... My Arthur, whom I shall not see
Till all my widowed race be run;
Dear as the mother to the son,
More than my brothers are to me. IXThe loss becomes generalized:... Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last – far off – at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.
So runs my dream; but what am I?
An infant crying in the night;
An infant crying for the light,
And with no language but a cry. LIV
Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life ... LV
Man, her last work, who seemed so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer, temples
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law –
Though Nature, red in tooth and claw
With rav ine, shrieked against his creed – LVI
There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
O earth, what changes hast thou seen!
There where the long street roars hath been
The stillness of the central sea. CXXV
Te nnyson was the first poet to come to terms with geological time and Evolution.In
Memoriam climbs slowly, moaning, towards a hard-won Christian faith. It drama-
tizes inner feelings and projects them onto an outer world of landscape, space and
time. Notable lyrics of natural symbolism act as points of emotional transition on
the journey to the third Christmas: ‘Calm is the morn without a sound’; ‘To-night
the winds beg in to rise’; ‘Witch-elms that counterchange the floor’; ‘The time draws
near the birth of Christ’; ‘Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky’; ‘Now fades the last
long streak of snow.’ The cycle makes its effect from repetition as much as from
arrangement.Its composer’s gift was for song, scene and soliloquy rather than narra-
tive or architecture. Like Wordsworth before him and Hardy and Eliot after him, he
‘sees by glimpses’ and ‘remembers’. His best work is from the first half of his career,
but he kept his lyric gift.
The Romantics had turned poetry towards autobiography, real, pretended or
disguised. The Victorians often avoided self-disclosure by the use of a first-person
speaker,historical, legendary or invented. Tennyson’s best poems outside In
Memoriam include dramatic monologues such as Ulysses and Tithonus. Without
context, monologue is open to various interpretation. In Ulysses, Odysseus plans
a last voyage into the western ocean; he hopes, if he dies, ‘to see the great Achilles,276 9 · POETRY