In Our Time - Tennyson's In Memoriam

Episode Date: June 29, 2011

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Alfred, Lord Tennyson's long poem In Memoriam.In 1850, shortly before his appointment as Poet Laureate, Tennyson published a work which many critics regard as his masterpiece. In Memoriam A.H.H. was written in tribute to a close friend, Arthur Hallam, who had died seventeen years earlier. The two had met while at university in Cambridge; during one summer when Hallam was visiting Tennyson he had fallen in love with and become engaged to Tennyson's sister, Emily. When Hallam died suddenly at the age of 22 Tennyson was torn apart by grief. He started to write verses for In Memoriam almost straight away, but it was only later that he assembled these fragments into one long poem. The work is a farewell not just to Hallam but to an entire system of thought. New geological discoveries meant that Biblical certainties, such as the age of the Earth, were suddenly thrown into question. Tennyson realised that the advent of new scientific certainties meant the death of old religious ones. The work was enormously successful; one early reader was Queen Victoria, who after the death of Prince Albert wrote: "Next to the Bible, In Memoriam is my comfort".With: Dinah BirchProfessor of English Literature and Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at Liverpool UniversitySeamus PerryFellow and Tutor in English at Balliol College, University of OxfordJane WrightLecturer in English at the University of Bristol. Producer: Natalia Fernandez.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, about 50 yards from where I'm sitting in Broadcasting House is a street called Hallam Street. It's named after a Victorian historian, Henry Hallam, whose son Arthur was a brilliant classicist

and the closest friend of a young poet called Alfred Tennyson. Sorry. Tennyson died suddenly in 1833 at the age of 22. Tennyson was devastated and plunged into despair, but the intensity of his grief produced some of the greatest poetry he'd ever written. In 1850, the resulting poem, in Memoriam, A-H-H, was published, and it changed his life forever. The poem is long and complex,

and not only documents the agony of bereavement, but also grapples with the rapidly changing state of the Victorian world, one in which biblical truth was now being questioned by new scientific, scientific developments. It was much admired by his contemporaries. After the death of Prince Albert in 1861, Queen Victoria wrote, next to the Bible, in Memorium, is my comfort. With me to discuss Tennyson's poem in Memorium are Dinah Birch, Professor of English Literature and Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research at Liverpool University, Seamus Perry, fellow and tutor in English at Baylorleau College Oxford, and Jane Wright, lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. Dina Burch,

can you tell us something about Tennyson's family? Well, his childhood was spectacularly difficult, and it left deep marks on his later life. He came from a large and ambitious family, but on his father's side, they were a gloomy, suspicious and remarkably quarrelsome lot. And they all seemed to have what Tennyson was later to describe as the black blood of the family.

His grandfather was a bad-tempered bully, but he was forceful and successful, and he had made himself a wealthy man. His father was the immediate family problem. He was a Lincolnshire clergyman, had a living in the Lincolnshire village of Somersby, intelligent, cultivated, and in fact a literary man, but unstable, violent and an alcoholic.

And he had been disinherited in favour of his younger brother, who was a karma, and more competent character and that created a lasting sense of injustice and oppression in young Alfred's family. So the childhood was eccentric, it was troubled,

but it certainly wasn't lonely. There were 12 young Tennyson's crowded into the rectory at Somersby and Tennyson felt a sense of responsibility in a very strong sense of connection towards his siblings, especially his younger siblings. He was educated locally at Louth and then got into Cambridge. What happened to him when he went to Cambridge University?

