Otey Parish, my childhood church
Alfred Lord Tennyson’s three Christmas passages in In Memoriam are reminiscent of the way that my own family celebrates Christmas. My ancestry is British and the ceremonies that we observe date at least as far back as my great grandmother Eliza Scott Fulcher, born in the 1850’s.
Christmas in Sewanee, Tennessee (which is where we are headed as I write this) began with the children’s service at Otey Episcopal Parish, followed by a dinner (often a leg of lamb), carol singing around the piano, a reading of Christmas stories and poems, and a hanging of the stockings. On Christmas morning, my three brothers (Jonathan, David, Sam) and I would go down and get the stockings, which we would open on our parents’ bed. My mother would have baked a coffee cake, and the rule was that we had to eat breakfast before we opened any presents.
Ritual has the effect of moving one from (in the words of anthropologist Marcel Eliade) profane space and time to sacred space and time. By following these seemingly arbitrary rules, we step back in time and into our childhood wonder. My feeling is that, if we were ever to get matter-of-fact about Christmas and abandon the steps, the magic would disappear.
In the first Christmas following Hallam’s death, Tennyson feels at first that the magic is dead. A mute shadow hangs over the ceremony, and the Christmas games feel forced. Singing the carols, however, brings back some of the spirit.
The second Christmas brings a different set of challenges. Tennyson finds himself wrestling with what C. S. Lewis in A Grief Observed calls the “second death.” This is the death of grief. What does it say about his love for Hallam, Tennyson wonders, if his agony can subside.
He notes the changes in this second Christmas. He no longer questions the value of weaving a wreath or playing games. The atmospheric turmoil of the first Christmas has changed. A rainy cloud no longer possesses the earth and the wind is still:
Again at Christmas did we weave
The holly round the Christmas hearth;
The silent snow possess’d the earth,
And calmly fell our Christmas-eve:
The yule-clog sparkled keen with frost,
No wing of wind the region swept,
But over all things brooding slept
The quiet sense of something lost.
As in the winters left behind,
Again our ancient games had place,
The mimic picture’s breathing grace,
And dance and song and hoodman-blind.
Most noticeably, people are no longer crying for Hallam. Can his grief for this man, who was “more than my brothers are to me,” come to an end, Tennyson wonders. Can regret itself die?
Who show’d a token of distress?
No single tear, no mark of pain:
O sorrow, then can sorrow wane?
O grief, can grief be changed to less?
O last regret, regret can die!
No–mixt with all this mystic frame,
Her deep relations are the same,
But with long use her tears are dry.
With Justin, I learned about the second death when the first anniversary of his drowning was approaching. I suddenly became more depressed than I had been in a while, and I figured out later that I was worried that I would lose my suffering. Strange as this might sound, that suffering somehow kept him present. That’s why, incidentally, you should never tell the bereaved that things will get better. Sometimes we don’t want them to get better.
As it turned out, the day of the death was actually a relief when I discovered that he still was no less present.
Tennyson discovers something comparable. He has not lost Hallam. To use a phrase from Wordsworth, a “primal sympathy” remains. I think that’s what he’s getting at in the next passage where he talks about “the costliest love” (when love goes deep, death exacts a heavy fee in suffering). The fact that he and Hallam were so close as children–admiring nature together, praying together, studying together–means that they have a bond that death cannot sever. Hallam, already a gifted and sensitive poet (“he was rich where I was poor”), shaped the younger Tennyson, helping him step into his poetic gifts:
‘More than my brothers are to me,’–
Let this not vex thee, noble heart!
I know thee of what force thou art
To hold the costliest love in fee.
But thou and I are one in kind,
As moulded like in Nature’s mint;
And hill and wood and field did print
The same sweet forms in either mind.
For us the same cold streamlet curl’d
Thro’ all his eddying coves; the same
All winds that roam the twilight came
In whispers of the beauteous world.
At one dear knee we proffer’d vows,
One lesson from one book we learn’d,
Ere childhood’s flaxen ringlet turn’d
To black and brown on kindred brows.
And so my wealth resembles thine,
But he was rich where I was poor,
And he supplied my want the more
As his unlikeness fitted mine.
I don’t entirely understand the stanzas that come next and that conclude the second Christmas meditation. Tennyson may be wishing that he had died rather than Arthur Hallam. (I had such a fantasy regarding Justin.) This fantasy (if I’m reading Tennyson right) then leads him to imagine how Hallam would have responded.
His conclusion is that, while Hallam would experience grief “as deep as life or thought,” he would also have “stay’d in peace with God and man.” No destructive grief, in other words.
Even better, Tennyson imagines (making a picture in his brain and channeling Hallam’s words) that he would “turn the burthen into gain.” Through this exercise of the imagination, Tennyson appears able to step beyond the guilt for his dwindling grief and turn Hallam’s death into gain.
If any vague desire should rise,
That holy Death ere Arthur died
Had moved me kindly from his side,
And dropt the dust on tearless eyes;
Then fancy shapes, as fancy can,
The grief my loss in him had wrought,
A grief as deep as life or thought,
But stay’d in peace with God and man.
I make a picture in the brain;
I hear the sentence that he speaks;
He bears the burthen of the weeks
But turns his burthen into gain.
His credit thus shall set me free;
And, influence-rich to soothe and save,
Unused example from the grave
Reach out dead hands to comfort me.
I don’t understand Tennyson’s use of money imagery. Does Tennyson feel such a debt to Hallam that he feels it necessary to be in perpetual mourning for him and then feels guilty when he comes up short? Is he burdened by something he did or didn’t do while Hallam was alive, something he feels he can never pay back? Does imagining these freeing words from Hallam erase a guilt he has feared he could never erase? Is Hallam a Christ figure who takes the burden on himself, freeing Tennyson. Is he an example who should be used whereas, up to now, he has been “unused”? Is Tennyson now calling upon him for help: “Reach out dead hands to comfort me.”
Tennyson is so committed to exploring the meaning of Hallam’s death in all its complexity that he provides us with any number of threads that we can latch onto to address our own issues. For instance, many of those who the dead leave behind are often torn by feelings of indebtedness and guilt. I will discuss in some future post about my own guilt regarding Justin.
But the major thing I get out of the second Christmas episode, in addition to its insights into the second death, is the idea of turning burden into gain.
After Justin died, I remember thinking, “Whether this turns out to be a curse or a blessing depends upon me.” I was determined that, to the extent that it was up to me, it would not blight the lives of Darien and Toby. I resolved to find a way to not only get water to flow in what felt like a barren desert but to share that water with others.
Was that resolve an example of Justin’s arms reaching out? At the very least, it made his death easier to bear.