Reading In Memoriam

by Timothy Peltason

Overview

By making his argument about In Memoriam a continuous argument for it, Timothy Peltason brings to light a wider appreciation of its greatness and of its central place in the history of modern poetry.

Originally published in 1986.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691611181
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Essays in Literature , #549
Pages:	196
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.50(d)

Read an Excerpt

Reading in Memoriam

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By Timothy Peltason

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1985 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06650-9

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

In Memoriam was so quickly and surely established as the representative poem of its age and of its author that it must always have been difficult to appreciate its extravagance and its idiosyncrasy. Taken most often as the comfortably conventional expression of conventionally comfortable feelings, especially by those who have not read it recently or carefully, the poem is, in fact, very oddly made: each of its 700-odd stanzas the product of daunting and obvious formal constraint; all of its stanzas collected together into a large and uncertain form the rules of which nobody can quite discern. And it looks oddly made with good reason. Even for Tennyson, whose methods of composition were never straightforward or regular, the making of In Memoriam was a protracted and peculiar and largely a hidden business. Moreover, the individual lyrics just do not sound like most of Tennyson's previous poetry, so in recognizing them as Tennysonian, we must widen the reference of that adjective. The shortness of the lines; the almost laconic sharpness and concision of many of them; the trying out of ideas that must have seemed to Tennyson's earnest fellow Apostles, as well as to the harshly sensible critics of his first volumes, a bold striking out in new directions; the frankly autobiographical bearing of many of the lyrics: all of these signal Tennyson's possession of a new expressive idiom, an idiom that has arisen in response to new expressive needs and that reflects the exemplary strangeness of Tennyson's life and sensibility.

Begun in 1833 within a few weeks of Arthur Hallam's death, the sections of In Memoriam were written at many times and in many places over the next ten or fifteen years, but kept mostly out of sight while Tennyson revised the poems of his 1832 volume, wrote and rewrote the new poems that he would publish with his earlier work in 1842, wrote and then published The Princess in 1847, and lived the vagabond life that Robert Bernard Martin's recent biography has documented. Tennyson's father had died in 1831, and Hallam's death overturned the family once again, withdrawing suddenly the promise of some settlement in life, not just for Tennyson's sister Emily, who was engaged to marry Hallam, but for the whole family, whose connection to him must have seemed the connection to a world more securely and comfortingly ordinary than their own. In the seventeen years between Hallam's death and the publication of In Memoriam in 1850, Tennyson himself fell in and out of love with one woman, made and broke for ten years an engagement with another, worked on many different tasks, and lived and visited in many different inns and watering places and homes, none of them truly his own. And somewhere behind or between the narratable events of this period and the published poems, Tennyson was writing the different sections of In Memoriam, ranging widely in subject and mood, but keeping strictly to the four-line stanza and a b b a rhyme scheme that he had either chosen or fallen into as a way of binding together what he once considered calling his Fragments of an Elegy. Most of these fragments had probably been written by 1842, but they were not gathered together into the poem we now read until some time close to its official publication in May 1850, just a few weeks before Tennyson gathered together his private life as well, married Emily Sellwood, and settled at last into a home.

The finished poem records little of the external movement of this period of Tennyson's life, but registers finely and variously the psychic homelessness that accompanied it, the puzzled alternations of mood, the strange sense of starting over again with each new mood or moment, the persistent and frustrated search to put an end to this wandering among moods and to discover some stabilizing pattern in the history of recorded moments. For In Memoriam is exactly what Denis Donoghue has called all of Tennyson's poetry, "a Book of Moments," a book in which one moment, one lyric may continue from the last or may seem to replace it absolutely, leaving reader and poet together to confront the mysterious and unwilled changefulness of experience. The short sections of the poem, each divided into stanzas and each stanza closed in upon itself by rhyme, present to the reader discrete fragments of experience, momentary and present apprehensions. Even when individual lyrics look forward or back, as they regularly do, they are written from and for the present. The tentative organizations of experience achieved from within any moment can claim no final authority and must expose themselves to disruption or disproof in the moments that follow.

And then these moments, too, present themselves to be assimilated, organized, understood.

As a long poem made up of short poems, In Memoriam naturally interests itself in the way that short structures build into longer ones, the relations of part to part and part to whole. But this formalistic language hardly evokes our experience of the poem, and the parts and wholes of In Memoriam are not empty forms. The investigation that the poem conducts into the relationship of parts and wholes is an investigation also of the principles of psychic change and of the possibility of psychic integrity, conducted from within the history of a single troubled and speculative consciousness. And when this consciousness takes on itself the burden of the exemplary, it casts the questioning of its own integrity in time as a questioning of the larger possibility of historical connection, where history is both what happens between one moment and the next and between the beginning of time and the end.

