Publication Date

6-1970

Advisor(s) - Committee Chair

Roy Miller, Addie Hilliard, William McMahon

Degree Program

Department of English

Degree Type

Master of Arts

Abstract

The vehicle Tennyson uses to explore the thematic ambiguities of love/indifference; faith/doubt; hope/despair; and life/death is domestic imagery, specifically images which involve the home or house and those images of personal relationships which move the poet from despair to a tentative faith.

The initial chapter of this work will present a general view of Tennyson and In Memoriam by which the subsequent study of the elegy's domestic imagery may be brought into focus. In addition to a discussion of the occasion of the poem, pertinent critical material will be evaluated in terms of value to this discussion of imagery. After a brief working definition of domestic imagery in Chapter II, an in-depth analysis of this imagery in In Memoriam will be studied. The first major cluster of domestic images is found in the beginning movement of the poem. In this movement images of domesticity proliferate. The aspects of home life which pertain to the poet's grief over the loss of his beloved friend will be explored and analyzed in depth in Chapter III. Moving away from the domestic scene, the poet concentrates in the next major movement on a specific symbol: the hand. This hand imagery is the vehicle for the poet's exploration of the tree aspects of love: agape, philia and eros. In Chapter V, it will be shown that the poet, in his grief, progresses through a movement of mind from negation to indifference. These attitudes of denial and insouciance are not conveyed by a single cluster of images such as those of domesticity and the home, but rather by disparate images as widely scattered as physical objects, states of mind, and human relationships. In delineating the progress of Tennyson's grief from despair through indefference to affirmation, the poet traversed essentially those elements found in Hegelian Triad - thesis, antithesis and synthesis - or in the Carlylian diction of the Everlasting Nay, the Centre of Indifference, and the Everlasting Yea. The Everlasting Yea, or rather, the arrival of the poet at a tentative affirmation is the subject matter of Chapter VI. The final movement of the poem considered in this chapter makes use of all previously used symbols to some degree for the purpose of revealing the emergence of a new state of mind and a more healthy attitude toward life as exhibited by the poet.

By way of conclusion, a synthesis of the six preceding chapters will be presented in which the interaction and interrelation of domestic imagery, hand imagery, scenes of domestic relationship, and states of mind show a persistent progression from uncontrolled grief through a period of apathy and indifference to arrive finally at a state of acceptance of life as it is and of affirmation, although qualified, of the significance of life.

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature | Literature in English, British Isles

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