The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Alfred Tennyson · a sequence of 133 poems: a prologue, 131 numbered sections and an epilogue, in about 2,900 lines · Edward Moxon, London, 1850, published anonymously · scored on the poem in its final authorised form, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Elegy turned from the pastoral to a sequence of 131 lyrics, ordered as the record of a mind changing in grief
Mythos
The year’s death and return; the ship bearing the body home; the yew in the churchyard; the dark door; a dream voyage down a river to the sea; the dead raised into a higher order
Phase
Three years of the poem’s own time, measured by three Christmases and the anniversaries of the death, against about seventeen years of composition, from Hallam’s death at Vienna on 15 September 1833 to 1849 or 1850
Presentation
Poem of about 2,900 lines in iambic tetrameter quatrains rhymed abba throughout: a prologue dated 1849, 131 numbered sections running from three stanzas to over thirty, and an epilogue on the marriage of Cecilia Tennyson to Edmund Lushington in 1842
Register
Plain and slow at the worst of the grief, rising to the cosmic and the visionary, reaching at times for poetic periphrasis, and closing in the domestic music of a wedding
Scale
One mourning consciousness across three years, with a friendship, a family, deep time and the argument of faith and science, and the nation at the margins
Governing Proposition
A young man dies abroad, and his friend writes short poems of grief for him for seventeen years, then orders 131 of them, with a prologue and a wedding for epilogue, into the record of a mind across three years: it goes numb, fears its own healing, faces a nature that the new geology has shown careless of the single life, keeps faith only as honest doubt, and comes slowly and partly to a consolation. The wager of the poem is that a sequence of lyrics in one enclosing stanza can do what a single elegy cannot: show mourning as a process in time, leave the doubt standing, and let the reader watch the consolation arrive, fail, return and be half believed.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Arthur Henry Hallam died at Vienna on 15 September 1833. Alfred Tennyson, his friend, began to write short poems of mourning for him, and went on writing them for about seventeen years. In 1850 Edward Moxon published 131 of them, with a prologue dated 1849 and an epilogue, as In Memoriam A. H. H., without the author’s name. The desk scores that sequence in its final authorised form: 133 poems, about 2,900 lines, every stanza four lines of iambic tetrameter rhymed abba, the stanza since named for the poem. It is weighed as one work.
Section VII stands before the dark house of Hallam in Wimpole Street: “Doors, where my heart was used to beat / So quickly”. What is missed there is “A hand that can be clasp’d no more”. “He is not here; but far away / The noise of life begins again”, and the section ends on a line of flat, heavy syllables: “On the bald street breaks the blank day”. It is grief at its numbest, given without consolation, and the vowels carry the numbness.
The body comes home by sea, and nine sections, IX to XVII, follow the ship. In XI, “Calm is the morn without a sound”: the stillness of the land is turned to the stillness of the dead man carried on the water. He is buried at Clevedon on the Severn (XIX). Earlier, in II, the mourner speaks to the old yew of the churchyard, which “graspest at the stones” over the dead. The poem will see it again, in flower. The ship, the door and the yew are its first images, and each is made to return.
Movement II
The early sections fear their own healing. To lose the grief, the mourner feels, would be to lose the man, and he holds to it. In V he says what the writing is for, and what it cannot do: “For words, like Nature, half reveal / And half conceal the Soul within”. The measured language is a narcotic, dulling the pain it handles. The poem is aware of itself as a means of getting through, and does not pretend to be more.
In XXI the old pastoral is raised, the singer at the grave, and set aside: passers-by mock the song, and the poem does not take up the shepherd’s mask again. The form of Lycidas and Adonais, one poem, a procession, a resolution, gives way to something nearer the sonnet sequences of Petrarch and Shakespeare: many short poems, written over years, ordered into a record. In XXVII the mourner finds that it is “better to have loved and lost”; the phrase passed into the language, and its cost is the whole poem around it.
The first Christmas comes in XXVIII to XXX, and it is desolate. It is the first of three, and with the anniversaries of the death (LXXII, XCIX) and the spring sections they mark about three years of the poem’s own time against seventeen of its making. Inside each section the stanza does what the whole does: abba, the fourth line turning back to the sound of the first, going out and returning. Over more than seven hundred stanzas that enclosure is the poem’s sense of being held in a circle that only time loosens.
Movement III
In LIV to LVI the grief meets the new science. The mourner is an infant crying in the night. Nature, in LV, seems to care for the species and not the creature: “So careful of the type she seems, / So careless of the single life”. In LVI even that is withdrawn, for the rocks show whole kinds gone, and the nature that love must live in is “Nature, red in tooth and claw”. This was printed in 1850, nine years before the Origin of Species.
