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4.7: from In Memoriam A. H. H.

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    3125
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    Alfred, Lord Tennyson

    Obiit MDCCCXXXIII[1]

    Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
    Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
    By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
    Believing where we cannot prove;

    Thine are these orbs of light and shade[2];
    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:
    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.
    Our wills are ours, we know not how;
    Our wills are ours, to make them thine.

    Our little systems[3] have their day;
    They have their day and cease to be:
    They are but broken lights of thee,
    And thou, O Lord, art more than they.

    We have but faith: we cannot know;
    For knowledge is of things we see
    And yet we trust it comes from thee,
    A beam in darkness: let it grow.

    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[4],

    But vaster. We are fools and slight;
    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;
    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
    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.[5]

    I

    I held it truth, with him who sings
    To one clear harp in divers tones[6],
    That men may rise on stepping-stones
    Of their dead selves to higher things.

    But who shall so forecast the years
    And find in loss a gain to match?
    Or reach a hand thro’ time to catch
    The far-off interest of tears?

    Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown’d,
    Let darkness keep her raven gloss:
    Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss,
    To dance with death, to beat the ground,

    Than that the victor Hours should scorn
    The long result of love, and boast,
    ‘Behold the man that loved and lost,
    But all he was is overworn.’

    II

    Old Yew, which graspest at the stones
    That name the under-lying dead,
    Thy fibres net the dreamless head,
    Thy roots are wrapt about the bones.

    The seasons bring the flower again,
    And bring the firstling to the flock;
    And in the dusk of thee, the clock[7]
    Beats out the little lives of men.

    O, not for thee the glow, the bloom,
    Who changest not in any gale,
    Nor branding summer suns avail
    To touch thy thousand years of gloom[8]:

    And gazing on thee, sullen tree,
    Sick for thy stubborn hardihood,
    I seem to fail from out my blood
    And grow incorporate into thee.

    III

    O Sorrow, cruel fellowship,
    O Priestess in the vaults of Death,
    O sweet and bitter in a breath,
    What whispers from thy lying lip?

    ‘The stars,’ she whispers, ‘blindly run[9];
    A web is wov’n across the sky;
    From out waste places comes a cry,
    And murmurs from the dying sun:

    ‘And all the phantom, Nature, stands?
    With all the music in her tone,
    A hollow echo of my own,?
    A hollow form with empty hands.’

    And shall I take a thing so blind,
    Embrace her as my natural good;
    Or crush her, like a vice of blood,
    Upon the threshold of the mind?

    IV

    To Sleep I give my powers away;
    My will is bondsman to the dark;
    I sit within a helmless bark,
    And with my heart I muse and say:

    O heart, how fares it with thee now,
    That thou should’st fail from thy desire,
    Who scarcely darest to inquire,
    ‘What is it makes me beat so low?’

    Something it is which thou hast lost,
    Some pleasure from thine early years.
    Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears,
    That grief hath shaken into frost!

    Such clouds of nameless trouble cross
    All night below the darken’d eyes;
    With morning wakes the will, and cries,
    ‘Thou shalt not be the fool of loss.’

    V

    I sometimes hold it half a sin
    To put in words the grief I feel;
    For words, like Nature, half reveal
    And half conceal the Soul within.

    But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
    A use in measured language lies;
    The sad mechanic exercise,
    Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

    In words, like weeds[10], I’ll wrap me o’er,
    Like coarsest clothes against the cold:
    But that large grief which these enfold
    Is given in outline and no more.

    VI

    One writes, that ‘Other friends remain,’
    That ‘Loss is common to the race’?
    And common is the commonplace,
    And vacant chaff well meant for grain.

    That loss is common would not make
    My own less bitter, rather more:
    Too common! Never morning wore
    To evening, but some heart did break.

    O father, wheresoe’er thou be,
    Who pledgest now thy gallant son;
    A shot, ere half thy draught be done,
    Hath still’d the life that beat from thee.

    O mother, praying God will save
    Thy sailor,—while thy head is bow’d,
    His heavy-shotted hammock-shroud[11]
    Drops in his vast and wandering grave.

    Ye know no more than I who wrought
    At that last hour to please him well;
    Who mused on all I had to tell,
    And something written, something thought;

    Expecting still his advent home;
    And ever met him on his way
    With wishes, thinking, ‘here to-day,’
    Or ‘here to-morrow will he come.’

    O somewhere, meek, unconscious dove[12],
    That sittest ranging golden hair;
    And glad to find thyself so fair,
    Poor child, that waitest for thy love!

    For now her father’s chimney glows
    In expectation of a guest;
    And thinking ‘this will please him best,’
    She takes a riband or a rose;

    For he will see them on to-night;
    And with the thought her colour burns;
    And, having left the glass, she turns
    Once more to set a ringlet right;

    And, even when she turn’d, the curse
    Had fallen, and her future Lord
    Was drown’d in passing thro’ the ford,
    Or kill’d in falling from his horse.

    O what to her shall be the end?
    And what to me remains of good?
    To her, perpetual maidenhood,
    And unto me no second friend.

