In Memoriam

I find it interesting how a previous post talks about how in In Memoriam “Tennyson's lord is inseparable from humanity and the earth”. In my Victorian Period class, we recently looked at In Memoriam and one of our main focuses was on sections 54-56, where Tennyson talks about “I can but trust that good will fall” (56-14), he has no certainty about the protection God offers and in section 55 he asks “Are God and Nature then at strife,” (55-5). In this part of the poem at least, he sets up an opposition between God and Nature (with a capital “N”): he has been taught and told that he needs to trust in God and the afterlife but when he looks at nature he sees how Nature is “so careless of the single life” (55-8). This idea is summed up in section 56, “God was love indeed…Tho’ Nature…shriek’d against this creed-” (56 13-16). At this point, his general sentiment seems to be that the seemingly random viciousness of nature (possibly foreshadowing Darwin’s ideas of natural selection) negates the existence of a loving God.

Although this conflict seems to be resolved by the end of the poem, where “That God that ever lives and loves…To which the whole creation moves.” (Epilogue 141-144) in the middle there seems to be mostly confusion and a struggle to make sense of the roles of God, Nature and man. This is understandable when you consider the circumstances in which Tennyson wrote the poem – one of his closest friends had died and In Memoriam spans a number of years in which he slowly comes to term with his grief.