Faith and loss

The next two authors we’ll be looking at are considered Victorian rather than Romantic. The Victorian period lasts from 1830 to1901: in other words, the reign of Queen Victoria. It’s separated from the Romantic period for a number of reasons—for one thing, England goes through a number of social changes, one of which is the social and economic consequences of industrialization. We’ve had a little discussion of the impact of the Industrial Revolution on Romanticism; during the reign of Queen Victoria, England becomes an industrial and economic power. Industrialization brings about enormous changes in the way people live and work and travel; it also brings an enormous increase in wealth. Historian David Thomson calls the period “one of strenuous activity and dynamic change, of ferment of ideas and recurrent social unrest, of great inventiveness and expansion.”

The first couple of decades of Victoria’s reign are marked by fears of social revolution: there are masses of workers living in crowded, unsanitary conditions, working long hours in dangerous environments for very low wages. There’s widespread anxiety that the workers will simply rebel and by their sheer number take over the wealth of society. One of the solutions to the problem is implemented in 1846, when Parliament repeals the Corn Laws, tariffs against imported grain which kept prices high for English farmers. This causes the price of food to fall, resulting in significant improvements in the lives of English factory workers. Another improvement comes in the form of the Factory Acts passed in 1848, which place restrictions on child labor and the number of hours laborers can be required to work.

Another crisis of the time involves the challenge that scientific discoveries pose to religious faith. Geological and astronomical discoveries suggest the world is much older, and much smaller, than Christians had assumed; humanity may be nothing more than a speck in a vast universe, a brief moment in an unimaginably long panorama of time. The essayist John Ruskin wrote in 1851, “If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful hammers! I hear the clink of them at the cadence of the Bible verses.” Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) adds to the anxiety: it makes a strong argument in the case that science has been making for years, namely that the account of origin of life in Genesis is contradicted by scientific evidence and there is no inherent distinction between humanity and animals. At the same time, scholars have begun to study the Bible using what they believe to be scientific methods; the “Higher Criticism” treats the Bible not as the sacred, infallible Word of God but as a historical document created by human beings.

Some of these anxieties are reflected in the literature of the time. To get a good sense of the character and scope of Victorian literature, it would be helpful to read novels by George Eliot, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackery, the Brontes, and others, but I imagine you’re just as glad not to be reading three or four hundred extra pages this semester. Hurray for poetry!!

Victorian poetry differs from Romantic poetry in subtle ways. There isn’t the enormous break that we find between Neoclassicism and Romanticism—poetry is still generally lyric, which means it’s a personal, emotional statement by an individual. Tennyson writes in the tradition of Keats, and Browning was influenced by Shelley early in his career. One difference is that the Victorian poets led less scandalous lives than their Romantic predecessors: both Browning and Tennyson managed to make it to the end of their lives without abandoning the mother of their children, for example. Also, Victorian poets tend to be a bit less experimental when it comes to poetic forms—they don’t come across as thought they’re trying to reinvent poetry from the ground up, as Shelley does at times.

Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam was published in 1850, but it centers around an event that took place in 1833. Arthur Henry Hallam, Tennyson’s friend/mentor and his sister’s fiancé, dies at the age of 22. This loss shakes Tennyson’s faith and causes him to question humanity’s role in the universe. In Memoriam is a series of poems that focus on Hallam’s memory and Tennyson’s grief—they were written separately and can be read as individual poems, but taken together they give a picture of Tennyson’s recovery from a sense of despair to a feeling of hope. The introduction, which was written after the rest of the poems were completed, gives us a sense of Tennyson’s recovery. The lines “Forgive my grief for one removed,/Thy creature, whom I found so fair./I trust he lives in thee, and there/I find him worthier to be loved” (Norton 889) show Tennyson has returned to faith, but much of In Memoriam is concerned with his struggles with belief. T.S. Eliot wrote that In Memoriam was remarkable not “because of the quality of its faith but because of the quality of its doubt.”