    VII

    Dark house[13], 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,

    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
    The noise of life begins again,
    And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
    On the bald street breaks the blank day.

    VIII

    A happy lover who has come
    To look on her that loves him well,
    Who ‘lights and rings the gateway bell,
    And learns her gone and far from home;

    He saddens, all the magic light
    Dies off at once from bower and hall,
    And all the place is dark, and all
    The chambers emptied of delight:

    So find I every pleasant spot
    In which we two were wont to meet,
    The field, the chamber, and the street,
    For all is dark where thou art not.

    Yet as that other, wandering there
    In those deserted walks, may find
    A flower beat with rain and wind,
    Which once she foster’d up with care;

    So seems it in my deep regret,
    O my forsaken heart, with thee
    And this poor flower of poesy
    Which little cared for fades not yet.

    But since it pleased a vanish’d eye[14],
    I go to plant it on his tomb,
    That if it can it there may bloom,
    Or, dying, there at least may die.

    IX

    Fair ship, that from the Italian shore[15]
    Sailest the placid ocean-plains
    With my lost Arthur’s loved remains,
    Spread thy full wings, and waft him o’er.

    So draw him home to those that mourn
    In vain; a favourable speed
    Ruffle thy mirror’d mast, and lead
    Thro’ prosperous floods his holy urn.

    All night no ruder air perplex
    Thy sliding keel, till Phosphor[16], bright
    As our pure love, thro’ early light
    Shall glimmer on the dewy decks.

    Sphere all your lights around, above;
    Sleep, gentle heavens, before the prow;
    Sleep, gentle winds, as he sleeps now,
    My friend, the brother of my love;

    My Arthur, whom I shall not see
    Till all my widow’d race be run;
    Dear as the mother to the son,
    More than my brothers are to me.

    X

    I hear the noise about thy keel;
    I hear the bell struck in the night:
    I see the cabin-window bright;
    I see the sailor at the wheel.

    Thou bring’st the sailor to his wife,
    And travell’d men from foreign lands;
    And letters unto trembling hands;
    And, thy dark freight, a vanish’d life.

    So bring him; we have idle dreams:
    This look of quiet flatters thus
    Our home-bred fancies. O to us,
    The fools of habit, sweeter seems

    To rest beneath the clover sod,
    That takes the sunshine and the rains,
    Or where the kneeling hamlet drains
    The chalice of the grapes of God;

    Than if with thee the roaring wells
    Should gulf him fathom-deep in brine;
    And hands so often clasp’d in mine,
    Should toss with tangle and with shells.

    XI

    Calm is the morn without a sound,
    Calm as to suit a calmer grief,
    And only thro’ the faded leaf
    The chestnut pattering to the ground:

    Calm and deep peace on this high wold[17],
    And on these dews that drench the furze[18],
    And all the silvery gossamers
    That twinkle into green and gold:

    Calm and still light on yon great plain
    That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,
    And crowded farms and lessening towers,
    To mingle with the bounding main:

    Calm and deep peace in this wide air,
    These leaves that redden to the fall;
    And in my heart, if calm at all,
    If any calm, a calm despair:

    Calm on the seas, and silver sleep,
    And waves that sway themselves in rest,
    And dead calm in that noble breast
    Which heaves but with the heaving deep.

    XII

    Lo, as a dove when up she springs
    To bear thro’ Heaven a tale of woe,
    Some dolorous message knit below
    The wild pulsation of her wings;

    Like her I go; I cannot stay;
    I leave this mortal ark behind,
    A weight of nerves without a mind,
    And leave the cliffs, and haste away

    O’er ocean-mirrors rounded large,
    And reach the glow of southern skies,
    And see the sails at distance rise,
    And linger weeping on the marge,

    And saying; ‘Comes he thus, my friend?
    Is this the end of all my care?’
    And circle moaning in the air:
    ‘Is this the end? Is this the end?’

    And forward dart again, and play
    About the prow, and back return
    To where the body sits, and learn
    That I have been an hour away.

    XIII

    Tears of the widower, when he sees
    A late-lost form that sleep reveals,
    And moves his doubtful arms, and feels
    Her place is empty, fall like these;

    Which weep a loss for ever new,
    A void where heart on heart reposed;
    And, where warm hands have prest and closed,
    Silence, till I be silent too.

    Which weep the comrade of my choice,
    An awful thought, a life removed,
    The human-hearted man I loved,
    A Spirit, not a breathing voice.

    Come, Time, and teach me, many years,
    I do not suffer in a dream;
    For now so strange do these things seem,
    Mine eyes have leisure for their tears;

    My fancies time to rise on wing,
    And glance about the approaching sails,
    As tho’ they brought but merchants’ bales,
    And not the burthen that they bring.

