Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “In Memoriam A.H.H.” captures the grief of losing a friend. More profoundly, it articulates the more significant doubts such grief occasions.
The poem contains many oft-quoted phrases that you probably didn’t know came from this poem.
It was Tennyson who called Nature “red in tooth and claw,” and it was Tennyson who observed, “Better to have loved and lost, / Than never to have loved at all.”
The poem has 133 sections, all elegiac. While reading a selection of them today, my favorite was LI. The number has a biblical significance; Psalm 51 is the famous penitential hymn where David repents of his sin with Bathsheba. Tennyson strikes a note of despondency, a familiar tone in the Psalms, but mourns the world’s brokenness rather than his shortcomings.
Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is rack’d with pangs that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a Fury slinging flame.
Time and Life are the enemies. They attack Tennyson’s faith by confronting him with mortality (“dust”) and damnation (“flame”). What’s so powerful about Tennyson’s poem is how it captures the doubt we feel when we are emotionally and physically broken.
Covenantally, this poem is about sanctions and succession. Tennyson wants to know why the good suffer and what kind of eternal promise awaits those who serve God. Tennyson knows the answer in his head. In the poem’s prologue, he writes:
Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:
Thou madest man, he knows not why,
He thinks he was not made to die;
And thou hast made him: thou art just.
By the poem’s conclusion, Tennyson takes the proposition that God made man with the implication that man will live eternally and applies it to himself.
Experiments in Criticism 