[In the following essay, Cohen states that Tennyson's In Memoriam is the record of the author's own experience following the death of contemporary poet and friend, Arthur Hallam.]

‘Answer for me that I have given my belief in “In Memoriam,”’ Tennyson would instruct his son Hallam when dealing with one of those numerous correspondents who questioned his Christian belief. To whom could a doubting reader turn with more assurance than to the Laureate for confirmation of his wavering faith? The answer in the passage to which Tennyson referred his troubled applicant was unequivocal:

And so the Word had breath, and wrought
          With human hands the creed of creeds
          In loveliness of perfect deeds,
More strong than all poetic thought.

Had his convictions and his poetry remained throughout on this pedestrian level, had the Sunday school piety of this quatrain faithfully expressed the nature and intensity of his religious thought, the poem would not bear this re-examination a hundred years after its completion. ‘In Memoriam,’ however, is the record of a profound and deeply individual experience, the central experience of Alfred Tennyson's life. Before it was written, all the best of his work was coloured by melancholy and apprehension. By following Arthur Hallam down to the grave and facing with him the stark fact of death Tennyson, at least partially, conquered the fear and weakness of his own nature, and won a certain spiritual security, which enabled him to envisage the perils and uncertainties of life with greater calm. ‘He that is near Me is near the fire,’ is a traditional saying of Christ's which the poet frequently quoted. ‘The fire was the fire of inspiration,’ his son explains. ‘For in “In Memoriam” the soul, after grappling with anguish and darkness, doubt and death, emerges with the inspiration of a strong and steadfast faith.’ He fails to comment, however, on the strange confusion throughout the poem between the figures of Christ and of his father's dead friend. But it is this revealing and seemingly unconscious identification that gave ‘In Memoriam’ its especial strength. Before it was written the emotion in Tennyson's poems was monotonous and dilute; the poet seemed to be the inchoate servant of his own not very profound sadness. After 1850 come the good Farringford years; he is a happier man and makes his long postponed marriage; but the later poems to which we return with any pleasure are very few. The ‘Idylls of the King’ treat a great theme with the encaustic piety of a knighted architect restoring a mediaeval church. In contrast ‘The Ring and the Book’ is a secular building, erected in a contemporary style to suit a human and contemporary need. After ‘In Memoriam’ Tennyson was a great figure but seldom a good poet; before it he was sometimes a good poet, but certainly no great figure: only into ‘In Memoriam’ did all his virtues flow.

The poem was sixteen years in the making. The twenty-four-year-old Tennyson who pencilled its first lines on a stray sheet had a few months before published his 1833 volume and established himself for all posterity with ‘The Lotos Eaters’ and ‘Oenone’; his ‘lost Arthur,’ whose body was at that moment travelling home from ‘the Italian shore,’ had been a year his junior. On ‘the elegy's’ anonymous publication Tennyson was forty, and Arthur Hallam, had he lived, would have been thirty-nine. In the interval the poem had been composed, section by section, in the ‘long butcher-ledger-like book’ which so narrowly escaped loss upon its completion; ‘some in Lincolnshire, some in London, Essex, Gloucestershire, Wales, anywhere I happened to be,’ the poet tells us; and during all those years, which saw as well the writing of much of the 1842 volume—of ‘Morte d'Arthur,’ ‘Ulysses’ and ‘St. Agnes Eve’—and of ‘The Princess,’ the central theme of the poet's life was, beyond all question, his mourning for his Cambridge friend.

A great number of his contemporaries testify to Arthur Hallam's outstanding promise. ‘A man of wonderful mind and knowledge on all subjects, hardly credible at his age,’ wrote Alford, later Dean of Canterbury. ‘When most bereavements will be forgotten, he will still be remembered,’ testified Gladstone, a truer prophet than he knew. For a future bishop, Thirlwall, he was ‘the only man of my own standing before whom I bow in conscious inferiority in everything.’ But for Tennyson he was more, a close friend and future brother-in-law: Hallam had fallen in love with Emily Tennyson at the age of eighteen or nineteen, and spent long weeks of his vacations at Somersby Vicarage, the Tennysons' home. And yet one more firm bond united the two men: Hallam's belief in Tennyson's poetry, and the support he gave him in the face of ‘the captious and unintelligent criticism’ of ‘Blackwood’ and the ‘Quarterly,’ which considerably rattled the over-sensitive poet. But deeply though Tennyson treasured their many-sided intimacy the relationship between them was by no means exclusive; they were both members of a wide and brotherly intellectual circle. But long before his death Arthur Hallam had achieved an outstanding place in the poet's affections.