It was a liberation. He went up in 1827. He was 18 years old. And in a sense, it was a family expectation. His two elder brothers had gone up before him. So he wasn't being any kind of rebel. It was a conformist thing to do. But it was the first opportunity to break free. from the family. It wasn't easy. He went up to Trinity in Cambridge, which was a very grand college,

and Tennyson had not been brought up with grand manners. But he wasn't timid. He was a poet and made himself a role in the student life of the college through being a poet. And he had some successes that began to transform his life. I think one important turning point came when he won the Chancellor's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1829. And that gave him an entree into a group of undergraduates that really, really changed his life, the Apostles. The Apostles were an undergraduate society, very high-minded, who would meet regularly to discuss philosophical and other ideas. And the Apostles gave Tennyson the opportunity to create for himself an emotional warmth in his life, a sense of support, a sense that his life as a poet, which was already

quite well developed. He'd been writing, in fact, for years. His identity as a poet needn't necessarily be developed in complete isolation, and it was a terrific opportunity for him. Shamisbury, one of the apostles was Arthur Hallam, who was younger than Tennyson, although he'd been up at Cambridge two years before Tennyson, which, as I understand it, which is a a mark of his precocious brilliance. He'd been at Eton. He was almost revered by boys who remembered at Eton, including Gladstone. Can you tell us about the early meetings between Tennyson and Hallam? They seem to have been attracted to each other magnetically and instantaneously. Yes, that's right. It's difficult to piece together quite what the presence of Hallam must have been like, because so much of it must have relied upon personal charisma and nothing is harder to recreate than a long-lost charisma. One can see from the writings that remain that he was a person of tremendous intelligence. He was philosophically very

interested. He was politically very interested. He was liberally inclined, but at the same time very fearful of some of the consequences of political reform. So that spoke to something very much in Tennyson too. He was a poet himself in very much kind of Wordsworth, Coleridge

tradition, so he left behind some interesting blank verse nature poems full of philosophical reflections, a little bit like Tintan Abbey and poems of Coleridge's of the same kind. I think what Tennyson probably saw in Hallam particularly was an extraordinary sense of intellectual purpose and vocation, a strong association between the life of the mind and the life of some sort of public benefit or public good, some kind of contribution to the broader polity of the nation or the Republic of Letters.

and I suppose also he saw someone who recognised his own talent one of the finest essays that Hallam leaves behind is a review of Tennyson's first book which he writes for a London magazine in 1830 without ever letting on in the... And Hallam's about 2021 at the time, isn't it? And it's a dazzling piece of writing

and it's one of the first really coherent accounts in English of what would later be called a steticism so the poet Yates at the end of the century he looks back and sees the Hallam essay as in a way the founding of the aesthetic school in English. It's that major. It's a very substantial piece. And Hallam doesn't let on in the review

that he's Tennyson's best friend. So these days he get in private eye and be in trouble and I'm sure that's right. But leaving that to one side is an extraordinarily insightful piece, not least because he is unself-consciously putting Tennyson in the same company as Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats. Not just because he's his

chum, but he recognises in what is actually quite youthful Tennyson that they're There's a real gift there. Is it psychobabble to think that Tennyson must have been flattered, as Dinah's mentioned, liberated, but flattered and felt almost elevated, that this most brilliant young man at Cambridge, let's assume that. We must assume that.

Everybody said that. This dazzling man took him up and appreciated his poetry. He didn't have to seek out Hallam. It seems to be the other way around. And this was exhilarating for him. And I also took him into the apostles. Diana mentioned the apostles, but if you can just say how Tennyson played into the apostles with Helms' help. The apostles are a kind of semi-secret group, as Diana was saying, which met to, you were the only joint-away invitation, very much based around Trinity.

And you met to... Trinity College, which was the smartest college in Cambridge. That's right. And you met to discuss philosophical or political questions of the day. Now the level of intellectual work that these young men did was kind of forbidding and they had discussions on motions of amazing sort of abstraction and intellectual pretension if you like and there's a vast amount of... Such as?

