Saturday, December 3, 2011
CXX
The lines in CXX seem to mark a huge distinction between man and beast. Lines like "Like Paul with beasts, I fought with Death;" and "cunning casts in clay" seem to establish humans as being the superior beings in this world. In regards to the idea of evolution, he states "Let him, the wiser man who springs hereafter", which suggests that humans can become smarter by creating progeny, through natural selection we reproduce in a fashion to produce offspring that are better than we are at the moment. This is further shown in the following lines: "up from childhood shape his actions like the greater ape, but I was born to other things.". The "childhood shape" stands for the early humans, whose "actions" were "like the greater ape". However, Tennyson, being that he is not a neanderthal, was obviously "born to other things", the modern human species.
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Section 118-120 do indeed turn on the distinction between humans and animals--this is a crucial part of Tennyson's argument and how he recaptures his faith. The 5th stanza of section CXVIII gets at precisely what you are pointing to: in order for man as a "type" or species to advance, the individual must replicate its development in his/her life, either by moving gradually from "more to more" or by struggling with sorrow and grief. So, Tennyson is making an analogy between the individual's emotional development (ie. what happens in the poem) and the development of the species from a sensual feast to a transcendental state ("arise and fly"). What makes this analogy stand up is the division between sense-bound animals and faith-bound people: Tennyson advises the individual and the species to "move upward, working out the beast, / And let the ape and tiger die." What proves this distinction? The poem itself.
ReplyDeleteThough Tennyson does “In Memorium’s” concluding stanzas extol the idea of humans evolving through procreation, he fails to consider how true his words may actually prove to be. With a world population passing 7 billion this year and the environmental impact of such blessings/burdens being realized everyday, we may very well “let the ape and tiger die” in the wake of our human evolution (we lost the Black Rhinoceros this year alone). Tennyson’s ideas echo Martin Heidegger’s view of the relationship of man and Nature “that human beings are animals.” Tennyson, like Heidegger “asserts that humans are ontologically different from all other entities, Heidegger follows in his own unique way the traditional idea that humans stand outside of nature, even while being part of it” (Zimmerman).
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