In Memoriam A.H.H. is built from 131 short cantos, framed by a prologue and an epilogue — together around 2,900 lines, written over roughly seventeen years.
Excerpts
The selections below are drawn from across the poem and arranged in sequence, to follow its movement from raw grief, through doubt, to a hard-won faith. Each is identified by its canto number; the full poem is far longer than what appears here.
From the Prologue: The Faith That Frames the Whole
Strong Son of God, immortal Love, Whom we, that have not seen thy face, By faith, and faith alone, embrace, Believing where we cannot prove;
Canto 7: The Empty House
Dark house, by which once more I stand Here in the long unlovely street, Doors, where my heart was used to beat So quickly, waiting for a hand, A hand that can be clasp’d no more— Behold me, for I cannot sleep, And like a guilty thing I creep At earliest morning to the door. He is not here; but far away The noise of life begins again, And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain On the bald street breaks the blank day.
Canto 27: “’Tis Better to Have Loved and Lost”
I hold it true, whate’er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; ’Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.
Canto 54: Trust, and the Cry in the Dark
Behold, we know not anything; I can but trust that good shall fall At last—far off—at last, to all, And every winter change to spring. So runs my dream: but what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry.
From Canto 56: “Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw”
‘So careful of the type?’ but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.’
. . .
Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law—
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed—
From Canto 106: “Ring Out, Wild Bells”
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
. . .
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.
From the Epilogue — The Final Affirmation
That God, which ever lives and loves, One God, one law, one element, And one far-off divine event, To which the whole creation moves.
On This Page: Summary · Background · Analysis and Themes · Form and Technique · Notable Lines · Glossary · Related Poems
Summary
In Memoriam A.H.H. is Tennyson’s vast elegy for his closest friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly at twenty-two. Across 131 short cantos written over some seventeen years, it follows the mourner’s slow, halting movement from the first shock of grief, through a long crisis of religious and scientific doubt, toward a faith reached only after great struggle. The excerpts on this page trace that journey.
The Prologue frames the whole with an act of faith; Canto 7 stands desolate outside the dead friend’s empty house at dawn; Canto 27 reaches the famous consolation that it is “better to have loved and lost”; Cantos 54 and 56 sink into the deepest doubt, where the speaker is “an infant crying in the night” and Nature itself, “red in tooth and claw,” seems to mock the idea of a loving God; Canto 106 rings in renewal and hope with the wild New Year bells; and the Epilogue closes on a serene vision of “one far-off divine event, / To which the whole creation moves.”
Background
Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892) met Arthur Henry Hallam at Cambridge, and the two became inseparable; Hallam was also engaged to Tennyson’s sister. In 1833 Hallam died abruptly, of a stroke, at twenty-two. The loss devastated Tennyson, and over the next seventeen years he wrote the short poems that he eventually gathered into In Memoriam A.H.H., published anonymously in 1850 — the same year he was made Poet Laureate. He composed the cantos in no fixed order, as grief came and went, and only late assembled them into the sequence and added the Prologue (written in 1849) to frame it.
The poem became the central elegy of the Victorian age and a genuine cultural touchstone; Queen Victoria is said to have found it, after the Bible, her greatest comfort following the death of Prince Albert. Two facts give it special weight. First, it was written before Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), yet it already wrestles with the disturbing new geology — the evidence of vast time and mass extinction — that was shaking Victorian faith. Second, the distinctive four-line stanza Tennyson uses throughout is now simply called the “In Memoriam stanza,” named for this poem.
Analysis and Themes
In Memoriam is usually summarized as a journey from doubt to faith, and that is true. But what has made it endure is not the faith it arrives at; it is the honesty and depth of the doubt it travels through. Three things are worth following: why the doubt outweighs the faith, the famous confrontation with a cruel and indifferent nature, and the long shape of grief that the whole sequence enacts.
A Faith Made of Doubt
T. S. Eliot made the famous observation that In Memoriam is a great poem not because of the quality of its faith but because of the quality of its doubt — and the excerpts here show why. The Prologue and Epilogue bookend the work with confident belief: “By faith, and faith alone, embrace, / Believing where we cannot prove,” and at the close, “one far-off divine event, / To which the whole creation moves.” But these were composed late, after the struggle was over, and laid around the outside of the poem like a frame. The 131 cantos between them tell a different, far less settled story. Their grief is raw, their questions genuinely unanswered, and their most powerful passages — the bleak dawn of Canto 7, the cry of Canto 54, the despair of Canto 56 — are more convincing than the reassurances that surround them. That is precisely the source of the poem’s lasting power and its strikingly modern feel: it does not pretend faith comes easily, and it lets the doubt speak in its own full voice.
Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw
The deepest point of doubt is Canto 56, and it is also where the poem becomes a document of its whole era. Tennyson had read the new geology, which revealed an earth unimaginably old and littered with the bones of vanished species. In the canto, he personifies Nature and lets her speak with chilling indifference: she is not even “careful of the type” — the species — for “a thousand types are gone: / I care for nothing, all shall go.” Against this stands Man, who “trusted God was love indeed / And love Creation’s final law” — and the famous line crashes that hope: “Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw / With ravine, shriek’d against his creed.” A natural world built on predation, waste, and extinction seems to scream against the belief that love is the law of creation. This is the Victorian crisis of faith in four lines, written years before Darwin gave the mechanism a name, and the phrase “red in tooth and claw” has been the shorthand for nature’s violence ever since. The poem does not refute the horror; it simply, eventually, decides to keep trusting in spite of it.
The Long Road from Grief to Faith
What the sequence captures better than almost any other poem is that grief is not a moment but a process — slow, recursive, measured in years and seasons. The excerpts trace its stages. Canto 7 is the rawest: the mourner creeping “like a guilty thing” to the door of the dead man’s house before dawn, finding only the indifferent day breaking on a “bald street.” Canto 27 reaches the first real consolation, the hard-won conviction that the love was worth the loss. Cantos 54 and 56 then plunge back down into doubt — proof that the road does not run straight. Only much later, in Canto 106, does the mood genuinely lift, as the New Year bells “ring out the old, ring in the new” and at last “ring in the Christ that is to be.” The poem is organized around three successive Christmases, marking time as the mourner slowly changes, and its final faith feels earned precisely because we have watched it cost so much. The most quoted line in the poem — “’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all” — is often tossed off as a greeting-card sentiment, but in context it is the opposite: a conclusion wrung out of seventeen years of mourning.
Form and Technique
The whole poem is written in one stanza form, used so memorably that it now bears the poem’s name: the “In Memoriam stanza,” four lines of iambic tetrameter rhyming ABBA. That enclosed rhyme scheme is quietly perfect for elegy. Because the rhyme folds back on itself — the first and last lines chiming, the middle pair locked inside — each stanza turns inward and returns to where it began, rather than driving forward to a final couplet.
Critics have long noted how this circling, unprogressing motion mirrors the experience of grief itself, which does not advance in a line but keeps coming back to the same loss. The short four-beat lines add a sense of constraint and effort, of language labouring under a weight.
Just as important is the larger structure. In Memoriam is not one continuous poem but a sequence of 131 separate cantos, each a self-contained lyric of varying length and mood. Written piecemeal over many years, this mosaic form lets the poem move in waves — a canto of despair beside a canto of calm, doubt returning long after it seemed resolved — which is far truer to how mourning actually unfolds than a single smooth narrative would be.
Recurring images thread the sequence together and chart the change: hands (the clasped hand “that can be clasp’d no more”), light and dark (the “blank day” of early grief against the later dawns of hope), and above all bells — the tolling funeral bell of the opening cantos transformed, by Canto 106, into the wild, joyful New Year bells of renewal.
Notable Lines
Three of the poem’s most famous moments, drawn from the excerpts above.
’Tis better to have loved and lost
Canto 27
Than never to have loved at all.
Probably the most quoted lines Tennyson ever wrote, and almost always quoted out of context as easy comfort. Within the poem they are anything but easy: a conviction the mourner has to fight his way to, and one the very next cantos will test almost to breaking.
And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
Canto 7
On the bald street breaks the blank day.
One of the bleakest images of grief in English. After a sleepless vigil at the dead friend’s door, the dawn brings no comfort — only an indifferent world resuming. The hammering, joyless “b” sounds of “bald … breaks … blank” make the daybreak itself feel like a blow.
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
Canto 56
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed—
The line that named a whole idea. A natural order built on bloodshed and extinction seems to scream against the belief that love rules creation — the central doubt of the Victorian age, captured before science had even fully framed the question.
Glossary
A few terms and references in the excerpts:
- A.H.H. (title) — Arthur Henry Hallam (1811–1833), Tennyson’s closest friend, engaged to the poet’s sister, whose sudden death the poem mourns.
- canto — a major numbered division of a long poem; In Memoriam is made of 131 of them.
- scarped (Canto 56) — cut into a steep face or cliff, as by erosion or quarrying; the exposed rock that revealed Earth’s deep geological past.
- type (Canto 56) — a species or kind; “a thousand types are gone” means a thousand whole species have become extinct.
- ravine (Canto 56) — here not a valley but an old word for rapacity or the violent seizing of prey (related to “ravening”); Nature feeding on life.
- fanes (Canto 56) — temples or places of worship; man builds “fanes of fruitless prayer.”
Related Poems
If this poem moves you, these three stand near it as elegies and as reckonings with death.
- Lycidas by John Milton: The towering English elegy that stands behind Tennyson’s, a young poet mourning a drowned friend and wrestling, as Tennyson does, with whether such a death can have meaning in a just universe.
- Adonais by Percy Bysshe Shelley: Shelley’s great Romantic elegy for the young John Keats, another long and ambitious mourning of a brilliant life cut off too soon.
- Crossing the Bar by Alfred Tennyson: Tennyson’s own late, serene poem of facing death, where the long doubt of In Memoriam has finally resolved into the quiet, hard-won hope of meeting his Pilot — a fitting coda to the journey this poem records.