Indianness in Indian English Poetry

Source: http://www.yabaluri.org/Web%20(1978%20%202008)/indiannessinindianenglishpoetryjul91.htm

INDIANNESS IN INDIAN ENGLISH POETRY 

V.S.V.L. Ramana

            Indian English poetry is an attempt to give a generic cover to the Indian imagination seeking creative outlet in and through English. Many Indian poets write in English because they think their creative urge can be fulfilled in a better way in English than in the vernacular. Prof. Srinivasa Iyengar rightly pointed out that Indian writing in English is a novel experiment in creative mutation when he said: “To be Indian in thought and feeling and emotion and experience, yet also to court the graces and submit to the discipline of English for expression”¹ is some­thing that the present writers aim at. The post independence Indian English verse has gained in both strength and variety an appreciable position. It has been said that it is Indian in sensibility and context and Indian English, if we choose to call it so, in language. It is rooted in and stems out from the Indian environment and reflects its mores.

            In spite of the differences between one medium and another there is a unity of supreme significance among Indian writers writing in regional language like Oriya, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu or Marathi. The unity of Indianness, i.e., all transcending response to the physical, idealistic, and intellectual personality of India, in them brings these poets together.

            The Indian English poets, giving expression to the Indian, experience in thought and imagery, are in the main stream of a tradition. A cultural activity does not grow all of a sudden it has an origin and a development. It is pertinent to consider the tradition that has been built up by this output and the impact of this tradition on the writers of today. P. Lal remarks that these poets are instrumental in rediscovering “values and techniques within one’s own tradition” ² which is a body of concepts and usages, ideas and feelings to be felt or thought, to win acceptance and currency or to provoke dissent or modification.

            The angle of the poet’s vision has been conditioned by his own experience and temperament by the primary attitudes or modes of his perception. “Language, Music, Form, Meaning, Style, Imagery, Inner Meaning, Mood, Attitude and Vision: this is how we get to know a poem in each stage of its creation, whatever the process of integration that goes to make up the poem as a whole,” ³ says V. K. Gokak.

            When we come to Indian English poetry, we find ourselves in a world in which the response to Indian reality, the underlying sensibility, the use of imagery, diction, etc., are strikingly different, particularly in the contemporary leading poets. Our attempt will be a study whether there are any noteworthy differences in the poetic sensibility shaped by their Indianness in the poets of pre-independence era such as Sri Aurobindo, Sarojini Naidu, etc., and the poets in the post-independence period with special reference to Nissim Ezekiel, A. K. Ramanujan, Kamala Das, Jayant Mahapatra and Shiv K. Kumar.

            Many contemporary poets write in English about their experience of today’s Indian milieu without losing their national identity. Gouri Deshpande, Meera Pillai and other poets from writers’ workshop rightly speak of the Indian background and they are not ignorant of the shaping of a national consciousness by the environment of the country, the climate, the background of tradition. But some of the new poets deny any umbilical connection with their historical past. A tradition cannot be wholly disowned. Amalendu Bose says that this denial “is a boisterous proclamation that these writers are upstarts, and rootless.” ⁴

            In a work of art, that is, a well-realised creative effort, presence of Indianness is invariably expressed. It must be noted that within the text, a good writer does not give direct indications of such a presence, but that the operational response of the Indian writer could be deduced by the sensibility working in it. What characterizes the Indianness in the writing is finally ‘the mind behind the orgaisation’ of the context, the life attitudes and modes of perception. C. R. Srinath aptly says: “The Indian poet while using English as his medium should have his roots in his own soil and yet be a part of the common culture of the English speaking peoples, indeed of all mankind to the extent that it gives an edge to his native vigour and sensibilities.” ⁵

            Creative writing is an achievement of harmony between concept and medium, between what is to be said and how it is to be said. As for concept, the Indian poet is as capable in that area as any poet handling from another language group. It is in respect of the handling of the medium that the non-native poet’s ability has to pass through a fire test. Several poets have the ability to control their medium and thus achieve aesthetic success. The alien language does not necessarily diminish or regard the writer’s sense of heritage. Toru Dutt, Sarojini Naidu, Nissim Ezekiel, A. K. Ramanujan, Kamala Das and others have been compe­tent in retaining their Indianness in full measure. To discuss and evaluate the poets, the principal question will be the degree of their Indianness in terms of authenticity and credibility of their local and culture and medium of their expression.

            When Sarojini Naidu addresses and sonnet to India, her patriotic zeal is beyond all doubt and yet the actual product is too heavily cultured with stock ideas and responses and stale expressions:

            “Thy Future calls thee with a man if old sound

            To crescent honours, splendours, victories vast.⁶

            Unless the Indian poet’s experience is authentic and his own, and not derivative and imitative of conventional modes of the way, the mere choice of specifically Indian themes and settings would not make for authenticity. The Indian poet in English can be a poet only by being truly an Indian. For M. K. Naik to be truly an Indian of modern times is ‘to constitute a synthesis of the age-old ethos of India and the culture of the west which English literature and ideas brought to India; it is to live and breathe the culture of India as it exists today, a complex product which has changed, matured over millenia, losing and gaining much in the process; it is to write with Indian in one’s bones.”⁷ This synthesis has clear glimpses in the works of modern poets like Ezekiel, Mahapatra, etc. For example, Nissim Ezekiel’s “Night of the Scorpion” ably illustrates the Indian synthesis in the work of modernists. The contrast between the two attitudes to scorpion bite; the sceptic, rationalist attitude armed with a little paraffin as a remedy and the superstitious attitude fortified by prayers and incantations - a contrast typical of the modern Indian situation. Coolness, authentic and objectivity are some of the marks of Ezekiel’s harsher notations of Indian life.

            Ramanujan’s creative work, both as poet and translator, has drawn praise from the English speaking world. Ezekiel is of the opinion that Ramanujam has enriched the Indo-Anglican tradition of poetry’s Even the titles of some of his poems such as “A HINDU TO HIS BODY” (The Hindu: he does not hurt a fly or a spider either) “SMALL TOWN, SOUTH INDIA”, “OLD INDIAN BELIEF”, and “PRAYERS TO LORD MURUGA” suggest Ramanujan’s Indianness. In conventions of despair, the poet tells explicitly that he rejects the demands of the modern man such as marrying again and again:

            “I must seek and will find

            my particular hell only in my Hindu mind.” ⁹

            Ramanujan’s Indianness in his poetry indicates a complex interaction or psychological forces kept under linguistic and formal control. His poetry is essentially Indian with the modern connection vitalising it as in “A River,”

            “The new poets still quoted

            the old poets, but no one spoke

            in verse,

            of the pregnant woman drowned....” ¹⁰

            Ramanujan finds his objective correlative in a family around him. In the poem, “Obituary” he recalls his father’s death, and uses the occasion to comment ironically on ceremonies and rituals associated with the dead.

            There is a conspicuous craftsmanship, introspection and self analysis in Kamala Das’s poetry. Confessional tone is sharper in her poems. If we look for her strength as a poet, we must detect in her poetry the dust, the heat, the crowds, the poverty of India combined with misery and endurance of womankind. She tries to strike a sort of synthesis between the changing reality of a private passion and the apparently unchanging reality of the shining sun on Indian horizon. The overtones of the poem “SUMMER IN CALCUTTA” can be taken into account. She is not alienated from the Indian landscape or its social milieu.

