"Eternal honour to his name": Tennyson's Ode on the death of the Duke of Wellington and Victorian Memorial Aesthetics.

The death of the Duke of Wellington stamped itself on the national consciousness of nineteenth-century Britain. Wellington and Nelson were the "heroes of the age" but it was Wellington who survied into peacetime, proving himself as "the greatest single argument for Victorian hero worship" "the greatest single argument for Victorian hero worship" (Houghton 309). In mourning for Wellington, the people of Britain had the opportunity to act out their emergent national and cultural identity. Wellington's death provided an occasion for Victoria's nation to describe itself. He was "one of the established institutions of the country ... as little to be questioned as the existence of St. James's Palace or the action of parliament" (The Spectator 18/9/1852), and so to memorialize "England's Duke" was to memorialize the Duke's England. And yet, burdened by an awareness of its own modernity, this Great Exhibition of Grief could never do its subject justice. As one journalist wrote in The Spectator "you might as well (to use the phrase in no irreverent sense) seek a biography of gunpowder or of steam, as of that strong-willed English sense of duty which the Duke impersonated among public men" (Ibid). The feeling that an occasion so momentous could only be trivialized by public ceremony was strengthened by the Duke's own reputation as a man of silence and of action, who "hated display of any kind" (Gentleman's Magazine Oct, 1852). For the two months that followed Wellington's death and culminated with his funeral, an apparently compulsive need to create and produce display through lavish ceremony, public art and pages upon pages of print was countered by a general sense of unease about the pomp and circumstance that were required to memorialize the great Duke.

The protracted debate surrounding the funeral procession and ceremony revolved around this conflict between distaste for lavish public spectacle and the impossibility of producing anything else. The funeral was a pageant of modern Englishness. From the parade of military strength that accompanied the coffin, to the gas lights that were used to illuminate St. Paul's and the mechanical pulley that was used to winch the coffin from the funeral car, to the multitude of people that swarmed into London on the railways to witness the procession, every detail of the event spoke of the new commercial and industrial Empire of which the Duke of Wellington had been a figurehead. The fact that the extensive preparations were barely finished on time and the modern technologies employed were not entirely successful--the funeral car was too heavy and broke down under its own weight, the pulleys used to winch the bier did not work smoothly and the light from the gas lamps was drowned out by the sunlight streaming through the windows of the cathedral--lent the occasion a clumsiness that only served to emphasise its modernity.

The modernity of the funeral provoked an uncomfortable response: "The few great ceremonials, whether local or national, still remaining among us hold there place as relics of the past, not to be lightly interfered with, or approved by, the spirit of our age" (Illustrated London News 25/9/1852). One of the event's more generous reviewers, while acknowledging the need for such magnificence, expresses unease about the overt materialism:

   We could not have been content with less than the performance
   of such a tribute, and yet while it was in progress
   we felt it was too much ... That it was an
   impressive pageant--that it did express a great national
   idea--that it spoke eloquently the national sentiment in
   regard to the national man, we all admit; and yet there is
   a feeling, that the spontaneity, the completeness, the genuineness
   of the manifestation are abated by the sight of
   the machinery. It was the real thing, but made to wear
   the aspect of a getting-up. Enthusiasm wearied itself with
   its own appliances. The sentiment was overlaid by the
   timber, the estimates and the plans; the thing was done so
   handsomely that the material was in excess of the
   spiritual. (The Spectator 20/11/1852)

The reviewer for The Examiner found the ceremony to be a distraction from the serious business of remembrance:

   Reverent thoughts of the dead were in all minds; but
   necessarily overlaid by thoughts obtruded by the
   pageantry, they were drawn away from the coffin and
   passed to the "funeral car drawn by twelve horses,
   decorated with trophies and heraldic achievements"
   (20/11/1852)

And a particularly critical letter to the editor of The Spectator, entitled "Funereal and Memorial Aesthetics," describes the "whole proceedings" as "vulgar, overcharged and unnatural" and sees the Duke's funeral as representative of much that was wrong with the England of the day:

   Though Englishmen possess sensibility they suppress it.
   ... They are so very practical that they take more interest
   in the sign than in the signified. By velvet at twelve
   shillings a yard, and gilding laid on without stint, they
   express the measure of difference between a hero and a
   common man. (20/11/1852)

Each writer suggests that the measure of a hero cannot be found on the rich surfaces of fine ceremony, that it is a thing of depth, beyond the "double gilt, illuminated embroidered and embossed" material language of greatness.

Permanent public memorials to the Duke, were received with a similar scepticism. Two statues had been erected in honor of Wellington while he was still alive: the eighteen foot high naked Achilles, subscribed for and erected to Wellington and his brave companions in arms by their countrywomen had caused a certain amount of laughter. (1) Matthew Cotes Wyatt's bronze statue of the Duke was so unpopular that it was moved from its original site in Hyde Park to Aldershot after his death. In spite of a general feeling that "Colossal statues have rarely produced happy works of art" (Spectator 25/20/1852). 23,000 [pounds sterling], left over from the 100,000 [pounds sterling] set aside for the cost of the funeral, was used to pay for a national memorial and numerous provincial statues were erected throughout the country.

