Articles for ‘Tennyson’

Tennyson’s Women

Sunday, May 10th, 2009

In this essay, undergraduate Judith Jacob looks at the representation of women in four poems: 'Mariana', 'Mariana in the South', 'The Lady of Shalott', and 'Fatima'. Her detailed readings find that even when Tennyson attributes some power to women he still denies them a real voice, and real effectuality.


Let's take a look at Tennyson's women, a forlorn and 'aweary' group of creatures doomed to inhabit heavily constricted spaces containing stagnant water, drought and mirrors.


Mariana

In his early poem 'Mariana', Tennyson depicts a despairing woman in a landscape of decay. The landscape in which Mariana is presented in the poem is the non-specific 'moated grange' from Shakespeare's . The fact that Tennyson chooses not to locate it specifically intensifies the sense of loneliness and isolation in the poem, making it seem as though the grange occupies a place outside of normal space and discourse. Descriptions such as 'thickly crusted' (line 2) and 'thickest dark' (line 18) are heavy and choking, ornamenting the poem like the layers of rust and decay that ornament Mariana's mental and physical landscapes.

Every inch of the landscape, and every minute detail expressed communicates the utter despair of the protagonist and repeatedly reiterates the idea of unrealised potential. Though the grange in the poem is both lonely and isolated we assume that it was once used as a farm and a storage place. The grange itself suggests all the possibilities of fertility and healthy growth while simultaneously asserting the reality of darkness and stagnation, and the land that Mariana lives on is bounded and obstructed by stagnant water. The grange is 'moated', and within it is a 'sluice' where the 'blackened waters slept' (line 38). Each description in 'Mariana' simultaneously confronts the reader with fertility and stagnation. The water is filthy and black, but it is sleeping and thus has the power to awake and transform. Likewise, the 'blackest moss' (line 1) and 'marish-mosses' (line 40) obscure and encrust accepted images of health and fertility. Rather than bearing flowers, the flowerpots are 'thickly crusted' (line 2), while the water engenders unhealthy and unwanted growth.

The typically feminine symbols that abound in the rich landscape of 'Mariana' are all impeded in one way or another: like the stagnant water, the moon is not able to rise to its full potential; when it appears in the poem it is 'very low' (line 53). Every element in 'Mariana' is painfully bounded and restricted. This idea is expressed most clearly in line 54, where even the 'wild winds [are] bound within their cell'. The sense of restriction and boundedness expressed in 'Mariana' has religious undertones. The word 'cell' derives from the monastic term 'cella' which designated an enclosed space such as a monastery. Similarly .


Mariana in the South

The religious suggestiveness in 'Mariana' is fully realised in Tennyson's later poem, 'Mariana in the South', a poem which Arthur Hallam described as . The same sense of darkness and boundedness appears in both poems as, for example, 'Mariana in the South' opens with a description of a 'black shadow' (line 1) in a 'close-latticed' (line 3) house. The greatest similarity between the two poems is the repetitive though subtly changing refrain of womanly despair. In 'Mariana' the refrain deals with the passing of time and the absence of her lover. 'Life', 'night', and 'day' are each described as hopelessly 'dreary' in a poem where the very words 'weary' and 'dreary' repeated in each refrain are accented so as to lengthen them and make their sound seem never-ending, for example:

She only said, 'The night is dreary,
He cometh not', she said;
She said, 'I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!' (lines 21-4)

'Mariana in the South' also looks to time as a reference point as her lament is called out 'night and morn'. Both poems have a circularity to them which adds a further layer of constraint and boundedness to the lives of their protagonists. However, Mariana in the South is able to appeal to her - albeit with less frequency as the poem progresses - and rather than simply voicing her despair, she sings it. Another sense of release becomes available through the shift of tone at the end of the poem when Mariana predicts a time when she will 'cease to be all alone' (line 95).

While Mariana inhabits a bounded watery landscape, the Southern Mariana lives in a world 'Of stony drought and steaming salt' (line 40). There is no water present in the land to provide relief from the days that pass from 'heat to heat' (line 39). Everything is suggestive of overpowering heat and consuming brightness. The sand is 'glaring', the inlets are 'bright' (line 8), and the light is described as a 'furnace' (line 55). Against this vivid and overwhelming heat, the Southern Mariana persistently dreams of relief in the form of fresh and flowing water. We first see this in her dream of the 'runlets babbling down the glen' (line 44), and when she wakes, 'the babble of the stream' (line 51) is starkly juxtaposed with the 'dusty-white' (line 54) river bed. In the last stanza, when hope in the form of death beckons Mariana, the shift in tone is heralded by 'a sound as of the sea' (line 86).

However, neither Mariana nor the Southern Mariana is able to realise the full potential of her feminine self. Tennyson communicates the failure of each primarily through the landscape she inhabits. The words of the women themselves are limited to a short refrain of four lines which varies only very slightly. They are unable to see beyond their despair or outside the refrain that hammers relentlessly in their minds, tainting their entire world. Mariana is surrounded by stagnant water and requires strong motion to break her state of beautiful feminine apathy. This sort of action is enticingly suggested throughout the poem. Tennyson writes 'Unlifted was the clinking latch' (line 6) and - as the critic Christopher Ricks succinctly puts it -, . All the motion expressed in 'Mariana' is uncomfortable and frustrated. This is communicated through verbs such as 'flitting', 'glanced', 'seemed', 'crept', 'shook', 'sway' and 'creaked'. The southern Mariana exists in a similar, though interestingly different, state of impotence. Hers is a state of dehydration, a landscape in which desire has risen to such an extreme that it has dried up every avenue of female fertility and creativity.


The Lady of Shalott

Enclosed spaces are constructed around almost all of Tennyson's female figures. 'The Lady of Shalott' presents us with another constricted woman who closely resembles the two Marianas.  Like Mariana, the Lady of Shalott is placed in a liminal area, isolated from the mainland of patriarchal Camelot and dwelling alone on the island of Shalott. Both Mariana and the lady are constricted by water that hems in their isolated dwelling-place. However, the water takes on a different role in the later poem: rather than being left as a stagnant and limiting presence, the water becomes representative of a process of visual dislocation. Not only is the lady unable to live in freedom in the normal world; she is also unable to look at the world directly. Thus, her visions of the world take the form of 'shadows' (line 48) that she observes through the safety of 'a mirror clear' (line 46).

