Tennyson's 'In Memoriam' : Explanation 3 / Reference to Context

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O Sorrow, with thou live with me
No casual mistress, but a wife,
My bosom friend and half of life;
As I confess it needs must be.

These lines have been taken from Lord Tennyson’s elegiac poem 'In Memoriam'.

The poet, after the untimely death of his intimate friend named Arthur Henry Hallam, was mentally broken down. That is to say, he composed these lines in the remembrance of his deceased chum.

Here, the poet greets 'Sorrow', by using an apostrophic address, to be with him as a lifelong partner or an inseparable wife. However, he will never allow 'Sorrow' as a 'casual mistress'. That is to say, he emnraces sorrow to inhabit with him as a devoted wife or his 'bosom friend' for the half of his life. He does acknowledge that it must come into effect. There is a need of it; moreover, there is a compulsion in this regard.

In this perspective, it must be noted that the poet's tone of speaking sounds as if his heavy heart is wallowing in utmost lamentation for Arthur, his crony. The poet becomes helpless. He seems to be oscillating like a pendulum between hope and despair, between pain and his attempt to get over it, and between life's sorrow and his desperation to shape the sorrow to some kind of acceptance of reality.

Sorrow has been personified in this context. The heavy heart of the speaker can bear the agony no more, still, he has to. He learns that acceptance alone can be the key to be genuinely reconciled with the ups and downs or with the weal and woe of human life.

This stanza is written in the rhyme scheme of ABBA that constitutes a quatrain. Right here, the poet's welcoming spirit towards grief and its acceptance is revealed. Sorrow is projected here as having a therapeutic value.


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