The disclosure is the poem’s second, and it holds as stated: what it is to keep love and faith in a nature that geology had just shown indifferent. The poem does not answer it here. It leaves the doubt standing, and the vertigo of these sections, deep time and the loss of whole kinds set against one dead man, is one of its heights. Whatever consolation comes later has to be reached past this, and the poem says so.
Then the middle run, from the sixties to the eighties. The mourner asks whether the dead remember the living (LX to LXII); he dreams the career Hallam would have had in the world (LXIV, LXXXIV); the second Christmas, in LXXVIII, is kept calmly; LXXXV is a long letter to Lushington. Much of this says again what had been said, and the order of many of these sections could change without loss. The sequence’s method admits accretion, and here it accretes.
Movement IV
XCV is the turn. On the lawn the mourner falls into a trance: “The dead man touch’d me from the past”. The section ends at dawn, with the winds that “Mixt their dim lights, like life and death, / To broaden into boundless day”. It is the poem’s visionary height, and after it the sequence moves differently: the grief has not gone, but it has changed into something else.
In XCVI the poem states its faith in the only form it can: “There lives more faith in honest doubt, / Believe me, than in half the creeds”. Then the family leaves Somersby, the house of the father, in C to CIII, and in CIII the mourner dreams a voyage: he sails with the Muses down a river to the sea, and finds Hallam on the deck. The pastoral’s gods have been dismissed; this is a myth built for the poem.
The third Christmas, in CIV and CV, is kept in the new house. In CVI the bells ring out, and among what they ring out is the quarrel of rich and poor; the nation and its history enter, at the margin, where they stay. The three Christmases, desolate, calm and in a new place, have carried the change, and the form has done the work a single elegy would have had to state.
Movement V
Spring comes in CXV: “Now fades the last long streak of snow”. In CXVIII the hope turns evolutionary, and the race is bidden to “Move upward, working out the beast, / And let the ape and tiger die”. In CXIX the mourner stands again at the door of VII, and the return means what it means because a hundred sections lie between. In CXXIII deep time comes back: “There rolls the deep where grew the tree”, and “The hills are shadows, and they flow / From form to form, and nothing stands”. Against the colder reasoning, in CXXIV, he answers that he has felt.
The epilogue is a wedding: the marriage of Tennyson’s sister Cecilia to Edmund Lushington, in 1842. Hallam is made the type of a higher race to come, and the poem closes on “one far-off divine event, / To which the whole creation moves”. Here, and in the prologue written last, in 1849, the poem asserts more than it discloses: a settled faith and a social occasion imposed from outside the sequence’s law. The ending descends to the domestic on purpose, and some readers find the wedding a different poem.
The poem made Tennyson Laureate in November 1850, and the sequence of linked lyrics passed to Meredith’s Modern Love, to Maud and to Hardy’s Poems of 1912 to 1913. On this desk it stands below Lycidas (9.0), the elegy whose form it turns from, which it passes only on The Unconcealment and The Encompassed, and below The Prelude (8.8), the long poem of the same year. What it keeps is its own: a grief shown in time, from the bald street to the boundless day, with the doubt left standing.
Act III · The Twelve
The lowest of the twelve, and the subtractive test shows why. The sequence’s cumulative method admits accretion, and it accretes: the middle run, from the sixties to the eighties, says several times what had been said, in the dream of the career Hallam would have had (LXIV, LXXXIV) and in the speculations on whether the dead remember (LX to LXII). The order of many middle sections could be shuffled without loss, and perhaps a fifth of the poem could go without real loss. Against that, the repetition is in part the knowledge, for grief returns on itself. The door of VII, “Doors, where my heart was used to beat / So quickly”, needs the long interval before the same door in CXIX for the return to mean anything; and the frame of the three Christmases, the turn at XCV and the bells of CVI is required. What holds the axis here is the middle: an order that could take more or less of it without breaking.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The poem brings two things into the open, and both hold as stated. The first is the temporal shape of mourning: its numbness, “He is not here; but far away / The noise of life begins again” (VII); its fear of its own healing, the sense in the early sections that to lose the grief would be to lose the man; its sudden returns at anniversaries; its slow change into something else. This is mourning as a process in time, articulated, not a mood. The second is what it is to keep love and faith in a nature that geology had just shown indifferent: “So careful of the type she seems, / So careless of the single life” (LV), then, in LVI, “Nature, red in tooth and claw”. That doubt can be the honest form of faith is stated and holds: “There lives more faith in honest doubt, / Believe me, than in half the creeds” (XCVI). Held below 9 because the closing consolation asserts more than it discloses.