The Lady of Shalott's mirror provides a reflection of reality, an inversion of the patriarchal landscape of Camelot. The Lady is forced to inhabit this reflection as if it were reality for fear of a curse despite the fact 'She knows not what the curse may be' (line 42). The patriarchal landscape only becomes fit for female eyes through an inversion, and the curse itself can be interpreted as the idea that women ought to be disconnected from reality. The mirror is initially 'clear' but later reappears in the poem as 'the mirror blue' (line 60) and then again as 'the crystal mirror' (line 106), before dramatically cracking 'from side to side' (line 115). If the shadows that dance across the mirror are the only reality available to the Lady of Shalott, then these changes in its colour and texture are significant. At the beginning of the poem the lady trusts the mirror image completely, believing it to be a direct translation of the world, a 'clear' or untainted perspective.

Her looking glass transforms and takes on colour in the following passage:

And sometimes through the mirror blue
The knights come riding two and two:
She hath no loyal knight and true,
The Lady of Shalott. (Lines 60-3)

The colour change occurs at the same moment as the suggestion of love and partnership and the simultaneous assertion that the lady has no knight of her own and therefore no place within these issues. There is an absence of love, loyalty and truth in her life, and because of this her view of the world is coloured by the mirror's melancholy blue. Finally, the mirror becomes 'crystal':

From the bank and from the river
He flashed into the crystal mirror
'Tirra lira', by the river. (lines 105-7)

Crystal has many facets and here can be taken to represent a multiplicity and intensity of perspective. Ricks writes that this passage shows a which is overwhelming to the point that it serves to cancel out the Lady of Shalott's previously calm life of reflection. He also points out the 'river/river' rhyme in this passage as . This perfection within the verse is used ironically to describe the Lady's reflected life, a life which creates an imperfect reality, and a mode of perception which is ultimately unsustainable. Interestingly, the process leading up to this perfect reflection is described through terms of heat and fire similar to those used in 'Mariana in the South'. In the description of Lancelot we read 'The helmet and the helmet-feather /  Burned like one burning flame together' (line 93-4). He is later described as 'Some bearded meteor' (line 98) and he glows 'in sunlight' (line 100). Likewise, when he appears in the mirror he does so blindingly: 'he flashed into the crystal mirror' (line 106). The burning and all-powerful language of desire follows Lancelot into the world of Shalott, and shatters the fragile life of female art and reflection.


Fatima

Throughout Tennyson's work, feminine spaces are portrayed as incompatible with and separate from patriarchal society. They are generally fragile frameworks that shatter with the first hint of fiery desire, or fall into apathy along with protagonists who possess no will to realise their independent female creativity. One poem which appears to provide an exception to this pattern of tragic female figures and landscapes is 'Fatima'. Though the first stanza appears to portray weakness in love, and female fragility through phrases such as 'O withering might!' (line 1) and 'Lo, parched and withered, deaf and blind' (line 6), a strong sense of Fatima's power manifests itself as the poem progresses. There is no refrain in this poem and because of this its protagonist is not bounded tightly by language and landscape in the style of the women we have so far looked at; instead the steady four beat rhythm powerfully carries the poem forwards.

Once more we encounter the language of fiery desire: the poem features a 'burning drouth' (line 13), 'a fire / Is poured upon the hills' (lines 30-1), and Tennyson describes 'a sultry sky' (line 37). However, the fire here is not immobilising. Instead, Fatima takes on a force and power entirely different to Tennyson's other women. In the third stanza she says:

Last night, when some one spoke his name,
From my swift blood that went and came
A thousand little shafts of flame
Were shivered in my narrow frame.
O love, O fire! once he drew
With one long kiss my whole soul through
My lips, as sunlight drinketh dew. (Lines 15-21)

Not only do we see powerful motion in the 'swift blood', which contrasts the cramped and uncomfortable motion in poems such as 'Mariana', but we also perceive an assumption of masculine power in the phallic 'shafts of flame' which take over the body of the protagonist. Furthermore, though the poem explores the familiar female terrain of fire and water, it appears to find a possible synthesis. The sunlight and the dew come together in two of the most beautiful lines of the poem. In the penultimate stanza we encounter similar images, though here they are more intense. The strong and assertive 'My heart, pierced through with fierce delight, / Bursts into blossom in his sight' is overtly sexual.

At first glance it appears that this poem embraces feminine spaces and provides a powerful feminine discourse for its bold protagonist. However, when we look closely we find that this is not the case. Though powerful, Fatima's language is full of phallic imagery and male pronouns. The last few lines are the most telling. Fatima tells us determinedly: 'I will possess him or will die. / I will grow round him in his place' (lines 39-40). The verb 'will' gains strength by italicisation and repetition, but is ultimately undermined. Fatima has no female power or language to express herself with. Unlike the liminal female landscapes of other poems, the strong female here is forced to grow 'in his place'. Despite her will and determination, she is ultimately nothing but an appendage to a man in a male environment. To assume power Fatima assumes male discourse, but this leaves her without a voice of her own, and this is the true tragedy of Tennyson's women.



Further Reading

All line numbers here are to the poems in Tennyson: A Selected Edition, ed. Christopher Ricks (London, 2007). This is an excellent student-oriented edition of Tennyson's works, and would be an obvious place to start further reading.


Further Thinking

Judith Jacob finds these women tragic in their lack of self-determination. Do you think this means Tennyson's poems are misogynistic? Or do they seem sympathetic to women?

Mariana, The Lady of Shalott, Fatima: these ought to be very different women in very different worlds. Do you think Judith Jacob is right to compare them so closely? Does Tennyson actually present a surprisingly consistent situation?

In Measure for Measure a character called Mariana, who has been abandoned by her lover, resides at a 'moated grange' (which means, a country house perhaps a farm or barn, with a moat) waiting for him. They are reunited, but only by means of deception.
On a margin or boundary.
This is the definition in A.D. Mills, A Dictionary of British Place-Names (Oxford, 2003)
This quotation can be found in Christopher Ricks, ed., Tennyson (Longman Annotated English Poets, London, 1972), p. 27.
An Italian name for the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus; 'Mariana in the South' appeals to her for help.
See Tennyson, ed. Ricks, p. 48.
See Tennyson, ed. Ricks, p. 81
See Tennyson, ed. Ricks, p. 81.

Reading ‘Tears, idle tears’ (6): Have Your Say

Saturday, May 9th, 2009


Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remember'd kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

F.R. LEAVIS thought that 'complexity' was 'not a marked characteristic of Tennyson's poem' and that 'it moves simply forward with a sweetly plangent flow'.

