Studies in English Language and Literature

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, And gather dust and chaff, and call To what I feel is Lord of all, And faintly trust the larger hope... These lines have been taken from Lord Tennyson’s elegiac poem 'In Memoriam'. To be more specific, we must mention that this excerpt is from Lyric 55 of the said poem. The poet, after the untimely death of his intimate friend named Arthur Henry Hallam, became mentally devastated. In this regard, we need to say that he composed these lines in the remembrance of his deceased chum. The speaker persona of the poem stretches out the "lame hands of faith", because whenever he tries to rationalise his doubts, he gains unsatisfactory consequences alone. All that he can do, in this perspective, is to "gather dust and chaff" only. He, therefore, submits himself to the Lord and he dimly trusts "the larger hope". This is his optimism and his faith in the Christian concept, which is solid and unshaken. The helple...

Are God and Nature then at strife,        That Nature lends such evil dreams?        So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life... These lines have been taken from Lord Tennyson’s elegiac poem 'In Memoriam'. To be more specific, we must mention that this excerpt is from Lyric 55 of the said poem. The poet, after the untimely death of his intimate friend named Arthur Henry Hallam, became mentally devastated. In this regard, we need to say that he composed these lines in the remembrance of his deceased chum. Here, Tennyson oscillates like a pendulum between the Christian faith of the immortality of soul and the doubts born out of science. The poet wonders, therefore, that God and Nature might have a conflict between each other, since God represents eternal love but Nature emblematises the survival of the fittest. God infuses life but Nature ends us all one very day. In this context, God and Nature seem...