_Tennyson's "In Memoriam"_ (Vol. iii., pp. 142. 227. 458.).--I submit
that the "crimson-circled star" may be named without calling on the poet
to explain.
The planet Venus, when she is to the east of the sun, is our _evening
star_ (and as such used to be termed Hesperus by the ancients).
The evening star in a summer twilight is seen surrounded with the glow
of sunset, "crimson-circled." The rose, too, was a flower sacred to
Venus, which might justify the epithet. But I suppose the blush of the
sky was what the poet thought of at such a moment.
Venus sinking into the sea, which in setting she would appear to
do,--falls into the _grave of Uranus_,--her father, according to the
theory of Hesiod (190). The part cast into the sea, from which Aphrodite
sprung, is here taken, by a becoming license (which softens the
grossness of the old tradition), for the whole; so that the ocean,
beneath the horizon of which the evening star sinks, may be well
described by the poet as "_her_ father's grave."
That Venus is meant, the gender of the pronoun relating to the star
seems to prove beyond a doubt; there being no other sufficiently
important to occur in a picture of this kind, to which a female name is
given.