"In Memoriam, Unity, and Tennyson's Inescapable Loss" Nancy Canevari College

Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” acts as an elegy for his best friend, Arthur Hallam, while also helping him to process his decades-long grief. While the poem’s length can cause readers to focus on certain memorable selections from it, T.S. Eliot makes the case that doing so undermines the poem’s intent as a long, diary entry of sorts that reveals the slow progression of mourning. The poem holds a strong degree of unity because it follows the full human progression of grief. While the tone may change from one of despair to one of hope, reading only specific selections from “In Memoriam” makes it impossible to understand its true message. Tennyson creates a sense of unity throughout the poem by creating parallels between locations and times of the year, and showing how his emotions in relation to those places and times change as his grief changes. He also creates a sense of unity by showing the stages of grief, from deepest despair to something more hopeful that looks to a brighter future, developing one unified grief journey. However, in addition to creating a poem that parallels different moments of grief, and therefore creates a unified, coherent image of it, Tennyson also reveals the way that loss becomes inescapable....