For the sixteen years of the poem's writing Tennyson's mourning for Hallam had a significance in his life comparable only to Flaubert's death cult for his dead friends, which was his lifelong religion. But the losses which the Frenchman celebrated in the inner graveyard of his heart were many; that of Alfred le Poittevin, the intellectual companion to whom he was bound by more exclusive ties than was Tennyson to Hallam, was only the first. For Flaubert death followed death; for Tennyson there was but one. Each successive loss plunged Flaubert deeper into a melancholy isolation from which only remorseless work could temporarily relieve him; to Tennyson the death of Hallam brought a secret strength, confirming him ultimately in a deeply personal faith hammered out during the years of ‘In Memoriam’'s composition.

His thoughts, however, immediately upon his friend's death, turned to suicide, against which course he forthwith argued in ‘The Two Voices’ with a dogmatism which is both dull and unconvincing. He succeeded in forcing upon himself a theoretical consolation, however, that it took him in practice sixteen years to achieve. How much more compelling is the ‘still small voice’ tempting him to self-destruction than the ‘little whisper silver-clear, A murmur, “Be of better cheer,”’ with which he finds solace. For the tempter speaks in lines of authentic strength:

Then comes the check, the change, the fall,
Pain rises up, old pleasures pall.
There is one remedy for all.
Yet hadst thou, thro' enduring pain,
Link'd month to month with such a chain
Of knitted purport, all were vain.
Thou had'st not between death and birth
Dissolved the riddle of the earth.
So were thy labour little-worth …

The despair is more genuine than the comfort. If the best of Tennyson's poetry had hitherto always a dying fall, the death of Arthur Hallam served only to reinforce that underlying sense of fatality, most directly expressed in ‘The Vision of Sin,’ but implicit also in the weak cadences of ‘The Lotos Eaters.’ The younger Tennyson had been only too ready to foresee and accept defeat, awarding himself the dubious comfort of a ready-made and moralising faith. ‘In Memoriam’ marks the stages by which loss was turned to gain, and it is not by chance that the sequence, opening with Emily Tennyson's loss of her lover, closes with her sister Cecilia's marriage to another of Tennyson's friends, Edmund Lushington; the publication of the poem was immediately followed by his own marriage to Emily Sellwood.

It is in this symbolic plan rather than in the buoyantly orthodox introductory verses that we must read the true nature of Tennyson's hard-won faith. ‘I rejoiced in the Introduction,’ wrote Bishop Westcott, ‘which appeared to me to be the mature summing up, after an interval, of the many strains of thought in the “Elegies” … his splendid faith … seems to me to express a lesson of the Gospel which the circumstances of all time encourage us to master.’ Certainly the Bishop could quote lines to support his case:

Our little systems have their day;
          They have their day and cease to be:
          They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they.

Yet such passages are as unconvincing as the forced moral of the ‘The Two Voices.’ Tennyson's acceptance did not go so far, and indeed the Bishop's hearty encomium stresses a familiar aspect of the prevalent Victorian misconception concerning the Laureate. Again in his praise of ‘honest doubt,’ Tennyson laid himself open to claims of kinship from the scientific agnostics. In reality, however, most of his more public and deliberately broadminded pronouncements were based on a minor personality which, a shy man, he readily assumed when he felt that a statement was expected of him. In contrast to Hallam, the Tennysons had been enthusiastic for the Reform Bill, and I think that it was with the family voice that the poet welcomed the forward march of Victorian progress, which in private caused him considerable alarm. From Hallam he took over a hatred of tyranny, and from his Cambridge circle a rather cloudy political optimism, that had no very deep roots in his nature. With Hallam he had made a dangerous journey to the Spanish frontier bearing funds for a democratic, constitutional and anti-clerical insurrection; and it was from John Sterling, perhaps, that he caught his enthusiasm for large-scale and high-principled progress—‘the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.’ His own judgments were apt to be narrower and more subjective, as witness his celebration of the ennobling effects of war—in this case the Crimean War—at the conclusion of ‘Maud.’ His public attitude to the niceties of religious dogma, too, was Hallam's, for whom ‘the essential feelings of religion subsist in the utmost diversity of forms.’ Tennyson's were no doctrinal doubts, however; they were a far more fundamental questioning of his own significance in a universe whose tremendous laws were even now being laid bare by his scientific contemporaries. It did not help him to disown his qualms by labelling them the ‘Supposed Confessions of a Second-rate Sensitive Mind not in unity with itself.’ It was with his own voice that he prayed:

… Oh teach me yet
Somewhat before the heavy clod
Weighs on me, and the busy fret
Of that sharp-headed worm begins
In the gross blackness underneath.

