Alfred, Lord Tennyson's work, In
Memorium, was an enormous success. It was written during the Victorian era,
seen as a chaotic time of "scientific discovery and growing industrialization." Many
writers of the time were resistant to the changes England was experiencing with the
changes brought by the Industrial Revolution.
Tennyson was
also deeply influenced by the death of his closest friend, Arthur Hallam, who died
suddenly at the age of twenty-two. In Memoriam is generally
considered to have four sections, divided by the several Christmases after Hallam's
passing. The mood of the poem also changes, perhaps most accurately reflecting
Tennyson's emotional stages. However, a very strong theme in his writing is Tennyson's
consideration of faith in God, specifically in this section, a faith in life after
death.
The
mood progresses from despair, longing, doubt, and sorrow to hope, inner-peace, and
faith.
Poetry is something
that is very subjective, speaking to each reader in a different way, based upon that
person's experiences, ideas, etc. This is my
interpretation.
The first stanza speaks of a death of
nature. This may well reflect Tennyson's despair over Hallum's death. The stanza
reflects that spring will never come again, alluding to the constancy of winter in light
of losing Hallum. The image of black streets with smoke and frost perpetuates this dark
theme.
The speaker then leaves the city, in the second
stanza, going into the country, making himself a "crown of thorns." This is a clear
allusion to the passion of Christ, when a similar crown was crushed onto his brow,
causing great pain: the reference here, I would assume, is to the narrator's suffering
though he wears his crown like a " href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civic_Crown">civic crown," something
given in Rome to honor heroic deeds. So the narrator wears his
crown with pride—and pain.
In the third stanza, the author
says that he is ridiculed for wearing his crown by young people, babies and the
elderly:
...from youth and babe and hoary
hairs
The mood changes
drastically in the fourth stanza where the suffering narrator, even as he is called
"fool" and "child," encounters "an angel of the night" that does
not scorn his crown. Here the poem is open to personal
interpretation even more so, in trying to identify who the angel is. I assume that
"night" used here refers to death. This angel may represent Hallum himself, with a "low
voice" but a "bright look."
[As an interjection, the
friendship between Hallum and Tennyson was a happy one:
An
account was given...
...of Hallam and Tennyson at one meeting lying on
the ground in order to laugh less painfully, when [a friend] imitated the sun going
behind a cloud and coming out
again.
Emily Tennyson found
Hallam's "bright, angelic spirit and his gentle, chivalrous manner"
charming.]
The angel, then, may well be Hallam, who looks
at the crown and smiles.
The last stanza describes the
"glory of a hand," an angel's hand, that reaches out and touches the crown, changing the
thorns to leaves. This symbolizes a change from pain to the hope of a new spring; the
voice, either the narrator's or the angel's, was "not the voice of grief," though "the
words were hard to understand." To me this means that the narrator's pain has been
eased; he experiences hope. The grief is gone. However, in that the
words are hard to understand, I would assume the narrator does not claim to have a clear
understanding, and his journey to the href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/reconcile">reconciliation to
Hallum's death is not yet over.
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