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In Memoriam Week 2
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than never to have loved at all.”
I had no idea that this was the source of that quote. It's much more poignant coming from the death of a loved one.
I love the idea of viewing Tennyson's words in respect to our modern understanding of the grief process. And, no, the stages aren't so separate as they might seem on paper. Much more crossover and flow between them. As your first quite demonstrates. It would be so much tidier if emotions stayed in their clinical confines.
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The first is my brother who acted as pallbearer to a teammate while still in high school. (The young man had been killed in a car accident with a drunk driver.) I was away at college by then, and almost unaware of the impact it must have made on those who knew him, healthy, beautiful, young, and full of promise. I do remember quite clearly how my brother recalled what it was to feel the shift of his friend's body within the coffin they carried. Somehow, that moment must have made the loss very real.
The second is of a woman I knew whose son had traveled overseas to explore medical alternatives for his cancer. I remember thinking that the time spent arranging for and awaiting the return of his body seemed so additionally cruel, on top of her loss. It does make a person wonder how the grieving and healing are potentially distended under those circumstances.
I'm not a fan of the modern funeral. The brutality of a grief-stricken family having to stand beside the coffin of their loved one in order to greet the procession of mourners. But I recognize that there's something psychological in the finality of seeing the body, which seems to move the process along.
Moving from XIV, in which I found a respite from the chaos of mourning, into XV, I found it a puzzling shock. Back into the hurricane we go. In the third stanza (line 286, I think) who is "thy"? The sunbeam? And if so, how do its "motions gently pass Athwart a plane of molten glass"? "Molten glass" is a wonderful phrase. Any ideas what is going on here?
Everyman, thank you for the description of how the cantos in this section move from autumn to winter and the whole emotional sequence here, which was very helpful. I definitely feel that the cantos follow on from one another here, with the images of a day and a path or track running through.In XXIII he is tempted to idealise the time when he and his friend were happy together -
"And all we met was fair and good,
And all was good that Time could bring..."
but then in XXIV the mood shifts and he questions his own memories, in this great opening stanza:
"And was the day of my delight
As pure and perfect as I say?
The very source and fount of Day
Is dash'd with wandering isles of night."
Then XXV shifts the focus again and remembers their time together more realistically, showing how everything wasn't perfect but their love made it seem so - and in XXVI he is still walking along the track, but alone.
Judy wrote: "I definitely feel that the cantos follow on from one another here, with the images of a day and a path or track running through.."That's a nice image.
I definitely feel the changes in mood, tone, feeling, as we move from Canto to Canto. This is presumably a function of the cantos not having been originally intended as a unified whole, but having been written out of order and at various times over about fifteen years, with his deciding at some point to bring them together into a whole. But for me it is a nice reflection of the way the human mind actually works, especially under deep emotion, not neatly and linearly but in fits and starts, moments of grief and moments of peace, thoughts whizzing this way and that way. For me, this experience of a mind at work over time is very well represented in the way the poem is put together.
Thank you Everyman. This makes sense. I've struggled a bit with the order, knowing it was not written as presented. Grief is a funny thing though and lingers over the years.
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I like how you brought that together so neatly: life as a journey, always with burdens to be borne. At times these burdens are lightened by the willing hands and pleasant companionship of our loved ones, but those burdens seem to take on more weight when borne alone and with the additional weight of grief. I think it may not have been that unusual for a young man such as Tennyson to ponder his own mortality in the wake of this tragedy, especially since death at a young age was not so unusual then. Although medical science was making strides, they still had no antibiotics, as Owen Wilson notes in Midnight in Paris!
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The first is my brother who acted as pallbearer to a teammate while still in high school. (The young man had ..."
What tragic stories, Renee, but very poignant examples of the raw emotions Tennyson is expressing. Funerals are excruciating, but you're right about that painful closure being necessary to start healing.
Sections XXI and XXVII refer to linnets. "The linnet's song has been a double-edged sword: along with his attractive plumage it was the main reason why, during the Victorian era, linnets were trapped in vast numbers. For people of that newly urbanised society, keeping a caged songbird in your home was a reminder of their rural roots. So birds such as the linnet, and its equally attractive cousin the goldfinch, suffered incarceration for their beauty." From:https://www.theguardian.com/environme...
I find this repeated reference to a caged song-bird significant. Perhaps the sense that sorrow is a sort of a cage? And the sorrower sings "because I must".
Ginny wrote: "Sections XXI and XXVII refer to linnets. "The linnet's song has been a double-edged sword: along with his attractive plumage it was the main reason why, during the Victorian era, linnets were tra..."
Nice find.
Birds in cages were a significant element in many Victorian novels, particularly of Dickens (Bleak House being a primary example), but also in many other works. I think they brought a touch of the country into the bleak London cityscape, but you're right that they paid highly for their cheerful songs.
Everyman wrote: "Ginny wrote: "Sections XXI and XXVII refer to linnets. "The linnet's song has been a double-edged sword: along with his attractive plumage it was the main reason why, during the Victorian era, li..."
Skipping into the twentieth century, this discussion made me remember a Dylan Thomas poem that begins:
Because the pleasure-bird whistles after the hot wires,
Shall the blind horse sing sweeter?
Convenient bird and beast lie lodged to suffer
The supper and knives of a mood.
Pet birds were blinded because it was believed it made them sing better, and Thomas is using the metaphor to examine is own feelings about the suffering that the world is on the verge of in 1938, and also how suffering and art are entwined.
Linnets, like other birds, are often used to represent the creative spirit because they soar free and high in the air, and migrate to other lands, the linnet apparently eats hemp, which made is poetically associated with mythical and spiritual out of body experiences. As they began to be caught and caged in the Age of Enlightenment, they could also be a metaphor for science and industrialisation trying to control and trap the creative spirit.
