Tennyson and Zeno: Three Infinities (Alfred Tennyson) (Critical Essay‪)‬

Though Tennyson left Cambridge without a degree because he refused to climb "the apparently unscalable wall of mathematics," (1) astronomy, physics, and the new geology of Robert Chambers and Charles Lyell continue to fire his imagination with thoughts of two immensities: the infinitely great and the infinitely small. As the mourner contemplates the fossil record and the long perspectives of the earth's history, sowing the dust of continents to be in In Memoriam, he hears a female harpy cry, like the sibyl in Heraclitus: "A thousand types are gone; / I care for nothing, all shall go." (2) The poem also plunges Tennyson into a second kind of infinity: the vortex of an endlessly receding mindscape. Within Tennyson's picture of the earth is a picture of his own mind, and within that picture a picture of the mind that frames the pictures, and so on to infinity. In the third place, as a mystic who uses mantras to evoke God's presence, Tennyson is continually trying to map the coordinates of the Nameless of the hundred Names. Transformed by rapture and transfixed by awe, he is touched in turn by these three infinities: physical infinities of space and time, infinities of a mindscape, and the metaphysical paradox of a God who is absolute and infinite at the same time. 1