•Do loss and sorrow actually bring a greater good?
•Do death and sorrow make life meaningless?
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Sections 1-3 of In
Memoriam introduce Tennyson’s initial attitudes toward sorrow and
loss.In the height of his grief
over the death of his friend, the speaker questions the value of sorrow.In section one (lines 3-4), while the
speaker admits that at one time he believed “That men may rise on stepping
stones/ Of their dead selves to higher things” (from loss we can move upward
and progress), the speaker now wonders if it is possible to “find in loss a
gain to match” or “reach a hand through time to catch/ The far-off interest
of tears” (lines 6-8).Will a greater
good (a “far-off interest”) come from our tears in the future?Will sorrow eventuallybring
about spiritual progress to “higher things,” or do sorrow and loss make life
meaningless?In section 2, the
speaker addresses an old yew tree that stands above graves in a cemetery
(this is an ancient yew in the cemetery where Tennyson’s friend Hallam was
buried).The tree, like sorrow, seems
eternal, everlasting, while individual lives (represented in the graves of
the dead beneath the tree) pass away.In section 3, Sorrow is personified and seems to say to the poet that
“the stars blindly run” (line 5) and life is without purpose—Nature is a
“hollow form with empty hands” (line 12).The speaker asks, therefore, if he should “embrace” sorrow “as my
natural good” or crush and deny it.Thus,
the opening sections of the poem ask a question that is examined throughout
the remainder of elegy—can any good come of grief?
