When his closest friend Arthur Henry Hallam died suddenly in 1833, Tennyson began writing short lyrics of grief that grew over seventeen years into a single long poem. Its sections move from despair through doubt about God and nature, red in tooth and claw, toward hesitant faith. This text follows the first edition of 1850.
Among the great elegies in English and the poem Queen Victoria said comforted her most after Albert’s death. Download the free EPUB.