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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Nearly every book or article on Tennyson alludes to the poet's characteristic ambiguity, one neither of syntax nor of meaning but inherent in his very choice of subject and thus an essential aspect of his imagination. Few critics, however, have even tried to build a unified thesis from their isolated perceptions of, for instance, Tennyson's simultaneous concern with macrocosm and microcosm, the similarity and mutual attraction of opposites in his poetry, and, over all, his assumption of the dualistic nature of things. Most references to these phenomena are as brief, but rarely so significant, as Eliot's evaluation of the success and failure of In Memoriam, which calls attention to the poem's expression at once of the most obvious and the most sensitive: “Tennyson's surface, his technical accomplishment, is intimate with his depths: what we most quickly see about Tennyson is that which moves between the surface and the depths, that which is of slight importance.”
Note 1 in page 577 T. S. Eliot, “In Memoriam,” Essays Ancient and Modern (London, 1936), p. 189.
Note 2 in page 577 It is well known that in fact three brothers contributed to the volume; Frederick, Charles, and Alfred were nineteen, eighteen, and seventeen respectively at the time of its publication in 1826 (the book is postdated 1827 on the title page). It is Charles who in successive poems kills off father, grandmother, brother, sister, various lovers, and Lord Byron, while Alfred is repeatedly horrified as he contemplates the destruction of Peru, Jerusalem, Druidical Britain, Babylon, Persia, Egypt, and Hindostan. All three confess to depths of depravity hardly to be expected in youths of such retired upbringing in a quiet Lincolnshire rectory.
Note 3 in page 577 All references to the poems are to the Works of Tennyson, ed. Hallam Tennyson, Eversley Edition, 9 vols. (London, 1908), hereafter referred to as Works.
Note 4 in page 580 Tennyson had previously used this idea in “Locksley Hall,” where, however, it serves mainly as an insult to Amy's future husband: “Like a dog he hunts in dreams, and thou art staring at the wall.”
Note 5 in page 581 In this they resemble the “sad mechanic exercise” of writing poems with which the speaker of In Memoriam controls his grief. But for Lucretius it is the reduction of the inexplicable to logic which is important, while in In Memoriam it is precisely the leap into intuition which eventually will provide reassurance.
Note 6 in page 581 R. C. Jebb, “On Mr. Tennyson's ‘Lucretius’,” Macmillan's Magazine, xviii (1868), 98–99, 103.
Note 7 in page 582 It is often a serious falsification, or at best a mistake of emphasis, to attach a poet to a philosophical system unless, like Pope, he deliberately sets himself up as its spokesman. In Tennyson's case we may with certainty identify his position as one opposed to philosophical materialism. This may be seen in his interest in the Metaphysical Society, which he helped found and for whose first meeting he wrote “The Higher Pantheism.” The idea is strongly confirmed by numerous poems, most notably Lucretius. As E. D. H. Johnson points out in The Alien Vision of the Victorian Poets, it is from the conflict between Tennyson's idealism and what he felt was his duty to pronounce on social questions that most of his more notable failures proceed. Conversely, it is through the understanding that the conflict exists that we may arrive at a sympathetic reading of these poems. Many of the objections to Maud, for example, disappear or in any case are minimized if we consider the poem as a dramatic presentation (“A Monodrama”), one specific solution to the problem of appearance and reality dealt with variously in “Locksley Hall,” The Princess, and In Memoriam.
Note 8 in page 582 Works, vii, 383.
Note 9 in page 583 It is well to remember that the line, “The old order changeth, yielding place to new,” appears in “The Coming of Arthur” as well as in the “Passing.”
Note 10 in page 583 Hallam Tennyson, Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, 2 vols. (London, 1897), ii, 226, hereafter referred to as Memoir.
Note 11 in page 583 Wilfred Ward, “The Comments of Tennyson on One of his Later Ethical Poems,” Tennyson and his Friends, ed. Hallam Tennyson (London, 1911), p. 478.
Note 12 in page 583 The supposed belief in progress for which Tennyson is too often ridiculed may properly be understood as one among other metaphors for the endless balancing of contraries.
Note 13 in page 583 Memoir, i, 278.
Note 14 in page 584 Robert Mann, Tennyson's ‘Maud’ Vindicated: An Explanatory Essay (London, 188—?), p. 76.
Note 15 in page 584 William Gladstone, “Tennyson's Poems,” Quart., cvi (1859), 461.
Note 16 in page 584 “The King should have made him a soldier, he would have been one of his best.”
Note 17 in page 584 Works, ii, 341.
Note 18 in page 585 In this he echoes the speaker of In Memoriam: “The shade by which my life was crost, / Which makes a desert in the mind, / Has made me kindly with my kind” (lxvi), and “I will not shut me from my kind” (cviii). But In Memoriam, arriving at a conclusion so similar to that of Maud, traces an altogether different path. This fact serves to reinforce the claim that the Crimean War has no essential meaning for the latter poem.