Examining Section Four of Tennyson's In Memoriam
Taking a Look at the Fourth Part of the Elegy for Arthur Hallam
Aug 10, 2009
The speaker of section 4 of In Memoriam is contradictorily forceful when he declares he is relinquishing all his powers to Sleep, which is capitalized to convey, like Death and Nature, that Sleep is powerful and comforting as it envelopes him in darkness. Yet it paralyzes at the same time, for the speaker describes himself as stationed in a “helmless bark” (3). He finds the comforts of oblivion more important than the pain of waking life.
“O Heart, How Fares it with Thee Now”
The speaker addresses his heart directly in his dream, asking it why it feels so low and yet chooses to do nothing about it. He questions why it should not ask, “What is it makes me beat so low?” (8). The heart is so numb from the pain of loss that it cannot help itself or even reason as to how it has become so dull.
“Something it is Which Thou Hast Lost”
The poet hints that the loss sustained by his heart is the loss of his friendship with Arthur Hallam, which had brought him much joy in his youth. In line 10 he describes it as “Some pleasure from thine early years,” confirming that it is this young happiness that he shared with Arthur which is lost forever.
In a nod to another Tennyson poem “Break, break, break”, the speaker orders “Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears / That grief hath shaken into frost” (11-12). Again reiterating his statements from sections 1 and 3 of In Memoriam that an active grief is better than a passive one, this command rejects the frozenness and immobility of his devastated heart. Grief for the dead must not make him dead inside.
“Morning Wakes the Will”
In lines 13-16, the speaker muses on his troubled dreams that he had surrendered himself to at the beginning of section 4. He describes them as “nameless troubles” (13) that float behind “darken’d eyes” (14). His use of the phrase darkened eyes is startling, for they are similar to the darkened eyes of the dead Arthur Hallam.
Yet there is strength within the grief-stricken body of the speaker, for in the light of day, the human will breaks free. It declares, “Thou shalt not be the fool of loss” (16). It is uttered like a commandment. The heart, halted by pain and grief, is revived by the will that orders it to survive and remove its emotional shackles.
Section 4 of In Memoriam is about the brief and yet necessary revival of the heart when it is frozen by grief. Although the pain of loss will never go away, one must not become utterly immobilized by it. At least in section 4 of Tennyson’s elegy for Arthur Hallam, the speaker’s will breaks through grief’s barriers.
Source
Tennyson, Alfred Lord, ed. Robert H. Ross, In Memoriam (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1973).
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