In Memoriam

Literature is sometimes the most constant reminder that there is some humanity in life... that there are words that can be said about tragedy, death, loss, and despair.

An elegy is a lyric poem lamenting death. Some of the most well-known elegies include: Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Bereavement," Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," W. H. Auden's "In Memory of W.B. Yeats." And, there are many more. Of course, one of the most famous elegies in literature was written by Alfred Lord Tennyson after his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, died suddenly at the age of 22. Hallam was a poet, critic, and member of the Cambridge Apostles. He was engaged to marry Tennyson's sister, and was Tennyson's closest friend and confidant. After Hallam's death, Tennyson spent the next 17 years (1833-1849) writing the 133 poems that were finally published in 1850 as "In Memoriam." That same year, Tennyson was made Poet Laureate, successor to Wordsworth. With the financial success of this work, he was finally able to marry Emily Sellwood. Tennyson's ultimate happiness came about in part because of this work. In the work as a whole, Tennyson moves from despair to doubt to hope to faith. In Section V, Tennyson writes:

I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.

But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold:
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.

Then, in Section VII, he writes:

He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

"In Memoriam" ends with an epithalamion, celebrating the marriage of Tennyson's sister Cecilia to Edmund Lushington in 1842. He writes:

O happy hour, behold the bride
With him to whom her hand I gave.
They leave the porch, they pass the grave
That has today its sunny side...