In this blog we are going to tell you about Tis Better to have Loved and Lost, so read this blog carefully to get the complete information.
‘It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all’ is a complete thought which has become a proverb now. Such proverbs are usually authorless. However, it is not always true. Although proverbs like ‘a stitch in time save nine’ or ‘if you want to sup with the Devil, you’d better have a long spoon’ are associated with the most prominent authors. Many other proverbial jewels of wisdom do have an open and recognizable author. For instance, ‘Procrastination is the thief of time’ belongs to Edward Young who is the eighteenth-century author of the long meditative poem Night Thoughts. And another example ‘Love conquers all’ came out in the works of the Roman poet, Virgil. Similarly, we are going to talk about the above mentioned proverb and talk about the author and where it is taken from or inspired by. Continue reading the article to know more about the author of ‘Tis Better to have Loved and Lost’ proverb along with other facts that you would be surprised to know.
About the Author of Tis Better to have Loved and Lost
‘Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all’ is one of the proverbs which surely has an author we can refer to. In this case, perhaps surprisingly, we only have to look back to the mid-nineteenth century to find the origins of the proverb. This quote was written by the most popular English poet of the Victorian era, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92).
One of the most ambitious and most celebrated poems of Tennyson is a long elegy that he wrote for the death of a friend whom he knew from his college days at Cambridge.
About the Poem
In Memoriam A. H. H. is the poem in which the proverb ‘this better to have loved and lost’ is written. It is divided into 133 cantos which means shorter lyric poems and they collectively make up one long elegy. This poem was written for Tennyson’s friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died unexpectedly due to a brain hemorrhage in 1833 at the age of 22. Tennyson, also in his early twenties when Hallam died, was inconsolable. This was the reason his grief for his close friend motivated many poems that Tennyson wrote, especially in the 1830s.
But the most driving of these was In Memoriam as he worked on it for sixteen years between 1833 and 1849. This poem was then published in 1850 which was the year when Tennyson became UK Poet Laureate after the death of Wordsworth.
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Why did Tennyson write the poem?
Every elegy is compensation for private grief and public mourning. In Memoriam indicates the complex interrelationship between the two more evidently than most elegies. Throughout the poem, we see Tennyson analyzing some private memories such as a visit to Hallam’s childhood home, or something his friend once said to him. And then struggling outwards from it to deliver some universally applicable truth about death, grief, and love.
It is clear that Tennyson loved Hallam whether just as a close friend or as something more. But love is clearly a crucial theme of In Memoriam. And this is the reason he wrote the poem in memory of his friend.
The poem includes the lines as follows:
I envy not in any moods
The captive void of noble rage,
The linnet born within the cage,
That never knew the summer woods:
I envy not the beast that takes
His licence in the field of time,
Unfetter’d by the sense of crime,
To whom a conscience never wakes;
Nor, what may count itself as blest,
The heart that never plighted troth
But stagnates in the weeds of sloth;
Nor any want-begotten rest.
I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most:
’Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
So even though loving someone and losing them is heart-breaking but never have known what love is worse.
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The final words
According to Tennyson, the soul that has never understood love is smaller, a slighter and meaner thing than one which has loved, even if the matter of that love has since been taken from us. In other words, I believe Tennyson’s words don’t just express the pleasant memories that having loved deliver us with but also they talk to a deeper truth about love, loving another, and the advantages it imparts to our experience of life and our knowledge of ourselves.
So overall, the idea of ‘loving and losing’ is found elsewhere in a long poem by Tennyson. Certainly, In Memoriam unlocks with a reference to having ‘loved and lost. We hope you found this article helpful and understood the concept behind ‘Tis Better to have loved and lost’.
Conclusion
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