In Memoriam

Alfred Tennyson

from  In Memoriam A. H. H.

         5

I sometimes hold it half a sin

  To put in words the grief I feel;

  For words, like Nature, half reveal

And half conceal the Soul within.

But, for the unquiet heart and brain,

  A use in measured language lies;

  The sad mechanic exercise,

Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er,

  Like coarsest clothes against the cold;

  But that large grief which these enfold

Is given in outline and no more.

          7

Dark house, by which once more I stand

  Here in the long unlovely street,

  Doors, where my heart was used to beat

So quickly, waiting for a hand,

A hand that can be clasped no more—

  Behold me, for I cannot sleep,

  And like a guilty thing I creep

At earliest morning to the door.

He is not here; but far away

  The noise of life begins again,

  And ghastly through the drizzling rain

On the bald street breaks the blank day.

           22

The path by which we twain did go,

  Which led by tracts that pleased us well,

  Through four sweet years arose and fell,

From flower to flower, from snow to snow;

And we with singing cheered the way,

  And, crowned with all the season lent,

  From April on to April went,

And glad at heart from May to May.

But where the path we walked began

  To slant the fifth autumnal slope,

  As we descended following Hope,

There sat the Shadow feared of man;

Who broke our fair companionship,

  And spread his mantle dark and cold,

  And wrapped thee formless in the fold,

And dulled the murmur in thy lip.

And bore thee where I could not see

  Nor follow, though I walk in haste,

  And think that somewhere in the waste

The Shadow sits and waits for me.

         24

And was the day of my delight

  As pure and perfect as I say?

  The very source and fount of day

Is dashed with wandering isles of night.

If all was good and fair we met,

  This earth had been the Paradise

  It never looked to human eyes

Since our first sun arose and set.

And is it that the haze of grief

  Makes former gladness loom so great?

  The lowness of the present state,

That sets the past in this relief?

Or that the past will always win

  A glory from its being far,

  And orb into the perfect star

We saw not when we moved therein?

                71

Sleep, kinsman thou to death and trance

  And madness, thou hast forged at last

  A night-long present of the past

In which we went through summer France.

Hadst thou such credit with the soul?

  Then bring an opiate trebly strong,

  Drug down the blindfold sense of wrong,

That so my pleasure may be whole;

While now we talk as once we talked

  Of men and minds, the dust of change,

  The days that grow to something strange,

In walking as of old we walked,

Beside the river's wooded reach,

  The fortress, and the mountain ridge,

  The cataract flashing from the bridge,

The breaker breaking on the beach.

         

(1833-50)



Alfred, Lord Tennyson

—oOo—