How Tennyson Grieves In Poetry

 

SOURCES

Hallam Tennyson's biography of his father:

MUSIC (via Epidemic Sound)

Anna Dager, Hanna Ekström, "Suspension"
Anna Dager, Hanna Ekström, "Jordskred"

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The Nerdwriter is a series of video essays about art, culture, politics, philosophy and more.

[thomashudry]

"A voice that is still" could also be read as "a voice that still is" therefore meaning that he still hears that voice.
This verse and the one before not only picture absence, but the duality between presence and absence, "the touch of a vanished hand". The touch relates to something he could still feel.
I find it incredible how with such a simple line he can both say the voice is gone and still here without changing anything about the line itself.

[Kyreille]

Everytime I see a new Nerdwriter video, I know it's going to be a good day, even when it's a melancholic topic

[scaife]

When Hallam can write a letter that beautiful at such a young age and still see you as "the genius of the two", you know you've got something special.

[holly]

“Break, break, break” to me feels like pleading for the grief to break. But grief, like the sea, is so powerful, all consuming and inescapable. He’s standing on a cliff, at the mercy of its vastness and power, just begging for it to break.

[cradac]

In German class (i'm from germany) we often had to write a poem analysis as an exam - even at the A-levels there was the option to write an analysis instead of an essay or a book comparison.

But I never really understood the appeal of it or how to really write it. I never got behind the lines the artists wrote and put all analysis off as "putting words into the mouth of a dead person".

I've been out of school for a few years now and I wouldn't have thought I would be confronted with this type of essay again. But if I'm honest they are some of my favourite videos of yours.

I finally understand it.

[MrSegrist]

I just got a phone call today that a friend of mine died; this video and Tennyson's poetry has helped me immensely in my grieving process. Thank you.

[lignjahal]

I discovered Tennyson through Del Toro’s Hellboy 2 (wild place to find him, I know). And In Memoriam Stanza 40 is still my favorite piece of poetry and I have had it memorized since I watched that movie.

Tennyson’s beautiful poetry is so impactful. I appreciate the acknowledgment of his sorrowful poetry, but everyone should check out his love poems, which are just as poignant.

[adrianbyrne]

fantastic video. i liked it within the first 30 seconds, and then got so caught up with it that halfway through I scrolled down to try to like it again without realising.

[inklingite]

I love that you do videos on poetry @Nerdwriter1. Keep keeping the eternal flame ablaze!

[coyote]

Wonderful as always. I would argue, though, that the stately ships are being buried under the hill. childhood > adult > death. It is the "under the hill" that doesn't make sense for ships to go. The "haven" is the grave.

[joshuaharper]

I love the way Tennyson plays with the meter in this poem. All but two lines have 3 stresses, but those two (the 3rd lines of stanzas 3 and 4) have 4, and they are the lines speaking of the absence (yet phantom presence) of the lost one. The longer lines are subtly highlighted by thus rhythm, as is the relentless and sombre "Beeak, break, break" with its three stresses and concomitant pauses.

[Theodelous]

This video is good i enjoyed all of it completely. Your poetry analysis is amazing man keep it up

[MrCymbalmonkey]

Fantastic video essay. My only qualm is that, I would argue, Lord Tennyson’s defining characteristic as a poet was not grief; his great subject was the at once irreconcilable nature of a changing world and Victorian England’s own ideals, and their interwoven identities. A man torn between national pride and nature (which Coleridge would famously remark on as art’s role; it being “the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man.”) In that way, he could often be a mirrror to Milton at his finest, for his “quarrel with the world” — as Robert Frost called it — or his “negative capability”, as Keats called it. Or maybe even, less favourably, with John Clare, in that sense. Undoubtedly that topic had its own miseries — for which Tennyson worked with excellent conceit — but no more than other Britons and their subjects who would follow him in the proceeding years, or those before him: Shakespeare, Arnold, Keats, Housman, Auden, Larkin, to think of but a few.

What’s remarkable about Tennyson is his lyricism — the greatest England has ever known, arguably. His match of craft with emotion was what made him the great poet he was.

But ultimately, while Tennyson certainly penned some magnificent truths on sorrow, and laid his heart bare, he was not the great English poet of grief; that title belongs to Thomas Hardy.

[extremetee]

As basically a philistine who doesn`t really "get" most art I love these videos because he reveals the layers great art can have and even if I don`t understand it I can at least understand it bit more!

[WarbossPepe]

love your poetry series. Please never stop them

[ThomasConrad-fp]

"In Memoriam" was a high mark in Tennyson's elegiac poetry, but "The Lotus Eaters" was his true master-piece, on a par with the best of Swinburne. Melonchonia was always his companion in all his 'outpourings' and the old Queen Victoria (after Albert's death) wrote about sharing the sentiments of his poetry in her diaries.

[Ominous_Droning_Intensifies]

Keep those up ! Helps me go back to/discover more classical litt stuff, which is harder and harder when spammed with more accessible pop-culture subjects and videos

[evanokeeffe]

If we look at the order of the stanzas as the speaker slowly raising his gaze from the rocks below to the horizon, we can almost replay his actions while soaking in the scene. Pensive, but vacant. Then back to the final stanza, we can see Tennyson almost sighing back down to the rocks below (aka, reality; but in the face of death; always in the face of death).

[syifams]

He wrote a series of sad poems, i remember crying to In Memoriam

[yukimorandini]

this actually reminds me of a chinese poem, the english translation always loose a lot of the subtlty, but the structure, there s sth very much alike here. here is the poem.

It's ten years you're gone and I'm living
- to the tune of Jiangchengzi
(my dream on January 20th, 1075)

translated by Gordon Osing and Julia Min


It's ten years you're gone and I'm living

in two worlds apart and fading.

If l've tried hard not to recall,

I’d say also I can't ignore.

It's a thousand miles to your tomb;

so whom can I share my mood of gloom?

You would not know me by now,

my temples frosted with lines on brow.


Last night In the mist of my dream-world,

I was home again, watching by your window.

You are adorning yourself, still young and fair.

Our eyes meet and freeze ---

we're in silence and in tears;

then the dream ends right there.

Where the moon illumines your ridge of pines.

I swear my heart breaks further each year