Well, such as is a benevolent first cause deducible from the phenomena of nature, things like that. And you have papers presented and you chat away about that for the afternoon or the evening and come to a decision at the end. the record book survive and we know which way Hallam and Tennyson voted on lots of these motions. I think the important thing about it is partly that it's Tennyson's

entree into a very cleaky almost world of Cambridge intellectual aristocracy. So as remote from growing up in the worlds of Lincolnshire in this desperate dark place as you could get. At the same time

I think it's also important to recognise that Tennyson's own intelligence wasn't of that same kind of abstract and philosophical kind. And it's very interesting that when Tennyson has to give his speech to the apostles, you have to give your first sort of paper as a way of confirming your membership. He can't do it. He's meant to give a paper about ghosts and he just can't do it. He doesn't have that kind of intellect. His intellect works in a literary or kind of poetic way, but not in the more sort of philosophical or metaphysical way that Hallam does. So it's that Hallam recognises his greatness and that's flattering, but also

that he recognises Hallam as a different kind of mind of his own. That's part of the success of their relationship. And then the axe falls in September in 1833 when he's 22, travelling abroad. Hallam dies suddenly of aneurysm and Tennyson is well the impact on Tennyson

is in memoriam and a great deal that comes from it. Jane Wright, before we go into that, he began to write, he wouldn't write and contribute to Hallam's father's book of Hallam's collected works. He said he just couldn't do it. But he did, he continued to write, and the grief for Hallam is beginning to appear in

earlier poems, before in Monument. Let's just touch on Ulysses. Okay. Yes, I mean, he said to Henry Hallam, having been invited to contribute to the poetry and prose remains, I failed to do him justice to write a memoir immediately following Hallam's death. He said, I failed to please myself. I couldn't very well have pleased you. Ulysses is a remarkable poem for a number of reasons. Tennyson comments on it to friends on various occasions and says there is more about myself in Ulysses than in Memoriam. He says Ulysses was written under the sense of loss and that all had gone by, he says, but that still life must be fought out to the end.

It's a poem about the struggle of going forward and facing life without Hallam in it. And it's a remarkable poem as one that is written by a very young man still. Tennyson's only two years older than Hallam. So he's still in his early 20s himself when he writes this. But it's written in the voice of a much older man, hoping against hope that the best of life has not gone by. And that wonderful last line. To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.

Yes. But that in itself, the way this poem is, written is interesting for the way it uses tenses, because it's a poem which is full of the language of adventure, of moving forward, looking, you know, the Trojan wars have happened, he's come back to Ithaca, he's sitting with his aged wife, as he calls her. I want to get back to her memorial.

So the impact of Hallam was profound, so profound that at the beginning he couldn't write about it directly. Can you tell us a little, little, about, what impact it had on his personal life. What did he do? I mean, did he disappear back into the country? His father died, didn't he had to leave university then. But did he moper come around?

Just give us some idea of the impact on his daily life for a while. Because he's talking about an impact that lasted for the rest of his life and a grief that was nurtured and nourished for the rest of his life, which is the in-memorium point of the poem, as it were, 17 years later, 17 years in the making. Yes. Well, when his father died, he, he moved back to Somersby and really became, I think, felt that he was a parent to some of his younger siblings.

And he writes in Memoriam about Emily, one of his, the younger sister who was going to marry Hallam, and he remembers sort of bouncing her on his knee. There's a strong sense of parental and sibling connections. And when did he begin to write what became in Memorium? Well, he began to write some sections fairly early on. I mean, he's writing them in late 1833. Those poems are remarkably calm in a sense. They seem to be written in a state of shock, and he imagines the ship coming back, bringing Hallam's remains to him.

It's difficult for us to piece together exactly what was written when. We know there are certain moments. We know that in 1840, for instance, Edmund Lushington, whose marriage is described in the epilogue at the end of in memoriam, says, oh, Tennyson showed me a book in which he's been writing his elegiacs, and there are a lot more poems in there than the last time I saw it. There seems to have been, Aubrey DeVier is somebody else who comments in 1822. Are you suggesting that his grief over Hallam grew as time passed

because it never left him, but was the impact a bit of a shock, was it such a shock that nothing, as it were, was allowed to come out in poetry, and then he grew and grew as he thought more about it. Because it... I'm trying to get over to the listener who don't know a memorand very well.

