1. “Incorporate” Subjectivity

Tennyson insisted that the lyric “I” of In Memoriam shuttles fluidly between persons and species. In Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son, Hallam Tennyson recalls how his father described In Memoriam as “a poem, not an actual biography.” Hallam's memoir records Tennyson as having once stated that the lyric “I” of the elegy “is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking thro’ him.”Footnote ²¹ Tennyson repeated this idea on more than one occasion. “When reading ‘In Memoriam’,” James Knowles reports, the poet once said: “It is rather the cry of the whole human race than mine. In the poem altogether private grief swells out into thought of, and hope for, the whole world. … It is a very impersonal poem, as well as personal.”Footnote ²² Not insignificantly, it is on both “personal” and “impersonal” registers—the scale of the individual and the scale of the species—that Tennyson explores his “thought of, and hope for, the whole world.”Footnote ²³ The poem's anonymous publication amplifies the “impersonal” orientation of its lyrics. That In Memoriam was identified almost immediately as Tennyson's work reinforces, rather than complicates, this argument. In this sense, the affected anonymity of In Memoriam’s author—the stark expanse of its title page and the impersonality it provocatively performs—is a polemic: it incites readers to remove the poem from the grip of biography and read it instead as coming from no one and from everyone, from no person in particular and, at the same time, an entire “race” or species.Footnote ²⁴

Superficially, the erasure of individual identity here might be seen to coincide with normative lyric subjectivity. In such a reading, In Memoriam’s blank title page and Tennyson's identification of his poem as “the cry of the whole human race” posit a lyric “specimen” or subject who exemplifies the restrictive notion of humankind that anchors Mill's theorization of poetic universality. So understood, lyric constitutes an overheard “soliloquy,” an “unconscious” mode of expression that “paint[s] the human soul truly” such that self-disclosure is at one and the same time species-disclosure.Footnote ²⁵ Readers of poetry who recognize their selves in this normative lyric “specimen” are interpellated into the category of the human, whereas those who do not are abjected as nonhuman. Yet I argue that the poem's impersonal and perhaps nonpersonifying “I” steadfastly resists this universalizing model of lyric subjectivity and its implicit species taxonomy. In other words, the concept of species is itself at stake in In Memoriam’s impersonal “I” and the poem's insistent commingling of human and nonhuman such that the human as a conceptual category is effectually dissolved.Footnote ²⁶ Thus, the speaker longs for the de-subjectivated place to which Hallam has traveled in death: a shifting world that “has centre everywhere / Nor cares to fix itself to form” (33.3–4)—a world whose forms decenter and even annihilate the category of the human altogether. Insofar as the “I” of In Memoriam marks the fantasy of breaking form—of escaping the alienating fixity of the type—it makes possible a more capacious imagining of the relationship between lyric subjectivity and collectivity within and across species.

This is evident in section 2, which imagines the lyric speaker not as hermetically isolated but as de-subjectivated such that he becomes inextricable from the nonhuman figures of yew tree and corpse. The speaker here metamorphoses into an entity more “incorporate” in form and agency:

Initially, these lines might be understood as epitomizing the pathetic fallacy. Tennyson says as much near the poem's conclusion, wondering: “What find I in the highest place, / But mine own phantom chanting hymns?” (108.9–10). If “on the depths of death there swims” only “The reflex of a human face” (108.11–12), what “profit” (108.5), what “fruit” (108.13), what “wisdom” (108.16) could the poem ever offer? And yet, though the specter of the pathetic fallacy haunts Tennyson's yew trees and corpses, it cannot fully account for the inherent strangeness of these figures in and of themselves, or for the wayward interrelationalities they proliferate. To attend exclusively to the pathetic fallacy is, as Jonathan Culler puts it, to risk “reduc[ing] the strangeness” of lyric figuration and the “natural objects” toward which “direc[t] address” turns in the poem.Footnote ²⁷ Armstrong argues precisely this point in her reading of section 2, which she understands as gripped by a deep and generative uncertainty about whether language is “mind-moulded or matter-moulded, actively shaped by the self” or “passively formed by an external world.”Footnote ²⁸ Or, I would suggest: something between these two extremes, something more slippery, something more strange.

The yew's affective capacity—its simultaneous and paradoxical figuration as unfeeling and feeling, as narcotic and moody—is especially curious. These affective discontinuities make visible how the yew fails (or, perhaps, refuses) to mirror perfectly the poet's anthropomorphizing desires for “stubborn hardihood.” The yew's backtalk moves in antithetical directions, its response to the poet simultaneously compliant and noncompliant. This recalcitrance takes overt and distinctly material shape as the yew tree “grasp[s],” reaches, acts such that it is as mobile as immobile, kinetic as rooted, active as passive. As with the veneer of the pathetic fallacy, the tropes of lyric and elegy—the figures of direct address and yew tree—here become fantastical. Re-visioned by way of the Victorian geologic imaginary, they together make visible an increasingly acute self-awareness of the entanglements between human and nonhuman experience, between worlds anthropogenic and posthuman. Thus, if in section 2 the world is “mind-moulded,” the yew insists simultaneously upon a world that is “matter-moulded” by insinuating itself into the forms of earth and corpse such that they are “mouldered,” “moulded,” transfigured anew. The language of physiological agency, like the tree's shifting affects, bespeaks a lyric addressee that inconsistently mirrors and sometimes actively distorts the speaker's desires for “dreamless” immutability.

The ways that lyric and elegiac trope might together slip into something more elusive, more agential, is likewise evident in section 76, another poem preoccupied with the geologic recalcitrance of trees:

Pondering once again “the mouldering of a yew,” the poet's “deepest lays are dumb” (76.7–8). Here, the action of “mouldering” and its transitive objects are shifty. On one hand, the yew is figured as “mouldering”—as an image of decay in slow time. But, in section 2, the yew is also imagined in precisely the opposite terms: long-historied and immutable, a figure of “stubborn hardihood.” That the yew signifies an interminable duration points toward a counterreading of section 76, wherein the yew is an agent of “mouldering”—an agent whose geologic longevity enacts “mouldering” upon others, decomposing and recasting their forms. Here, I am particularly interested in the strangeness of Tennyson's language: the poet ponders not the literal yew, as he does in section 2, but rather its “mouldering” force—its materialization of those planetary processes of de- and re-formation that come to bear upon the speaker as he considers the yew tree's unattainable durability and, by extension, the temporal infinitude of a “secular” or geologic “abyss” (76.6). Thus, in the third and fourth stanzas the poet and his “lays” (76.7) are dis- and re-composed in temporal confrontation with the yew and its geologic materiality. Both poet and poem must eventually “wither”—and, indeed, are already withering—“in the vast / Ere half the lifetime” of comparatively geologic plants like yew trees. The poet's speechlessness—his loss of voice, of language, of an expressive capacity that would seem distinctly human—refigures the “wither[ing]” of the human individual as the “wither[ing]” of the human species. The human form here “moulders”—decomposes, discomposes, recomposes—into something Other. Lingering in the fallout, the lyric closes with the haunting image of a posthuman world wherein poems and civilizations alike have been reduced to “The ruin'd shells of hollow towers” (76.16)—to exoskeletons whose hollowed out, unindividuated, abstracted forms invite speculation about the life of poetry in a future when the human has come and gone.

It is this posthuman world order that Tennyson describes as “incorporate” in section 2, a lyric wherein the “materiality” of the dead “speaks volumes.”Footnote ²⁹ Here, the corpse's “dreamless head” is “net[ted]” with the “fibres” of the yew, whose “roots” are also “wrapt about the bones,” their frameworks slowly enmeshing over time (2.3–4). Still possessing identifiable appendages—heads and roots, bones and tissues—corpse and yew nevertheless exist in an “incorporate” or hybrid state, their kinetic structures retaining formal specificity while at the same time establishing material contiguities that disrupt the boundaries between human and nonhuman.Footnote ³⁰ Fugitive in both the transitory and transgressive senses of the word, the forms of corpse and plant here wander from the confines of taxonomic schemata to enunciate a world full of new, promiscuous life. It seems telling, in this context, that yew trees signify the very real possibility of biological hybridization. In the Principles, for instance, Lyell comments on the frequency with which,

But whereas the Principles turns away from the implications of the yew's procreative havoc by insisting on “a natural aversion in plants, as well as in animals, to irregular sexual unions” (2:55), In Memoriam plays out these peculiar copulations. That the yew tree co-opts the forces of “air,” “wind,” and “zephyr” for reproductive purposes is a case in point:

Here, the speaker imagines himself as having mobilized the pathetic fallacy to compel the tree to “answe[r] now my random stroke” (39.2). But in so doing, the speaker, however unknowingly, becomes a sexual partner of sorts for the tree. His caressing “stroke” looses “fruitful cloud[s] and living smoke” of pollen—of the yew tree's propagative matter (39.3). The word “random” is an indicator, here, of how the speaker is more instrument than necromancer. His “stroke” is a measure not of mastery but impotence, not of intentionality but nonintentionality, not of life but a capacity to be called into life—to be called into intercourse by and with a not-necessarily-human agent. The always “grasp[ing]” plant (39.4) thus instrumentalizes the speaker's agency for its own purposes, incorporating him into a weird and wild act of interspecies copulation that circumvents the conventional pattern of animating human call and acquiescent nonhuman response.