Death was terrible to him, and the fear of annihilation beyond the grave most real and present. But the teaching he asked for was not to be found in Hallam's liberal Christianity. A refuge in aestheticism, ‘a lordly pleasure-house’ erected by many artists from Flaubert to our own contemporaries, he rejected in ‘The Palace of Art,’ though with the final hope that ‘Perchance I may return with others there When I have purged my guilt.’ It would be easy to enlarge on this word ‘guilt’ and attribute to Tennyson a profound neurosis. If there was some self-frustrating sense of sin and inadequacy in the poet before the writing of ‘In Memoriam,’ it was largely dispelled in that poem. He had never known the inhibiting isolation from experience of Clough nor, despite the evidence of ‘The Two Voices’ and the mad monologue in ‘Maud,’ had he more than momentarily wandered the hallucinatory streets of the City of Dreadful Night. Only in ‘Maud’ do we find a suggestion of Thomson's insomniac despair:

… my heart is a handful of dust,
And the wheels go over my head,
And my bones are shaken with pain
For into a shallow grave they are thrust,
Only a yard beneath the street,
And the hoofs of the horses beat, beat,
The hoofs of the horses beat,
Beat into my scalp and my brain.

But though ‘one of the best-known doctors for the insane wrote that it was the most faithful representation of madness since Shakespeare,’ it is in fact no more than melancholic. Tennyson had no touch of that majestic schizophrenia which we have of late years come to confuse with genius.

This frustrating melancholy, which finds expression in his too ready confusion of dream with reality, remained constant to him throughout his early life: his most familiar landscape is of autumn, of ripe fruit dropping to decay, of weariness and sleep. The Cornhill reader could have been in no doubt as to the authorship of one of his greatest poems, which he found in his February number in 1860; the opening lines of ‘Tithonus’ are in themselves a signature:

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.

This consciousness of the transience, unreality and corruption of the worldly scene was rooted, in part, in his dreamy and melancholic languor, but it was reinforced in no uncertain way by a recurrent and other-worldly experience with which Tennyson was frequently visited. He describes it, rather unexpectedly, in one of his least successful poems, ‘The Princess.’ The ‘blue-eyed Prince,’ its faintly Arthurian hero, is introducing some supernatural trappings, which appear highly significant yet play no further part in the development of that ill-assorted Girtonian idyll.

Myself too had weird seizures, Heaven knows what:
On a sudden in the midst of men and day,
And while I walk'd and talk'd as heretofore,
I seemed to move amongst a world of ghosts,
And feel myself the shadow of a dream.

This state of dissociation must have been very frequent with the younger Tennyson, and one can often view his most detailed and myopic descriptions as a very deliberate effort to re-attach himself to the outward scene, or as evidence of a heightened sharpness of vision associated with an increased spiritual awareness. Despite the evidence of his extreme short sight, and the consequently greater clarity to him of nearby objects, I think it significant that it is often things seen at a considerable distance that he notes most minutely, ‘The leaves that tremble round the nightingale,’ for instance, or ‘the twinkling laurel scattering silver lights;’ there must have been moments when his vision at a distance was extraordinarily acute.

It is possible that these ‘weird seizures’ were sometimes most alarming. ‘If God were to withdraw himself for one single instant from this Universe,’ he would frequently say, ‘everything would vanish into nothingness.’ This statement throws some light, I think, on the strangely detached state described in the lines quoted, and on the shimmering emptiness of his earliest poetry. There were moments for him in which God—or his consciousness—did withdraw from the Universe, leaving no distinction between dream and reality. This, however, was only a partial and negative aspect of a more complete and positive experience, which he several times described in notes or in conversation.

‘A kind of waking trance I have frequently had,’ he wrote, ‘quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me thro' repeating my own name two or three times to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life. This might be the state which St. Paul describes, “Whether in the body I cannot tell, or whether out of the body I cannot tell.”’—‘It is no nebulous ecstasy,’ he said on another occasion, ‘but a state of transcendent wonder, associated with absolute clearness of mind.’