All of this commentary and criticsm was recorded in the national press. (2) Every day for the two months between the Duke's death and his funeral newspapers published articles about his life, his career and meticulous and endlessly revised accounts of his final hours, until the writing became its own self-perpetuating subject. The press had a strong sense of its role in transforming Wellington into a national institution:

   His attendance at the early service at the Chapel Royal
   and at the Whitehall sermons, his walk in the park in former
   years, and of late times his rides to the Horse Guards
   or the House of Lords, with his servants behind him, are
   incidents which every newspaper has long chronicled for
   the information of the country. (Gentleman's Magazine
   Oct. 1852)

Articles expressed a new confidence in the adequacy of the press to such an important occasion:

   The press of all parties, in paying tribute to departing
   greatness, has reviewed the career and the character of
   the Duke of Wellington with a fairness and a discrimination
   to which journalism would not have been equal some
   years before. (Spectator 18/9/1852)

But despite these claims, its extensive involvement might still be felt to be somehow inappropriate:

   It needs all the genuine respect for the memory of the
   Duke of Wellington to prevent the mass of writing, about
   the past, present and even future, which floods the
   journals, in respect to his career, his departure and his
   funeral, from degenerating into a nuisance; and there can
   be no doubt that it has already had an inevitable tendency
   in that direction. Every conceivable phase of his character,
   all the traits that marked and did not mark it, are
   reviewed, not as chance suggests, but systematically,
   from day to day. A "leading article" about Wellington
   blocks up one column in each morning journal, as a funeral
   shutter remains in the window of some West End
   shopkeeper every day. Society itself joins in the endless
   talk; seeming to feel that it is bound to show that it
   appreciates its loss, and forgetting that genuine feelings
   usually find their own utterance. (Ibid)

The author of this article, despite his opinion that "genuine respect" and "genuine feelings" are best expressed by not writing and not talking, is unable himself to remain silent. His own contribution to the mass of articles that he considers such a nuisance is just one more example of the dilemma of presentation occasioned by the death of the Duke of Wellington. Moved to use everything available to them in order adequately to respond to the demise of their national hero, the Victorians found that what the technology and culture of their age produced, these massive surfaces of material and print, offended their aesthetic sensibility. Their commitment to sincerity, depth and silence, inherited from previous generations was buried beneath modern surfaces, many of which were perpetuated by anxieties about their own value.

The death of the Duke of Wellington gave not just the nation, but its recently appointed laureate an opportunity to establish a new identity. Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, Tennyson's first separate publication since he had been appointed laureate in 1850, was not officially a laureate poem--Tennyson received no request from the Queen for its composition--but the connection between national hero and national poet was readily available to reviewers and journalists: "It is fitting" wrote a reviewer for The Times, "that the requiem for England's greatest warrior should be hymned by England's laureate." Hence Tennyson's poem was not only a memorial tribute to the Duke, but also the first monument to Tennyson's laureateship. Tennyson expressed something of this in a letter to his Aunt Russell, saying of the Ode: "I wrote it because it was expected of me to write."

The poem was very much a part of the funeral ceremony and the press response. Ten thousand copies were printed for sale on the day of the funeral and the tact that only 6,000 of these were bought can to some extent be explained by the fact that it was reproduced more or less in its entirety in The Times the previous day. Although the poem was by no means the critical disaster that Tennyson perceived it to be, it was not an unqualified success. Reviews of the poem express a disappointment and a discomfort very similar to that expressed about the funeral ceremony and press involvement. There is a sense of the potential that the occasion offers--"Of these themes, the ode before us has the most august that ever fell to the chance of poet laureate, one to have wakened emotion in the most humble of minstrels"--a feeling that Tennyson's poem only served to trivialize its occasion--"But Mr. Tennyson seems to have thought otherwise, and regarded the occasion as happily intended to illustrate how readily he could sport with a great subject and reduce its mightiness to the sing-song of indolent rhythm and familiar rhyme"--and that the strained dignity of the poem was incongruous with the hero it celebrated: "Most inappropriate alas! Is this mode of treatment to the topic; for the 'Great Duke' whom he commemorates was the most unaffected of men; and this self-same method is, of all the methods of verse-writing, the most affected" (Illustrated London News 27/11/1852). The only defense is that it is at least in keeping with the elaborate funeral ceremony: "Grand and solemn to the occasion is the poet's simple strain of music that accompanies the funeral pageant to St. Paul's" (Examiner 20/11/1852).

Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington might also be criticized for its lack of difference from the funeral ceremony and the media circus surrounding it. Even though the newspapers and journals made it part of the "Wellington Literature" that filled their pages by quoting it wholesale in their reviews, what they saw as its failure to stand apart from the mass of print became a subject of their criticism. The Weekly News and Chronicle could see little to separate the poem from "dozens of such lines" that had been received by the provincial newspapers over the past three months (20/11/1852) and The Leader (20/11/1852) expressed its disappointment that the only thing that caused this ode to "stand eminent" from the "articles and biographies, pamphlets and poems that crowd upon the inattentive public" was Tennyson's name at the bottom (20/11/1852). While feelings of unease about the magnificence of the funeral could be tempered by an understanding that nothing else and nothing less could be done, there was a more specific, more informed view that this was not the way one should do poetry.

