In Memoriam

Kimberly Shen
Professor Donahue
Throughout “In Memoriam,” Alfred Tennyson utilizes the passage of time to emphasize the permanence of death. Indeed, he alludes heavily to John Milton’s poem, “Methought I saw my late espoused saint,” as a means of conveying the extent of his grief in the face of death’s finality. Although both men have lost someone close to them, their experiences of grief have different temporal effects in the face of loss. For Milton, the short-term passage of time is evidenced in the transience of a dream; the sorrow he feels becomes painfully clear when he wakes up, for this transition from dream to reality serves as a painful reminder that his wife is no longer with him. However, for Tennyson, the passage of time has both short-term and long-term implications for his grieving process. In contrast to Milton, who watches his wife disappear with the end of a fleeting dream, Tennyson experiences what should have been a short-term passage of time as a long-term ordeal, for he is anxiously waiting for his friend to appear with the arrival of the ship carrying the body at the end of his poem. Surprisingly, on a wider long-term scale, his grief towards the passage of time parallels that of Milton, especially due to the ambiguity surrounding the nature of his feelings for his friend. By alluding so heavily to Milton’s poem, Tennyson emphasizes the full extent of his grief as he likens his friendship to a husband-wife relationship. That he deliberately utilizes vocabulary associated with the ideas of marriage and lifelong love adds a new temporal dimension to the nature of Tennyson’s grief, for one grieves differently for a long-term romantic partner than one would for a mere platonic friend. To illustrate the effect that the passage of time has on his experiences of grief, Tennyson begins his poem with a reference to John Milton’s work, for he opens with “Tears of the widower, when he sees a late-lost form that sleep reveals…and feels her place is