            One of the Indian English poets who has emerged as a major poet only recently is Shiv K. Kumar, Kumar gives in his poetry an evidence of genuine poetic inspiration. His poetry has great precision and the image glistens like polished brass though he has often been criticised for his over refinement, a bizarre search for right word, right phrase, right stance. Subterfuses, Cobwebs in the Sunshine are evasions or de­captions that we encounter in our life. The cobweb being swept away, the subterfuses become visible to us. “A MANGO VENDOR” is an eloquent metaphor:

            “Through the slits

            Of her patched blouse

            One bare shoulder

            Two white moons

            Pull all horses

            Off the track.” ¹¹

            Kumar’s originality lies in the uniqueness of his imaginative world. He grapples with abstractions and ideas, images of men and women on the social scene, the complex of emotions centering round human varieties like sex, love, companionship and problems relating to art. Through powerfully evoked images the past is relevened. “MY CO-RESPOND­ENT” is a fine example of how Kumar achieves an integrative of idea and image, statement and drama to provide a wholly satisfying experience.

            Deeply involved in his immediate environment, Kumar continues to strike a convincing note of contemporary life. Trapfalls in the Sky is his fifth collection of verse which won Sahitya Academic Award for 1987. The poems have flawless attention to detail, for instance, the opening poem “MOTHER THERESA FEEDS LEEPERS AT HER HOME FOR DESTITUTES, CALCUTTA”, and “AN INDIAN MOTHER’S ADVICE TO HER DAUGHTER BEFORE MARRIAGE”. ¹²

            The poetry of these and other modern Indian English poets suggests a case for exploring Indianness in terms of not only the authenticity of their locale and culture, but the medium of the expression. They regard English language as one of the many Indian languages, and their exploration of it to its fullest possibilities, both in range and depth produces some of the best poetry. Their poetry is lyrical poetry which is unique in that the weight or intellect never overburdens their authentic feelings.

¹ Iyengar, K. R. Srinivasa: Indian Writing in English (Asia Publishing House, 2nd edition, 1973) P. 8.

² Lal. P, quoted by Linda Hess in Meenakshi Mukerjee, Considerations (Bombay: Allied, 1977) P.25.

³ Gokak V.K.: An Integral view of poetry; an Indian perspective (1975) P. 64.

⁴ Sinha, Krishna Nandan ed. Indian Writing in English (1979) p. 64.

⁵ Kulshertha, Chirantan, ed. Contemporary Indian Verse; An Evaluation (1980) p. 96.

⁶ Naidu, Sarojini: The Sceptred Flute, p. 58.

⁷ Naik, M.K. “Echo and Voice in Indian Poetry,” in Contemporary Indian Verse An Evaluation ed. C. Kulshrestha, 1980, p. 37.

⁸ Sinha, Krishna Nandan. ed. Indian Writing In English (1979) p.121.

⁹ Parthasarathy, R. ed. Ten Twentieth Century Poets (Delhi: Oxford, Crown Se­ries, 1976) p. 97.

¹⁰ Ibid, p.98.

¹¹ Ibid, p. 54.

¹² Kumar, Shiv K.: Trapfalls in the Sky (Delhi: Macmillan, 1986) p. 13 & 14.

W. B. Yeats, ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’

W. B. Yeats, ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’, in “The Symbolism of Poetry” by William Butler Yeats,
 first published in The Dome (April 1900); reprinted in Ideas of Good and Evil (1903).

[Source: Available at Richard Nordquist, About Education website - online; accessed 09.08.2016]

I
“Symbolism, as seen in the writers of our day, would have no value if it were not seen also, under one disguise or another, in every great imaginative writer,” writes Mr. Arthur Symons in The Symbolist Movement in Literature, a subtle book which I cannot praise as I would, because it has been dedicated to me; and he goes on to show how many profound writers have in the last few years sought for a philosophy of poetry in the doctrine of symbolism, and how even in countries where it is almost scandalous to seek for any philosophy of poetry, new writers are following them in their search.

We do not know what the writers of ancient times talked of among themselves, and one bull is all that remains of Shakespeare's talk, who was on the edge of modern times; and the journalist is convinced, it seems, that they talked of wine and women and politics, but never about their art, or never quite seriously about their art. He is certain that no one who had a philosophy of his art, or a theory of how he should write, has ever made a work of art, that people have no imagination who do not write without forethought and afterthought as he writes his own articles. He says this with enthusiasm, because he has heard it at so many comfortable dinner-tables, where some one had mentioned through carelessness, or foolish zeal, a book whose difficulty had offended indolence, or a man who had not forgotten that beauty is an accusation.

Those formulas and generalisations, in which a hidden sergeant has drilled the ideas of journalists and through them the ideas of all but all the modern world, have created in their turn a forgetfulness like that of soldiers in battle, so that journalists and their readers have forgotten, among many like events, that Wagner spent seven years arranging and explaining his ideas before he began his most characteristic music; that opera, and with it modern music, arose from certain talks at the house of one Giovanni Bardi of Florence; and that the Pléiade laid the foundations of modern French literature with a pamphlet.

Goethe has said, “a poet needs all philosophy, but he must keep it out of his work,” though that is not always necessary; and almost certainly no great art, outside England, where journalists are more powerful and ideas less plentiful than elsewhere, has arisen without a great criticism, for its herald or its interpreter and protector, and it may be for this reason that great art, now that vulgarity has armed itself and multiplied itself, is perhaps dead in England.

All writers, all artists of any kind, in so far as they have had any philosophical or critical power, perhaps just in so far as they have been deliberate artists at all, have had some philosophy, some criticism of their art; and it has often been this philosophy, or this criticism, that has evoked their most startling inspiration calling into outer life some portion of the divine life, or of the buried reality, which could alone extinguish in the emotions what their philosophy or their criticism would extinguish in the intellect. They have sought for no new thing, it may be, but only to understand and to copy the pure inspiration of early times, but because the divine life wars upon our outer life, and must needs change its weapons and its movements as we change ours, inspiration has come to them in beautiful startling shapes. The scientific movement brought with it a literature, which was always tending to lose itself in externalities of all kinds, in opinion, in declamation, in picturesque writing, in word-painting, or in what Mr. Symons has called an attempt “to build in brick and mortar inside the covers of a book“; and new writers have begun to dwell upon the element of evocation, of suggestion, upon what we call the symbolism in great writers.

II
In “Symbolism in Painting,” I tried to describe the element of symbolism that is in pictures and sculpture, and described a little the symbolism in poetry, but did not describe at all the continuous indefinable symbolism which is the substance of all style.

There are no lines with more melancholy beauty than these by Burns:

The white moon is setting behind the white wave,
And Time is setting with me, O!

and these lines are perfectly symbolical. Take from them the whiteness of the moon and of the wave, whose relation to the setting of Time is too subtle for the intellect, and you take from them their beauty. But, when all are together, moon and wave and whiteness and setting Time and the last melancholy cry, they evoke an emotion which cannot be evoked by any other arrangement of colours and sounds and forms. We may call this metaphorical writing, but it is better to call it symbolical writing, because metaphors are not profound enough to be moving, when they are not symbols, and when they are symbols they are the most perfect of all, because the most subtle, outside of pure sound, and through them one can the best find out what symbols are.

If one begins the reverie with any beautiful lines that one can remember, one finds they are like those by Burns. Begin with this line by Blake -

The gay fishes on the wave when the moon sucks up the dew;

or these lines by Nash - 

Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath closed Helen's eye;
or these lines by Shakespeare -
Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beached verge of the salt flood;
Who once a day with his embossed froth
The turbulent surge shall cover;

or take some line that is quite simple, that gets its beauty from its place in a story, and see how it flickers with the light of the many symbols that have given the story its beauty, as a sword-blade may flicker with the light of burning towers.

