![]() ![]() Like Tennyson’s In Memoriam above, the poem reflects many Victorians’ difficulties in reconciling Christianity with the new worldview influenced by recent philosophy and scientific discoveries. The poem is about Rossetti’s struggle to feel close to Christ and the teachings of Christianity, and to weep for the sacrifice he made. This poem was published in Christina Rossetti’s 1866 collection The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems. ![]() ![]() To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss, That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross, By the end of this long cycle of moving poems, Tennyson has conquered his doubts and his faith in God has been restored. ![]() Eliot said, was a great religious poem not because of the quality of its faith, but because of the quality of its doubt. These lines from this long 1850 elegy for Tennyson’s friend – perhaps his finest achievement – strike to the core of the greatness of Tennyson’s poem, which, as T. ‘There lives more faith in honest doubt, / Believe me, than in half the creeds’. ‘They Are All Gone into the World of Light’ is about death, God, and the afterlife, and the poet’s desire to pass over into the next life – the ‘World of Light’ – to join those whom he has lost. The Welsh metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan (1621-95) is best known for his 1650 collection, Silex Scintillans (‘Sparks from the Flint’), which established him as one of the great devotional poets in English literature. Or those faint beams in which this hill is drest, It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast, They are all gone into the world of light! ![]()
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