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Heights recur, and of more than one kind. The dreadful sublime of VII’s dawn: “On the bald street breaks the blank day”. The stilled landscape of XI, “Calm is the morn without a sound”, its calm turned to the calm of the dead carried on the sea. The cosmic vertigo of LVI and CXXIII: “There rolls the deep where grew the tree”; “The hills are shadows, and they flow / From form to form, and nothing stands”. The trance of XCV, where “The dead man touch’d me from the past” and the dawn winds “Mixt their dim lights, like life and death, / To broaden into boundless day”. Then the bells of CVI and the spring of CXV. For a poem of this length the heights are frequent, and they are among the highest in Victorian verse. Against them stand long tracts at a level temperature and an ending that descends to the domestic on purpose: the plateau between the peaks keeps the axis below the epics.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The elegy’s archetype, death, descent, a turning, the dead raised into a higher order, consolation, is load-bearing here, not ornament: the sequence is built on the year’s death and return, and the three Christmases measure it. Particular images grow archetypal in the poem’s own making: the yew of II, which “graspest at the stones” and which the poem later sees in flower; the ship bearing the body home (IX to XVII); the dark door; the dream voyage of CIII, in which the poet sails with the Muses down a river to the sea and finds Hallam on the deck, a myth built for the poem. But the larger mythmaking strains. Hallam as the type of a higher race to come, and the evolutionary hope of CXVIII, “Move upward, working out the beast, / And let the ape and tiger die”, are asserted figures rather than lived ones, and the Christian frame of the prologue is evoked more than constructed. The myth that fails is the one the ending rests on.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inherited form is the pastoral elegy of Theocritus, Bion and Moschus, Lycidas and Adonais: one poem, a shepherd’s mask, a procession of mourners, a resolution. Tennyson turns from all of it. There is no mask and no pastoral machinery; the pastoral is raised in XXI and set aside as passers-by mock the singer. In its place stands a sequence of 131 lyrics written over seventeen years and ordered as the record of a mind changing, with doubt left standing, science admitted and the consolation reached slowly and partly. The model is nearer the sonnet sequences of Petrarch and Shakespeare than the elegy: a real crossing of kinds. The stake was real: a long, private, unresolved grief for a young man, its language of love open to question, its faith uncertain, issued anonymously. Held at 8.6 because the stanza, the diction and the final reconciliation stay inside the decorum of their moment.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the poem stops knowing what it knows. The abba quatrain closes on the sound it opened with: each stanza turns back to its first rhyme, which is grief’s motion, going out and returning, and over more than seven hundred stanzas that enclosure becomes the poem’s sense of being held in a circle that only time loosens. The sequence is the knowledge of mourning as duration: a single elegy could state the consolation, but only a sequence written and ordered across years can show it arriving slowly, failing, returning and being half believed. The three Christmases, the first desolate, the second kept calmly, the third at a new house, let the form carry the change. Section V gives the poem’s own theory of its form: “For words, like Nature, half reveal / And half conceal the Soul within”, the measured language as a narcotic for pain. Held a little lower because the frame is loose in the middle and the epilogue’s form, an epithalamium, is grafted on.
Score: 8.8 / 10
A century and three quarters of return. The poem has yielded to its first readers as consolation; to the Victorian argument over science and faith; to T. S. Eliot’s essay of 1936, which found its religious force in its doubt; to the scholarship of Ricks and others on its composition and order; to readings of its love for Hallam and of friendship and desire between men; to readings of its prosody; and to readers of grief who care for none of these. Its formal questions are unsettled: how far the order is an order, and who the speaking self is. Held below 9 because its intellectual matter, the argument of faith and science, is more bounded by its moment than its grief is, and because much of the return is to sections rather than to the whole.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The field is English poetry of the nineteenth century, with the elegiac tradition behind it. The intrinsic force: the poem reorganised what an elegy could be, a long lyric sequence as the record of a mind across time, and it brought the new geology into poetry nine years before the Origin of Species. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it made Tennyson Laureate in November 1850 and set the terms of Victorian public mourning; the sequence of linked lyrics passed to Meredith’s Modern Love (1862) and to Tennyson’s own Maud; Hardy’s Poems of 1912 to 1913 are elegies in its line, and the elegiac sequence of the twentieth century inherits its frame. Its phrases, “better to have loved and lost” (XXVII) and “red in tooth and claw” (LVI), entered the language. Held at 8.6 because the modernists reacted against Tennyson more than they built on him, the redirection is within the Victorian field more than of poetry at large, and Whitman, Hopkins and Baudelaire, its contemporaries, moved the field further.