Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, September 11, 2012.

Today's poem is a portion of Alfred Lord Tennyson's lengthy poem in Memorium.

It takes its full title, In Memorium A.H. Obit 1833 from the circumstance of its

creation, the sudden and tragic death of Tennyson's close friend, Arthur Hallam, who died at the age of

22 of a sudden brain hemorrhage.

Tennyson spent a good 17 years composing the first draft of In Memorium, which is 133 cantos in total.

He added a few more in revision after the poem's initial publication and success. Today, we'll be reading Canto 27. This Canto is on the shorter side compared to some of its fellows in the rest of

a memoriam, but it ends with a very recognizable, a very famous phrase.

There are quite a few famous phrases that come into our English idiom from this poem, but this maybe takes the cake.

It is the now proverbial saying that tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

Tennyson is entering into a storied time-honored debate by offering this conclusion.

Great thinkers such as Boethius have offered opposing views, although when Boethius says that

the greatest misery someone can experience is to remember times of happiness during times of suffering.

He's doing so through the mouth of a character with his name in the Constellation of Philosophy.

But that semi-fictional boethystias is in the midst of deep spiritual depression and lady philosophy,

the personification of wisdom, has to come and cure his mental illness, his spiritual illness.

So maybe we can't take that claim at face value.

I suspect that Boetheus would really have his readers come to the

conclusion that Tennyson comes to here. And so though in Memorium is a long, sweeping, sprawling

wrestling with grief that seems to go through all the stages of grief and loss, and also takes discursies to meditate Job-like on the nature of suffering,

the nature of God's providence, the loss of youth and the beginning of maturity, all of that and more, there is still a sense of it being

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