The asymmetry of loss

While on holiday in Vienna in 1833, the English poet Arthur Henry Hallam died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage, aged just twenty-two. Over the next seventeen years, one of his close friends and fellow poets worked on an elegy in his honour. “In Memoriam A.H.H.” was published anonymously in 1850; later that same year, its author, Alfred Tennyson, was appointed Poet Laureate. Tennyson’s poem is a remarkable work of mourning, one that perhaps predictably struck a chord with the most famo...