International House of Elegy

You haven't really lived until you've been hit on by an alcoholic 40 years your senior at 3 a.m. in a Waffle House. I was in a small town on the border of Alabama and Florida for the summer before my freshman year of college. I was supposed to be making money, getting acclimated to being back in the States, getting ready for school.


The rest of the family was traveling around the country raising support to go back to the field, so I was in the mission house of a local church by myself, with only a video rental membership card and some Lord Tennyson to keep me company. Both came in handy: Trainspotting taught me I should never try drugs; Tennyson taught me that while it's better to have loved and lost, it hurts like hell.


I hunted for a short-term job most of the summer, mostly unsuccessfully, but I had some graduation money saved up, so every now and then I went out late at night to the only place still open: Waffle House. Waiters didn't care that I sat there reading a book as long as I kept ordering something. In one evening I made it most of the way through "In Memoriam," Tennyson's extended elegy for his closest friend — Arthur Hallam — dead of a stroke at 22. I think that was the same night a truck driver's intoxicated companion decided to tell me I was good-looking and ask if my butt was cute. (I was 18, so I guess it was.)


"In Memoriam" is both elegant and some very rough going: hundreds of individual poems cross-pollinating and enlarging on their theme of the journey of an individual soul, as seen through the lens of grief and loss. Tennyson surprises: is diction is very high, sometimes almost a caricature of "poetical" language, like:


With blackest moss the flower-plots
Were thickly crusted, one and all.


Which is the line Eliza Dolitle is forced to recite at great length in "My Fair Lady" to improve her elocution.


But there's a great reservoir of passion and intellect in his work that transcends the trappings and old-timey Romantic-ness of it all. It's almost like you have to wade through his verse to reach his poetry. But this poem is one that struck me right away without a need to translate his thoughts into less flowery verbiage.

In Memoriam A.H.H.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII.


Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove;



Thine are these orbs of light and shade; 
Thou madest Life in man and brute;
Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made.



Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:
Thou madest man, he knows not why,
He thinks he was not made to die;
And thou hast made him: thou art just.



Thou seemest human and divine,
The highest, holiest manhood, thou.
Our wills are ours, we know not how;
Our wills are ours, to make them thine.


Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they.


We have but faith: we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see
And yet we trust it comes from thee,
A beam in darkness: let it grow.


Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before,


But vaster. We are fools and slight; 
We mock thee when we do not fear: 
But help thy foolish ones to bear;
Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light.


Forgive what seem'd my sin in me;
What seem'd my worth since I began;
For merit lives from man to man,
And not from man, O Lord, to thee.


Forgive my grief for one removed,
Thy creature, whom I found so fair.
I trust he lives in thee, and there
I find him worthier to be loved.



Forgive these wild and wandering cries,
Confusions of a wasted youth;
Forgive them where they fail in truth,
And in thy wisdom make me wise.