In Memoriam
by Alfred Tennyson
Prologue
* Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove;
Thine are these orbs of light and shade;
Thou madest Life in man and brute;
Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made.
* Thou seemest human and divine,
The highest, holiest manhood, thou.
Our wills are ours, we know not how;
Our wills are ours, to make them thine.
* Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they.
* Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before,
But vaster. We are fools and slight;
We mock thee when we do not fear:
But help thy foolish ones to bear;
Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light.
* Forgive what seem'd my sin in me;
What seem'd my worth since I began;
For merit lives from man to man,
And not from man, O Lord, to thee.
* Forgive these wild and wandering cries,
Confusions of a wasted youth;
Forgive them where they fail in truth,
And in thy wisdom make me wise.
7 comments:
The speaker in the prelude of this poem talks about a comparison between God's knowledge and man's one. He describes how the divine turns our life form darkness( ignorance) into the light ( knowledge).
yes that is good.
also when he says forgive my sin in me here the speaker may went to a moment where he did't believe in god after the death of his friend and after thinking and contemplation he knows that science is limited and we are living in the light of god who is the creator of all living things.
After learning of Hallam’s death, Tennyson was overwhelmed with doubts about the meaning of life and the significance of man’s existence.
In “In Memoriam,” Tennyson insisted that we hold fast to our faith in a higher power in spite of our inability to prove God’s existence: “Believing where we cannot prove. Tennyson replaces the doctrine of the immortality of the soul with the immortality of mankind through evolution, thereby achieving a synthesis between his profound religious faith and the new scientific ideas of his day.
IN Memorian,the poet shows us the nature of human beings who think that they are strong and invincible in their welfare and who forget God ,and when they are weak ,they resort to God.At heart ,this is similar to the pulley written by Goerge Herbert.
Hello
All previous comments can be considered the final destination of Tennyson's poetic journey in conducting his poem "in memoriam''.
One can observe that this poem is the final product of Tennyson's efforts to get his faith of God back.
This poem was published after break, break and tears idle tears which are written for the purpose of lament his young dead friend.
About the former poems, he described his grief upon his last friend. Such grief led him to lose his faith of God, so he started to search on a solution. This solution took seventeen years to be found.
In memoriam represents these seventeen years and describe the changes happened to Tennyson's psychology chronically
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