Composed by Alfred Tennyson as a requiem for his college friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1833, "In Memoriam A. H. H." is a poem written over a seventeen year period and completed in 1849. Widely considered as one of the greatest poems of the Victorian era it is a richly lyrical work which meditates on the search for hope in the wake of a great loss. The length of this work and the period of time in which Tennyson took to complete it speaks volumes as to