SOURCE: Bruns, Gerald L. “‘The Lesser Faith’: Hope and Reversal in Tennyson's In Memoriam.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 77 (1978): 247-64.

In the following essay, Bruns examines the organization of In Memoriam, asserting that the poem's reversals of hope and faith need to be critically explored and understood rather than resolved, as some critics contend.

For me, the most credible readings of In Memoriam are those that have been concerned less with the unity or totality of the poem than with its variable or heterogeneous nature.¹ In this paper I want to engage this variability once more, not in order to resolve it into an ideal form, but simply to understand its meaning. Although my title predicts a thesis, or a conclusion, my intention is not a tendentious one; rather, it is to think through the peculiar reversals that Tennyson's lyrics force us to undergo at the end...