23 Prologue, VII, LIV, LV, LVI, XCV, XCVI, and CVI of In Memoriam (1850/1906)
Alfred Tennyson
In Memoriam by Lord Alfred Tennyson was first published in 1850; however, most modern editions of In Memoriam use the 1906 edition edited by Hallam Tennyson, Alfred’s son. A digitized version of Hallam’s edition is available through the Library of Congress. The following poems (the prologue, VII, LIV, LV, LVI, XCV, XCVI, and CVI) are in the public domain.
The editorial notes are available under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. Unless otherwise attributed, they were written by Dr. Kylee-Anne Hingston at the University of Saskatchewan.
Prologue, VII, LIV, LV, LVI, XCV, XCVI, and CVI of In Memoriam[1]
IN MEMORIAM A.H.H.[2]
OBITT MDCCCXXXIII
Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone,[3] embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove;
5
Thine are these orbs of light and shade;
Thou madest Life in man and brute;
Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made.
Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:[4]
10
Thou madest man, he knows not why,
He thinks he was not made to die;
And thou hast made him: thou art just.
Thou seemest human and divine,
The highest, holiest manhood, thou:
15
Our wills are ours, we know not how;
Our wills are ours, to make them thine.[5]
Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of thee,
20
And thou, O Lord, art more than they.
We have but faith: we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see;[6]
And yet we trust it comes from thee,
A beam in darkness: let it grow.
25
Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before,
But vaster. We are fools and slight;
30
We mock thee when we do not fear:
But help thy foolish ones to bear;
Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light.
Forgive what seem’d my sin in me;
What seem’d my worth since I began;
35
For merit lives from man to man,
And not from man, O Lord, to thee.
Forgive my grief for one removed,
Thy creature, whom I found so fair.
I trust he lives in thee, and there
40
I find him worthier to be loved.
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.
1849.[7]
VII.
Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,
5
A hand that can be clasp’d no more—
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.
He is not here; but far away
10
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.
LIV.
Oh, yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;
5
That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroy’d,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;
That not a worm is cloven in vain;
10
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivell’d in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another’s gain.
Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
15
At last—far off—at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.
So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
20
And with no language but a cry.
LV.
The wish, that of the living whole
No life may fail beyond the grave,[8]
Derives it[9] not from what we have
The likest God within the soul?
5
Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type[10]she seems,
So careless of the single life;
That I, considering everywhere
10
Her secret meaning in her deeds,
And finding that of fifty seeds
She often brings but one to bear,
I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
15
Upon the great world’s altar-stairs
That slope thro’ darkness up to God,
I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
20
And faintly trust the larger hope.
LVI.
‘So careful of the type?’ but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
I care for nothing, all shall go.
5
‘Thou makest thine appeal to me:
I bring to life, I bring to death:
The spirit does but mean the breath:
I know no more.’ And he, shall he,
Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,
10
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law—
15
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed—
Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
20
Or seal’d within the iron hills?
No more? A monster then, a dream,
A discord. Dragons of the prime,
That tare each other in their slime,
Were mellow music match’d with him.
25
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.[13]
XCV.
By night we linger’d on the lawn,
For underfoot the herb was dry;
And genial warmth; and o’er the sky
The silvery haze of summer drawn;
5
And calm that let the tapers burn
Unwavering: not a cricket chirr’d:
The brook alone far-off was heard,
And on the board the fluttering urn:
And bats went round in fragrant skies,
10
And wheel’d or lit the filmy shapes
That haunt the dusk, with ermine capes
And woolly breasts and beaded eyes;
While now we sang old songs that peal’d
From knoll to knoll, where, couch’d at ease,
15
The white kine[14] glimmer’d, and the trees
Laid their dark arms about the field.
But when those others, one by one,
Withdrew themselves from me and night,
And in the house light after light
20
Went out, and I was all alone,
A hunger seized my heart; I read
Of that glad year which once had been,
In those fall’n leaves which kept their green,
The noble letters of the dead:
25
And strangely on the silence broke
The silent-speaking words, and strange
Was love’s dumb cry defying change
To test his worth; and strangely spoke
The faith, the vigour, bold to dwell
30
On doubts that drive the coward back,
And keen thro’ wordy snares to track
Suggestion to her inmost cell.
So word by word, and line by line,
The dead man touch’d me from the past,
35
And all at once it seem’d at last
The living soul was flash’d on mine,
And mine in this was wound, and whirl’d
About empyreal heights of thought,
And came on that which is, and caught
40
The deep pulsations of the world,
Æonian[15]music measuring out
The steps of Time—the shocks of Chance—
The blows of Death. At length my trance
Was cancell’d, stricken thro’ with doubt.
