"The Globe we groan in": Astronomical Distance and Stellar Decay in In Memoriam

TENNYSON SCHOLARSHIP HAS YET TO ACCOUNT FOR THE IMPORTANT CONNECTIONS between the poet's lifelong preoccupation with astronomy and his larger poetic project. Astronomy fascinated Tennyson for its own sake, and also, I will argue, because it exposed a particular set of intellectual problems. ¹ Tennyson's tutor at Cambridge (1828-1831) was the natural theologian William Whewell, who went on to write the 1833 Bridgewater Treatise On Astronomy and General Physics. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, Tennyson followed contemporary debates in astronomy. He owned Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences from the Earliest to the Present Times (1837), John Pringle Nichol's popular Views of the Architecture of the Heavens (1837), John Herschel's Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1830), and Mary Somerville's On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1835). ² He also appears to have acquired both Whewell's Bridgewater Treatise and Robert Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), which begins with an evolutionary account of the origins of the universe. ³ Later in life, he had his own two-inch telescope at Aldworth and visited more powerful observatories to view double stars, and nebulae such as those in Cassiopeia and Lyra. ⁴ His friend Norman Lockyer, an innovator in the recent science of spectroscopy, ⁵ commented that Tennyson's "mind is saturated with astronomy" (Hallam Tennyson, 2:381). In later decades, Tennyson continued to follow developments in the new field of astrophysics, building up a substantial library. ⁶ He was particularly interested toward the end of his life in "the spectrum analysis of light, and the photographs which reveal starlight in the interstellar spaces where stars were hitherto undreamt of " (Hallam Tennyson, 2:408).

How did Tennyson's interest in astronomy infuse the form and subject matter of his poetry? A. C. Bradley has asserted that Tennyson is "the only one of our great poets . . . to whose habitual way of seeing, imagining, or thinking it makes any real difference that Laplace, or for that matter Copernicus, ever lived." ⁷ I will argue that what drew Tennyson to astronomy as a poetic resource are the lessons it teaches about the fragile relation between human sensory perception and conceptual ideas.

Astronomy presents peculiar challenges to sensory perception. In astronomical observation, vision has a tendency to distort, whereas in ordinary experience, one depends on vision to judge distances accurately. To do so, Richard Gregory explains, it is "necessary that retinal images should be calibrated against direct measures, such as touching objects or walking towards them and recording the size-change of the eye." ⁸ Neither is possible when observing celestial bodies. At such distances, vision flattens out what one sees. Astronomy pushes discrepancies between perceptual and conceptual knowledge to their most extreme. Our senses tell us that the sun is a luminous disk that rises and sets, the ground we walk on a solid, stationary expanse. Intellectually we know that what we see is not accurate, but that knowledge does not affect our sensory perception (Gregory, pp. 104, 105). By "perceptual" I mean those mental events based on sensory perception; by "conceptual," simply abstract ideas or beliefs.

While references to astronomy appear in Tennyson's poetry throughout his career, In Memoriam A.H.H. shows the most sustained preoccupation with astronomical images and ideas. Tennyson's poetry reveals an unexpected affinity between his work as an elegist and the concerns of the nineteenth-century astronomer. The elegy is famously unprecedented in both its length and in the time it took to write, the seventeen years between Hallam's death in 1833 and the poem's 1850 publication. ⁹ Its 133 sections address Hallam's death from a remarkable variety of perspectives. The poem encompasses wrenching portraits of different manifestations of grief, attempts at connection with the dead through memory and the imagination, the gradual internalization of the deceased, and philosophical speculations given...