Victorians! discussion

Everyman, leader of this discussion, will post background information here, so stay tuned.

The discussion begins June 1.

In Memoriam is probably unlike any other poem you have read. The inspiration for the poem was the early death of Tennyson’s very close friend Arthur Henry Hallam (of whom more in a later post) shortly before Hallam’s planned wedding to Tennyson’s sister. On the most basic level it is a poem of Tennyson working through his grief, but it is very much more than that.

In Memoriam is generally recognized as one of the great elegies of the English language, following in the tradition of, among others, Milton’s “Lycidas” (1638) and Shelley’s “Adonais” (1821).

The poem was not initially conceived or composed as a single poem. Rather, it consists of many (133 to be precise) “sections” (Tennyson’s term) which were written over a period of seventeen years “at many different places, 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.” (Hallam Tennyson quoting his father in Alfred Lord Tennyson, A Memoir.)

Eventually, of course, he did merge the sections into a single poem, consisting of a Prologue, a hundred and thirty one numbered sections ranging in length from some only four stanzas long to others up to thirty stanzas. Each section is internally complete, though in a number of cases stanzas are closely connected by occasion or theme. (I believe that the sections do not appear in the order written, but were ordered by Tennyson, though I have found no definitive information on this point.)

It is hard to speak specifically about a work which is quite disjointed in its composition but fully unified in its theme, but in general it describes the progression of Tennyson’s response to his grief over a period of three years, from first learning of the death of Hallam to the wedding of Tennyson’s younger sister (not the sister who was engaged to Hallam).

A personal note and encouragement:

For myself, I have found it both challenging and exhilarating to seek out unifying themes within the poem and to try to track the changes in Tennyson’s thought as I work through the poem. As with most serious poetry, I am finding that it rewards rereading and re-rereading. Some sections which appeared to me simple or trivial on first reading have turned out to have depths of meaning that I had initially missed. So if you have the time and interest, I do suggest reading the sections more than once. The depth of our discussion here will, I suggest, be greatly enriched by this approach.

I hope those joining this reading will find the work as enjoyable and rewarding as I am. I look forward to hearing the views and wisdom of the wonderful posters here.

And, a very important note: I encourage everyone not to be "scared off" or shy about posting because it is poetry, and in some places challenging poetry. All views and thoughts will be of value to somebody here. You may think some of your thoughts are not important enough to mention, but those very thoughts may be the ones that open new vistas of understanding to others. So do join in the discussion, knowing that you will thereby be enriching the experience for all the other readers here.

A similar comment, perhaps:

If anyone is interested but unsure whether they really want to commit to the poem, I'd recommend reading T.S. Eliot's essay on the poem (in Essays Ancient and Modern, but anthologized elsewhere, too, I think). While I found it a bit difficult to get into it initially, getting a sense of Eliot's enthusiasm and admiration for the work has made me a bit more open to it.

Brian wrote: "A similar comment, perhaps:

If anyone is interested but unsure whether they really want to commit to the poem, I'd recommend reading T.S. Eliot's essay on the poem (in Essays Ancient and Modern, ..."

That's good find. Portions of Eliot's essay are reprinted in the Norton edition of the, and it is clear that he was greatly influenced by it.

While I haven't found a copy of Eliot's essay online, here's a nice piece on Tennyson's influence on Eliot.
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/t...
Several other critics I have read have commented similarly to this that Eliot's The Wasteland can be viewed almost as a rewriting of In Memoriam, and others have commented that In Memoriam and The Wasteland were both the seminal poems of their generations.

Do we have anyone here who has read the Wasteland and might be able to comment on the parallels between them as the discussion progresses?

I thought I would post this here. For those of us who cannot read poetry to ourselves (I have no inner rhythym) it is available for free as an audiobook on Librivox.

Here is the link http://librivox.org/in-memoriam-ahh-b...

Elizabeth Klett is a fantastic reader, so there should be no quality issues.

Thanks, Becky.....