The poem's failings were often put down to its being a piece of laureate verse, required by public events rather than inspired by Tennyson's own feelings of loss--"Wherefore did Alfred write this ode? Because he is Poet Laureate? Surely not because the [spirit] within goaded him with that poetic pain that insists on utterance" (The Leader 20/11/1852)--and the position of laureate was itself called into question: "Poets Laureate in these material times are veritable objects of pity. To dream dreams, to open cells of sweet sensibility--to order--is now a thing of terror to a man of poetic genius" (Weekly News and Chronicle 20/11/1852). This last remark is particularly interesting because it suggests that it is the materialism of the age that unfits it for poetry. Materialism, the word that defined Victorian modernity for this journalist, is placed in opposition to aesthetics. Patronage confounds poetic sensibility in the same way that the twelve shilling yards of velvet suppressed the sensibility of a nation at the Duke's funeral. Poetry of any worth cannot, therefore, be modern; it must rise above the times or stay behind them, confining itself to the margins in order to retain any worth.

Ironically, it seems to have been Tennyson's own In Memoriam that helped to create all the expectations that Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington disappointed. The reviewer for The Court Journal goes so far as to make a direct comparison:

   Alfred Tennyson, who, when really touched by grief,
   sobbed forth his soul in the touching In
   Memoriam--Alfred Tennyson, as we suppose feeling
   himself bound, as the public's pensioner, to pay his
   laudatory tribute to the memory of the public's idol, has
   written an ode which ... is very far inferior to anything
   that has yet fallen from his pen? (20/11/1852)

It is a comparison that is hard to ignore. In Memoriam and Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington were almost consecutive publications and both poems are written on the occasion of the death of a man named Arthur. This initial similarity makes differences between the poems all the more obvious. The first Arthur, too young to have achieved any public fame when he died, was Tennyson's close personal friend. The poem that mourned him was written and revised over the course of sixteen years and published anonymously with only Hallam's initials printed on the second title page. The second Arthur, living into old age to acquire unparalleled fame was no better known to Tennyson than he was to the public at large. Tennyson wrote his poem to this Arthur in just two months and the published edition bore the names and titles of both himself and the Duke. (3) It is this easy juxtaposition that informed the reception of Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington. Tennyson's own In Memoriam provided the most powerful precedent for modern elegy. In Memoriam not only represents the aesthetic from which Tennyson departed when he wrote his ode, it also exemplified and helped to form the public sensibility that was so offended by the whole memorial experiment instigated by Wellington's death: by the funeral, by the press accounts of the man and by Tennyson's own memorial ode. (4)

In a recent essay on the Victorian elegy Seamus Perry locates its emergence "at a specific, late-Romantic moment in history," a moment that was influenced by the inward turn towards the "particular 'I,'" towards uniqueness and sincerity, "so that the testing point for post-Romantic elegy is about the eloquence or the inwardness of poetic language: its public efficacy and address or its personal authenticity" (117-118). Naming Wordsworth as "the most important Romantic presence in Victorian elegy," Perry cites Wordsworth's "Essays on Epitaphs" in order to illustrate his argument. In these essays Wordsworth's emphasis is not on the meaning of the words that are carved on the tombstone, but on the "slow laborious work" to which the engraven letters "testify" and the unwritten feeling that lies within them, all the more sincere and powerful for its not being bodied forth in language:

   ... where the internal evidence proves that the writer
   was moved, in other words where the charm of sincerity
   lurks in the language of a tombstone and secretly pervades
   it, there are no errors in style or manner for which
   it will not be, in some degree, a recompense (345).

In Memoriam, with its fragmented collection of four-line stanzas, might be compared to a graveyard in which the few words on each tombstone are only markers for the body that is buried beneath it. To indicate the depth and sincerity of his grief, the speaker constantly draws attention to the inadequacy of words fully to express it: he is no more articulate than "an infant crying in the night," his "large grief" is "given in outline and no more" (V, 9-12). The yew tree that marks out the poem's broken progress fascinates the mourner because he imagines that the roots from which its trunk and branches are "wrapped around the bones" of his friend (II, 4). But, even though it is in closer contact with Hallam than the stone that marks his grave, the mourner is frustrated by the tree's refusal to communicate what is going oil beneath it:

   And gazing on thee, sullen tree,
   Sick for thy stubborn hardihood,
   I seem to fail from out my blood
   And grow incorporate into thee. (II, 13-16)

He wonders that his own life, like that of the tree, can continue after Hallam's death, but, although on the surface his life and work may even signify the opposite of what they mean, they are valuable because their presence marks the loss that they grieve. In this sense, the lyrics that make up Tennyson's elegy are repeated inscriptions of its title: In Memoriam A. H. H. (5)

   In Wordsworth's third essay on epitaphs he writes:

