Grief's Grammar
On In Memoriam and what form does to feeling
In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850) was seventeen years in the making. Tennyson began writing the elegies in 1833 after the sudden death of his close friend Arthur Hallam, and published them nearly two decades later. The form he invented -- what we now call the 'In Memoriam stanza' -- turns out to be the argument.
The stanza that circles back
The In Memoriam stanza is four lines of iambic tetrameter rhyming ABBA. The pattern -- out and back, always returning to where it started -- is unusual. The more common elegiac move is forward, narrative, progressive: grief as a journey toward some resolution. Tennyson's stanza refuses that. It circles back. You reach the fourth line and you're at the rhyme of the first line again, just a beat later.
This is not incidental to what the poem is about. The lyric speakers of In Memoriam are trying to move past grief and finding, section after section, that they cannot stay moved. The ABBA pattern enacts this at the level of the line: you advance (B, B) and return (A). Grief's grammar, Tennyson is saying, is this. Not a line but a loop.
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.
Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), xxvii
Faith and doubt as equals
What Queen Victoria famously said about In Memoriam -- that it comforted her after Prince Albert's death -- is true but incomplete. The poem isn't comfortable. It earns its consolation through 130-odd sections of genuine doubt. The faith in the later sections is not a given; it's what survives the argument.
Section xxvii ('I hold it true, whate'er befall') is the most quoted passage because it sounds like resolution. But it comes early in the poem, before the harder, darker sections. Tennyson placed it there deliberately: he knows you'll quote it, and he wants you to earn the right to quote it by reading what comes after.
Why the anthology excerpts it here
The 1881 anthology gives In Memoriam two pages, placed immediately after Dickens's storm scene from David Copperfield. The adjacency is interesting: both are about loss that arrives suddenly, from outside, without warning. The Dickens storm is all external turbulence. The Tennyson lyric is what's left after the storm -- the interior work of carrying what happened.
Placing them together, the anthology suggests a reading of the Victorian sensibility: the capacity to witness extreme external drama and then to sit with it internally, in measured form, long enough to understand what it means. The ABBA stanza is not a retreat from the Dickens storm. It's what you do with it afterward.