The wish, that of the living whole
No life may fail beyond the grave,
Derives it not from what we have
The likest God within the soul?
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;
That I, considering everywhere
Her secret meaning in her deeds,
And finding that of fifty seeds
She often brings but one to bear,
I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world's altar-stairs
That slope thro' darkness up to God,
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.
Notes
NOTES
Form:
abba
1.
First published anonymously in the volume with this title in
1850, though the 131 sections or separate poems that compose it were
written and rewritten from 1833 to the time of publication. Two of the
131 sections were added in later editions: LIX in 1851, and XXXIX in
1872. The poem is in memory of Tennyson's friend Arthur Henry Hallam,
son of the eminent historian. Hallam was engaged to marry Tennyson's
sister Emily, when he died suddenly of a stroke in Vienna on September
15, 1833, at the age of twenty-two. Although written without any plan
at first, the parts of the poem were finally arranged in a pattern to cover
the period of about three years following Hallam's death. Tennyson himself
insisted that it is "a poem, not a biography .... The different moods of sorrow
as in a drama are dramatically given, and my conviction that fear, doubts,
and suffering will find answer and relief only through Faith in a God of
Love. `I' is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the
human race speaking through him."
OBIIT MDCCCXXXIIII: he died in 1833.
4.
likest to God within the soul: man's most God-like quality, manifested in
"the wish," is clearly love.
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