The sort of strength, depth, and continuation of this obsession with this dead young friend of his, and this obsession with his role, the Hallam's role, in another life, that the afterlife, which is the big thing that Tennyson holds onto of his Christian film.

I think, I mean, he does write other things along the way. In a sense, he's very protective of these poems. The poems that he gathers together, which eventually become in Memoriam, he shows them to a few close friends. And I say there are these moments when we hear little things about them from friends who have seen them in a book.

Tennyson says around 1845, they are too imperfect, and I can't send them forth yet. I can't publish. But I want the listeners to get the, idea, I saw it to persist a little bit, of the strength of this feeling in this poem. I mean, we've talked a little bit about the history. It puts these poems together over 17 years, right. And they happen at different times, right. They maybe aren't really one continuum. That's another matter.

But what strength of feeling, how can you describe the impact that Hallam had on Tennyson after his death? It's huge. It changes his life. It's possibly the single most important event of this frighten. life. He returns to Hallam's memory time and time again, not just in accruing these poems, but in writing poems about other Arthur's, in writing his own Arthuriad. Right at the end of his life, he's still revising Idols of the King. And Arthur Hallam's presence is strong to that poem too. So really, Hallam is there with him throughout his career. But he states explicitly that he's more important than his brothers, and implicitly is more important than his wife and his family. I get that, do you?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can talk about some of the moments of the expressions of grief. I think that spousal metaphor that comes back time and again in immemorialium till all my widowed race be run, tears of the widower when he sees a late lost form that sleep reveals, he says, and moves his doubtful arm and feels her places empty fall like these. A terrible moment of expectation, semi-consciousness, of, of, picturing himself as a man reaching out in the dark, and his semi-conscious mind is so sure he will touch his wife

and his hand falls through empty space. And Tennyson uses that metaphor. It's a profoundly of if marriage is a profound public declaration of an intensely private bond, it's one of many metaphors that he uses to announce the intensity of this relationship. Dinaburge, it has a rather unusual poetic structure. Tell us about that.

Yes, it does have an unusual structure. It's a very firm, clear and rather simple form, and I think it's a real reason for the power of the poem. The subject and language of the poem constantly changes. It's fluid. It's a poem, as Jane has suggested, about uncertainty. It's about doubt. But the form doesn't change.

There are four-line stanzas, and there's a regular four-beat. rhythm, an iambic tetrameter, but all that means, it four beats in a line, and the stress falls on the second syllabus, syllable, sorry. And there's an A, B, B, A, rhyme structure. And what that means is that each of those four-line stanzas returns to its beginning. It has a curiously circular form. Can you give us a couple of examples? Well, let's start with the very first section.

A good place to start. I held it truth with him who sings to one clear harp in divers tones that men may rise on stepping stones of their dead selves to hire things. And you hear in that how the things take you back to the sings. and it's a standard of thinking about moving forward, how you build on your dead self to hire things, but the rhyme takes you into the origins of the poem. It's one of the ways in which the poem performs that theme of circularity

that's so central really to its preoccupation with grief and mourning. Because the whole poem circles around grief again and again and again. And in the earlier section... Exactly. There's a kind of claustrophobia, particularly in the earlier sections, about the way in which that rhyme structure and that pounding rhythm constantly returns on itself.

It's like that biblical image, again fairly early in the poem. I think it's section 12 of the dove that returns to the arc, the dove that represents the poet's mind as it darts forward. to the ship that's carrying the dead halem home. And it plays around that ship. It's thinking, it's imagining,

only to return to where the body sits and learn that I have been an hour away. And of course, sorry, eventually that returning dove finally brings a message of hope. Chaymas, Perry, can you give us one more example of this unusual poetic structure, which in fact had been used

by a couple of poets beforehand, although we assume that tennis and didn't know that. I think he was quite cross and it was pointed out. I think he thought it was his own invention. It's rather nice to it's called Abba, but that's a mere trivial aside. Well, it's interesting because some of the very, very early drafts that rhymed A-B-A-B, and he clearly realizes that's not right.

