Queer Forms, Queer Grief: Reclaiming and Transcending Loved Remains in Tennyson's In Memoriam and Michael Field's The Longer Allegiance

Abstract: This essay reads Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850) and Michael Field's The Longer Allegiance (1908) contrapuntally across three topoi: the threat of the beloved dead's remains being lost, queer desire, and queer poetic form. After the shocking death of Arthur Henry Hallam, Tennyson's earliest lyrics expressed anxieties lest the ship transporting Hallam's corpse to England should be lost. Michael Field began writing The Longer Allegiance (twenty-four sonnets and an epilogue) when the body of James Cooper, Edith Cooper's father, had not yet been found after his accidental death while he was hiking in the Alps. Both elegies turn to negotiating the poets' relations to mortal remains once those remains are recovered. Recurring references to dust, initially a locus of horror in In Memoriam , register the mourner's shift from denials of death to desire for lasting union with a spiritualized Hallam. In The Longer Allegiance , dust's materiality is the medium of sustained connection to the dead, centered in the dust over which the living walk. Yet from Cooper's "dust" the erotic union of his living mourners is reborn. The essay concludes by exploring both elegies' queering of traditional elegy and prior masculine queer elegies, Tennyson by refusing to displace desire onto loss, Michael Field by the fissuring of a unified male "I," and both by disrupting linearity.