Tags
"The Way of the Soul", Alfred Tennyson, House of Lords, loss and grief, Poet Laureate, Victorian poetry, What is faith?
In Memoriam A.H.H.
(excerpt)
LIV
Oh yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;
That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroyed,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;
That not a worm is cloven in vain;
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another’s gain.
Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last—far off—at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.
So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.
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Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1809 – 1892, is one of the greatest and persistently most popular poets of the English language. Long-term Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom (his appointment to this capacity succeeded William Wordsworth’s tenure); accepting a baronetcy, took his seat in the House of Lords in 1884. “In Memoriam A.H.H.” is a long poem, composed over several years. Including the prologue and epilogue, it comprises 133 divisions called cantos (Italian for “songs”); it’s a meditation on love and loss, sorrow and hope. Its original title was “The Way of the Soul”. As to his religious beliefs, Tennyson admitted that they were not an orthodox / traditionalist Christianity, they “defied convention, leaning towards agnosticism and pandeism”.
Given a century’s perspective, Victorian poetry can be considered to be “essentially a continuation of Romantic poetry into the third and fourth generations” (Victorian Prose and Poetry, 1973; editors Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom; this volume is part of the series “The Oxford Anthology of English Literature”).
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The phrase in memoriam is Latin for “in memory of / to the memory of / as a memorial to”
WordVerseUniverse 
This is wonderful. A beautiful expression of hope and optimism.
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last—far off—at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.
I trust that too.
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Bill, thank-you for taking the time to comment. I’m really slow at gathering my thoughts (into even a knot!), so please forgive me if I don’t wing back swift replies. But then it usually happens that the more I think the less I understand, and so I get sick of trying to verbalize anything at all. Maybe that’s why I appreciate reading poetry, where so much can be communicated so succinctly. Yes, optimism is sustaining . . . But I often find myself moving towards its boundaries: of course, thankfully, tomorrow and spring will come, for most of us, but . . . confronting beyond those things (only if / when one must!) I wonder is it possible for a human to live out life without some sort of teleological faith (even if paired with doubt; at least a “hope”, but maybe even “trust” or “knowing”—Carl Jung said that he did not “believe in” God, he simply “knew” that God is) that my (and every) life is even a bit meaningful to / valued in some order that transcends what we can experience with our rational faculty / finite constitution, that by definition will forever elude our logical comprehension? Because, honestly, for all rational and material intents and purposes, my life (however I attempt to live “mindfully” and “in the present moment” and doing the “right thing”) and all the world, all the sound and fury and everything else throughout all earth’s history (however much the level of collective consciousness may be rising) seems just a flukey flash, a flakey flight (sorry) . . . Not sure I could get up in the morning believing that, as beautiful as are the spring and the dawn . . . (Thanks for lending an ear!)
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Yes. Beautifully said. I trust that too and it seems to me that it would all be pointless and despairing without that hope/faith. Tennyson here expresses beautifully what I trust and believe: “that nothing walks with aimless feet.” So runs my dream too. I’d never read this before you posted it. I’m very glad to have discovered it
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A couple of months ago I read a book of science essays by Stephen Jay Gould, in which Tennyson’s phrase “Nature, red in tooth and claw” appeared several times. I looked it up and found it comes from the same poem you dealt with here. The stanza that contains it is:
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law—
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed—
Gould makes the case that nature has no purpose; that things evolve the way they evolve and could just as well have taken different turns; that once a change occurs, an organism may take advantage of it but that the change didn’t occur in order to enable that later use.
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Thanks for your note, Steve.
So, Stephen Jay Gould is unable to discern a purpose in nature . . . and therefore he concludes that there is none.
I’m understanding that “purpose” here would refer to a conscious / unconscious future-orientation, specifically of a sort which would preclude complete freedom of choice / action for an entity at any given present moment; a sort of program or intentionality built into the cell / organism / species / all of living nature—in fact, a preprogrammed / destined end of some sort toward which the entity inevitably moves; and SJG is saying that there is in fact no such program; everything evolves freely, in each moment, as it chooses / wishes, with no goal it must aim towards (even survival, I guess that would mean, in the case of a living entity). If this is indeed what we’re discussing, I’ll up the ante a bit, and consider human beings—perhaps SJG is heading in this direction anyway. We would then seem to be confronted with a stark choice: are we human beings free agents? or, on the other hand, are we essentially, more or less unwittingly, just “playthings of destiny” (as Cavafy has Zeus say of humans in “The Horses of Achilles”), acting out some already-determined purpose which, really, must mock our sense of having free will?—(not to mention would be pretty boring for all concerned).
I imagine that, yes, we are free agents, with free will. And those cells / organisms choose freely, what ‘works best’ for them at that moment. But, here’s the thing: there may well be / is, also and simultaneously, a “purpose” at work after all. How is this possible? Well, whatever it is that we are, individually or as a species or a planet, we remain only a part of the whole, of the totality of all that is . . . Is this not so? Will not this be forever so? And doesn’t it follow logically that the Part simply cannot comprehend the Whole of which it’s a part?
For all we know, for all we can say, our experience of (even absolute) free will is precisely the “purpose” which this Whole has for us, for this Part of itself. There is no need to decide on the one to the exclusion of the other. Both may well be / are true. I think that there is indeed a need, though, to recognize that whatever we do learn about reality, whether through science or art, through rational or irrational, sensory or extra-sensory or mystical experience, there will always (always!) be that which remains beyond our grasp, our knowing, our comprehension. We are, after all, only human.
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Phew, I got seriously carried away there!
But I wanted to ask you, Steve, what’s the title of the book by Stephen Jay Gould you mentioned? Would you recommend it, or another one by him? Do you find his writing to be accessible to the ‘layman’? I’d like to wrestle a bit with some of these ideas, and summer seems like a good time to do it, channel some solar power into the endeavour :) At least to (try to) get some basic concepts defined / understood — without which it’s hard to think and communicate usefully. Meantime am reading and enjoying Jeremy Narby’s Intelligence in Nature: An Inquiry Into Knowledge, 2005.
I hope you’re having a fine and bloomy Texas summer!
[Edit Comment]
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I believe the two collections of Gould’s essays that I read were Dinosaur in a Haystack and Bully for Brontosaurus. Gould was a paleontologist by profession, but he wrote his essays for the general public (though a thoughtful public, I’d add), so they’re certainly accessible to someone who wants to channel some solar power into them. Happy reading.
Half the year in Texas we have what you would call summer, so anyone who lives here has to deal with heat and humidity. I’ve gone out taking pictures less often in the past few weeks than in the spring, but still often enough. There’s always something to photograph in nature.
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Many thanks!
Stay cool, collected, inspired.
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