The Repression of the Return: Tennyson’s In Memoriam and the Art of the Unheard Echo

Form and psychology share a longstanding relationship within Tennyson studies. This fact was notoriously exemplified by W. H. Auden, when he elided his formal appreciations (Tennyson “had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet”) into a psychological appraisal: “he was also undoubtedly the stupidest; there was little about melancholia that he didn’t know; there was little else that he did.”¹ T. S. Eliot had gone the same route: “Tennyson is the great master of metric as well as of melancholia; I do not think any poet in English has ever had a finer ear for vowel sound, as well as a subtler feeling for some moods of anguish.”² These men were likely (Auden most certainly) responding to Lyric LIV from In Memoriam:

So runs my dream: but what am I?   An infant crying in the night:   An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry.

(ll. 17–20; emphasis added)³

Prosody does seem to reinforce a certain melancholic fixation. The terminal “cry” echoes the midline “crying” of the inner couplet. And that thrice-iterated “cry” extends a much older line of repeats—a lament that began with Hallam’s death in 1833 and persisted through all 133 lyrics and seventeen compositional years of Tennyson’s In Memoriam. It is possible that Hallam’s death re-invoked still earlier memories of morbidity and mortality: the passing of Tennyson’s father (1831), the madness of his brother Edward (institutionalized in 1833), the melancholic derangement of his brothers Charles and Septimus (Tennyson feared he was next in line), not to mention the terrors of Tennyson’s youth—his Aunt Bourne’s “violent” Calvinism or his father’s violent alcoholism.⁴ But W. H. Auden suspected something even deeper—some unwritten, unprocessed trauma packed into the infantine “cry” of Lyric LIV. “Emotions of early childhood are hard to express,” he writes, “because the original events associated with them are not remembered” (p. xvi). Hallam’s death gave occasion and vent to these earlier shocks and tremors, but really Tennyson’s grief issues straight from the nursery (p. xvi).

This, for readers like Auden, is the regressive essence of Tennyson’s verbal repeats. A local stammer of I’s and cries reinforces the stanza’s eternal ABBA, the poem’s inbuilt incapacity to get on with it, part and parcel of the elegy’s broader rhythms of melancholic recurrence: the anniversaries of a life now deceased, the Christmases that mark his absence, the memories of Cambridge, and, beneath it all, the recalcitrant half-memories of infancy and youth. In a word, Tennysonian repetition takes us beyond—well beyond—the pleasure principle.

Of course “beyond the pleasure principle” is also beyond conscious volition. It’s a tenet of Freudian psychoanalysis that repetition happens just south of consciousness (the patient is obliged to repeat what he cannot or will not properly remember),⁵ and Tennyson’s readers tend likewise to find that a verbal repeat suggests some deeper, preverbal burden—such as the poet himself conveys in Lyric IV:

Something it is which thou hast lost,   Some pleasure from thine early years. . . . Such clouds of nameless trouble . . .

(ll. 9–10, 13)

But critics have taken even the most localized repetitions (rhymes, alliterations) as so many symptoms of this central, “nameless trouble” (Peter Sacks has no difficulty calling it unconscious trouble).⁶ Thus have Tennyson’s words come to signal precisely that “abject space beyond words,” to quote from Aidan Day; and likewise his assonantal patterns register a psychological “grotesque” that “lies not at the verbal surface . . . but in areas subliminally intimated which exceed artistic patterning.”⁷ A similar (though finer) logic undergirds Seamus Perry’s reading of the above-quoted Lyric LIV: the “pervasive ‘i’ rhyme,” the echoing “cry,” bespeaks an “unshiftably forlorn . . . ‘I,’” even whispers of some “violence / A long way back,” to borrow a phrase which Perry quotes from Philip Larkin.⁸ He notes the Laureate’s unhappy, and quite possibly abused, childhood years: psychobiographical fodder which Perry treats cautiously but which nonetheless...