Evolution & Water in "In Memoriam"

In Memoriam, Tennyson's lengthy elegy for Arthur Henry Hallam, takes up various topics that were important and pressing to Victorian society (hardly surprising, since the poem took seventeen years to complete). One of the most notable recurring subjects is that of the then-nascent theory of evolution, which Tennyson references in several sections of the poem.

The poem’s initial attitude toward nature (“red in tooth and claw”) is often one of fear and anger, as we may observe in section LVI: “From scarped cliff and quarried stone / She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone: / I care for nothing, all shall go.’” Here, according to our footnote, “scarped” refers to an escarpment, or a cut-away section of earth, in which several layers of fossil and decomposed organic matter may be observed. “She” is nature, personified as a careless and cruel goddess; nature has even conquered the “Dragons of the prime,” or the dinosaurs. Throughout the first several sections of the poem, nature always seems to mimic Tennyson’s emotional state—when he is particularly distraught, a storm comes; when he is contemplative and melancholy, natural forces reflect the sentiment.

As Tennyson’s grief becomes more manageable, so does nature. Section LXXXIII welcomes the second spring after Hallam’s death and asks whether trouble “can live with April days, / Or sadness in the summer moons,” urging the new year to “bring orchis, bring the foxglove spire . . .” In section CXIX, Tennyson revisits Hallam’s old address (for the first time after a painful visit shortly after his death) and claims to “smell the meadow in the street . . .” Tennyson even finds Venus (or "Hesper-Phosphor") to be a site of comfort in section CXXI: “Sweet Hesper-Phosphor, double name / For what is one, the first, the last / Thou, like my present and my past, / Thy place is changed; thou art the same.” Tennyson’s having found comfort—and having identified a comforting quality of changelessness in a natural body—is a victory for the poem; it is one of the first sections in which Tennyson directly mingles scientific fact with hopeful rhetoric. Finally, the poem’s epilogue (written for the occasion of Tennyson’s sister’s marriage) is at significant peace. Tennyson foresees the birth of a niece or nephew, describing the “lower phase” of gestation in which the embryo “resembles lower forms of life”—a far cry from the outright fear of evolution that characterizes the earlier sections of the poem.

Additionally, the stream, river, and ocean are all recurring images throughout the poem. Earlier sections of the poem take rivers for their subjects; section XIX compares the tide’s stilling of the Wye to eyes “fill’d with tears that cannot fall . . .” The Lethe, which is a river in Hades, is mentioned several times. At one point, Tennyson expresses that he would rather have Hallam buried in the churchyard than at sea. In section CII, Tennyson describes a dream in which a dove brings “a summons from the sea.” Tennyson obeys the summons and goes to a ship, where he finds Hallam, and the men and their companions “steer . . . [the ship] toward a crimson cloud / That landlike sle[eps] along the deep.” We haven’t spoken much of bodies of water thus far in class, nor have they figured this heavily in many of the other works we have read. What kinds of work does water do for the poem? What can be said of the different ways in which bodies of water are represented throughout the various sections?