Now this rapt state so readily called up by the mere repetition of his name—one is reminded of the Hindu's use of the syllable OM—left the poet weary and melancholy on its passing. Extinction, which seemed laughably impossible at one moment, was a very haunting fear at the next. He did not use the word ‘mystical’ to describe his state—for him that word had the sense of ‘delusive’—but in claiming kinship with St. Paul, and in another place with Plotinus, he did confuse an almost involuntary fluctuation in consciousness with something greater and even more mysterious. The chief significance of these states for Tennyson was undoubtedly the certainty which they momentarily gave him of the spirit's survival after death, or of its existence in a state outside the bounds of Time. For the fear of extinction, of man's transient insignificance in a Universe subject to mindless laws, was Tennyson's abiding nightmare.

His readiest associations with death were the family's departure from Somersby Vicarage some years after his father's passing and his loss of Arthur Hallam. So much is clear from section cii. of ‘In Memoriam’—section ciii. of the later editions:

On that last night before we went
          From out the doors where I was bred,
          I dreamed a vision of the dead
Which left my after-morn content.

‘The dead’ is Hallam. Yet from the association with Somersby Vicarage we know that it is also the poet's father. In his dream Tennyson dwells in a hall where maidens serve a veiled statue which he knows as Hallam's. But soon he is himself summoned to go down to a shore, where everything assumes a vaster significance. He is facing the prospect of his own death, while the maidens, chanting ‘the history of that great race, which is to be’ and ‘the shaping of a star,’ stress the theme of his own insignificance—which does not distress him here. For before him he sees ‘A great ship lift her shining sides.’

The man we loved was there on deck,
          But thrice as large as man he bent
          To greet us. Up the side I went,
And fell in silence on his neck.
Whereat those maidens with one mind
          Bewailed their lot; I did them wrong:
          ‘We served thee here,’ they said, ‘so long,
And wilt thou leave us now behind?’
So rapt I was, they could not win
          An answer from my lips, but he
          Replying, ‘Enter likewise ye
And go with us?’ they entered in.

This, by no means the finest section of the poem, reveals an aspect of its meaning which on a fresh reading throws up corresponding facets in many other places. ‘The man we loved,’ who has passed beyond the sea of death and whose cult is practised in the dream-like hall of the living, can on that last shore, which is the moment of death, save not only the poet, but the maidens, who stand for the beauty and creativeness of this world. It is no mere accident that the next section opens with the name of Christ. Hallam stands, subsuming perhaps the figure of Tennyson's father, for the dead Redeemer, returning from the further shore to rescue the poet from the ever present fear of death, to save him from the suspicion that the Priestess Sorrow is not lying when

‘The stars,’ she whispers, ‘blindly run;
          A web is wov'n across the sky;
          From out waste places comes a cry,—
And murmurs from the dying sun.’

A mechanist's universe, that will deny the validity of Tennyson's ‘weird seizures,’ is the counterpart of death, from which he can be saved only by a visitor bearing witness from beyond the grave. ‘It is possible,’ he once claimed when discussing his supernormal states, ‘that there may be a more intimate communion than we could dream of between the living and the dead, at all events for a time.’ The same thought finds expression in verse:

The Ghost in man, the Ghost that once was Man,
But cannot wholly free itself from Man,
Are calling to each other thro' a dawn
Stranger than earth has ever seen; the veil
Is rending, and the Voices of the day
Are heard across the Voices of the dark.

The debt of these lines to crude spiritualism is obvious, but Tennyson's claim to communion with his dead friend was not generally based on so materialistic a hypothesis.

The plan of the poem is a loose one and falls into place around the three Christmas Eve sections; the lyrics were not written with a view to their assembly in a single poem, or even for publication. ‘The different moods of sorrow,’ in Tennyson's own words, ‘as in a drama are dramatically given,’ and most dramatic is his opening acceptance of his loss as he follows Hallam to his burial beneath the churchyard yew, the symbol of death itself:

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

But this acceptance, this assumption of death in the midst of life, yields only too soon to that familiar apathy in which even Sorrow is unreal.

To sleep I give my powers away;
          My will is bondsman to the dark;
          I sit within a helmless bark …

The image of the ship of death stays with Tennyson to the end. In the last section of ‘In Memoriam’ the figure of Hallam is at the prow; in his final ‘Crossing the Bar,’ however, the helmsman is no longer his dead friend, but ‘my Pilot,’ the Saviour Himself. The flux and reflux of emotion in these opening sections persist throughout the poem. The fourth section ends on a note of resolution: ‘Thou shalt not be the fool of loss’; but in the seventh he is standing desolate once more outside the dark house in which he and Hallam used to meet, while ‘On the bald street breaks the blank day.’

