A memoirist records: ‘I only once heard him talk much about Arthur Hallam, and that was one evening over his port wine when he dwelt on his intellectual power, on his geniality, on his courtesy, and ended by saying, “How you would have loved him!” ‘ (IR 113). Arthur Hallam, the brightest star among the Apostles (the society features in IM lxxxvii), the fiancé of Tennyson's sister, and the subject of Tennyson's greatest poem, In Memoriam A. H. H. Obiit MDCCCXXXIII, died, suddenly, from a blood vessel burst in his brain, at the age of 22, in September 1833. The first sections of In Memoriam to be written date from the month Tennyson learned of the death; it grew and grew over the next seventeen years, haphazardly: ‘I did not write them with any view of weaving them into a whole, or for publication, until I found that I had written so many,’ Hallam Tennyson, his son, reported the poet saying (M. i. 304); ‘The general way of its being written was so queer that if there were a blank space I would put in a poem’ (IR 96). Rearranged into a fictive chronological order spanning nine years (‘Epilogue’, l. 10), it was finally published, with some important revisions made on the eve of its appearance, in 1850.

The preoccupations I have been describing as Tennysonian – change and recurrence, progress and the resistance to progress – find a local habitation in the occasion of grief. Loss naturally plunges the bereaved into a life largely composed of repeats: as Alphonso Smith, one of our analysts of poetic repetition from Chapter 1, puts it, ‘the elegiac mood, in which the thought turns back so often upon itself, is best voiced by some form of repetition’. But, as a genre, elegy must fulfil duties other than sad recollection: its purpose is to recall, but to be prospective too.