William Blake writes:
With sweet May dews my wings were wet,
And Phoebus fir'd my vocal rage;
He caught me in his silken net,
And shut me in his golden cage.
He loves to sit and hear me sing,
Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;
Then stretches out my golden wing,
And mocks my loss of liberty.
Maybe Tennyson's use of the bird is representative of how his poetic spirit is trapped by the grief that is so difficult to express?
Ginny wrote: "Moving from XIV, in which I found a respite from the chaos of mourning, into XV, I found it a puzzling shock. Back into the hurricane we go. In the third stanza (line 286, I think) who is "thy"? Th..."It could be referring to Job 37.18
Hast thou with him spread out the sky, which is strong, and as a molten looking glass?
Which would fit into the sense of the poem as both questioning and ultimately trusting in God and bearing the suffering of a mortal life.
The change from a calm back to 'wild unrest' could be because Tennyson is writing the cantos at different times and different moods and this is a reflection of grief which can sometimes feel numb and other times rage with anger and tears.
Renee wrote: "This section made me think of two people I know with experiences different from mine. The first is my brother who acted as pallbearer to a teammate while still in high school. (The young man had ..."
Thank you for sharing your experiences, Renee. I find funerals very difficult, especially how polite and controlled they all are. The wailing of previous ages and cultures seems a more natural expression of intense grief, but someone who knows history much better than me says that the wailing was often fake and a show rather than real.
Clari wrote: "Pet birds were blinded because it was believed it made them sing better, and Thomas is using the metaphor to examine is own feelings about the suffering that the world is on the verge of in 1938, and also how suffering and art are entwined...."I have no Dylan Thomas on my shelves, and we are traveling to Wales in June. Any poetry edition you would recommend? Available on Kindle, or at least digitally?
I have the collected edition, which is good for me because it has lots of notes with it:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Collected-Po...
If you haven't read them, his short story collection 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog' is very good and has some stories which really evoke his childhood and relationship with Wales. And of course Under Milkwood is worth exploring if you have time.
I found this little gem online too which is one of the short films Dylan Thomas was commissioned to right for the war effort, but I believe was refused because it was considered anti-capitalist.
http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/ite...
I hope that you enjoy Thomas, and also enjoy Wales, whereabouts are you going?
You might find something you like the look of on this list too:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/200...
Clari wrote: "I hope that you enjoy Thomas, and also enjoy Wales, whereabouts are you going?..."Thanks so much for all the references. We are heading for London on June 20, then Wales for 2 weeks starting on July 6. We are a sibling book club, and chose Welsh books for our group, but no one chose Thomas. I thought I would read a bit, and have more to read when we are there.
Ginny wrote: "Clari wrote: "I hope that you enjoy Thomas, and also enjoy Wales, whereabouts are you going?..."Thanks so much for all the references. We are heading for London on June 20, then Wales for 2 weeks..."
I can't get the kindle version from Canada. I'll try again in a day or two. Sometimes if it does change. What a wonderful film. I have shared it with my group,
“To-night the winds begin to rise
And roar from yonder dropping day:
The last red leaf is whirl'd away,
The rooks are blown about the skies;
and brings us up to the first Christmas, which starts in the next section.
During this period, shortly after Hallam’s death in September (we don’t have a date for when the last red leaves are whirled away, but I would guess late October or into November) and up to Christmas, we (or more accurately I) see Tennyson having moved from almost unconsolable grief into, as I read the poem, anger, with perhaps a hint of the possibility in his mind of starting to move beyond straight anger. I know the modern understanding of the states of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – weren’t in use in Tennyson’s day, but that process may be one way of reading the poem, as Tennyson works through those stages. Of course it’s not as clean as just moving from one stage to the next; they overlap, there is regression at times, the movement through the stages is by fits and starts, and some people perhaps never pass through the full set of stages, but it may be useful as one approach (of many possible approaches) to the work to consider to what extent these stages are and are not tracked by the progress of the poem.
XVI starts:
“What words are these have falle'n from me?
Can calm despair and wild unrest
Be tenants of a single breast,
Or sorrow such a changeling be?”
These seem to me to indicate a mind still in the stages of denial and anger. Despair and wild unrest. He is still, it seems to me, in those early stages of grief.
XVII returns, with IX, to the coming of the ship bringing Hallam’s body home. Until it arrives, there can be no funeral, and without a funeral, can healing even start to begin?
This and the next few cantos are still centered around Hallam himself. By XXI he has been buried:
“I sing to him that rests below,
And, since the grasses round me wave,
I take the grasses of the grave,
And make them pipes whereon to blow.”
In XXII he moves from remembrance of times past to the Shadow taking Hallam and then to his awareness of his own mortality, unusual perhaps in one still young himself, but he complains that the Shadow
“ bore thee where I could not see
Nor follow, tho' I walk in haste,
And think, that somewhere in the waste
The Shadow sits and waits for me.”
The section then continues its emphasis on Hallam and Tennyson and their relationship; he is still mired in thinking on their lives together. For me, though, there is the beginning of a turning in the last canto of this week’s reading. The opening seems to be right out of the anger stage of grief:
“I envy not in any moods
The captive void of noble rage,”
but turns to what may be the beginning of the release of some of his anger with what are I think certainly one of the hundred best known lines in English literature, and perhaps one of the top 10:
“Tis better to have loved and lost
than never to have loved at all.”
He may still be angry at the Shadow for taking Hallam, but there is here, if read the lines right, the very beginning of a thought going beyond mere anger into a sense that there was something worthwhile and valuable that endures beyond Hallam’s death.
This is a very rudimentary summary of my personal sense of what is happening in this section of the poem. But there are many potential readings, and I am eager to hear those of other readers.