By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Dark House, by Which Once More I Stand’ is one canto (the seventh) from a much longer work of poetry, In Memoriam A. H. H. by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92). The poem shows Tennyson revisiting the home of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, whose untimely death in 1833 inspired the poem. Before we proceed to offer an analysis of this section of the poem, here’s a reminder of the ‘Dark house’ canto.
‘So careful of the type?’ A brief summary of Tennyson’s In Memoriam LVI
The so-called ‘dinosaur cantos’ or ‘dinosaur sections’ from Alfred, Lord Tennyson‘s long poem In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850) are among the most popular cantos from this elegy for Tennyson’s friend, Arthur Hallam, who had died suddenly in 1833. Hallam’s death had a profound effect on the young Tennyson, and close contextual analysis shows that many of his most celebrated poems were inspired, whether directly or indirectly, by this early tragedy. The stanzas below, comprising Canto LVI of In Memoriam, meditate on Tennyson’s personal loss by reflecting on the meaning and impact of the scientific discoveries of the day, and feature his famous description of Nature as ‘red in tooth and claw’: