I was grading some of my students’ work recently. I had a young man allude to some of the many famous lines from literature. My student wrongly attributed them to Dickens. Dickens is certainly a master, but in the prose form, not in the poetic one.

I gently corrected the student and redirected him to the actual author, Tennyson.

And from Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” a poem about his dear but departed friend, here’s the last section of one of Tennyson’s masterpieces:

XXVII from “In Memoriam”:

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 license 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.