All sounds, all colours, all forms, either because of their preordained energies or because of long association, evoke indefinable and yet precise emotions, or, as I prefer to think, call down among us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions; and when sound, and colour, and form are in a musical relation, a beautiful relation to one another, they become, as it were, one sound, one colour, one form, and evoke an emotion that is made out of their distinct evocations and yet is one emotion.

The same relation exists between all portions of every work of art, whether it be an epic or a song, and the more perfect it is, and the more various and numerous the elements that have flowed into its perfection, the more powerful will be the emotion, the power, the god it calls among us. Because an emotion does not exist, or does not become perceptible and active among us, till it has found its expression, in colour or in sound or in form, or in all of these, and because no two modulations or arrangements of these evoke the same emotion, poets and painters and musicians, and in a less degree because their effects are momentary, day and night and cloud and shadow, are continually making and unmaking mankind.

It is indeed only those things which seem useless or very feeble that have any power, and all those things that seem useful or strong, armies, moving wheels, modes of architecture, modes of government, speculations of the reason, would have been a little different if some mind long ago had not given itself to some emotion, as a woman gives herself to her lover, and shaped sounds or colours or forms, or all of these, into a musical relation, that their emotion might live in other minds.

A little lyric evokes an emotion, and this emotion gathers others about it and melts into their being in the making of some great epic; and at last, needing an always less delicate body, or symbol, as it grows more powerful, it flows out, with all it has gathered, among the blind instincts of daily life, where it moves a power within powers, as one sees ring within ring in the stem of an old tree. This is maybe what Arthur O'Shaughnessy meant when he made his poets say they had built Nineveh with their sighing; and I am certainly never certain, when I hear of some war, or of some religious excitement or of some new manufacture, or of anything else that fills the ear of the world, that it has not all happened because of something that a boy piped in Thessaly. I remember once telling a seer to ask one among the gods who, as she believed, were standing about her in their symbolic bodies, what would come of a charming but seeming trivial labour of a friend, and the form answering, “the devastation of peoples and the overwhelming of cities.” I doubt indeed if the crude circumstance of the world, which seems to create all our emotions, does more than reflect, as in multiplying mirrors, the emotions that have come to solitary men in moments of poetical contemplation; or that love itself would be more than an animal hunger but for the poet and his shadow the priest, for unless we believe that outer things are the reality, we must believe that the gross is the shadow of the subtle, that things are wise before they become foolish, and secret before they cry out in the market-place. Solitary men in moments of contemplation receive, as I think, the creative impulse from the lowest of the Nine Hierarchies, and so make and unmake mankind, and even the world itself, for does not “the eye altering alter all”?

Our towns are copied fragments from our breast;
And all man's Babylons strive but to impart
The grandeurs of his Babylonian heart.

IIIThe purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation, by hushing us with an alluring monotony, while it holds us waking by variety, to keep us in that state of perhaps real trance, in which the mind liberated from the pressure of the will is unfolded in symbols. If certain sensitive persons listen persistently to the ticking of a watch, or gaze persistently on the monotonous flashing of a light, they fall into the hypnotic trance; and rhythm is but the ticking of a watch made softer, that one must needs listen, and various, that one may not be swept beyond memory or grow weary of listening; while the patterns of the artist are but the monotonous flash woven to take the eyes in a subtler enchantment. I have heard in meditation voices that were forgotten the moment they had spoken; and I have been swept, when in more profound meditation, beyond all memory but of those things that came from beyond the threshold of waking life.

I was writing once at a very symbolical and abstract poem, when my pen fell on the ground; and as I stooped to pick it up, I remembered some phantastic adventure that yet did not seem phantastic, and then another like adventure, and when I asked myself when these things had happened, I found, that I was remembering my dreams for many nights. I tried to remember what I had done the day before, and then what I had done that morning; but all my waking life had perished from me, and it was only after a struggle that I came to remember it again, and as I did so that more powerful and startling life perished in its turn.

Had my pen not fallen on the ground and so made me turn from the images that I was weaving into verse, I would never have known that meditation had become trance, for I would have been like one who does not know that he is passing through a wood because his eyes are on the pathway. So I think that in the making and in the understanding of a work of art, and the more easily if it is full of patterns and symbols and music, we are lured to the threshold of sleep, and it may be far beyond it, without knowing that we have ever set our feet upon the steps of horn or of ivory.

IV
Besides emotional symbols, symbols that evoke emotions alone,--and in this sense all alluring or hateful things are symbols, although their relations with one another are too subtle to delight us fully, away from rhythm and pattern,--there are intellectual symbols, symbols that evoke ideas alone, or ideas mingled with emotions; and outside the very definite traditions of mysticism and the less definite criticism of certain modern poets, these alone are called symbols. Most things belong to one or another kind, according to the way we speak of them and the companions we give them, for symbols, associated with ideas that are more than fragments of the shadows thrown upon the intellect by the emotions they evoke, are the playthings of the allegorist or the pedant, and soon pass away.

If I say “white” or “purple” in an ordinary line of poetry, they evoke emotions so exclusively that I cannot say why they move me; but if I bring them into the same sentence with such obvious intellectual symbols as a cross or a crown of thorns, I think of purity and sovereignty. Furthermore, innumerable meanings, which are held to “white” or to “purple” by bonds of subtle suggestion, and alike in the emotions and in the intellect, move visibly through my mind, and move invisibly beyond the threshold of sleep, casting lights and shadows of an indefinable wisdom on what had seemed before, it may be, but sterility and noisy violence.

It is the intellect that decides where the reader shall ponder over the procession of the symbols, and if the symbols are merely emotional, he gazes from amid the accidents and destinies of the world; but if the symbols are intellectual too, he becomes himself a part of pure intellect, and he is himself mingled with the procession. If I watch a rushy pool in the moonlight, my emotion at its beauty is mixed with memories of the man that I have seen ploughing by its margin, or of the lovers I saw there a night ago; but if I look at the moon herself and remember any of her ancient names and meanings, I move among divine people, and things that have shaken off our mortality, the tower of ivory, the queen of waters, the shining stag among enchanted woods, the white hare sitting upon the hilltop, the fool of faery with his shining cup full of dreams, and it may be “make a friend of one of these images of wonder,” and “meet the Lord in the air.” So, too, if one is moved by Shakespeare, who is content with emotional symbols that he may come the nearer to our sympathy, one is mixed with the whole spectacle of the world; while if one is moved by Dante, or by the myth of Demeter, one is mixed into the shadow of God or of a goddess. So too one is furthest from symbols when one is busy doing this or that, but the soul moves among symbols and unfolds in symbols when trance, or madness, or deep meditation has withdrawn it from every impulse but its own. “I then saw,” wrote Gérard de Nerval of his madness, “vaguely drifting into form, plastic images of antiquity, which outlined themselves, became definite, and seemed to represent symbols of which I only seized the idea with difficulty.” In an earlier time he would have been of that multitude, whose souls austerity withdrew, even more perfectly than madness could withdraw his soul, from hope and memory, from desire and regret, that they might reveal those processions of symbols that men bow to before altars, and woo with incense and offerings. But being of our time, he has been like Maeterlinck, like Villiers de I'Isle-Adam in Axël, like all who are preoccupied with intellectual symbols in our time, a foreshadower of the new sacred book, of which all the arts, as somebody has said, are beginning to dream. How can the arts overcome the slow dying of men's hearts that we call the progress of the world, and lay their hands upon men's heartstrings again, without becoming the garment of religion as in old times?