Similar copulations are on view in section 2, wherein the yew tree “incorporates” into itself the figures of corpse and, later, speaker. “Net[ting]” (2.3) and involving itself into the corpse such that the skeletal integrity of the human frame is compromised, the yew tree's “grasp[ing]” (2.1) appendages suggest how the human might be profoundly permeable to the nonhuman. Meshed with “fibres” (2.3) and intertwined with “roots” (2.4), the corpse is a figure for the human species reconfigured, for how the human commingles with otherwise distinct material forms such that it enters into an intersubjective, involuted, “incorporate” assemblage. In the final moments of section 2, the speaker metamorphoses in precisely this way. He “seem[s] to fail from out [his] blood” (2.15) as he is ensnared in the yew's spidery grasp. Here, I read the word “seem” as marking an out-of-body, surreal experience—a moment of lyric disassociation, wherein the subject is alienated from himself as he “fail[s] from out [his] blood.” He observes his own disarticulation as if not himself, as if Other. This moment of lyric dissociation is compounded by the yew's covering over of the very thing—the name—by which human persons are designated as persons. “[G]rasp[ing] at the stones / That name the under-lying dead” (2.1–2), the plant actively obscures the name of the individual and, by extension, the category of the human. Suspended in an unindividuated and dissociative state, the speaker “grow[s] incorporate” into that which once was not “I” or “me,” revealing a self that is neither strictly human nor his own.

2. Apostrophe without Voice

Tennyson's vision of a person “grown incorporate into” (2.16) nonpersons lends a political valence to these intersubjective metamorphoses. As the poet is incorporated or “unit[ed], combin[ed], mix[ed], blend[ed]” with nonhuman life-forms, he is also “form[ed],” or perhaps reformed, into a more distributed and intercommunicative “corporation or body politick.”Footnote ³¹ The figure of apostrophe makes legible how this interspecies body politic destabilizes the primacy of human power. Apostrophe is conventionally understood as a mode of lyric address wherein the poet calls out to and thus animates the dead. This call is conventionally produced by and through speech—a seemingly isolable, legible, possessive human voice—which magicks the nonhuman world into anthropomorphic life. Thus, even as Culler argues against the temptation to “imagine that lyrics embody voices,” he insists that a universal characteristic of lyric expression is its insistent production of “voicing.”Footnote ³² Taking shape through “the echoing of rhyme, assonance, or alliteration, and rhythmic patterning,” voicing names a set of poetic devices that resist consolidation into “the distinctive voice of a speaker”—the voice of an individual, consolidated subject—and yet nevertheless suggest a type or species or category of voice that culls its power from the “patterning” of grammar or of human speech. Culler's preferred example of “voicing”—“the gratuitous ‘O’ that accompanies many apostrophes”—is an overtly human form of speech that connotes a “poetic subject” taxonomically distinct from the “natural object.” The “O,” in other words, “connects” an implicitly human “mouth” to an anthropomorphizing “event” that reconstitutes and replicates human subjectivity in the nonhuman.Footnote ³³ “Voice,” as Paul de Man argues, thus “assumes mouth, eye, and finally face” or, rather, a human form.Footnote ³⁴ Theorized as such, it is an instrument of anthropomorphic violence: it colonizes, eviscerates, and altogether erases nonhuman bodies and modes of expression, positing the human form as the condition of speech. Troubled by such figural violence, Giorgio Agamben's essay on Giovanni Pascoli's onomatopoeias concludes by asking a question that, I think, also haunts In Memoriam: “Can there be speech, poetry, and thought beyond the letter, beyond the death of the voice and the death of language?”Footnote ³⁵

