And was the day of my delight
As pure and perfect as I say?
The very source and fount of Day
Is dash'd with wandering isles of night […]

And is it that the haze of grief
Makes former gladness loom so great?
The lowness of the present state,
That sets the past in this relief?

Or that the past will always win
A glory from its being far;
And orb into the perfect star
We saw not, when we moved therein? (XXIV)

At this point we're well into Tennyson's lengthy poem about mourning. He's been getting seriously nostalgic and sad about the old days before Hallam's untimely death. It used to be so perfect. They did everything together. They had intense discussions. It was like they could read each other's minds.

But now Tennyson starts questioning himself. Are his memories getting fuzzy? Was everything really that perfect?

Logic vs. Nostalgia

In dissecting his own experience of grief, Tennyson is always running up against questions about life and death, and about religion and nature. Now he starts turning the questions on himself. Does he even remember his friend accurately, or is this just part of the grief? Tennyson confronts emotion with logic: maybe mourning is so terrible that, by contrast, it makes the old days seem more perfect than they really were.

Or maybe everything far away seems more perfect than it really is. (That's the same logic behind the saying "absence makes the heart grow fonder": it's so much easier to miss people when they aren't there hogging the remote control.)

Either way, Tennyson is taking a moment to get all logical on his nostalgia and grief.

An Uncertain Experience

As Tennyson questions himself, he walks us through his logic. It's like he's anticipating what we're thinking and asking the question on our mind: was Hallam really this perfect? The stanzas go from questions to answers—and even the possible answers end up taking the form of questions. Tennyson questions his nostalgic memories and ends up feeling uncertain about what exactly the past was like. That uncertainty leaks through to the style.