While on holiday in Vienna in 1833, the English poet Arthur Henry Hallam died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage, aged just twenty-two. Over the next seventeen years, one of his close friends and fellow poets worked on an elegy in his honour. “In Memoriam A.H.H.” was published anonymously in 1850; later that same year, its author, Alfred Tennyson, was appointed Poet Laureate.
Tennyson’s poem is a remarkable work of mourning, one that perhaps predictably struck a chord with the most famous mourner of the era, Queen Victoria herself. The poem’s most enduring legacy however is one specific phrase from Canto XXVIII, which has become familiar to the point of cliché. Here it is, in its original context:
I hold it true, whate’er befall; I feel it when I sorrow most; ‘Tis better to have loved
