The noble letters of the dead.
25 And strangely on the silence broke The silent-speaking words, and strange
2. Vessel for boiling water for tea or coffee, heated moths. by a fluttering flame. 4. Cast the shadows of their branches. 3. The white-winged night moths called ermine
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IN MEMORIAM, EPILOGUE / 1173
Was love's dumb cry defying change To test his worth; and strangely spoke
The faith, the vigor, bold to dwell 30
On doubts that drive the coward back, And keen through wordy snares to track Suggestion to her inmost cell.
So word by word, and line by line, The dead man touched me from the past, 35 And all at once it seemed at last The5 living soul was flashed on mine.
And mine in this was wound, and whirled About empyreal0 heights of thought, heavenly And came on that which is, and caught
40 The deep pulsations of the world,
Aeonian music6 measuring out The steps of Time?the shocks of Chance? The blows of Death. At length my trance
Was canceled, stricken through with doubt.7
45 Vague words! but ah, how hard to frame In matter-molded forms of speech, Or even for intellect to reach
Through memory that which I became.
Till now the doubtful dusk revealed 50 The knolls once more where, couched at ease, The white kine glimmered, and the trees Laid their dark arms about the field;
And sucked from out the distant gloom A breeze began to tremble o'er 55 The large leaves of the sycamore, And fluctuate all the still perfume,
And gathering freshlier overhead, Rocked the full-foliaged elms, and swung The heavy-folded rose, and flung
60 The lilies to and fro, and said,
5. 'His' in the 1st edition. Also in the 1st edition, state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of line 37 read: 'And mine in his was wound.' the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly 6. Music of the universe, which has pulsated for beyond words, where death was an almost laugh- eons. able impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it 7. In a letter of 1874, replying to an inquiry about were) seeming no extinction but the only true life. his experience of mystical trances, Tennyson . . . This might.. . be the state which St. Paul wrote: 'A kind of waking trance I have frequently describes, 'Whether in the body I cannot tell, or had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all whether out of the body I cannot tell.'.. . I am alone. This has generally come upon me through ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said repeating my own name two or three times to the state is utterly beyond words? But in a moment, myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the when I come back to my normal state of 'sanity,' I intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the am ready to fight for mein liebes lch [my dear self], individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade and hold that it will last for aeons of aeons' (Alfred away into boundless being, and this not a confused Lord Tennyson, A Memoir, 1897, vol. 1, 320).
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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
'The dawn, the dawn,' and died away;
And East and West, without a breath,
Mixed their dim lights, like life and death,
To broaden into boundless day.
96
You say, but with no touch of scorn,
Sweet-hearted, you,8 whose light blue eyes
Are tender over drowning flies,
You tell me, doubt is Devil-born. 5 1 know not: one indeed I knew
In many a subtle question versed,
Who touched a jarring lyre at first,
But ever strove to make it true; Perplexed in faith, but pure in deeds,
io At last he beat his music out.
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds. He fought his doubts and gathered strength,
He would not make his judgment blind,
is He faced the specters of the mind