CLEANTH BROOKS thought that Tennyson's poem was not 'a gentle melancholy reverie' because its 'images... rise up with a strange clarity and sharpness that shock' the complex character, 'Tennyson's Weeper'.

HEATHER GLEN thinks that it is useful to historicize Tennyson's poem. Highlighting certain facts about Tennyson and the original status of 'Tears, idle tears' as an embedded lyric within a longer poem, The Princess, Professor Glen also questioned whether Tennyson purposefully uses 'images of that over which human beings have no control' to create a sense of human frailty in the poem, and questioned whether its 'failure to do what Leavis asks it to do is part of its point'.

HERBERT F. TUCKER thinks that Tennyson's poem 'provides a symbolic meditation on the paradoxical presence of absence within the memory' and that its subject is 'thinking about thinking'. Through theorising about Tennyson's uses of language and imagery in the embedded lyric, Tucker also claims that 'Tears, idle tears' actively 'discourage[s] interest in the speaking subject'.


Whose reading is the most convincing?

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If you want to make a comment, or to say something about this poem that none of these critics has said, please do. These critics have by no means exhausted this poem, and it's a certainty that new emphases and new interpretations will rise and fall in the future. Remember also that the critical awareness and apparatus being explored here might be relevant when you are interpreting Tennyson's other poetry (and, indeed, any other poetry).

Reading ‘Tears, idle tears’ (5): Herbert F. Tucker and Tennyson’s experimental form

Saturday, May 9th, 2009


Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remember'd kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

According to Herbert F. Tucker in Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism, 'Tears, idle tears' is 'probably the greatest of the Princess songs and certainly the one that has received the most illuminating critical analysis'. 'From the best readings', claims Tucker, 'a consensus emerges that "Tears, idle tears" provides a symbolic meditation on the paradoxical presence of absence within the memory'. What do you think Tucker means when he suggests that Tennyson's poem is about 'the paradoxical presence of absence within the memory'? Do you think F.R. Leavis, Cleanth Brooks and Heather Glen would agree with him, and do you agree with his summary of 'Tears, idle tears'?

Tucker describes how Tennyson himself eventually said 'Tears, idle tears' was about 'the passion of the past' and 'the yearning that young people occasionally experience for that which seems to have passed away from them for ever'. How useful do you think these authorial statements are as keys to understanding the poem? 'Tennyson's comments' - according to Tucker - 'point to an indwelling mood, a state of mind occasionally experienced by anyone but belonging to no one, independent of personal control'. Inspired by the insights of another literary critic, Timothy Peltason, Tucker then suggests that 'the subject of this poem is not "thinking of the days that are no more" but rather thinking about thinking about those days'.

Perhaps the reason why 'Tears, idle tears' appears to be so impersonal is that it is a poem that thinks about thoughts and not about people: do you find this a useful way to think about the poem? Given how much emphasis Cleanth Brooks placed on the character of 'Tennyson's Weeper', it is not surprising that Tucker dismisses his discussion of 'Tears, idle tears' as one which 'epitomizes the shortcomings of persona poetics': insofar as this poem concerns 'thinking about thinking', claims Tucker, 'the speaking subject... scarcely exists at all'. Tucker suggests that Tennyson's poem concerns the idea of the subject - the idea of someone thinking and speaking - as opposed to any particular individual. Here he observes the same movement away from particularity that was noticed by both F.R. Leavis and Professor Glen, but then pushes this idea to the extreme. Do you think Tucker is too extreme here?

As much as Tucker disagrees with Brooks, he - like Professor Glen - uses many techniques which New Critics like Brooks would have endorsed in order to illustrate and justify his assertions. 'The disappearance of the individual subject' is, for Tucker, enacted in the poet's choice of language. For example: beyond stanza 2's initial replacement of the first-person singular with 'the communal "we" and "our"', Tucker believes that 'a subtler index' of the poet's 'self-effacing design lies in Tennyson's syntax: the speaker knows not "what they mean", but idle tears "Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes"'. He also notes the impersonal way that 'the' is preferred to 'my' in this line.

If you do agree with Tucker's central claim that 'Tears, idle tears' is about 'thinking about thinking', perhaps you will also agree with Tucker that an analysis of this lyric's function within its 'frame text' supports that claim. Indeed, considering 'the immediate context of The Princess', Tucker argues:

We may note that 'Tears, idle tears' elicits from Ida only a defensive scorn. This lyric devised by a male narrator and placed in the mouth of an unnamed minstrel 'maid' stakes out a no man's land that is no woman's either, as Ida understands in rejecting its , 'haunting' message as 'So sweet a voice and vague, fatal to men'.

Does Tucker convince you when he uses this claim that 'Tears, idle tears' is effectively sexless to support his assertion that the whole poem dramatises 'the disappearance of the individual subject'?

Now's your chance to have your own say in the ongoing debate about Tennyson's 'Tears, idle tears'. What do they mean? Go on to the next page and cast your votes!

Click here to continue to the next part of this close reading of Tennyson's 'Tears, idle tears'.

Like a siren; the sirens are figures in Greek mythology, half woman and half bird, whose song lured people to their doom

Reading ‘Tears, idle tears’ (4): Contextualising the poem as an ’embedded lyric’ in ‘The Princess’

Saturday, May 9th, 2009


Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remember'd kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

One final and very important way in which Professor Glen goes beyond 'the words on the page' in order to contextualise 'Tears, idle tears' is by exploring the poem's status not as an autonomous entity but as one of a number of 'embedded' lyrics within Tennyson's longer poem The Princess. The Princess tells the story of Princess Ida (who also became the central character in a , her initial rejection of marriage, her later decision to establish a university for women, and her eventual transformation of that university into a hospital. Whereas, as Professor Glen highlights, this 'frame text', The Princess, 'ponders many of the progressivist discourses of its day' (from evolutionary theory to feminism), 'Tears, idle tears' and all the other framed texts 'embody useless and irrational emotions... opposed to the active intellectual progressivism of Princess Ida'.

Moreover, Professor Glen draws important attention towards a passage in The Princess which immediately follows the embedded lyric we've been reading. Professor Glen highlights how, in that passage, Princess Ida directly passes judgment on the girl who sings 'Tears, idle tears':

She [the girl] ended with such passion that the tear
She sang of, shook and fell, an erring pearl
Lost in her bosom: but with some disdain
Answer'd the Princess, If indeed there haunt
About the moulder'd lodges of the Past
So sweet a voice and vague, fatal to men,
Well needs it we should cram our ears with wool
And so pace by: but thine are fancies hatch'd
In silken-folded idleness.