Mediating between these two extremes is the appropriate task of a poem whose form is the attempt to register great change incrementally and whose speaker is, in Tennyson's own words, "not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking through him." Tennyson earned the poet laureateship by writing In Memoriam — it is hard to imagine a reward more fitting or more truly deserved — and the poem repeatedly offers itself as a representative unit of human history, a model, for better or worse, of the individual life and the life of the species. Yet there is resistance as well as encouragement to this identification of the poet with his kind. The relationship of the part to the whole is antagonistic as well as constructive, and many individual lyrics subvert or challenge the process by which they are assimilated into a large and exemplary narrative, declaring the sovereignty of the moment and the absolute privacy and idiosyncrasy of the poet's experience. At the same time, however, this process of assimilation necessarily goes forward as one lyric, one moment follows another and as the poet continues to put his experience before us. Neither the poem nor its readers can renounce the difficult task of gathering things together and seeing them whole, of giving a name to the uncertain shapes of history, of human experience, of In Memoriam.

What the whole of In Memoriam teaches, we must stand outside any one of its parts to determine. And yet it is inside the poem, in the lyric-by-lyric experience of reading it, that we are given such carefully leading advice about how such determinations might be made. The parts of In Memoriam, both in their evocations of the moment and in their readings of one another, teach that history is Christian and redemptive, that it is evolutionary and progressive, that it is evolutionary and vicious, that it is meaningless and chaotic, that it is unreal, a travesty of the uniquely living moment. But whatever its models of human history, and even in its denials of history or of shared models for anything, the poem cannot help confronting the blank fact of change, a human mystery about which something must be said.

In section LXXVII, for instance, the poet thinks about the fate of his poem in history and the world.

    What hope is here for modern rhyme
    To him, who turns a musing eye
    On songs, and deeds, and lives, that lie
    Foreshorten'd in the tract of time?

    These mortal lullabies of pain
    May bind a book, may line a box,
    May serve to curl a maiden's locks;
    Or when a thousand moons shall wane

    A man upon a stall may find,
    And, passing, turn the page that tells
    A grief, then changed to something else,
    Sung by a long-forgotten mind.

    But what of that? My darken'd ways
    Shall ring with music all the same;
    To breathe my loss is more than fame,
    To utter love more sweet than praise.

In the grimly reductive fantasy of the first two stanzas, history destroys the spirit, and the living, breathing language of the poet falls into the ludicrously material. The only resistance to this extreme materialism is in the extreme spiritualism of the last stanza, the defiant claim that value resides wholly in the self-sufficient act of the poet. He does not need history or an audience, but only the instantaneous fulfillment of his own expression. And lying between these two extremes is the poem's attractively modest and empirical description of itself; between the fantasy that it will have no worldly, historical career and the pretense that it needs none, the poem encounters its reader — the man browsing in the stall — and the inescapable fact that it is itself an action in time. Pages must be turned, grief changes.

"A grief, then changed to something else"; this perfectly captures the oddity and suddenness of transition from one section to the next of In Memoriam, or even from one line to the next within a section, as well as the deep mystery of the poet's spiritual regeneration. Mood succeeds mood according to some law or chance beyond the poet's control. The pressing concern then is to account for these changes, to ask how they come about and to ask if they constitute the coherent history of an integrated self or only the "wild and wandering cries" (Prologue) of a self in fragments. Or is there another form of coherence, another way to redeem these fragments besides their absorption into a genetic history? These questions are both evaluative and analytic, questions about the success of Tennyson's effort to make a long poem out of short poems, as well as about the content and conduct of the poet's analysis of his own experience.

By "the poet" I do not mean the historical Tennyson, but the first person of In Memoriam, a figure who inhabits the poem, but also knows that he is creating it in words and meters: not Tennyson, but not just a character or "the speaker." The evaluative question is not answered, but is at least asked more sympathetically and more searchingly, when we recognize in this way that Tennyson has gone before us and so arranged matters that the mourner's self-analysis is also a poet's self-criticism. More and more often as the poem moves forward, the poet is reading as he writes — "What words are these have fall'n from me?" (XVl) — and asking himself what coherent and speakable meaning can be extracted from the experiences that are arranged before him. And this presses us to ask, as both a critical and a philosophical question, what the very fact of arrangement means for the discrete value of single lyrics and single moments. Is the uniqueness and intensity of the moment betrayed or enhanced by its assimilation into a larger whole? Is In Memoriam more or less than the sum of its parts?

Much more, I think, and I have already started to say why in my remarks on the enriching appropriateness of the poem's structure to its subject matter. But I should address more explicitly the objections of those critics for whom the structure of the poem is inadequate to its large aims and irrelevant to an appreciation of its local excellences. And I should begin, as such critics generally do, with the apparent depreciation of this structure by Tennyson himself.