In Memoriam’s lyric figures offer one answer to this question by gesturing beyond anthropomorphism and, more broadly, human voice. As they pluralize and deanthropomorphize the lyric subject—as they put into question who is calling upon and animating whom—these figures reveal and exploit what de Man describes as a slippage between “figuration and disfiguration,” between “the giving and taking away of faces” or, to put it a different way, between faced-ness and facelessness.Footnote ³⁶ Figuration thus affords rich terrain for “conceptualizing modes of communication not securely anchored in the word”—for envisioning forms of expression that slip out of and even resist humanness.Footnote ³⁷ Teeming with a poetry that readily “change[s] to something else” (77.11), In Memoriam rarely if ever conjures a lyric subject, or marshals poetic modes of expression, that are strictly human. Thus, the poem's “mortal lullabies” are perhaps as posthuman as human (77.5). They are, as Prins argues of Victorian poetry more generally, “mediated” and “estrang[ed]” from the human, their soundings evoking futures in which the human, both in form and in language, is technologized to unexpected ends—to “bind a book,” “line a box” (77.6), “curl a maiden's locks (77.7)—or forgotten altogether. The “lullabies” of a posthuman world, In Memoriam’s lyric figures resist the urge to “read Victorian poetry anthropomorphically” and thus “hold on to an idea of the human in a time when humanities seem increasingly in question.” The lyric “I” of In Memoriam eludes and exceeds what Prins calls “lyric humanism,” suggesting instead a poetic subject whose taxonomic status is decidedly less cut and dry.Footnote ³⁸ Thus, as it dissolves the category of the human, In Memoriam subjects its poet-speaker to a taxonomic death. This death is of course staged most immediately on the poem's title page, whose authorless expanse experiments with what de Man calls the “opposition between the name and the nameless,” the “privative” power of language and the defacements it enacts upon the human subject.Footnote ³⁹ Nameless and abstracted, the speaker grows increasingly “incorporate” with nonhuman organisms like the “Old Yew” (2.1), which circumvent his apostrophic calls and in so doing disrupt the strictly policed circuitry of human speech—the seemingly irreconcilable divide between “I” and “you,” subject and object, self and other—and the anthropogenic power this circuitry assumes.

Here, it is worth considering the homophonic resonance of “yew” and “you.” This sonic confusion exposes a lyric addressee that tends toward excess; that is plural, superabundant, luxuriant; that, as it refuses to stay in its proper lexical place, unfurls beyond and disarticulates the contours of human speech. The yew tree thus looks increasingly more subject than object. Person and nonperson are apostrophically “incorporated” in section 2 such that “the syntax go[es] mad, making no distinction between self and objects.”Footnote ⁴⁰ This breakdown extends to the distinction between human and nonhuman, revealing how the seemingly inanimate addressee not only occupies an interpenetrative relationality to the speaker but might also possess a capacity to call or to animate, though that call does not necessarily take the form of a conventional, auditory, legible poetic voice. The mischievous and insubordinate yew tree illustrates this point. Despite the poet's efforts to wrestle the yew into doing what it is told—to pacify it into silent anthropomorphism—the plant rarely submits, and when it does, that submission shimmers with a recalcitrance never fully extinguished. Thus, in sections 2 and 39, the yew is as much an addressee gone rogue as an addressee pacified. Its slippery affects and “grasp[ing]” appendages slink beyond the poet's control, hijacking the poet's “stroke” such that the poet is called out of humanness and reanimated as something other than human. The yew tree in this way destabilizes the mastery of the apostrophic addressor. Resisting the poet's anthropomorphizing summons and then wrangling that same poet into an “incorporate” compact, the yew assumes the role of apostrophizer. If the “O” of apostrophe smacks of human speech and anthropogenic power—if, as Culler argues, the “O” “proclaims its artificial character rather too obviously”—this trope is curiously absent from In Memoriam’s apostrophic calls to the yew tree.Footnote ⁴¹ The absence of the “O” intimates how these calls to the yew tree, especially their capacity to boomerang beyond the poet's control, are anything but “artificial.”

