In Memoriam A.H.H.


In Memoriam A.H.H. by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, is an elegy for his Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died of cerebral haemorrhage in Vienna, at the age of twenty-two years, in 1833. As a sustained exercise in tetrametric lyrical verse, Tennyson's poetical reflections extend beyond the meaning of the death of Hallam, thus, In Memoriam also explores the random cruelty of Nature seen from the conflicting perspectives of materialist science and declining Christian faith in the Victorian era, the poem thus is an elegy, a requiem, and a dirge for a friend, a time, and a place.

History

In Memoriam A.H.H. 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: the prologue, the poem, and the epilogue. 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". 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 an epithalamium, a nuptial poem for the poet's sister, Cecilia Tennyson, on her wedding to the academic Edmund Law Lushington, in 1842.

The poem

Metrical form

Written in iambic tetrameter, the poetical metre of In 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 of nostalgia, philosophic speculation, and Romantic 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".

Themes

As a man of the Victorian age and as a poet, Tennyson addressed the intellectual matters of his day, such as the theory of the transmutation of species presented in the anonymously published book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a speculative natural history about the negative theological implications of Nature functioning without divine direction. Moreover, 19th-century Evangelicalism required belief in literal interpretations of The Holy Bible against the theory of human evolution; thus, in Canto CXXIX, Tennyson alludes to "the truths that never can be proved" – the Victorian belief that reason and intellect would reconcile science with religion.
In Canto LV, the poet asks:
In Canto LVI, the poet queries Nature about the existential circumstance of Man on planet Earth:
Moreover, although Tennyson published "In Memoriam A.H.H." nine years before Charles Darwin published the book On the Origin of Species, contemporary advocates for the theory of natural selection had adopted the poetical phrase Nature, red in tooth and claw to support their humanist arguments for the theory of human evolution.
In Canto CXXII, Tennyson addresses the conflict between conscience and theology:
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.

Personal themes

The literary scholar Christopher 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.
In Canto XCIX, the poet writes:

Quotations

The poem has yielded many literary quotations:
In Canto XXVII:
In Canto LIV:
In Canto LVI:
In Canto CXXIII:
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 planet Earth was geologically active and far older than believed a century earlier.

Legacy

Queen Victoria

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. In 1862 and in 1883, Queen Victoria met Tennyson to tell him she much liked his poetry.

Novels

In the novel The Tragedy of the Korosko, by Arthur Conan Doyle, characters quote the poem by citing Canto LIV of In 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's In Memoriam is "the grandest and the deepest and the most inspired in our language".
The 1924 short story "A Neighbour's Landmark" by M. R. James quotes the line "With no language but a cry" from In Memoriam A.H.H..
Alan Hollinghurst, in his novel The Stranger's Child, 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 novel In Memoriam mentions In Memoriam throughout the novel, with the principal characters discussing writing their own "In Memoriam" poems for each other if they die in World War I.

Musical settings