Following the death of his great friend Arthur Henry Hallam in 1833, the poet Alfred Tennyson began writing In Memoriam AHH, perhaps the greatest elegy in the English language. It would take him 17 years of composing, writing and editing until he finally published it — anonymously — in 1850. While the long (2,916 lines of iambic tetrameter) poem is generally considered to be a literary achievement, it also gives us an insight into the growing conflict between Christianity and geology in the period just before publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859.
Tennyson and Hallam met in the spring of 1829 while they were both students at Oxford University, bonding over their love of religion, philosophy and poetry. They both entered the Chancellor’s Prize Poem Competition, which Tennyson won. That Christmas, Hallam visited Tennyson’s home in Lincolnshire, where he fell in love with — and subsequently became engaged to — Tennyson’s younger sister Emilia. Four years later, Hallam died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage in Vienna. He was 22.
The famous line, “Nature red in tooth and claw,” is found in Canto 56 of In Memoriam (the “dinosaur canto”), in which Tennyson tries to reconcile his Christian faith with new discoveries by geologists showing that the Earth had been around for very much longer than a literal interpretation of the Bible would suggest. In particular, Tennyson meditates on the fate of mankind (“Man, [Nature’s] last work, who seem’d so fair …”), seeing that the fossil record showed many earlier species had gone extinct, in particular newly discovered dinosaurs: “Dragons of the prime/ That tare each other in their slime ….” Was our species likewise doomed to extinction, with brutal Nature having the last word? (Note: “Ravine” is used here in its old sense of “prey.”)
Man…Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final lay—
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against the creed …
Nine years after publication of In Memoriam, Tennyson’s question — were we bound by the same laws as the rest of creation? — was definitively answered with the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (“Evolution’s Co-Discoverer,” Nov. 5, 2021). No longer could humans consider ourselves to be some separate and exalted class of beings en route to the Promised Land, but, in contrast to the Biblical story, just one of perhaps 10 million species alive today, all close or distant cousins.
As an aside, echoes of Tennyson’s grief at the death of his friend can be found in several other of his poems, particularly Ulysses, in which the long-lost hero of the Trojan War finally returns to his homeland of Ithaca, only to be bored beyond measure. Even though he is old (“this gray spirit”), Ulysses decides to set sail with his crew, “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” (Not that we’re told what, exactly, they were hoping to find.) Tennyson later wrote that Ulysses was “more written with the feeling of [Hallam’s] loss upon me than many poems.”
Ironically, when Tennyson died in 1892, “Darwin’s Bulldog” T.H. Huxley, a man whose anti-Biblical views would have once been anathema to the poet, led a series of glowing tributes in The Nineteenth Century magazine. Sort of like Richard Dawkins praising the Pope! •
Barry Evans (he/him, barryevans9yahoo.com) has a new Humboldt-themed substack: planethumboldt.substack.com.
This article appears in Youngest North Coast Condor Dies of Lead Poisoning.