Seeing as Princess Ida explicitly condemns the weeper's 'idleness', perhaps she has (and perhaps Tennyson has) the same attitude towards the 'habitual indulgence' that Leavis reacted against? So if Tennyson thus dramatises both 'idleness' and Ida's conventional condemnation of 'idleness' in 'Tears, idle tears' and its frame poem The Princess, is it not perhaps unfair to accuse him of endorsing habitual indulgence?

'Idle', Professor Glen highlights, is 'one of the strongest and most striking words in Tennyson's poem. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of the word is 'serving no purpose' or 'of persons, not engaged in work'. Embedded within a frame poem which recognised and dramatised the extent to which Tennyson's age was one of 'purposeful , useful toil and useful knowledge' perhaps, Professor Glen suggests, 'Tears, idle tears' may be seen as 'a riposte' or 'counterpoint to that rhetoric of progress' which characterised Tennyson's era.

'Trailing off rather than ending', 'not completed and rounded off by rhyme' and neither offering closure nor 'a sense of personal or aesthetic resolution', this lyric's 'failure to do what Leavis asks it to do' may, Professor Glen concludes, be its point. How does this make you feel about 'Tears, idle tears', and does this cause you to question the New Critics' seemingly self-evident idea that all one ought to attend to, when inquiring about a poem's meaning, are 'words on the page'?

Let's take a look at just one more interpretation of the poem, presented in the final chapter of a book by Herbert F. Tucker called Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism.

Click here to continue to the next part of this close reading of Tennyson's 'Tears, idle tears'.

W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan wrote many comic operas between the 1860s and the 1890s. They are still popular today and some (The Mikado, The Pirates of Penzance, H.M.S. Pinafore, etc.) are frequently performed.
Being didactic, a commitment to teaching useful lessons. The Victorian era is associated here with a wish to extract practical and moral benefit from every aspect of life.

Reading ‘Tears, idle tears’ (3): Heather Glen on Putting Tennyson in Context

Saturday, May 9th, 2009


Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remember'd kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

'What might it mean' - Professor Heather Glen questions in a Literary Criticism lecture she currently gives to Cambridge undergraduates - 'to think about Tennyson's poem as historically different' from other 'romantic lyrics'?. In many ways 'Tears, idle tears' can be interestingly compared to later 'romantic lyrics', like : both of these 'romantic lyrics' might be seen as 'expressions', says Glen, 'of a solitary speaker providing a revelatory account of the self'. But what is distinctive about Tennyson's lyric?

Professor Glen argues that the 'I' of the poem, its speaking voice, is much less particularized, or individualized, than the 'I' in many other lyrics. Whereas Leavis saw a lack of particularity as a defect in the poem, she does not. She goes on to highlight how Tennyson's 'images' are 'not those of specific unique autobiographical memory'; Tennyson uses more generalized literary images than lyricists like Lawrence for example, such that - again - there is less focus on the individual character of the speaker than we might expect in other poetry. In this respect she differs from Brooks, who gave much more attention to the character of the 'Weeper'.

Supporting her claim about the 'literary' nature of Tennyson's imagery by illustrating how its 'happy autumn-fields' seem intentionally to echo the imagery of , Professor Glen goes on to suggest that 'Tears, idle tears' seems less concerned 'with individual feeling [or individual images] than with feelings [and images] that are shared by all'. What do you think about this? 'Customarily', she continues, 'the movement from the personal to the impersonal involves an implicit claiming of authority', a transition from claims like 'this is what I feel' to claims like 'this is true'. Do you think that, by moving away from particularity and towards general feelings and communal imagery, Tennyson intends his narrator to appear more authoritative?

If Tennyson does adopt a voice of 'authority' in 'Tears, idle tears', Professor Glen suggests that we might connect this with some biographical facts about Tennyson, such as that he had already been established as a public poet by 1847; that he was by this time, already in receipt of a ; and that just three years later he would become the Poet Laureate. By incorporating extra-textual information of this kind within our interpretation, we begin to depart from the strict ethos of New Criticism. Think about whether or not you are happy with this departure: do you think it is better to focus on poems in isolation or do you think it is useful to introduce these kinds of biographical detail into our analysis of what a poem means?

Whereas we might thus want to say that the speaker in Tennyson's poem appears de-personalized because the public poet is consciously adopting a super-human voice of cultural authority, Professor Glen suggests how we might alternatively counter this idea by observing that the voice of 'Tears, idle tears' is not actually confident. Indeed, the 'we' of the second stanza, Professor Glen continues, 'is hardly that of assured and urbane control; it is more like one of shared pain'. Tennyson is referring to how everything 'we' love 'sinks... below the verge'. Obviously this is a general statement about something that happens to all of us, and in that limited sense it is bold, but does it sound authoritative?

Having echoed Leavis in highlighting how 'the first person fades out of this poem', Professor Glen echoes Brooks when she talks about the power of this poem's imagery. However, 'the images whose sharpness Cleanth Brooks admired' she claims, 'are, at least in the first three stanzas, images of that over which human beings have no control': for example Tennyson highlights the seasons in stanza 1 and then 'the implicit rage of the rising and setting sun' throughout stanza 2, before expanding this image into the dark summer dawns of stanza 3. If mortality is therefore a central focus of the poem, Professor Glen wonders whether Tennyson's apparent adoption of authority is in fact (or is at least countered by) an admission of common human frailty. What do you think? Is Tennyson's speaker fragile or strong?

Professor Glen links both this poem's lack of rhyme scheme (unusually for a lyric of this sort, none of the lines rhyme) and its 'binding, relenting, tolling repetition' to the idea that Tennyson may have consciously intended to offer no sense of resolution or relief in 'Tears, idle tears'. As we read it, we encounter 'repetition rather than formal completion'. Perhaps this idea of incompletion relates to and enhances the sense of human weakness which Professor Glen believes is expressed in the poem. Can you see how this might be so?

Click here to continue to the next part of this close reading of Tennyson's 'Tears, idle tears'.

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) is one of the greatest writers of the early twentieth century. Most famous for novels, he also wrote poems. 'The Piano' describes childhood memories unlocked by the playing of a piano.
In 1819 John Keats wrote this and his other Odes, which are among his greatest poems. 'Autumn' (which famously starts 'Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness') explores life's changes as they are evoked by an autumnal scene.
Whereas today a state pension is paid to everyone over a certain age, here it means something different. In recognition of his poetic merits and the prestige they brought to Britain, Tennyson was paid a salary to support him as he wrote.

