An Act of Remembering: Control and Mourning in Tennyson’s In Memoriam Mack Hammond College

Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam, a poem of substantial length that he wrote in mourning of his best friend Arthur Henry Hallum, has withstood the test of time into the 21st century as a celebrated work that explores how humans work through trauma upon being presented with sudden loss. Tennyson experienced the various stages of this very trauma while writing In Memoriam, capturing his spirit’s struggle in the moments and then years afterwards. In the work, Tennyson often depicts himself as having little control over this mourning process, though it can be argued that he is desperate for this sense of control and authority in his loss. In analyzing passages from the poem, along with the consultation of Sigmund Freud’s exploration of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, we find that Tennyson’s work here is in itself an attempt to exercise control over his mourning.

Early in the poem, we see that Tennyson feels as if he has very little control over this situation and his mourning that has come as a result of it. This process that he has been thrown into after the loss of his best friend bewilders him, and he expresses a feeling of a lack of autonomy over his life. Tennyson, without his friend Arthur, is all but lost at sea. He...