Becky wrote: "I thought I would post this here. For those of us who cannot read poetry to ourselves (I have no inner rhythym) it is available for free as an audiobook on Librivox.

Here is the link http://libriv..."

Great find. Thanks.

In 1850, when In Memoriam was published, Darwin's Origin of the Species was still in the future, but biologists and, particularly, geologists had been making discoveries which challenged the Biblical view of creation.

While some early Christian thinkers had interpreted Genesis allegorically and not literally, the Protestant Reformation taught a literal interpretation of the Bible. Thus the apparent conflict between the teachings of science and Biblical teaching was causing a crisis of faith for many Victorians.

Tennyson was very interested in science and new scientific findings, and this is reflected in a number of places in In Memoriam. The poem's exploration of this conflict of reason and faith was a significant aspect of its importance to the Victorian readership.

I suggest that readers keep this aspect of the poem in mind and consider how the poet deals with (or sometimes perhaps doesn't deal with) this dilemma.

I have been listening to the Librivox production for several days. I also have Christopher Ricks's Tennyson, which has the entire poem and many textual notes, including Tennyson's. I also have on my Kindle a book called A Key to Lord Tennyson's "In Memoriam" by Alfred Gatty. I haven't gotten into that much yet, so I don't know how valuable it will be.

Tennyson himself provided a number of interpretative comments where he thought some of the more obscure references might not be understood by all readers.

I will try to mention some of these in the discussion, for the benefit of those reading an edition that doesn't discuss Tennyson's comments, but others should feel free to discuss his comments also if they have editions that include them.

One initial comment: Tennyson said that the “I” in the poem should not always be assumed to be Tennyson himself. “In various notes to his work, the poet cautions that he is sometimes using the speaker to represent all of humankind struggling to understand the sense of loss that has come upon it as a result of scientific discoveries that have shattered its faith in the afterlife.” (Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition)

As one measure of what In Memoriam meant to the Victorians, after the death of Queen Victoria's husband Prince Albert in 1861, Queen Victoria wrote that "next to the Bible, In Memoriam is my comfort."

The BBC had an "In Our Time" segment on In Memoriam which you can listen to here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0124pnq
click on Listen Now, and don't worry about the first minute of something else; it quickly gets into the segment.

I recommend it, but if you can't listen to it, it made several points I found quite interesting and perhaps not obvious.

One concerns the somewhat peculiar form of the poem, the four line stanzas of four feet with the abba rhyme. (It's a form that Tennyson believed he had invented, though it had in fact been used by other poets before him.)

For myself, I found this scheme surprisingly disturbing (perhaps because it is so unfamiliar), so it was fascinating to hear the speakers in the program spend quite a bit of time discussing it and its effect.

Then noted that the rhyme scheme is circular, the end of each stanza bringing you back to its beginning, so that as one speaker says it "performs the theme of circularity which is so central to [the poem's] preoccupation with grief and mourning."

Another speaker noted that the center two lines of each stanza are a couplet, which is a progressive form, but the last line goes back to the beginning of the stanza and closes it down to end the progression and send it back to the beginning.

In a way, the rhyme scheme prevents the poem (and the poet's thought) from moving smoothly forward, but forces it to circle round and round in a series of hitches, almost two steps forward and one and a half steps back, so that there isn't a sense of smooth motion as is the case with most poetry, but is an almost herky-jerky motion which, as I read it, represents the poet's great difficulty in moving forward in his own mind and life; it represents, I think, his unwillingness to leave the past behind him and move on, but rather requires him to be constantly looking behind him, never getting away from that constant backward looking.

Apparently Tennyson originally wrote the early sections in a more standard abab rhyme scheme, but found that that didn't serve his purpose, and so changed to the abba scheme.

We can discuss the specific aspects of the rhyme scheme on specific ideas in the poem as we get to the various sections, but as a general comment, what do others think of the rhyme scheme? Did you find it unusual? Do you like it, dislike it, or find it irrelevant? If you have read far into the poem, or have read it more than once, has your view of the scheme and its effect altered?

