Example of Train of Thought Analysis of a Christmas Poem:
"In Memoriam A. H. H.: 78. Again at Christmas did we weave"
by Lord Alfred Tennyson
Again at Christmas did we weave
The holly round the Christmas hearth;
The silent snow possess'd the earth,
And calmly fell our Christmas-eve:
The yule-log sparkled keen with frost,
No wing of wind the region swept,
But over all things brooding slept
The quiet sense of something lost.
As in the winters left behind,
Again our ancient games had place,
The mimic picture's breathing grace,
And dance and song and hoodman-blind.
Who show'd a token of distress?
No single tear, no mark of pain:
O sorrow, then can sorrow wane?
O grief, can grief be changed to less?
O last regret, regret can die!
No--mixt with all this mystic frame,
Her deep relations are the same,
But with long use her tears are dry.
This title tells me that Tennyson is still remembering his good friend Arthur Henry Hallam who died while still young and for whom he wrote his famous In Memoriam poem. This seems to be a remembrance of him at Christmas. I wonder how long after he died Tennyson wrote it*.
The speaker is describing that "we" decorated the fire with holly, that snow is on the ground, and things are "calm."That sounds good, hope it stays that way, but could be a foreboding since it's so early in the poem.
The fire "sparkled" and there was no wind, which adds to the calm mood, but sparkle seems happy, and then there is "brooding" and sleeping and a feeling of loss. Here comes the remembrance.
Speaker remembers past winters and the "ancient games" which could be winter sports or indoor activities, who knows? Oh, the next lines sound like games although the "mimic picture" and "breathing grace" confuses me, unless it is like the tableaus presented in Jane Eyre where players present a scene and stand like statues until the other people guess what the scene represents, sort of like a cross between non-moving charades and Pictionary. Breathing grace could be being able to breathe even though you are statue-still. And the dead are statue-still but don't have the "grace" of breath! Other activities are the dance and song and blind man's bluff. The dead are also blind, but they can't dance or sing. Maybe the mix of the two represents the living and the dead.
Next stanza the speaker loses it and starts getting upset that no one was sad, and is sad himself that he still mourns his dead friend and wonders if his grief will ever diminish.
"O last regret, regret can die" seemed paradoxical on first reading, but now the speaker seems to be saying that he is sad that his grief will indeed grow less, the diminishing he seemed to be wishing for in the previous stanza. Looking back at that stanza, when he says that no one was sad, maybe he wasn't sad only because no one remembered but because our sorrow brought on by death does diminish and he doesn't want it to! So it is a paradox after all.
Then, the "No" that I didn't understand is another paradox. He is sorry that remembrance fades, but says it does and it doesn't when it is inside our hearts- "mixt with this mystic frame" that is the human body. "Her" refers to what? the human body or regret? Personification of regret would fit well here because it is human emotion he refers to. Then regret's "relations" could be her kin or fellow beings or friends, or her feelings, saying they are "the same" meaning still there, but it's been so long now that the speaker doesn't have to cry anymore.
Theme?: It is true that time lessens grief, but not completely, because we don't want to forget what we loved so much.
It just occurred to me that winter is appropriate for this remembrance because it connotes cold and death while the holly, the hearth, the sparkling log, and the games, dances,and songs bring a sense of life still existing in the "dead" of winter. This juxtaposition adds to the meaning of the poem because the speaker has a feeling for both death and life inside him, as do all humans.
* Hallam died in 1833. Tennyson wrote In Memoriam for years and finally published it in 1849. The number 78 in the title of this poem that I thought might be the year he wrote it is actually the verse number from In Memoriam. When I first saw this poem I thought it would be part of the longer poem, so I didn't consider giving it to the class to analyze. When I looked for a poem to analyze, I decided to check this one out, since Tennyson is my favorite poet, and it seemed to be complete in itself, so I used it.
