In the Library
In Memoriam A.H.H.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1850
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 1.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 133
- Length
- Length 19k words
£1.99
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'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
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- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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About the book
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky. One section is set on a New Year's Eve, the bells carrying across the midnight snow as Tennyson asks them to ring out the grief that saps the mind. In Memoriam A.H.H. is the elegy he kept writing for seventeen years after Arthur Henry Hallam, the dearest friend of his youth, died without warning in Vienna at twenty-two. It runs to 131 sections, each sealed in a four-line stanza whose outer rhymes reach across the inner pair to close, the shape of a hand trying to hold what is no longer there. The years of its making were the years geology was quietly unmaking Victorian faith, and Tennyson refused to look away: nature is red in tooth and claw, and still he asked whether love could outlast what the mind now honestly knew. The famous verdict, that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, is nothing handed over cheaply here. It was won across seventeen winters, against everything that wanted it to be untrue.