In Memoriam Quotes Flashcards
1
Q
Prologue: Forgive these wild and wandering cries, Confusions of a wasted youth; Forgive them where they fail in truth, And in thy wisdom make me wise
A
- /w/ phoneme, lengthens the anguish - paralleled with the final line /w/ phoneme repetition, indicates the transition that occurs across the poem
- “thy” “me” - pronouns highlight the relationship between God and man, repetition of “forgive” evokes prayfulness
- both a foreshadowing preface to, and retrospective reflection on, Tennyson’s emotional journey throughout the poem
- “wild and wandering” - reference to Troilus and Cressida “wild words wander here and there” - feeling of tragic abandonment etc.
- mitigation of the preposition in “confusions…” - mimics the typically dismissive formulation of speech
- “wasted youth” - Arthur, cannot understand the wasted potential, also Tennyson himself ie. admitting his youthful ignorance
2
Q
LV 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;
A
- scientific terminology draws attention to the contemporary scientific influence (especially 1830-1833 Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology)
- deification of nature via capitalisation
- with the scientific developments into astrology - the scale of the universe increases which means the significance of the individual life can no longer be assured - potential implications for the personal relatioship between God and man, metaphor of God as the shepherd etc. (Destabilises the message behind the parable of the Lost Sheep)
3
Q
LVI '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.
A
- requotes himself in order to correct his view - suddenly everything seems able to be falsified and all certainities have been destabilised
- “She” - resorts to the gender binary to emphasise the parallel discrepancy between God and nature, but implicitly to prefigure his subsequent argument that nature is subordinate to God’s control
- potentially also to indicate the distance from the Christian God - pronoun connects this dismissive attitude to the arbitrariness of the ancient gods (King Lear - “as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport”
- at this point - does not question God’s benevolence - questions whether it is possible “Are God and Nature then at strife”
- potentially, however, nature has been subjected to the will of God “a thousand types are gone…” - frustratedly dismissive
4
Q
What is the significance of the form of the poem?
- iambic pulse and regular stanzaic form
A
- appear to be stagnating in the thematic repetition and circularity of the abba structure BUT each stanza becomes woven into a progressive narrative of the bereavement process
- indicates the movement from the individual message surrounding AHH’s death to the larger ideas for humanity and thus not only hope for his friend but for humanity itself
- both stabilising and stagnating
- Michael Wheeler - can be compared to the systolic-diastolic movement of the heart (contraction and expansion) - if AHH’s death was caused by a want of energy to the heart then the poem’s pulse becomes a literary representation of the Romantic reorientation of the mourner rather than the mourned
- encapsulates a form of proto-hypertextuality - each section only exists as an idealised form of Tennyson’s grief/ mourning and cannot exist alone as a full reflection of his grief but only when they are synthesised as a whole can they become an in-depth reflection (each part exists inadequately on its own)
- “believed myself the originator of the metre” - wasn’t until after publication that someone told him that Philip Sidney and Ben Jonson used it
5
Q
LVI 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.
VEIL FOCUS
A
- veil - euphemistic reference to the afterlife
- possibly neo-Platonic ie. there is more going on than we can know (idea of Plato’s cave - we can only experience life in the shadows) - link to ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (continuation of ideas of Plato and the curse of being rendered ignorant to a full view of the earth)
- “veil” - EB Mattes says this might be the allusion to the veiled statue of Isis as discussed in “The Veiled Image at Sais” by Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805) - the truth that exists behind the veil may only be found at the cost of one’s life (potential link in Genesis to Lot’s wife - turned into a pillar of salt for looking back at Sodom)
- the concept of the veil was also enjoyed by Robert Chambers who operated behind the veil of secret authorship and anonymity - his ‘Illustrations of the Author of Waverley’ has a frontispiece of a veiled figure
6
Q
What happens in the epilogue?
A
the marriage of Tennyson’s sister Cecilia to Edmund Lushington
7
Q
How does the marriage of Cecilia and Lushington mirror Tennyson’s grief?
A
- he recognises that it is necessary for him to endure loss but he needs to endure the situation
For I that danced her on my knee,
That watch’d her on her nurse’s arm,
That shielded all her life from harm
“At last must part with her to thee;”
Breathed in her ear. The ring is on,
The wilt thou' answer'd, and again
The wilt thou’ ask’d, till out of twain
“Her sweet `I will’ has made you one.”
8
Q
What does the marriage of Cecilia and Lushington show Tennyson?
A
- God has “madest man” and thus has made the love shared between them possible which would indicate that he will extend his divine love to Arthur in the afterlife
- God gives us an immense capacity for love, encouraging our trust that he acts out of love also
9
Q
Prologue Thou wilt not leave us in the dust: Thou madest man, he knows not why, He thinks he was not made to die; And thou hast made him: thou art just.
A
- “thou wilt not leave us in the dust” - uneasy self-assurance, especially drawing on the similar formation in Psalm XIV
- division between the glory of God and the vulnerability of man’s naivety - indicated by the distancing achieved through the impersonal “man” and third person address
- Sir Thomas Browne ‘Religio Medici’ - “thus we are men, and we know not how”
- was not made to usher in something greater, for life’s greatest purpose to be the significance of death (ie. fossil records, life has to gain greater significance)
10
Q
LIV 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.
A
- sense of surrender in the futility of his position
- “infant” - self-disminishing definition - ignorant, pathetic BUT also abandoned, betrayed
- “light” - truth, enlightenment, hope
- we instinctively ‘cry’ out in frustration when we feel an arbitrary breaking of the human bond, grief renders him paralysed
- suggestion of regression - reduced to an involuntary state of immediate reaction, possible that part of his emotional journey is reaching a more enlightened position on earth but this is paradoxically achieved through acceptance of ignorance
- confusion
- adjustment to our new scientific knowledge
- lack of comprehension
11
Q
“As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport” - King Lear
A
- the play progresses further and further to hopelessness
- nihilism in its starkest form
- no order, no goodness in the universe, only caprice and cruelty
- no order, no goodness in the universe, only caprice and cruelty
12
Q
How might we characterise the difference between LV and LVI and the epilogue?
A
LV and LVI are influenced by Lyell whereas the epilogue is influenced by Robert Chambers
- LV and LVI are the most doubtful which reflects the destabilising effects of Lyell - ie. that the earth was older than the bible said, the various impacts of fossil records ie. how can God allow individuals to go extinct? are our lives merely to “subserve another’s gain”?
- whereas Robert Chambers is much more optimistic, gives a theistic cast to the operation of nature and indicates his belief in the impossibility of nature operating without divine intervention
13
Q
I
“Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drowned”
A
Tucker: ordeal of 1833 taught Tennyson that to clasp grief hard enough was to crystallise melancholia into mourning, to shape a mood into a vector, to mould a state of feeling into a programme for action
14
Q
Prologue
“By faith, and faith alone, embrace
Believing where we cannot prove”
A
- empirical evidence cannot be relied upon
- hierarchy of knowledge
- “and faith alone” - prioritisation and isolation of religious faith mimicked in the subordinate clause which isolates the sentiment from the main clause
15
Q
Prologue
“Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot/ Is on the skull which thou hast made”
A
- EB Mattes - Christ’s victory over death as symbolised in medieval paintings with his foot on the skull
- to have faith is not only in the certainties but in the places we find most contradiction and confusion
- implies that his relationship to nature is conditional, creates nature and does not have any qualms about transgressing the rules he has formulated
- in actuality - death originated as a punishment for humanity, suggests a contradiction in his attitude towards humans also ie. forgiveness or punishment?
