To one pure image of regret.”
ARTHUR HALLAM
Other sections speak of Arthur Hallam, and as each Christmas comes round, or each birthday of his friend, the poet’s feelings are voiced in such a way that, if we read it with care, the poem gives us a good deal of the author’s own life history.
Arthur Hallam died on September 15, 1833, at Vienna, and his remains were brought home at the end of the year and interred at Clevedon in Somersetshire on January 4, 1834.
“The Danube to the Severn gave
The darken’d heart that beat no more;
They laid him by the pleasant shore
And in the hearing of the wave.”
Immediately after his death Tennyson had turned to work as the one solace in his overwhelming grief, although, but for those dependent on his aid, such as his sister Emily who was betrothed to Hallam, he said that he himself would have gladly died. He wrote the fine classic poem Ulysses, in which he voiced the need he felt of going forward and braving the struggle of life, and then, before it had reached England, he wrote the first section of In Memoriam No. 9 addressed to the ship with its sad burden.
“Fair ship that from the Italian shore