In Memoriam A.H.H.

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.Tennyson, A. In Memoriam. (1850). London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street. 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).{{Cite book|url=https://archive.org/details/completepoetical00tenn|title=The Complete Poetical Works of Tennyson|year=1898 |publisher=The Riverside Press|editor-last=James Rolfe|editor-first=William|editor-link=William James Rolfe|location=Cambridge, Mass.|pages=162}} 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.Tennyson, A. In Memoriam. (1850). London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street. p. 203.

File:Arthur Henry Hallam bust.jpg)]]

Written in iambic tetrameter (four-line ABBA stanzas), 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".Tennyson, A. In Memoriam. (1850). London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street. p. 12.

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 the transmutation of species presented in the anonymously published book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), a speculative natural history about the negative theological implications of Nature functioning without divine direction."Early Victorian Verse", The New Encyclopædia Britannica, Volume 18, p. 455. 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.{{cite web |url=http://www.victorianweb.org/religion/altholz/a2.html |title=The Warfare of Conscience with Theology |access-date=6 November 2007 |author=Josef L. Altholz, Professor of History, University of Minnesota |year=1976 |work=The Mind and Art of Victorian England |publisher=Victorian Web }}

In Canto LV, the poet asks:

{{Poem quote|text=

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.}}

File:Alfred Tennyson by Lewis Carroll.jpg

In Canto LVI, the poet queries Nature about the existential circumstance of Man on planet Earth:Tennyson, A. In Memoriam. (1850). London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street. pp. 80–81.

{{Poem quote|text=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 before Charles Darwin published the book On the Origin of Species (1859), contemporary advocates for the theory of natural selection had adopted the poetical phrase Nature, red in tooth and claw (Canto LVI) to support their humanist arguments for the theory of human evolution.[http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/red-in-tooth-and-claw.html Red in Tooth and Claw], Gary Martin, Phrases, Sayings and Idioms at The Phrase Finder, 1996.

In Canto CXXII, Tennyson addresses the conflict between conscience and theology:

{{Poem quote|text=

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).AQA A AS English Literature: Victorian Literature: Student's Book

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.{{cite book|url-access=registration |title=Tennyson|last=Ricks |first=Christopher |year=1989 |isbn=9780520067844 |url=https://archive.org/details/tennyson0000rick/page/136 |publisher=University of California Press}}

In Canto XCIX, the poet writes:

{{Poem quote|text=

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:

{{Poem quote|text=

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:

{{Poem quote|text=

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:

{{Poem quote|text=

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:

{{Poem quote|text=

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 planet Earth was geologically active and far older than believed a century earlier.Landow, George P. (2012). [http://www.victorianweb.org/science/darwin/geochange.html "The hills are shadows, and they flow from form to form, and nothing stands"]. Victorian Web. Retrieved 1 March 2019

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.http://www.queenvictoriasjournals.org/home.do 5 January 1862 In 1862 and in 1883, Queen Victoria met Tennyson to tell him she much liked his poetry.http://www.queenvictoriasjournals.org/home.do 7 August 1883

In the novel The Tragedy of the Korosko (1898), 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 [poem] in our language".{{cite book | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=EpfPAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA330 | page=330 | publisher =Smith, Elder, & Company | first= Arthur Conan | last = Doyle | date= 1905 | title = The Tragedy of the Korosko }}

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..{{cite book |title=The Haunted Dolls' House and Other Ghost Stories: The Complete Ghost Stories of M. R. James |volume=2 |contributor-first=S. T. |contributor-last=Joshi |contribution=Explanatory Notes |publisher=Penguin Books |isbn=978-0143039396 |page=283-285 |year=2005 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=H1X2fB1PoYIC |contributor-link=S. T. Joshi |author-link=M. R. James |first=M. R. |last=James }}

Alan Hollinghurst, in his novel The 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 novel In Memoriam (2023) 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.{{Cite book |last=Winn |first=Alice |title=In Memoriam |publisher=Knopf Publishing Group |year=2023 |isbn=9780593534564 |location=United States}}

• The cycle of songs Four Songs from In Memoriam (1885), by Maude Valérie White{{Cite web |last=Howe |first=Rachel |date=2022 |title=Maude Valérie White {{!}} Composers |url=https://oxfordsong.org/composer/maude-val%C3%A9rie-white |access-date=2024-07-13 |website=Oxford Song}}
• The song "There Rolls the Deep" (1897), by Hubert Parry{{Cite journal |last=Allis |first=Michael |date=8 April 2022 |title=Refiguring the Poetic Elegy in Music: The Rhetoric of Mourning in Parry's Elegy for Brahms |url=https://academic.oup.com/ml/article/103/3/430/6564929 |journal=Music and Letters |volume=103 |issue=3 |pages=430–463 |doi=10.1093/ml/gcab101 |via=Oxford Academic}}
• Song cycle in 12 sections by Liza Lehmann (1899).Richard Stokes. The Penguin Book of English Song (2016), pp. 450-456
• The cycle of seven songs Under Alter'd Skies (2017), by Jonathan Dove{{Cite news |last=Jeal |first=Erica |date=2020-07-09 |title=Solitude review – loneliness or reverie? Intense songs with lockdown resonance |url=https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jul/09/solitude-review-james-gilchrist-anna-tilbrook-chandos |access-date=2024-07-13 |work=The Guardian|location=London|issn=0261-3077}}

{{reflist}}

• A. C. Bradley, A Commentary on Tennyson's In Memoriam. London, Macmillan and Co. 1901.

• [http://www.online-literature.com/tennyson/718/ Text of "In Memoriam A.H.H."] from The Literature Network.

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• {{librivox book | title=In Memoriam A.H.H. | author=Alfred, Lord TENNYSON}}

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Category:Poetry by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Category:British poems

Category:1849 poems