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“Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead by Alfred Lord Tennyson is a classic example of breakdown of emotions. The widow is devastated on seeing the dead body of her warrior husband. Instead of crying and wailing which is a natural emotional outlet, she becomes numb. “All her maidens, watching, said, “ She must weep or she will die.”
Survival against all odds is the most primordial instinct of all organisms. Nature just wants you to fight for your life, reproduce and ensure continuation of the species. In the evolutionary hierarchy, various life forms do this in several ways.
Lower organisms adapt to a fierce environment by taking in what’s available which may not be sufficient or even harmful for higher organisms. Water, sunlight, oxygen in air are good enough for plant life. Cockroaches are known to have survived after taking in even radioactive waste after the nuclear holocaust in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Animals are endowed with predatory skills to kill and eat presumably weaker ones who themselves predate even lower ones.
Humans have developed intelligence, consciousness etc. for survival. Psychologists say the variety of human emotions have been developed to protect the species. Anger, rage, jealousy, are all pre runners for further action to combat adversaries and ensure continuation of life to start with and make him feel better than others as he climbs from biological needs to social needs.
We asked our behavioural science professor “what are the important rules for happiness?” He wrote his own 10 commandments, and the top of the list was, ‘bring out your emotions immediately and do not bottle them up’. Sadness and depression for a brief period on the loss of a dear one is good and gives us time to reminisce the shared love and cope up with the anxiety of what next. Psychologically, this is getting into a comfort zone of inactivity and washing away any responsibility for the future, and one has to come out of it soon.
In the case of the widow in Tennyson’s poem, everyone felt she will collapse and probably die without concern for the little baby she has. She cannot bottle up the sorrow, but cry, if only for the sake of the baby. So an old lady puts the baby on her lap. The widow comes out of the seemingly endless gloom and says, “Sweet my child, I live for thee.”