The Work
In Memoriam A.H.H. was published anonymously by Edward Moxon in May 1850, and its authorship was immediately attributed to Alfred Tennyson. It consists of 133 numbered sections plus a Prologue and Epilogue, written over seventeen years following the sudden death of Tennyson's closest friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, in Vienna on September 15, 1833. Hallam was twenty-two; Tennyson was twenty-four. The poem was composed not in one sitting but as a sequence of lyric fragments over more than a decade and a half, and it shows in its structure: the sections vary in tone, scope, and emotional register, united by the recurring stanza form (four lines of iambic tetrameter, rhyming ABBA - a form now called 'In Memoriam stanza').
The poem's reception was immediate and extraordinary. Queen Victoria, who read it after Prince Albert's death in 1861, said she found more comfort in it than in almost any book except the Bible. The Poet Laureateship was offered to Tennyson partly on the strength of the poem's publication. It sold 60,000 copies in the year of publication. It remains the most widely read Victorian elegy and one of the most important English-language meditations on faith, doubt, and the hope of resurrection.
Biblical Engagement
The poem's engagement with Scripture is extensive, structurally significant, and complicated by the fact that the poem represents a genuine crisis of faith, not a celebration of it. Tennyson is wrestling with Job, not imitating him; the biblical resonances are the language in which his grief speaks, not a settled doctrinal framework.
1 Corinthians 15:54 ('So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory') is the resurrection hope against which the poem's grief is measured. Section 130 approaches the Pauline climax: 'That each, who seems a separate whole, / Should move his rounds, and fusing all / The skirts of self again, should fall / Remerging in the general Soul.' But this is a vague Tennysonian pantheism rather than a specifically Pauline resurrection - the poem consistently approaches Christian hope and then retreats into something more diffuse.
Job 19:25-26 ('For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: and though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God') is the poem's most direct scriptural anchor. The famous Section 56 - 'Are God and Nature then at strife' - voices the Joban anguish with specific reference to natural selection (published the same year as Charles Darwin's first unpublished sketch): 'And he, shall he, / Man, her last work, who seemed so fair, / Such splendid purpose in his eyes, / Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies, / Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer, / Who trusted God was love indeed / And love Creation's final law - / Though Nature, red in tooth and claw / With ravine, shrieked against his creed.' The phrase 'nature red in tooth and claw' - one of the most famous in Victorian literature - is Tennyson's despairing paraphrase of a world where Job's innocent suffering appears to be not the exception but the rule.
Psalm 22:1 ('My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?') provides the emotional register of the poem's darkest sections. Section 3 ('O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me') and Section 50 ('Be near me when my light is low') are pure lament psalms, employing the direct address to God in the face of apparent divine absence that characterizes Psalms 22 and 88.
The Prologue (written last, in 1849, to frame the completed poem) is addressed directly to Christ as 'Strong Son of God, immortal Love' - a credal statement that frames the entire sequence in terms of Christological faith. But this profession of faith is made in full acknowledgment of its difficulty: 'We have but faith: we cannot know; / For knowledge is of things we see; / And yet we trust it comes from thee, / A beam in darkness: let it grow.' The movement from 'knowledge' to 'trust' to 'faith' is precisely the epistemological journey of the poem - and it draws on Hebrews 11:1 ('faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen').
The three Christmas sections (Sections 28, 78, and 104) structure the poem's temporal movement and mark Tennyson's relationship to the Christian liturgical calendar. The first Christmas after Hallam's death (Section 28) is a hollow ritual: 'When four years were / We lit the candles for Yule-tide, and ate.' The second (Section 78) is warmer. The third (Section 104) arrives at a tentative peace: 'No longer caring to embalm / In dying songs a dead regret, / But like a statue solid-set, / And moulded in colossal calm.' The movement from hollow ritual to living worship marks the poem's emotional arc.
Revelation 21:1-4 (the new creation, the wiping away of tears) provides the eschatological horizon toward which the poem moves. The Epilogue's marriage celebration - Tennyson's sister Cecilia marries Edmund Lushington - is explicitly presented as a figure of the eschatological union, 'A higher height, a deeper deep, / For Faustus reft of Paradise, / Regained it on the topmost height, / Breathed deep of God's new morning breath.'
