ABSTRACT
The Princess thematizes the unity of diversity by creating the fiction that many mouths have made one text. The poem thereby suggests that a more encompassing and less ephemeral vision of human experience can issue from plural voices in a polyphonic concert. In Memoriam, by reversing the terms of this alchemical formula, accomplishes an even more startling transformation. It demonstrates how a single voice, repeating the same motifs in numerous variations, can overreach the usual limitations of the monotone (or mono typic) view. In "no language but a cry" (54.20), the "sad mechanic exercise" (5.7) of its one speaker transcends time and space to speak for many. More selfconsciously and completely jailed in language's prison than any other poem by Tennyson, In Memoriam trills language's limits into flight. 1 It has the audacity to suggest that, by means of a poetry born out of broken language, life can proceed from death, and that out of the nothingness left in the wake of incomprehensible loss, a self-sustaining creation can be gained. One misreads its astonishing claims as a poem by underestimating the attempt of its lyrics to mirror the divine act of creation. Out of the chaos of language and loss, In Memoriam constructs an ordered artifact of meaning.2 To comprehend the
In Memoriam is a shocking poem. It has long unsettled its readers from particular complacencies, overturning here an idea that it seems to have espoused, countering there a feeling which at first seemed deep and unassailable. It is a poem of contrasts and contradictions, a hymn of devotion and a furtive cry in the darkness of grief, a work of art deeply imbued with the traditions of the past, yet radical and new in its visionary appropriation of modem ideas. Its profound faith abounds even as its spiritual musing borders on heresy. The placid meter of its rolling verse can lull a reader into the ease of lyrical appreciation just before a jolting thought or phrase will snap one back toward the terrifying recognition, for example, that nature wars with itself, "red in tooth and claw" (56.15).3 In Memoriam dwells in juxtaposition, delights in disturbance, and cunningly entices readers to uncover the unity and method within its apparently haphazard but tantalizingly suggestive form and order. But perhaps the most disquieting thing of all about this poem is the sheer violence of its passion, the sharp, shrill horror of its "infant crying in the night" (54.18), the tenacity with which its love clasps grief, the near infinitude of its sorrow and the embarrassing (to some modem readers) buoyancy of its final joy.4