Reading ‘Tears, idle tears’ (2): New Criticism, Cleanth Brooks, and Tennyson’s Ambiguity

Saturday, May 9th, 2009


Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remember'd kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

Very influenced by I.A. Richards' and F.R. Leavis' methods, the New Criticism movement formed a dominant strand of English and American literary criticism between the 1920s and early 1960s. Even more so than for Richards and Leavis, what mattered for New Critics like William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley were 'words on the page': New Critical readings demand exacting attention to works of literature, with particular attention being paid to the use of techniques like paradox, ambiguity, irony and tension, in order to discover what texts mean. Unlike Richards and Leavis however, the New Critics went so far as to imagine that literary texts function as autonomous entities, independent of the cultures that created them, such that many modern critics have criticised the movement on the grounds that its focus on words on the page necessarily involves a forced inattention to the context which produced and surrounded these words.

In stark contrast with Leavis, Cleanth Brooks praised 'Tears, idle tears' because he felt that it did contain enough complexity to convey an important message about the co-existence of contrary impulses within 'the Weeper's' character. After reading the following sentence from Brooks' account of the poem, in his book The Well-Wrought Urn, think about how his account might help you to appreciate the meaning of Tennyson's poem in a way that Leavis' did not: 'If this poem were a gentle melancholy reverie on the sweet sadness of the past', Brooks claims, then 'stanzas II and III would have no place in it'. Is there anything special about its second and third stanzas? Do they interrupt that 'sweetly plangent flow' which Leavis was writing about? What effect is created by the poet's repeated emphasis on objects and ideas that are 'sad' and 'strange'?

Brooks uses his close reading to support the idea that Tennyson's poem is not actually 'a gentle melancholy reverie':

The poem is no such reverie: the images from the past rise up with a strange clarity and sharpness that shock the speaker.

Notice here how Brooks ascribes 'a strange clarity and sharpness' to those same images which Leavis suggested were vague. What do you think about these images? Brooks continues:

The past should be tame, fettered, brought to heel; it is not... The word 'wild' in the final stanza is bold but not justified. It reasserts the line of development which has been maintained throughout the earlier stanzas: 'fresh', 'strange', and now 'wild' - all adjectives which suggest passionate, irrational life.

Already then, before we have begun considering how things outside the text might influence our appreciation of its meaning, we have come across two strongly opposed readings of 'Tears, idle tears'. According to Leavis the poem is simple; moreover, it is dangerous insofar as it lures us into acquiescing with its 'sweetly plangent flow'. According to Brooks the poem is complex; its initially 'gentle', melancholic and rationally reflective mood is interrupted in stanzas two and three, which contain an eruption of 'passionate, irrational life'. Which critic do you most agree with?

It is now time to focus on some factors beyond 'the words on the page', and to think about how these might help us to understand the poetry.

Click here to continue with this close reading of Tennyson's 'Tears, idle tears'.

Reading ‘Tears, idle tears’ (1): Practical Criticism, F. R. Leavis and Tennyson’s ‘sweetly plangent flow’

Saturday, May 9th, 2009


Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remember'd kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

I.A. Richards is often considered to have founded the contemporary study of literature in English. Indeed, when Richards began teaching English Literature at Cambridge University in the early twentieth century, Magdalene College would not pay him a salary to teach the new and untested subject, and he had to collect tuition from his students at the beginning of each class every week! Richards' book Practical Criticism emerged out of some experiments he performed in these classes. He presented a collection of Cambridge undergraduates with thirteen poems that had been stripped of all authorial and contextual information, and then observed how the students interpreted them: could they recognise which poems were written by respected poets, and which poems were written by marginal poets? Did they misread the poems in certain ways that they would not have done if they knew who had written them and when?

Imagine if you had to respond to a Tennyson poem without knowing who wrote it, and without access to any biographical and contextual information. Would you find it harder to establish what these poems mean? Richards' point is that readers often fail to cultivate adequate interpretative skills because they rely too heavily on such information, instead of focussing attention on the text itself and thus discovering its meaning. What do you think about this idea? Suspending our awareness of authorial and contextual information (insofar as we can), let's see what the methods of 'Practical Criticism' will allow us to discover about the 'meaning' of 'Tears, idle tears', by considering what another Cambridge literary critic, F.R. Leavis, had to say about the poem.

F.R. Leavis, who spent most of his life studying and teaching at Downing College, Cambridge, was a very influential British literary critic throughout the mid-twentieth century. Influenced by Richards, Leavis took works of art themselves to be the primary focus of critical discussion and believed evaluation to be the principal concern of criticism. Let's see how Leavis evaluates 'Tears, idle tears':

Complexity is not a marked characteristic of Tennyson's poem... It moves simply forward with a sweetly plangent flow, without check, cross-tension or any qualifying element. To give it the reading it asks for is to flow with it, acquiescing in a complete and simple immersion; there is no attitude towards the experience except one of complaisance. (From Leavis's essay 'Thought and Emotional Quality', Scrutiny, 13 (1945), 53-71.)

Over the next few web-pages we'll be considering some other ways in which we could read this same poem. For the moment though, do you agree with Leavis' ideas about simplicity and Tennyson's 'sweetly plangent flow'? Do you experience a sense of flowing with the poem, and what do you think is creating this sense if so? It could be the result of the poem's metrical structure (the poetic equivalent of musical beats in a bar), or it might be the poem's imagery (its 'Autumn fields', 'half-awaken'd birds' and so on). Alternatively, perhaps there is something in the poem that interrupts the flow that Leavis writes about?

Leavis also writes about the lack of 'particularity' within this poem. 'We note', Leavis claims, 'the complete absence of... [authentic] particularity; the particularity of 'the happy Autumn fields', 'the first beam glittering on a sail', and the casement that 'slowly fades a glimmering square' is only specious... No new definitions or directions of feeling emerge from these suggestions of imagery.'

For Leavis, these images are just 'suggestions': they are too general to refer to anything in particular and neither violently affect us, nor make us feel anything new. It might be useful to ask yourself whether Tennyson's image of 'happy Autumn fields' enables you to imagine any one particular location, for example, or whether it just helps to create the general atmosphere of the poem. If you think that this image primarily serves to create an abstract atmosphere and is representative in doing so, maybe you will also agree with Leavis' final, negative appraisal of 'Tears, idle tears':

It is plain that habitual indulgence of the kind represented by 'Tears, idle tears' would be, on grounds of emotional and spiritual hygiene, something to deplore.