It has to be A-B-B-A. Well, here's a lovely one. He's talking about Hallam's body being brought back in a boat across the sea to be buried in Clevedon and talking about the calmness of the sea that's carrying him and the last dancer of Section 11, which is what this is, gives that calmness a terrible morbid twist. Calm on the seas and silver sleep

and waves that sway themselves in rest and dead calm in that noble breast which heaves but with the heaving deep. And it's a lovely example of what Dinah's talking about. In the middle you have a couplet. Yes, rest and breast arriving as a couplet and a cuplet is a very progressive kind of verse form, but the couplet is snagged up in this minor rhyme

that keeps returning back to itself. I think Dinah's word circularity is very important. He does circle around, brood around this death. The more he broods, the more he finds. And sometimes I find it a bit repetitious, and as Diana said, claustrophobic, but then I'm sure it bears rereading, rereading, rereading, re-reading, re-reading. It was, it wasn't, as Jane's pointed out,

it wasn't, didn't begin as one long poem, was sort of decided on, perhaps by his wife, to be one long poem, and she also gave it the title. And do you think that shows, did he made a rushed attempt at the last minute to give it a cohesion, or is it scholars like you who give it a cohesion? Well, I mean, I think it's, I don't think it's scholars like me who did. It's a very good question.

All three. Because if you were to have bought this little book in 1850 in your local bookshop and brought it home, it wouldn't be absolutely clear to you whether it was a single poem called in memoriam, or whether it was a book called in memoriam, in the way that Philip Larkin writes a book called The Wits and Weddings, as it were.

And whether it is a series of poems or one coherent overall structure is a really interesting ambiguity about the work, I think. And it speaks to an ambiguity which is part of Tennyson's inspiration. It's an elegy, so it's meant to do what egregies normally do, which is to, by the last page, reconcile you to life.

again. That's what elegies do. Eligies don't just stay in a state of grief and remorse. You work through your mourning process and you reconcile yourself to life on the last page. Like the end of Lissadas, you know, you get up and you go off to Forest Fresh and Passages and you and so on. But this poem never kind of quite persuades itself that it's able to do that. If it were able to do that in a completely kind of resolved and coherent way, then it would be manifestly a single and coherent work.

And I think the very fact that there's some kind of hesitation about the incoherence of its achievement is precisely because of that lingering and circling, non-progressive kind of quality to the emotion, and it's unable to complete the elegiate business with complete conviction and bringing you through to faith and consolation in the end. Could you take that on, Jane Wright, the idea which you developed in your opening remarks about being widowed, feeling he was widowed by Hallam's death, and the way that the grief is the driving force, and yet we seem to be going in other directions as well. Could you develop that and maybe give us one or two examples?

Okay. Well, I mean, as Chameas and Diana have both said, this is a poem which circles, which accrues, and in that sense is denying, it wants to deny the passing of time, and yet really needs to come to term. I mean, evolution is one of the things it needs to come to terms with, not just as a sort of frightening thing,

which threatens religious faith in this period. But actually, it's potentially a good thing. If you can't evolve, then you can't move forward. And it is a poem which is struggling always, both at those micro-levels, the little levels of the verse form, and in the larger sense, doing the work of an elegy, to move forward, to move on and to find consolation. I mean, there are some wonderful,

this I talked about the marital metaphor, and the note of expectation that's set up there. If I just quote this is just three stanzas, it's a short section, section seven early on. This again is about expectation, but it does something both with the speaker's expectations

and with our expectations as a reader. So in terms of the experience of grief, it's really trying to impart that very clearly. This is the poet imagining standing at the house at Wimpole Street, where Hallam used to live. He says, Dark House, by which once more I stand here in the long and lovely street, doors where my heart was used to beat so quickly,