A number of themes are repeated throughout the sequence. One of the themes, religious doubt, shows up in poem 3, where Tennyson pictures sorrow as a priestess tempting her hearer that life has no purpose: “’The stars,’ she whispers, ‘blindly run;/A web is woven across the sky/ . . .And all the phantom, Nature, stands—/With all the music in her tone,/A hollow echo of my own,—/A hollow form with empty hands’” (891). His grief leads him to question whether there is any order to the universe, to doubt that there’s any meaning to the world other than sorrow, and to believe there’s a barrier between humanity and God. The same ideas come up again and again in the sequence.

Another repeated theme addresses questions of why Tennyson is writing these poems. In poem 4, Tennyson observes that he holds it “half a sin/To put in words the grief I feel;/For words, like Nature, half reveal/And half conceal the soul within” (891). The poems give only a partial picture of his grief; however, he goes on to observe that writing them acts as a kind of drug against his sorrow: “A use in measured language lies;/The sad mechanic exercise,/Like dull narcotics, numbing pain” (891).

The same theme comes up again in poem 21, where Tennyson constructs a little dialogue from figures who overhear his poems for Hallam and feel compelled to criticize: one calls him a weakling, another says he’s pretending to be sadder than he really is so that people will notice what a good friend he is, another criticizes him for writing about a personal matter when there are so many political and scientific subjects that he really ought to be writing about instead. In this case, Tennyson’s justification is to compare himself to a songbird and say he’s writing these poems because that’s what poets do:

I do but sing because I must,
And pipe but as the linnets sing;

And one is glad; her note is gay,
For now her little ones have ranged;
And one is sad; her note is changed,
Because her brood is stolen away. (896)

Poems 28, 78, and 106 focus on successive Christmases, giving us insights into how Tennyson’s emotions are changing year by year. Poem 28 describes the sound of Christmas bells ringing out from four surrounding towns, and then Tennyson notes they “Swell out and fail, as if a door/Were shut between me and the sound.” The imagery suggests he’s cut off from the celebration of Christmas, and the final two stanzas give us a picture of someone who’s wrapped up in nearly impenetrable grief:

This year I slept and woke with pain,
I almost wished no more to wake,
And that my hold on life would break
Before I heard those bells again;

But they my troubled spirit rule,
For they controlled me when a boy;
They bring me sorrow touched with joy,
The merry, merry bells of Yule.

Poem 78 begins with a description of a Christmas celebration: holly on the hearth, snow, dancing, singing, games. Slipped into the middle of the description are the lines “But over all things brooding slept/The quiet sense of something lost.” The poem concludes with a mournful observation:

Who showed a token of distress?
No single tear, no mark of pain:
O sorrow, then can sorrow wane?
O grief, can grief be changed to less?

O last regret, regret can die!
No—mixed with all this mystic frame,
Her deep relations are the same,
But with long use her tears are dry.

The change is that Tennyson is not obviously in pain anymore, but it’s not because he’s recovered from his friend’s death: he’s cried so much he can’t cry anymore. It’s an interesting progression from year to year.

In Poem 106, we return to the sound of the Christmas bells, but the mood and the themes have changed: the focus of the poem is not simply on the loss of one person—it now includes a wider field of human affairs. Note the lines when Tennyson writes “The year is dying in the night;/Ring out, wild bells, and let him die” (lines 3-4) and “The year is going, let him go” (line 7). He seems to be saying, with only the barest metaphor, that he’s ready to stop mourning his friend and move on to something else. The third stanza gives that impression as well:

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Again, he saying, almost directly, that he’s finished spending all his energy grieving for Hallam and is now ready to open his mind to broader social concerns, which he addresses in the rest of the poem.

