THAIS E. MORGANto joy, and loss to gain. But notice how Tennyson revises Dante. By placing
the poetic persona in the lover's position, Hallam in the position of
Beatrice, and God at the summit of the triangulation, Tennyson homoer-
oticizes the spiritual mediation. The mystic marriage between Dante and
Beatrice is transformed into one between Tennyson's persona and Hallam:
"The dead man touched me... / [His] living soul was flashed on mine, /
And mine in this [his] was wound" (XCV, 34, 36-37). 23 Although
addressed as "the Spirit," Hallam continues to have a markedly physical
presence: "Descend, and touch, and enter; hear / The wish too strong for
words to name" (XCIII, 13-14). Is the penetration wished for here
heavenly or carnal? The lyrical structure and equivocal mode of address
throughout In Memoriam evoke another model, Shakespeare's sonnets: "I
loved thee, Spirit, and love, nor can / The soul of Shakespeare love thee
more" (LXI, 11-12). Victorian readers were discomfited by "the startling
peculiarity of transferring every epithet of womanly endearment to a
masculine friend." 24 A third discourse informing In Memoriam is the
pastoral, which since the ancient Greek poet Theocritus has given voice to
the possibilities of homoeroticism within the dominant heterosocial world.
The speaker longingly recalls the university life he once shared with his
friend in an idealized rural landscape: "And thou .../... towering
sycamore; / How often... / My Arthur found your shadows fair" (LXXX,
3-6). Like his use of analogies, Tennyson deploys well known intertexts
from the literary tradition in ways that are undecidably conventional and
transgressive at the same time; consequently, Victorian as well as twentieth-
century readers of In Memoriam disagree over its meanings.
A metonymic chain of beckoning hands links the speaker with Hallam
and Christ. The "central warmth diffusing bliss" that Hallam once trans-
mitted "In glance and smile, and clasp and kiss" is transformed into "the
shining hand" with which Christ reaches out to the two men who unite "as
a single soul" (LXXXFV, 6-j, 43-44). By metaphorical substitution,
Hallam - the best friend on earth - typologically figures Christ, the
redeeming Friend in heaven. Hallam's "manhood fused with female grace"
(CIX, 17) reflects "The highest, holiest manhood" of Christ, founded on
"Love" ("Prologue," 14, 1). The insistence on the bodily presence of
Hallam-Christ puts into play a constant slippage between signifiers and
signifieds. The speaker aims to sublimate his feelings for Hallam in worship
of Christ: "Known and unknown, human and divine; / Sweet human hand
and lips and eye; / Dear heavenly friend that canst not die, / Mine, mine, for
ever, ever mine" (CXXIX, 5-8). The physical possessiveness expressed,
though, does not imply completed transcendence. Charles Kingsley, one of
the spokesmen for mid-Victorian "muscular Christianity," strains to