Dead Poets Society: Remembering the Deceased

(source: getty images)

I read Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam A.H.H’ (1850), Arnold’s ‘Thyrsis’ (1865) and Swinburne’s ‘Ave Atque Vale’ (1868) to explore how three seminal Victorian poets elegise the dead.

Jerome McGann writes of Swinburne’s ‘Ave Atque Vale’ that ‘like all elegiac poets, Swinburne is not so much concerned about Baudelaire as himself, the living, and the generations of men unborn [...] Now he is dead, what meaning, significance, or purpose remains to be seen?’. This somewhat solipsistic turn inwards is characteristic of each elegist, and pivots against the poets’ self-abnegating and newly diminished world-views. The poets’ worlds are in suspension – their changing love for the static love-object engenders an inertia, stunting the advancement of solace. As Seamus Perry writes, elegy is a ‘dealing with despair’, moving towards a feeling ‘consolatory, though (in the best elegies), not simply consolatory’. In ‘In Memoriam A.H.H’, ‘Thyrsis’ and ‘Ave Atque Vale’, the poets’ responses to death are threefold: the outside world becomes newly diminished and static; they turn inwards and see a commensurately diminished self; and they reach towards a complex and hesitant consolation.

In ‘In Memoriam’, Tennyson’s material world is depleted as a result of Arthur Hallam’s death. In Stanza VII, the old-accustomed ‘house’ and ‘doors’ (VII) so associated with their friendship have become ‘long’ ‘unlovely’ and ‘dark’. Grief has rendered familiar objects disconcerting and distressing: Tennyson’s portrayal of a diminished outside world is figured in temporal terms. It is ‘once more’ (VII) that he stands in the street, a place where his heart ‘was used to beat’ for a hand ‘that can be clasp’d no more’; and it is tediously ‘again’ that the relentless ‘noise of life begins’. The new dawn proffers no hope, but is a ‘ghastly’ sight, ‘blank’ (VII) in its emotionless, mocking persistence. In ‘Ave Atque Vale’ Swinburne’s ‘dumb’ day, ‘dim ground’, ‘low light’ and ‘faint field’ are cast in this same bloodless, wan colouration, a benumbing sense of mundanity. This motif of neutered, dim light continues: in the next stanza Tennyson likens his grief to the abandoned ‘happy lover’ – for whom ‘all the magic light/ Dies off at once [...] and all the place is dark, and all/ The chambers emptied of delight’ (VII). Tennyson invokes his and Hallam’s former ‘pleasant spot[s]: ‘the field, the chamber, and the street’, only to negate them: ‘for all is dark where thou art not’. ‘All’ pivots against the poet’s nothings and absences: ‘all the magic light’, ‘all the place’ ‘all the chambers’, ‘every’ spot and ‘all is dark’ are at loggerheads with the verbs and adjectives accompanying them: ‘gone and far’, ‘dies off’, ‘emptied of’. Instead of the world being objectively, universally disfigured by death then, this is a state visible only to the bereaved – repeatedly Tennyson’s line breaks separate the invoked ‘all’ from their cut-off negatory coeval: ‘rings the gateway bell,/ And learns her gone’, ‘all the magic light/ Dies off at once’, formally intensifying this discrepancy between what objectively exists and what has become inaccessible and invisible to him alone. 

Arnold does something similar in his pastoral imitation ‘Thyrsis’: his breathless listing of the rural idyll’s ‘red loosestrife and blond meadow-sweet’ is retrospectively, bathetically denied: ‘they all are gone, and thou art gone as well!’ (130). This sense of loss is maintained, rolling over seamlessly into the next stanza: ‘Yes, thou art gone!’ (131), an explicit testament to Clough’s death – a harsher attestation than Arnold’s prior euphemisms (‘But Thyrsis of his own will went away’ (40)). Arnold’s material natural world demands reassessment following Clough’s death: ‘Here came I often, often, in old days—/Thyrsis and I; we still had Thyrsis then’ (9-10).

The whole poem is a grappling with the fact that nature can remain unchanged while love is forced to change, warped by loss. The poet-speaker considers the scene ‘lovely’, but dimmed by ‘some loss of habit's power’ (22). His actions of the present are constantly compared to his past experiences with Clough, the present consistently coming up short: ‘Now seldom come I, since I came with him’ (25). Tennyson explicitly worries about such aestheticisation of the past; temporality again creating a perplexing disjunction – ‘the lowness of the present state’ (XXIV) is perhaps to blame for the past’s aureate semblance. The past, he decides, is endowed with glory simply ‘from its being far’, and will inevitably ‘always win’. But Tennyson’s formulation of this idea as a question (‘when we moved therein?’) undermines the claim a line later that ‘I know that this was Life,--’ (XXV), an ostensible certainty further formally belied by caesura. Not only then, is the external world rendered cold, dark and obsolete by death, but time seems to be suspended and corrupted by the ‘haze of grief’, a sense of torpidity which is mirrored in the relentless ABBA rhyme scheme, where each stanza recapitulates its opening, not progressing beyond its first rhyme. 

