Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law—
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed — (LVI)

These stanzas come midway into Tennyson's epic of an elegy, In Memoriam. And things are getting rough. (Pretty much as you'd expect in a poem about death and mourning.) We're not sure which stage of grief Tennyson is at, but he's having his doubts about God, so it's definitely at one of the "things just got real" stages. Right before the passage quoted, Tennyson confesses "I falter where I firmly trod / I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope / […] and call / To what I feel is Lord of all."

It turns out out God's not exactly returning this dude's calls.

Tennyson is in crisis mode. It only takes him one step to go from "Why won't God answer me?" to the worst-case scenario: "What if there isn't a God at all?"

In that first stanza, Tennyson describes humankind (or, since this is the 19th century, "man"): "Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair." Man is her last work—but who is she? While man is saying "fruitless prayers" to the skies and trusting that "God was love indeed," who's actually watching over Tennyson?

Tennyson is worried that humans are just another of Nature's creations. And this turns out to be a scary idea. Nature isn't all rainbows and sunshine—she's "shrieking" and "red in tooth and claw." Mother Nature starts to sound like Evil Stepmother Nature.

This is one of the most quoted sections of Tennyson's poem. Tennyson's idea of nature is downright brutal—bloody and bloodthirsty. But he's thinking about Nature in light of science: what about all those species that Nature killed off? What about the fossil record? (Oh, and soon the 19th century will have to face a little theory you might have heard of—evolution, anyone?)

Tennyson confronts some pretty heady stuff in this poem—not only death, but also the question of why people exist in the first place. And yet his stanzas are all quite short: just 8 syllables in each line, and just 4 lines per stanza. Not surprisingly, he keeps this single sentence going (even beyond the part we quoted), and has to use enjambment like there's no tomorrow.

Even when this nature vs. religion debate starts to spread itself too thin, Tennyson pulls it together with his rhyme scheme. And sometimes the rhymes seem to highlight key terms and images—like "eyes" and "skies," and "law" and "claw" (claw law?).