Tennyson wrote In Memoriam Essay Example for Free

Tennyson wrote In Memoriam Essay Tennyson wrote In Memoriam for a dear lost friend of his. The poems span the length of 17 years. When Tennyson writes of the way of the soul, is most definitely referring to that metaphysical aspect of a person’s spirit – that thing which travels beyond death. Tennyson’s fear however, is that he cannot write about the soul, as he says, â€Å"For words, like Nature, half reveal/And half conceal the Soul within. † (Tennyson lines 3-4 poem V. ) In short, Tennyson writes of the loss of his friend’s soul. Tennyson’s fear becomes that he will not know his friend any longer in his mortal form (perhaps Tennyson fears he will not recognize his friend’s soul should they meet again); such desire is shown in poem XII, ‘Is this the end? Is this the end? ’ (Tennyson line 16 XII). However, Tennyson forgoes his fears and finds a certainty as expressed in these lines, â€Å"And I perceived no touch of change,/No hint of death in all his frame,/But found him all in all the same,/I should not feel it to be strange. † (Tennyson lines 17-20 poem XIV) thereby proving that his friend is not altogether lost to him, nor should Tennyson feel sorrow for one who is not lost. 2. Tennyson wrote Mariana as a character taken from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. In the poem Tennyson illustrates the woman’s waiting for her lover; the ambiance of the poem illustrates the woman’s vain waiting with word choices such as, â€Å"rusted nails† â€Å"broken sheds† and hinges that â€Å"creak† (Tennyson). Such elements of dilapidation reveal the psychology of the main character’s actions; thus Tennyson uses environment as revelation to the person’s psychological makeup. In Browning’s My Last Duchess the reader is exposed to a subjective reality in which the Duke reveals to the emissary that, â€Å"[he] gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together. † (Browning). Thus, the reader is left to believe he killed her, or had the Duchess killed because of her flirtatious (according to the Duke) wanderings. Browning’s use of enjambment instead of the metered revelry of Tennyson’s poem stand as stark contrast to one another: Tennyson’s work is pleasing to the ear, affecting the reader to follow the meter and its revelations of grief and love for the grieved while Browning’s enjambment give the reader a jilted session of reading making the reader disquieted and not all together comfortable in reading the poem, a technique that makes them wonder about the ease with which the Duke mentions that he murdered his wife. 3. Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is a work of hedonistic texture because of its many references to love or lust of earthly delights, as in the lines â€Å"Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,/A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse and Thou/Beside me singing in the Wilderness -/And Wilderness is Paradise enow† (Fitzgerald Quatrain XI). Thus, in order to be human, to feel human, Omar must indulge in earthly pleasures or else what is the point of eating bread? Drinking wine? Reading and singing? It is these components that make up the pleasures of humanity. In Fitzgerald’s translation of the poem, wine is almost a character which comes up and is referenced again and again, supporting the thesis of hedonism being the theme and design of the poem. The poet uses this device to escape the more sordid details of living such as â€Å"punishment and pain† as well as â€Å"dirty wind, fire, and water† (Fitzgerald). 4. Matthew Arnold’s poetry showed a heaviness of doubt: Doubt of self, doubt of love, doubt of God and the ever-after. In To Marguerite—Continued this doubt is plainly illustrated with lines such as, â€Å"†¦then a longing like despair†¦Ã¢â‚¬  (Arnold line 13) when speaking about the nightingales who sing sweetly, but their song becomes distorted in the poet’s ears as he feels as though their song is soured because the birds could remember a time when the continents were together instead of separated. This line represents a stance on lovers – how lovers are once together but separated and thus the longing of the past is bred into the poem through the songs of the birds. Also, as much beauty as Arnold places on the importance of the ocean, he overshadows this sentiment by making the ocean a divider with the line, â€Å"Now round us spreads the watery plain—† (Arnold line 17). And of love, Arnold gives no reverence but merely paints love out to be intermittent moments in a bleak world as in the poem The Buried Life he states, â€Å"Alas! is even love too weak† (Arnold line 12). This bleakness spreads into Arnold’s poem Dover Beach in which the sea again plays a vital part in expressing Arnold’s joyless life through the metaphor of a melancholy ocean. 5. One theme that runs through Arnold’s poems is that of doubt, concurrent with this theme is the image of an ocean. This ocean or â€Å"estranging sea† (Arnold line 24) as is described in To Marguerite—Continued is also read in his poem The Buried Life. He uses the ocean as a metaphor of a juggernaut of loneliness and separateness in which his doubt resides. The ocean is used to illustrate how he is alone from humanity as well as love in these two poems and how it is this unnamable force, this feeling as big as an ocean which makes his life miserable. Although he uses poetic metaphors, Arnold’s poems do not illustrate anything of the joyful hedonism of Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. One may postulate that such lack of hedonism is puritanical in comparison to Tennyson’s love illustrated in his In Memoriam however the reader may conjecture that perhaps Arnold had been loved or had loved at one point in his life because the suffering of his soul is in each poem he writes. Arnold’s theme is doubt and loneliness and in this doubt arises the question the reader must ask themselves, Is love worth such misery? For Arnold, perhaps it wasn’t.