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."

Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "Enoch Arden"

This post contains spoilers.

Last week I finished reading Tennyson's "Enoch Arden."  I noticed an extremely small thing about a line in this part:

But Enoch yearn'd to see her [Annie's] face again:
"If I might look on her sweet face again,
And know that she is happy."  So the thought
Haunted and harass'd him, and drove him forth,
At evening when the dull November day
Was growing duller twilight, to the hill.  (lines 713-718)

What I noticed is the alliteration in line 716:  "Haunted and harass'd him."  The alliteration between the two verbs further emphasizes their meaning.  The beginning H is present in both just like the thought that haunts and harasses Enoch is constantly before him.

But that H sound is also present in "him."  The haunting and harassing thought has infected him, and this thought gives Enoch life.  When he does see Annie (who's now married to Philip) and his children, their happiness moves him to keep his distance.  He thinks that his return will be "a blast of doom" that "would shatter all the happiness of the hearth" (lines 765, 766).  He prays to God, "Help me not to break in upon her peace" (line 783).  He works for himself, "Yet since he did but labor for himself, / Work without hope, there was not life in it [and]... a languor came / Upon him, gentle sickness, gradually / Weakening the man, till he could do no more" (lines 815-816, 819-821).  The thought of seeing Annie again keeps him alive throughout his years at sea and his being shipwrecked, but once he resolves himself against seeing her so that he can preserve her happiness, he has nothing left to live for and slowly fades into death.

All of this is illustrated in the infecting alliteration in those few words:  "the thought / Haunted and harass'd him."