   The most numerous class of sepulchral inscriptions do
   indeed record nothing more than the name of the buried
   person, but that he was born on one day and died on
   another ... a Tomb like this is a shrine to which the fancies
   of a scattered family may repair in pilgrimage; the
   thoughts of the individuals, without any communication
   with each other, must oftentimes meet here. Such a frail
   memorial then is not without its tendency to keep families
   together; it feeds also local attachment, which is the taproot
   of the tree of patriotism. (370)

We hear the echo of these ideas in Section 67 of In Memoriam:

   When on my bed the moonlight falls,
   I know that in thy place of rest
   By the broad water of the west,
   There comes a glory on the walls;

   Thy marble bright in dark appears,
   As slowly steals the the silvber flame
   Along the letters of thy name,
   And o'er the number of thy years. (LCVII, 1-8)

This imaginary pilgrimage to his friend's tomb occurs a number of times throughout In Memoriam. The anonymity of the poem's author and the fact that even the name of the person being mourned is reduced to its initials (the initials of an unknown youth) mean that it is a pilgrimage in which any of its readers may join. The initials can be appropriated by any mourner, since they function only as markings for the body beneath: the letters themselves can be substituted by any name, as long as it is that of a person who has been lost and for whom deep grief is felt. In this way, Tennyson manages to express a loss that is no less bitter for being common.

But this account of In Memoriam as epitaph can never do justice to such an intricate and lengthy poem. By making explicit the inarticulate depth of his feelings, Tennyson is free to write. Poetry is no more than a "sad mechanic exercise," so divorced from any real expression of grief that it serves as a distraction, numbing the pain that he cannot express. Safe in the knowledge that he can say nothing, Tennyson can say anything and he can do so as many times as he chooses. In so doing he amasses a weight of words that, of course, speaks volumes. Tennyson's compulsion to mark out his grief with poetry, like a prisoner marking out the days of his sentence on the prison wall, results in a rich and eloquent meditation on death informed by the religious, social and scientific debates of the time it was written. Thus, the sequence of voluble silences that make up Tennyson's epitaph, speak the grief of an age and a nation.

This is only one way of explaining the central paradox and great achievement of In Memoriam that has been addressed in some way by nearly every critic of the poem. Christopher Ricks describes it as "anonymous but confessional, private but naked" (221); David Shaw writes that, being "both introverted and intellectual" it successfully "transforms the official affirmations of his era into experienced truths"(141) and Alan Sinfield bases his reading of the poem around the figures of "The Linnet and the Artefact," arguing that Tennyson, builds a meaningful and powerful monument out of the unchecked outpourings of a genuine grief (17). But it was T. S. Eliot who first described this paradox in terms of depth and surface. In his essay on In Memoriam he writes:

   Tennyson's surface, his technical accomplishment, is
   intimate with his depths: that which we most quickly see
   about Tennyson is that which moves between the surface
   and the depths, that which is of slight importance. By
   looking innocently at the surface, we are now likely to
   come to the depths, to the abyss of sorrow. (6) (337)

In other words In Memoriam is a poem that effectively communicates the value of silence through its eloquence and of depth through its surfaces.

Many of these critics also argue that the reconciliation of the poem's paradoxical elements is achieved through its, somewhat circuitous, progress: that the movement of In Memoriam is upwards and outwards. Herbert F. Tucker provides the best description of this movement. He describes the poem as being at once private and public and argues that the poem works to reconcile the alienated, solipsistic mourner to society. This is not only a personal journey, it also travels forward from the moment in literary history described by Perry, building away from the Romantic traditions that form its foundations:

   The ennobling of In Memoriam, the calling of the "high
   muse" of Romanticism must draw on inward sources; yet
   the motive for this elevation is felt as a public duty to the
   poet's "brethren." The elegaic conventions of the poem
   will entail connecting the silent "deep self" to the self that
   speaks and reacts with the world ... and the rapprochment
   that the poem goes on to seek with the vanished
   presence of Hallam will be a massive figuration of the
   poet's own private brooding with public display. (389)

Tucker describes the process itself, the description of what a thing is through the narrative of what it was and what it has come to be, as "Bildungspoesie." This is as much part of Tennyson's Romantic inheritance as a belief in the incomprehensible depths of real feeling, but Temwson uses it to move away from that inheritance. By charting this movement as a self-conscious, doubtful and often guilty narrative, he is able to legitimize his arrival at the surface. Like the initials on a gravestone that gain strength and meaning from the life whose end they mark, In Memoriam draws much of its success from the traditions that its composition seeks to conclude.

Tucker also observes that this journey is somewhat contrived. The first verses of In Memoriam that Tennyson composed were not the ones in which the mourner appears farthest removed from society. His response to Hallam's death was initially social, the sections that reflect upon archetypal figures of mourning were among the first to be written, and it is from these that he withdrew "into a subjective realm of analysis and refinement," ending with a more powerful assertion of where he had begun. (7) The abba stanza form reflects this contrivance, retreating inwards from a first line that is then re-established, strengthened by the two lines which have intervened, in line four. The process that Tennyson describes might then be understood as being played out for the benefit of a late-Romantic readership more than working through his own grief in verse. This is not to say that Tennyson's grief at the loss of his friend was not immense, only that it was ineffable, so utterly beyond words, that a surface response was as accurate as any other and was perhaps more honest, in that it made no attempt to reach the feelings that words could not hope to fathom. It is this surface response, which Tennyson takes up in his composition of Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, that I am suggesting corresponds to the material surfaces of the funeral ceremony, the empty signification that was seen in both cases to be so reprehensibly modern.