In Memoriam is an elegy, and as such was expected by its readers to follow the standard elegiac form of starting in grief but, by the end, returning to acceptance and to the recognition that life goes on. This is the pattern of such famous elegies as Milton’s Lycidas and Shelley’s Adonis. Most elegies suggest a fairly rapid resolution of grief, but Tennyson’s grief was so great that at the very least it took him seventeen years to reach this reconciliation, if indeed he ever did; there is some sense, both in his life and, I think, in the poem that the grief is never really laid to rest. This may be an aspect of the poem to think about as we read it together.

In terms of resources, this is a fairly nice summary of Tennyson's life and the major influences on it
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/a...

I'm not sure that I would go so far as the article does in saying "In his own day he was said to be—with Queen Victoria and Gladstone—one of the three most famous living persons, a reputation no other poet writing in English has ever had," but he certainly was a major character not only in literature but beyond that.

But it does a nice summary of Tennyson's family environment, which was, to say the least, emotionally dreadful, with a father mentally unstable, most of his siblings having at least one mental breakdown during their lives and several confined at various times to mental institutions or rehabilitation from alcohol and drugs, a family history of epilepsy, all well summed up in the phrase the "black blood" of the family. Against this background, it is not surprising that the loss of a person who had become a shining light of his life was so devastating; he had no close family or friend to look to for refuge or help in working through is grief.

The article is, I think, worth reading through as important background for helping understand the environment from which the poem was written.

Everyman wrote: "The BBC had an "In Our Time" segment on In Memoriam which you can listen to here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0124pnq
click on Listen Now, and don't worry about the first minute of something e..."

Excellent programme--very helpful! I couldn't get the link to work on my iPad, so I went to the iTunes store/podcasts/"In Our Time" and downloaded it for free. It's the first item under "Culture."

Everyman wrote: "In Memoriam is an elegy, and as such was expected by its readers to follow the standard elegiac form of starting in grief but, by the end, returning to acceptance and to the recognition that life g..."

An interesting point in the podcast was that "Ulysses" gave Tennyson his "Life goes on" expression.

Readers of In Memoriam often wonder about the nature of the relationship between Tennyson and Hallam, and particularly whether there was a sexual component to the relationship.

Each reader’s view of that relationship will develop as they read the poem, but it may be of value to address the sexual issue up front to keep it from becoming a distraction.

There is no question that Tennyson and Hallam had an extremely close and loving relationship. However, virtually every reputable scholar agrees that there is no evidence at all of a homosexual relationship. Tennyson himself repeatedly denied any such relationship, and the facts as they are known seem to support his assertion that it was a conjunction of minds and spirits, not of bodies. One attempt to claim a sexual relationship is the 2001 self-published work Alfred and Arthur: An Historic Friendship by Garrett Jones. However, as hard as the author works to find evidence of a physical component to the friendship, in the end he admits that he is limited to speculation.

Perhaps the best, and one of the briefest, comments on the issue is found in The Oxford Anthology of English Literature: Victorian Prose and Poetry, edited by Lionel Trilling and Harold Boom, in which the editors write of the friendship (the passage is not identified as to which of the editors wrote it) that “if it had a repressed sexual element, neither Tennyson nor Hallam (nor anybody else) seems ever to have been aware of this.”

Another source, the online Poetry Foundation, writes “despite the too knowing skepticism of the twentieth century about such matters, it is almost certain that there was nothing homosexual about the friendship: definitely not on a conscious level and probably not on any other. Indeed, it was surely the very absence of such overtones that made the warmth of their feelings acceptable to both men, and allowed them to express those feelings so freely. “

I certainly do not want limit any reader’s interpretation of the relationship between the two men, but it may be helpful to lay aside, at least initially, the question whether there was a sexual component to the relationship so as to free the mind to more fully explore what exactly the nature of the relationship was.

Thank you, I was wondering about the tone of their relationship. It does seem quite extraordinary to grieve so for a friend. It does suggest that there was something more between them, but again who knows.

From what I have read it seems like a momentous tribute to to a worthwhile while perhaps complicated relationship.