The lyric “I” of In Memoriam in this way registers a world of distributed agencies, wherein corpses, plants, and other nonhuman entities resist the violence of personification and, in so doing, supplant the discrete categories of human and nonhuman with more-than-human ecologies. The slew of apostrophes that shadow the speaker's initial address to the yew tree are aswarm with wayward relationalities. Addressing “Sorrow” (3.1) and “Sleep” (4.1), his own “heart” (4.5 and 8.18), a “father” (6.9) and a “mother” (6.13), a “dove” (6.25), the “Dark house” that was once Hallam's home (7.1), and the “Fair ship” (9.1) that transports the “dark freight” (10.8) of Hallam's corpse, the opening sections of In Memoriam indiscriminately apostrophize entities as variable as abstractions and body parts. This apostrophic onslaught culminates in an image of disembodied “hands” (10.19), of a human body disarticulated into parts, “toss[ing] with tangle and with shells” (10.20). What emerges, here, is an apostrophic ecology which asserts that to be human is not simply to grapple with entanglement but to actually be “tangle”—to be “[a] complicated and confused assemblage” or “a confused network” of beings and agencies, “a tangled mass” of “intertwisted” forms, or, perhaps, “[a] tall and limp or flaccid person,” a being whose loose and limber flesh does not stay in the lines but instead elasticizes and renegotiates the boundaries of taxonomic form and personhood.Footnote ⁴² The lyric “I” of In Memoriam thus participates in an alternative economy of exchange wherein humans and even poetic voice itself are dehumanized or, perhaps, zoomorphized. Apostrophe, then, is not always that which “turns toward anything the poet throws his voice to, and in so doing magnetizes a world around his call.”Footnote ⁴³ In In Memoriam, lyric figuration transpires beyond and outside of human voice, beyond and outside of human speech. It is an “incorporate” mode of expression that emanates unsystematically from a multitude of nonhuman and de-subjectivating centers. The poem provocatively refuses to perpetuate the normative disparities between subject and object or human and nonhuman, to essentialize or “thing-ify” nonhumans as inanimate, powerless, speechless beings whose only hopes for animacy rest in their willing submission to a poet's “voicing,” to a human call to humanoid life. If apostrophe is indeed deeply hyperbolic in character, in In Memoriam it is so not simply because it “risk[s] animating the world, investing mundane objects or occurrence with meaning.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Rather, the hyperbole of apostrophe in the poem is its insinuation that an animate, agentic, speaking world already exists and persists—flourishes, even—without the assistance, and indeed in the total absence, of the human. Such a world does not naturalize, or desire, or require human intervention. And perhaps most radically, it discloses how lyric is a vehicle for nonhuman expression—for not only the animal (or what Tobias Menely calls “creaturely”) voice that exceeds and escapes the contours of the word, but also the silent, voiceless (which is not to say speechless), refractory calls of plants and similarly mouthless life-forms. In Memoriam’s “incorporate” poetics thus prophesizes a future in which poetry assumes a nonvocative, otherworldly, distinctly posthuman afterlife.

3. Lyric Extinctions

In In Memoriam, the “grow[ing] incorporate” of mutually apostrophizing humans and nonhumans posits the extinction of the normative speaking subject as the enabling condition of this more radical lyric mode. This is made especially clear by the contrasting forms of normative and posthuman subjectivities in the poem as well as the transformative sense of possibility with which the latter are imbued. In contrast to the isolable, isolated, bounded self, which is one of the hallmarks of lyric subjectivity normatively understood, Hallam in death occupies an “incorporate” world full of intersubjective penetration. He is unbound by restrictive form. Thus, the poem persistently figures him as a capacious and shifting vacuity—as “hollowness, emptiness, vacancy, blankness, dumbness.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In the place where Hallam once stood, Tennyson imagines “A void where heart on heart reposed; / And, where warm hands have prest and closed, / Silence” (13.6–8). Likewise, the ship that carries Hallam's body home is laden, quite strangely, with absence—with a “vanished life” whose void forms resist individuation (10.8). Why, in a poem about a human individual, does that individual remain largely and sometimes vexatiously invisible, shrouded in shadow, gossamer in substance, crepuscular in form? The obvious answer, of course, is that Hallam is dead. But more than a dead individual, he is dissipated and distributed across life-forms. Vacated and dimensionless, Hallam resists individuation even as he is elegized, offering an alternative to the isolated, consolidated, taxonomically defined speaking subject. That this alternative appears in death is crucial, because Tennyson likewise suggests that individual death coincides with the larger-scale, unindividuated forms of extinction. If Hallam embodies individual death, in other words, he is also a figure for death in the abstract, for death unindividuated, for death in the aggregate. If, as Taylor argues, abstraction makes possible the “aggregat[ion]” of individuals into species “based on some shared characteristic or characteristics that ignores distinguishing particularities,” Hallam's abstracted forms facilitate a similar leap from individual to species or, rather, from individualized to unindividualized death, from the passing of a single life to the extinction of life form, of the categories that partition human and nonhuman.Footnote ⁴⁶ Evacuated and abstracted, Hallam embodies the death of a life metamorphosed into the extinction of a type—the transfiguration of individual death such that it coincides with death in the aggregate, with the dissipation of a species, with the annihilation of the human as a category for restrictively taxonomizing or meting out agency and value.

