Alfred Lord Tennyson Five Stages Of Grief

An epic struggle between God and nature takes place within Alfred Lord Tennyson’s mind in his elegy, In Memoriam A.H.H.. Tennyson brings to life his own world of grief and suffering in a quest to discern man’s purpose on earth. He draws on his own experiences and knowledge of the natural world to challenge his personal beliefs on both God and nature.
Tennyson wrote In Memoriam A.H.H. following the death of his close friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. Devastated by the abrupt loss of life, he began to doubt many of his prior convictions and beliefs, using writing as a tool to attempt at making peace with this tragedy. It is a piece filled with Tennyson’s sadness and pain from the loss of his friend. Through the elegy, we are able to see the five stages of grief as defined by the Kubler-Ross model: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. In Memoriam A.H.H. takes us on a journey through Tennyson’s grieving process as a war between God and nature wages in the background. In the beginning, Tennyson pleads with God and shows his denial at what he believed was …show more content…
His friend’s sudden death causes him to doubt God. Tennyson tries to deny the reality that he feels life is meaningless if we all die in the end. He tries to convince himself that God would not just “leave us in the dust”. The last two lines even reference his prior beliefs saying “he was not made to die” and that “thou hast made him: thou art just”. It is as if Tennyson is trying to make himself believe that the lines he wrote here held true. Our experiences in life are all that we know. They define and shape us. None of us think that our purpose on this earth is to exist, procreate, then die. We believe in relationships, connections, and evoking emotions in other human beings. Tennyson is questioning the purpose of life as he feels that the death of his friend made all the relationships he had formed during his life