Reviewers who found themselves disappointed by Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington in spite of an admiration of Tennyson's work in general, often excused this new poem on the grounds that its author had not had enough time adequately to develop and reflect upon the national sense of bereavement. The review in The Leader ends by saying: "Tennyson is said to compose with great slowness and as this ode must have been written hastily, it may have that extenuation" (20/11/1853), and The Illustrated London News concludes that:

   The subject must, it is clear, await Mr Tennyson's better
   mood; must become, perhaps idealized by distance of
   time, and then we doubt not that we shall have a fine
   poem from his pen ... not hurried by the pressure of circumstances,
   but a free offering from the soul of the poet.
   (27/11/1852)

Their suggestion that, over time, Tennyson might present a more satisfactory offering from his soul offers guidelines for the composition of another In Memoriam. To a very limited extent, the predictions of these reviewers were fulfilled. A revised edition of the poem was published the following year and more changes were made to it before its inclusion in Maud and Other Poems in 1855. Tennyson's revisions of Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington have been examined in two articles by Edgar F. Shannon and Christopher Ricks, who observe that some of the alterations make for a poem that is more feeling and less formal. However, they also point out that these changes were made largely in response to the criticism that Tennyson received from the reviews. Ironically, it was in responding to the demands of his late-Romantic readership for spontaneity that Tennyson was writing to order, the very practice that so many of the reviewers had identified as the cause of the poem's failure. But no amount of revision could have transformed the Ode into a poem that could be enjoyed by the tastes In Mentoriam had created.

Tennyson's very first response to the problem of commemorating Wellington is Wordsworthian in every sense. In March 1851, eighteen months before the death of Arthur Wellesley, Tennyson wrote the following letter to Thomas Woolner:

   My dear Woolner,
   I had rather let Dr Davy have his own way but since he
   and you require an opinion, look here is an epitaph on the
   Duke of Wellington.

   To the memory
   Of the Duke of
   Wellington

   Who by singular calling and through the special foresight
   of Almighty God was [raised] up to be the safeguard of
   the greatest people of the world--who possessing the
   greatest military genius which the world etc. Won the
   battle of Waterloo etc etc etc--who was equally great in
   statesmanship as he was in etc. Now look here, do not
   the very words Duke of Wellington involve all this?
   Is Wordsworth a great poet? Well then, don't let us talk
   of him as if he were half known

   To the memory of
   William Wordsworth
   The Great Poet

   Even that seems too much but certainly is much better
   than the other, far nobler in its simplicity. (Leuers 2:10)

By using the name of the former laureate further to illustrate his point, Tennyson suggests a relationship between the name and fame of military leaders and of poets so that, even in this private letter, concerns about his own posterity are bound up with the Duke's memorial. But his invocation of Wordsworth as part of a discussion about epitaphs also recalls Wordsworth's own comments on epitaphs that commemorate greatness:

   The mighty benefactors of mankind, as they are not only
   known by their immediate survivors, but will continue to
   be known familiarly to latest posterity, do not stand in
   need of biographic sketches, in such a place; nor deliniations
   of character to individualise them. This is already
   done by their works, in the memories of men. Their
   naked names, and a grand comprehension of civic
   gratitude ...--these are the only tribute that can here be
   paid--the only offering that upon such an altar would not
   be unworthy. (336)

Tennyson's letter echoes these remarks. The impatient 'etceteras' that punctuate his imaginary epitaph stand in for facts and forms so familiar that they need not be spelled out and anticipate his final proposal that the Duke's name alone would make the best epitaph. The ability of the name to speak for itself is testament to its greatness and Tennyson suggests that allowing it to do so is the only way to give a man such as the Duke of Wellington the honor he deserves.

Such thoughts seem in keeping with In Memoriam but wholly incongruous with Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, a poem that does such wordy honour to the Duke's name. The fact that Tennyson expressed these ideas in private and then went on to compose his ode a year later is a contradiction that attests not just to his own unease but to the general unease of a nation compelled by the death of their hero to confront a modernity that offended its late-Romantic way of seeing. Tennyson's letter to Woolner places the poet amongst his readership. Like them, his tastes and ways of understanding were to a large extent defined by the Wordsworthian memorial aesthetic of In Memoriam and, like them, his sense of "duty" forced him into a poetic experiment that went against the grain. Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, then, should not only be read as characteristic of Victorian modernity, a poetic representation of "these material times," but also as a poem painfully aware of its newness, embarrassed by, and with little confidence in, its maginificent surfaces. (8)