V
If people were to accept the theory that poetry moves us because of its symbolism, what change should one look for in the manner of our poetry? A return to the way of our fathers, a casting out of descriptions of nature for the sake of nature, of the moral law for the sake of the moral law, a casting out of all anecdotes and of that brooding over scientific opinion that so often extinguished the central flame in Tennyson, and of that vehemence that would make us do or not do certain things; or, in other words, we should come to understand that the beryl stone was enchanted by our fathers that it might unfold the pictures in its heart, and not to mirror our own excited faces, or the boughs waving outside the window.

With this change of substance, this return to imagination, this understanding that the laws of art, which are the hidden laws of the world, can alone bind the imagination, would come a change of style, and we would cast out of serious poetry those energetic rhythms, as of a man running, which are the invention of the will with its eyes always on something to be done or undone; and we would seek out those wavering, meditative, organic rhythms, which are the embodiment of the imagination, that neither desires nor hates, because it has done with time, and only wishes to gaze upon some reality, some beauty; nor would it be any longer possible for anybody to deny the importance of form, in all its kinds, for although you can expound an opinion, or describe a thing, when your words are not quite well chosen, you cannot give a body to something that moves beyond the senses, unless your words are as subtle, as complex, as full of mysterious life, as the body of a flower or of a woman.

The form of sincere poetry, unlike the form of the “popular poetry,” may indeed be sometimes obscure, or ungrammatical as in some of the best of the Songs of Innocence and Experience, but it must have the perfections that escape analysis, the subtleties that have a new meaning every day, and it must have all this whether it be but a little song made out of a moment of dreamy indolence, or some great epic made out of the dreams of one poet and of a hundred generations whose hands were never weary of the sword. 

The Rape of the Lock: Relationship between Literature and Society

Link: http://neoenglishsystem.blogspot.com/2010/08/rape-of-lock-is-best-example-of.html

The Rape of the Lock is a poem in which Alexander Pope shows himself emphatically as the spokesman of his age. This poem pictures the artificial tone of the age and the frivolous aspect of femininity. "It is the epic of triflings; a page torn from the petty, pleasure-seeking life of fashionable beauty; mise-en-scene* of the toilet-chamber and the card table; in short, the veritable apotheosis in literary guise of scent, patches and powder." We see in this poem the elegance and the emptiness, the meanness and the vanity, the jealousies, treacheries and intrigues of the social life of the aristocracy of the eighteenth century.

At the very outset we become acquainted with the idleness, late-rising, and fondness for domestic pets of the aristocratic ladies of the time. Belinda wakes up at the hour of twelve and then falls asleep again. We also become acquainted in the very beginning of the poem with the superficiality of the ladies who loved gilded chariots, and affected a love of the game of ombre. Their ambition to marry peers and dukes, or men holding other high titles, is indicated, too, in the opening Canto:

Then gay ideas crowd the vacant brain,

While peers and dukes, and all their sweeping train....

The poem brings out the coquetry, the art, the artifice, and and the “ varying vanities” of the ladies of the time . these ladies learnt early in their life how to roll their eyes and to blush in an intriguing manner. Their hearts were like toy-shops which moved from one gallant to another:

With varying vanities, from every part,

They shift the moving toy-shop of their heart.

One gallant could drive put another gallant, and one coach could drive out another coach. "Levity" was the hallmark of these women. Their manners and behaviour were artificial and affected. They knew the art to lisp, to hang their heads aside, to faint into airs, and to languish with pride. They used to sink on their rich quilts and pretend sickness so that young gallant men should come to inquire after their health and in this way also see the costly gowns which they were wearing.

The women of the time felt glad to receive love-letters. Thus, when Belinda at last gets up from her bed, her eyes first open on a love-letter couched in the conventional language of such letters. Another of the vanities of these ladies was to keep domestic pets such as dogs and parrots. Thus Belinda has her Shock and her Poll. Among the ill-omens that Belinda recalls after losing a lock of her hair is the indifference of her two domestic pets: "Nay, Poll sat mute, and Shock was most unkind !"

Aristocratic ladies treated toilet as their chief concern. One important passage in The Rape of the Lock describes Belinda at her dressing-table. Before commencing her toilet operation, she offers a prayer to the "cosmetic powers". At her dressing-table are "the various offerings of the world"— India's glowing gems, Arabia's perfumes, speckled and white combs, files of pins, "puffs, powders, patches, bibles, billet-doux." Later in the poem, we are told how these ladies "take such constant care to prepare the bodkin, comb and essence !" They take special pains to curl their hair; they bind their locks in paper durance; and they strain their tender heads with fillets.

The ladies lose their tempers over trifles. Screams of horror from Belinda rend the affrighted skies, and a "living lightning" flashes from her eyes. Thalestris is described as the "fierce virago". The ladies in the poem are depicted as very aggressive, and it is they who start the battle. Women have been jealous of one another from time immemorial. Clarissa stealthily hands over a pair of scissors to the Baron in order to assist him in his wicked design. It is in all probability Clarissa's jealousy of Belinda's beauty, and fame that prompts her to offer this assistance to the Baron.

The ladies have no moral scruples. "Honour" is a word with little meaning for them; and "reputation" is more important to them than honour. The loss of "honour" does not matter if "reputation" is not lost. Several passages in the poem reveal the moral disarray of their lives. In one passage, for instance, a frail China-jar receiving a crack is equated with a lady's losing her chastity. A lady's staining her honour is more serious than her staining her new brocade. A lady's missing a dance-party is as serious a matter as her forgetting her prayers. A lady's losing her necklace is as serious as losing her heart. The death of a lap-dog or the breaking of a rich China-vessel is as serious a matter to the lady as the death of her husband. These are all examples of the superficial nature of the ladies of the time. There is a complete confusion of moral values in their minds. Belinda herself has no real sense of feminine virtue or honour. She is in love with the Baron, and for this reason Ariel gives her up when he sees "an earthly lover lurking at her heart". Her lament over the loss of a lock of her hair is sheer hypocrisy. Besides, she feels unhappy because the loss of this particular lock of hair was vital to her charm. She would not have been much hurt if the Baron had stolen any other hair:

Oh, hadst thou, cruel, been content to seize 

Hairs less in sight, or any hairs but these !

The aristocratic young men of the time were, like the ladies, lacking in any serious purpose or morality. Florio and Damon are representatives of those gallants and fops who vie with one another to capture the hearts of the ladies. There is a keen competition among them to win feminine favours. Wigs strive with wigs, and sword-knots strive with sword-knots. The attitude of these fops to love is amusingly described in the manner in which the Baron tries to propitiate heaven in order to win Belinda's heart. The Baron builds an altar to Love. This altar consists of twelve vast French romances, three garters, half a pair of gloves, and all the trophies of his former loves. He lights a fire with the tender love-letters that he has received, and breathes three amorous sighs to raise the fire.

The life of the fops is as empty and shallow as the life of the ladies. This is emphasized by the role played by the empty-headed Sir Plume with bit "unthinking face". He is proud of his "amber snuff-box" and "the nice conduct of a clouded cane". He can hardly speak a dozen words without uttering half a dozen oaths. The manner in which a "beau" or a "witling" perishes in the battle of the sexes shows the same thing . "One died in metaphor, and one in song." Taking snuff and wearing wigs were the foremost fashions among the men of that time.