    XIV

    If one should bring me this report,
    That thou hadst touch’d the land to-day,
    And I went down unto the quay,
    And found thee lying in the port;

    And standing, muffled round with woe,
    Should see thy passengers in rank
    Come stepping lightly down the plank,
    And beckoning unto those they know;

    And if along with these should come
    The man I held as half-divine;
    Should strike a sudden hand in mine,
    And ask a thousand things of home;

    And I should tell him all my pain,
    And how my life had droop’d of late,
    And he should sorrow o’er my state
    And marvel what possess’d my brain;

    And I perceived no touch of change,
    No hint of death in all his frame,
    But found him all in all the same,
    I should not feel it to be strange.

    XV

    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;

    The forest crack’d, the waters curl’d,
    The cattle huddled on the lea;
    And wildly dash’d on tower and tree
    The sunbeam strikes along the world:

    And but for fancies, which aver
    That all thy motions gently pass
    Athwart a plane of molten glass[19],
    I scarce could brook the strain and stir

    That makes the barren branches loud;
    And but for fear it is not so,
    The wild unrest that lives in woe
    Would dote and pore on yonder cloud

    That rises upward always higher,
    And onward drags a labouring breast,
    And topples round the dreary west,
    A looming bastion fringed with fire.

    XIX

    The Danube to the Severn[20] gave
    The darken’d heart that beat no more;
    They laid him by the pleasant shore,
    And in the hearing of the wave.

    There twice a day the Severn fills;
    The salt sea-water passes by,
    And hushes half the babbling Wye,
    And makes a silence in the hills.

    The Wye is hush’d nor moved along,
    And hush’d my deepest grief of all,
    When fill’d with tears that cannot fall,
    I brim with sorrow drowning song.

    The tide flows down, the wave again
    Is vocal in its wooded walls;
    My deeper anguish also falls,
    And I can speak a little then.

    XXIV

    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.

    If all was good and fair we met,
    This earth had been the Paradise
    It never look’d to human eyes
    Since our first Sun arose and set.

    And is it that the haze of grief
    Makes former gladness loom so great?
    The lowness of the present state,
    That sets the past in this relief?

    Or that the past will always win
    A glory from its being far;
    And orb into the perfect star
    We saw not, when we moved therein?

    XXVII

    I envy not in any moods
    The captive void of noble rage,
    The linnet born within the cage,
    That never knew the summer woods:

    I envy not the beast that takes
    His license in the field of time,
    Unfetter’d by the sense of crime,
    To whom a conscience never wakes;

    Nor, what may count itself as blest,
    The heart that never plighted troth
    But stagnates in the weeds of sloth;
    Nor any want-begotten rest.

    I hold it true, whate’er befall;
    I feel it, when I sorrow most;
    ‘Tis better to have loved and lost
    Than never to have loved at all.

    XXVIII

    The time draws near the birth of Christ[21]:
    The moon is hid; the night is still;
    The Christmas bells from hill to hill
    Answer each other in the mist.

    Four voices of four hamlets round,
    From far and near, on mead and moor,
    Swell out and fail, as if a door
    Were shut between me and the sound:

    Each voice four changes[22] on the wind,
    That now dilate, and now decrease,
    Peace and goodwill, goodwill and peace,
    Peace and goodwill, to all mankind.

    This year I slept and woke with pain,
    I almost wish’d no more to wake,
    And that my hold on life would break
    Before I heard those bells again:

    But they my troubled spirit rule,
    For they controll’d me when a boy;
    They bring me sorrow touch’d with joy,
    The merry merry bells of Yule.

    XXX

    With trembling fingers did we weave
    The holly round the Chrismas hearth;
    A rainy cloud possess’d the earth,
    And sadly fell our Christmas-eve.

    At our old pastimes in the hall
    We gambol’d, making vain pretence
    Of gladness, with an awful sense
    Of one mute Shadow watching all.

    We paused: the winds were in the beech:
    We heard them sweep the winter land;
    And in a circle hand-in-hand
    Sat silent, looking each at each.

    Then echo-like our voices rang;
    We sung, tho’ every eye was dim,
    A merry song we sang with him
    Last year: impetuously we sang:

    We ceased: a gentler feeling crept
    Upon us: surely rest is meet:
    ‘They rest,’ we said, ‘their sleep is sweet,’
    And silence follow’d, and we wept.

    Our voices took a higher range;
    Once more we sang: ‘They do not die
    Nor lose their mortal sympathy,
    Nor change to us, although they change;

    ‘Rapt from the fickle and the frail
    With gather’d power, yet the same,
    Pierces the keen seraphic flame
    From orb to orb, from veil to veil.’

    Rise, happy morn, rise, holy morn,
    Draw forth the cheerful day from night:
    O Father, touch the east, and light
    The light that shone when Hope was born.

    XXXIV

    My own dim life should teach me this,
    That life shall live for evermore,
    Else earth is darkness at the core,
    And dust and ashes all that is;

    This round of green, this orb of flame,
    Fantastic beauty such as lurks
    In some wild Poet, when he works
    Without a conscience or an aim.

    What then were God to such as I?
    ‘Twere hardly worth my while to choose
    Of things all mortal, or to use
    A tattle patience ere I die;

    ‘Twere best at once to sink to peace,
    Like birds the charming serpent draws,
    To drop head-foremost in the jaws
    Of vacant darkness and to cease.

