By Emma Laws, Cathedral Librarian
I hold it true what’er befall,
I feel it when I suffer most
Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
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These familiar words are from In Memoriam, a collection of verses by Alfred Lord Tennyson, published by Edward Moxon in 1850. The Cathedral Library has the 1859 edition in its original publisher’s cloth case binding – and in a conveniently portable size.
In Memoriam is a monument to a lost love. Tennyson wrote the verses to the memory of his close friend, Arthur Hallam, who died in 1833 at the age of just twenty-two. The two men had met at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Hallam had become engaged to Tennyson’s sister, Emilia. In Memoriam is Tennyson’s grief journal; he wrote the verses over a period of nearly two decades as he gradually came to terms with the sudden loss of his friend.
Poetry – especially poetry about love – provides us with a repertoire of feelings and emotions that we can dip into when we can’t quite find the right words to express how we feel. In Canto 52 of In Memoriam, Tennyson describes his verses as ‘only words … upon the topmost froth of thought’, yet his words have become proverbs – truths about the value of love and of loving someone. We carry his words within us.
Tennyson journeyed from despair to hope and from doubt to faith. In Memoriam ends with a wedding – a declaration of hope – and Tennyson acknowledges that love has ‘grown to something greater than before’. He also comes to understand his love for his friend within the continuum of God’s love. In the opening of In Memoriam, Tennyson addresses God as ‘immortal Love’; towards the end, Tennyson resolves that, since Arthur Hallam is now ‘past, present, and to be’, his love for him is immortal, too. Tennyson sees that death is an extension of life and love goes on.
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An invitation
We invite you to come along to our next ‘In Focus’ session, taking place on Thursday 12 February between 1pm-3pm inside the Cathedral Library, so that you may explore more examples and expressions of love divine. Click here to find out more.