Such transfigurations anchor sections 55 and 56, which conflate the passing of persons and of species, experimenting with a slippage that surfaces again and again in In Memoriam. In these so-called extinction lyrics, Tennyson famously conjures two conceptions of “Nature” (55.5) in quick succession: one that is “careful of the type” at the expense of “the single life” (55.7–8)—the individual human person—and a maniacal one that “care[s] for nothing at all” (56.4), obliterating “A thousand types” (or, perhaps, the very notion of the type) indiscriminately and without hesitation (56.3). John D. Rosenberg interprets these lines as “the nadir of despair in In Memoriam.” They “generaliz[e] and impersonalize[e]” the “calamity of individual loss so personally expressed” elsewhere, amplifying that “loss” so that it encompasses the potential extinction of “the entire race” of humankind.Footnote ⁴⁷ Here, death and extinction collapse into each other, the former standing in synecdochally for the latter. The synecdochal oscillation between individual and species—between death and extinction—gives shape to the poem as a whole.Footnote ⁴⁸ Such oscillations are visible in the shape-shiftings of the word “death,” which Erik Gray tracks by way of the “distorting mirror” of polyptoton, whose imperfect repetitions figure the word in “slightly altered form[s].” “[I]t is no coincidence,” as Gray argues, that “death” is “commonly subject to polyptotic variation” in In Memoriam. Interweaving “biological and linguistic morphology,” these variations convey death's capacity for profound “change.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Significantly, these variations are often scalar, marking how death slips fluidly from the singular into the plural, the individual into the collective, the micro into the macro. Thus, the poem's first reference to death takes the form of “Death” with a capital, ideational, figural “D” (prologue 7). If “Life” is here abstracted to encompass not only the lyric subject but also its types—the collective and speciating human “we” (prologue 2) as well as an aggregate of life-forms running the gamut from “brute” to “man” (prologue 6)—“Death” is similarly abstracted. It is poised to crush to dust the human individual and the unindividuated, collective, abstracted “skull” of all life-forms, both human and nonhuman (prologue 8). The lyric “we” here swells to cut across the “us” of humankind and the “us” of the myriad life-forms who together confront a world in which neither individual nor type can stay. The poem thus announces from the outset that to speak of death is to speak of extinction—to shuttle between the dissipation of persons and species, of individual and aggregate life, of the agential human subject and its supposedly passive nonhuman antithesis. As the category of the human dissolves, it takes with it the taxonomic estrangement upon which the categories of human and nonhuman are together predicated.Footnote ⁵⁰

The slippages between death and extinction are in this way a perhaps unexpected source of fantasy in In Memoriam. Nowhere is this more evident than in the poem's figurative experiments with incorporate forms of subjectivity and voiceless apostrophe. Thus, whereas many readers rightly view extinction and its attendant anxieties as a source of despair, I argue that they just as frequently mark a wellspring of desire.Footnote ⁵¹ Experimenting with how human and nonhuman, as well as individual and type, are deeply unstable and wholly unnatural categories, Tennyson figures extinction as a source of formal possibility or, rather, liberation: it constitutes a new frontier for being and animacy in the poem. In In Memoriam, extinction is an “impersonal” (and perhaps depersonalizing) process whose abstracted and abstracting forms undo the closure of individual human subjectivity, forcing an imagining of entwined human and nonhuman experience. Tennyson's yew trees materialize the abstracted and abstracting forms of extinction and the posthuman futures with which they shimmer, especially as they insinuate themselves into corpses and thus disrupt the category of the human as defined by physiological boundaries. Corpses—non-persons-who-were-once-human persons—occupy the interface between the categories of human and nonhuman as well as between death and extinction. As such, they possess a “materiality” that Deborah Lutz contends “held a certain enchantment for Victorians” because it unsettles “[t]he boundaries between self and other.”Footnote ⁵² Section 10 is one of many lyrics to experiment with and reorganize these boundaries. Here, Tennyson imagines Hallam's corpse as “rest[ing] beneath the clover sod”—as enmeshed with “rains” and roots and rocks, “toss[ed] with tangle and with shells” (10.13–4 and 19–20). Following on the heels of a quatrain whose anaphoric structure—“I hear,” “I hear,” “I see,” “I see” (10.1–4)— figures the alienation of the normative, subjectivating, possessive “I” on the page, the intermingled forms of corpse, “clover sod,” “tangle,” and “shells” together display how the abstracting forms of extinction proliferate formal porosities where seemingly impermeable surfaces once stood. In Memoriam’s corpses are in this way as geologic as they are elegiac, as experimental as they are generic. Intertwined with the language of climate and type, they convey how extinction intermingles human and nonhuman such that the lyric subject's isolation is undone. The figure of the corpse facilitates the “see[ing] of oneself as becoming or being material.” It “mak[es] meaning in the face of—and with the face of —death.”Footnote ⁵³ Or, to use Tennyson's own language, the corpse experiments with the “changes wrought on form and face” by “Death” (82.1–2), with the disfiguration of the human face and type, with the putting on of faces that are not strictly human—that resist categorization.

