RECENTLY, I found myself walking rather grimly through the streets of Norwich in a bleak, sleety January drizzle. My hands deep in the pockets of my old tweed greatcoat, which was already becoming damp and heavy, I asked myself the obvious question: Where is the poetry of drizzle?

There’s plenty celebrating winds and wild weather: Shelley’s glorious “Ode to the West Wind”, for example, and plenty that speaks of that mirroring of weather and mood which we so often experience, as in Keats’s lovely verse in his “Ode On Melancholy”:

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud.

But what about this dreich and melancholy drizzle augmenting our January blues? Almost as I asked the question, the answer came in a couple of lines of Tennyson’s, which almost perfectly described my experience at that moment:

And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

Reciting these lines doesn’t change the weather, but there is a certain grim satisfaction in knowing that one’s own experience of it has been so perfectly expressed.

T. S. Eliot reckoned that Tennyson had the finest ear for the sound of the English language of any poet, and, unsurprisingly, the author of The Waste Land singled out these two lines for particular praise, especially for the sheer downbeat plodding sound of the eight one-syllable words that make up the tetrameter of that final line.

It is, in fact, the final line of the shortest and, in many ways, most moving of the poems that make up Tennyson’s sequence In Memoriam, a sequence that usually has its national moment on New Year’s Eve or 1 January, when the ringing of our church bells is often accompanied with a reading of the great moment of recovery later in the sequence:

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

But Tennyson is not just for Christmas and New Year, and I’m glad to have him as a companion for those bleaker days later in January and February when we feel we simply have to hunker down and get through it. In Memoriam deals both truthfully and beautifully with depression and darkness, and especially, as its title suggests, with bereavement.

The short poem whose last lines I was remembering in the Norfolk drizzle begins with Tennyson, whether waking or in dreams is not clear, visiting the house of his friend Hallam, only to realise, once more, that he is gone for ever: a jolting experience of repeated reminders of absence, which any bereaved person will recognise. The poem doesn’t remove or even heal the grief, but I, for one, find comfort and a kind of solace in knowing that my own griefs have been experienced and so well expressed by others:

Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,
A hand that can be clasp’d no more.

The time comes, of course, when Tennyson can “Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes But ring the fuller minstrel in”; but I am glad that he was so honest with us about the time that it took to get there.