1054 Tennyson, Lord Alfred
injury that Hallam’s death wrought within him. The
end result is that the poet’s grief helps him to bet-
ter love—a necessity that is pointed out in the first
stanza, where he notes that he must let “Love clasp
Grief lest both be drown’d.” The line points out
an important paradoxical relationship between the
speaker and his grief: In order to find consolation
for his loss, he must experience deeper layers of grief
so that he may transcend the limitations of time and
space that Hallam’s death represents. Otherwise, if
the poet abandons himself to utter despair, he denies
the validity of the love he and his friend had shared
because it would merely be based on mortal, physi-
cal proximity. Reclaiming the transcendent nature of
their friendship requires the poet, then, to undergo
the torrents of grief that threaten to ravage his very
soul.
Throughout the poem, Tennyson wavers between
the agony of loss and the belief in the transcendence
of his relationship with Hallam. One of the great
lessons the poet learns as he works through his
grief is the necessity of embracing his sorrow. This
is summed up in stanza 59, where he notes that his
grief will be “No casual mistress, but a wife.” He has
managed to attain the understanding that his grief
must “put thy harsher moods aside, / If thou wilt
have me wise and good.” The poet indicates that one
cannot be endlessly tossed by the storms of despair
and sorrow, but must learn to ride the waves and
discover the wisdom that grief can teach. In part, the
poet learns that his grief confirms the eternal nature
of his friendship since he would otherwise not expe-
rience such profound levels of emotional disruption.
As the poem progresses, the speaker also begins
to learn that grief is a product of memory. For
instance, in stanzas 100–104, his family moves to
a new location, and though the departure from a
locale he had long associated with the happy times
he and Hallam had spent together causes an upwell-
ing of sorrow, he also discovers that his memories of
his friend and their times together are not fixed to
a specific physical location. In fact, the poet deter-
mines that nostalgia for the past is a major source
of his sorrow, and this is the beginning of a change
in his attitude that will eventually help him learn
to cope with his grief. As the poem moves toward
its conclusion, Tennyson realizes that Hallam is an
inspirational figure who holds out hope for him
and human potential rather than a dusty memory
of bygone times that can never be recovered. This
altered understanding of his friend’s role in his con-
tinuing life begins to assuage his grief and turn his
mind toward the future.
The ebullient turn in the poem is represented by
stanza 106, which instructs the church bells peal-
ing at the New Year to “Ring out the old, ring in
the new . . . Ring out the grief that saps the mind.”
Clearly, the poet has had a change of conscious-
ness brought about by his long journey through the
depths of despair. Though the emotional journey
was difficult, it was a necessary and instructive part
of his life: “For all we thought and loved and did, /
And hoped, and suffer’d, is but seed / Of what in
them is flower and fruit.” The poem’s latter sections
reveal the poet’s movement toward understanding
and acceptance of his friend’s sudden death, and
though the old religious sentiments that sustained
earlier generations are not present for him, he is still
able to find refuge, even hope, for the poet’s past and
his future are not defined by the harsh reality of loss
but bound together by the common experience into
a unified whole that transcends the limitations of
time. Thus, his grief at his untimely loss of Hallam
turns into a celebration of the human potential for
renewal and love—concepts that Tennyson would
not have learned to appreciate so deeply without
experiencing the profound grief that Hallam’s death
brought.
Joseph BeckerreLIGIon in In Memoriam A. H. H.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H.
consists of 133 sections (including a prologue and
epilogue) written between 1833 and 1849 and pub-
lished in 1850. In the poem, Tennyson describes
his spiritual and emotional journey from grief and
despair at the sudden loss of his best friend, Arthur
Henry Hallam, to eventual acceptance. The religious
tone of the poem begins in doubt, with the speaker
distraught and despairing over the loss of his young
friend. Hallam’s death forces the poet to question his
faith in life, God, and even his own poetical abilities.
Indeed, Tennyson’s early poems had been savagely
reviewed by critics but defended by Hallam. How-