SOURCE: Devlin, Francis P. “Dramatic Irony in the Early Sections of Tennyson's In Memoriam.” Papers on Language and Literature 8, no. 2 (spring 1972): 172-83.

In the following essay, Devlin explores dramatic irony as it appears in five conventional images from the first twenty lyrics of In Memoriam, theorizing that this device serves to unify the poem and draw distinctions between the poet and the narrative voice.

Speaking of In Memoriam, Tennyson wrote in an 1883 letter that “the different moods of sorrow as in a drama are dramatically given. …”¹ This brief remark suggests a view of Tennyson's elegy as a kind of drama, with the narrator as protagonist and his struggles to reintegrate his sensibility and achieve psychic balance as the nexus of action. That In Memoriam benefits from such an approach is evidenced by the increasing number of critical studies which identify the shifting consciousness of the narrator as the...