waiting for a hand, a hand that can be clasped no more. Behold me, for I cannot sleep, and like a guilty thing I creep at earliest morning to the door. He is not here, but far away the noise of life begins again, and ghastly through the drizzling rain on the bold street breaks the blank day. Now it's a brilliant instance of what he's talking about is the shock of waking up facing a new day, that awful memory. And again, memory is part of what this poem is tackling. It's very difficult to remember all the sections of this poem and what order they come in. It actually plays with the reader's memory. But here is this awful remembering that I've woken up and oh, and you're still not here. And we get that final line. And Diana mentioned

the rhythm of this poem, which is didum, did dum, didum, didum, each line. In that final line, having led us to expect that that will still be the rhythm, he gives us on the bold street, breaks the blank day, which, if one wants to try and put in the beats,

runs more like, dididum, dumb, d-de-dum, dumb, it slams into a brick wall metrically, that line. So that our experience as readers, they're already sort of mapped onto the shock. the jolting experience of grief that this speaker is experiencing. Diana, I thought that was brilliant.

Diana, I shot that once, I filmed that once for a film on tennis in the 1960s, in that street very early in the morning. Never mind. Long time ago. Diana, can you talk about nature in this poem, the significance of nature? I think it works in several ways. I mean, it's part of Tennyson's wish to engage with new ideas, which in fact is something that the elegy has always done.

The elegy has always had within it this strand of satire, of thinking about other sorts of intellectual context. So he's thinking about evolution, as Jane says, but also thinking about different ways of conceiving of a natural process of mourning and healing. So there's that. There's also the sense of the older traditions of the pastoral, which again feed in to what the elegy can do

so that nature in that sense becomes part of the traditional framework of an elegy. One of the things that makes this poem both deeply and intensely personal in the ways we've been describing, but also impersonal, rather detached from these immediate processes of grief and mourning.

And using the pastoral elegy with that framework of nature is one of the ways in which that happens. But of course, Tennyson isn't a classical poet. He's a post-romantic poet. So he's also thinking about the conceptions of nature that he had encountered in Wordsworth, in Shelley.

Shelley, a very important influence, in fact, in Memorial and Keats, especially Keats. So all of those strands of thinking about nature are coming together. And that means that you have a kind of, I won't call it fragmentation, because I don't think it's quite that. But you do have a very shifting concept of nature.

On the one hand, you've got in that phrase that everybody remembers from in memoriam, nature red in tooth and claw. You've got the cruelty of nature revealed as tennyson thought by new strands of scientific thought. But you've also got, I think, a very much more consoling image of nature. The white kind glimmered. and the trees laid their dark arms about the field. It's lovely consoling, almost maternal image. And that love for nature, that sympathy with it,

came, as you said, as you hinted out earlier, from his childhood, it might have been the consolation from that vicarage in Somersby, going into those woods around, which were very plangent and heavy, and he found. response to his melancholy there or an object of his melancholy. He also found nature which the new examination of nature

through the discovery in geology are about to become evolution started to hit very hard those of strong Christian faith the age of the universe, the idea of what was lasting, if anything was lasting, that one does wonderful stanzas about

where the mountains were, where the mountains are, there used to be clouds, and where the streets are, there used to be seas and so on. Can you take us forward a bit in that? Because he took that on, some of the strongest passages for me, in Memorium, that battle he has with what's coming at him in the 19th century in terms of science. For the early 19th century, geology is the most important of the sciences and the way that it impacts upon the more general mind of the period.

It's like quantum physics is to us. It's a sort of thing that seems to overthrow, everything that we take for granted and sets us up in a new kind of world of paradigms of uncertainty and so on. And that's what geology is really doing in the early part of the 19th century. And it's exactly what you've just said. It does several things. It says that the age of the earth is immeasurably older than anyone ever thought it was by deductions from genealogies in the Bible. It also says that where, you know, Shelley looks at Montblanc as he sees an image of transcendence and permanence.

Actually, he should have been seeing. Actually, Michelle he kind of sees fluidity too, but he should have been seeing flux and fluidity and change. And where you might see the stability of the creation, the natural world, what you actually get, if you dig in, dorset, and dig out all these fossils, as you see that there were species after species after species that just disappeared.

