In the Depth of Tears: Memory, Grief, and Musicality in Tennyson and Wordsworth
Tennyson Research Bulletin, 11.4 (2020), 347-361
Abstract
The musical eloquence and flexibility of Tennyson’s lyricism convey his complex poetic connection with Wordsworth on the subject of memory and grief. Tennyson’s lyrical musicality has been variously acknowledged by scholars as ‘one of [the] most memorable, sensuous, aestheticist voices’ of the nineteenth century (Leighton 2002, 65); this mnemonic and affective quality of Tennyson’s verbal artistry is closely associated with an ‘unrelenting fascination with ideas of recurrence and return in life’ ‘inherited’ from the great Romantic poets (Perry 2005, 16), or a ‘sense of grasping at memory through language’ ‘borrowed’ from Wordsworth (Thomas 2019, 93). While Wordsworth’s poetics of remembering does offer a structure and means for Tennyson to articulate his loss and locate his own form of consolation, this essay does not aim to set up Tennyson’s rich auditory aesthetics as a derivation from his predecessor, but rather, to show how the poets are united in the expressiveness and indefiniteness of lyrical musicality to communicate their corresponding representations of the role of memory in relation to grief and suffering. In this essay, I present a fresh comparative reading of Tennyson’s ‘Tears, Idle Tears’ (1847) and Wordsworth’s ‘Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (1807) to examine the poets’ respective approach to grief and the idea of a possible consolation through the retrospective quality and mnemonic function of the lyric. By re-establishing the significance of formal and linguistic musicality to the understanding of the treatment of memory and grief in the poetry of Tennyson and Wordsworth, my essay reveals how the poems’ musical qualities and auditory poetics shape a paradoxical tension between idleness and progression, remembering and forgetting, loss and recompense in the ‘depth’ of tears.