"The sections [of In Memoriam] were written at many different places," said Tennyson, "and as the phases of our intercourse came to my memory and suggested them. I did not write them with any view of weaving them into a whole, or for publication, until I found that I had written so many." Though often cited as evidence that In Memoriam is rather a collection of fragments than a single, long poem, this remark might as easily describe the value that Tennyson attached to the work of weaving as a distinct creative activity. This weaving is not the province of "the poet," whose moods, like ours, seem to come unbidden and whose will exerts itself against the massy personifications that figure forth his conscious experience — Love, Grief, the Hours, Sorrow, Nature: not the province of "the poet," but of the author, whose offstage manipulations give the poem its structure. For many modern admirers of In Memoriam, this separation of creative faculties requires little discussion, and the poem successfully imitates, in T. S. Eliot's phrase, "the concentrated diary of a man confessing himself," or, another of Tennyson's provisional titles, The Way of a Soul. But for many others the separation between the writer of the individual lyrics and their arranger, between the poet and the author, is insistently there to be described, or to be regretted.

Christopher Ricks, offering the most acute and explicit of recent challenges to the unity of the poem, will not settle for "the unity and continuity of a diary" perceived by Eliot. "The Way of a Soul," says Ricks, "would indeed provide a graph, but a graph is not the same thing as an artistic unity." Citing Charles Kingsley and Humphry House as allies, Ricks cannot find in In Memoriam the "conscious or organic method" or "single theme" that would unify the poem. The "links and cross-connections" among the sections do begin to weave the poem together, he acknowledges, but he does not think or make much of these and goes on to make an obscure, but apparently significant, distinction. "The Christmases, or the imagery of dark and light, of water and the human hand: these do much in the way of 'weaving them into a whole,' but it remains weaving, not growing or building." Ricks is distinguishing, I suppose, between an order imposed upon experience from without and an order that experience assumes, or convincingly seems to assume, in its own unforced unfolding. He wants In Memoriam to grow or to build as a piece of music builds, but not to be built — or woven — by an unseen hand. Alternatively, or perhaps in addition, Ricks and other critics of the poem's unity want a fuller and finer weaving of its parts, an arrangement that will show the relevance of each part to the whole and that will complete the exposition of a single, great theme. Either the poet or the author must exert greater control over his material and claim greater responsibility for the organization of the whole. But if it is not clear that woven things are less adequately made than things that grow or build, neither is it clear that "unity" is what In Memoriam must be shown to have in order to justify a decision to read and value it as a whole, long poem and not just as a collection of lyric hits and near misses. Long poems may be separable into parts, uneven in quality, and wayward in exposition — In Memoriam is all of these — and still require our attentiveness to the arranged relations between their parts and to the implicit and explicit claims to significance made by these arrangements.

It is not, then, a question of voting "yes" or "no" on the unity of In Memoriam. Ricks does not define, and I cannot define, "unity" in a way that makes the question of its mere presence or absence an interesting one. The question is how and how much to talk about In Memoriam and especially about the "links and cross-connections" that Ricks acknowledges, but spends no time on in his survey of the poem. The emphasis on local excellences results, in fact, in a serious undervaluing of individual lyrics, a failure to appreciate the extent to which lyrics and groups of lyrics serve one another as context or as subject matter. I am coming back around, of course, to an emphasis on the relations of part to part and part to whole, relations to which In Memoriam, in the felicity of its design, cannot help calling attention. The sections of In Memoriam do not just echo and remember one another, as Ricks's designedly dull catalogue of "links and cross-connections" suggests, but place in sequence and opposition an array of different arguments for feeling one way or another, and an array of self-sufficient moods that deny the place of argument in feeling, but whose sequence nevertheless constitutes an argument. This anteriority of mood to argument — the sense that even our experiences of inwardness may be passively discovered as much as willed or created or rationally chosen — is essential to the distinctively Tennysonian feel of In Memoriam and militates against attempts to explain the poet's progress as the working-through of a necessary and rational plan. And yet the poet does progress. A single ecstatic or grief-stricken part of In Memoriam may deny the authority of the whole, while the whole determines and limits the significance of any part and claims a separate authority for its own large movement from grief to affirmation. This tension between the part and the whole is the poem's continuous criticism of itself, and subsequent criticism properly acknowledges and builds upon it.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. vii
• PREFACE, pg. ix
• Chapter One. Introduction, pg. 1
• Chapter Two. The First Movements of Grief, pg. 19
• Chapter Three. The Poet's Exemplary Career, pg. 47
• Chapter Four. Moments of Vision, pg. 90
• Chapter Five. The Conditions of Belief, pg. 120
• Epilogue, pg. 164
• Notes, pg. 171
• Index to Sections of In Memoriam, pg. 177
• Index to Persons, pg. 180