Author and Context
Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, the fourth of twelve children of a Church of England rector. He attended Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became part of 'The Apostles,' an elite intellectual society whose most distinguished member in Tennyson's time was Arthur Henry Hallam. The relationship between Tennyson and Hallam was the defining friendship of Tennyson's life. Hallam was engaged to Tennyson's sister Emily at the time of his death.
Hallam died of a stroke in Vienna on September 15, 1833. The news reached Tennyson in England six weeks later. He had been composing lyric fragments for Hallam before the death; he continued composing them after, and the cumulative work became In Memoriam. The poem was thus composed in genuine grief, over real time, and its movement from despair to tentative hope reflects Tennyson's actual emotional journey - not a constructed narrative.
The poem was written against the backdrop of the Victorian crisis of faith, precipitated by the new geology (Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, 1830-1833) and the emerging evolutionary biology (Robert Chambers's Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, 1844). The discovery of deep geological time - billions of years of earth history in which species appeared and became extinct without any apparent divine purpose - challenged the providential interpretation of nature that had sustained British natural theology. Tennyson's poem engages this crisis directly: the famous 'red in tooth and claw' passage (Section 56) is the Victorian reader's confrontation with the indifferent mechanisms of natural selection, and the entire poem is an attempt to find a way to maintain Christian faith in the face of this confrontation.
Tennyson was appointed Poet Laureate in November 1850, partly on the strength of In Memoriam's publication. He held the position until his death in 1892, and became the voice of official Victorian sentiment, especially on matters of national loss and grief.
Structure and Key Sections
The poem's 133 sections fall into a loose three-part structure marked by the three Christmases. Part One (Sections 1-27, the first Christmas) is the period of initial shock, grief, and despair. Part Two (Sections 28-77, the second Christmas) is a period of slow emotional and intellectual recovery, punctuated by moments of mystical nearness to Hallam and moments of renewed despair. Part Three (Sections 78-131, the third Christmas) arrives at a tentative faith - not the confident faith of the Prologue's aspiration but a 'faith that looks through death.' The Epilogue is the marriage celebration that ritualizes the poem's movement from grief to hope.
Section 95 is the poem's mystical center. Tennyson is reading Hallam's letters on a summer night and falls into a trance state in which 'The living soul was flashed on mine, / And mine in this was wound': a moment of mystical union with the dead Hallam that draws on the tradition of mystical encounter from Paul's 'third heaven' (2 Corinthians 12:2-4) and the Song of Songs' experience of the beloved's presence.
Critical Reception
The poem's immediate reception was one of the most enthusiastic in Victorian literary history. Subsequent critical opinion has been more divided. T.S. Eliot, in his 1936 essay, called Tennyson 'the saddest of all English poets' and argued that the poem is great not because of its faith but because of its doubt: 'It is not religious because of the quality of its faith, but because of the quality of its feeling about faith.' This remains the dominant critical assessment.
Theological Significance
The poem's theological significance lies in its honest representation of faith as struggle rather than achievement. Tennyson does not offer the reader a doctrine of resurrection but a testimony to the difficulty of believing in resurrection when the evidence of natural history seems to deny it. This is the Joban tradition at its most contemporary: the ancient protest against divine silence takes new form in the face of the geological sublime.
Legacy
The poem's influence on subsequent literature is substantial. Hardy's In Memoriam echoes, Hopkins's 'terrible sonnets,' and the modern tradition of elegy all respond to Tennyson's model. In theology, the poem has been used as a primary text in discussions of the Victorian crisis of faith, theodicy, and the relationship between scientific cosmology and Christian hope.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Job 19:25-26 (the Redeemer who lives), Psalm 22 and Psalm 88 (the psalms of lament and abandonment), 1 Corinthians 15 (the resurrection chapter), Hebrews 11 (faith as the evidence of things not seen), Revelation 21:1-7 (the new creation), and John 11:1-44 (the raising of Lazarus, which Tennyson knew as the supreme biblical narrative of grief and resurrection).
Further Reading
- John D. Jump, Tennyson: The Critical Heritage (1967) - the standard collection of contemporary reviews and early critical responses. - A.C. Bradley, A Commentary on Tennyson's In Memoriam (1901) - still the most thorough structural and theological commentary. - Timothy Peltason, Reading In Memoriam (1985) - the best modern scholarly study of the poem's intellectual and theological dimensions.