Poem Of The Week : From In Memoriam A.H.H. By Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

Tennyson’s elegy to his Cambridge University friend Arthur Hallam, who died in 1833 at the age of twenty-two, is a recognised landmark of Victorian literature. A long poem of formal rhyming quatrains that toll in melancholic iambics like the figurative bell of Thomas Gray's Elegy, both theme and execution of In Memoriam, published in 1850, precisely mirror the predilections of an age of premature death and sustained mourning. Maudlin in tone, relentlessly lachrymose, Tennyson’s poem enshrines Hallam in the popular imagination more efficiently than the latter could ever have achieved in his short life.

The favoured poet of Queen Victoria – he was Laureate from the year of the publication of In Memoriam to his death in 1892 - Tennyson’s mood, here, is the touchstone for a generation. Giving vicarious solace to the bereaved, his words speak to a profoundly personal but also to a shared experience, no more so than for Victoria herself, whose loss of her husband, Prince Albert in 1861, precipitated many years of mourning, throughout which the poem yielded an ever-present sense of consolation.

The trauma of despair is visited on Tennyson’s narrator in sufficient weight to utterly transform mood: architecture and landscape are perceived through a darkening lens that renders aesthetic considerations meaningless. Streets are ‘unlovely’ and the rain drizzles in a vapid, insomniac anti-drama of grief and isolation.

Tennyson’s realisation of futility and emptiness is masterfully worked; this brief excerpt crystallizes the poem’s theme and the somnolent cloud that hangs over In Memoriam is inescapable. Hanging on the irony of a strict metrical arrangement – the sense of deep depression might have overwhelmed any commitment to form – it is significant that the measured iambics fracture only in the final line, whose alliterative gravitas almost embodies the brute vision it describes:

‘On the bald street breaks the blank day.’

‘In Memoriam A.H.H. vii’ is taken from Tennyson : Poems and Plays (1971) and was originally published by the Oxford University Press