Теннисонның «In Memoriam A. H. H.» поэмасы

1850 poem by Tennyson

The poem In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, is an elegy for his Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died of cerebral haemorrhage at the age of twenty two years, in Vienna in 1833. As a sustained exercise in tetrametric lyrical verse, Tennyson's poetical reflections extend beyond the meaning of the death of Hallam, thus, In Memoriam also explores the random cruelty of Nature seen from the conflicting perspectives of materialist science and declining Christian faith in the Victorian era (1837–1901), the poem thus is an elegy, a requiem, and a dirge for a friend, a time, and a place.

In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850) is an elegiac, narrative poem in 2,916 lines of iambic tetrameter, composed in 133 cantos, each canto headed with a Roman numeral, and organised in three parts: (i) the prologue, (ii) the poem, and (iii) the epilogue. After seventeen years of composing, writing, and editing, from 1833 to 1850, Tennyson anonymously published the poem under the Latin title "In Memoriam A. H. H. Obiit MDCCCXXXIII" (In Memoriam A. H. H. 1833). Moreover, upon the literary, artistic, and commercial success of the poetry, Tennyson further developed the poem and added Canto LIX: 'O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me' to the 1851 edition; and then added Canto XXXIX: 'Old warder of these buried bones' to the 1871 edition. The epilogue concludes "In Memoriam" with an epithalamium, a nuptial poem for the poet's sister, Cecilia Tennyson, on her wedding to the academic Edmund Law Lushington, in 1842.

Written in iambic tetrameter (four line ABBA stanzas), the poetical metre of In Memoriam A. H. H. creates the tonal effects of the sounds of grief and mourning. In 133 cantos, including the prologue and the epilogue, Tennyson uses the stylistic beats of tetrameter to address the subjects of spiritual loss and themes of nostalgia, philosophic speculation, and Romantic fantasy in service to mourning the death of his friend, the poet A. H. Hallam; thus, in Canto IX, Tennyson describes the return of the corpse to England: "Fair ship, that from the Italian shore / Saileth the placid ocean plains / With my lost Arthur's remains, / Spread thy full wings and waft o'er him".

In the novel The Tragedy of the Korosko (1898), by Arthur Conan Doyle, characters quote poetic by citing Canto LIII of In Memoriam: "Oh yet we trust that somehow good / will be the final goal of ill"; and by citing Canto LIV: "I falter where I firmly trod"; whilst another character says that Lord Tennyson's "In Memoriam" is "the grandest and the deepest and the most inspired [poem] in our language". Alice Winn's novel In Memoriam (2023) mentions In Memoriam throughout the novel, with the principal characters discussing writing their own "In Memoriam" poems for each other if they die in World War I.

In Memoriam was a favourite poem of Queen Victoria, who after the death of her husband, the Prince Consort Albert, was "soothed & pleased" by the feelings explored in Tennyson's poem. In 1862 and in 1883, Queen Victoria met Tennyson to tell him she much liked his poetry.