To the present writer—if a personal note may be permitted—the tone and outlook of this long-sustained effort are alike depressing. This is not robust poetry, and for the already morbid-minded it is easily conceivable that it might even be disastrous.
Tennyson in those early years had what we cannot but think the great misfortune not to possess a local knowledge. He made a personal acquaintance with what was then the little village of Clevedon only when “In Memoriam” was completed, and was thus unfortunately unable to verify some of his most important descriptive details. He visited Clevedon only belatedly, and knew so little of the circumstances, although he publicly mourned his friend so keenly and at such length, that he was not quite sure where they had laid him. We observe him trying twice to place the grave, and failing:
’Tis well; ’tis something; we may stand
Where he in English earth is laid,
And from his ashes may be made
The violet of his native land.
Or else, he proceeds to say, if not in the churchyard, then in the chancel:
Where the kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of God.
Leaving aside that shockingly infelicitous alliterative expression, “the grapes of God,” intended to convey the meaning of “communion wine,” we know that neither in the churchyard nor in the chancel was the body of Arthur Hallam laid, but in the south transept. But he continues: