Tennyson Death And Death Summary

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t may be said to be self-evident that the poem "In Memoriam A.H.H." by Alfred, LordTennyson is an extended expression of the poet's grief for the loss of his beloved friendArthur Hallam. What may not be as immediately obvious, and what I intend to show in thisessay, is that, over the course of the poem, the narrator (whom we may safely identify asTennyson, given the degree of correlation between the text and historical evidence) passesthrough each of the five stages of grief, as delineated by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her seminalwork On Death and Dying . 1 I intend to accomplish this through a juxtaposition of keydefinitions of each stage with evidence from Tennyson's text and a brief accompanyingexegesis.The first stage we might discuss, These sentiments are not immediately salient in the poem(with the exception of a rare explicit reference to anger in the final stanza of canto 82: "For this alone on Death I wreak / The wrath that garners in my heart"), but the question, of course,certainly is, most notably in l. 10-12 of the Preface: "Thou madest man, he knows not why, /He thinks he was not made to die; / And thou hast made him: thou art just." Faith, of course,deeply informs Tennyson's verse, but if we have a mind to it, we may certainly also discover anote of bitter sarcasm in these few lines: turning a rational creature such as man loose, in anear-infinitely complex and dangerous world (as Tennyson was, by degrees, discovering oursto be), without so much as a hint of purpose or direction, can hardly be called a just act. Canto21, additionally, reinforces this reading of an undercurrent of anger if we come to it with thesame perspective with which we approached canto 6: in penning imagined reactions to hislamenting Hallam's death (the acknowledgement of which, in l. 1's "rest" and l. 3's "grave",can be read as confirming that denial is no longer sustainable, as per Kübler-Ross'formulation), Tennyson might be said to be giving voices to parts of his own mind whichoppose, in whatever form, the expression of grief- note that the voices given the mostattention are those which speak "harshly" (l. 6-8) and are "wroth" (l. 13-20). Finally, variousreferences to suddenly-disturbed patterns (such as, among others, the first stanzas of cantos 7,8, and 13) and Tennyson's references, too frequent to enumerate, to Hallam's greatness, seemto echo Kübler-Ross and Kessler when they note that in the anger stage "assumptions comecrashing down around us when the good, the just, the loving, the healthy, the young, and eventhe needed and most wanted die on us" (14).The bargaining stage follows anger in the Kübler-Ross model; this stage ischaracterized by a general acknowledgement of

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