Far from the modern development that I have been describing, Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington seems to be an anachronism that does not fit into literary histories of the elegy or the ode, a step backwards rather than forwards. Jahan Ramazani, in the introduction to his study of the modern elegy, uses Tennyson's ode, the epitome of a traditional elegy, as a point of comparison with the modern works that he is introducing and then goes on to name In Memoriam as the first modern elegy, ignoring the fact that this "modern" poem preceded its "traditional" counterpart (210). Critics who have charted the history of the ode tend to locate the culmination of its development in the early nine-teenth century with Keats and Shelley. Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington serves tufty as a postscript: it was a "return to the metrical exemplars of antiquity," a symptom of the intellectual drift of his later poetry towards conservatism (Shuster 279). Paul Fry ignores the poem completely. He makes brief mention of Tennyson's early "apprentice work" before moving straight over to Swinbume. Fry understands that "to write an ode is to honor the company of fools: court hacks, windy curates, triflers with nature, versifiers on milady's fan--laureates.... The very word 'ode' has been enough to call down journalistic ridicule from antiquity to the present (10). A poem composed in earnest by just one such laureate does not fit happily into his scheme of development which describes the history of the ode as a sequence of increasingly self-aware performances.

However, Fry describes the form itself in terms that can help to understand how Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington moves away from the illusory depths of In Memoriam and thus establishes its uneasy modernity. As the most formal, elevated and public poetry, the ode is poetry at its farthest remove from the possibility of natural language. He argues that it has therefore become "a form of ontological and vocational doubt," "a proving ground of presentation that boldly attempts to invoke the reality that it would be part of, knowing that, if it were part of that reality, there would be no need to call" (9). Written out of the full knowledge of the inevitable failure of its project, it does not dwell on its inadequacies in an attempt to make up for them; instead it "writes itself hoarse," throwing itself into its doomed project with a masochistic poetic honesty. The superficiality of this formal anachronism enables it to be rewritten and reread as modern in a Victorian context, appropriate, if not appealing to a newly material nation. By composing Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, Tennyson takes the form to its farthest extreme, committing himself, without irony, to the surfaces of language that he knows to be inadequate.

Rather than leaving Wellington's name to speak for itself, the ode insistently speaks for the name. The poem may be entitled Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, but, after that title, the Duke's name is excluded from the poem. Tennyson prefers to talk about and around it. Wellington is the "Great Duke," the "last great Englishman," the "great world-victor's victor," "England's greatest son." These periphrastic expressions contrive repetitively to assert a greatness that they also imply goes without saying. Everything in the poem is brought back to the name, almost to the exclusion of the Duke himself. The thrice repeated refrain announces that the project of the ode and of the people for whom it would speak is to honor the name of their hero:

   A people's voice, when they rejoice
   At civic realm and pomp and game,
   Attest their great commander's claim
   With honour, honour, honour to him,
   Eternal honour to his name. (146-50)

Rather than admitting that language can barely scrape the surfaces of identity and loss by leaving the name, like an epitaph, as a marker for what the Duke was, Tennyson uses names that describe and explain. In so doing, he refuses to acknowledge the depths that separate his ode from what it represents. It does not keep a respectful and modest silence, nor does it verbalize silence with the anxiety-ridden language of In Memoriam. It is reduced instead to a rhetoric that is at once empty and insistent, a rhetoric of repetitions:

   With honour, honour, honour to him,
   Eternal honour to his name.

The result is a poem that strains under its own wordiness. Its compulsive and cumulative verbal over-reach works to create immense stretches of verse that draw attention to their own technicality rather than "the brilliance or profundity of their thought" (Pitt 191). Tennyson's reference to the funeral car, "bright ... with his blazoned deeds" (56) brings his own descriptions of the Duke's life and work to mind so that we can almost see his own poem blazoned across the pall. Even the simplest ideas are endlessly embroidered and elaborated upon. Each section is built around a single thought or statement that is clarified, drawn out, returned to and reiterated. In Section One this process occurs within a single sentence. The poem's opening exhortation: "Let us bury the Great Duke / With an empire's lamentation" is immediately repeated; but, as if the poet was not satisfied that he had used enough words, the "empire's lamentation" is rewritten as "the noise of the mourning of a mighty nation." This "rewrite" is nearly twice as long, the downbeats of "noise," "mourning," "mighty" and "nation" jolt the reader slowly along the line and the mirror symmetry of their initials (n, m, m, n.) draw attention to its wrought artifice. As the poem gains momentum its self-perpetuating sentences, intent on imitating the length of the funeral procession, become longer. Another clause is added and then another; and each compulsive addition is openly displayed to the reader through the use of conjunctions that naively reveal how one clause is simply tacked onto the next, drawing attention to the poet's need always to say just one more thing:

   Let the long long procession go,
   And let the sorrowing crowd about it grow,

   And let the mournful martial music blow;
   The last great Englishman is low. (15-18)

Tennyson sees Wellington's death was the end of an era. As the "last great Englishman" Wellington takes with him a time that cannot be retrieved, but he also leaves behind a legacy that it is the nation's duty to sustain. This theme is strongest in the 1852 version of the poem; Section Four begins:

   Mourn for to us he seems the last,
   Our sorrow draws but on the golden Past.

