder part,
          And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up and answer'd, ‘I have felt.’

(124. 9-10, 13-16)

That assertion leads on quite naturally to the hymn-like celebration of section 126—“Love is and was my lord and king.”

It is possible therefore—and again an accurate reflection of one mourning another, himself both much loved and selflessly loving—that Tennyson can imagine Hallam's spirit urging him to

          ‘Arise and get thee forth and seek
A friendship for the years to come.’

(85. 79-80)

In the same spirit Tennyson himself can paradoxically yet without contradiction acknowledge his continuing and undismissible desire for Hallam—

          Whatever change the years have wrought,
          I find not yet one lonely thought
That cries against my wish for thee

(90. 21-4)

—and at the same time accept Hallam's spirit's advice:

My heart, tho' widow'd, may not rest
          Quite in the love of what is gone,
          But seeks to beat in time with one
That warms another living breast.

(85. 113-16)

It is impossible to pretend to love those who are gone without being able and wanting to love someone who lives.

I return to Tennyson's remark to Knowles that the poem “begins with a funeral and ends with a marriage—begins with death and ends with promise of new life—a sort of Divine Comedy, cheerful at the close” and, of course, he explicitly states in the Epilogue that he has not

                    felt so much of bliss
          Since first he told me that he loved
          A daughter of our house; nor proved
Since that dark day a day like this.

(5-8)

He goes on:

Regret is dead, but love is more
          Than in the summers that are flown
          For I myself with these have grown
To something greater than before.

(17-20)

That for me is the real significance of the Epilogue; not its celebration of Cecilia's marriage, not its anticipation of the “one far-off divine event,” but the testimony it gives of the way Tennyson emerged from the long-drawn-out experience of Hallam's death and his own sorrow; no question of being cheerful at the close, no question of “private grief swell[ing] out into thought of and hope for the whole world,” but of the poet himself as individual being spiritually stronger, fuller and more developed, perfected through suffering.

From the first numbed moments of trying simply to comprehend that the loved one is dead, through the months and years of sorrow and despair, by mingled recollection and anticipation, on to communion here and now and the expectation of communion to be, in the understanding of death and bereavement by means of all-embracing love—thus did Tennyson provide in In Memoriam the most comprehensive and perceptive account and explanation of human loss and separation that any poet has ever written. Thus did he nobly succeed in the aim, as he attributed it to his own Melpomene,

To lull with song an aching heart
And render human love his dues.

(37. 15-16)

It is not surprising that the most distinguished mourner of the poet's own generation could say of her own bereavement: “Next to the Bible, In Memoriam is my comfort.”