Then, having traced the ship bearing his friend's body from the Italian shore to the lonely churchyard beside the Bristol Channel, where he was buried, he once more prays for his grief to be made more real to him:

Come Time, and teach me, many years,
          I do not suffer in a dream;
          For now so strange do these things seem,
Mine eyes have leisure for my tears; …

Yet only two sections later he welcomes this sense of unreality as some palliative for the terror that strikes him with the rising storm:

And but for fancies, which aver
          That all thy motions gently pass
          Athwart a plane of molten glass,
I scarce could brook the strain and stir
That makes the barren branches loud;—

Then, doubting the reality of his detachment, he is plunged back from ‘calm despair’ into ‘wild unrest.’ Again he doubts; this time it is the fluctuations of sorrow and his own sanity that he calls into question: the only abiding reality is that ‘ritual of the dead’ celebrated beneath the churchyard yew. Again, in the twenty-first section, he calls the validity of his feelings into question and their relevance in the contemporary world:

                              … Is this an hour
          For private sorrow's barren song,
          When more and more the people throng
The chairs and thrones of civil power.

And again he is confronted with the Shadow that, having wrapped Hallam in the fold of his mantle, now sits and waits for the poet himself. The whole first part of the poem is riddled with doubts and self distrust; not only does Tennyson question the strength and durability of his own feelings, but he calls into question as well the purpose of his writing and even the value of poetry in a scientific age. The second part opens, however, with the motive of resurrection:

The time draws near the birth of Christ:
          The moon is hid; the night is still;
          The Christmas bells from hill to hill
Answer each other in the mist.

And even the memory of the absent Christmas guest, himself now identified with the ‘mute Shadow,’ does not outweigh the seasonal good news that Hope is born. The Christmas poems were among the first sections of ‘In Memoriam’ to be written; It was in fact from the simple germ of death, sailing ‘the placid ocean plains,’ and rebirth, rung out on the Christmas bells, that the poem was elaborated; a rebirth that was not only stated with carol-like simplicity in the last section quoted, but re-stated, with all the solemnity of a Bach bass aria, by the theme of Lazarus and the mystery of death.

Behold a man raised up by Christ!
          The rest remaineth unrevealed;
          He told it not; or something sealed
The lips of that Evangelist.

Late in the poem Tennyson summons his friend likewise to return from the dead ‘in thine after form And like a finer light in light,’ but such a conclusive reassurance is impossible. Therefore he can only call on Hallam to be near him at the moment of his own death, in a lyric that recalls the terror-stricken accents of Dunbar's ‘Timor mortis conturbatme,’ and then, conscious of his own ‘inner vileness,’ questions whether he dare face ‘the clear eye’ of his returning friend; he can only accept the scientist's picture of the universe, and then, frightened by its dwarfing scale, clamour yet again for some promise of man's immortality, without which ‘Twere best at once to sink to peace.’ If he concludes on a note of faith, it is certainly not the unequivocal and unwavering faith of the Introduction. ‘Faith must give the last word,’ wrote Professor Sidgwick, a sympathetic but more sceptical questioner on religious matters, ‘but the last word is not the whole utterance of the truth: the whole truth is that assurance and doubt must alternate in the moral world in which we at present live, somewhat as night and day alternate in the physical world.’ He could not have interpreted more faithfully the changing moods of ‘In Memoriam.’ The poem contains Tennyson's finest writing, because in it he confronted his own doubts, no longer dismissing them as the ‘Confessions of a Second rate Sensitive Mind,’ and because his love of Hallam brought into play far deeper emotions than did the more literary subjects of his early poems. Many of the lyrics, in fact, are so deeply felt, and draw on such a range of individual yet familiar imagery—without ever descending to the commonplace—that they seem the uncontrived and natural expression of feelings that could be expressed in no other way; the music of the words and the overall impression, moreover, carry the reader past any lines whose exact meaning and syntax are doubtful. Here the poem stands with Shakespeare and the Gospels, in which much that is extremely difficult to comprehend passes almost unnoticed, so compelling and universal is the central theme, so deeply bedded in man's common thought the images.