Leavis is suggesting that there is something psychically or morally dangerous about this poem. What do you think about such an attitude?

Leavis grounds his reading of Tennyson's poem on the idea that 'to give it the reading it asks for is to flow with it', but we might want to question whether he really does give the poem 'the reading it asks for'. For example, he comments on the image of the 'casement' that 'slowly fades to a glimmering square'. Take another look at this particular line in the original poem and you may feel that Leavis' own commitment to 'particularity' is itself slightly 'specious'. In the original poem, the casement 'slowly grows to a glimmering square'; it does not actually fade at all. Perhaps Leavis' reading does not enable us to fully appreciate 'Tears, idle tears' because it doesn't play close enough attention to the verbal structure of the work? We'll test out this idea on the following page, by considering what the 'New Critic' Cleanth Brooks had to say about the poem in a famous essay entitled 'The Motivation of Tennyson's Weeper'.

Click here to go on to Part 2 of this reading of Tennyson's 'Tears, idle tears'.

‘Tears, idle tears’: An Introduction to Reading Tennyson

Saturday, May 9th, 2009


In these linked pages graduate editor Simon Calder looks at the different ways in which one short poem can be read and interpreted. By reading through the approaches taken by several important critics, you'll get a number of perspectives on 'Tears, idle tears', but you'll also be thinking over questions relevant to many, if not all, poems. At the end there's a chance to choose one of the approaches that seems to work best for you, and to offer comments on your own perspective on the poem.


'Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean'

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remember'd kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

'Tears, idle tears' was published in 1847, when it first appeared as a lyric embedded within Tennyson's longer poem The Princess: a Medley. In the opening line of the poem Tennyson's narrator says that they do not know what their own idle tears mean; what do you think they mean by the end? Over the course of the next few pages we'll consider what four different literary critics have said about the meaning of the poem, and think about whether or not to agree. We'll come across some contrasting ideas about how to read a poem which we should try to keep in mind whenever we're reading poetry.

Click here to proceed to the rest of this discussion of 'Tears, idle tears'.

Tennyson and Science

Saturday, May 9th, 2009

In this essay Claire Wilkinson, a second-year undergraduate, looks at how Tennyson responded to the dynamic changes in science and technology that occurred in the Victorian period.


From the theory of evolution to the invention of the photograph, modern science owes a lot to Victorian scientific thought.  The era saw the discipline of Science expand rapidly, and considerable progress was made in establishing the foundations of the different sciences of today.  What, however, is 'science'?  The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term as:

Knowledge acquired by study . . . A branch of study which is concerned either with a connected body of demonstrated truths or with observed facts systematically classified and more or less by being brought under general laws, and which includes trustworthy methods for the discovery of new truth within its own domain. (OED, 'science', n., 2, 4)

'Science' is therefore a kind of organized knowledge, interested in intellectual truths and developing the base of human knowledge.  Developments in general scientific knowledge during Tennyson's lifetime allowed for simultaneous developments in technology, as recently discovered knowledge was applied to the creation of new objects.  Technological advance in turn bred social change; as the railways spread through England, people became more mobile: a journey which would previously have taken several days would only take a matter of hours on a train.

Tennyson was particularly interested in contemporary science, and there are numerous references to the sciences, particularly geology, within his poetry.  As mentioned above, the theory of evolution was itself evolving during Tennyson's life time. Often credited to Darwin and his 1859 Origin of the Species, the theory had actually been taking shape for several years.  Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830-33) was one of the first works by an English author to consider seriously that the Earth's age was likely to be considerably higher than the biblical estimate of around 6000 years, meaning that evolutionary concepts requiring great timescales were becoming viable.  In Memoriam A.H.H. uses geological images to create a backdrop in which nothing is permanent and every object or moment merely a link in an evolutionary chain.  Tennyson is referring to the geological past in lyric 56 with the phrase 'A thousand types are gone'; when he speaks of a 'type', Tennyson is referring to an evolutionary phase.  A thousand 'types' of rocks are gone, but the impersonal articulation of the poem implies that a thousand 'types' of life may also be gone.  The  implication is clear: Tennyson's awareness of modern scientific theory has led him to the conclusion that events in his life are no more important or significant to an impersonal and uncaring 'Nature' than any other natural process.

Consider the relevant segment of lyric 56:

'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.'

. . .

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 -

Notable attention is paid to a lack of constancy in the world; Nature 'care[s] for nothing, all shall go'.  Contemporary scientific theory is challenging received ideas about God and religion, forcing the poet to forge his own conclusions about his place in the world.  Tennyson seems to be concerned with the difficulties in reconciling the laws of 'Nature' with the creeds of God. That Nature has 'shriek'd against his creed' anticipates the problems that later geologists and naturalists would face when developing new theories which were fully in accord with modern science, but contradictory to religion.

Indeed, scientific thinkers have struggled for millennia with the issue of contradicting current religious thought.  What continues to this day in the ongoing debate about stem cell research between the church and scientists was also rife in Ancient Greek society.  Aristotle, the great philosopher, theorist and scientist had to go into hiding in 322BC because the Athenian government deemed that he did not respect the Gods in his work. His predecessor Socrates died under a similar charge in 399BC.  Scientists such as Lyell, Darwin and Spencer faced opposition from the church, which was reluctant to accept ideas contrary to its traditional teachings

Lyell, Darwin and Spencer are the three 'big names' to consider when we're thinking about the development of evolutionary theory.  Most people will have heard of Darwin, who published The Origin of Species in 1859, but Lyell and Spencer contributed a great deal of the groundwork which allowed Darwin's theories to take shape.  Lyell, as mentioned above, studied geology, considering the age and structure of the Earth.  Spencer developed a theory of evolution, published in his Developmental Hypothesis in 1852; it was he who popularised the term 'evolution' and thought up the phrase 'survival of the fittest'.

We have considered how Tennyson interpreted the science and religion debate, but how did the scientific theorists at the heart of the matter view the question?  Were they, for example, actively trying to be anti-religious?  The best answer to this is a straightforward 'no'; however, if you type the question into Google, you'll be surprised at the passionate range of answers displayed!  The issue clearly remains controversial, 150 years after Darwin's publication.  The theory of evolution was not developed with the intention of disproving anything said by the church; more acutely, as the theory has gained intellectual weight, it has come to compromise some traditional Christian beliefs.  Lyell, for example, found it difficult to believe that natural selection could be the driving force behind evolution - his religious beliefs led him to doubt the basis of a theory which his own research had initiated.  Darwin died an agnostic, but his beliefs (just like Tennyson's), were often intimately personal - the death of his daughter Annie in 1851 prompted Darwin to question religion just as Tennyson did in personal response to Hallam's death throughout In Memoriam A.H.H. (Darwin's letters give insights into his thoughts on many matters; see 'Further Reading' below.)