    XXXIX

    Old warder[23] of these buried bones,
    And answering now my random stroke
    With fruitful cloud and living smoke,
    Dark yew, that graspest at the stones

    And dippest toward the dreamless head,
    To thee too comes the golden hour
    When flower is feeling after flower;
    But Sorrow?fixt upon the dead,

    And darkening the dark graves of men,?
    What whisper’d from her lying lips?
    Thy gloom is kindled at the tips,
    And passes into gloom again.

    L

    Be near me when my light is low,
    When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
    And tingle; and the heart is sick,
    And all the wheels of Being slow.

    Be near me when the sensuous frame
    Is rack’d with pangs that conquer trust;
    And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
    And Life, a Fury slinging flame.

    Be near me when my faith is dry,
    And men the flies of latter spring,
    That lay their eggs, and sting and sing
    And weave their petty cells and die.

    Be near me when I fade away,
    To point the term of human strife,
    And on the low dark verge of life
    The twilight of eternal 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;

    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;
    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
    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:
    And with no language but a cry.

    LV

    The wish, that of the living whole
    No life may fail beyond the grave,
    Derives it not from what we have
    The likest God within the soul[24]?

    Are God and Nature then at strife,
    That Nature lends such evil dreams?
    So careful of the type[25] she seems,
    So careless of the single life;

    That I, considering everywhere
    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
    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,
    And faintly trust the larger hope[26].

    LVI

    ‘So careful of the type?’ but no.
    From scarpèd cliff and quarried stone
    She[27] cries, ‘A thousand types are gone[28]:
    I care for nothing, all shall go.

    ‘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,
    Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
    Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,
    Who built him fanes[29] of fruitless prayer,

    Who trusted God was love indeed
    And love Creation’s final law?
    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,
    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.

    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.

    LIX

    O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me
    No casual mistress, but a wife,
    My bosom-friend and half of life;
    As I confess it needs must be;

    O Sorrow, wilt thou rule my blood,
    Be sometimes lovely like a bride,
    And put thy harsher moods aside,
    If thou wilt have me wise and good.

    My centred passion cannot move,
    Nor will it lessen from to-day;
    But I’ll have leave at times to play
    As with the creature of my love;

    And set thee forth, for thou art mine,
    With so much hope for years to come,
    That, howsoe’er I know thee, some
    Could hardly tell what name were thine.

    LXVII

    When on my bed the moonlight falls,
    I know that in thy place of rest
    By that broad water of the west[30],
    There comes a glory on the walls;

    Thy marble bright in dark appears,
    As slowly steals a silver flame
    Along the letters of thy name,
    And o’er the number of thy years.

    The mystic glory swims away;
    From off my bed the moonlight dies;
    And closing eaves of wearied eyes
    I sleep till dusk is dipt in gray;

    And then I know the mist is drawn
    A lucid veil from coast to coast,
    And in the dark church like a ghost
    Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn.

    LXXII

    Risest thou thus, dim dawn, again[31],
    And howlest, issuing out of night,
    With blasts that blow the poplar white,
    And lash with storm the streaming pane?

    Day, when my crown’d estate[32] begun
    To pine in that reverse of doom[33],
    Which sicken’d every living bloom,
    And blurr’d the splendour of the sun;

    Who usherest in the dolorous hour
    With thy quick tears that make the rose
    Pull sideways, and the daisy close
    Her crimson fringes to the shower;

    Who might’st have heaved a windless flame
    Up the deep East, or, whispering, play’d
    A chequer-work of beam and shade
    Along the hills, yet look’d the same.

    As wan, as chill, as wild as now;
    Day, mark’d as with some hideous crime,
    When the dark hand struck down thro’ time,
    And cancell’d nature’s best: but thou,

    Lift as thou may’st thy burthen’d brows
    Thro’ clouds that drench the morning star,
    And whirl the ungarner’d sheaf afar,
    And sow the sky with flying boughs,

    And up thy vault with roaring sound
    Climb thy thick noon, disastrous day;
    Touch thy dull goal of joyless gray,
    And hide thy shame beneath the ground.

    LXXVIII

    Again at Christmas[34] did we weave
    The holly round the Christmas hearth;
    The silent snow possess’d the earth,
    And calmly fell our Christmas-eve:

    The yule-clog[35] sparkled keen with frost,
    No wing of wind the region swept,
    But over all things brooding slept
    The quiet sense of something lost.

    As in the winters left behind,
    Again our ancient games had place,
    The mimic picture’s[36] breathing grace,
    And dance and song and hoodman-blind.

    Who show’d a token of distress?
    No single tear, no mark of pain:
    O sorrow, then can sorrow wane?
    O grief, can grief be changed to less?

    O last regret, regret can die!
    No—mixt with all this mystic frame,
    Her deep relations are the same,
    But with long use her tears are dry.

    LXXX

    If any vague desire should rise,
    That holy Death ere Arthur died
    Had moved me kindly from his side,
    And dropt the dust on tearless eyes;

    Then fancy shapes, as fancy can,
    The grief my loss in him had wrought,
    A grief as deep as life or thought,
    But stay’d in peace with God and man.

