SOURCE: Gransden, K. W. “The Poem.” In Tennyson: In Memoriam, pp. 42-60. London: Edward Arnold (Publishers) LTD., 1964.

In the following excerpt, Gransden examines In Memoriam as an elegy, noting that Tennyson's approach is tentative and exploratory, resulting in a poem that documents his trial and error as he attempted to translate his vision into words.

Tennyson at one time thought of calling In Memoriam ‘Fragments of an Elegy’, a title which overstresses the intermittent nature of the poem at the expense of its underlying unity and development. A better pointer is his subtitle ‘The Way of the Soul’, and his remark, quoted in the Memoir, that the poem is a kind of divine comedy beginning with a death and ending with a marriage. The poem moves from the darkness of loss towards the light of hope and future gain: we shall see that both meanings of ‘loss’, as...