I have been well-acquainted with grief. As a Shiʿi Muslim, it permeates my religious consciousness and finds expression through annual mourning rituals. I find nourishment in mourning: from a young age I have lent my ears to lamentations and shed tears for martyrs felled in far-off lands.
Recently though, grief, paid a more personal visit when news reached me of my grandmother’s passing. In response, I turned to my favourite poem, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H., which ranks among the most profound and poignant elegies ever penned, in any language.
Tennyson’s words are a balm for the soul, but some passages caught my eye for a different reason:
I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.
But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.
I was taken aback, for Tennyson’s words cast doubt on the effectiveness of poetry to deal with grief. It made me question whether the solace I sought in poetry was real, or merely a superficial remedy that lacked any substance. This spurred serious reflection on my part on the purpose of poetry in confronting grief, ably assisted by The Penguin Book of Elegy, which helped refine my thought process. I present some of these reflections below.
All poetry is, in a sense, elegiac, as it attempts to preserve or recall that which has been, or will be, devoured by death. In wrestling with death, poetry attempts to distil the panorama of human experience into words, though it will inevitably fall short in describing the emotions and experiences of the poet. Tennyson alluded to this in the above excerpt when he wrote that words “half conceal the Soul within”.
That is only half the picture, though, for Tennyson also conceded that words “half reveal”. It is in this tension that much of the beauty of poetry resides: it causes us to simultaneously hope and despair; urges us hold on and let go; and emboldens us to confront and flee from death. Poetry allows our hearts to hover in that mysterious realm that lies between life and death, to catch glimpses of our soul – for that part of us which yearns for something far greater than it. Words may not help us reach that which is beyond us, but they do help to reignite within us the innate desire to transcend ourselves.
There is also something to be said for the role of poetry in transforming mourning from an individual into a communal experience. Poetry helps to unearth grief from one heart and plant it within the hearts of others; an individual pain is transformed into a shared sorrow. Words alone may not heal wounds, but I have found throughout my life that grief is easier to digest when it is shared.
Tennyson’s own poem is proof of this: millions of readers have resonated with his words and perhaps found a degree of comfort and consolation that escaped Tennyson himself. A lone, pained voice of grief can feel meek before the shadow of death, but a symphony of sorrow orchestrated by hearts in sync can help soothe the grief.
Some may read this and think I’ve overstated the significance of poetry in dealing with grief. This may be true, but I think we often fail to realise that words are magic: that with the assortment of letters cobbled together to form meaning, the emotions and thoughts that meander in our minds and hearts can flutter towards the minds and hearts of others.
When we grieve, we mourn the most precious things that we have lost. But poetry helps us to not only preserve them, but to transform them: in allowing loss to sing, that which we have lost becomes beautiful and sublime, alive in ways we can only half comprehend.
Ali Hammoud is a PhD candidate at Western Sydney University. He is broadly interested in Shīʿīsm and Islamicate intellectual history. More of his writings can be found on his Substack page