Each poet sees the outside world as reduced and darkened, but an equal and opposite sense of self-oriented, introspective abandonment shapes each elegy. The poet-speaker in Arnold’s ‘Thyrsis’ is explicitly aggrieved: ‘There thou art gone, and me thou leavest here/ Sole in these fields!’ (191-2). The speaker resolves not to yield to grief: ‘yet will I not despair./ Despair I will not, while I yet descry’ (193-4), but his duplication of both ‘despair’ and the countering ‘yet’ seem tautologous and equivocatory. A sense of blame rings through in Arnold’s accusatory ‘thou’’s, intimated throughout in the speaker’s ambivalence towards Clough’s impatience, ‘It irk'd him to be here, he could not rest’ (41).

Again a contradictory ‘yet’ is pitted against ostensible certainties: ‘He loved each simple joy the country yields,/ He loved his mates, but yet he could not keep’ (42-3) – the slightly too personalised account of Clough’s potential deficiencies expose the elegy’s tendency to look inwards in affronted grievance. Tennyson’s admonishments to Hallam are less frequent, but a solipsistic anger does spill out of his grief at times: ‘And what to me remains of good? [...] unto me no second friend’ (VI). He is absorbed and sequestered  by his grief: ‘sometimes in my sorrow shut,/ Or breaking into song by fits,/ Alone, alone, to where he sits’ (XXIII). His creative process has become fitful, and he angrily rebukes social platitudes, patronising proverbs whose bromidic appeasement fails to articulate his grief: ‘That loss is common would not make/ My own less bitter, rather more:/ Too common!’ (VI). It is noteworthy that ‘one writes’ these bland aphorisms, a further acknowledgement of literature’s ineffectuality at countering profound emotion in a poem so troubled by ‘this poor flower of poesy’ (VIII). Tennyson’s desire for a privileged, unique and rare experience of sadness combines solipsism in its self-aggrandisement with a poignant testament to the unchanging universality of death: ‘Never morning wore/ To evening, but some heart did break’ (VI).

Swinburne’s ‘Ave Atque Vale’ also has its moments of authorly self-absorption. His opening line, ‘shall I strew on thee rose or rue or laurel [...]?’ (1) frames the poet as the active participant, asking how best to honour a deceased, and thus unresponsive addressee. The poet-speaker himself admits that his words are inaccessible to Baudelaire: ‘Thou art far too far for wings of words to follow,/ Far too far off for thought or any prayer’ (IX), a tacit admission that his words are not entirely self-emptying and homage-paying, but directed to someone other than the deceased. In contrast to the ‘deaf, and blind’ (IX) Baudelaire, Swinburne is emphatically materially present: he is able to ‘salute, [to] touch, [to] clasp and fold’ (X) the ‘memories and melodies’ of Baudelaire’s words. Where the deceased was untouchable, ‘hand unclasped of unbeholden friend’ in stanza V, for Swinburne, Baudelaire’s writing is ‘as though a hand were in my hand to hold’ (X). The living poet is still able to gain and grow from his corporeal connection to Baudelaire’s work, even though it is inaccessible now to its creator. He refuses death’s power to ‘estrange[]’ his ‘spirit from communion’ (X) with Baudelaire’s poetic spirit.

The poet-speaker testifies to the dubious restorative power of poetry: ‘not all our songs, O friend,/ Will make death clear or make life durable’ (XVI), but he assumes the mantle himself, considering it his duty to ‘fill the place’ left by ‘this dust of thine’ (XVI). In so doing, Swinburne echoes another seminal text, Ecclesiastes 3:20, ‘all go to one place; all come from dust, and all return to dust’ – the Bible, Baudelaire and Swinburne all constituent parts of a lineage of influence and re-kindlings of creative inspiration. Swinburne’s unquestioning positioning of himself here amidst a canon of historical texts is redolent, perhaps, of the ‘egotistical sublime’. Indeed, by the end, the poet’s imperatives have rendered him master over the deceased; ‘Take at my hands this garland, and farewell’ (XVIII). Swinburne answers his own former questions – ‘Hast thou found any likeness for thy vision?’,  ‘does the dim ground grow any seed of ours?’, ‘Are there flowers/ At all, or any fruit?’(VII) –  the answer of course, yes, in the shape of the poet who has taken upon himself the creative inheritance of the deceased, pledging to ‘bear,/ [...] what I may of fruits in this chilled air’ (XI). 

