Faith and Hope in In Memoriam Sara Manlowe College

Of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, T. S. Eliot wrote that ‘its faith is a poor thing, but its doubt is a very intense experience,’ while Christopher Ricks wrote, similarly, that its ‘poems of most intense feeling…tend to be the darkest.’ Neither of these statements are untrue, exactly, but to leave them at that – to speak primarily of doubt and darkness – neglects the ‘desperate hope’ (12, Dodsworth) that is able to shine all the brighter out of this comparatively dim background. The emotional experience of In Memoriam does not end at doubt; indeed, ‘many of Tennyson’s poems attempt to find lyric shapes for the variety of ways in which a voice on a page might falter, from choked misery to speechless wonder’ (184, Douglas-Fairhurst). We are given, instead, a variety of emotional states, and the doubt and the darkness of which Eliot and Ricks speak is never left uncomplicated. Over the course of In Memoriam, the reader encounters poems of grief and poems of hope, as well as poems that sway from one to the other. ‘It is central to Tennyson’s creative identity,’ Douglas-Fairhurst writes, ‘that lines on the irrevocable should not themselves be irrevocable, so testing on a local scale an idea which also spans his writing career, that no poem...