In Memoriam L: Be near me
The basic hope and despair of this poem are not new to poets or to humanity in general.
This poem, like many others in In Memoriam, is full of disturbing images and phrases. “And
Time, a maniac scattering dust” is one of my favorites. I also like the creepy comparison of
people to short-lived flies, and the daring, horrible, and (in the context) understandable
suggestion that the cycle of life and death is pointless. The poem implies that human
children are like insect eggs! This is a sickening notion. Imagine how much more sickening it
must have been to Victorian Britons. But, equally important, I think, are Tennyson’s
rhetoric, form, and versification, which give the poem most of its saturnine power.
In terms of rhetoric, we might first notice that Tennyson directly addresses his dead friend.
The poem is emotionally raw, but also oddly formal: raw because Tennyson addresses his
inmost, desperate feelings to a beloved friend; formal because directly addressing dead
people is a convention of poetry and oratory. Probably the most important and obvious
rhetorical device at work here is the repetition of “Be near me when . . .” This repetition
contains a pause, too, between “me” and “when,” and it becomes more and more
portentous as the phrase repeats, each time introducing new griefs. The pause follows an
odd, unaccented syllable, which checks the rising meter and the symmetry of the four-beat
line. Tennyson also repeats “and” over and over, so that we feel how overwhelmed he is by
despair.
Tennyson varies the poem’s rhythm against its meter, varies the positions of the pauses in
each line, and occasionally runs over lines, all of which helps create an excited and exciting texture. He uses specific rhythmic variations with great aplomb: heavy, grave offbeats (e.g.,
“dark” in “low dark verge”); light beats that sometimes speed things up toward urgency, and
sometimes contribute to a more speechlike rhythm; and very regular meter, as in “sting and
sing / And weave their petty cells and die,” which further underscores Tennyson’s sense of a
tediously repetitious and pointless life cycle.
In terms of stanzaic form, the first thing contemporary readers will probably notice is the
regular rhyme. It’s often misleading to generalize about the meaning of a rhyme scheme,
but I think this one, in this poem, creates a kind of rising and ebbing emphasis, partly
because no rhyme is answered till the third line of its stanza, which ends on a heavy
rhyme sound, and then the fourth line resonates more subtly with the distant first. Though
there are abundant rhythmic variations and at least one line in each stanza where the
syntax runs past the line-end, the closed stanza—known as the In Memoriam stanza—
gives finality to each upwelling of despair. Finally, after each stanza ends, there’s
another, more portentous pause, and we are back where we started rhetorically, formally,
rhythmically, and emotionally.
References
Joshua Mehigan - www.joshuamehigan.net/tennyson.pdf
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