Positing such disfigurations—or, perhaps, extinction events—as the enabling condition of lyric, In Memoriam explores how poetry is a materially incorporate process that dis- and refigures not only its human speaker but also its human readers and auditors. In section 21, the speaker considers how poetry is in material and “incorporate” commerce with organic and inorganic life-forms:

Here, poetry is figured as the progeny of an interspecies materialism rooted in the “incorporate” forms of poet, corpse, and plant. Sitting atop Hallam's “grave” amidst a sea of “grass,” the poet fashions a set of “pipes” from the surrounding reeds with which to compose a song in honor of “him,” the dead. This song is not the work of a single human author but, rather, an interspecies compact made legible only in the space after death. Lyric speech, in other words, emerges in the moment at which the poet's lips conjoin with the tubular orifices of grass. Growing from soil enriched by the decay of human remains, the “grasses of the grave” transport the poet into “incorporate” intercourse with “him that rests below.” Recalling the involuted forms of poet, corpse, and yew in sections 2, 39, and 76, this moment of formal incorporation—which stretches into the final quatrain, wherein the poet's song mingles with the “note[s]” of the warbling linnets—positions poetry, and lyric in particular, as a desubjectivating and largely nonhuman phenomenon. The poem here insists on a more capacious theory of the lyric whose multivocal, intersubjective, extrahuman resonances transform the material world and its sociopolitical structures, making realizable intersubjective forms of expression, of relationality, of co-creation.

This argument is, perhaps surprisingly, reinforced by the arguments of poetry's detractors as they are represented in In Memoriam. In section 21, one of the travelers goes so far as to suggest there is little if any place for poetry in a time when the voice of the body politic has drowned out that of the “private” individual and when “Science” has, under the banner of empire, developed an appetite for other planets. In a historical moment like this, poetry is, according to the travelers, sentimental at best and self-indulgent at worst. But section 21 also shows how these dismissals of poetry express anxiety about its deeply (de-)formative powers. The first traveler worries over what poetry does to “men” and, by extension, humankind. In “melt[ing] the waxen hearts of men,” verse provokes an excess of feeling that would make men “weak.” These lines gesture to the ways in which this “weakness” might operate not only at the scale of the individual reader but also the collective, infecting the entire human species. Poetry, in other words, functions as a destabilizing force: it unravels the “hearts” of its readers and, by extension, the “waxen”—translucent, malleable, plastic, precarious—forms of “men.” In Memoriam thus invites one to imagine humankind as quite literally melting away under the influence of poetry. “Waxen” seems an especially telling word, here, given its significance in Victorian funerary culture. Wax is the stuff of death masks and effigies, and in its adjectival form the word figures the collective “men” as pale and corpselike in pallor, as in the throes of defacement or disfiguration. The melting forms of poetry here trigger an extinction event wherein man is transformed in and by verse, and is then man no more. Reconfigured by way of poetry, the human auditor or reader becomes receptive to new imaginative categories and abstractions; to very different forms of agency and collectivity; to a dynamic, burgeoning, intercommunicative world and a future that is emphatically posthuman.