Each elegy tentatively reaches towards consolation, trying to find meaning in the seemingly meaningless experience of grief. Arnold wrote in ‘The Study of Poetry’ that ‘more and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us [...] in poetry [...] we will find [...] consolation and stay’. Swinburne, as we have seen, gestures towards a consolation offered by a poetic lineage, placing faith in the natural, ‘seed’ to ‘fruit’ generational (and indeed re-generational) transferral of poetic inspiration. But although this is reasonable consolation for himself, it is perhaps too introspective and personalised to speak to the multitudes of grievers, the ‘many mourners’ who sing a ‘mourning musical’ (X) for the deceased Baudelaire. Swinburne’s self-orientation problematises the consolation he suggests. He almost realises this, when in the final stanza he seeks to make a profound statement on death per se; but his mollification, to ‘content thee, howsoe'er, whose days are done;/ There lies not any troublous thing before’ (XVIII), advocates comfort in blissful unconsciousness, and thus seems to dispel the poem’s otherwise focus on the workings of the conscious and creative human mind. 

Arnold’s ‘Thyrsis’ also reaches hesitant solace in Clough’s Wordsworthian spiritual abidance in nature: ‘Our tree yet crowns the hill,/ Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side’ (240-1). The fictional, ventriloquised voice of the deceased’s is italicised and thus distanced from the authorial voice, though; through it, Arnold preaches stoicism: ‘Roam on!’ (238). His imperatives function similarly to Swinburne’s, as the poet-speaker impels the deceased, impossibly, to ‘Let in thy voice a whisper often come,/ To chase fatigue and fear’ (235). Arnold’s promise for some vague spirit of a voice to console him in his grief is optimistic, but the disjunct between caller and unresponsive responder reminds the reader of the aperture between the poet’s present loss and past friendship.

The shaky currency of ‘all’ in ‘In Memoriam’ is similarly pitted against the nothing’s of Tennyson’s depleted existence. This tension finds rearticulation in the poem’s conclusion: the poet-speaker decides ‘'Tis better to have loved and lost/ Than never to have loved at all’ (XXVII). But this does not bear the reassurance it might, in a poem where Tennyson’s repeatedly invoked ‘all’s were so consistently shattered into negation and fragmentation. Swinburne’s concluding ‘all’s are similarly redundant: for the deceased, ‘all winds are quiet as the sun,/ All waters as the shore’ (XVIII). The poet has just celebrated the deceased’s newfound peace; he is unassailable by earthly bombardment: ‘Nor sight nor sound [will] war against thee more’ (XVIII). Yet his comparison of audial experiences (the wind and the waters) to the silent (the sun and shore) speaks only of loss, and sensory depletion: it is as he said in stanza  IX, ‘still the foiled earnest ear is deaf’. 

Tennyson, Arnold and Swinburne all have to look within themselves in order to look beyond, in their attempts to create meaning out of death, which seems so meaningless. Their elegies are couched in uncertainty and bemusement – Tennyson laments human inconsequentiality (‘we are fools and slight’ (29)). As Freud wrote in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, profound mourning involves a ‘loss of interest in the outside world—in so far as it does not recall [the deceased]’. Tennyson considers the living world a mockery, worthless, altered beyond recognition by his loss, and Arnold and Swinburne’s worlds are also depleted, delineated in terms of negation and absence. The poets’ consolatory extrapolations are distinct in content but similarly irresolute. Tennyson’s concluding aphorism is undermined by the poem’s troubled conception of ‘all’, and pitches two types of loss against one another – the ‘loss’ of a love being a preferred anguish to its nonexistence. Arnold’s ventriloquism of the deceased seeks to render his pastoral elegy the dialogue it traditionally would have been, but the obvious disjunct between dead and living renders the dialogue unreciprocated. Swinburne’s consolation via his own espousal of a historical poetic lineage is product of the solipsism induced by mourning – that which Freud termed the ‘inhibition and circumscription of the ego’. It places both Swinburne and Baudelaire in an exclusive roster of intellectuals, unable to offer any more universalised or general solace for grief. As Perry suggested, these elegies are all the more powerful because of their ultimate failure to adequately console themselves, or provide any universal enduring consolation for death: they are not, as Perry says, ‘simply consolatory’, because their ability to console at all is so limited. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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McGann, Jerome J, “‘Ave Atque Vale’: An Introduction to Swinburne’, Victorian Poetry 9, no. 1/2 (1971): pp. 145–63 http://www.jstor.org/stable/40001595

Perry, Seamus, ‘Elegy’ in Cronin, et al. A Companion to Victorian Poetry (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Pub., 2002), pp. 113-133

Reno, Seth T, ‘Tennyson, Arnold, and the Victorians: The Legacy of Romantic Love’, Amorous Aesthetics (Liverpool University Press, 2019) 

Thwaite, M. J, LECTURE – ‘‘Love and Loss’: Forms of Victorian Elegy’, Victorian Poetry: Styles and Genres (5th Feb 2025)

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