    I make a picture in the brain;
    I hear the sentence that he speaks;
    He bears the burthen of the weeks
    But turns his burthen into gain.

    His credit thus shall set me free;
    And, influence-rich to soothe and save,
    Unused example from the grave
    Reach out dead hands to comfort me.

    LXXXVI

    Sweet after showers[37], ambrosial air,
    That rollest from the gorgeous gloom
    Of evening over brake and bloom
    And meadow, slowly breathing bare

    The round of space, and rapt below
    Thro’ all the dewy-tassell’d wood,
    And shadowing down the horned flood
    In ripples, fan my brows and blow

    The fever from my cheek, and sigh
    The full new life that feeds thy breath
    Throughout my frame, till Doubt and Death,
    Ill brethren, let the fancy fly

    From belt to belt of crimson seas
    On leagues of odour streaming far,
    To where in yonder orient star
    A hundred spirits whisper ‘Peace.’

    LXXXIX

    Witch-elms that counterchange the floor
    Of this flat lawn with dusk and bright;
    And thou, with all thy breadth and height
    Of foliage, towering sycamore;

    How often, hither wandering down,
    My Arthur found your shadows fair,
    And shook to all the liberal air
    The dust and din and steam of town:

    He brought an eye for all he saw;
    He mixt in all our simple sports;
    They pleased him, fresh from brawling courts
    And dusty purlieus of the law[38].

    O joy to him in this retreat,
    Inmantled in ambrosial dark,
    To drink the cooler air, and mark
    The landscape winking thro’ the heat:

    O sound to rout the brood of cares,
    The sweep of scythe in morning dew,
    The gust that round the garden flew,
    And tumbled half the mellowing pears!

    O bliss, when all in circle drawn
    About him, heart and ear were fed
    To hear him, as he lay and read
    The Tuscan poets[39] on the lawn:

    Or in the all-golden afternoon
    A guest, or happy sister, sung,
    Or here she brought the harp and flung
    A ballad to the brightening moon:

    Nor less it pleased in livelier moods,
    Beyond the bounding hill to stray,
    And break the livelong summer day
    With banquet in the distant woods;

    Whereat we glanced from theme to theme,
    Discuss’d the books to love or hate,
    Or touch’d the changes of the state,
    Or threaded some Socratic dream;

    But if I praised the busy town,
    He loved to rail against it still,
    For ‘ground in yonder social mill
    We rub each other’s angles down,

    ‘And merge,’ he said, ‘in form and gloss
    The picturesque of man and man.’
    We talk’d: the stream beneath us ran,
    The wine-flask lying couch’d in moss,

    Or cool’d within the glooming wave;
    And last, returning from afar,
    Before the crimson-circled star
    Had fall’n into her father’s grave,

    And brushing ankle-deep in flowers,
    We heard behind the woodbine veil
    The milk that bubbled in the pail,
    And buzzings of the honied hours.

    XCIII

    I shall not see thee. Dare I say
    No spirit ever brake the band
    That stays him from the native land
    Where first he walk’d when claspt in clay?

    No visual shade of some one lost,
    But he, the Spirit himself, may come
    Where all the nerve of sense is numb;
    Spirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost.

    O, therefore from thy sightless range
    With gods in unconjectured bliss,
    O, from the distance of the abyss
    Of tenfold-complicated change,

    Descend, and touch, and enter; hear
    The wish too strong for words to name;
    That in this blindness of the frame
    My Ghost may feel that thine is near.

    XCIV

    How pure at heart and sound in head,
    With what divine affections bold
    Should be the man whose thought would hold
    An hour’s communion with the dead.

    In vain shalt thou, or any, call
    The spirits from their golden day,
    Except, like them, thou too canst say,
    My spirit is at peace with all.

    They haunt the silence of the breast,
    Imaginations calm and fair,
    The memory like a cloudless air,
    The conscience as a sea at rest:

    But when the heart is full of din,
    And doubt beside the portal waits,
    They can but listen at the gates
    And hear the household jar within.

    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;

    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[40]:

    And bats went round in fragrant skies,
    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,
    The white kine[41] 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
    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:

    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
    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,
    And all at once it seem’d at last
    The living soul was flash’d on mine,

    And mine in his was wound, and whirl’d
    About empyreal heights of thought,
    And came on that which is, and caught
    The deep pulsations of the world,

    Aeonian music[42] 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.

    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
    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
    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
    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,
    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.

    I know not: one[43] indeed I knew
    In many a subtle question versed,
    Who touch’d a jarring lyre at first,
    But ever strove to make it true:

    Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,
    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,
    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,
    And dwells not in the light alone,

    But in the darkness and the cloud,
    As over Sinai’s peaks of old,
    While Israel made their gods of gold,
    Altho’ the trumpet blew so loud.

