In Memoriam was directly responsible for Tennyson's appointment as poet-laureate. Queen Victoria declared that she received more comfort from it than from any other book except the Bible. The first stanza of the poem (quoted on page 9) has proved as much of a moral stimulus as any single utterance of Carlyle or of Browning.
This work is one of the three great elegies of a literature that stands first in elegiac poetry. Milton's Lycidas has more of a massive commanding power, and Shelley's Adonais rises at times to poetic heights that Tennyson did not reach; but neither Lycidas nor Adonais equals In Memoriam in tracing every shadow of bereavement, from the first feeling of despair until the mourner can realize that—
"…the song of woe Is after all an earthly song,"
and can express his unassailable faith in—
"One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event
To which the whole creation moves."
With this hopeful assurance closes Tennyson's most noble and beautiful poem.
Maud, a lyrical melodrama, paints the changing emotions of a lover who passes from morbid gloom to ecstasy. Then, in a moment of anger, he murders Maud's brother. Despair, insanity, and recovery follow, but he sees Maud's face no more. While the poem as a whole is not a masterpiece, it contains some of Tennyson's finest lyrics. The eleven stanzas of the lover's song to Maud, the—
"Queen Rose of the rosebud garden of girls,"
are such an exquisite blending of woodbine spice and musk of rose, of star and daffodil sky, of music of flute and song of bird, of the soul of the rose with the passion of the lover, of meadows and violets,—that we easily understand why Tennyson loved to read these lines.
The Idylls of the King.—In 1859 Tennyson published Lancelot and
Elaine, one of a series of twelve Idylls, the last of which
appeared in 1855. Together these form an epic on the subject of King
Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. Tennyson relied mainly on
Malory's Morte d'Arthur for the characters and the stories.