Extract

Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

A ship carries a coffin home across the sea, and a young poet begins to write his way through a grief that will take seventeen years to find its form. Alfred, Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam, published in 1850, mourns Arthur Henry Hallam, the brilliant friend whose sudden death at twenty-two shattered the world that had made sense. Composed in 131 linked sections of an abba stanza Tennyson made permanently his own, the poem moves through doubt, despair, and the new terrors of geological time before arriving at a hard-won faith that love survives the body. It is the great Victorian confrontation between feeling and science, between the heart's insistence on meaning and the fossil record's silence. It does not resolve. It endures.