Tennyson, In Memoriam
We’re having a poetry reading of Tennyson’s In Memoriam here in the Chapel next month. I have taught in the Faculty on this poem, along with Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner and Manley Hopkins Wreck of the Deutschland – three poems that all deal with themes of theodicy, guilt, death and reward, and doubt and certainty. The course I taught on has just been replaced by a new thing, so I guess I’ll have to mothball this particular combination for the time being. But it will be nice (in memoriam) to take part in this reading…
2 Responses to “Tennyson, In Memoriam”
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Maggi has kept a blog since September 2003, writing about theology and faith, the arts and literature, and a little about life and random nonsense...
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Wow, three great poems. Makes me wish I was back at Uni.
In Memoriam LV Tennyson considers how of 50 seeds Nature often brings but one to bear
I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world’s altar-stairs
That slope thro’ darkness up to God,
This 19th Century stumbling on a new vision of nature seems to me critical to the birth of Modernism. And the “novel” evidence looks on the face of it to be slim. It wasn’t novel surely, that Nature is profligate? That the living are lucky?
I wonder if there is a connection between this notion that nature (aka God?) doesn’t care, and the British Deist movement.