Where Have All The Flowers Gone?

Where indeed? I am stumped. Why is that cut rootless fir tree on my porch not drying? Not dying? The answer can be found in these, some of the most astounding and awe-inspiring pieces of verse ever written. Welcome to In Memoriam, Tennyson's magnum opus. A taost to the phoenix like vitality of life.

II.

Old Yew, which graspest at the stones
That name the under-lying dead,
Thy fibres net the dreamless head,
Thy roots are wrapt about the bones.
The seasons bring the flower again,
And bring the firstling to the flock;
And in the dusk of thee, the clock
Beats out the little lives of men.
O not for thee the glow, the bloom,
Who changest not in any gale,
Nor branding summer suns avail
To touch thy thousand years of gloom:
And gazing on thee, sullen tree,
Sick for thy stubborn hardihood,
I seem to fail from out my blood
And grow incorporate into thee.

and also this

XI.
Calm is the morn without a sound,
Calm as to suit a calmer grief,
And only thro’ the faded leaf
The chestnut pattering to the ground:
Calm and deep peace on this high wold,
And on these dews that drench the furze,
And all the silvery gossamers
That twinkle into green and gold:
Calm and still light on yon great plain
That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,
And crowded farms and lessening towers,
To mingle with the bounding main:
Calm and deep peace in this wide air,
These leaves that redden to the fall;
And in my heart, if calm at all,
If any calm, a calm despair:
Calm on the seas, and silver sleep,
And waves that sway themselves in rest,
And dead calm in that noble breast
Which heaves but with the heaving deep.

At the age of 22, Hallam, his dear friend and his sister's fiance died of brain haemorhage. Tennyson was shocked. And started writing In Memoriam. After 17 years of reflections, it was finally published. An ode to a long lost but long remembered mate. The intangible feeling of loss and longing, of a disturbed soul trying to come to terms with the cruel hand of fate. How much more can you ask of a Romantic?