Whilst Tennyson's poetry is concerned with scientific thought, he also makes numerous references to technology, especially to the development of the railway.  The England that Tennyson was born into in 1809 was considerably different from the country in which he died in 1892.  The period was one of great industrial change, and Tennyson makes allusions to such changes in poems such as 'Locksley Hall', which discusses (in part) the effects of technology upon humanity.  A notable line from the poem was penned after the poet had taken a train between two cities:

When I first went from Liverpool to Manchester, I thought that the wheels ran in a groove... then I made this line:

Not in vain the distance beckons.  Forward, forward let us range,
Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.

He was excited by the potential of the railway, but did not actually understand it. Train wheels do not actually run in grooves. Nevertheless, Tennyson is clearly concerned with the implications of science for human life. The poem juxtaposes the images of advancing technology, mythology (Diana and Orion, the great hunters of mythology, feature heavily), and a tale of Tennyson's own - a lost love:

There methinks would be enjoyment more than in this march of mind,
In the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake mankind.

There the passions cramp'd no longer shall have scope and breathing space;
I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.

Tennyson's concern lies in his conviction that modern technologies promise advancement yet fail to recognise that the human race is 'savage'.  It will not significantly change, despite technology.  We can hear doubt in the narrator's voice in the above extract; 'methinks would be enjoyment more' suggests that the 'march of mind' is not delivering what it promises.

Consider the juxtaposition of the first and second couplets quoted above.  The images 'march of mind', 'steamship', 'railway' and 'thoughts that shake mankind' are all forward thinking, expressive of progression and advancement, but they are made to sound rather ridiculous in light of the second paragraph.  Against the image of 'passions cramp'd' which have no 'breathing space', the earlier images look very contrived and artificial.  All the narrator seems to desire is a 'savage woman'. He has no need for the artifice created by modern society, but yet appreciates that if he holds this mentality, he shall become 'dusky'.  The poet illuminates possible problems with technological advancement, but equally anticipates the necessity of remaining in touch with developments.  Indeed, the entire poem is very involved with the image of moving forward; 'marching', 'forward' and 'beacons' all propel the reader into the technological future Tennyson imagines.

It seems that humanity is racing towards the future, propelled by scientific thought and technological advances, advances which, for Tennyson, are to be treated with both excitement and trepidation.  Throughout his poetry, Tennyson does not shy from discussing controversial themes arising from the domains of both science and technology, and as a poet and thinker we can see him engage actively with 'challenging' thoughts and theories.  Science and technology were just two areas of many that underwent significant change during Tennyson's lifetime, and Tennyson's engagement reflects this.



Further Reading

Claire Wilkinson used The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. F. Darwin (1887), p. 304, as a source for Darwin's questioning of religion. The Darwin Correspondence Project has made a great deal of his correspondence available on the web. It is a mine of information for anyone interested in Victorian science: http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/.


Further Thinking

1. Claire notes that Tennyson admitted that the 'ringing grooves' of 'Locksley Hall' are the result of a simple error. Disregarding the error, do you think it is an effective image? What are its implications? Do you think it's significant that Tennyson misunderstood the technology?

2. It might seem strange to us to find even Victorian poets thinking about the relationship between humans and science / technology, and indeed between poetry and science / technology. Do you think that more modern writers that you have come across share Tennyson's interests and concerns, or not?

This just means connected, or bound together.

Tennyson and Religion

Saturday, May 9th, 2009


In this essay second-year undergraduate Claire Wilkinson tries to define Tennyson's views on religion. Some key poems and passages are presented, and readers are invited to consider their own answers to some important questions.


If you try looking for a photograph of Tennyson, either on an internet search engine or in your school library, you'll probably come across a black and white print of a rather austere looking man.  Complete with a full beard, tightly buttoned combination of black waistcoat and jacket, and a suitably pensive expression, it is immediately evident that Tennyson was from a time quite different from our own.  Maybe you'd describe the person you see as a 'typically Victorian' gentleman.  However, whilst Tennyson may have dressed conventionally, his attitudes to religion and also his religious beliefs were anything but conventional.

England under the reign of Victoria (1837-1901) was undisputedly Christian; very few families would have chosen not to visit church on Sundays, and Christians dominated public life.  The period of Queen Victoria's reign was, however, a period of change.  Over its 64-year span, life changed rapidly: industrialisation took hold and brought the development of the railway, thus widening people's horizons by effectively shrinking England.  Scientific thinkers began to contemplate evolutionary theories and to question their implications and compatibility with a religion nearly two millennia old. As Tennyson's work spanned almost the entire Victorian period, it is perhaps not surprising that the concepts of religion and faith feature heavily in his poetry - how, we can ask, did personal experience effect Tennyson's views on religion?  And what can we make of the references to religion in Tennyson's poetry, both in isolation and as a body of work written by a man who undoubtedly suffered uncertainties about his own faith?

In referring broadly to Tennyson's own 'uncertainties', there is one formative experience that cannot be forgotten.  Personal, as well as social, change forced the poet to question his religious beliefs.  The unexpected death of Arthur Hallam (Tennyson's friend, mentor and sister's fiancé) in 1833 so shook Tennyson that he spent a considerable amount of time during the next seventeen years composing a poem of remembrance to his dead friend, In Memoriam A.H.H. This epic poem describes Tennyson's grief at Hallam's death, and was so popular that it is said that .


Faith, Doubt, and Tennyson's Conclusions

We have seen that Tennyson's views on religion were shaped by his experience, but we still do not know what Tennyson believed.  Looking at his poetry should give us some clues about whether or not Tennyson abandoned faith altogether:

There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.

In Memoriam A.H.H. 96.II.iii-iv

You may well have come across the above words before; indeed they are some of Tennyson's better-known lines of poetry.  We need to consider exactly what Tennyson is trying to communicate in the extract.  'Faith' and 'doubt' are commonly used but complex terms, and in his assertion, Tennyson is questioning orthodox creeds.  Importantly, Tennyson does not neglect faith - he only questions the validity of a faith which has not been doubted.  The literary critic and poet T.S. Eliot said of In Memoriam:

It is not religious for the quality of its faith, but because of the quality of its doubt.  Its faith is a poor thing, but its doubt is a very intense experience.  In Memoriam is a poem of despair, but of despair of the religious kind.