4. Victorian Lyric Now

In this essay's final turn, I briefly consider whether the lyric “I” of In Memoriam affords a language through which to conceive the Anthropocene, its human causation, and its legacies. Recent scholarship on deep history and object-oriented ontology sometimes takes the notion of a normative, consolidated, privileged humanity for granted. This position is perhaps most prominently declared in Timothy Morton's writing on ecological disaster. In an essay that tracks the continuities between the Victorian period and its anthropogenic fallout, he describes the human species’ capacity to “ac[t] as a geophysical force” as formally akin to the “numerous hyperobjects” that structure life and world at present. As one of Morton's so-called hyperobjects, humankind seems to command “powers reserved for God, that are thinkable yet unthinkable, speakable yet unspeakable.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Here, the human is singularly capable of wielding and consolidating power. Such claims presume that the so-called Anthropocene can be fixed only by those who broke it.Footnote ⁵⁵ There is no room in this perspective for thinking beyond the extremity of supreme mastery and its corollary, supreme impotence, that together suffuse much contemporary environmental discourse. Comprising two sides of the same coin, these extremes careen between a “comic faith” in the human as agentic anomaly—as Earth's most “naughty but very clever children” who will dream up a superheroic “technofi[x]” once again and just in the nick of time—or the narcissism that emerges in the wake of an “abstract futurism” in which the “game is over” and all that remains, as Donna Haraway puts it, is the “sublime despair” of humankind's unprecedentedly cataclysmic handiwork.Footnote ⁵⁶ However different they might seem, both of these perspectives are similarly exceptionalist. They are also equally dangerous. As Claire Colebrook puts it, they cover over how “humanity is not an actuality from which we can draw grounds for action.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Together, these perspectives perpetuate the fantasy that humans are the sole guardians of (or are entirely evacuated of material and ethical attachments to) nonhuman life-forms and the planet itself. And like normative lyric subjectivity, these perspectives also flatten intraspecies dissonance—the differences that exist within species—thereby perpetuating the fallacy of a monolithic humankind universally accountable for environmental degradation, uniformly at the mercy of its repercussions, and equally obligated (but also similarly dispossessed of the capacity) to act.

But what would it mean, in this context, to take seriously In Memoriam’s imagining of lyric being—of interpenetrative selves, bodies, agencies, forces—as an affordance for the future? To reimagine subjectivity as the co-constitutive nexus between ourselves and the myriad life-forms and material planet with whom we cohabit—between selves that are emphatically and unconditionally not our selves, that never were or will be strictly our own, but rather have always been irrevocably intertwined with and porous to the multiformity of life and of planet? The forms of lyric poetry I have discussed in this essay afford viable points of departure for answering these questions—for rethinking the human as neither the possessive individual nor a homogeneous unity charged with breaking (and fixing) the world and its futures. If our contemporary “crisis point” is borne from the categories of subjectivity and agency at issue in contemporary environmental discourse—from the flattening and false “discontinuities” that at once give shape to and meet their annihilation in In Memoriam—it may be critical to think about these categories by and through Victorian lyric experiment. To be absolutely clear, by rejecting the notion of the human as defined through agency, what I am not saying is that we catapult to an opposing notion of the human as a site of complete passivity. To reiterate: these extremes are two sides of the same exceptionalist coin. And, of course, to position the human as totally powerless would be to give the human (or, to be more specific, the particular humans most responsible for wreaking environmental havoc to accumulate capital) a pass, so to speak; to take as a given an aporia between complete power and complete impotence; to slip into a sublime and narcissistic anthropocentrism. What I am saying, however, is that by rejecting the notion of the human as defined through voice and agency—by imagining instead how humans, animals, and planet are enfolded in and, as Haraway puts it, “at stake with each other”—we open ourselves up to very different, more complex, redistributed forms of individuality and collectivity, agency and futurity.Footnote ⁵⁸

In Memoriam and other Victorian lyric poems that experiment with incorporate, nonanthropomorphic, collective forms of expression might constitute such an opening up by way of their intersubjectivity. Taking shape through a weaving of being and speech that disfigures the human—that reconfigures the relationships between the human and the nonhuman, the singular and the collective, such that the distinctions between them slip away—Tennyson's speaking “I” calls attention to a plural, distributed, extrahuman sense of being. It posits the human subject as “ecologically excessive,” to borrow Kathryn Yusoff's phrasing—as shot through with nonhuman dimensionalities, as permeated by and in communication with energies that are at once alien to but also constitutive of the self.Footnote ⁵⁹ This subject is, in other words, profoundly open to and renegotiated by way of nonhuman forms and forces that are at once external and internal. To understand the world in this way—to imagine it as not only before, and around, but also with and inside us; as capacious and plural, layered and intercommunicative—might allow us to imagine and think with multiple forms of being and agency, and to inhabit and participate in them as potentialities. Lyric poems like In Memoriam have much to tell us about the geophysical forms and systems that were emergent in the Victorian period and that continue to shape our world at present. As Tennyson's lyric “I” resists the bifurcated account of human subjectivity—at once all-powerful and utterly impotent—that has become commonplace, it registers our drift away from older and necessarily poetic reservoirs of possibility. In Memoriam in this way calls for us to turn back to and take up a newly and urgently Victorian, which is to say not-so-human, life in lyric.