SOURCE: Taaffe, James G. “Circle Imagery in Tennyson's In Memoriam.” Victorian Poetry 1, no. 2 (April 1963): 123-31.

In the following essay, Taaffe offers a close reading of In Memoriam, focusing on its circle imagery and connecting the poem to Dante's Divina Commedia.

In Memoriam, Tennyson tells us, “was meant to be a kind of Divina Commedia, ending with happiness.” The poem, beginning with the burial of Arthur Henry Hallam, he says, “concludes with the marriage of my youngest sister Cecilia.”¹ This statement has been generally believed to indicate the movement of the poem from a Tennysonian Inferno to a Victorian Paradiso: from a “wasteland” to a “mystical vision … assuredly the sanction of his faith.”² In an article entitled “The Symbolic Imagination” Allen Tate has perceptively discussed the central symbol and image of Dante's Divina Commedia; it is the circle which both defines and creates Dante's cosmos. From its first appearance...