However, this apparent retention of faith seems to suddenly be dashed to pieces when he immediately changes tack and despairs that
"Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall."
This stanza gives the impression that the beginning of the canto was a mockery of a foolish and dead belief system. The use of 'behold' gives the sense that he suddenly realizes the folly of Christianity and that we really have no idea whether there can be a God, or even if good inherently prevails over evil. It's as if he is pulling a cloth from our eyes that had been blinding humanity to reality. This reflection of whether God can exist proves to be a central question of the entire poem. He endsthe section by questioning who he really is.
"... but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
And infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry."
This essentially says that the reality mankind needs to face is that there is no real reason for anything, but that we are miniscule and helpless creatures that have no real way of defending our faith. He sees no way to justify his belief in God and feels helpless because of it. He wants to just be able to believe and trust in God and the power of good without having to prove it, but cannot seem to find a way to do so.
The contemplation of this conflict continues immediately in the next canto. Tennyson opens it with a rhetorical question asking if our belief in an afterlife, or in this case Heaven, is based on the belief in God that we feel within our souls. It is not something that has been proven to us to cause the belief, but something that each Christian feels within his or her own self. This provides a small sense of justification for faith. It doesn't necessarily have to be proven, because it is something each person has to feel for his or herself. Each individual has a slightly different type of faith and each sees God slightly differently. Therefore that there cannot realistically be something that categorically proves he exists. The next step is a simple question.
"Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?"
Tennyson rationalizes that if God is something we feel within ourselves, then he cannot be in conflict with Nature. If God did not exist, or was not all-powerful, then why would nature evolve humans with the capacity to believe that God did exist? Perhaps Nature has some inherent ill will toward us that it gives us false dreams and hopes with no discernable purpose. If a God did exist, why would we turn and try to deny him? If God does not exist, then there would be no way for Nature to have such a will and therefore no reason for these "evil dreams."
Tennyson also makes specific effort here to capitalize the word "Nature," as he does on the multiple occasions where he personifies it. Generally only names are capitalized within a sentence. In this case, Tennyson makes sure to capitalize both "God" and "Nature," putting them on an equal footing. Since normally only "God" would be capitalized here, this shows how Tennyson has raised up Nature to the level of a deity. Though this is may seem an irrelevant detail, perhaps he is suggesting here that God and Nature are not at strife, but are, in fact, one and the same. This seems to be another tentative insertion of a tendril of his remaining faith.
It appears this is not so, though, when looking at the next two lines of the stanza where he states of nature:
"So careful of the type she seems,
so careless of the single life."
This is almost a direct contradiction of Matthew 10: 29-30, which says that
"Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered."
If the Bible is correct, then God sees even the tiniest things, and cares for everything, down to the hairs on our heads. He must then be a loving God indeed, as the Victorians were taught. However, if nature does only care for the mass survival of a species, and not for the individual, then it cannot be a creation of a loving God. Therefore He must be as cruel as nature itself. To the Victorians, this would shatter their perception of God. Tennyson recognizes all this, but still clings to hope, as he says in the third and fourth stanzas.
"I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world's altar-stairs
That slope thro' darkness up to God,
I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope." (Canto 55, 13-20)
As the poem moves into section 55, Tennyson's faith has gone from trust to something much weaker. No longer able to trust implicitly and blindly in God, Tennyson now must
"Wish...that of the living whole
No life may fail beyond the grave".
Faced with mounting evidence telling him his faith is baseless, the poet now wishes that there is life beyond death, and that there is a Heaven. The path to God has become dark; Tennyson cannot see Him or the way to get to Him. God, who is represented as a deity of light, has become enveloped in darkness. God is no longer a beacon of hope to the Victorians, but an unknowable void. Now Tennyson feels that the only action he can perform in the darkness is to
"stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff”.
His faith is lame, unhealthy, and he blindly gropes without the light of God to show him what he reaches for. All that he gathers is "dust and chaff", the worthless remains of dead creatures, that cannot help him in his journey into the darkness. Tennyson can only gather to himself the very substance he is afraid humanity will become. All that is left for him to study in the darkness is evidence that frightens him. The poet, and the people, calls
“To what [they] feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope".
In the darkness, the Victorians cry out to God, not because they know He exists, but because they hope and feel He exists. Their belief, Tennyson's belief, is not based on fact or even faith anymore, but only a feeling. This feeling, this trust he has in a Heaven, a reward for earthly suffering, is faint, barely felt. His faith has no strength, no vitality, and it is not growing. Tennyson's trust is very close to dead because he can no longer see God working in the world and can barely manage to hope that he will see Him after death.
In the prologue section,Tennyson's hope in God or an afterlife has completely fallen apart. When he cries,
Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
It has become apparent to him that life on Earth is useless; there is nothing to hope for after death. The only point to his living is to prolong a miserable species, and even the chance to do that is not assured since the law of Nature is eat or be eaten. In desperation, Tennyson cries out to his deceased friend Arthur Hallam "to soothe and bless" his distraught mind. The poet has completely abandoned his trust in God to answer his prayers and is seeking hope in another source. Hallam had been a mentor to the author in life, a man of great intelligence and profound thoughts. Once again, Tennyson turns to him for an answer. Tennyson wants to know that there is indeed a God waiting to receive him, that his faithful life has not been in vain. Alas, there is no "hope of answer, or redress” for Hallam is "behind the veil" of death. In the temple of God there was a veil from behind which God would speak to the priests. At the moment of Jesus's death, that veil was ripped in half and God's voice came from behind it no more. If the soul and voice of Hallam exist at all anymore, Tennyson cannot know. Hallam is behind that veil and from there he cannot speak to the living. The lines of communication that Tennyson and his fellow Victorians felt they once had to the other side are broken down. Hallam can no more easily give Tennyson an answer than God can, now that the poet has no faith.
The Victorian Age, as reported by Tennyson in "‘In Memoriam’", was a turbulent time during which many old institutions were damaged irrevocably; a number of religious beliefs were challenged and discarded as baseless. Some Victorian citizens, including Tennyson, were able to reconcile what they had learned of the physical world with what they believed of the spiritual realm. In later sections of the poem, the poet comes to a sense of peace within his heart and mind. However, in sections 54, 55, and 56, the author is in the grip of a soul-deep dilemma. His faith steadily degrades from a blind, forced belief to utter hopelessness after careful consideration of evidence he cannot deny. He is wounded by God's apparent betrayal of humanity and desperate for an answer, but there is none forthcoming. It took years for the wounds inflicted by science on the faithful to heal. Some Victorians chose agnosticism as their new philosophy of God; if someone could prove to them His Existence, then they would believe. Others chose to become atheists. Atheism stated that there was no God, no afterlife, and no divine creator. While neither of these theologies was very popular during the Victorian period, they have continued to exist. The citizens like Tennyson who attempted to reconcile their old faith with their new knowledge had to find ways to blend the two together, to show that it was possible for God to work through Nature to achieve His ends. They had to gather together the dust of Earth, and with it shape a Heaven.
Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ contains many theological elements debating the confusion between science and religion. The striking theology in the poem makes it different from the other contemporary Victorian poems.