(1850) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, is an elegy for his Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died of cerebral haemorrhage at the age of twenty-two years, in Vienna in 1833.

[1] As a sustained exercise in tetrametric lyrical verse, Tennyson's poetical reflections extend beyond the meaning of the death of Hallam, thus, In Memoriam also explores the random cruelty of Nature seen from the conflicting perspectives of materialist science and declining Christian faith in the Victorian era (1837–1901),[2] the poem thus is an elegy, a requiem, and a dirge for a friend, a time, and a place.

The epilogue concludes "In Memoriam" with an epithalamium, a nuptial poem for the poet's sister, Cecilia Tennyson, on her wedding to the academic Edmund Law Lushington, in 1842.

In 133 cantos, including the prologue and the epilogue, Tennyson uses the stylistic beats of tetrameter to address the subjects of spiritual loss and themes of nostalgia, philosophic speculation, and Romantic fantasy in service to mourning the death of his friend, the poet A. H. Hallam; thus, in Canto IX, Tennyson describes the return of the corpse to England: "Fair ship, that from the Italian shore / Saileth the placid ocean-plains / With my lost Arthur's remains, / Spread thy full wings and waft him o'er".

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, And gather dust and chaff, and call To what I feel is Lord of all, And faintly trust the larger hope.

[11] In Canto CXXII, Tennyson addresses the conflict between conscience and theology: If e'er when faith had fallen asleep, I hear a voice 'believe no more' And heard an ever-breaking shore That tumbled in the Godless deep;

[13] In Canto XCIX, the poet writes: Unwatched, the garden bough shall sway, The tender blossom flutter down, Unloved, that beech will gather brown, This maple burn itself away.