In the 1853 version the second line was changed to: "Remembering all his greatness in the Past," so that the absolute split of then and now occasioned by the Duke's death is exchanged for the departed greatness of a single man. The less moderate first version gives greater purpose to the lengthy descriptions of Wellington that follow. The remainder of Section Four draws on journalistic sketches of his character. Wellington was "moderate, resolute" (25), "greatest yet with least pretence" (29), "Rich in saving common sense/And, as the greatest only are,/In his simplicity sublime" (32-4). The reviewers need not have pointed out the disparity between Wellington's character and Tennyson's poetic, as the laureate seems intent on doing it for them. With this remarkably elaborate tribute to simplicity, Tennyson acknowledges the need to move forward, away from a past that, though golden, is nevertheless over, and into the modern present that remains.

Wellington's voice, now silent, is employed by Tennyson as symbol of the late lamented national character. The Duke's language was the deep, wordless language of canon-fire:

   And the volleying canon thunder his loss;
   He knew their voices of old.
   For many a time in many a clime
   His captain's-ear had heard them boom
   Bellowing victory, bellowing doom:
   When he with those deep voices wrought,
   Guarding realms and kings from shame;
   With those deep voices our dead captain taught
   The tyrant, and asserts his claim
   In that dread sound to the great name (63-71)

But, however powerful, it will be heard no more: "0 friends our chief state-oracle is mute" (23), "His voice is silent in your council-hall / For ever" (174-5). A different voice, however imperfect, must now be used, to do honour to the name. Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington attempts to find that voice and speak with it:

   A people's voice! we are a people yet.
   Though all men else their nobler dreams forget,
   Confused by brainless mobs and lawless Powers;
   We have a voice, with which to pay the debt
   Of boundless love and reverence and regret. (151-5)

But the poem is uneasy about its own procedures. In Section Five, a single line thrice repeated, "Let the bell be tolled," briefly interrupts the momentum of ode and funeral procession as they roll towards St Paul's. The invocation of this wordless sound, the tolling bell, betrays a conviction that the proper indication of the sincerity of grief is the inarticulacy that lies buried beneath this poem's persistent articulations. (9)

In Section Nine the poem enjoins silence:

   Peace, his triumph will be sung
   By some yet unmoulded tongue
   Far on in summers that we shall not see:
   Peace, it is a day of pain
   For one about whose patriarchal knee
   Late the little children eking:
   O peace.... (232-238)

As he draws his ode to a close, Tennyson offers consolation to the mourners, but his call upon them to be at peace can also be read as a request, made to himself as much as to them, to be quiet. The ode seems to split into two voices, one asking for peace, the other unable to stop talking. By this stage the second voice has gained too much momentum to be held to a dignified silence and it moves on to a beautiful profession of faith before it is asked once again to "Hush" as the Duke is committed to the ground. Tennyson is unable to brazen out this moment with words. At the point towards which this whole poem has been moving, his ode recognizes its own inappropriateness and, in the few lines that follow the burial, reach its oddly muted conclusion. It will "speak no more of his renown" and concludes instead with a quiet prayer: "God accept him, Christ receive him" (281). Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, then, was not the complete departure from In Memoriam that the reviews understood it to be; rather it expands upon the surfaces that In Memoriam ventures towards, immersing itself in the material world to which Hallam's mourner is finally reconciled. The self-doubt that runs through Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, its embarrassment about its own public magnificence results in the poem being a rather fine poetic failure. Tennyson's lack of confidence in these great surfaces of language that he has created lends them the fragility of a nation and a poet reaching maturity. In the end, Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington can never be uncoupled from anxieties surrounding the emergent modernity of Victorian Britain. And these are anxieties that persist. A poetic that so perfectly reflects the age in which it is written is distasteful even now and the embarrassment with which Tennyson's ode resonates is our own. Not yet reconciled to an aesthetic made up of the material surfaces of modern culture and still enamored with illusions of depth, we are more likely to regard Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington as an historical document than a poem: an artifact that confers honour on the name of its subject rather than a work of art that honours the name of the poet.

(1) Benedict Read uses memorial statues of the Duke of Wellington to illustrate the difficulties surrounding public sculpture during the Victorian Period and there are parallels to be drawn between this art form and Tennyson's laureate verse. Read writes that although "as a form of patronage, the public memorial could bring consistently to the sculptor both prestige and success," the artistic integrity of the sculptor was seen to be compromised by the patron and commissioned sculptures suffered strong criticism from the likes of Arnold and F. T. Palgrave. He also comments on the difficulty of memorializing modern subjects as works of art. which, for Victorian sculptors, manifested itself in the question of how to clothe their subjects. The "tight trousers" of contemporary dress were seen as unsuitable costume for sculptures and contemporary subjects were often presented in classical dress. This is an example of a nineteenth-century squeemishness about its own modern aesthetic that Tennyson had to confront in his composition of his memorial verse. His decision to write a classical ode on a modern subject might be understood as analogous to those sculptors such as Gibson. whose statue of Peel of 1852, is dressed in a toga.

