Victorian poetry and sciencechallenges to the validity of the scientific project, which he sees as driven
inexorably toward materialist conclusions.
But it is not just the status of scientific knowledge that In Memoriam
brings into question. Early in the poem, Tennyson formulates a dictum
about language and nature, and the extent to which they present us with
their truths: "For words, like Nature, half reveal / And half conceal the Soul
within" (V, 3-4). Although Tennyson retains the Christian-idealist meta-
phor of spirit that Wordsworth and other Romantics identified with poetry,
he suggests that this principle of truth may be undermined by the
duplicitous nature of the words that comprise it. If Nature and words are
evenly poised between revelation and concealment, between Romantic
expressivism and materialist skepticism, how can we know whether their
representations in poetry or science actually convey "the Soul within"? This
profound uncertainty creates a decisive break not only with the epistemolo-
gical surety of natural theology but also the optimistic Romantic meta-
physic expounded in Wordsworth's "Preface."
In Memoriam proposes that science and poetry "feel" Nature in different
ways; they have different "dreams" of Nature. Indeed, the image of the
dream that recurs throughout much of the poem 8 provides a series of
curious shifting and skeptical commentaries on both positivistic science and
Romantic metaphysics. The dream - a state of consciousness in which
products of the imagination are experienced with the conviction that they
are in fact actual sense-impressions - critiques the positivist faith in sense-
data. But in Tennyson's work it soon becomes clear that the dream
represents only an unsteady version of idealism. In modern times the ideal -
the principle of rational form - has largely been banished from the physical
world in which Aristotle entrenched it. As a consequence the ideal has been
exiled to individual consciousness. That i s why Romantic poets such as
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, like Tennyson, are apt to figure it as shadowy and
dream-like. In Coleridge's "Constancy to an Ideal Object" (1828), for
example, thought "haunt'st" the persona. He compares it to the ghostly
effect of the Brocken-specter, an Alpine trick of light and mist in which the
spectator perceives the shape of a giant figure unaware that it is he who
"makes the shadow, he pursues." 9 According to this modern perspective,
there is no guarantee that subjective perception corresponds to an external
reality unaffected by individual states of mind. In Tennyson's poem the
feeling of sorrow, for example, makes nature succumb to the pathetic
fallacy. He perceives "the phantom, Nature" solipsistically: "all the music
in her tone" is a "A hollow echo of my own" (III, 9-11).
The Coleridgean epistemological metaphors of dreams, ghosts, and mists
are given greater point in Tennyson's poem by contemporary scientific
141