legaic form requires some resolution of the mourner's grief and some sort of effective closure to the poem. T. employs many forms of resolution, including the mystical experience of 95 and his play on notions of typology. His means of closure are equally novel, for T. employs a device of comedy and the novel — a mariage, specifically that of his sister Cecilia to his friend Edmund Lushington, later Dean of Westminster, which took place on 10 October 1842. Lushington's reminiscences, which Hallam Tennyson includes in the Memoirs, relate that "during the hottest part of the summer (1845)," Lushington visited the poet at Eastbourne: "He had then completed many of the cantos in In Memoriam... He said to me, `I have brought in your marriage at the end of 'In Memoriam,' and then showed me those poems of 'In Memoriam' which were finished and which were a perfectly novel surprise to me" (Memoirs 1:203).
Last modified 20 February 2010