    XCIX

    Risest thou thus, dim dawn, again[44],
    So loud with voices of the birds,
    So thick with lowings of the herds,
    Day, when I lost the flower of men;

    Who tremblest thro’ thy darkling red
    On yon swoll’n brook that bubbles fast
    By meadows breathing of the past,
    And woodlands holy to the dead;

    Who murmurest in the foliaged eaves
    A song that slights the coming care,
    And Autumn laying here and there
    A fiery finger on the leaves;

    Who wakenest with thy balmy breath
    To myriads on the genial earth,
    Memories of bridal, or of birth,
    And unto myriads more, of death.

    O, wheresoever those may be,
    Betwixt the slumber of the poles,
    To-day they count as kindred souls;
    They know me not, but mourn with me.

    CIV

    The time draws near the birth of Christ[45];
    The moon is hid, the night is still;
    A single church[46] below the hill
    Is pealing, folded in the mist.

    A single peal of bells below,
    That wakens at this hour of rest
    A single murmur in the breast,
    That these are not the bells I know[47].

    Like strangers’ voices here they sound,
    In lands where not a memory strays,
    Nor landmark breathes of other days,
    But all is new unhallow’d ground.

    CV

    To-night ungather’d let us leave
    This laurel, let this holly stand:
    We live within the stranger’s land,
    And strangely falls our Christmas-eve.

    Our father’s dust is left alone
    And silent under other snows:
    There in due time the woodbine blows,
    The violet comes, but we are gone.

    No more shall wayward grief abuse
    The genial hour with mask and mime,
    For change of place, like growth of time,
    Has broke the bond of dying use.

    Let cares that petty shadows cast,
    By which our lives are chiefly proved,
    A little spare the night I loved,
    And hold it solemn to the past.

    But let no footstep beat the floor,
    Nor bowl of wassail mantle warm;
    For who would keep an ancient form
    Thro’ which the spirit breathes no more?

    Be neither song, nor game, nor feast;
    Nor harp be touch’d, nor flute be blown;
    No dance, no motion, save alone
    What lightens in the lucid east

    Of rising worlds by yonder wood.
    Long sleeps the summer in the seed;
    Run out your measured arcs, and lead
    The closing cycle rich in good.

    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[48].

    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,
    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;
    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,
    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.

    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,
    The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
    Ring out the darkness of the land,
    Ring in the Christ that is to be.

    CVII

    It is the day when he was born[49],
    A bitter day that early sank
    Behind a purple-frosty bank
    Of vapour, leaving night forlorn.

    The time admits not flowers or leaves
    To deck the banquet. Fiercely flies
    The blast of North and East, and ice
    Makes daggers at the sharpen’d eaves,

    And bristles all the brakes and thorns
    To yon hard crescent, as she hangs
    Above the wood which grides and clangs
    Its leafless ribs and iron horns

    Together, in the drifts that pass
    To darken on the rolling brine
    That breaks the coast. But fetch the wine,
    Arrange the board and brim the glass;

    Bring in great logs and let them lie,
    To make a solid core of heat;
    Be cheerful-minded, talk and treat
    Of all things ev’n as he were by;

    We keep the day. With festal cheer,
    With books and music, surely we
    Will drink to him, whate’er he be,
    And sing the songs he loved to hear.

    CVIII

    I will not shut me from my kind,
    And, lest I stiffen into stone,
    I will not eat my heart alone,
    Nor feed with sighs a passing wind:

    What profit lies in barren faith,
    And vacant yearning, tho’ with might
    To scale the heaven’s highest height,
    Or dive below the wells of Death?

    What find I in the highest place,
    But mine own phantom chanting hymns?
    And on the depths of death there swims
    The reflex of a human face.

    I’ll rather take what fruit may be
    Of sorrow under human skies:
    ‘Tis held that sorrow makes us wise,
    Whatever wisdom sleep with thee.

    CXV

    Now fades the last long streak of snow,
    Now burgeons every maze of quick[50]
    About the flowering squares[51], and thick
    By ashen roots the violets blow.

    Now rings the woodland loud and long,
    The distance takes a lovelier hue,
    And drown’d in yonder living blue
    The lark becomes a sightless song.

    Now dance the lights on lawn and lea,
    The flocks are whiter down the vale,
    And milkier every milky sail
    On winding stream or distant sea;

    Where now the seamew[52] pipes, or dives
    In yonder greening gleam, and fly
    The happy birds, that change their sky
    To build and brood; that live their lives

    From land to land; and in my breast
    Spring wakens too; and my regret
    Becomes an April violet,
    And buds and blossoms like the rest.

    CXVII

    O days and hours, your work is this
    To hold me from my proper place,
    A little while from his embrace,
    For fuller gain of after bliss:

    That out of distance might ensue
    Desire of nearness doubly sweet;
    And unto meeting when we meet,
    Delight a hundredfold accrue,

    For every grain of sand that runs,
    And every span of shade that steals,
    And every kiss of toothed wheels,
    And all the courses of the suns.

