Tennyson’s In Memoriam: Explanation 1 / Reference to Context
"The dawn, the dawn", and died away; And East and West, without a breath, Mixt their dim lights, like life and death, To broaden into boundless day. 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. In this elegy, we find Tennyson oscillating like a pendulum between the Christian faith in the immortality of Hallam’s soul and the scientific doubts that was typical of the Victorian Age. Here, the poet states that it is ‘dawn’; the night has ‘died away’. It feels as if ‘dawn’ is like a mirage that tries to allure him to even more despair. Moreover, both the Orient and the Occident become mixed up in life’s ‘dim lights’ breathlessly, just as ‘life and death’ become fused with each other in the natural cycle. Moreover, it may be evident that there is no distinction...