So as it were, the precondition for the world, as you experience it walking around, isn't permanence and stability, but on the contrary, flux and change. And this was something that chimed a tennyson so greatly, I suppose, because he was always haunted by the thought of a universe driven by dark forces of destruction and meaninglessness and pointlessness, I suppose, which is why the death of Hallam hits him so particularly hard

because it seems to confirm everything that it's most dark about the kind of countervailing view to the more general optimism that I suppose is part of the spirit of the age. He has this total genius for saying things which are very profound so simply. It's what you were just talking about. talking about one line even, there rose the deep where grew the tree. And then the three more lines are equally powerful that follow that. And yet at the same time, Jane, sorry to keep coming back to on this one.

It's the grief that keeps coming through. But grief is expressed by the grief that he has in his ideas about nature, and his ideas about signs, in his grief at the passing of certain parts of Christianity, though he holds on. He has to, because that's what he has to hold on to. He has to. what he was born with, he uses, puts born in italics, means that he was born, not outside,

but we're not part of this scientific evolution. We are part, but really also not part. And also he's born with the idea that there is a present afterlife. Yes, I mean, there are lots of ways in this poem, as I think between us in this conversation we're coming at, where Tennyson is always doing more than one thing at once. I mean, he's always both conforming to the function of elegy, trying to seek consolation and yet not and yet denying, hanging back,

loitering on, as a phrase that he uses, which is, how do you do that? Loiter and move on at the same time, but Tennyson does it. And yes, I mean, coming to terms with nature is one thing that he seeks to do. I mean, I've talked about that sort of dark house moment early on where he feels very alienated from his physical environment. And there's a connection early in the poem, I think, and which runs, through between nature and language, because language is something else this poem has got to come to terms with mediation and expression. So he says, there's an early section in which he

says, I sometimes hold it half a sin to put in words the grief I feel, for words like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within. There's a sense there that he's trying to come to terms with language, and then that moment that Dinah mentioned later on about the white kind glimmering, that that's a sense. That's a very well-known section, Section 95, when Tennyson is sitting in a garden, in a natural environment, he sees himself surrounded by this beautiful countryside. And what does he do?

He sits and reads Hallam's old letters in that section. And he describes them as those fallen leaves, which kept their green, the noble letters of the dead. And it's that, it's reading, through reading Hallam's words, that he says, at last, the living soul was flashed on mine. He feels having struggled to make a connection with Hallam in all sorts of ways through the poem so far, he feels that Hallam's words have reached him.

And there's a way in which it can seem like a moment where he feels reconciled to nature and reconciled to language, at least a little more than he was. And there are ways in which that falls away later. But he finds later on that he says in Section 100, he finds no place that does not breathe some gracious memory of his friend.

He begins to see how them imbued in the landscape around him. Diana, I know you want to say something, please do, but then can you tell us why it struck such a chord in 1850? The prelude comes out at the same time, indisputably, one of the great works in English literature. It is eclipsed for quite a while in in memoria, I mean impact and in the number of people who want to read it. It did strike a chord

And I think one of the reasons for its striking accord is that very multiplicity that Jane has just mentioned. It did so many things for the people who read it. It confronted the great issues of the age. What did it mean to come to terms with death if you could no longer be certain of the old Christian truths, the old teaching about immortality, had seemed to falter?

How could you deal with that? Immemorial seemed to offer you. a way of dealing with that. It talked about science. It talks in fact that we haven't addressed this really in broad terms about politics. But it also provides people with a new experience, it seems to me,

of what poetry can do, that it can speak to you in a very personal and immediate and direct way about experiences that all of us will have. But at the same time, it can set those personal experiences in a much broader literary context.