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The highest of the twelve. Survival is demonstrated over 176 years, and the axis stands at the usual figure for that span. The text is whole and authorised in its final form; nothing is lost, and there is no charge on form or fabric. The poem has been in print without a break since 1850, is taught in every survey of Victorian poetry, and is quoted in public and private mourning to this day. Two things keep it from the widest figure the span allows: its presence dipped under modernism, and it is read mainly in selected sections, the whole poem mostly in the academy. Its surface is fixed in part to its moment, the Victorian debate of faith and science and the evolutionary hope of CXVIII; its core, the shape of grief in time, has outlived those conditions.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on Tennyson’s English. His ear is among the finest in the language, and here it is load-bearing. The heavy, flat vowels of VII’s close; the monosyllabic weight of “A hand that can be clasp’d no more” (VII); the slowed calm of XI; the movement of CXV, “Now fades the last long streak of snow”: in each the sound is the sense. The stanza is handled with a variety of syntax across its four lines that keeps it from going dead through most of 2,900 lines, and the craft of arrangement is exact, with echoes laid across a hundred sections: the doors, the yew, the Christmases. Held below 9 by what the length exacts: the tetrameter quatrain does produce monotony over this span, stanzas in the middle sections are padded, and the diction at times reaches for poetic periphrasis.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the dawn of VII on “the bald street” and the wedding feast of the epilogue; or the careless nature of LVI and the “one far-off divine event, / To which the whole creation moves” with which the epilogue closes. Do they obey one law? Largely. The law is the mourner’s mind changing in time, and the poem is explicit that the later hope is reached from the earlier despair, not in denial of it: in CXXIV the answer to the colder reasoning is that he has felt. The stanza and the voice hold throughout. The charge is the frame. The prologue, written last, in 1849, and the epilogue impose a settled faith and a social occasion from outside the sequence’s law, so that frame and poem do not fully cohere, and the wedding can read as a different poem.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Orders held: consciousness above all; friendship and love between men; the family, in Somersby and its leaving (C to CIII), the sister’s wedding and the father’s house; the natural order and deep time (LVI, CXXIII); the sacred, as faith, doubt and the argument between them; the nation and history at the margins, in the bells of CVI, the revolutions of CXXVII, and CXIII on what Hallam might have done in the state. A single mourning consciousness integrates them, and they do not carry equal weight: labour, the city and the social order are glimpsed, not held. For a lyric sequence the range is wide. Against the novels and epics, it is narrower, and that holds the axis at 8.4.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Made at 8.9, then The Unconcealment and The Living Form at 8.8. A text whole and continuously present for 176 years, quoted in mourning to this day; an ear among the finest in English, load-bearing across some 2,900 lines of one stanza; a disclosure of mourning as a process in time and of faith kept in an indifferent nature; and a form, the enclosing quatrain in a sequence written across years, that is itself the knowledge of grief as duration.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.7, held by a middle run that repeats what had been said and an order that could take more or less of it without breaking. Then The Archetypal Deep and The Encompassed at 8.4: the crowning figures of the ending, Hallam as the type of a higher race and the evolutionary hope, are asserted rather than lived, and labour, the city and the social order are glimpsed, not held.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.9, The Living Form at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.8, The Swerve at 8.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 falls a tenth short, the year’s death and return built into the sequence but the figures meant to crown it, Hallam as the type of a higher race and the evolutionary hope, asserted rather than achieved. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below The Inevitable at 7.7, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.4. The aggregate stands below 9.0 in any case, and the poem is placed in the Canonical tier on its standing.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H., published anonymously by Edward Moxon, London, in 1850, and scored as the poem in its final authorised form: a prologue dated 1849, 131 numbered sections and an epilogue on the marriage of Cecilia Tennyson to Edmund Lushington in 1842, composed over about seventeen years from the death of Arthur Henry Hallam at Vienna on 15 September 1833. It was written in English, so there is no question of translation. No text of the poem was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. The poem is known closely in its famous sections and less closely in the middle run of the sixties to the eighties. English is quoted only where its words are certain, cited by section in Roman numerals; everything else is paraphrase. Named as history: Theocritus, Bion and Moschus; Milton’s Lycidas; Shelley’s Adonais; the sonnet sequences of Petrarch and Shakespeare; Darwin’s Origin of Species; Meredith’s Modern Love (1862); Tennyson’s Maud; Hardy’s Poems of 1912 to 1913; T. S. Eliot’s essay of 1936; the scholarship of Ricks. Matters that could not be verified, among them the exact line count, the dates at which particular sections entered the poem after its first edition, earlier English uses of the stanza, which section is the longest, the poem’s reception in early reviews and in the royal household, the wording of Eliot’s judgment, and Tennyson’s own account of the speaking “I”, are not given.