In Memoriam A.H.H.

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 in Vienna, at the age of twenty-two years, in 1833. As a sustained exercise in tetrametric lyrical verse, Tennyson's poetical reflections extend beyond the meaning of the death of Hallam. In Memoriam also explores the random cruelty of Nature seen from the conflicting perspectives of materialist science and the declining Christian faith of the Victorian era (1837–1901). The poem is thus 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 (1833 to 1850) of composing, writing, and editing, Tennyson anonymously published the poem under the Latin title In Memoriam A.H.H. Obiit MDCCCXXXIII (In Memoriam A.H.H. 1833). Upon the literary, artistic, and commercial success of the poem, Tennyson further developed it 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.