    CXVIII

    Contèmplate all this work of Time[53],
    The giant labouring in his youth;
    Nor dream of human love and truth,
    As dying Nature’s earth and lime[54];

    But trust that those we call the dead
    Are breathers of an ampler day
    For ever nobler ends. They[55] say,
    The solid earth whereon we tread

    In tracts of fluent heat began,
    And grew to seeming-random forms,
    The seeming prey of cyclic storms,
    Till at the last arose the man;

    Who throve and branch’d from clime to clime,
    The herald of a higher race,
    And of himself in higher place,
    If so he type[56] this work of time

    Within himself, from more to more;
    Or, crown’d with attributes of woe
    Like glories, move his course, and show
    That life is not as idle ore,

    But iron dug from central gloom,
    And heated hot with burning fears,
    And dipt in baths of hissing tears,
    And batter’d with the shocks of doom

    To shape and use. Arise and fly
    The reeling Faun[57], the sensual feast;
    Move upward, working out the beast,
    And let the ape and tiger die.

    CXIX

    Doors[58], where my heart was used to beat
    So quickly, not as one that weeps
    I come once more; the city sleeps;
    I smell the meadow in the street;

    I hear a chirp of birds; I see
    Betwixt the black fronts long-withdrawn
    A light-blue lane of early dawn,
    And think of early days and thee,

    And bless thee, for thy lips are bland,
    And bright the friendship of thine eye;
    And in my thoughts with scarce a sigh
    I take the pressure of thine hand.

    CXX

    I trust I have not wasted breath:
    I think we are not wholly brain,
    Magnetic mockeries[59]; not in vain,
    Like Paul with beasts, I fought with Death;

    Not only cunning casts in clay:
    Let Science prove we are, and then
    What matters Science unto men,
    At least to me? I would not stay.

    Let him, the wiser man who springs
    Hereafter, up from childhood shape
    His action like the greater ape,
    But I was born to other things.

    CXXIII

    There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
    O earth, what changes hast thou seen!
    There where the long street roars, hath been
    The stillness of the central sea.

    The hills are shadows, and they flow
    From form to form, and nothing stands;
    They melt like mist, the solid lands,
    Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

    But in my spirit will I dwell,
    And dream my dream, and hold it true;
    For tho’ my lips may breathe adieu,
    I cannot think the thing farewell.

    CXXIV

    That which we dare invoke to bless;
    Our dearest faith; our ghastliest doubt;
    He, They, One, All; within, without;
    The Power in darkness whom we guess,—

    I found Him not in world or sun,
    Or eagle’s wing, or insect’s eye[60],
    Nor thro’ the questions men may try,
    The petty cobwebs we have spun.

    If e’er when faith had fall’n asleep,
    I heard a voice ‘believe no more,’
    And heard an ever-breaking shore
    That tumbled in the Godless deep,

    A warmth within the breast would melt
    The freezing reason’s colder part,
    And like a man in wrath the heart
    Stood up and answer’d ‘I have felt.’

    No, like a child in doubt and fear:
    But that blind clamour made me wise;
    Then was I as a child that cries,
    But, crying, knows his father near;

    And what I am beheld again
    What is, and no man understands;
    And out of darkness came the hands
    That reach thro’ nature, moulding men.

    CXXX

    Thy voice is on the rolling air;
    I hear thee where the waters run;
    Thou standest in the rising sun,
    And in the setting thou art fair.

    What art thou then? I cannot guess;
    But tho’ I seem in star and flower
    To feel thee some diffusive power,
    I do not therefore love thee less.

    My love involves the love before;
    My love is vaster passion now;
    Tho’ mix’d with God and Nature thou,
    I seem to love thee more and more.

    Far off thou art, but ever nigh;
    I have thee still, and I rejoice;
    I prosper, circled with thy voice;
    I shall not lose thee tho’ I die.

    CXXXI

    O living will[61] that shalt endure
    When all that seems shall suffer shock,
    Rise in the spiritual rock[62],
    Flow thro’ our deeds and make them pure,

    That we may lift from out of dust
    A voice as unto him that hears,
    A cry above the conquer’d years
    To one that with us works, and trust,

    With faith that comes of self-control,
    The truths that never can be proved
    Until we close with all we loved,
    And all we flow from, soul in soul.

    [from Epilogue[63]]

    ...And rise, O moon, from yonder down,
    Till over down and over dale
    All night the shining vapour sail
    And pass the silent-lighted town,

    The white-faced halls, the glancing rills,
    And catch at every mountain head,
    And o'er the friths that branch and spread
    Their sleeping silver thro' the hills;

    And touch with shade the bridal doors,
    With tender gloom the roof, the wall;
    And breaking let the splendour fall
    To spangle all the happy shores

    By which they rest, and ocean sounds,
    And, star and system rolling past,
    A soul shall draw from out the vast
    And strike his being into bounds,

    And, moved thro' life of lower phase,
    Result in man, be born and think,
    And act and love, a closer link
    Betwixt us and the crowning race

    Of those that, eye to eye, shall look
    On knowledge, under whose command
    Is Earth and Earth's, and in their hand
    Is Nature like an open book;

    No longer half-akin to brute,
    For all we thought and loved and did,
    And hoped, and suffer'd, is but seed
    Of what in them is flower and fruit;

    Whereof the man, that with me trod
    This planet, was a noble type
    Appearing ere the times were ripe,
    That friend of mine who lives in God,

    That God, which ever lives and loves,
    One God, one law, one element,
    And one far-off divine event,
    To which the whole creation moves.

