In Memoriam, Section III [“O Sorrow, cruel fellowship”]

Directions: (1) Links on single words take the reader to documents containing lists of those and related words in other sections of the poem. (2) Links to phrases contain explanatory com- mentary, which, depending upon the length of the section, appears in the left-hand column or below the poem (3) Longer commentaries and discussion questions appear as separate linked documents.

Principal motifs: death, doubt, sorrow, nature, wasteland

Notes

“The stars,” she whispers: Ricks 866 compares this line to Shelley's "Adonais" 482, upon Love versus mortality: "Which through the web of being blindly wove." What does this allusion to one of the most famous traditional elegies in English do for In Memoriam?

hollow echo: In line 11 Ricks 866 finds an allusion to Spenser's "Shepherd's Calendar": August 160: "The hollow Echo of my carefull cryes." If In Memoriam works in so many ways against the pattern and intention of the traditional elegy, why does he allude to Spenser and (a few lines earlier) to Shelley?

O Sorrow, cruel fellowship,
O Priestess in the vaults of Death,
O sweet and bitter in a breath,
What whispers from thy lying lip?

"The stars," she whispers, "blindly run;
A web is wov'n across the sky;
From out waste places comes a cry,
And murmurs from the dying sun;

"And all the phantom, Nature, stands —
With all the music in her tone,
A hollow echo of my own, —
A hollow form with empty hande."

And shall I take a thing so blind,
Embrace her as my natural good;
Or crush her, like a vice of blood,
Upon the threshold of the mind?

Last modified 22 February 2010

III [“O Sorrow, cruel fellowship”]

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Notes