The shallowness and superficiality of the time are also clear from the kind of gossip that goes on at the court; "At every word a reputation dies". Pauses in conversation are filled with snuff-taking or fan-swinging, or "with singing, laughing, ogling, and all that." Card parties were common. Ombre was the favourite game. A victory at ombre gave to a woman a feeling of importance. Coffee-drinking was another important diversion of the times. Coffee "made the politician wise". It was coffee that gave rise to a clever device in the Baron's brain for obtaining possession of a lock of Belinda's hair.

We are given a satirical picture of judges, jury men, and merchants. The judges are in a hurry to sign the judgment and the jury-men are in a hurry to pronounce a verdict of-"guilty" because they want to get back home for dinner. The merchants spend feverish hours at the Exchange. Other aspects of the life of the time which are mentioned in an amusing manner are the wits of heroes and of beaux, courtiers' promises, cages for gnats, chains to yoke a flea, dried butterflies, and heavy books of casuistry. There are references in the poem also to Hyde Park Circus, the Mall, and Rosamonda's Lake. And there is a reference to the well-known astrologer of the time, Partridge, who always made prophecies about the downfall of Louis of France, and of the Pope at Rome.

The glitter and the elegance of the period are also effectively depicted in the poem. Belinda's beauty and charm receive much attention. Robed in white, she sees her heavenly reflection in the mirror. Assisted by her maid, Betty, she decorates and embellishes herself with cosmetics and jewellery. We are fascinated by Belinda's beauty as described in the famous passage dealing with her toilet. Her beauty and charm are mentioned again and again in the poem. She is described as the rival of the beams of the sun. She wears a sparkling cross on her white breast. She smiles at everyone:

Bright as the sun, her eyes the gazers strike 

And, like the sun, they shine on all alike.

The poet invests her almost with the character of a divinity. If she has any faults, they are hidden by her graceful ease and her sweetness. If she suffers from any errors, the beauty of her face would make us ignore them. She has a care-free temper: "Belinda smiled, and all the world was gay." She is shallow and superficial and yet she is fascinating. We see her as a coquette, a sweet charmer, a society belle, a rival of the sun, and a murderer of millions. This Cleopatra-like variety indicates simultaneously her charm and a vacuous lack of character. The poet uses hyperbolic language in describing her— faultless beauty and even divinity; "nymph", "maid", "the fair virgin", "goddess", etc. The idealising words used by Pope for Belinda reflect the homage which society paid to the image of the beautiful woman. The portrait that Pope paints of Belinda is, of course, satirical, but we also feel compelled to admire this woman who is not less than a divinity. Pope's attitude, and therefore our attitude, towards Belinda, is mocking and yet tender, critical and yet admiring.

Tennyson’s In Memoriam as the Freudian Trauerarbeit

Link: http://www.williamscottharkey.com/the-poetic-work-of-mourning-tennysons-in-memoriam-as-the-freudian-trauerarbeit/

The Poetic Work of Mourning: Tennyson’s In Memoriam as the Freudian Trauerarbeit

The death of Lord Tennyson’s beloved friend Arthur Hallam yielded perhaps one of the most profound works of poetry and the most sorrowful elegies of commemoration in Western literature. Within a matter of weeks after receiving word of Hallam’s tragic death, Tennyson began sketching a poem that would go on to memorialize his friend, display his personal odyssey through mourning, and provide solace to its readers by offering passionate words to the once ineffable emotions of loss. This poem of the grief and suffering that loss produces, which would come to be entitled In Memoriam, chronicles Tennyson’s personal struggle with existential despair, despair not only in the loss a close friend but also in a loss of part of his identity—a poem that, as Henry Shepherd claims, portrays “the several phases of evolution or development through which a human soul, stricken with the burden of a great sorrow, may pass in the process of restoration” (44). In Memoriam chronicles this evolutionary struggle, as well as chronicles Tennyson’s attempt to fill the void in his identity, the empty space once maintained by Hallam.

It is with this idea of evolutionary struggling to regain one’s sense of a holistic identity through the process of mourning that we turn our attention. It will be the duty of this essay to explicate in detail how Tennyson’s In Memoriam functions within the Freudian economy as the “work” that the poet uses to complete his process of mourning. Within this process, we will see how In Memoriam discloses a movement beginning from negation to substitution, to consolation. As my argument will show, this movement or evolutionary process reveals how the act of writing the poem, the course of composition, becomes Tennyson’s Freudian trauerarbeit (work), as the text allows the subject to distance him or herself from the lost object through the written word, as well as allows for the end product of writing, in this case the poem/elegy itself, to become the object of substitution.

Tennyson, in looking back on his completed work, groups his poem of 131 disconnected lyrics into nine separate groups, with the prologue, written after the poem’s completion serving in the final group, placed at the beginning of the poem in order to frame its content. For the purpose of this research, the prologue will not be addressed first despite its placement at the beginning; we will begin with the oldest lyrics composed within the first collection. According to Tennyson, this first grouping represents the poet’s desolate state in the wake of losing Hallam. This first grouping is made up of poems I through VIII. Within this group, a reader finds the poet in a great state of existential despair, beginning the journey to seek out the lost aspect of his identity through philosophical musing and then turning to composing a written work as therapy within the first stages of his passage through mourning.

The poem begins with the poet meditating on the loss of his friend and the hope in the dead rising to a higher place. Though the soul of the lost may go on to a better place, away from time’s influence, the sufferings endured by those who the lost soul leaves behind are in need of some sort of psychical substitution, someone or something to fill the void of the object now lost in death:

I held it truth, with him who sings

To one clear harp in divers tones,

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.’ (Tennyson I 1-16)

The poet is grief-stricken by the loss of his friend and hopes that the soul of his dead friend has risen to a world beyond the living, but this form of consolation doesn’t fill the void left within the poet’s identity. Tennyson, as the poet in question, in his state of mourning, is well aware that the individual subject is a culmination or a product of external objects, both people and things. These external objects that comprise the individual’s identity, the deep builders of one’s personal psyche, are detrimental to an individual’s identity when threatened or taken away. Tennyson proclaims an unfortunate attribute of the human condition is that in loss, the individual’s very identity is damaged, and left with an empty space in need of filling. This assault on the poet’s very identity is the context of section IV of this first grouping:

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.’ (IV 5-16)

In the passage above, the reader sees the clear conflict the poet is engaged in: the fragmentation of his self-identity. The poet’s sleep is disrupted by an unbearable sense of loss, so unbearable that the lost object becomes incomprehensible. The process of mourning begins with conflict between the remembrance of one’s former self as a whole identity and the new feeling of a divided self.

The poet falls asleep with the hope that the new coming day will bring some sense of solace. When no solace comes, the poet begins to search for some means of mental therapy from his philosophical thoughts on the arbitrariness of death as well as from the pneumonic objects that always call to mind the memory of his deceased friend. The poet begins to write as a means of committing to the page his personal journey through mourning. Though this form of therapy is only a minor material and artistic production, it becomes his greatest means of filling the void, of substitution, of his lost friend with the object of his compositions:

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, 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. (V 1-12)

Tennyson, as the poet, finds reprieve in committing his sorrow into language, textualizing his grief into a material product. Though words cannot express the breadth of his grief, there is solace in it. Committing his despondency into a material form, we find Tennyson’s first attempt at “working” through his grief and substituting the lost object for another, traits clearly confirmed in Freud’s 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia.”