    —1833-50, 1850

    Contributors


    1. He died in 1883.
    2. Sun and moon.
    3. Systems of philosophy.
    4. Before mind and soul came to sing different tunes with the advent of science.
    5. The 11 stanzas that Tennyson wrote as a prologue were written after the rest of the poem was complete.
    6. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).
    7. The clock of the church tower behind the yew.
    8. The yew tree, symbolic of grief, has a very long life.
    9. cf. “Planets and Suns run blindly thro’ the sky,” Pope, “Essay on Man”, I. 252.
    10. Mourning clothes.
    11. Sailors were often buried in their own hammocks, which were weighted to allow the corpse to sink.
    12. Tennyson’s sister Emilia (1811-87), who had been engaged to Hallam. She later married Richard Jesse, a British naval officer, and their eldest son was given the names Arthur Henry Hallam.
    13. The house at 67 Wimpole Street where Hallam had lived.
    14. Hallam wrote a positive review of Tennyson’s early poems in 1831.
    15. Hallam’s body was brought back by ship from Trieste, the Italian port.
    16. The morning star.
    17. An upland plain.
    18. A spiny evergreen shrub.
    19. Calm sea.
    20. Hallam died in Vienna, on the Danube River, and was buried in the church at Clevedon on the Severn River in southwest England.
    21. As the first Christmas (1833) after Hallam’s death approaches, the poet listens to the church bells from four villages. A.C. Bradley suggests that the second part of "In Memoriam" begins here in XXVIII. A Commentary on Tennyson’s In Memoriam.
    22. Arrangements of church bell ringing.
    23. The churchyard yew. This section was written in 1868; cf. II.
    24. The inner consciousness—the divine in man [Tennyson’s note]. ↵
    25. Species; i.e., Nature ensures the preservation of the species but is indifferent to the fate of the individual. ↵
    26. Tennyson’s son Hallam writes in the biography of his father, “...by ‘the larger hope’ that the whole human race would through, perhaps, ages of suffering, be at length purified and saved” (Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, I, 321-22).
    27. Nature.
    28. The new science of geology, particularly in Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830) , which Tennyson had read, was providing evidence that countless forms of life have disappeared from the earth.
    29. Temples. ↵
    30. Hallam was buried near the Severn River in southwestern England.
    31. The first anniversary of Hallam’s death, September 15, 1884.
    32. State of happiness.
    33. Reversal of fortunes as the result of Hallam’s death.
    34. The second Christmas (1884) after Hallam’s death.
    35. Yule log.
    36. Tableau-vivant; literally, “living picture," a silent and motionless group of people arranged to represent a scene or incident.
    37. This poem signals “the full new life which is beginning to revive in the poet’s heart and to dispel the last shadow of the evil dreams which Nature seemed to lend when he was under the sway of...Doubt and Death” (Bradley, 223).
    38. After leaving Cambridge, Hallam became a law student in London.
    39. Dante and Petrarch. ↵
    40. Vessel for boiling water for tea or coffee. ↵
    41. Cows. ↵
    42. Age-old music.
    43. Hallam.
    44. September 15, 1835, the second anniversary of Hallam’s death.
    45. The third Christmas since Hallam’s death.
    46. Waltham Abbey.
    47. Tennyson’s family has moved to a new home in Epping, Surrey, where they spent their first Christmas in 1837, four years after Hallam’s death.
    48. New Year’s resolutions. Tennyson is determined “to re-shape his attitude to Hallam’s death: ‘let him die….Year by year, Tennyson’s cause has been to keep Hallam’s memory alive; all of a sudden, he sounds resolved to let his memory fade in the comforting knowledge that he lives forever in Christ’ (‘Ring in the Christ that is meant to be’)” (Cash 9).
    49. February 1, Hallam’s birthday.
    50. Hawthorn hedge.
    51. Fields.
    52. Seabird.
    53. The Titan giant Cronus (Saturn) regarded as the god of devouring time.
    54. Do not dream that love and fidelity are merely transient things.
    55. Scientists.
    56. Prefigures.
    57. Faunus. Also Pan, Roman god of country life, half-beast, half man.
    58. The doors of Hallam’s London house at 67 Wimpole Street, to which Tennyson has returned.
    59. Automatons.
    60. Tennyson rejects the argument of God’s existence from the design of nature and hence the need for a designer.
    61. Tennyson equated this with “Free-will, the higher and enduring part of man” (Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, I, 319).
    62. Christ. cf. 1 Corinthians: 10.4
    63. The poem comes full circle with a description of the wedding of Tennyson’s sister Cecilia to Edward Lushington and to the birth which will result from their union. ↵

    4.7: from In Memoriam A. H. H. is shared under a CC BY license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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