SOURCE: Kilroy, James. “The Chiastic Structure of In Memoriam, A. H. H.” Philological Quarterly 56, no. 3 (summer 1977): 358-73.

In the following essay, Kilroy looks at the use of chiasmus, or inversion of the second of two parallel phrases, throughout In Memoriam, with particular focus on several stanzas at the center of the work.

One of the recurrent challenges to critics of Victorian poetry has been the attempt to describe the structure of Tennyson's greatest poem, In Memoriam, A. H. H. Few deny its unity, but explanations of how its one hundred thirty-three separate poems are organized into an artistic whole have ranged from Eliot's description of it as “the concentrated diary of a man confessing himself” to the much more elaborate schemes proposed by A. C. Bradley and Valerie Pitt.¹ Despite the knowledge that Tennyson added two sections after the trial edition and that he once considered entitling it...