| In Memoriam | |
|---|---|
| byAlfred, Lord Tennyson | |
 Title page of 1st edition (1850) | |
| Original title | IN MEMORIAM A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Requiem,elegy |
| Rhyme scheme | abba |
| Publication date | 1850 |
| Lines | 2916 |
| Full text | |
 In Memoriam (Tennyson) atWikisource | |
In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850) byAlfred, Lord Tennyson, is anelegy for his Cambridge friendArthur Henry Hallam, who died ofcerebral haemorrhage in Vienna, at the age of twenty-two years, in 1833.[1] As a sustained exercise intetrametric lyrical verse, Tennyson's poetical reflections extend beyond the meaning of the death of Hallam, thus,In Memoriam also explores the random cruelty ofNature seen from the conflicting perspectives ofmaterialist science and declining Christian faith in theVictorian era (1837–1901),[2] the poem thus is an elegy, arequiem, and adirge for a friend, a time, and a place.[3]
In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850) is an elegiac, narrative poem in 2,916 lines of iambic tetrameter, composed in 133 cantos, each canto headed with a Roman numeral, and organised in three parts: (i) the prologue, (ii) the poem, and (iii) the epilogue.[4] After seventeen years of composing, writing, and editing, from 1833 to 1850, Tennyson anonymously published the poem under the Latin title "In Memoriam A.H.H. Obiit MDCCCXXXIII" (In Memoriam A.H.H. 1833).[5] Moreover, upon the literary, artistic, and commercial success of the poetry, Tennyson further developed the poem and added Canto LIX: 'O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me' to the 1851 edition; and then added Canto XXXIX: 'Old warder of these buried bones' to the 1871 edition. The epilogue concludes "In Memoriam" with anepithalamium, a nuptial poem for the poet's sister, Cecilia Tennyson, on her wedding to the academicEdmund Law Lushington, in 1842.[6]
Written iniambic tetrameter (four-line ABBA stanzas), the poetical metre ofIn Memoriam A.H.H. creates the tonal effects of the sounds of grief and mourning. In 133 cantos, including the prologue and the epilogue, Tennyson uses the stylistic beats of tetrameter to address the subjects of spiritual loss and themes ofnostalgia, philosophic speculation, andRomantic fantasy in service to mourning the death of his friend, the poet A. H. Hallam; thus, in Canto IX, Tennyson describes the return of the corpse to England: "Fair ship, that from the Italian shore / Saileth the placid ocean-plains / With my lost Arthur's remains, / Spread thy full wings and waft him o'er".[7]
As a man of the Victorian age (1837–1901) and as a poet, Tennyson addressed the intellectual matters of his day, such as the theory of thetransmutation of species presented in the anonymously published bookVestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), a speculativenatural history about the negative theological implications ofNature functioning without divine direction.[8] Moreover, 19th-centuryEvangelicalism required belief inliteral interpretations ofThe Holy Bible against the theory ofhuman evolution; thus, in Canto CXXIX, Tennyson alludes to "the truths that never can be proved" – the Victorian belief thatreason andintellect would reconcile science with religion.[9]
In Canto LV, the poet asks:
Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life;
That I, considering everywhere
Her secret meaning in her deeds,
And finding that of fifty seeds
She often brings but one to bear,
I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world's altar-stairs
That slope thro' darkness up to God,
I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.
In Canto LVI, the poet queries Nature about theexistential circumstance of Man on planet Earth:[10]
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law —
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed —
Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seal'd within the iron hills?"
Moreover, although Tennyson published "In Memoriam A.H.H." (1850) nine years beforeCharles Darwin published the bookOn the Origin of Species (1859), contemporary advocates for the theory ofnatural selection had adopted the poetical phraseNature, red in tooth and claw (Canto LVI) to support theirhumanist arguments for the theory ofhuman evolution.[11]
In Canto CXXII, Tennyson addresses the conflict between conscience and theology:
If e'er when faith had fallen asleep,
I hear a voice 'believe no more'
And heard an ever-breaking shore
That tumbled in the Godless deep;
A warmth within the breast would melt
The freezing reason's colder part,
And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up and answer'd 'I have felt.'
No, like a child in doubt and fear:
But that blind clamour made me wise;
Then was I as a child that cries,
But, crying knows his father near;
The conclusion of the poem reaffirmed Tennyson's religiosity, his progress from doubt-and-despair to faith-and-hope, which he realised by mourning the death of his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam (1811–1833).[12]
The literary scholarChristopher Ricks relates the following lines, from canto XCIX, to the end of Tennyson's boyhood at the Somersby Rectory, Lincolnshire, especially the boy's leaving Somersby upon the death of his father.[13]
In Canto XCIX, the poet writes:
Unwatched, the garden bough shall sway,
The tender blossom flutter down,
Unloved, that beech will gather brown,
This maple burn itself away.
The poem has yielded many literary quotations:
In Canto XXVII:
I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
In Canto LIV:
So runs my dream, but what am I?
An infant crying in the night
An infant crying for the light
And with no language but a cry.
In Canto LVI:
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed
In Canto CXXIII:
The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.
Concerning the natural science of the time, in Canto CXXIII, Tennyson reports that "The hills are shadows, and they flow / From form to form, and nothing stands" in reference to the then-recent discovery, in the 19th century, that planetEarth was geologically active and far older than believed a century earlier.[14]
In Memoriam was a favourite poem of Queen Victoria, who after the death of her husband, the Prince Consort Albert, was "soothed & pleased" by the feelings explored in Tennyson's poem.[15] In 1862 and in 1883, Queen Victoria met Tennyson to tell him she much liked his poetry.[16]
In the novelThe Tragedy of the Korosko (1898), by Arthur Conan Doyle, characters quote the poem by citing Canto LIV ofIn Memoriam: "Oh yet we trust that somehow good / will be the final goal of ill"; and by citing Canto LV: I falter where I firmly trod"; whilst another character says that Lord Tennyson'sIn Memoriam is "the grandest and the deepest and the most inspired [poem] in our language".[17]
The 1924 short story "A Neighbour's Landmark" byM. R. James quotes the line "With no language but a cry" fromIn Memoriam A.H.H..[18]
Alan Hollinghurst, in his novelThe Stranger's Child (2011), has his central character, the doomed Cecil Valance, quote from Canto CI, in which appear the lines "And year by year the landscape grow / Familiar to the stranger's child".
Alice Winn's novelIn Memoriam (2023) mentionsIn Memoriam throughout the novel, with the principal characters discussing writing their own "In Memoriam" poems for each other if they die inWorld War I.[19]
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Texts from Wikisource
Data from Wikidata
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