It can give you the experience of thinking about Shakespeare, about Dante. We haven't mentioned Dante, but he's a hugely important model for In Memoriam. Milton, we've mentioned, the great classical poets. You don't need to know that tradition to feel that through reading this poem, you're in touch with it. But there's also a very human intensity

about the poem. That on the one hand, as you said, Melvin, it's a poem about needing to hold on to faith and to hope and to find a way through the finality of loss. But at the same time, it's a poem that wants to hold on to grief in that way that so many people who've been bereaved experience, you don't quite want to get over it. Let darkness keep her raven gloss.

and that impulse, you know, very, very widely experience is one of the things I think that draws people into the poem. Yes, and it's against closure. Yes, I'm all poor against closure. Jane, you want to say something, then I must go to Seamus. Of course. I think I just wanted to reinforce what Diana was saying there, really, which goes back to this question of grief and expressions of grief.

There are so many, this is 133 poems long, and those poems are anything between 12 lines and 100. 44 lines in length each. Most of them are 12 lines or 16 lines there. I'm trying not to put off the listener. No, but the... You must... The listener must read this poem.

I mean, I think in terms of the expressions of grief, there are so many that there's something in it for everybody to connect with, I think. Can I ask you, Seamus? Maybe one of the attractions about the poem, I mean, you three know infinitely more about than I do, is the fact that it is probing grief.

It keeps coming back. back to it. Now in some ways that can be sickly in a way and claustrophobic but the circularity, diner's word, eventually just you think yeah he is, this is what happens you do keep going back to it. Somebody you've loved very much and lost very abruptly or lost at all. You just keep going back there again and again and so there's that

tension there isn't because sometimes you think oh that's enough and then you think well no there is more you're fine now? They were absolutely right and that's one of the themes of the poem and the poem is constantly trying to kind of pull itself together it's a poem of tremendous sort of understated but heroic

and a moral purpose and one of the great current ideas in the poem is to pick up the word from Ulysses not yielding but at the same time not ignoring the grief that is consuming you he's anticipating in a very instinctive

and brilliant way what Freud says about mourning in the early part of the 20th century that a successful mourning process takes you through your grief and reconciles you to reality and if you don't get through that successful mourning process you're stuck in a state of what Freud calls melancholia and this is a brilliant literary

impersonation of a soul stuck in a kind of melancholia but constantly trying to push itself forward to a new emotional response to life and at the same time push itself forward to the achievement of a particular kind of literary form which is ending happily Tennyson says I want this poem to be like a

divine comedy. It starts in hell and it takes you through to paradise. And one of his tactless friends said, I think you ought to write the paradise bit. And he's very cross. And he's, I've written what I can write and I can write no more, he says. But that's the trajectory that the poem has. And it's part of the human greatness of the poem, that it doesn't actually complete the aesthetic job that it sets itself. The impact it had, we have very little time. Has it had a great influence on other poets, right up to today, to Mick Imla, for example, who wrote, as you're nodding very heavily, though, Shamest,

but on the way between Tennyson and the present day. A huge impact, I think. I mean, it gave the poets who came after Tennyson a model for writing poetry that could draw on the resources of the past through personal memory, but also through the memory of tradition, of what had gone before, without losing a sense of direct personal connection.

I mean, one of the areas where I think the influences felt most keenly might seem odd in that I would argue it's high modernism. We think of this as such a mid-Victorian poem, but actually T.S. Eliot, for instance, learned enormously from the way in which Tennyson had managed to combine so many poetic narratives in one repeating form. And I suspect the idea of Christianity,

which Elliot had very strongly, but doubted at last, and the idea of bringing in many cultural, not so much references as influences. Absolutely, absolutely. But it's also, I think, a sense of an emotional register that communicated itself to those poets who came after. 19th century poets, I mean,

one thinks of Christine Rosetti, for instance, who is profoundly influenced by in-memorium. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But also Hausman, I think, carries in-memorium. I'm really sorry about this. We have to stop. There you go. There you go. Thank you very much, Jane Wright, Diana Birch and Shamis Perry. I love doing that.

Next week, the last of this present series, There May Noan Civilisation, Brongage, Greet. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.