In Memoriam 2

The Poem from In Memoriam A.H.H. | Introduction

“Poem” was originally published as the introductory passage to Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s booklength poem In Memoriam A. H. H. The complete poem consists of 131 sections and was written over the course of seventeen years, capturing the development of the poet’s grief over the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam. The influence of Hallam’s death can be seen in several of Tennyson’s poems, including “Ulysses,” “Tithonus,” “The Two Voices,” and “Break, break, break.” Tennyson met Hallam in the 1820s at Trinity College, Cambridge. Hallam was considered by his classmates to be one of the most promising scholars of the day, until his sudden death from a stroke in 1833, at age twenty-two. Hallam and Tennyson were close companions. They traveled through Europe together, and at the time of his death, Hallam was engaged to Tennyson’s sister Emily.

In Memoriam A. H. H. is considered one of the single most influential poems of the Victorian age. It was a favorite of Queen Victoria’s and her husband Prince Albert and was so admired by the royal couple that Tennyson was appointed poet laureate the year the poem was published. Throughout the last half of the century, In Memoriam A. H. H. was frequently quoted in church sermons, due to Tennyson’s masterful control of the language and the poem’s mournful contemplation of humanity’s relationship to the eternal. In modern times, the poem is seldom read in its 2,868-line entirety, but individual sections like “Proem” are considered examples of Tennyson’s poetry at its best.

The Poem from In Memoriam A.H.H. Summary

Lines 1–4
The “Proem” for Tennyson’s long poem In Memoriam A. H. H. literally opens with a strong beginning: the word “strong” emphasizes the speaker’s awe and gives the poem a powerful tone. The phrase “Strong Son of God” can be read in two ways. The most obvious of these is that it is a reference to Jesus, who is referred to frequently in Christian doctrine as the Son of God. This emphasis on God’s human element also serves to imply a human subject to the poem, perhaps Arthur Henry Hallam, who is not mentioned in “Proem,” but whose initials appear in the title of the longer poem. Throughout the longer poem, readers find more evidence that Tennyson has drawn a connection between Christ and Hallam, whom he represents as a figure for the higher race of humanity that is expected to develop from Christ’s prophesied second-coming.

The last three lines of this first stanza refer to the unknown aspects of God. Tennyson points out that human faith is based on a lack of direct experience, noting that people believe in God even though they cannot see Him.

Lines 5–8
Ancient and medieval astronomers believed that the Earth was surrounded by a series of transparent orbs, or spheres, that rotated around it, accounting for the change from night to day, which the poem refers to in line 5. Saying that they are God’s is Tennyson’s way of noting that God holds power over all the universe. Even more impressive is the power, noted in line 6, to make life, and the corresponding power to make death. Line 8 uses the image of a foot crushing a skull to show how God maintains control over the life that He has made.

Lines 9–12
Tennyson follows the brutal image of God’s foot on man’s skull with the declaration that God is in fact good and concerned and will not abandon humanity to the mechanical world. There is a slight shift in the voice of the poem’s speaker from line 9, which refers to humanity as “us,” to line 10, in which “man” is referred to as “him.” This shift becomes clear in the rest of the stanza, in which the speaker shows that a normal person feels entitled to more than just death: the poem’s speaker, on the other hand, is willing to accept anything that God decides to do for or to humanity. He has complete faith that, regardless what happens or how it seems at the time, God is just.