Musings on Form

I’ve been thinking more about Tennyson’s use of form in In Memoriam since our class discussion yesterday. It’s certainly an interesting decision to write such long poem in such a constrained and definite form, and I definitely agree with the various conclusions we came to yesterday. In the context of nature, I’d also like to add another idea, which is admittedly somewhat of an extrapolation. I think that Tennyson’s form reflects not only how he expresses his grief, but is also a reflection of how nature is constructed—essentially, all natural and living things can be broken down into their smallest complete unit, a cell. I think that Tennyson’s stanzas function as the “cells” that build the greater organism, which is his poem as a whole. To extrapolate this comparison even further, one could say that the cells form individual tissues or even organs in the ways they make up each canto of the poem. Each stanza functions in some way as a stand-alone entity, and they are all very alike, but all are needed to create this poem as a whole. Tennyson probably didn’t have cell theory in mind when writing this poem (although historically, it was formulated right around the time he would have been writing In Memoriam) but I think the comparisons that can be made between this poem and the scientific construction of living organisms are very interesting, particularly in the context of our class.