45
Vague words! but ah, how hard to frame
In matter-moulded forms of speech,
Or ev’n for intellect to reach
Thro’ memory that which I became:
Till now the doubtful dusk reveal’d
50
The knolls once more where, couch’d at ease,
The white kine glimmer’d, and the trees
Laid their dark arms about the field:
And suck’d from out the distant gloom
A breeze began to tremble o’er
55
The large leaves of the sycamore,
And fluctuate all the still perfume,
And gathering freshlier overhead,
Rock’d the full-foliaged elms, and swung
The heavy-folded rose, and flung
60
The lilies to and fro, and said
‘The dawn, the dawn,’ and died away;
And East and West, without a breath,
Mixt their dim lights, like life and death,[16]
To broaden into boundless day.
XCVI.
You say, but with no touch of scorn,
Sweet-hearted, you, whose light-blue eyes
Are tender over drowning flies,
You tell me, doubt is Devil-born.
5
I know not: one indeed I knew
In many a subtle question versed,
Who touch’d a jarring lyre at first,
But ever strove to make it true:[17]
Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,
10
At last he beat his music out.
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
He fought his doubts and gather’d strength,
He would not make his judgment blind,
15
He faced the spectres of the mind
And laid them: thus he came at length
To find a stronger faith his own;
And Power was with him in the night,
Which makes the darkness and the light,
20
And dwells not in the light alone,
But in the darkness and the cloud,
As over Sinaï’s peaks of old,
While Israel made their gods of gold
Altho’ the trumpet blew so loud.
CVI.
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
5
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
10
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
15
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.
Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
20
But ring the fuller minstrel in.
Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
25
Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold,
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
Ring in the valiant man and free,
30
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.
Works Cited
Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford UP, Sept. 2020, www.oed.com/.
Tennyson, Alfred. “In Memoriam A.H.H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII [all 133 poems].” Edited by Ian Lancanshire. Representative Poetry Online, U of Toronto Libraries, 1998, rpo.library.utoronto.ca/content/memoriam-h-h-obiit-mdcccxxxiii-all-133-poems.
———. In Memoriam. Edited by Hallam Tennyson, Macmillan and Co., 1906. Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/06002094/.
- If you want to read all 133 poems in the series, Representative Poetry Online has them all freely available. ↵
- Arthur Henry Hallam (1811–1833), Tennyson’s best friend and the fiancé of Tennyson’s sister. ↵
- This refers to a doctrine known as sola fide, a key tenet of many strands of Protestant Christianity. It is the belief that only by faith, not by reason or action, that humankind can receive salvation from God. ↵
- This line could refer to Genesis, which describes humanity being created by God from dust: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (KJV, Gen 2.7); later in Genesis, God describes death as being returned to dust: “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (KJV, Gen 3.19). However, it could also refer to Psalm 22.15: “My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; and thou hast brought me into the dust of death” (KJV). Either way, these lines associate dust with death and indicate the speaker (and other believers) being brought out of that dust via spiritual redemption. ↵
- This refers to the theological doctrine of free will, which argues that God gave humans free will so that they would choose to follow him freely. ↵
- These lines allude to the following scriptures: “For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for?” (KJV, Rom. 8.24) and “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (KJV, Heb. 11.1). ↵
- Sixteen years after Hallam’s death and one year before the poem’s publication. The date additionally suggests that the opinions expressed in the prologue have the final say; that is, it implies that, despite all the battles between faith and doubt in the poems that follow the prologue, faith ultimately wins the war. ↵
- While this stanza describes the speaker’s hope for life beyond death, it also challenges theologies of Hell. During the Victorian era, many questioned how a just and loving God could possibly send any part of his creation to an everlasting Hell, a long-held theological doctrine of punishment for sin. ↵
- That is, the wish. ↵
- That is, of the collective whole (e.g., the species). ↵
- That is, Nature. ↵
- Referring to the archealogical and geological discovery of extinct species. ↵
- Behind the veil is a euphemism for dying, meaning to gain “entry into the afterlife or into the presence of God” and “allu[des] to the veil of the Jewish Temple” (“Veil, N.(1)” def. P.3.). In the Temple, this veil separated the holiest of holies—the place where God’s presence was strongest (see Lev. 16.2)—from the rest of the Temple. Hebrews 6.19–20, in particular, connects passing through the veil with the afterlife. ↵
- Kine is an archaic plural for cow that is at times still used in Scotland (“Kine, N.(1)”). ↵
- Æonian is an adjective that describes something as “lasting an aeon,” implying an “eternal, everlasting” quality (“Aeonian, Adj.”). ↵
- The blending of sunrise and starshine, of life and death, faith and doubt. ↵
- Hallam, too, had written poetry. ↵
