Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Alfred, Lord Tennyson is recalled through a letter describing a “waking trance” that had come upon him from boyhood. His account makes the dissolution of personal identity sound not like confusion or extinction, but like an unusually clear form of life; in the book, it becomes a point of contact between a poet’s testimony and the narrator’s newly understood experience.

Identity and Experience

Tennyson enters the narrative not through a biographical account, but through his own description of an experience that recurred from boyhood. The phrase “waking trance” holds together two conditions that might seem opposed: ordinary wakefulness and a transformed state of consciousness. The narrator presents the account as a letter, emphasizing that this was an experience Tennyson tried to describe in his own words.

The Trance as Tennyson Describes It

In the passage, the intensity of individual consciousness gives way to the apparent dissolution of individuality itself. Tennyson insists that the resulting state was not confused: it was, in his description, exceptionally clear and certain. He also reverses the ordinary meaning of self-loss and death. The loss of personality seems not like extinction, but like access to “the only true life”; death, in this vision, becomes almost impossible to take seriously.

Narrative Significance

Tennyson’s account helps the narrator recognize that descriptions of mystical experience can carry a precise meaning even when they once seemed overly abstract. The phrase “boundless being,” in particular, changes from something the narrator might have passed over into language for something familiar. Tennyson’s testimony thus becomes more than an example in a literary catalogue: it is a kind of receiver through which the narrator can hear a conversation about experience that had previously remained closed to him.