Drawing from the idea of loss as a disruption of one’s own self-love (narcissism), Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” explicates the basic process of mourning and the dangers of lapsing into states of melancholia during that process. Mourning, as Freud concludes, is the inevitable outcome of loss, and melancholia is the possible perverse and unhealthy tangent that may come about in one’s process of mourning. This loss can either take the form of a lost person, like a loved one; something more objectified, like a deeply personal item; or even something abstract, like the deterioration of an ideal. Mourning is thus a response to loss, a call to fill the newly formed hole within one’s psyche (Freud 243-47). It is through the process of work (trauerarbeit) that the subject begins to loosen his or her attachments from the lost object and slowly move toward a successful substitution and consolation, an end in mourning. Through “working,” the subject progresses toward this ending, and if moments of melancholia arise during this progression, the subject must defeat its arresting influence and continue along with mourning if the process is to end successfully (248-55). It is with this form of material production, in verbalizing the feelings of loss and the endearment of a fragmented identity, that Tennyson begins working toward successfully substituting the lost aspect of himself with his trauerarbeit. In Freudian terms, Tennyson is working on negating the lost object of himself in order for a new substitute object to fill in the void, to negate with negation.

After this first grouping, functioning as a chaotic display of impulsive emotions and musings in the wake of hearing of his friend’s death, the poet begins to narratize the death of his friend, to construct order within his fragmented ego, to take control of the overflow of emotions. Tennyson, in the second grouping, which consists of poems IX through XX, begins this narratization with the return of Hallam’s body by boat. A reader finds in this section the poet’s split ego, as he struggles with denial and reality: the fantasy that Hallam is being brought back home alive, and the reality that Hallam is dead and will never return. Additionally here, the poet takes his first plunge into melancholia, where the hope in successfully completing the process of mourning seems lost, and the void of the absent object seems to retain its strongest hold on the subject:

What words are these have falle’n from me?

Can calm despair and wild unrest

Be tenants of a single breast,

Or sorrow such a changeling be?

Or cloth she only seem to take

The touch of change in calm or storm;

But knows no more of transient form

In her deep self, than some dead lake

That holds the shadow of a lark

Hung in the shadow of a heaven?

Or has the shock, so harshly given,

Confused me like the unhappy bark

That strikes by night a craggy shelf,

And staggers blindly ere she sink?

And stunn’d me from my power to think

And all my knowledge of myself. (XVI 1-16)

The questions Tennyson is asking are typical of a subject in mourning, questions arising in bouts of melancholia: does grief ever end, and will I ever be whole again?

While mourning is considered the natural response to losing the object of invested identity, according to Freud, melancholia is when the subject cannot successfully substitute the lost object for the living and present one. The subject has narcissistically devoured the lost object, and this lifeless object has now become a part of the subject’s ego. Or in another way, the subject preserves a half-dead element within his or her psyche. As the subject’s lost object remains in this half-dead state, it causes great mental harm to the psyche of the subject, in that the subject is not letting go—or is keeping alive—something that is already dead. Melancholia causes complete entropy in the subject’s psyche and leads the subject to identify with the dead and lost, as opposed to the living and present. It is not the object that is dead in melancholia, but the very subject him or herself (Carel 6-9). The melancholic is immobile in the process of mourning, as he or she is unable to create a new object to invest his or her identity in since he or she has narcissistically consumed the lost object and remains faithful to it, thus preserving the present by arresting time and refusing change. Just as the melancholic subject is psychologically dead, so too is the world dead for the melancholic (Freud 256). In the process of mourning, there are always moments when melancholia arises occasionally.

This kind of melancholic condition carries over into the third grouping, poems XXI through XXVII, where Tennyson begins to recollect on the times he spent with Hallam and the various discussions they had. The poet, in both the second and third groupings, is in a state of pure abeyance, remaining locked in a condition of existential despair, unable to progress further in his process of mourning. But the poet must undergo this particular process. The poet must negate the past and the void within his identity by working through it, narratizing it, and committing it to words, in order to construct the foundation in which to begin a successful completion of grief and a successful substitution of the lost object—where melancholia becomes namable, and the subject overcomes his or her loss by controlling symbols (Ruti 648). Narratizing, in committing the ego to language, thus distances the poet from the trauma of the lost object and aids in a successful substitution. It is through this melancholic stage that only those who can see their way out will be able to end their sorrow. Tennyson seems compelled to write, to rework the past along constructive lines:

Behold, ye speak an idle thing:

Ye never knew that sacred dust:

I do but sing because I must

And but as the linnets sing. (XXI 21-24)

Tennyson must compose his sadness if he ever wishes to find passage out of his melancholic impasse. He must narrate on the past, must dwell within the memories, in order to take control of it, to regain his sense of autonomy over what has occurred in order to force himself to fill the void left by Hallam with his own poetic work.

This form of therapy, Freud argues, is the negation of the lost object. The subject undergoing the process of mourning must negate the lost object, negate the negation or the void, and substitute its absence with a new object. This first negation must take place in order to begin a successful journey toward consolation and the ending of mourning. Tennyson begins this negation by taking control over his past memories. Havi Carel writes,

This process of negating a negation, deleting a lack, is one of overcoming death and loss and a process that eventually leads to a renewed investment in life and in love…. This is the normal process of mourning, where the ultimate loyalty is to life, to Eros and to the renewed investment in a new object. On this understanding of mourning, in the attenuation of the investment both the positive and the negative emotions attached to the lost object become muffled, weakened, and with time are transformed into memories (3).

The poet’s identity is fragmented, and there resides a Hallam-shaped hole in it. In order to pull together the pieces of his identity and negate the negated space, Tennyson must control his past (Clewell 44). The present and a substitute object is a negation of the void, just as the past is the negation of the present. By taking control over his memories, narratizing them, and substituting his void with the written word, Tennyson orders the fragments of his ego and creates a consolatory space for their reconstruction.

As Freud describes in “Mourning and Melancholia,” it is the melancholic who views reality in a purer, unadulterated, and material manner. Loss lies at the very heart of human subjectivity. It is loss that creates the subject. Just as the subject is an accumulation of externalities, the subject is also a product of the dialectical usurpation and negation of those very objects. Within the Freudian canon, this is most clearly seen in the Oedipus complex, where the subject becomes a subject through the primal loss of his or her mother and moves through life driven by the desire to find a substitute for the former infantile feeling of wholeness. The subject is driven by desire to fill in the lack.

It is the melancholic, according to Freud, who has a more keen awareness of this loss and the drive of his or her own compulsions. The melancholic sees life unhindered by socially constructed fantasies. Tennyson appears in this very state in discussing death, it’s arbitrariness but also its necessary and natural occurrence, as far back as in the first grouping:

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

Drops in his vast and wandering grave. (VI 1-16)

Here, we see an instant in which melancholia allows the poet to assess, in a more pure form, the nature of death and dying, the reality of all life’s finitude. There is no rational understanding as to why some die at particular times and why others do not. The poet here does not delve into the idea of cosmological theodicy. Tennyson is simply addressing the absurdity and the mere randomness of death: an arbitrary occurrence free of any reasonableness or justification. This idea is common among melancholics, as they see life as absent of meaning and death as a random occurrence to which we are all susceptible.

Tennyson continues his melancholic musings further in the latter parts of the third group of lyrics, specifically in poems XXIV through XXVII. Tennyson, continuing with narratizing his recollections of the past, begins to project and fictionalize his own ideality onto his memories, rewriting them in order to hopefully conquer them. Tennyson begins by questioning the perfection of the past and the validity of his memory. Was the past perfect, or is the perfection of the past—the ideal nature of his friendship with Hallam, the fond times they had with one another, the complete omission of any turbulent times—just a mere projection of Tennyson’s mind? It seems that, according to the poet, it is a projection. Because of the distance between the present and past, the gap between the two adds to the fantastical nature of the memory.

