A Life-Tomb

Arthur O'Shaughnessy's A Life-Tomb

Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s A Life-Tomb is a melancholic meditation on love, loss, and the spectral persistence of memory. The poem, suffused with Gothic undertones and a profound sense of yearning, explores the liminal space between presence and absence, life and death, where the beloved’s ghost lingers in the very architecture of the speaker’s existence. Through rich imagery, haunting repetition, and a deeply introspective tone, O’Shaughnessy crafts a work that is as much about the psychology of grief as it is about the uncanny nature of memory. This analysis will examine the poem’s historical and literary context, its use of literary devices, its thematic concerns, and its emotional resonance, ultimately arguing that A Life-Tomb is a poignant exploration of how the past haunts the present.

Historical and Biographical Context

Arthur O’Shaughnessy (1844–1881) was a British poet and herpetologist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements. His work often reflects the Romantic fascination with beauty, melancholy, and the ephemeral nature of life. A Life-Tomb fits within the broader Victorian tradition of elegiac poetry, where death and mourning were frequent subjects, influenced by both personal bereavement and the era’s preoccupation with spiritualism and the afterlife. The Victorian period saw a surge in Gothic literature, with ghosts serving as metaphors for unresolved grief, repressed desires, and the inescapability of the past.

While O’Shaughnessy’s personal life does not provide a clear biographical link to the poem, the intensity of its sorrow suggests an intimate familiarity with loss. The poem’s fixation on sensory remnants—footsteps, touches, sighs—aligns with Victorian mourning customs, where relics of the dead (such as hair jewelry and post-mortem photography) were kept to sustain a connection with the departed. The speaker’s haunted house becomes a psychological extension of this tradition, where memory itself is a kind of relic.

Literary Devices and Imagery

O’Shaughnessy employs a range of literary devices to evoke the poem’s eerie, dreamlike atmosphere. The most striking of these is the sustained metaphor of the house as a tomb, a space where the living and the dead coexist uneasily. The opening lines—

"The house is haunted and rife / With Her touch behind panel and door / And her footfalls under the floor"

—immediately establish a Gothic sensibility, where domestic space becomes uncanny. The house, typically a site of comfort, is inverted into a place of spectral occupation. The enjambment between "haunted and rife" and "Her touch behind panel and door" creates a sense of suffusion, as though the beloved’s presence seeps into every crevice. The auditory imagery of "footfalls under the floor" suggests an unseen presence, reinforcing the poem’s preoccupation with absence made palpable.

The poem’s central paradox—"Is She here dead in my life? / Am I here alive in her tomb?"—encapsulates the speaker’s existential dislocation. The beloved is both absent (dead) and present (in memory), while the speaker is both alive and yet entombed in grief. This chiasmus structure heightens the sense of inversion, where life and death are no longer distinct states but interwoven conditions.

O’Shaughnessy also employs synesthetic imagery, blending sensory impressions to convey the persistence of memory. The "purple nights and days" suggests a synesthetic fusion of color and time, imbuing memory with a dreamlike hue. The dying embers—

"To sit with dull eyes cast / On slowly dying embers / Of things the heart remembers"

—symbolize the gradual fading of recollection, yet their residual glow suggests that memory never fully extinguishes. The shift from visual ("dull eyes") to auditory ("tones, that seem to start / From the shadows") underscores the multisensory nature of grief, where the past is not merely recalled but re-experienced.

Themes: Haunting, Memory, and the Uncanny

At its core, A Life-Tomb is a poem about haunting—not in the conventional Gothic sense of a malevolent specter, but in the psychological sense of memory’s inescapability. The beloved’s presence is felt not as a ghostly apparition but as a series of sensory echoes: touches, footfalls, sighs. This aligns with Freud’s concept of the uncanny, where the familiar becomes disturbingly unfamiliar. The house, once a shared domestic space, is now a site of eerie recurrence, where the past intrudes upon the present.

The poem also explores the tension between active remembrance and passive melancholy. The speaker expresses a desire—

"Ah fain am I still to track / And to walk along the ways / Sown with flowers by her feet"

—to retrace the beloved’s steps, to gather the remnants of lost time. Yet this impulse is undercut by the futility of the act: the days and nights are "sown" like flowers, suggesting both beauty and transience. The act of remembrance is both nourishing and agonizing, as seen in the lines—

"The heart with tremulous stir / Lives a moment and then dies."

Here, memory briefly reanimates the heart, only to underscore its finality.

Emotional Impact and Philosophical Underpinnings

The emotional power of A Life-Tomb lies in its oscillation between yearning and resignation. The speaker does not rage against loss but inhabits it, allowing the beloved’s presence to permeate the present. This quiet melancholy resonates with the Victorian era’s broader philosophical anxieties about time and mortality. The poem’s closing image—

"And her soul seems to look out / As from dim and distant eyes, / And a shade of lips to pout / With some remnant of her sighs."

—captures the fragile liminality of memory, where the beloved is neither fully present nor entirely gone. The "remnant of her sighs" suggests that even grief is a form of communion, a way of sustaining connection beyond death.

Comparative Readings and Conclusion

A Life-Tomb can be fruitfully compared to other Victorian poems of mourning, such as Tennyson’s In Memoriam or Christina Rossetti’s Remember. Like Tennyson, O’Shaughnessy grapples with the tension between sorrow and consolation, though his approach is more interior and less explicitly theological. Unlike Rossetti’s speaker, who urges the beloved to "remember me when I am gone away," O’Shaughnessy’s protagonist is the one haunted by memory, unable to fully relinquish the past.

In conclusion, A Life-Tomb is a masterful exploration of grief’s lingering presence. Through its evocative imagery, paradoxical structure, and profound emotional depth, the poem captures the way loss reshapes perception, turning the familiar into the spectral. O’Shaughnessy’s work reminds us that poetry, at its best, does not merely describe emotion but enacts it, allowing readers to dwell in the spaces between memory and reality, presence and absence. In this way, A Life-Tomb is not just an elegy for the dead but a testament to the enduring power of love—even, or especially, in the face of irrevocable loss.