Saturday, May 30, 2020

Tennyson's In Memoriam A.H.H. section 16

Lately, I've been (slowly) reading the essays in the back of my Norton Critical Edition of Tennyson's Poetry.  The one I'm slogging through now quotes nearly all of section 16 of In Memoriam A.H.H., and I realized a small thing about it.

Here's the whole section:
What words are these have fallen from me?
   Can calm despair and wild unrest
   Be tenants of a single breast,
Or Sorrow such a changeling be?
Or doth she only seem to take
   The touch of change in calm or storm,
   But knows no more of transient form
In her deep self, than some dead lake
That holds the shadow of a lark
   Hung in the shadow of a heaven?
   Or has the shock, so harshly given,
Confused me like the unhappy bark
That strikes by night a craggy shelf,
   And staggers blindly ere she sink?
   And stunn'd me from my power to think
And all my knowledge of myself;
And made me that delirious man
   Whose fancy fuses old and new,
   And flashes into false and true,
And mingles all without a plan?
It's particularly clear in the punctuation that there's something of a shift in the middle of this section.  "Or has the shock, so harshly given, / Confused me like the unhappy bark // That strikes by night a craggy shelf, / And staggers blindly ere she sink?" are four lines that are linkt as far as meaning (they form a single sentence), but the line break between the stanzas separates them into two halves.  This aspect of the structure illustrates the confusion that the narrator feels after his "shock."