ABSTRACT
Religious truth, as a matter of faith, and as Isobel Armstrong correctly asserts, is then only ever "'darkly" or obscurely apprehended'. When considering the matter of faith, Alfred Tennyson's relationship to the conventions of Christianity in In Memoriam is revealed as being both complex and complexly encrypted. In the context of Christian faith, a poetics becomes discernible in the text as a constant pre-phenomenal marking, whereby faith is articulated through an implicit comprehension of the immanence of incarnation everywhere, yet impossible to represent. Incarnation through the acoherence of Tennyson's analogy of apperception constitutes an interruption of received narratives qua incorporation of the spirit. A commentary on the intimate interconnectedness of faith and doubt and their mutual and reciprocal cross-incorporation - the one as the ghost of the other - is pertinent to Tennysonian quasi-theological tropology and anticipates the reciprocity and deconstructive iterability pertaining to incarnation.
