Excerpt from In Memoriam A. H. H.

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I’ve written of Alfred Tennyson here at Word and Song, and of his extraordinary friendship with Arthur Henry Hallam, his schoolmate at Oxford. Hallam died young, when he was away in Italy, and his death shook his friend Alfred to the core, and Emily Tennyson too, because Arthur and she were engaged to be married. We must try very hard to understand what it meant to be a friend, in a time when people were not distracted by a thousand machines that would get between them and others, or between them and the natural world, even between them and God. Think about it. It’s an October evening, and you’ve just had supper, and the weather is mild, and there you are in the family house with your father and mother, your sisters and brothers, perhaps a neighbor from down the road, perhaps your friend from school — so what do you do? You played cards or chess, perhaps. You sang songs while somebody played on the piano or the fiddle. You read aloud to each other. You talked. What might you talk about? Anything at all that exercises the body and the mind of man. What were those conversations like? I think we might get a sense of them by “eavesdropping” on printed sermons given before big congregations of people by no means all educated, such as John Henry Newman gave, or by reading the diaries of soldiers, or the letters people wrote to each other, often in the heat of emergencies, such as those that William T. Sherman, the shrewd and formidable general, and his brother John Sherman the senator, wrote to one another during and after the Civil War. In any case — people did things together, and they talked.

In this selection from In Memoriam, Tennyson imagines what life might have been like had Arthur not died. It’s a various picture. There are the home fires, and he, the poet, welcomed as an honored guest in the house of his sister and his dear friend, now his brother-in-law, and the little boys come running up to him, calling out, “Uncle!” And there are conversations, “table-talk,” sometimes “deep dispute,” about some political or philosophical or religious point, often “jest,” but always warm friendship, always love. And he imagines the years moving on, crowning Arthur’s good life with success and the esteem of his fellow men, in the time of “reverence and the silver hair.” Finally, there would come to his friend, and to himself, that day of parting with the earth. It seems strange, in a poem that was inspired by the early death of a dear friend, that the poet should imagine what would have been, in future years, future even to the time when he is writing these words, a death in old age, as calm as lying down to sleep. Then there is the time beyond time, when “He that died in Holy Land” would welcome them, as if they were “a single soul.”

But then the present comes back to him, and he blames his “backward fancy” for waking in him again “the old bitterness.” Which of all English poets had the finest “ear,” for interweaving sound with significance? I think that Tennyson might get more votes than anybody, and the last three lines of this section show why. “The old bitterness” has to be pronounced, as the meter rules, with “the” and “old” clamped together in a single-syllable vise. You can do that, because the first word ends with a vowel and the second one begins with a vowel. But the effect in this particular line is jarring, and it’s meant to be — we read the line with a hitch, because “the old bitterness” isn’t the subject of the sentence, but the object, with the verb hanging out at the end of the line before it. The alliteration is important, too. Think of alliteration as front-end rhyme, and keep in mind that in the hands of a master, rhyme binds together words that would otherwise not be bound. Here we have “bitterness” and “break,” in one line, and again a verb hanging, as it were broken, at the end of a line, waiting for its object, which then comes in the last line: “The low beginnings of content.” Maestro.

“Childhood Friends,” Carl Spitweg. Public Domain.

When I contemplate all alone
The life that had been thine below, 
And fix my thoughts on all the glow
To which thy crescent would have grown,

I see thee sitting crowned with good, 
A central warmth diffusing bliss 
In glance and smile, and clasp and kiss,
On all the branches of thy blood ;

Thy blood, my friend, and partly mine; 
For now the day was drawing on,
When thou shouldst link thy life with one
Of mine own house, and boys of thine

Had babbled ' Uncle ' on my knee; 
But that remorseless iron hour
Made cypress of her orange flower,
Despair of hope, and earth of thee.

I seem to meet their least desire,
To clap their cheeks, to call them mine.
I see their unborn faces shine 
Beside the never-lighted fire.

I see myself an honored guest,
Thy partner in the flowery walk 
Of letters, genial table-talk,
Or deep dispute, and graceful jest;

While now thy prosperous labor fills
The lips of men with honest praise, 
And sun by sun the happy days
Descend below the golden hills

With promise of a morn as fair;
And all the train of bounteous hours
Conduct, by paths of growing powers,
To reverence and the silver hair;

Till slowly worn her earthly robe,
Her lavish mission richly wrought,
Leaving great legacies of thought,
Thy spirit should fail from off the globe ;

What time mine own might also flee,
As linked with thine in love and fate,
And, hovering o'er the dolorous strait
To the other shore, involved in thee,

Arrive at last the blessed goal,
And He that died in Holy Land 
Would reach us out the shining hand,
And take us as a single soul.

What reed was that on which I leant? 
Ah, backward fancy, wherefore wake 
The old bitterness again, and break
The low beginnings of content ?