Elegy and Epithalamium in In Memoriam

PETER HINCHCLIFFE Elegy and Epithalamium in In Memoriam If literature is a map, then scholars and critics are surveyors and cartographers. Our task is to take new bearings and to draw new contours, not just to complete the work of our predecessors, but to determine where we have moved from those predecessors in relation to the landmarks that we study. As literary works recede into the past, some perspectives - immediacy of response and personal recollection, for example - become closed to us, but new perspectives open out. Critical studies of In Memoriam written during the last twenty-five years show us a poem more complex and serious than readers of the two previous generations would have been willing to accept, and a different kind of poem from the one that Tennyson's Victorian readers acclaimed. Yet despite the increasing sophistication of our map-making skills In Memoriam remains stubbornly puzzling, and the questions that puzzle its readers can be reduced to two: 'Is it possible to apprehend the In Memoriam sequence as a whole poem?' and 'What kind of poem is it?' In other words, the central issues are structural and generic, and if we could give assured answers to those two questions, we would know better how to read In Memoriam. The difficulties of apprehending the structure of In Memoriam are obvious and formidable. The 133individual poems were written from time to time over seventeen years, and not in continuous order. Though scholars have been able to date the composition of many sections, we know very little about Tennyson's act of arranging or how he made his final choice of inclusion. (Not all the sections that Tennyson wrote made their way into the final version of In Memoriam. See Appendix A to Christopher Ricks's Poems o/Tennyson.) Within the published text we find an encyclopedic variety of subject-matter and many different signs of organization - recurring anniversaries, repeated metaphors, patterns of syntax, etc - yet each of these signs just misses becoming definitive. The ending of In Memoriam is problematic in a way that some readers find gravely disturbing. Tennyson's own comments about the structure of In Memoriam are tantalizing gems of reticence and indirection, worthy of the Ancient Sage or of Merlin himself. The common element in all these difficulties is that author and poem are always saying both too much and too little, but Tennyson seems to have found this a necessary condition of writing In Memoriam: 'words, like Nature, half reveal/And half conceal UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 52, NUMBER 3, SPRING 19BJ 0042-0247IBY0500-o241-Q262$oI .501o Q UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS 242 PETER HINCHCLIFFE the Soul within' (5.3-4). Finally, of all the long poems in English, In Memoriam insists most strongly on the singularity of its parts. Sorrow holds it sin and shame to draw The deepestmeasurefrom the chords: Nor dare she trust a larger lay, But rather loosens from the lip Short swallow-flights of song, that dip Their wings in tears, and skim away. (48.11- 16) When we consider the genre of In Memoriam, we encounter again this same difficulty of too much and too little. In Memoriam appears too long to be read with assurance as an elegy, too short to be taken for anything else. Several recent critics have been troubled by what seems to be its displacement or rejection of the pastoral motifs that are conventional in elegy. Others, aware that the use of traditional genres by nineteenth-century English writers has itself become a critical problem, look to other forms than elegy to explain what kind of poem it is. As it does with its indications of structure, In Memoriam provides the reader with a bewildering variety of generic signals. Epic, drama, novel, confessional autobiography, sonnet sequence, collection of aphorisms - all have been claimed as formal models for In Memoriam, and epic and sonnet sequence, at least, are hinted at by Tennyson himself. These generic claims are competing, not complementary; I do not see how any poetic sequence could fulfil more than a couple of them. Moreover, just to list the possible genres is to realize that my two initial questions are...