Paradoxically, it was the spectre of Hallam—which lent such majesty to his own memorial verses—that conferred that dead quality which we find in most of Tennyson's later poetry. For if the memory of his dead friend gave him a renewed confidence in life, blest his marriage and freed him from the worst of his melancholy fears, it also inspired those most deliberately ‘great’ utterances of his later years. Hallam stood to Tennyson for a high seriousness that demanded mighty themes; to be worthy of his friend, he undertook to recount the great Arthurian legend, over which Hallam had presided in bright unworldly mock-mediaeval armour from the first, ‘like a modern gentleman of stateliest port;’ it was but natural that the completed Idylls should be dedicated to the nation's Hallam, the dead Prince Albert.

But there was another Tennyson, who was too often crowded out by the Laureate's majestic presence, the Lincolnshire man with a fine eye for natural detail and a sensitive ear for the rhythms of country speech; it was the heir to Crabbe's ‘gift of a hard pathos’—Tennyson's own words—that was thrust aside, the man who can challenge Barnes or Hawker as a poet of crisply drawn local scenery. We do not look to this man for pronouncements on war, science, and evolution; these are the utterances of a mere laurel crowned mask. What is permanent in Tennyson is not all charged with the deep emotion of ‘In Memoriam,’ nor even with the more transient feelings of the songs from ‘the Princess,’ ‘Ulysses’ or ‘Tithonus’; there is a quality of wit in such poems as ‘Audley End’ and ‘Walking to the Mail,’ a power of observation and even a sense of character, which make the earlier half of the collected works a quarry for the lover of descriptive poetry. What could be better drawn in the Dutch school of still life than the pasty in ‘Audley End’:

                                                            … a pasty costly made,
Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay,
Like fossils of the rocks, with golden yolks
Imbedded and injellied … ?

And how exactly recorded are the lines with which he ends ‘The Golden Year’:

                                        and, high above, I heard them blast
The steep slate-quarry, and the great echo flap
And buffet round the hills from bluff to bluff.

Even ‘the Princess’ is rich in such observations, noted, I feel, on sundry occasions and packed into the poem of the moment without great care for their relevance:

                                        Walter warp'd his mouth at this
To something so mock-solemn, that I laugh'd
And Lilia woke with sudden shrilling mirth
An echo like a ghostly woodpecker,
Hid in the ruins.

Trivial perhaps beside the great theme of female education and the sex war, such lines have a Frithlike matter-of-factness much more appealing than the large G. F. Watts canvases that the later Tennyson felt himself called upon to fill. Then again we catch him in an ironic narrative mood in ‘Walking to the Mail,’ whose conversational tones look forward to the flat delicacy of Robert Frost:

                                        … his house, for so they say,
Was haunted with a jolly ghost, that shook
The curtains, whined in lobbies, tapt at doors
And rummaged like a rat; no servant stayed:
The farmer vext packs up his beds and chairs,
And all his household stuff; and with his boy
Betwixt his knees, his wife upon the tilt,
Sets out, and meets a friend, who hails him, ‘What!
You're flitting!’—‘Yes, we're flitting,’ says the ghost
(For they had packed the thing among the beds),
‘Oh well,’ says he, ‘you flitting with us too—
Jack, turn the horses' heads and home again.’

The dialect poems, too, have their own slow-witted rustic humour, though their sentimentality would look a little naïve translated into Southern English. There was, in fact, a certain tough provinciality about Alfred Tennyson that did not survive in the Laureate, a quality of minute observation that we miss once he devoted himself to universal themes. It is a quality that we value—and perhaps over-value—today, lacking as we do contemporary poetry on great themes.

‘I have written what I have felt and known,’ said Tennyson of ‘In Memoriam,’ ‘and I will never write anything else.’ It is true that he wrote very little else on that level, for only during its writing was he ‘carrying a bit of Chaos about him, which he was manufacturing into Cosmos.’ Yet for ever afterwards he bore in his heart the deified figure of his dead friend, whose approval on his far shore he sought to win and keep. Can it have been Hallam, then, from whom he pleaded for release in the character of the aged ‘Tithonus’?

                                                                                                    Can thy love,
Thy beauty, make amends, tho' even now,
Close over us, the silver star, thy guide,
Shines in those tremulous eyes that fill with tears
To hear me? Let me go: take back thy gift:
Why should a man desire in any way
To vary from the kindly race of men,
Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance
Where all should pause, as is most meet for all?

For if ‘In Memoriam’ left him with a faith that survived the pillar shatterings of the scientific Sampsons, it saddled him also with an ideal of righteousness and high-mindedness that it was very hard to live up to and, thumbing through the correctly laidout wastes of the last six hundred pages of his Works, in search of the occasional oasis of the lines to Fitzgerald or to Virgil, one regrets with Tithonus that

‘The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.’