But these memories, writing down the past in a material form, drive the poet into even greater despair. Time doesn’t move for the melancholic who continuously remains in the past. As Ruti discuses, “it is possible that melancholia facilitates a different type of rewriting—one that does not seek to surmount but merely to revisit and reassess the past” (644). Though, as stated above, narratizing memories is how the mourner takes control over the past and uses that narratization to pull him or herself out of a melancholic stage, memory is also a very dangerous aspect to dwell upon (Hsiao176). Remembering “might technically help us ‘come to terms’ with our painful memories as much as it can go awry—in the direction of compulsive repeating and/or melancholia” (Gana 61). We see this sort of “going awry” in Tennyson’s XXVI lyric, where the poet, remaining too long within a past memory, dives further into his melancholic state. For the melancholic, time cannot move forward the process of mourning. The melancholic wishes to preserve the present state of mourning, without progressing and without the possibility of a successful ending to the process of mourning. Maintaining the pain keeps the absent object alive.

But, again, recollecting these memories and narratizing them, gaining a sense of ownership over the past by even fictionalizing it, is a necessary plunge into melancholia that allows the subject a greater chance in moving forward. Tennyson has already began the preliminary stages of substitution by negating the void—that is, replacing Hallam with an elegy to Hallam—but he must go backward, regressing into melancholia, in order to move forward. As Bruce explains, Tennyson must venture through these “mournful memories and melancholy forebodings” in order to reach the other side of consolation (445). Through the pain of the past, through the negation of the past and the void it has created, the poet may have a chance at ending his existential despair and sorrow.

Poems XXVIII through XLIX contain recollections on the poet’s first Christmas without Hallam. It is with this first Christmas that Tennyson is thrown in to his deepest state of melancholia, even going so far as to wish for death to end his sadness and suffering: “This year I slept and woke with pain, / I almost wished no more to wake” (XXVIII 13-14). Again, with melancholia, Freud argues that individuals arrested in their process of mourning, those living-dead mourners still stuck in the past, have a keener and more accurate sense of the horrors of life (257). Their views are unclouded by the contentment created by society, and their sufferings brings about a greater sense of truth in the meaninglessness of existence. We see this existential clarity when Tennyson writes,

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. (XXXIV 5-8)

We also find here Tennyson continuously revisiting the notion of his own death. Since the object that the subject has once invested a part of its identity in is dead, the subject also wishes for his or her own death to narcissistically mirror the dead object—unable to endure the state of half living. Freud argues that in primary narcissism, the ego sees itself outside of itself, and so the external object of love and/or admiration is primarily one of a representation of the subject’s very ego. With that said, if the external ego that subject has identified with is dead, the subject wishes to be like his or her mirrored ego—namely, dead (Clewell 46). The subject is in a sense already dead, so it seems only fitting to physically end one’s life when stuck in the impasse of melancholia. We see Tennyson musing over this thought, both over his own death and consistently reassessing the death of Hallam. In Tennyson’s melancholic thoughts on death, we find him unable to take solace in thinking of the afterlife. The idea of heaven and the joyous notion of living after death in eternal bliss are of no comfort to him. We see this very melancholic approach to death, Tennyson’s more real sense of it, also in his views on love:

Yet if some voice that man could trust

Should murmur from the narrow house,

‘The cheeks drop in; the body bows;

Man dies: nor is there hope in dust:’

Might I not say? ‘Yet even here,

But for one hour, O Love, I strive

To keep so sweet a thing alive:’

But I should turn mine ears and hear

The moanings of the homeless sea,

The sound of streams that swift or slow

Draw down Æonian hills, and sow

The dust of continents to be;

And Love would answer with a sigh,

‘The sound of that forgetful shore

Will change my sweetness more and more,

Half-dead to know that I shall die.’

O me, what profits it to put

An idle case? If Death were seen

At first as Death, Love had not been,

Or been in narrowest working shut…. (XXXV 1-20)

Both death and love do not have a theological quality to them. Death is arbitrary, and all love will eventually die. Both the notions of an afterlife and love cannot console the melancholic suffer who is mourning for the loss of his own self.

For Tennyson, this first Christmas ushers in the greatest sensation of emptiness. His psychological state appears to be at its lowest while his melancholic bouts seem to be at their highest. Wishful thinking on the afterlife and love are unable to console his grieving, and towards the latter part of this lyrical group, it becomes apparent that the true enemy of mourning is consciousness. It is one’s awareness, one’s ability to remember and project the present into past memories and future projects, that becomes damaging to the mourner. Unable to forget, the melancholic remains stuck in the memory. The poet asks if death will be the end of consciousness as the individual soul merges with the universal soul, or will death be even more detrimental and consciousness is further heightened.

The poet seems unable to shake off these ideas as he battles with melancholia, even going so far as to doubt the very therapy of substituting Hallam with his material elegy:

Beneath all fancied hopes and fears

Ay me, the sorrow deepens down.

Whose muffled motions blindly drown

The bases of my life in tears. (XLIX 13-16)

Art, poetry, nature, philosophy: nothing is worthy to stand as a substitute for Hallam. This first Christmas, a time of gathering, propels Tennyson into his deepest despair, into his deepest bout with melancholia. We see here the poet latching onto the dead object, unable to, in Freudian terms, to respond to the call of reality. Ferber notes that it is the “melancholic who remains sunken in his loss, unable to acknowledge and accept the need to cleave and in a self-destructive loyalty to the lost object, internalizes it into his ego, thus furthermore circumscribing the conflict related to the loss. The lost object continues to exist…” (66). Coping with the lost object and resulting lack by resuscitating the lost object as an ever-present specter in the subject’s psyche, the melancholic refuses the external world for the world of the dead and the world of existential despair. Yet, again, this regression may become a valuable aid to the mourner in progressing forward. Past this first difficult time, Tennyson is able to withstand the entropy of melancholia and rise above it in order to once again move forward in the process of mourning.

In the fifth and sixth groups of poems, Tennyson describes his uncertainties on the existence of a higher being and on the phantom of Hallam. He does so in the same sort of melancholic tone as described above. However, unlike the lyrics before, among this sea of melancholy, the poet shows instances of sporadic hope in moving past this state and continuing on with the process of mourning through substitution. In the first lyrical group, the poet is conflicted with the hope in an afterlife. Though during this point in the nineteenth century, there arose many advances in science and technology that would challenge the belief in God, heaven, and the spiritual realm and suggest them to be fiction and fantastical wishful thinking, the poet begins to find solace in thinking, whether fact or fiction, that the spiritual world does exist:

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. (LIV 13-20)

The concluding lyrics of this group also speak in a similar manner, hoping for the continuation of life after death despite the evidence that concludes otherwise. Throughout Tennyson’s passage through mourning, we have thus seen him go through the preliminary stages of mourning, and, while attempting to substitute Hallam for his own written composition, we find him sink into bouts of melancholia, where even the living poet seems just as dead as his lost object. Here, in the passage above, with hope in the afterlife, the poet now seems to be emerging out of the depths of his melancholy in order to continue in successfully substituting Hallam with a new and living object of identity investment.