In Poems 55 and 56 introduce a scientific theme—like many people of his day, Tennyson was aware of discoveries in geology and biology, and he was concerned about their implications on religious faith. Poem 55 begins with the thought that our belief in life after death comes from something that God has placed in our soul. Then he notes that this belief seems to be refuted by what we see in Nature:

Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life (lines 5-8)

When we look at the natural world, in other words, we see that it doesn’t really seem to care about individuals at all—it’s main interest is in preserving the species, not the individual. In the next stanza he provides an example: a plant may produce fifty seeds, but only one actually grows into a new plant—the other forty-nine just rot. The logical conclusion, Tennyson seems to suggest, is that Nature doesn’t care about preserving individuals, so why should we believe that God is interested in preserving the individual spirit after death?

Poem 56 picks up on the theme from the previous poem, and takes Tennyson’s despair even further:

“So careful of the type?” but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, “A thousand types are gone;
I care for nothing, all shall go.”

Again, Tennyson is drawing on his knowledge of geology. Fossil evidence reveals that entire species of plants and animals no longer exist. Not only is Nature careless of the individual, it’s also careless of the species. The realization causes Tennyson to consider that all of life is simply chance, that all of our beliefs are completely mistaken.

Man, her last work, who seemed so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law—
Though Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravin, shrieked against his creed—

Notice the Darwinian vision of Nature that Tennyson presents, even though Origin of Species hasn’t been published. The natural world shows us a vision of the survival of the fittest, eat or be eaten—what if, Tennyson asks, all our religious commitments are simply wrong? The poem ends with the faintest hope that these questions can be answered:

O life as futile, then, as frail!
O for thy voice to soothe and bless!
What hope of answer, or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil.

The answers to these questions can only be found beyond the veil of death. Again, this is faint faith—Tennyson is at one of his lowest points.

The turning point of the poem, according to most critics, is found in Poem 95. Tennyson describes an evening gathering in a country home. The rest of the guests go off to bed, and Tennyson by himself outside. He reads over Hallam’s letters, and then he seems to have a kind of mystical experience where he feels a connection with Hallam’s spirit:

So word by word, and line by line,
The dead man touched me from the past,
And all at once it seemed at last
The living soul was flashed on mine.

And mine in this was wound, and whirled
About empyreal heights of thought,
And came on that which is, and caught
The deep pulsations of the world

Aeonian music measuring out
The steps of Time—the shocks of Chance—
The blows of Death. At length my trance
Was canceled, stricken through with doubt.

Tennyson has this moment of contact where he feels as though he has some kind of transcendent insight—he almost immediately begins to doubt, and it’s hard for him to put into words, but the rest of the poem gives us a signal that something significant has changed. The wind rises and begins to move the leaves and the trees: it even seems to say “The dawn, the dawn,” and the sun rises.

And East and West, without a breath,
Mixt their dim lights, like life and death,
To broaden into boundless day.

It’s not that Tennyson’s grief is completely removed at this point, but this does seem to mark a transition from day to night, from darkness to light, from doubt and grief to recovery and faith.

The epilogue of the poem gives a picture of a wedding: Tennyson’s sister, who had been engaged to Hallam, has fallen in love again and is marrying Edmund Lushington. The last few stanzas of this poem are a kind of prayer/blessing that this couple will know happiness and that their children will be a step forward in human development:

a closer link
Betwixt us and the crowning race

Of those that, eye to eye, shall look
On knowledge; under whose command
Is Earth and Earth’s, and in their hand
Is Nature like an open book;

No longer half-akin to brute,
For all we thought and loved and did,
And hoped, and suffered, is but seed
Of what in them is flower and fruit;

Whereof the man that with me trod
This planet was a noble type
Appearing ere the times were ripe,
That friend of mine who lives in God (lines 55-68)

Hallam is evoked as someone who was born before his time, a foreshadowing of a future humanity that will live up to humanity’s promise, that will be wiser and less brutal. The poem ends with an affirmation of faith in God, in humanity, and even in the knowledge that Hallam’s death was not a senseless waste but a forecast of what humanity should and will someday be.

For discussion:

- What do you think of T.S. Eliot's observation that In Memoriam is more remarkable for its doubt than its faith? What sections of the poem struck you as interesting, confusing, remarkable, or troublesome?