Q. 2. “In Memoriam goes against the assurance found in the classical elegies”.

The most obvious difference between In Memoriam and its predecessors is the structural
nature of its constituent poems. The discussion may be continued with the lines of G.H. Lewis-
‘In mere amplitude In Memoriam differs from all its predecessors’. In Memoriam in Smith's words,
“the classical elegiac conventions are observed, but not in such a way as to provide either a
framework for the whole or dividing lines within the work.”(Smith) It is difficult to specify
Tennyson's place in the pastoral tradition and the endeavor is made more difficult by the fact that,
although being particularly favorites of Tennyson, neither of the two main pastoral writers of
classical antiquity—Theocritus and Virgil—to whom world would normally seek as models valued
neither one of them primarily as an elegist.

Tennyson revered Theocritus for a quality of "tender loveliness"; (New York, 1897) and his
delicate, elaborately decorated studies of classic and beautiful landscapes, like the opening of
"Oenone," as well as his propensity to romanticize the simple and easy lifestyle in his household
"idylls." Virgil was for Tennyson, as Douglas Bush has suggested, the poet of "lacrimae rerum," a
generalized mood of melancholy, (New York, 1963) rather than his formal model for a particular
lament. Thus, the attempt to discover within In Memoriam any extensive pattern based on the
classical pastoral and elegiac tradition becomes almost inevitably an exercise in frustration. In
Memoriam, in fact, contains passages which directly echo Miltonic themes: there is evidence to
suggest that Tennyson took deliberate pains to duplicate in his own elegy situations and sentiments
that Milton had used in Lycidas.

The maneuver Tennyson executes an exhibitionistic replacement of Milton by Hallam's

body and then by himself, builds shrewdly not only on his own skill but also on a critical
tradition that suspected Lycidas of being insincere. Although In Memoriam as a whole is
clearly not a pastoral elegy, some of its lyrics exploit the conventions of the genre in
significant ways. (Kennedy)

From the start of the poem, Tennyson simultaneously exploits and transforms the
conventions of the pastoral mode. An introductory invocation, for example, is a common
feature of the pastoral elegy, but Tennyson's is no conventional invocation, for "immortal

1
 Love" is invoked in place of a Muse, and the resolution of the poem is announced in
advance. (Kennedy)

Allowing for minor changes in specifics, the verses of In Memoriam may be seen as a miniature
pastoral elegy contained inside the broader poem. The resemblance is particularly evident in terms
of the lyrical structure. The traditional elegy often comprised the subject's death announcement,
the summoning of natural, human, and divine mourners to share the poet's sorrow and pay honour
to the deceased, the subject's burial or its equivalent, and some sort of solace. As the purpose of
the early portions of In Memoriam is to depict sadness so profound that it cannot be articulated,
the customary notification of death is omitted. Nonetheless, the rest of the common version is
discernible. This plea may be expanded to encompass all of Tennyson's addresses to the ship that
carries Hallam's corpse to England, in which the poet pleas to the powers of nature, the sea, and
the stars, to be mindful of the dead (in ix, x, xv, and xvii). The arrival of the ship replaces the usual
arrival of mourners, and instead of flowers being brought to decorate the coffin, the coffin itself is
delivered for burial.

Still, for Tennyson this private affirmation, an affirmation based on the intense personal experience
implied in his declaration, "I have felt" (cxxiv.16), was not enough. It was necessary to relate
himself once again to his fellow men. "I will not shut me from my kind," he comes to assert
(cviii.1), as he begins to involve the whole human race in the vision of good which he has privately
discovered. Looked at from one point of view, Tennyson's use of pastoral conventions serves the
same function of symbolic reconciliation as his resolution to identify his own fate with the destiny
of mankind. His attempt to link his personal song of woe through Milton’s Lycidas to the long
tradition of pastoral elegy amounts to an attempt to break open the loneliness of a confining
personal grief and the distinctive isolation that imprisons modern man within himself and to
reestablish contact, at least on a literary level, with the human community. Far from being unique,
as Eliot has characterized them,

Tennyson's feelings are quite representative; and his ultimate failure to sustain formal
conventions within this elegy is as valid a way of dramatizing the fragmentary character
of modern life as the way Eliot himself devised in The Waste Land. (Sendry)

----------------- Word count-783

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References

Bradley, A.C. A Commentary on Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Macmillan, 1910.

Carter, Rod. "In Memoriam, Jeffery John Carter, 1970–1999". Journal Of Pastoral Care, vol 55,
no.3, 2001, pp.317-318.SAGE, https://doi.org/10.1177/002234090105500311.

Kennedy, Ian H. C. “‘In Memoriam’ and the Tradition of Pastoral Elegy.” Victorian Poetry, vol.
15, no. 4, 1977, pp. 351–66. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40002885. Accessed 17
Aug. 2022.

Kincaid, James. Annoying the Victorians. Taylor and Francis, 2013.

McSweeney, Kerry. “The Pattern of Natural Consolation in In Memoriam.” Victorian Poetry, vol.
11, no. 2, Summer 1973, pp. 87-99.

Moore, Carlisle. “Faith, Doubt, and Mystical Experience in In Memoriam.” Victorian Studies, vol.
7, no. 2, 1963, pp. 155-169.

Richards, Bernard. "Tennyson's In Memoriam XCV". The Explicator, vol 46, no. 3, 1988, pp. 15-
16. Informa UK Limited, https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.1988.9934716.

Sendry, Joseph. "In Memoriam And Lycidas". Publications Of The Modern Language Association
Of America, vol 82, no. 5, 1967, pp. 437-443. Modern Language Association (MLA),
https://doi.org/10.2307/460773. Accessed 17 Aug 2022.

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