ARTHUR HALLAM
I turn to go: my feet are set
To leave the pleasant fields and farms;
They mix in one another's arms
To one pure image of regret."
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
Sailest the placid ocean plains
With my lost Arthur's loved remains,
Spread thy full wings and waft him o'er."
At some later time, possibly many years later, for In Memoriam was sixteen years in the making, he added section 10—"I hear the noise about thy keel"—which carries on the subject, and also alludes to Somersby church
"where the kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of God."
For the time he wrote no more sections, but busied himself with The Two Voices, only towards the end of 1834 he wrote section 30, which he afterwards prefaced by sections 28 and 29, all describing the sad first Christmas of 1833, the first since Arthur's death. In 28 he hears the bells of four village steeples near Somersby rising and sinking on the wind. He had more