(2) Peter W. Sinnema provides a case study of the ways The Illustrated London News' reported the death and funeral of the Duke of Wellington in the final chapter of Dynamics of the Pictured Page: Representing the Nation in the Illustrated London News. He describes its coverage as "sincere but opportunistic" (182). His observation that the pictures of the funeral procession "withhold a glimpse of the funeral car" (195) is particularly pertinent to this discussion because it implies that "the dead hero functions as an alibi for something else," (195) for a celebration of the modernity that enveloped it.

(3) "Tennyson's Arthurian psychodrama" by Cecil Y. Lang makes a comparison between these two Arthurs and the Arthur of Idylls of the King.

(4) In her recent article "Burying the Great Duke: Victorian Mourning and the Funeral of the Duke of Wellington." Cornelia D. J. Paersall examines I Duke's funeral and Tennyson's ode as examples of Victorian cultu anxiety about death and mourning. Her argument focuses on the two-month delay between Wellington's death and burial and describes an unwillingness to commit the dead body to the earth. The pageant and public spectacle, she argues, was a way of keeping him part "of the civic landscape," rescuing it from "the yearning, defiled interior." My argument, which covers the same ground as Pearsall's article would place greater emphasis on on the anxieties about the civic landscape itself, and understand the Duke's death as an unprecedented occasion for the presentation of that landscape, uncomfortably new to the eyes of nineteenth-century Britain.

(5) This reading resonates with Isobel Armstrong's discussion of graffiti in The Radical Aesthetic. She writes that graffiti does "not have the deciferability of writing. The many sets of initials tell you only that these are initials, just as the dominance of pseudo-words--KOF, UURZ--tells you that you cannot read them.... These are anti-words ... [they] constitute an aggressive barrier to reading" (152).

(6) Ideas about surface and depth also form part of Eric Griffiths' discussion of In Memoriam and Maud (97-170).

(7) Without this contrivance the social, or surface poetic is unpalatable even to critics today. I imagine that David Shaw speaks for many readers when he asserts that the Prelude to In Memoriam does not work because private truths are too quickly and too easily bodied forth as public sentiment.

(8) Valerie Pitt is the only critic I have come across who recognizes Tennyson's laureate verse as trying out a new poetic. She argues that "Tennyson's major problem ... was that, although there was a body of common sentiment, there was no available poetic with which to express it.... Tennyson's laureate verse is not. then, the verse of a complacent poet working in outworn conventions, but the vigorous creation of new forms for a new national consciousness" (195).

(9) An addition made to the 1855 version of the Ode is worth noting. Between the lines "Let the bell be tolled" and "And the sound of the sorrowing anthem rolled," Tennyson inserted "And a deeper knell in the heart be knolled. This additional line, which gestures towards depths that the poem does not otherwise attempt to fathom, is a capitulation to the critics: a return to the self-conscious poetic of In Memoriam.

Works Cited

Armstrong, Isobel. The Radical Aesthetic. Blackwell, 2000. Court Journal. November 20, 1852.

Eliot, T. S. "In Memoriam," in Selected Essays. London: Faber & Faber, 1951.

The Eraminer. November 20, 1852.

Fry, Paul H. The Poet's Calling and the English Ode. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1980.

The Gentleman's Magazine. October, 1852.

Griffiths, Eric. The Printed Voice in Victorian Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon. 1989.

Houghton, Walter. The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830-1870. New Haven: Yale UP, 1957.

Illustrated London News. November 25, 1852.

--. November 27, 1852.

Lang, Cecil Y. "Tennyson's Arthurian Psychodrama." Lincoln: The Tennyson Society, 1983.

The Leader. November 20, 1852.

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Pearsall, Cornelia D. J. "Burying the Great Duke: Victorian Mourning and the Funeral of the Duke of Wellington." Victorian Literature and Culture 27:2 (1999): 265-93.

Perry, Seamus. "Elegy," in A Companion to Victorian Poetry and Poetics. Eds. Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman and Antony S. Harrison. Oxford: Blackwells, 2002.

Pitt, Valerie. Tennyson Laureate. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962. Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heany. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.

Read, Benedict. Victorian Sculpture. New Haven & London: Yale UP, 1983: 85.

Ricks, Christopher. Tennyson. New York & London: Macmillan, 1972.

Shannon, Edgar F. "The History of a Poem: Tennyson's Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington." Studies in Bibliography (1960): 149-77.

--and Christopher Ricks. "A Further History of Tennyson's Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington. The Manuscript and the Galley Proofs at Lincoln." Studies in Bibliography (1979): 125-57.

Shaw, W. David. Tennyson's Style. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1976.

Shuster, George N. The English Ode from Milton to Keats. New York: Columbia UP, 1940.

Sinfield, Alan. The Language of Tennyson's In Memoriam. Blackwell, 1971.

Sinnema, Peter W. Dynamics of the Pictured Page: Representing the Nation in the Illustrated London News. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998.

The Spectator. September 18, 1852.

--. November 11, 1852.

Tennyson, Alfred Lord. The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson. 3 vols. Eds. Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon. Oxford: Clarendon, 1982-1990.

Tucker, Herbert F. Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.

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Wordsworth, William. Selected Prose. Ed. John O'Hayden. New York: Penguin, 1988.

Anna Jane Barton

University of Glasgow