In Memoriam

In 1833 Alfred Tennyson's closest friend, the brilliant young Arthur Henry Hallam, engaged to Tennyson's sister, died suddenly in Vienna at twenty-two. Over the next seventeen years Tennyson wrote these 131 short poems of mourning, moving from shock and despair, through doubt, as the new science of geology seemed to show a nature 'red in tooth and claw', to a hard-won faith and hope: ''Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.'

Published anonymously in 1850, the poem became Queen Victoria's great comfort after the death of Prince Albert, and Tennyson was made Poet Laureate the same year. This is the first edition, published by Edward Moxon. Read Tennyson's Idylls of the King.