T.S. Eliot - Religion and Literature (1935)

In Memoriam A.H.H. is certainly concerned with religion, as we can see from the numerous references to religious figures and celebrations throughout.  What we need to decide is how the various references operate within the poem; do they confirm Tennyson's faith?  Or further the argument that Tennyson had rejected Christianity?

Take a look at two parts of In Memoriam: lyric 30 and lyric 78:

30
With trembling fingers did we weave
The holly round the Christmas hearth;
A rainy cloud possess'd the earth,
And sadly fell our Christmas-eve. (lines 1-4)

78
Again at Christmas did we weave
The holly round the Christmas hearth;
The silent snow possess'd the earth
And calmly fell our Christmas-eve. (lines 1-4)

The respective sections of the poem discuss Christmas celebrations in the December following Hallam's death (1833), and Christmas the year after (1834).  There are obvious contrasts in the language (look at 'sadly' in the earlier piece, next to 'calmly' in the second) and tone (how do you think the second extract sounds in comparison to the first?). This leads to some interesting points for consideration regarding Tennyson's use of religious imagery:

(i) Does Tennyson ever really commit himself to the religious images he uses within the poem?

(ii) Do you think that Tennyson uses Christmas as a marker in time? - Is the celebration itself significant, or is it more important to look at the differences in the poet's articulation that this poem presents as having developed over the course of a year?

We might extend this comparison to consider both lyric 30 and 78 in their entireties:

30

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.

78

Again at Christmas 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 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 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.

You could use the guidelines below to develop your own thoughts on this pair of lyrics, thinking in terms of form, structure and language:

(i) Why is lyric 30 longer than lyric 78?  Is it simply that Tennyson had more to say in lyric 30?  Or does the length achieve another effect?

(ii) There are places in which the two extracts are very similar; consider how Tennyson's choice of different words within a similar sentence alters the tone of the pieces.

(iii) Can we track the developments in lyric 30 that lead to the more resigned tone in lyric 78?  Look at lines 17-20 of lyric 30.  Tennyson says that 'a gentler feeling crept / Upon us'; is this 'gentler feeling' reflected in lyric 78?  How can we determine if this is a point of change in the poem?

(iv) Although it's not a direct comparison, what do you think is significant about the 20th line both the lyrics?

'And silence follow'd, and we wept.'
'But with long use her tears are dry.'

(v) There is actually another reference to Christmas in In Memoriam, and it's quite different to the two accounts given here.  See if you can find it - how is it similar / different?  Do Tennyson's accounts of Christmas express a movement forward in his process of grief, or do you feel that he is always returning to a position of comfort?

Discussing religion and faith within Tennyson's work is difficult to say the least.  We can come to the conclusion that 'faith' and 'religion' were not synonymous for the poet, but it is impossible to fully derive Tennyson's own beliefs from his work.  There are two final important clues that we must consider: what Tennyson himself said on the matter, and his final wishes.

, a contemporary of the poet and a renowned Irish diarist, recorded that Tennyson believed in Pantheism.  In a discussion with Allingham, it is claimed that Tennyson said: 'Well!... I think I believe in Pantheism, of a sort'.  Allingham's diary was written in October 1865 (some 15 years after the publication of In Memoriam A.H.H. and 32 years after the poem was started), which suggests that Tennyson had used the intervening time to develop the thoughts he was entertaining in In Memoriam A.H.H. into conclusions.  Importantly, we must understand what Pantheism is before we can come to any of our own conclusions about Tennyson's beliefs.  'Pantheism' is constructed of the Greek 'pan' and 'theos', meaning 'all' and 'God' respectively.  In this element, it is similar to Christianity; the concept that 'all is God' is shared between the two beliefs.  Pantheism, however, is much more abstract than conventional Christianity.  Whilst Christians believe in a personal and creative deity, Pantheism denies any individuality in a creator; the spirit of a 'God' simply exists in everything - 'God is all' and 'all is God'.  Tennyson's own allusion to the nature of his beliefs suggests that Tennyson's own faith was existent, if very different from traditional religion.

Finally, Tennyson expressed a wish that his poem 'Crossing the Bar' be placed at the end of every edition of his poetry, and if you look through any collection of his works, you'll find that this wish has been widely respected. The poem was written in 1889, only three years before Tennyson's death, as he crossed the sea on a ferry to his home on the Isle of Wight:

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.

How can we interpret this poem?  There is a close reading of this poem on this site. We could begin by asking some key questions:

(i) Tennyson requested that this poem be placed at the end of each of his collections of work.  How might you come to think differently if he'd specified a different poem, such as 'Break, Break, Break', in its place?

(ii) What tone do you think Tennyson develops throughout the text?  You might compare phrases conveying certainty ('one clear call for me', 'when I have crossed the bar') with those conveying speculation or uncertainty ('and may there be no moaning', 'as moving seems asleep', 'I hope to see').

(iii) Who, or what, is Tennyson's 'Pilot'?  Is there an argument that this is God?  Or do you think that he is referring to Hallam as the person who has motivated him throughout his life?

(iv) What do you think about Tennyson's choice of central image?  What is Tennyson referring to when he speaks of 'crossing the bar'? We know that the image is literally the crossing of a bar of sand in water.  What other meanings might be suggested?

(v) Why do you think 'Time' and 'Place' are capitalised in the middle of a phrase?  What particular stress is the author attempting to put on these words?

All these questions about details in the poem help build up a picture of the whole thing, but in the end the poem may well remain ambiguous.  However, we must recognise the significance of the fact that Tennyson wished the poem to be published at the end of each collection of his works.  The poem can be seen as a conclusion to his life's works even though it sets nothing in stone regarding his final views: as with all matters of faith in the personal lives of each individual, it is necessary to come to your own conclusion.

The fascinating image of Queen Victoria keeping In Memoriam by her bedside came from an article in an academic journal: Kirstie Blair, 'Touching Hearts: Queen Victoria and the Curative Properties of In Memoriam', Tennyson Research Bulletin, 5 (2001), 246-254.
William Allingham's Diary: 1824-1889 was published by Penguin in 1985. Himself a poet, Allingham records his encounters with famous people of the time, including Tennyson.