Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 54:214 (Apr 1897)
Article: Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”
Author: Theodore W. Hunt

BSac 54:214 (Apr 1897) p. 249

Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”

Theodore W. Hunt

There are few readers of Tennyson who, if compelled to select one of his poems to the exclusion of all others, would not choose the “In Memoriam “as the most representative single production. Whatever praise may rightfully be accorded to the “Idyls of the King,” to “Maud,” or “The Princess” or to “Becket” as the best of his dramas, this magnificent threnody is so comprehensive and vital, so full of mind and soul and art and suggestion, that it stands alone, and unapproachably alone, among the poems of the author and among those of any of his contemporaries.

It is, in fact, a poem so much greater than the theme of it, or the sad event that suggested and inspired it, that there is almost an incongruity in the contrast, and the wonder increases, upon every renewed reading of it, that such a work of thought and feeling could have been based upon a foundation so limited and local. Our purpose in the study of this poem will best be subserved by noting, with some degree of regularity, the various topics of interest that arise as we peruse and examine it.

1. As to its Occasion. This is a matter of historical fact, and is found, as we know, in the death of Arthur Henry Hallam, the poet’s college companion and intimate personal friend. His death at Vienna, September 15, 1833, marks the actual origin as well as the occasion of the poem, inasmuch as it was in this year that Tennyson began

BSac 54:214 (Apr 1897) p. 250

its composition, not completing it fully until seventeen years after, the year 1850, the middle year of the century, and the forty-first of the author’s long and illustrious career. It is thus that he calls it, An Elegy, while it is also a Eulogy, as he reiterates and impresses the .varied virtues of his beloved Arthur; taking occasion, thereby, to exalt the personal qualities of all true characters in every age and clime. As already suggested, such an event as this, the untimely death of a college friend, would scarcely seem a fitting theme for so elaborate a production, and seems like magnifying one of the most ordinary incidents of our every-day life into a place of undeserved prominence; and yet the poet deals with the theme, both in its local and universal character, as a specific event of sorrow in his personal history as a man, and, also, as a general event of historic character in the developing history of men. The death of the gifted Hallam is thus but the text of a broad and thoroughly elaborated system of truth—a fact in life and providence and human history awakening attention to a thousand other related and wider reaching facts—a germinal idea or principle whose prolific fruitage is as undying as it is abundant.

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