A Commentary on Tennyson's in Memoriam (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1920 edition. Excerpt: ...of this group are otherwise so closely connected that we expect to find here something bearing on the question of memory in the next life, considered as a necessary condition of the poet's reunion with his friend. And in the first two stanzas we seem to find this. The poet in XLV. has persuaded himself that the dead remember. Now the thought seems to occur to him that here on earth, though we remember the past, our memory is very imperfect, and that accordingly the memory of the dead also may be imperfect; from which it would follow that his friend after all may not remember him. To this he answers that there is a good reason why memory on earth should be dim and broken, and that this reason does not hold of the next life. But the 'shall' in line 7, and still more the next two stanzas, show that he is not thinking of his friend's present state, but of some future time when in another life someone will look back on the earthly life and the five years of friendship. And it is not clear who this someone is--himself, or his friend, or both of them; and still less clear is the meaning of the last stanza, which appears to correct something said in stanza 3 (see the paraphrase above). Of the commentators, Genung says: 1 The lifetime which Arthur remembers may perhaps show those five years of friendship as its richest period, lending radiance to all the rest.' But this interpretation seems impossible, not only for the reason given above, but also (1) because, according to it, Arthur is asked, in stanza 4, to regard in the light of Love, not only the five years of friendship which terminated his short life, but the preceding years in which he did not know the poet at all; and (2) because on this view stanza 3 is the description of a life ended in...