United States or Bulgaria ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But by 1828-1830 men were less joyous in their escape from all that had hitherto consoled and fortified humanity. Long before he dreamed of In Memoriam, in the Poems chiefly Lyrical of 1830 Tennyson had written "'Yet, said I, in my morn of youth, The unsunn'd freshness of my strength, When I went forth in quest of truth, 'It is man's privilege to doubt. . . . Ay me!
The closing lines of In Memoriam and Crossing the Bar show how triumphantly he met all the doubts and the skepticism of the age. Like Milton, Tennyson received much of his inspiration from books, especially from the classical writers; but this characteristic was more than counterbalanced by his acute observation and responsiveness to the thought of the age.
People, I mean, like Arthur Hallam, whose letters and remains are fearfully pompous and tiresome and who yet had In Memoriam written about him, and who was described by Gladstone as the most perfect human being, physically, intellectually and morally, he had ever seen.
And while he is thus busily pulling down the old scaffolding, he is calmly beginning to consider the practical results. This is his method of "leaving the world a little better than he found it." He professes to understand and appreciate "In Memoriam." Has he ever reflected on the lines: "O thou that after toil and storm," when the practical conclusion is
No biographer tells us whether this was a personal complaint or a mere set of verses on an imaginary occasion. In In Memoriam Tennyson speaks out concerning the loss of a friend. In Maud, as in Locksley Hall, he makes his hero reveal the agony caused by the loss of a mistress.
There is not ill Adonais that note of personal bereavement which wails through Tennyson's 'In Memoriam' or Cowley's 'Ode on the Death of Mr. Hervey'. Much, especially in the earlier stanzas, is common form. The Muse Urania is summoned to lament, and a host of personified abstractions flit before us, "like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream"
Long before the Free Kirk had been born, she and all her family had been Dissenters of some kind or other. And yet her life and her home were affected by this Episcopal "In Memoriam" in a great number of small, dominating ways, so that in the course of years she had learned to respect a ceremonial that she did not endorse.
Had In Memoriam been then written, a more exact parallel might have been found in Tennyson's warning to the young enthusiast: "See thou, that countest reason ripe In holding by the law within, Thou fail not in a world of sin, And ev'n for want of such a type." The story is for the most part admirably told.
Of Hallam, whose name is for ever linked with his own, Tennyson said that he would have been a great man, but not a great poet; "he was as near perfection as mortal man could be." His scanty remains are chiefly notable for his divination of Tennyson as a great poet; for the rest, we can only trust the author of In Memoriam and the verdict of tradition.
If we can show that Browning had a definite ideal of beauty and loyally pursued it, it is not necessary to prove that he could have written In Memoriam if he had tried. Browning has suffered far more injustice from his admirers than from his opponents, for his admirers have for the most part got hold of the matter, so to speak, by the wrong end.
Word Of The Day