Page:A Commentary on Tennyson's In Memoriam (1901).djvu/22



‘ must be remembered, writes Tennyson in a note on In Memoriam, ‘that this is a poem, not an actual biography. The different moods of sorrow as in a drama are dramatically given, and my conviction that fear, doubts, and suffering will find answer and relief only through Faith in a God of Love. “I” is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking through him.’

This being so, it would seem that, in order to understand the poem, we need know nothing of the circumstances which occasioned it, any more than we require a knowledge of the lives of Shakespeare or of Gray in order to understand Hamlet or the Elegy. But In Memoriam is not quite like Hamlet or Gray’s Elegy; it rather resembles such a poem as Adonais. Just as