In Memoriam A.H.H.
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson(1850)
“'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
One great work, every day
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson(1850)
“'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson(1850)
Tennyson spent seventeen years writing this elegy for his closest friend Arthur Hallam, who died suddenly at twenty-two. The poem moves through 131 sections of varying moods: despair, doubt, tentative faith, and something like acceptance. The stanza form Tennyson invented for it, with its enclosed rhyme scheme, creates a sense of turning inward, of thought circling back on itself. Victorian England found in it a language for grief that accommodated religious uncertainty. 'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all: the line has become so familiar we forget it was forged in genuine anguish. The poem is a cathedral built from loss.