Again, this substitution, exchanging the lost object with the written composition, is the Freudian work:

The long and arduous process of the work of mourning maintains the lost object within the psyche, gradually accepting the fact that it is indeed lost and working a way out of the attachment to it. The work is composed of a slow and painful working through of each of the memories and strands attaching the dejected subject to the object, which Freud defines as a thousand links. The detachment from the loss is done thereupon, through an extremely meticulous work of untangling the attachment, which is largely composed of memories. However difficult and even unbearable this work may be, it nevertheless ends with a complete loosening of all points of attachment…. In other words, the cutting of the strands of attachment is dictated by the voice of reality, so that the work of mourning is directed towards life and lifeenergy. This is the point in which the principle of life takes over and directs the mourner to focus himself on the important work of detachment and uninhibited life. The aim of the process of detachment has thus, nothing to do with the object itself, but with the subject which has to be freed from it. (Ferber 71)

Through work, composing Hallam’s elegy that will fill the void within Tennyson’s psyche, the poet is able to loosen his attachments with the dead object. He is able to redirect his energies toward a living investment, where life is once again valued, the ego is provided new meaning, and the dead are laid to rest.

It is in the seventh lyrical group, those dealing with the first anniversary of Hallam’s death as well as the second Christmas without him, that Tennyson negates his former melancholic self along with his lost object in order to fully substitute Hallam with his poem. In lyric LXXVII, the reader finds this negation, and the beginnings of a successful substitution come about, as the poet muses over fame and the art of the poetry. The poet acknowledges that death comes to everyone, and with death also goes the death of the poet’s fame. But the poet is no longer writing for fame:

What hope is here for modern rhyme

To him, who turns a musing eye

On songs, and deeds, and lives, that lie

Foreshorten’d in the tract of time?

These mortal lullabies of pain

May bind a book, may line a box,

May serve to curl a maiden’s locks;

Or when a thousand moons shall wane

A man upon a stall may find,

And, passing, turn the page that tells

A grief, then changed to something else,

Sung by a long-forgotten mind.

But what of that? My darken’d ways

Shall ring with music all the same;

To breathe my loss is more than fame,

To utter love more sweet than praise. (LXXVII 1-16)

The poem will be forgotten, but the poet will continue to write despite the transitory nature of the poem and despite the transitory nature of fame a poem may bring. The poet will continue to write as a form of therapy, mastering his memories, taking control over an event that seemed arbitrary and uncontrollable, mastering his emotions, and moving toward replacing his lost friend with his material work. Though the work may never be an acclaimed success, it is truly a work only for the poet himself, a private meditation and constant dialectical procedure moving him toward filling the void within his identity. For Tennyson, Hallam was “rich where [he] was poor / And he supplied [his] want the more / As his unlikeness fitted [his]” (LXXIX 17-20). But with the aid of his elegy, Tennyson’s fragmented identity—these areas now plagued by a lack where Hallam was once present—will be filled.

In poem LXXXV, a reader begins to see the success the written poem as the substitute for Hallam is having on Tennyson’s passage through mourning. Though Tennyson is still conflicted with sorrow, working through his memories and narrating them, shifting his effects from contemplating on Hallam as a lost object and the dead aspect of his identity to his material composition as the Freudian trauerarbeit, the substitution begins to loosen the attachment Tennyson has maintained with the lost object:

My pulses therefore beat again

For other friends that once I met;

Nor can it suit me to forget

The mighty hopes that make us men. (LXXXV 57-60)

My old affection of the tomb,

A part of stillness, yearns to speak:

‘Arise, and get thee forth and seek

A friendship for the years to come.

‘I watch thee from the quiet shore;

Thy spirit up to mine can reach;

But in dear words of human speech

We two communicate no more.’ (LXXXV 77-84)

My heart, tho’ widow’d, may not rest

Quite in the love of what is gone,

But seeks to beat in time with one

That warms another living breast.

Ah, take the imperfect gift I bring,

Knowing the primrose yet is dear,

The primrose of the later year,

As not unlike to that of Spring. (LXXXV 113-120)

Though the origin of pain is always present, the poet begins to recover through substituting his work for the lost object. Tennyson finds his therapy in substituting the poet’s speech for the dead and begins to take control over the void within his identity, even going so far as to convince himself, like convincing himself of the bless felt in the afterlife discussed earlier, that Hallam wishes him to take on another, living, friend—a human substitute.

Here, a reader finds Tennyson’s substitution through the aid of Freudian work coming to its conclusion. The process of mourning comes to a close as the poet transitions his emphasis from the lost and dead object to the living elegy, thus filling the once hollow space in his identity left from Hallam’s death with a psychical object that both represents Tennyson’s mastery over the past and his holistic identity reflected back to him through the completed composition.

We have now reached the conclusion of Tennyson’s poem, lyrics CIV through both the epilogue and prologue. In these passages, Tennyson’s journey through mourning draws to a close. Commencing with Hallam’s death, arrested at times with bouts of melancholia, Tennyson has successfully substituted his dead object and filled the void within his identity with his poetic work. As the poem functioned as a dialectical conversation within himself, Tennyson rises to a new and higher level of understanding, where he is sure in the existence of a divine and omnipotent God and an afterlife:

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. (Epilogue 137-144)

This similar success in the process of mourning is accepted further in the prologue, written seven years after the poem had been completed. Through work, the Freudian trauerarbeit, Tennyson was able to attain a higher state of being and regain his sense of holism that was fragmented by Hallam’s passing. He was able to take control over his mourning and conquer melancholia by loosening his attachment to the void within himself and his deceased friend by focusing his energies and constructing a new identity by his own hand, a composition worthy to be invested into his psychological self and worthy to fill the hole left by such a beloved friend.

Upon reaching the conclusion of mourning, Tennyson comes to his final evolutionary phases, that of consolation. Consolation occurs, in the case of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, when the poet has successfully substituted his lost object with an other. This other comes in the form of his completed work. The work functions, in the words of Hsiao, as a stand in, for the lost aspect of himself (187). No longer is the poet a fragmented ego, gaining his sense of self from a lost and deceased object. He is now a holistic subject, as the void within his identity has been successfully negated, and replaced with the material product of his therapeutic work.

Works Cited

Carel, Havi. “The Ambivalence of Mourning.” Friends of Wisdom. N.d., 2004. Web. 1 Oct 2011. <http://www.friends-of-wisdom.com/readings/Carel.pdf>.

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Ferber, Ilit. “Melancholy Philosophy: Freud and Benjamin.” EREA 4.1 (2006): 66-77. Web. 2 Oct. 2011. <http://erea.revues.org/413>.

Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund FreudVol. 14. Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1957. 243-58.

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Harold, Bruce. “Tennyson and Death.” Sewanee Review 25.4 (1917): 443-56. Web. 8 Oct. 2011. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/27533057?origin=JSTOR-pdf>.

Hsiao, Irene. “Calculating Loss in Tennyson’s In Memoriam.” Victorian Poetry. 47.1 (2009): 173-196. Web. 1 Oct. 2011. <http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/ victorian_poetry/v047/47.1.hsiao.pdf>.

Ruti, Mari. “From Melancholia to Meaning: How to Live the Past in the Present.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 15.5 (2005): 637-60. Web. 2 Oct. 2011. <http://www.complit.ucla.edu/people/faculty/gana/GanaHamletPDF.pdf>.

Shepherd, Henry. “Some Phases of Tennyson’s in Memoriam.” Modern Language Association 6.1 (1891): 41-51. Web. 1 Oct. 2011. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/ 456295?origin=JSTOR-pdf>.

Tennyson, Alfred. In Memoriam. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2004.