The Principle of Analgoy and the Immortality Question in Tennyson's In Memoriam

Abstract

since metaphor and simile are special kinds of analogies, there is a sense in which all poetry, at its very roots, exemplifies analogical thinking. Beyond this, however, some poets show a special predisposition toward the imaginative exploration of analogies. Tennyson is one of these. Speaking in the context of intellectual history, one might remark that Tennyson's mind, while thoroughly absorbing the dominant nineteenth-century paradigm of Reality-as-Process, also seems to have retained the analogical way of apprehending truth so characteristic of the Medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment outlooks. All of Tennyson's more philosophical poems reveal the importance which analogy had in his serious speculative efforts, and In Memoriam, his masterpiece in this class of poetry, is particularly saturated with the analogical mode of thinking and feeling. I should like to suggest some of the disparate levels of the poem at which the principle of analogy is vital.