In Memoriam A. H. H.

Abstract

This is a composite work, represented best perhaps by the title of the trial edition, ‘Fragments of an Elegy’. It consists of a series of poems, written at various periods, mainly in the earlier years, from 1833 to 1849, with reference to Arthur Hallam’s sudden death in Vienna at the age of twenty-two. Many are composed singly, others sequentially; ultimately they were arranged in relatively homogeneous groups, irrespective of the order of composition, to present a whole range of feelings, with philosophical and religious reflections, on the way to recovery from the doubts and fears which assailed Tennyson’s faith in consequence of the loss of one who had been the mainspring of his hope. The shock revived familiar forms of scepticism (the resolution of which had been the subject of ‘The Two Voices’) with numbing and sometimes agonizing persistence.